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E s t e m a n u a l f o i d is p o n ib iliz a d o e m s u a v e r s ã o d ig it a i a f i m d e p r o p o r c io n a r a c e s s o à p e s s o a s c o m d e fic iê n c ia
v is u a l, p o s s ib ilit a n d o a le it u r a p o r m e io d e a p lic a t iv o s T T S ( T e x t to S p e e c h ) , q u e c o n v e r t e m t e x t o e m v o z
h u m a n a . P a r a d is p o s it iv o s m ó v e is r e c o m e n d a m o s V o x d o x ( w w w .v o x d o x .n e t ) .
L E I N ° 9 .6 1 0 , D E 1 9 D E F E V E R E I R O D E 1 9 9 8 .( L e g i s l a ç ã o d e D ir e it o s A u t o r a is )
A r t . 4 6 . N ã o c o n s t it u i o fe n s a a o s d ir e it o s a u t o r a is :

I - a r e p r o d u ç ã o :
d ) d e o b r a s lit e r á r ia s , a r t ís t ic a s o u c ie n t ífic a s , p a r a u s o e x c lu s iv o d e d e fic ie n t e s v is u a is , s e m p r e q u e a r e p r o d u ç ã o ,
s e m f in s c o m e r c ia is , s e ja f e it a m e d ia n t e o s is t e m a B r a ille o u o u t r o p r o c e d im e n t o e m q u a lq u e r s u p o r t e p a r a e s s e s
d e s t in a t á r io s ;
h t t p :/ / w w w .p l a n a l t o .g o v .b r / c c i v i l _ 0 3 / l e is / L 9 6 1 0 .h t m
h t t p :/ / w w w 2 .c a m a r a .l e g .b r / le g i n / f e d / l e i / 1 9 9 8 / l e i - 9 6 1 0 - 1 9 - f e v e r e i r o - 1 9 9 8 - 3 6 5 3 9 9 - n o r m a a t u a li z a d a - p l .h t m l

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ALSO B Y B. F. SKINNER

The Behavior of Organisms: An Experimental Analysis

Walden Two

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Science and Human Behavior
Verbal Behavior

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Schedules of Reinforcement

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(with Charles B. Ferster)
Cumulative Record

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The Analysis of Behavior
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(with James G. Holland)
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The Technology o f Teaching
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Contingencies o f Reinforcement: A Theoretical Analysis

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Beyond Freedom and Dignity

About Behaviorism
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Reflections on Behaviorism and Society

Enjoy Old Age
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(with Margaret E. Vaughan)

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A T H R E E -V O L U M E AUTOBIOGRAPH Y

Particulars of My Life
The Shaping o f a Behaviorist
A Matter o f Consequences

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Particulars

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OF

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Part One of an Autobiography

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B. F. SKINNER
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New York University Press
Washington Square, New York
1984

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C o p y rig h t © 19 7 6 by B. F . S k in n e r

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

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Skinner, Burrhus Fiedeiic, [date]
Particulars of my life.
1. Skinner, Burrhus Frederic, 19 0 4 - 2. Psychologists— Correspondence,
reminiscences, etc. I. Title.
BF 109.S 55A 33 150'. 19-4340924
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ISBN O -8 147-78 43-7
[b ] 75-34927
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ISBN 0 -8 14 7 -7 8 4 6 -1 set
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Manufactured in the United States of America

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Remembering
Raphael Miller

1904-1929

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Do thou stand for my father and examine me upon the particulars

of my life.
— Henry IV, Part I

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PART I

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X h e S u s q u e h a n n a R i v e r , named for an Iroquois tribe, rises in
Otsego Lake in New York State. It flows southwest and south and

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crosses into Pennsylvania a few miles below the town of Windsor.

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Almost at once it meets a foothill of the Alleghenies, which proves
unbreachable, and it abandons its southern course, swings west and
north, and returns to the hospitable plains of New York State. It

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flows west past Binghamton and Owego and tackles Pennsylvania
again at a more vulnerable point. This tune it succeeds and, picking
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up the support of a large western branch, continues south past the
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state capital of Harrisburg and into Maryland and Chesapeake Bay,
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and so at last into the Atlantic Ocean.

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In that first attack on Pennsylvania the river has cut a deep sickle­
shaped valley about fifteen miles long. The left bank, the outside of
the curve, presses tightly against that foothill of the Alleghenies, and
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the right bank has little land flat enough to be worth farming, but it
was once all part of a great hardwood forest, and lumbermen and
trappers came, and five towns sprang up within that fifteen-mile
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stretch— Lanesboro and Hallstead on the left, named for early settlers,
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and Oakland, Hickory Grove, and Great Bend on the right, named
for two of the most valuable hardwoods and the arc of the river itself.
In that narrow sweep of a river valley I spent the first eighteen years
of my life.
Toward the end of the eighteenth century an area south and east
of the river was cleared, and much of it proved to be good farmland.
In the perfectionist spirit of the time it was named Harmony, and
its settlers had appropriate visions of progress. A north-south road,
coming down from Binghamton, crossed the river at Great Bend and
Hallstead, and someone dreamed of a branch to the east that would
form part of a trade route from the Atlantic seaboard to the Great
Lakes.

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That dream perished, but something like it came true in what was
eventually called the Erie Railroad. It started at Pierpont on the Hud­
son (and was only later extended to Jersey C ity ), ran west to the Dela­
ware River, which it followed northwest as far as possible, and then
crossed into the Susquehanna valley.
The route was not without its problems, the biggest of which was
the hill separating the two river valleys. There was no convenient pass,
and grades almost too steep for the engines of the time were needed.

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Once over the top, the roadway had to be cut into the precipitous
left bank of the Susquehanna until it reached river level, and in that

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descent there were two large tributary valleys to be crossed.

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In the first of these, the valley of the Cascade Creek, a great rock-
and-earth fill solved the problem, with a tunnel drilled in solid rock
at one side to take care of the creek. Except during spring floods,

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water simply collected in a pond above the fill and seeped into the
ground. My friends and I often played in the dry tunnel, hallooing
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from one end to the other, but we never swam in the pond because it
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had slippery clay banks, and we were afraid of it because it was called
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the Devil’s Punchbowl.

The second valley, cut by the Starrucca Creek, was wider, and
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since there were people living in it, a bridge was needed. Two attempts
to build one failed, but a Scottish engineer succeeded, using stone
quarried in the neighborhood. The bridge looked like a Roman aque­
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duct and was officially named the Starrucca Viaduct, but we always
called it the Stone Bridge. It is said that there were doubts about its
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safety and that the first engine to cross it (the “ Orange” ) did so
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under a small head of steam without benefit of engineer.

The roadbed finally reached the level of the river at a particu­
larly narrow part of the valley— at the mouth of still another creek
small enough to be diverted through a culvert— and there, on a strip
of land only a few hundred yards wide, the Erie Railroad Company
built a storehouse for supplies and shops where equipment could be
repaired, and called the place Susquehanna Depot. A long one-story
stone building (the Long House) was finished during the Civil War.
It contained a carpenter shop, a machine shop, a boiler factory (re­
sponsible for a few “ boilermaker’s ears” among the older people I
knew), and a roundhouse with a locomotive turntable. Beyond it

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were a freight terminal and a station, the latter equipped for the
passenger traffic of a day when there were no diners or sleeping cars
and many people preferred to break a long journey. Susquehanna was
about a day’s run from New York City, and the station included a
hotel with a large neo-gothic dining room and seventy-five bedrooms.
It was inevitable that a town would grow up around all this, but
the Railroad had used almost all the available flat land. It would have
been better to locate Susquehanna Depot a mile or two farther west,

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but that would have conflicted with one of its purposes— to service
the powerful engines called “ pushers'* which got behind heavy trains

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and helped them up the hill and across the Stone Bridge and the

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Cascade fill until they could start down into the Delaware valley.
There was no point in pushing before the grade began, and hence the
town of Susquehanna (the “ Depot” was soon dropped) was left to

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find space for itself where it could. Main Street ran parallel with the
Shops and was almost level, but all the other streets were graded.
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Flagstones in the sidewalks were kept from sliding by driving iron
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spikes between them, and some roads proved too steep to be used.
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Stairs were built for pedestrians at many points, and Susquehanna was
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sometimes called the City of Stairs.

In spite of these difficulties, hotels, churches, business blocks,
banks, a livery stable, a post office, and hundreds of houses went up
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in the decade following the Civil W ar. Work was available, and people
flocked to the area, and among them were my grandparents.
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M y g r a n d m o t h e r S k in n e r , bom Josephine Penn, was one of ten or

twelve children of a dirt farmer who lived near Starrucca, a small
town on the creek that flowed under the Stone Bridge. She claimed a
connection with W illiam Penn, and my father once investigated but
found nothing. Farther south in the Appalachians her family would
have been called poor white, and I saw something of their way of life
because my father often took us to Penn reunions. A different family
would take the reunion each year, and I was struck by the unpainted
houses with their bare floors and “ backhouses” in place of indoor
toilets.

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A sister of my grandmother's moved out of that culture and had

a son who became a banker in Hallstead, and another sister, my
father’s Aunt Althea, whom we all called Aunt Alt, I knew when she
lived with her husband in a pleasant house on the banks of the Dela­
ware River in Walton, New York. Two or three brothers escaped, too,
and so did my grandmother, though it is hard to say why. She was not
intelligent and must have had very little schooling; she could read,
write, and do simple sums, and she went to church on Sundays and

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pretended to read a bit of the Bible ever)' day, putting on her glasses
and looking at a few verses in the belief that they improved her

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spiritual health, but that was the extent of her intellectual attainments.
She was small and thin and walked with a slight limp because she

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had “ water on the knee," the result of an accident while chopping
wood as a child. There was something cat-like about her face: she had

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globular cheeks, sharply undercut, and a short nose, and the long
cleft above her lips seemed to demand two sprays of whiskers. She
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used too much powder, rouge, and lipstick. Her hair was frizzly, and as
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she grew older it thinned, and my father bought her a “ transforma­
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tion,” which she wore as if it were a kind of fur hat.

She moved hesitantly, never seeming to know whether she was
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properly dressed or about to do the right thing, but she was an

obsessive talker and never in want of anything to say because she had
no hesitation in repeating herself. She had a small repertoire of stories,
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mostly about her numerous relatives, and a small stock of “ sayings.”

If I coughed while eating ice cream, she would say, “ If you cough,
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you’ve had enough,” and she could not pick up a pin without saying,
“ Find a pin, pick it up, and all the day you’ll have good luck.” She
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was hesitant even in her speech, and laughed nervously after every
remark, as if it might have been a mistake. I never played any kind
of game with her, though she insisted that when I was very young I
called her “ Kinnykins” and followed her about the house, not crawling
but hitching across the floor.
She cooked, as she would have said, by guess and by gosh. Her
specialty was sugar cookies, and my brother and I liked them because
they were sprinkled with sugar and had large raisins pressed into their
centers, but the texture varied from chewy to crumbly to powdery,
depending upon how big a scoopful of flour or how many spoonfuls

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Part I

of butter she happened to put into the dough. She could sew on
a button, but she had trouble with knitting and crocheting, and tatting
was quite beyond her. Her plants never flourished, and the fruits and
vegetables she put up in glass jars often exploded.
Her taste in humor was curiously scatological. She loved to tell
about the time I was left with her when a baby and mussed my pants.
(The nearest thing to this sense of “ muss” in the Oxford English
Dictionary is “ to make untidy,” but it had a specific local meaning.

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When I was in fifth grade, a girl reading from R ip Van W inkle
threw our class into hilarious merriment and our teacher into conster­

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nation when she mispronounced "musing” and told us that “ for some

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time Rip sat mussing over this scene.” ) M y grandmother would go
into minute detail about how she cleaned me and my clothing after the
accident, wrapping me in a blanket while my clothes dried over the
stove.
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She loved to tell the story, years before James Joyce used it, of a
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woman who when praised because she made strong tea said, “ When
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I make tea I make tea, when I make water I make water.” She had a
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clipboard and often told us how she came by it. At one time she and
my grandfather were said to have “ kept hotel,” and a traveling sales­
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man who had stayed with them found during the night that the
chamber pot had no cover. He used his clipboard as a substitute and
went off and left it. M y grandmother would tell us how thoroughly
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she had cleaned the board before putting it to its proper use.
She was not by nature generous, and my grandfather never
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earned much money, and when upon occasion it fell to her to pay
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for the ice cream when we were out for a drive, she would recall the
event for days, describing “ her treat” and the kinds of ice cream each
of us had chosen for our cones. Whenever we complimented her on
the food she served, she would say, “ It was the best I could get.”
Her closest friend was her canary, whose cage hung in the bay
window of the dining room, surrounded by potted plants in brass
jardinieres. She talked to it as she gave it its bath in a saucer of water
on newspapers spread on the kitchen table, where it splashed reck­
lessly, and it would stand on her finger, and by putting a seed between
her lips she could induce it to kiss her, as she called it.
Only one thing makes any sense of the fact that she escaped

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from her family background. For some curious reason she had aspira­
tions: she would be a lady. And when my father was born, he was
included: he would be a great man. She never made it, and neither
did he, but where her aspirations cost her nothing, for she was quite
satisfied with her life, the aspirations she gave her son cost him dearly.
She once told me that when he was a baby she pinched his nose to
make it sharp and more distinguished-looking, but she pinched him
in other ways, not so easily identified or described, and in the long

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run the other pinches were more painful and possibly not much
more successful.

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M y g r a n d f a t h e r , James Skinner, was born in Devonshire, England,

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and came to America with two half-brothers, Edward and William
Dumble, in the early seventies. The half-brothers stayed in New York,
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where one of them eventually ran a successful decorator’s store on
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Broadway. Somehow my grandfather found his way to Starrucca,
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where he met and married my grandmother.

He must have cut an attractive figure in that farming com­
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munity. An early full-faced photograph shows a dapper young man

with a handlebar mustache reaching well beyond his cheeks. His light
hair is parted on the left and brushed up and away from his right
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temple. He is wearing a wing collar and a cravat. His eyes are clear,
trusting, friendly.
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If he attracted my grandmother because he was English, she

could not complain of misrepresentation, because he maintained that
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distinction all his life by dropping an occasional h and adding one

where it was not needed. He trimmed that great mustache and could
dispense with his mustache cup, but he kept a lock of hair swept
across his forehead in pub-keeper’s style. He grew rather heavy, and
his most characteristic gesture was the way he hoisted himself out of
the large, black-leather platform rocker in which he spent much of his
life. He had a strawberry nose and the florid face of a drunkard, but
in fact drank very little.
He grew deaf at an early age, though perhaps not as early as most
people supposed. He would respond to most of the things my grand­

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Part I

mother said with a quizzical but rather amused grunt, but if what
she had to say was important, she adopted a special manner, and he
knew the sign and would then listen and had no trouble in hearing
her. He could never manage the hearing aids my father bought for
him and accepted his deafness without complaint. He never went to
church and I should have supposed him entirely indifferent to re­
ligion if he had not once picked up a copy of Tom Paine’s Age of
Reason that I had left about and, after reading a page or two, thrown

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it down in disgust exclaiming, “ W hy, that man doesn't believe in the
crucifixion of Jesus Christ!”

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He was always looking for work but never found any that suited

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him. Shortly after their marriage he and my grandmother went to
Massachusetts and sampled life in the shoe industry in Amesbury,
but they soon returned to Starrucca and then settled in Susquehanna.

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The only evidence I have that they "'kept hotel” is the story of the
chamber pot and a number of small gadgets in their attic which were
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said to have survived from hotel days, when they may have functioned
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a little like pinball machines. In one of them you put a penny in a
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slot and it fell downward, bouncing against pins and ending in

compartments some one of which may have meant at least a free
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play.
If my grandfather had any trade at all, it was that of a house
painter. He painted the more accessible parts of our house and all
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of his own. He used paint lavishly, and the lower edges of window
frames and eaves developed a series of droplets— true guttae— which
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grew larger with each new coat. In his later years this profession be­
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came official: my father got him a job tending the Erie paint shop,
where his duty, never onerous, was to mix pails of paint of various
colors for other workmen.
He was involved in a business venture that had to do with a
patented stove polisher. I never saw one in its finished form, but an
advertising circular shows a rectangular strip of felt with serrated
edges glued to the underside of a wooden block with a handle. On the
top of the block is a small tin cup with a sponge stuffed into the open
end. A piece of rubber tubing runs through the handle and into the
cup. I am not sure how it was to be used. It sold for only thirty-five
cents, but no one seems to have bought any, and for years the hayloft

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in my grandfather's barn contained a barrel of felt pads, a barrel of

wooden blocks with handles, a barrel of tin cups, a barrel of small
sponges, and great coils of white rubber tubing. The sponges proved
useful in the kitchen and in polishing the brass on our Ford.
M y grandfather had absolutely no ambition. He could scarcely
be said to have waited for something to turn up. He read the news­
papers closely and loved politics and baseball, though he never, I
suppose, saw a game properly played. M y grandmother cared for him

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and fed him, and somehow expenses were met. If he lived any life
at all, it was my father's. Every Sunday morning for many years my

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father would walk over to his parents' house and spend an hour or two
telling my grandfather about the law business he had transacted during

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the week. In warm weather they sat on the side porch, and as my
grandfather grew deafer, some question arose about the confidentiality

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of Lawyer Skinner’s business.
M y grandfather seemed proud of my grandmother, though he
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laughed with the rest of us at her foibles. Their domestic life seemed
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perfectly tranquil. I never saw either one angry with the other. They
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owned their house on Jackson Avenue, and it was reasonably con­

venient. The front door led directly into a small living room dominated
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by a black parlor stove with fancy nickel trim, parts of which, when
the weather was cold, were red hot and had to be carefully avoided.
A large parlor, well lighted but not heated, contained an overstuffed
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sofa with chair to match in orange-and-gold velour and a large glass

case enclosing a model of an ocean-going steamer set in a glassy
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sea. There was some sail rigging, but it was indubitably a steamer
because cotton wool poured from a large stack. It may have been the
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boat on which my grandparents went back to the “ old country” for

a brief visit before I was born. The parlor was never used except when
I played the organ, and I seldom did so because the only music was a
book of transcriptions from oratorios or operas, with an ancient
fingering system in which x stood for the thumb.
A bedroom on the first floor saved my grandfather the trouble
of climbing stairs. He could wash in the kitchen sink and use the back­
house at the far end of the lot. When, presumably at my father's
urging and no doubt at his expense, a bathroom was installed on the
second floor, my grandfather was obliged to climb the narrow stairway,
but he accepted this chore cheerfully as the price of progress.

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A driveway which once ran to the barn at the rear was as green
as the rest of the lawn, but a steppingstone bearing a heavy iron ring
for tethering a horse survived from another era. The floor of the barn
also showed a long history of carriage tires and shod hooves, but there
was no horse there in my grandparents’ day. The stall had been con­
verted into a chicken coop opening into a screened run behind the
barn. Some of the tools of my grandfather's trade were to be found
on a heavy bench near a window— dried brushes, putty knives, and

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cans of long-solidified paint.

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M y f a t h e r , W illiam Arthur Skinner, the rather surprising fruit of the
union of Josephine Penn and James Skinner, was born on June 22,

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1875, in Starrucca, before his parents moved to Susquehanna. Early
photographs show a well-dressed child with nicely combed hair and
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a sensitive, inquiring face, and in pictures taken in high school he
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appears again immaculately groomed. Later he sported a mustache for
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a few years but abandoned it, and when it became necessary to wear
glasses, he chose pince-nez and continued to wear them all his life,
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deep red indentations on the bridge of his nose seeming a standard

part of his anatomy when he shaved or bathed.
As an only child, pushed forward by his mother, he never learned
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to get along easily with other people. He often appeared conceited

and was called “ bumpy,” and I once heard another boy, borrowing the
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phrase from his parents, refer to my father as “ Big I and little u."
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That reputation haunted him all his life, but he never stopped trying
to live it down and to be hail-fellow-well-met.
He was of medium height and became rather stocky. He walked
a good deal and continued to do so long after the advent of automo­
biles and convenient public transportation. As a young man he played
indoor baseball and later golf. He was a competent performer on the
cornet, and he was second in a graduating class of eleven.
WTien he finished high school, he followed the local custom and
went into the Railroad Shops, but since he lacked mechanical skills
and had little taste for the life of a carpenter or machinist, he ap­
prenticed himself as a blueprint boy and draftsman in the Mechanical
Engineering Department. In a photograph of the employees of the

1 1

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division my father is surrounded by older people with whom it is ha

to imagine him being comfortable, nor was the future which p:
sumably lay ahead likely to meet his or his mother's aspirations. I
therefore turned to “ reading law” in the office of a local lawyer ai
then went on to New York Law School, supporting himself by keepii
books in his half-uncle's decorator’s shop and playing cornet in
church. It was a two-year law course, but because he had read law, V
was allowed to take the second-year courses (he said that Woodro
Wilson lectured in one of them), and he passed the second-yei

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examinations. But he had been there only one year and therefor
got a handwritten certificate rather than a diploma:

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The University of the State of New York
Be it known that William A. Skinner passed satisfactorily examina­
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on completion of all other requirements prescribed by law or by Uni­
versity ordinances. Countersigned for the School. George Chase. June
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10, lSg 6.
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It was not quite the kind of thing to frame and hang in an office.
He returned to Susquehanna and passed the bar examination two
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months after his twenty-first birthday. He set up an office in two dark,

grimy rooms with two heating stoves, a desk, and a few chairs. A
bookshelf held his law-school texts, a few volumes purchased with a
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loan from his father, and a number of large and impressive books
borrowed from an older friend which had no connection whatsoever
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with the practice of law.

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M y f i r s t n a m e , Burrhus, was my mother’s maiden name, and it has

always been troublesome: it must be spelled out and explained. The
spelling may have been adopted at a time when it was fashionable to
latinize North European names. M y mother’s father, Charles Burrhus,
was born in Walton, New York, in 1848. W hen not quite sixteen, he
lied about his age and enlisted in the Grand Army of the Republic.
He saw duty with a regiment of the New York Voluntary Infantry,
which by the time he joined it was in South Carolina. He was on

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duty until the end of the war, when he was honorably discharged. He
would never tell me about his war experiences. Other old vets came
to our school on Memorial Day, but if I started to repeat their stories,
my grandfather would dismiss me gruffly.
He was a short, stocky, muscular man with a bushy mustache
and a shock of brown hair that never turned gray. He favored bow
ties and smoked a pipe with a straight stem. He came from New
York State in August of 1875 to work for the Railroad in an emergency

PS
when the fill across the Cascade Creek washed out, and he met my
grandmother in Thompson, a small town south of Lanesboro in the

U
Harmony region. His early pictures show a rather dashing young man

RO
who must have had the manners of a reasonably genteel small-town
family and who was perhaps then not unwilling to describe his war
experiences. In any event, he wooed and won my grandmother, and

G
they came to Susquehanna in 1879, where he found work in the
Carpenter Shop, of which he eventually became foreman.
S
I am sure he was a good craftsman although I have only two
K
pieces of evidence. He put marvelous points on my pencils—a series
O

of thin isosceles triangles, all of the same size, done with a pocket
knife kept razor sharp— and he could peel an apple in one long
BO

unbroken string of reversing s’s. If you threw the string over your
shoulder, it would fall on the floor in the shape of the swash capital
of the initial of the girl you were to marry— a different girl almost
EX

every time. Except for these modest achievements, I never saw any
sign of the craftsman, for he never built anything or tinkered with
D

anything about the house.

IN

He enjoyed life and wanted me to do so too. W hen I was quite

small, he would put a spoonful of coffee in my milk over my mother’s
protest that it would stunt my growth. When I was in high school
he gave me extra spending money when I had a date, and he en­
couraged me to attend dances in the hall of the Odd Fellows, a lodge
to which he belonged, and teased me a bit about the girls I danced
with, but only to make sure that I danced with them again.
Though he never owned a house, he owned automobiles, be­
ginning with a Ford in 1 9 11 and moving on to a Maxwell. Once when
he was taking my grandmother, my brother, and me for a ride, some­
thing distracted him and he drove into a fence. W e were not going

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very fast and it was not a serious accident. He was able to drive us
back to our summer place on the river, but while we were waiting for
lunch, someone put a sentimental song on the phonograph, and he
broke down and wept. He was not very well known and had few
friends. He spent a good deal of time with another Civil W ar veteran,
who would come over to talk about politics and the misbehavior of
the townsfolk.
I sensed that he was rather a disciplinarian with his men in the

PS
Carpenter Shop, but his relations with them were good until near
the end. A strike, called in 1922, was not going well, and pressure

U
was put on the foremen to join it and walk off their jobs. In the past
the foremen had been assumed to be part of the company and had kept

RO
their places. Now all of them left except my grandfather, who stub­
bornly stuck to tradition and was made to suffer. I drove his car to a

G
garage to have it washed, and the manager asked, “ Isn’t that Charlie
Burrhus's car?” and when I said it was, he refused to wash it. My
S
grandfather did not dare walk to work, and one day when I drove
K
him toward the Shops through the Italian section of the town, he was
O

obviously frightened and urged me to drive as fast as possible. The

strike came to an end, but I doubt whether he ever again enjoyed his
BO

work.
He served the Erie for nearly fifty years, and shortly before his
death he was commended in a company magazine for his services, but
EX

the words were chosen for company purposes:

D

One of the valuable features of this veteran’s career with the Erie
is his proverbial economic use of lumber. While he is not unnecessarily
IN

frugal in its use, he always takes care not to waste any, for he knows
that lumber costs money nowadays. Also he has been active in reclaim­
ing asbestos boiler lagging.

M y grandmother Burrhus left a paper sealed in an envelope to

be read after her death, and when she died my father assembled my
grandfather, my mother, and my uncle and aunt and opened the
envelope. He read a few sentences to himself and then got up and
threw the paper in the parlor stove, saying, “ I don’t think this should
be read.” He told me later that my grandfather looked very sheepish,
but he did not tell me what was in the letter or at what period in
their marriage my grandfather had sinned.

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* * *

M y g r a n d m o t h e r Burrhus was born on Washington's birthday, 1855,

and we celebrated both anniversaries with cardboard hatchets filled
with small candies called red-hots. An early photograph shows a rather
countrified young lady, not at all sure of herself, with her hair done in
tight curls for the occasion. She is wearing a patterned shirtwaist with
choker, rings hang from her pierced ears, and steel-rimmed eyeglasses

PS
dangle from a long chain pinned to one shoulder. W hen I knew her,
she wore her hair drawn back in a bun and dressed mostly in gray or

U
black shirtwaists and long skirts which concealed all but the toes of her

RO
buttoned shoes. W hen she went out, she wore the kind of hat later
to be made famous by Queen Mary.
Her family had been in America from the early eighteenth

G
century. An ancestor had fought under Washington. Her mother had
come from Vermont as a child when her family settled in Thompson,
S
long before Susquehanna was founded, and there my grandmother
K
was born and there she grew up. They were all quietly successful
O

farmers or small businessmen who showed little or no inclination to be

anything else, and the trait ran true in my grandmother. She com­
BO

pletely lacked the aspirations of my grandmother Skinner. Her speech

retained a provincial touch. She served "victuals’' and the bread she
did not bake herself was "boughten.” She would say, “ Don’t plague
EX

your brother.”
She belonged to the W omen’s Auxiliary of the Odd Fellows and
D

would come and watch me dance in the Odd Fellows’ Hall, and she
IN

enjoyed a drive in the country, wearing her big black hat and a black
duster, especially when she visited her relatives near Thompson. Except
for these occasional forays, she stayed home. W hen I was young she
kept in touch with the world through a Mrs. Bronson, the wife of a
jeweler, who also wore Queen Mary hats and was as outgoing as my
grandmother was reticent. Mrs. Bronson stopped in almost every day
to bring the news. She had a great sense of humor, and I loved to hear
them talk. They both wore “ creepers,” small metal treads like minia­
ture crampons attached to the heels of their gaiters, which could be
folded into the instep when not in use but snapped back under the
heel when necessary to prevent slipping. One day when the sidewalks
were particularly icy, Mrs. Bronson reported to my grandmother that

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in spite of her creepers she went back two steps for every step she tool
forward. I was at just the right age: I thought it an excruciatingly
funny remark.
M y grandmother read a good deal of fiction and was the only one
of my grandparents or parents to do so. She subscribed to pulp maga­
zines and closely followed their continued stories. I read them too and
discussed them with her. I saw her almost every day for years. I would
drop in after school to play a few hands of rummy, or a card game
called Pedro, or a game or two of dominoes. I don’t think she de­

PS
liberately allowed me to win, but she could act the bad loser con­
summately, so that whenever 1 won, it was a great occasion. W hen she

U
had no domino that would play, she would go to “ the boneyard” and

RO
draw dominoes slowly, showing a separate frustration for each piece
that would not fit.
In a back pantry I could always get a piece of “ Grampa’s cake/’

G
brown and spongy and cut into squares, and there was usually a large
S
block of maple sugar from which a lump could be broken off. Apples
K
were always available, although by spring they would be russets—
small apples with an unattractive brown, rather shriveled skin and
O

rubbery flesh but with the merit of keeping well over the winter. When
BO

she served mackerel— salt mackerel soaked overnight before cooking—

I stayed for dinner. I loved mackerel, and we never had it at home
because my father disliked it and it made the house smell. The height
EX

of her art was apple pie— made of fresh or dried apples as the season
dictated, with brown sugar slightly burned around the edges of the tin.
There was always a pie in the pantry with a knife and a supply of
D

cheese (the word meant Cheddar).

IN

She knew the power she wielded. Once I had quarreled with her
and was staying away, but as I came by on my way home from school,
she called to me from behind a screen door, and I went near and saw
that she was holding up a piece of maple sugar.
Her great skill was needlework. She crocheted and tatted doilies,
borders for pillowcases, tablecloths, and even whole bedspreads. She
was extremely quick, and I could not follow the movement of the small
bobbin with which she tatted. When the war came and the women
in town began to knit sweaters, helmets, socks, and mittens, she was
a miracle of productivity.

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She was a worrier. She never mentioned any future plan without
adding, “ — if I live and have my health.” When my mother had a
serious appendectomy with complications, however, it was my grand­
mother Burrhus who managed the family. She protested violently
when I once said, "I wish Christmas were here.” “ N e v e r” she ex­
claimed, "wish away a single hour of your life!” She had a chronic dry
cough, and she wore on her chest pieces of red flannel on which a man
named Starkweather had placed his hands. Starkweather worked in

PS
the Machine Shop, and it was believed that his contact with metal
gave him curative powers.

U
M y grandmother and grandfather called each other Mr. and Mrs.
1

RO
B, and my father, my brother, and followed that practice most of the
time, but my mother called them Mama and Papa. They lived out
their lives in a series of rented houses, of which I remember three.

G
The yard in front of the first was badly kept, the sour soil growing
only moss and a wiry grass. In the earth-floored cellar a toad lived for
S
many years, keeping it free of insects. A parlor, never used, was
K
furnished with upholstered and tasseled chairs, and twice a year its
O

lace curtains were washed and stretched to dry on a frame and its
BO

patterned carpet was beaten on a clothesline.

In the living room a center table bore my grandmother’s work
basket, in which, among darning eggs, crochet needles, tatting bobbins,
EX

spools of thread, and thimbles, there was a small slab of talc. It was
like soft green jade, and when scraped with a knife, it yielded real
talcum powder.
D

I knew their other houses better, because I stayed in them from

IN

time to time when my parents were away. Several clocks which ticked
loudly were taken from one house to another like lares and penates,
and as a vestige of an earlier culture my grandmother always kept an
oil lamp burning dimly in the kitchen during the evening.
They had a few books, among them one called Aunt Samantha
Among the Brethren, rather like the things being written at the time
by Mark Twain, Artemus Ward, and Josh Billings, poking fun at the
Shakers, Adventists, and other perfectionists. There was also a H ill’s
Manual, long out of date by the time I saw it, which advocated
a different kind of perfectionism; I remember a picture of a dinner
party at which each guest was demonstrating some social error: one

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was feeding a dog and another waving his amis and talking loudly.
They had four children, two of whom died when very young. They
lived together in apparent tranquility. I saw no sign of the resentment
which led my grandmother to plan that exposure of my grandfather's
sins after her death.

PS
M y m o t h e r , Grace Madge Burrhus, was born on June 4, 1878. She
graduated from the Susquehanna High School when she had just

U
turned sixteen and, like my father, was second in her class. She had
studied typing and shorthand and went to work immediately as sec­

RO
retary to E. R. W . Searle, a lawyer. Later, as the local paper reported
it, she "began her duties as stenographer and typewriter in the office

G
of A. E. Mitchell, mechanical superintendent of the Erie. The selec­
tion of Miss Burrhus for this position is a merited recognition of her
S
superior attainments in her chosen profession and many friends will
K
unite with the Transcript in extending congratulations.”
She had long chestnut hair and was rated something of a beauty.
O

She was popular, and according to the scrapbook which her mother
BO

kept she often visited friends in Binghamton, Scranton, and elsewhere,

as well as relatives in Walton, New York. She was occasionally re­
ported “ on the sick list/’ but it seemed to be nothing serious. She
EX

played the piano in an orchestra and accompanied singers in recitals,

and she herself had a lovely contralto voice which inspired the editor
D

of the paper to write: "W e, with others, have heard considerable

foreign vocal talent, in this place of late, but all who have an idea of
IN

purity of tone and correct rendition of theme, acknowledge that as an

alto-soloist, Miss Grace Burrhus, of this place, has no superiors. It is
really a treat to hear her renditions.” Her repertoire was limited, how­
ever. She sometimes sang the same song on different occasions with
an appropriate change of text. J. C. Bartlett’s "A Dream” begins,
"Last night I was dreaming of thee, love, was dreaming.” That would
do for a recital, but my mother’s copy contains a version for use at
funerals with another text in her hand beginning: “ Come Jesus Re­
deemer, abide thou with me-e.” All her songs were sentimental—
"Just for Today," "T he Song That Reached M y Heart," "T he Day Is

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Ended"— and many had a religious touch— “ M y God, M y Father,

W hile I Stray/’ “ Thy W ill Be Done/’ or “ Savior, Comfort M e.” She
herself was no doubt sentimental, but she was not particularly devout,
and her religious repertoire must have reflected the demands of her
listeners.

PS
B y the early 1890s Susquehanna had its first crop of young people
who had grown up together. They had talent and made the most of it,

U
and the town, with a population of only 2500, became known for its

RO
musical and theatrical performances. The principal of the high school
left his stamp on many of these. He was a “ reader and impersonator/’
and he had students in the same line. On a program for the benefit

G
of the library in Hallstead, billed simply as “ Susquehanna Talent!”
he recited “ The Light from Over the Range/’ and one of his pupils
S
“ The Yarn of the Nancy Belle.” Miss Grace Burrhus sang “ A Dream/’
K
and a penciled memorandum on the program indicated that she
O

appeared as “ Bachelor’s Lady Love, bright colored dress, huge bonnet,

holds fan in one hand, parasol in the other.” On another program she
BO

played the piano for tableaux depicting “ Mary Queen of Scots Con­
fronting Elizabeth” and “ Mary Queen of Scots Taking Leave of Her
Attendants.” On the same program someone sang “ I W ant to Pawn
EX

M y Dolly,” and Mamie Metzger, who years later would be my first-

grade teacher, recited “ How Uncle Henry Dyed His Hair.”
D

Various “ professors” moved about the countryside carrying seen-

IN

ery and costumes and organizing local talent. The operetta Esmeralda
was an especially ambitious undertaking, in which W . A. Skinner
appeared as Dave Hardy and Grace Burrhus as Kate Desmond.
The Transcript reported the premiere as follows:

That Susquehanna is possessed of superior dramatic and histri­

onic talent, was fully demonstrated last evening, when the popular
play of “ Esmeralda” was presented at Hogan Opera House by the Sus­
quehanna Dramatic Club. . . .
The admirable impersonation of the different characters in the
play by the members of the club, coupled with their apparent lack of

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stage fright, was appreciated by the audience and contributed to the

grand success of the entertainment.

and Grace Burrhus saw a good deal of each other while

W i l l S k in n e r
displaying their talents, and in a small community there were many
other occasions when they were together. M y father was on the com­
mittee of a social club which arranged one such occasion, though he

PS
was not, I am fairly sure, the correspondent who reported it in the
Transcript with such a surfeit of quotation marks:

U
RO
MOONLIGHT EXCURSION

The weather last evening for the "moonlight excursion” of that

popular social organization, the Crescent Club, up the river on the

G
steamer Erminie, to Forest House Park, could not well have been more
propitious had it been “ made to order” by the bureau having in charge
S
the varied climatic changes. . . .
K
Married men and their better halves, young men and their best
girls, marriageable young ladies, marriageable young men assembled on
O

Drinker street “ suspension bridge” at 7:30 o'clock, and under the active
BO

management of the “ perishable freight” committee of the Crescent

Club, were “ sandwiched” into “ fondly waiting” busses and transported
by horse power in the twinkling of an eye to the Oakland dock of the
EX

placid river, where the steamer Erminie, puffing and wheezing, was in
waiting to receive the multitude and proceed seven miles up the wind­
ing and watery course to that popular resort, Forest House Park. . . .
D

Shortly after nine o'clock “ Erminie,” the Pride of the Susque­

IN

hanna, “ tooted” for the Forest House dock, where the human cargo
was discharged. . . . Crescents and their guests thronged the park, and
were not slow in finding the pavilion, where terpsichorean exercises
were set in motion to excellent music discoursed by Warner & Sped’s
orchestra.

M y father presumably had strong competition, for my mother

was always described by the Transcript as popular, and years later I
heard occasional references to early rivals. A second cousin, a student
at Cornell College, visited the Burrhuses twice in the late 1890s, and
my mother gave a musicale in his honor. M y father would have lacked

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his sophistication and style. His mother must have been a problem,
but he resorted to a rather clever strategy. In June of 1899 the Tran­
script reported that

Mr. and Mrs. James Skinner, Attorney William A. Skinner, Miss

Grace Burrhus, Mr. and Mrs. W. H. Dumble, Mr. and Mrs. Ed
Dumble, accompanied by fishing tackle and the necessary provender,
are enjoying an outing at Page’s pond today.

PS
M y father was covering the deficiencies of his father and mother by

U
bringing in his two half-uncles and -aunts from New York. They were
far more interesting and polished, and they knew how to silence my

RO
grandmother.
In August of the following year my father and mother were

G
among a party of young people— including my U nde Harry Burrhus
and his fiancée, Leila Outwater—who spent ten days at Heart Lake.
S
They were chaperoned by my grandmother Skinner and my father's
K
Aunt Alt. Aunt Alt was a jolly, generous, thoroughly likable person,
O

as down to earth as my grandmother was highfalutin, as simple and

honest as my grandmother was pretentious, and as warm and natural
BO

as my grandmother was artificial. She would take care of the atmos­

phere in the cottage at Heart Lake.
The strategy was successful, and eventually my mother capitu­
EX

lated. The Transcript for May 1, 1902, contained the following item:
D

MARRIED LAST EVENING

At their own home, on Grand street, last evening, at 8 o'clock,

IN

were united in marriage, by Rev. E. E. Riley, Mr. Wm. Arthur Skinner

and Miss Grace Madge Burrhus. . . . The bride and groom left the
same evening for a trip to Philadelphia and Washington D.C. They
will be at home after May 10.
The bridegroom is a popular and rising young lawyer, and the
bride one of Susquehanna’s fairest and most accomplished daughters.
Many warm friends extend the best wishes possible for a happy and
prosperous life.

M y father and mother were married “ in their own home” be­

cause my father had bought a house and they had worked together to

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furnish it for their marriage. No. 433 Grand Street was a fairly good
location. Many of the older families lived on Grand Street, and the
house was near the top of a hill, above much of the cinders and smoke
of the Shops and trains. Still, it could not have cost my father very
much. It was next to a cemetery, which was not to everyone’s taste,
and it was a box of a house, with a pyramidal roof, in no particular
style. It had been lived in for a long time and needed updating. A few
years later its wooden siding was covered with stucco and its roof

PS
with slate (I was old enough to watch and I was fascinated by the
foot-operated device which punched holes in a slate without cracking

U
it). Round pillars and a “ steel ceiling" were added to the front porch,
and a small wing in which for a while the former owner had continued

RO
to live was made into a library with a great red brick fireplace. And
room by room the old planked flooring was replaced or, rather, cov­
ered by a hardwood floor.
G
There was running hot and cold water in kitchen and bathroom,
S
but it was hot only so long as a good fire burned in the kitchen stove.
K
The bathroom, added to the house to replace an outdoor privy, was
O

awkwardly located, since it was necessary to pass through it to reach

the main bedrooms, until a second stairway was added when the
BO

wing was taken over. Electricity replaced kerosene, but the wires were
mounted on white ceramic blocks on the surface of the walls and
ceilings. (Two delicately tinted Tiffany wall lamps, more recently in-
EX

stalled alongside the brick fireplace in the library, had no visible electri­
cal connections.)
D

My father's first move was to put in central heating. He selected

IN

an underfeed furnace which burned a small, inexpensive size of an­

thracite coal but was hard to operate. A hopperful of coal was forced
up under the firebed by repeatedly lifting the end of a wooden arm
seven or eight feet long and pulling it down with a great crunch. The
furnace had to be damped at night, and in cold weather the water
pipes under the kitchen sink often froze. In short, it was not a con­
venient house, and certainly not an attractive one, but there my father
and mother lived for twenty years, and there my brother and I were
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M y b ir t h was difficult and my mother nearly died— a fact of which

I was occasionally to be reminded. There were two newspapers in
Susquehanna at the time, and one reported my birth as follows:

N EW ARRIVAL

Born yesterday morning March 20, 1904 to Attorney William A. Skin-

ner and his wife Grace a handsome boy. The many friends of the over­
joyed parents are sending congratulations by the bushel. Long live the

PS
youngster, and his papa and mama.

U
The Transcript could not resist a lighter touch: “ Susquehanna
has a new law firm—W m . A. Skinner & Son,” a theme which I am

RO
sure had already occurred to my father. The paper in Montrose,
the county seat, carried on the joke: “ The Susquehanna Transcript

G
says that town has a new firm— W . A. Skinner & Son. W e don’t
suppose the recently added member can be termed a 'silent partner.' ”
S
The supposition was apparently correct. W hen I was quite small my
K
father and mother took me to Milford, a resort town on the Delaware
O

River, and they were asked to leave the first hotel in which they
registered because I cried all night.
BO

I was nevertheless healthy, nursed by my mother, and later fed

a kind of breakfast cereal or baby food called, ahead of its time, Force.
When I was able to move around the house, it was discovered that I
EX

was eating dirt from the potted plants, and I once pushed a bean up
my nose and it was not discovered until it had swelled enormously
D

and had to be extracted by a doctor, but these were minor complaints.

My brother, Edward James Skinner, was born on November 6,
IN

1906, and I have always thought that I remembered the event though
I was only two and a half. I remember being taken into my mother’s
and father’s bedroom on what was obviously a very solemn occasion
and shown something just to the left of the bed, the side on which
my mother slept and on which a bassinet would have been placed.

L i f e a t 4 3 3 Grand Street, as I began to be aware of it, followed a

stable pattern. W e all rose at seven, and in cold weather my father's
first duty was to take care of the furnace. (W hen he was out of town

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on business it was my mother's first duty, until I was tall enough to

reach the end of the arm and heavy enough to pull it down.) He re­
turned to the bathroom, where he shaved, working up lather in a
shaving mug and sharpening his razor on a leather strop. Back in his
room, he retrieved his trousers from the back of a chair where he had
carefully folded them the night before. (Years later my mother gave
him an expensive gold watch, paid for with money she had filched, a
coin or two at a time, from the trousers that hung over that chair.)

PS
He wore the same shirt for two or three days but with a fresh starched
collar each day taken from a leather case in the top drawer of his chif­

U
fonier. He added a conservative four-in-hand tie and secured the knot
with a garnet stickpin. He retrieved his coat from a clothes tree in the

RO
corner of the room, shined his shoes with polish and cloth kept in a
small footlocker in the bathroom, and went down to breakfast.

G
In cold weather I pulled my underclothes into bed with me to
warm them and put them on under the covers. Then I dressed quickly,
S
washed, cleaned my teeth, brushed my hair, and went down to hover
K
(with my brother and in very cold weather my mother) on the large
O

grille between living room and dining room where the first warm air
had begun to rise.
BO

My mother would have shaken down the ashes in the kitchen

stove and added kindling wood and coal carried from the shed at the
rear of the house. One or two concentric cast-iron rings could be re­
EX

moved from a lid on the stove for direct access to any available flame.
W e breakfasted on bacon and eggs, or pancakes baked on a large
D

round griddle, or boiled eggs mixed with broken toast in large cups.
The toast was made on a fork over the coals of the stove, and if done
IN

too hastily was merely cold white bread sprinkled with black char.
(M y father once won an electric toaster at a fair. It was a small metal
table with a few wires under a grid, and we pulled down the shades
to darken the room to assure ourselves that the wires actually turned
a dull red. It was too slow to be useful.) On a Sunday morning my
mother might take the time to make “ fried cakes,” better known as
doughnuts.
After breakfast my father walked to his office. He had moved to
a suite in the Post Office Building on Main Street. It was just a step
from the First National Bank, and his office on the corner of the

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second floor had two conspicuous windows in which glass panels

hanging on brass chains read “ W . A. Skinner" and “ Attorney and
Counselor at Law" in gold letters.
An outer office was furnished with a large safe, a paper-press used
to put sharp creases in deeds and contracts, and a typewriter. The
inner office contained my father’s desk, an impressive chair, and a
nonfunctional corner fireplace above which hung a picture of my
mother, my brother, and me. On his desk were a tobacco jar, a pipe

PS
rack, and a device which stamped his signature—W . A. Skinner, with
a flourish underlining the whole name— and returned the stamp to a

U
concealed ink pad. There was also a kind of punch which in a single

RO
operation cut a tongue and slot in two or three sheets of paper and
threaded one through the other to bind the sheets together.
He began his day by reading the Binghamton paper, which had

G
come down on the morning train. Later his secretary brought the mail
from the box in the post office downstairs, and a client or two
S
might come in. For many years a daily visitor was Frank Zeller, the
K
local brewer, who came to talk about business ventures, or the marital
O

problems of his daughter, or politics, or things in general.

BO

When the Shop whistle blew at noon, my father started home. In

fair weather we waited for him on the front porch, and when my
mother saw him coming up the street, walking jauntily along, slapping
EX

his thigh with the rolled-up morning paper, she went in and put
things on the table. W e had our big meal at noon and called it
dinner, and it was almost always meat and mashed potatoes with
D

a side vegetable. For dessert there was usually pumpkin, huckle­

IN

berry, or custard pie, or strawberry shortcake in season.

After dinner my father walked back to his office, and my mother
took her nap (and woe to anyone who made a noise and woke her
up!). Home again in late afternoon, he did any necessary odd jobs
around the house or went over his fishing tackle or polished the brass
on our Ford. Supper was a lighter meal and in place of pie we had
“ sauce"— canned fruit or stewed rhubarb— or rice pudding with raisins,
or maple syrup poured over hot baking-powder biscuits.
After supper, wearing a smoking jacket, my father took his place
in his chair in the living room beside an oak table, the claw-and-ball
feet of which I first knew at baby-cye level, and filled his pipe with

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Prince Albert tobacco. The reading lamp had a green glass shade, and
in addition he often wore a green celluloid eye shade. W e subscribed
to the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Literary Digest, and they, to­
gether with the Transcript and the Binghamton paper, kept him up
to date.
He had given up the comet. He had “ lost his lip," and I never
heard him play more than half a dozen notes at any one time. He
turned to other forms of expression. He made an ashtray by pasting

PS
cigar bands on a shallow glass dish so that the patterns could be seen
through the glass and then covering the outside with felt. He took up

U
pyrography. He bought slabs of wood on which designs, pictures, and
mottoes had been lightly printed, and he burned the lines away with

RO
the needle-like flame of an alcohol lamp produced by a jet of air from
a rubber bulb covered with string netting. He made some of the

G
picture frames on our walls and one ambitious plaque for my grand­
father and grandmother Skinner showing a puppy wearing a big
S
muzzle and alongside it the words: “ All I did was growl a little bit.”
K
O
BO

very little change in my father’s day-to-day life,

M a r r ia g e h a d m a d e
but it was not so with my mother. She was no longer serving as typist,
secretary, and notary public in the busy office of the chief executive
EX

of the Railroad; instead she was keeping house in an inconvenient,

ramshackle structure which needed much work to make it livable.
D

Although we had a telephone, few people had, and my mother took

IN

advantage of the fact that a man would drop by from the grocery store
to take orders. A little later in the morning Jackie Kane would arrive
with his meat wagon, stopping in front of our house and putting a
block of wood under a rear wheel to rest his horse. He would open the
back of the wagon and bring out unrefrigerated slabs of meat from
which he cut the pieces wanted by my mother, weighing them on a
spring scale hanging from the ceiling of the wagon. He would give
my brother and me half a frankfurter cach to eat raw, and there was
always plenty of free liver for the cat. The iceman would disturb no
one because a small window had been cut into the outside wall of the
pantry, through which a block of ice could be put directly into the
icebox.

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Part I

On Mondays Mrs. Barnes came to do the laundry. W e had a

washing machine, manufactured by a local company of which my
father was a director. It consisted of a large wooden tub with a hinged
cover on the underside of which was an agitator, looking rather like a
milking stool, rotated forward and back by an electric motor mounted
on the top of the cover. You filled the tub with water from a hose or
pail, added the clothes and soap, lowered the cover, and turned on the
current, allowing the agitator to run as long as the condition of the

PS
clothes seemed to require. All this was done in the kitchen or wood­
shed or, in good weather, on the back porch, but Mrs. Barnes

U
always ironed in the kitchen because the sadirons were heated on the

RO
stove.
M y mother practiced many economies. She cut buttons off
garments before they were thrown away and stored them in a bag

G
decorated with dancing figures whose heads were made of buttons.
Somewhere she had read that soap lasted longer if thoroughly dried,
S
and in the cramped space above the library which served as attic there
K
were small pyramids of dusty bars, unwrapped and drying. The main
O

result was that they lost all their perfume. It was only at my grand­
BO

parents’, where soap was bought a cake at a time, that it smelled good
— Packer’s Tar Soap at my grandmother Burrhus’s and Colgate Cash-
mere Bouquet at my grandmother Skinner’s.
EX

Whenever eggs were cheap, my mother put them down in large

butter crocks full of “ waterglass.” It was often my duty to go down
cellar with a bowl and a long spoon and fish out a few eggs coated
D

with a white gelatinous matter. My mother, like almost everyone else,

IN

also “ canned.” Food poisoning from badly canned vegetables was

fairly common, but badly canned fruit seemed simply to ferment, and
we often ate it for sauce even though it stung our tongues.

T h e f i r s t p e r s o n a l p o s s e s s io n I remember was my Teddy Bear. Its

imitation fur was light brown and it had a white knitted cap and
jacket. The Teddy Bear was a fairly recent innovation: a newspaper
cartoon had shown Theodore Roosevelt sparing a bear cub during one
of his big-game exploits, and copies of the cub came on the market as
toys for children. It was the kind of doll a boy might respectably play

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with. At about the same time I had a “ rag book” — an alphabet book
printed on cloth with a picture for each letter or figure.
M y brother and I usually played on the pale blue-green carpet in
the parlor, a room opening into both living and dining rooms and con­
taining our upright piano and two mahogany chairs upholstered in
green watered silk. One of our favorite toys was a set of stone blocks.
Some were brick red, others slate blue, and others a warm honey
color. There were arches, cornices, and a steeple, and they were heavy

PS
and would stay wrhere you put them. A book showed a great variety
of buildings that could be made with them, all very Germanic.

U
W e had a jigsaw puzzle advertising the Delaware, Lackawanna,

RO
and Western Railroad, which used anthracite coal rather than bitumi­
nous and claimed that its passenger cars were therefore free of cinders.
The puzzle showed a beautiful girl named Phoebe Snow, dressed all

G
in white because she “ rode the road of anthracite,” standing on the
back platform of the train, the polished brass railings of which made it
S
easy to fit the pieces of the puzzle together.
K
Our toy trains were primitive. The sections of track were easily
O

bent—especially when stepped on— and never fitted very snugly to­
gether. The engine was heavy and ran for some time when wound up
BO

with a key, but the cars were too light to stay on the uneven track,
and they were hooked together insecurely.
Our set of dominoes, already “ antique,” was made of thin slabs
EX

of ivory and ebony held together with brass pins turning green in the
crevices. W e soon acquired a set of double nines, much more impres­
D

sive than double sixes though simply of unpainted wood, and much
IN

more useful in setting up those long snake-like chains that fall down
like burning fuses. W e set up chains on a card table, being careful not
to jiggle it, and leaving gaps every so often to be filled in at the last
moment to minimize the risk of accident.
W e played checkers on a board made years before by my father
with his drafting instruments— the squares neatly ruled in India ink
on red cardboard and numbered so that annotated games could be
followed. My father occasionally played with us, but always a little
didactically. W hen we played checkers he would stop to show us how
to get a king out of a double corner and when we played dominoes,
how to count the number of pieces already on the board to see whether
we could block the game.

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Part I

A favorite toy was a spelling board. Letters of the alphabet

printed on disks could be moved in a large circular channel from
which single letters could be selected and moved into a horizontal
channel to spell a word, the meaningless jumble of letters in the great
circle yielding a pattern that said something.
W e made pinwheels and paper airplanes, and we knew how to
bend the wings to make them loop the loop. W e cut thin sheets of
red gelatin into fish-shaped pieces which, placed on a warm, moist

PS
palm, slowly curled with a semblance of lethargic life. W e made buzz­
ers of large buttons and loops of string, spinning a button with great

U
speed first one way and then the other as we tightened and relaxed

RO
the string in a lovely rhythmic pulsation.

G
M y m o t h e r sang to us with that voice so much admired by her towns­
S
folk. Her songs were consoling, yet not without a touch of sorrow.
K
“ The Slumber Boat” began:
O

Baby's boat's the silver moon

BO

Sailing in the sky,

Sailing o'er the sea of sleep
While the clouds float by.
EX

Sail, baby, sail, out upon that sea,

Only don’t forget to sail back again to me.
D

The sobering note of that last line was echoed in the chorus of “ Sing
IN

Me to Sleep"—

Love, I am lonely, years are so long.

I want you only, you and your song.
Dark is life’s shore, love, night is so deep.
Leave me no more, love, sing me to sleep.

Both my father and mother read to us, but the stories were often
the bloodthirsty kind of which the brothers Grimm were masters. I
once went to bed terrified by “ Hansel and Gretel.” W ould parents de­
liberately leave their children in the woods to be rid of them? Was
there a wicked witch who lured children with a house built of candy

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and then put them in cages and fed them until they were plump
enough to eat? “ Goldilocks and the Three Bears” had a happy end­
ing, though by the merest luck, and a happy ending had not yet been
invented for “ Little Red Riding Hood.” Even “ Cinderella” seemed
threatening in spite of her triumph (how often could one count on a
fairy godmother?).
At eight o’clock we were sent off to bed after kissing our parents
good night. There came a time when I kissed my mother and started

PS
upstairs and she protested, “ You haven’t kissed your father,” and my
father said quickly, “ That's all right.” He understood; I had reached

U
the age at which boys did not kiss their fathers.
When my mother and father were going to a party, they would

RO
come into our bedroom so that we could see them all dressed up.
On some occasions my father wore a “ tux” and my mother a beautiful

G
gray satin gown. When they entertained at home, our library came
to life. A roaring fire was built of lengths of oil-soaked oak planks from
S
a discarded floor of the Erie Shops. The Tiffany lights on the two
K
sides of the fireplace were turned on, and they and the flames were
reflected dozens of times in the glass covers of the sectional bookcases
O

which lined two walls. Even the freshly waxed black-leather platform
BO

rocker (like my grandfather Skinner’s) glistened with points of light.

W e were allowed to taste the marguerites (cookies made with egg
white and nuts) and to see the place cards and table decorations, but
EX

we were sent upstairs before the guests arrived and were condemned
to enjoy only what we could hear. M y father and mother did not drink,
D

nor, so far as I know, did any of their friends.

IN

W e h a d most of the childhood diseases— chicken pox, mumps,

measles, and whooping cough. Our doctor reported each case to the
Board of Health, and an officer came and tacked a large sign on our
door, the color of which told the nature of the infection. This put us
in quarantine, and we were not allowed to leave the house until the
sign was taken down, nor was anyone else allowed in. There was only
one case of polio in the town in my day, but I myself had a brief bout
of rheumatic fever. I awoke one morning with very sore knees and

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Part I

could scarcely get downstairs. The doctor ordered me confined to a

chair. I had some very small toy cars at the time and the arms of the
chair had channels of the right gauge and I spent many hours running
the cars up and down. Starkweather was called in, and this time there
were to be no flannel pads; he put his hands directly on my knees.
(Starkweather’s services were always gratis; it was a gift he freely
shared.) The illness disappeared within a week.
W hen I was quite young, I came home late one afternoon to

PS
find both my grandmother Skinner and my mother in tears. M y
father was doing his best to smooth things over. My grandmother had

U
come to insist that my brother and I be wormed. At the time children

RO
were given some kind of medication which produced a gray stool, ap­
parently showing that intestinal worms had been killed and excreted,
but my mother would have none of it, and she accused my grand­
mother of meddling.
G
W hen I was somewhat older, I was troubled with large, painful
S
boils, mostly on my bottom. I fell on one of them once and got up
K
with blood and pus streaming down my leg. M y father treated them
O

according to our doctor's instructions: I lay face down across my bed,

BO

and he touched the boil first with carbolic acid and then a few mo­
ments later with alcohol. Once he spilled something on my leg and
was not sure whether it was the acid or the alcohol. Instead of taking
EX

no chances and wiping it off, he left it until it began to burn into the
skin, and I limped around with a painful acid burn for weeks.
D
IN

S h o r t l y b e f o r e C h r i s t m a s we made fondant. M y mother boiled

sugar and water in a large kettle until a sample formed a ball when
dropped into a glass of water. Around a marble-topped table, moved
into the kitchen for the occasion, my father, my brother, and I sat
waiting, armed with spatulas and pancake turners. The syrup, colored
and flavored, was poured slowly onto the middle of the marble slab,
and we kept it from running off the edges by using the spatulas as fast
as possible. Slowly the mixture hardened and developed a fine grain,
and we made it into small flattened balls, on some of which we im­
pressed almonds or halves of walnuts. There were green ones flavored

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with almond, yellow with lemon, pink with a rosewater flavor I nev
liked, and white mixed with coconut shreds and vanilla. They wei
put on sheets of wax paper to season in the attic and then take
around to relatives and friends as presents.
The day before Christmas a tree was set up in the parlor, an
candles were attached in little sockets clipped to branches in the safes
places. On Christmas Eve we went to the Presbyterian church, wher
there was a tree, and under it the presents we had given our Sunda)

PS
school teachers and the very small presents they had given us. Jake1
Brandt, the dentist, unsuccessfully disguised as Santa Claus, read th<
names on the packages and passed them out with great spirit. W<

U
sang a few carols and came home. Then, in spite of the danger, w<

RO
lighted the candles on our own tree and allowed them to burn foi
fifteen or twenty minutes.
In bed we stayed awake listening to our parents as they put oui

G
presents around the tree. W e knew there was no Santa Claus long be­
S
fore we were supposed to know it. On Christmas morning we were up
K
before dawrn, and we dashed downstairs in our pajamas to play with
our presents. Later in the morning we walked to our grandparents’,
O

carrying baskets, bearing small gifts and returning with large ones.
BO

Our two sets of grandparents had few tastes or interests in com­

mon and saw little of each other, although they lived no more than
five or six blocks apart. They could not avoid being together on
EX

Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's Day. M y mother would

“ take” Christmas because it belonged to my brother and me. Both
D

grandmothers preferred Thanksgiving, but my grandmother Skinner

usually got it for one trumped-up reason or another, and that left New
IN

Year's for my grandmother Burrhus, when we had scarcely recovered

from Christmas. There was an unspoken contest between them about
the size of the turkey, number of side vegetables, and kinds of pie.
M y grandmother Burrhus was by far the better cook and won easily
when it came to quality.
And so the years passed, and I became aware of their passing. I
remember lying awake on New Year's Eve, 1910 , regretting the passing
of that year with its lovely round number.

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S oon a f t e r passing the bar examination, my father plunged into

politics. I do not know whether he began as the confirmed Republican
he was to remain all his life or whether he convinced himself by his
early successes as a speechmaker, but successful he was. A newspaper
reported a meeting in the county seat:

A rousing meeting was held at the rooms of the McKinley and

Roosevelt Club on Saturday evening. . . . The speaker was William A.

PS
Skinner, Esq. . . . With no thought of flattery, but a simple desire to
bestow praise where it is due and in such measure as merited, con­

U
strains your correspondent to say of Mr. Skinner's address that it was
the most exhaustive, comprehensive and convincing argument in be­

RO
half of the Republican cause that has been heard in Montrose during
the campaign, while in choice diction, eloquent periods and graceful
delivery it is seldom equalled.
G
S
He was then twenty-four years old. Four years later he was on
K
the hustings again and a paper published the following account:
O

Mr. Skinner speaks in a tone clear and strong, using few gestures
BO

and depending largely for the effect which has made him popular as a
public speaker by the mere inflection and modulation of the voice,
eliminating haranguing entirely. He is not one who attempts charming
EX

his listeners with figurative language but on the opposite deals in clean-
cut, convincing facts, presented in an intelligible manner.
D

He was speaking on behalf of Theodore Roosevelt, and his en­

IN

thusiasm knew no bounds:

Never before has there been a higher type of true manhood. Never
before any better example to young and old. Never before has there
been any officer who more conscientiously said what he knew was right.
With him the first question is, "Is it right?" not, “ Is it expedient
alone?" If it is right then go ahead regardless of whom it hits or hurts.
. . . He has courage, intelligence, and strict honesty. . . . He has no
apologies to make and what he says he says straight from the shoulder.
Such are a few Republican principles, and such is our candidate. Demo­
crats may steal our principles but they cannot steal our—man.

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By 19 12 Roosevelt had founded his own Bull Moose Party, and

my father sang a different tune. He taught me a little campaign verse:

Mary had a little lamb.

It soon would turn to mutton.
And every time it wagged its tail,
It dropped a Bull Moose button.

PS
His lecture on “ The Muckraker and Representative Democracy” was
said by a Montrose paper to be an “ eye-opener/’ “ Muckraker” was

U
Roosevelt’s word, and I am sure my father did not believe that it was
part of the vocabulary of representative democracy.

RO
(W hen I was perhaps twelve, we were at a summer resort, and
one of the guests was a distinguished man from Binghamton who was

G
well liked by everyone but who, my father told me with mixed
amusement and contempt, was a socialist.)
S
Not all my father’s speeches were political. At a men’s meeting
K
at the Railroad Y M C A he spoke on “ The Arrest, Trial and Conviction
O

of Jesus from a Legal Standpoint.” The Transcript reported that

the lecture showed a large amount of study, but it was not my father’s
BO

study, for he had taken the whole thing from a book bearing a similar
title that I had seen in our library. Other books, such as five small
volumes of Gems of Humor, had no doubt also been acquired for
EX

their usefulness in speechmaking. He was always rather nervous be­

fore he spoke and read his speeches or at least followed notes closely,
D

but he was nonetheless effective. He may have profited from his ex­
IN

perience in Esmeralda and the other displays of Susquehanna talent.

The Transcript reported that he held an audience “ spellbound” by
reading Dr. Conwcll’s “ Acres of Diamonds,” a lecture that Dr. Con-
well himself was said to have given several thousand times.

W i t h or w i t h o u t the help of his eloquence, my father’s business

was expanding. (He overcame the slight handicap of his name. An out-
of-town paper reported that “ Susquehanna actually has a lawyer named
Skinner/’ and I occasionally heard the comment, “ Skinner by name,

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Skinner by nature/’ ) His practice took him to the county courthouse

in Montrose and to the Superior and Supreme Courts of Pennsylvania
in Philadelphia. The clippings my mother cut from the Transcript
describe only cases of local interest and are no doubt not a fair sample
of his first ten or fifteen years as a lawyer, but they are illuminating.
He defended a man charged with stealing part of a ninety-foot length
of rope: he lost the case, but the plaintiff was awarded only eighty
cents and required to pay costs of twenty dollars. He defended a man

PS
charged with stealing brass from the Railroad, and another charged
with stealing two hundred pounds of hay. He defended two hoodlums

U
charged with reckless and drunken driving and horsewhipping a

RO
number of people as they passed. He represented a company suing
to recover payment for a cheese cutter, a man from whom a silver
watch and nine dollars in coin had been stolen, the Commonwealth

G
in a raid on a bawdy house, the Railroad in a suit against employees
whose carelessness had caused a fatal collision, a bankrupt against a
S
receiver who was said to be persecuting him, a group of creditors
K
against a man who wanted to be declared a bankrupt, and a man who
O

claimed to have been assaulted by the Chief of Police of Oakland.

BO

In 1903 he became United States Commissioner, hearing and dis­

posing of cases involving the Federal government— seldom anything
more important than tearing down mailboxes on a rural postal route
EX

or stealing from the post office. In 1907 he went to New York to be

interviewed for the position of local attorney for the Erie Railroad.
He bad won a case for the company involving a fairly large amount of
D

money and had come to the attention of a Judge W illard who was
IN

then attorney for the Erie Company as a whole. He sent a cryptic wire
to my mother: “ Three hundred year ten fifteen thirty first annual for
you home in morning W ill.”
In spite of his eloquence his own political career had not prospered.
He lacked the gifts of a politician. His childhood had not prepared him
to make friends quickly. He often seemed to glower, and some of my
acquaintances were rather afraid of him. He was the Republican candi­
date for Mayor of Susquehanna in 1903 but lost to a Democrat. In
1904 he was a candidate for the Republican nomination for District
Attorney but ran a poor third. And his first really big case was to put
an end to all political aspirations.

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* * *

O n M a y 24, 1907, the Machinists' Union called a strike in the Erie

Shops. Employees who were not members of the union stayed on the
job, and the company brought in strikebreakers and housed them in
a business block. Most of them did not speak English, and the M a­
chinists' Union hired an “ interpreter,” whose main task seems to have
been to persuade the strikebreakers to quit their jobs. Possibly through

PS
company maneuvering, the interpreter was arrested and found to be
carrying a revolver, and he was held on bond and brought to trial. He

U
was declared not guilty of carrying a weapon “ with the intent to injure

RO
anyone,” but just before Christmas a union member was arrested
and a revolver found on him, and as if in retaliation the same thing
soon happened to a strikebreaker.

G
Joseph Frank, an Italian who had lived in Susquehanna for some
time, was one of those who remained at work in the roundhouse of
S
the Shops. He was threatened by pickets, who called him a scab, and
K
on one occasion they chased him home, and so he, too, bought a
O

revolver at a local hardware store. On the day after Christmas the man
BO

whose job it was to blow the Shop whistle was a little befuddled and
blew it fifteen minutes early. Frank heard it while he was eating his
breakfast and jumped up, put on his coat, and hurried off to work. His
EX

wife had not had time to fill his dinner pail, and so at noon he came
out of the Shops to get something to eat. He was stopped by two
pickets named Hannigan and Sullivan. A scuffle ensued, and Frank
D

pulled out his pistol and shot Sullivan dead.

IN

Three lawyers were chosen to defend him. One was W . D. B.

Ainey of Montrose, who, as the papers later reported, argued points
of law. Another was an Italian from New York who never put in an
appearance and, when the trial was finally called, was said to be in
Italy. M y father was the third, and it was up to him to prepare the
case.
Frank was well known in Susquehanna, and my father was able
to find many witnesses to speak in his defense. One said that he saw
Sullivan pick up a large stone and throw it at Frank, and when Sulli­
van stooped to pick up something else, Frank backed up and put his
hand out as if to make Sullivan go away, but Sullivan put his arms
around Frank and “ knocked him.” The witness heard a shot fired and

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saw Frank stop a moment, and lie took Frank's arm and led him into
the roundhouse. These facts were known before the trial, and it was
clear that it would be claimed that Frank had fired in self-defense.
The prosecution would presumably accept a plea of second-degree
murder. At the very least the verdict would be manslaughter. But to
everyone's surprise Frank was declared not guilty.
After the verdict Frank held a reception in the Sheriff’s office, and
it must have been my father’s finest hour. The expressions of gratitude

PS
of Frank and his friends, congratulations of the lawyers and officers
of the court— could life be more wonderful? All the papers gave my

U
father full credit. They carried a two-column photograph showing

RO
him with a rather stern expression, pince-nez, a bushy mustache, and
a high starched collar with tie and stickpin. There was talk of his
running for District Attorney.

G
The real impact of the trial was soon felt. It was an exceedingly
unpopular verdict. According to the Transcript:
S
K
Citizens of Susquehanna were thoroughly wrought up when the
O

news was flashed here about 5:30 last evening that Joe Frank had been
acquitted, that a verdict of not guilty had been rendered, in very quick
BO

time, and a murderer had been released.

While there were very few persons who expected that a first degree
verdict would be found, there was scarcely anyone who thought the
EX

Italian would escape with less than manslaughter.. . .

How the jury could figure it out that the Italian was justified in
D

shooting Sullivan was a difficult problem to solve, but there is no way of

telling how a jury will decide anything, they are always an uncertainty
IN

and in many instances verdicts are in favor of or against the attorneys

instead of the man on trial.
This verdict is clearly one of the worst cases of the miscarriage of
justice that has ever taken place in Susquehanna and will do much to
promote lawlessness in the sections of the County where this foreign
element are numerous. It has produced a bitter feeling against the
Italians in Susquehanna and will probably result in many more fights
and even murders in an effort on the part of the citizens to avenge the
murder of John Sullivan.

His success in defending Frank meant that my father could no

longer look forward to a political future. He had defended a strike­
breaker against a picket, and organized labor would not forget. He had

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defended an Italian against an Irishman, and the Italians were a

minority group, many of them speaking only Italian and not yet
enfranchised, while the Irish dominated local politics. And since judges
were elected, the natural culmination of a legal career toward which
he might aspire was now wholly out of reach. Five years later a long
interview with my father in a Montrose paper contained the following:
“ Not withstanding his many activities in the Republican interest, he
has no political aspirations. He is quite satisfied to continue giving

PS
good service—appreciated service—at the legal bar.”

U
RO
had passed since my father had escaped from the M e­
F if t e e n y ea r s
chanical Engineering Department of the Erie Railroad and had gone

G
to New York for that one-year course in law, and he had come a long
way. The newspapers were correct in referring to him repeatedly as a
S
rising young lawyer, but he was not to rise much further. He was then
K
about as effective, personally and professionally, as he was ever to be.
O

At the start of his career he began to keep a fifty-cent piece in his

pocket. So long as he had it, "he would never be broke,” and perhaps
BO

it is a proof of his success that it was in his pocket when he died. But
it was by then only a thin disk of silver, wholly unmarked, with sharp
edges. For more than fifty years it had survived the perils of loss or
EX

theft, but it had been buffeted and abraded by other coins and pocket
knives and had lost its character and its value.
D

After the Frank trial my father suffered a similar fate. He had

become a successful lawyer, but the minting was complete. The things
IN

that were to happen to him later would add no new details. Life was
to abrade him, to wear him down. He struggled to satisfy that craving
for a sense of worth with which his mother had damned him, but
forty years later he would throw himself on his bed, weeping, and
cry, “ I am no good, I am no good."

M y f a t h e r apparently never knew how he looked to other people.

Every successful step in becoming a self-made man intensified his zeal
in improving himself, and he saw no reason why everyone should not

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improve— why Susquehanna should not be a self-made town—but

few of its citizens agreed with him.
He campaigned by writing letters to the Transcript. In one he
pointed to the filthy condition of the gutters with their grass and tin
cans. In another he complained of the noise made by muffler cutouts:

Many drivers seem to think that they are making an impression on

the public as to the wonderful power and quality of their cars when they

PS
are making the most noise. A good muffler at most only decreases the
power of an engine 3% and when one has to run his car with cutout
wide open all the time he proves that his engine is so dirty that it is

U
about to stall. Many drivers never go up any hill without opening the

RO
cutout and as Susquehanna is all hills we have no rest. Running with
the cutout open is a violation of the State Law and the borough ordi­
nance.

G
In another letter he pointed out that the town could easily in­
S
crease its tax revenue by $30,000 a year, which should be spent “ with
K
some business judgment and for improvements.” The limit on the
O

amount of money the town could borrow had also been increased, and
a “ Alteration plant” was no longer out of the question. W hen streets
BO

began to be paved, he wrote that the electric-light company should

be required to put its lines in cables under the streets to remove un­
sightly poles.
EX

Few people cared about these things, and those who did took a
different position. It was not good strategy' to argue that to use a
D

muffler cutout was to concede the weakness of one's engine, and not
IN

many people cared to have their taxes raised or the town debt in­
creased. The officers of the electric-light company would not put its
lines underground willingly, and if they did so, they would raise the
rates. M y father was ready to sacrifice for the sake of progress but
others were not. His proposals merely bolstered his reputation as "B ig
I and little u.”
He continued to go to Penn family reunions— in part, no doubt,
to show his relatives how far he had moved up in the world, but he
wanted them to move up too. On one occasion a young boy played a
saxophone solo as he had evidently learned to do from an instruction
booklet, paying no attention to sharps or flats. It was pretty dreadful,
and my father was tactless enough to criticize him. W hy could they

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not find someone to teach the boy to play properly? This was “ bumpy
W ill Skinner” at his worst.
A t one time a former resident returned to Susquehanna to pro­
mote a hardware-manufacturing company, and for some reason the
local priest presided at a meeting to consider this chance to create new
jobs. It would be necessary for the citizens to subscribe $50,000 as an
initial investment, and they were urged to act quickly because another
town was said to be on the point of snapping up the offer. Shares were

PS
sold and a company was organized, but it failed before a factory was
completed. M y father, with Frank Zeller and Sid Hersh, the son of

U
one of the proprietors of the Eisman and Hersh Department Store,
sought help in New York City and then organized the Blue Ridge

RO
Metal Manufacturing Company to take over what was left of the
old company (for $3,0 10). An enterprising and creative man, Mott

G
Jones, was brought in as general manager. (He served for years as a
kind of scientist in residence to whom my father and his friends
S
appealed for solutions to all kinds of mechanical problems. W hen
K
I once pointed out that the extra-large tires my father had bought for
our Ford would reduce both the speed and the mileage registered on
O

the speedometer, he naturally checked with Mott Jones.)

BO

The old company had some orders to be filled, including one for
5000 lamps for a South African mine, and my father and his associates
also negotiated a contract to manufacture candlesticks in which the
EX

candles, held in celluloid sleeves, were moved upward by springs as

they grew shorter. There was once a claim for damages when a candle
D

jumped abruptly and spattered wax on a man's tuxedo. When the war
started, the company began to manufacture “ trench mirrors"— small
IN

sheets of silver-plated brass— but the supply of brass ran out, and the
steel that replaced it rusted in the trenches. Eventually no metal was
available, and the company stopped production. M y father and his
friends had failed again to do something for the town.

M y m o t h e r was on my father’s side in all this. She herself served

the local hospital in many capacities and worked in the Women's
Relief Corps (associated with the war in which her father had played

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his small part), and during the World W ar she served in Red C a n
canteens. Service, she began to say, was the main thing in life.
There was an element of service in her friendships. The only
friend of whom this was not true was Dora Scheuer. Her father had
come to the Susquehanna area as a pack peddler, selling cloth, thread,
and tinware along country roads. He had made enough money to open
a feed store in Susquehanna and then to move to Buffalo and start a
business there. Dora shared many of my mother’s interests and skills.

PS
She went to France as a nurse in the W orld War, and her long and
interesting letters to my mother were published in the T ranscript.

U
W hen she returned she brought me a small bronze stamp box deco­

RO
rated with a Dijon lion. She was bright and witty, and I remember her
best for her unrestrained laughter.
M y mother’s relationship with a friend whom I called Aunt

G
Harriet was very different. Harriet had moved away when they were
both quite young, and they wrote to each other every week until they
S
married and had children, and after that every other week for almost
K
seventy years. A dependency quickly developed. Aunt Harriet married
O

a shoe clerk and lived for a number of years in Flatbush, where her
BO

son was bom. Her husband died, and she was forced to shift for herself.
She and my mother were approximately the same size, and my
mother sent on to her all her discarded clothing. Whenever I saw
EX

Aunt Harriet it was like last year’s version of my mother. The de­
pendency continued during a second marriage, and when her second
husband died and she took over his modest business, my mother
D

continued to help. The loyalty she received in return was important

IN

to her.
She was even proud of the attention she received from a cat.
There was a boardinghouse across the street from us run by an older
woman whom we all called Gran’ma Graham. She had a cat named
Varley. In fair weather we spent a good deal of time on our front
porch, and once a day Varley came to see my mother. “ Here comes
Varley/' she would say, with the intonation of “ Didn’t I tell you?”
Varley would work his way up along the gutter on the far side of the
road, look carefully up and down the street, and then hurry across,
even if no wagon or car was in sight. He would come up on the porch
and go directly to my mother’s lap, where she would smooth the hair

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on his head and back and talk to him affectionately. So far as I know,
she never fed him or gave him anything except this attention. After
spending the proper amount of time for a social call, Varley would
get down, again cross the road with care, and go home.
The whole thing was a great satisfaction to my mother, and there
was something of the same sort in her relationships with her friends.
If she had not heard from Harriet near the end of a week in which a
letter was due, she would say again and again, “ I haven't heard from

PS
Harriet/’ She was no doubt concerned for Harriet’s welfare, but she
was perhaps also needing reassurance that the friendship was intact.

U
Her relationship with Mrs. Barnes, our washerwoman, who
worked for us in Susquehanna for twenty years, and with her daughter,

RO
Bernice, who worked in the same capacity after we moved to Scranton,
had something of the same character. They were extraordinarily loyal,

G
but only, I think, because my mother skillfully played the role of Lady
Bountiful.
S
She was proud of her appearance. She stood up for twenty min­
K
utes after every meal to preserve her figure, and did indeed keep a
O

good figure and posture all her life. She loved to tell a story about
the picture in my father’s office that showed her with my brother and
BO

me. A stranger had asked my father if it was a picture of his family

and had then said, “ How nice,, two boys and a girl!” When someone
made a complimentary remark about a friend, she would treasure it,
EX

and when she saw the friend, she would announce that she had a T .L.
— a “ trade last” —meaning that she would pass on the compliment in
D

return for one the friend might have heard about her.
IN

She laughed a good deal and often had uncontrollable giggling

spells, but she tended to laugh at people. She thought it was scream­
ingly funny when Mrs. Barnes said that a friend had reached the
mental pause, or when a neighbor referred to Ethelbert Nevin’s song
as “ The Rosarary.” The news items published in the Transcript from
small towns were her delight. She often clipped them out and sent
them to friends and even mounted some in her scrapbook:

Miss Bemice Burchell is assisting Mrs. Clayton Slocum with her

work, on account of Mr. Slocum’s illness. The neighbors have been very
kind in assisting with the barn chores.

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Clayton Slocum had the misfortune to injure his back last week
but is able to draw the milk again.

On the right occasion one of these would set off a giggling spell.
W hat she found funny was very much like what she knew was
not “ right/' She could sit in a railway station and be amused by the
odd people she saw, but the same shortcomings in those who were
close to her were treated as almost sinful. A shirt and tie which did

PS
not go well together were amusing on a stranger; on a son they brought
a violent protest. A neighbor’s noisy car was terribly funny, but a

U
squeak or rattle in our own called for immediate treatment, and we

RO
would drive up and down the street standing on the running board
leaning over at precarious angles to spot the offending member. When
other people mispronounced a word she would store it away to tell

G
her friends, but when I mispronounced one she would sternly cor­
rect me.
S
She did what was right in a spirit of martyrdom. She told me once
K
of finding a hair in the ice cream served by a friend at a party. It would
O

not have been “ right’' to hurt her friend by taking the hair out of her
mouth and so she chewed and swallowed it bravely. Perhaps she was
BO

thinking of my own difficult birth when she told me once that a boy
who lived down the street “ had no right to be alive” because his
mother had died when he was born. W hen our minister, the Reverend
EX

Mr. Pritchard, gorged himself at a church supper and had an attack

of indigestion, she called him as intemperate as if he had been a
D

drunkard.
IN

She had strong and curious tastes. She loved the smell of the gas­
works in Binghamton which we passed as we drove into the city, but
she hated the smell of apples. It was a mortal sin, immediately pointed
out, to have an apple or two in the fruit bowl on the dining-room table
if she was invited to call. W ben my grandmother Skinner once boasted
of frequently serving apple pie because we loved it so much, my
mother was challenged, and she baked a pie, holding the apples under
running water as she peeled them. By a brook near Hickory Grove we
gathered sprigs of mint to be made into sauce but my mother could
not stand the odor of spearmint gum.
She had presentiments, and took them seriously in spite of my

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PARTICU LARS OF MY L IF E

father’s skepticism. “ I know you don’t think I can tell,” she would
say, and it was clear that she felt injured, and when a presentiment
came true, her triumph knew no bounds: “ W hat did I tell you?”—
and then with a special twist, “ I know you don't believe...
She had one ability about which there was no doubt: she could
find four-leaf clovers. If she saw a patch of clover on someone’s lawn,
she would bend down and almost immediately come up with a stem
with four leaves. She would frequently find two or three while the

PS
rest of us searched in vain. Her satisfaction was intense, and she never
overlooked an opportunity to demonstrate her skill.

U
RO
M y m o t h e r was in many ways the dominant member of the family.

G
She had consented to marry my father, and there was an element of
consent in her behavior with respect to him throughout his life. She
S
had been the more prominent, the more successful, and the more
K
sought-after person in their group, and my father barely made the
O

grade in persuading her to marry him.

There were some things my father had done of which she always
BO

spoke with great condescension. A flood had washed out a small

bridge near the center of the town several years before they were
married, and my father had apparently rescued two young girls, hold­
EX

ing on to them when the bridge collapsed. My mother used to tell this
story in a derisive way, possibly to offset the no doubt laudatory
D

fashion in which my father or his mother reported the event. She

IN

occasionally referred slightingly to a detective story he had written,

the plot of which hinged on the invention of a gun that could shoot
a bullet around a sharp corner. He sent it off to a magazine and got
it back with a flat rejection. She always hoped that I would be tall,
and during my adolescent years she would comment on my growth
in a way which must have hurt my father, who was not a tall man.
(As it turned out, I disappointed her there too.)
W ithin his family and among his friends my father readily
admitted his mistakes and acknowledged his limitations, and perhaps
the most important role my mother played was that of confessor. I
doubt whether he ever made a mistake that he did not report to her.

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It could be something as simple as a verbal slip. I once heard him tell

her that when a woman came to inquire about her bill with the tele­
phone company, of which he was treasurer, and suggested a different
way of keeping the books, he had started to reply, “ If we did that we
would get our books all balled up,’7 but had said instead, . . we
would get our balls . . .” Much later I heard him confess the agony
he suffered when, because he had grown hard of hearing, he was
unable to hear what a judge said to him when he was trying a case

PS
and was afraid to ask him to repeat. M y mother always had a word or
two of consolation: he should remember that everyone had problems.

U
M y father hated to lose a case and would be unhappy for days when

RO
he had done so, and it was my mother who would reassure him: “ You
cannot win them all.”
E. R. W . Searle, the uninhibited lawyer who knew both my

G
father and mother well before their marriage, said many years later
that “ Grace made quite a man of W ill Skinner.” It was an achieve­
S
ment of which my mother was not entirely unaware.
K
She was apparently frigid. Her mother may have been similarly
O

disinclined or at least determined that her daughter would never have

occasion to leave a document to be read after her death. Something
BO

of the intensity of my mother's responses to sexual advances can be

inferred from an episode in her early twenties. She had a date with a
young man named Joe Boyden, the son of my grandfather Burrhus's
EX

close friend, and something happened that deeply offended her—

possibly some sudden pawing. In any case she refused to speak to him
D

again. Fortunately he left Susquehanna fairly soon, but he would come

IN

back occasionally, and in spite of the fact that his father and my grand­
father continued to be close friends, my mother never spoke to him
again— never.
She apparently gave my father very little sexual satisfaction.
W hen my brother and I were young, we slept in a room next to my
parents’, and the connecting door was usually left open. One night I
heard murmurs and muffled activity in the next room. Then I heard
my mother say, “ Do you hate to quit?” and my father muttered some
reply. E. R. W . Searle also once said that “ W ill Skinner would be a
better man if he went to see the chippies now and then,” but I am
sure he never did.

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He showed a rather surprising independence in his relations with

other women, however. He developed a close relationship with a Mrs.
Church, a younger, good-looking woman, whose sister had an apart­
ment on the floor above my father’s office. He would often take Mrs.
Church with him when he drove to Montrose, the county seat, on
business. Her husband apparently had no objection, and occasionally
the two couples went out together. M y mother referred to Mrs.
Church as my father’s “ affinity,” always with amusement. She told

PS
me later that my grandmother was terribly concerned about my
father's behavior, but evidently she herself was not.

U
M y father was also interested in Elisabeth Lamb, a young divorcee
living in Binghamton, whose mother, a distinguished piano teacher,

RO
was later to play a role in my musical development. Mrs. Taylor and
her daughter w’ould come to call on us with some relatives who lived

G
in Susquehanna, and Elisabeth Lamb would sing. She had a pleasant
voice, but the only repertoire we heard was composed of things like
S
“ The Land of the Sky Blue Waters.” She studied singing seriously
K
but never had a career. My father had glamorous ideas about singers,
O

and he once rather petulantly complained to some friends in my

mother’s hearing that Elisabeth Lamb had refused to have dinner with
BO

him when he had happened to be in Binghamton.

If he flirted with anyone in their immediate circle, it would have
been Nell Owens, the wife of the owner of the hardware store. She
EX

was the most openly flirtatious and could be counted on for the latest
sexual gossip, reported with the least use of innuendo. A bit of
D

flirtation would explain an early memory. My father and I were on

the train to Binghamton, and a seat had been turned over to make
IN

space for four. Nell Owens was sitting opposite us and talking with
my father. I was playing with the latch of the window, and Nell said
something to me about punching her ticket, as if the latch were a
conductors punch. Inexplicably, I burst into tears. It was quite unlike
me, and it is possible that I had been annoyed by a flirtatious conver­
sation designed to be unintelligible to me.
M y father was necessarily involved in discussing sexual matters
in connection with divorces, and for that or some other reason he had
purchased a set of Havelock Ellis's Studies in the Psychology of Sex,
which he kept concealed in his office. (He once complained that Nell

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Owens had never returned one volume and had broken his set.)
Allusions to sex around our house were never very frank. A picture
called “ September Morn” was popular at the time and frequently
reproduced. It showed a nude girl standing in shallow water covering
herself very effectively with her arms and long hair. “ September M orn"
was almost a synonym for nudity in our family.
Annette Kellerman had swum nude in a movie we had all seen,
though we had by no means seen all of Miss Kellerman, but the

PS
standard bathing costume for women was a dark blue or black dress
with a skirt and stockings and slippers. One evening when my mother

U
was getting supper, my father cut out the bare arms of one picture

RO
of a bathing girl and fastened them on the legs of another so that she
appeared to be bare legged. He told me to show it to my mother in
the kitchen. She was not amused.

G
S
K
O
BO
EX
D
IN

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U
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G
S
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O
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EX
D
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PS
U
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G
S
K
O
BO
EX
D
IN

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i g r e w u p in a bountiful world, in which many w'onderful things
were to be had for the asking. Our backyard offered black cherries,

U
red cherries {shared with the robins), purple plums, green plums,

RO
Concord grapes, currants, raspberries, rhubarb, horseradish, and mus­
tard. None of them needed any care; they w’ere simply there in season.
Our neighbors had other kinds of slipskin grapes, plums, and apples.

G
In the fall we wrent nutting. The chestnuts had not yet been
blighted, and we took flour sacks and filled them until they were
S
almost too heavy to carry home. W e kept a few in our pockets and
K
put them on the hearth of the fireplace to pop open. W e often drove
O

into the country after supper to gather hickory nuts, and sometimes
we found butternuts or black walnuts, the shells of which were harder
BO

to crack, and you had to dig out the delicious meat with a horseshoe
nail. Once in a while we found beechnuts, small and hard to peel but
with a delicate flavor.
EX

In the spring, wintergreen leaves and berries were among the first
things to push through the matted leaves after the snow had melted,
D

and when we were out for a drive, wre knew where to stop to harvest
IN

watercress and the young fiddleheads of ferns. W e enjoyed the odor

of an occasional stand of pine trees and believed that it was good for
people with tuberculosis.
It was a beautiful world. Susquehanna was a dirty, unkempt town,
but the great sweep of the river valley was magnificent. There were
fields and pastures on the inner bank, reaching well up into the hills,
and some of what remained uncultivated was part of the original
hardwood forest, which blazed with color in the autumn. In spring
we knew where to find the delicate trillium, arbutus, fringed gentian,
and jack in-the-pulpit; and we did not even have to look to find honey­
suckle, columbine, and dogwood. To the despair of farmers, pastures
would fill with red and yellow devil’s paintbrushes and goldenrod,

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and here and there patches of violets or bluets. Masses of Queen

Anne’s lace flourished along the roadside. In our backyard there were
roses on an arbor and a large bleeding-heart plant, the blossoms of
which could be pulled apart to reveal a fascinating inner structure.
Along the porch we planted petunias and salvias, and every now and
then someone made the standard joke of calling them spittoonias and
salivas.
In the cemetery next to our house there were snowballs— white

PS
berries the size of marbles which gave satisfying plops when thrown
against tombstones. W e collected stems of plants with galls of inter­

U
esting shapes. And everywhere there were the beautiful but trouble­

RO
some burdocks, each bur composed of scores of small, barbed hooks
like crochet needles. W e pelted each other with the burs and in more
creative moods made them into chains and baskets.

G
S
K
It w as a we shared with animals. Thornton Burgess and
w o rld
O

Ernest Thompson Seton told stories about animals that were scarcely
less anthropomorphic than B r’er Rabbit or the characters in Aesop’s
BO

Fables, but we did not learn from books. I had a cage-like mousetrap
that caught mice alive, and I used it to catch chipmunks. I could never
tame them, and I let them go when red marks developed on the sides
EX

of their snouts as they tried to force their way between the wires of
the trap. Not much could be done with frogs, toads, or lizards, but
D

turtles were easy to catch, and I used to make ladders and teeter-totters
IN

for them to perform on. Later we killed snakes rather than capture
them, and on that rare occasion when it was a rattlesnake, we counted
the buttons in its rattle to evaluate our achievement. In early summer
we caught fireflies and put them under an inverted drinking glass to
see them glow in the dark— a steady glowing which, alas, meant death.
In autumn we found cocoons and brought them into the house, and
we might be rewarded months later when a butterfly emerged. I could
catch a bee in a hollyhock blossom, folding the petals together to
make a small bottle, the bee buzzing furiously until I tired of the
game and released it. W e knew and stayed away from hornets’ nests,
but I once watched a swarm of bees taken out of a tree in front of my

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grandmother Burrhus’s by a man wearing a hat with a veil falling over

his shoulders; he smoked the buzzing mass with a small smudge pot
until it became quiet and then simply pried it free and took it away.
My friend Raphael Miller took care of his father’s carriage horse,
and I used to help him clean the stable. The horse frightened me not
so much by its size as by the loud sound of its hooves on the plank
floor. A runaway horse pulling terrified passengers in a careening
carriage at breakneck speed was, like a house on fire, something to

PS
see and talk about. A few of the citizens of Susquehanna hunted, and
one of them was Billy Main, whose blacksmith shop was at the rear

U
of our property. One of his dogs once tangled with a porcupine, and
back at the shop I heard it howling mournfully as the quills were

RO
pulled out of its mouth one by one.
It could have been true, as we believed, that rattlesnakes traveled

G
in pairs and when killing one you should watch out for the other, or
that a bunch of bananas arriving in a grocery store might conceal a
S
deadly tarantula, or that somewhere in the vicinity there might be
K
quicksand as treacherous as that which permitted Captain Marion,
O

the Swamp Fox, to escape from the British, but we also believed that
the sounds made by robins when a storm was brewing were a way of
BO

“ calling for rain,” that the rays of light streaming through the clouds
under certain atmospheric conditions showed that “ the sun was draw­
ing water,” that a horsehair soaked long enough in water would turn
EX

into the fine snake-like creatures we occasionally saw at the edge of a

pond, that bats tried to get in one's hair and that if you saw one in
D

the evening sky and threw up your cap you might trick it into going
into the cap in search of hair, that darning needles or dragonflies
IN

would sew up your ears, eyelids, or lips, and that a cat sleeping in one’s
bed could “ draw out” one's vital forces or even one’s life.

T in that world, too, and some of them were inter­

h ere w er e peo ple

esting. Among them, predictably, was a blacksmith. He worked in

Billy Main’s shop, and I used to watch him crank the rotary blower of
his forge and thrust a horseshoe deep into the hot, sparkling coals
with long iron pincers. As he tested the hot shoe for fit, the air filled

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with the pungent smell of scorched hoof, and there was a burst of
steam as he plunged a shoe heated to a cherry red into a tub of water
to temper it.
In the yard outside there was a bender through which straps of
iron were cranked to form wagon tires, and I was amazed to see holes
drilled through them with a hand-operated drill press. A tire was
heated before being pressed over the wooden wheel, and as it cooled
it contracted and drew the rim and spokes tightly together. Also in

PS
the yard were the remains of two early automobiles far beyond repair,
though I nevertheless dreamed of putting them in working order.

U
A block from our house in the other direction was a carpenter
shop, and we often heard the coughing of its one-cylinder engine and

RO
the occasional whine of a planer or saw. The carpenter did cabinet
work, and I was surprised to see how often he simply glued pieces of

G
wood together, but the glue was hot and hence presumably stronger
than the kind I used.
S
Almost directly across the street was the boardinghouse run by
K
Gran'ma Graham and her daughter Nellie. The house was full of
O

jovial, outgoing boarders— among them the head nurse at the hospital,
the chief clerk at Ned Owens's hardware store, and the rector of the
BO

Episcopal church. They all sat around a big table at mealtime, with
Nellie carrying dishes to and from the kitchen.
I never saw Gran’ma Graham outside her house, but every
EX

Christmas Nellie or one of the boarders would bring over baskets for
my brother and me with great red and green bows tied on the handles,
D

filled with apples, oranges, dates, figs, bunches of raisins on stems, and
candy— ribbon candy in bright colors and strong flavors that broke
IN

into dangerously sharp pieces when you bit it, or stubby cylinders
with colored pictures— flags or bouquets— running straight through
from one face to the other.
I had a small reciprocal duty to perform on New Year’s Day.
Gran'ma Graham believed that if the “ first foot” to cross her threshold
was a dark-complexioned man, the year would bring bad luck. I
could solve the problem because I was fair, and I went over as early
as possible on the first day of each new year to knock at the kitchen
door. Gran’ma Graham would be up getting breakfast and would
welcome me and give me a bit of silver as part of the ritual. It was
always a dime.

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Miss Nugent had a candy store, on the corner of Myrtle Street

and Jackson Avenue, which I passed four times a day for twelve years
on my way to and from school. It was a small, red, one-story build­
ing, the back half screened off for living space, and all business
transacted in the right front corner, where there were two glass
cabinets full of penny candy, with a box for short children to stand on,
and beyond them some shelves of tablets, pencils, crayons, rubber
balls, and notebooks.

PS
The same staple candies were available year after year— Tootsie
Rolls, red-hots, licorice sticks, spongy yellow bananas, jujubes, lemon

U
drops, and paraffin chewing gum— but once in a while there were

RO
novelties, such as large blocks of brown, dry, frothy sugar, light as
feathers and quickly reduced to small chewy bits in the mouth, or
very small tin frying pans holding candy eggs, sunny side up, with

G
a tin spoon to eat them with. It would take us several minutes to
chose a nickel’s worth, but Miss Nugent had all the time in the
S
world. Once she put in some cheap golf balls and my mother evidently
K
told someone that they wfere dangerous because they had compressed
O

gas at the center. Miss Nugent had a boy cut one in half and she was
BO

very serious as she told me, one of her best customers, that my mother
was wrong. I wras surprised that she would let a boy risk doing it, and
also embarrassed at being a member of an opposing faction.
EX

Lizzy Smith lived in a badly run-down house on Jackson Avenue.

The town may have forgiven her her taxes as a gesture of welfare,
but she made her living by peddling drugs and cosmetics from
D

door to door and baking bread, rolls, and cakes. I went to her house
IN

one cold evening at suppertime to pick up some Parker House rolls

my mother had ordered for a dinner party and was astonished by all
the things I saw spread out on great tables in her hot and steamy
kitchen.

W h enI w a s f o u r or five years old, a girl down the street played

school, and I was one of her pupils. All I learned about school was
that you sat with your hands folded on the table in front of you.
It was not a bad preparation. Miss Metzger, who taught first and
second grades, was a pleasant, well-disposed woman, but discipline

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was a part of life in Susquehanna and we did indeed sit some of the
time with our hands folded on the desks in front of us. W e held up
one finger when we had to go to the toilet to urinate and two fingers
for something more serious. Both grades were taught in the same
room, Miss Metzger moving from one side to the other. To teach
us to read she held up cards and we called out the names of letters
and later pronounced words.
Miss Graves came to the room to teach art. W e had sewing

PS
cards, with holes punched in patterns through which we drew colored
yarns with safe, dull-pointed needles and we also colored printed

U
figures. Miss Graves was once scandalized when she discovered that
I was using an orange crayon to color a man's face, and she dug into

RO
a box of scraps until she found a small flesh-colored crayon. Mrs.
Mooney, the Catholic-church organist, came to teach singing. She

G
put up great charts showing notes on staves, and in a rough but ac­
curately pitched voice led us through the do, re, mi of a primitive
S
solfège. W e all learned to read, draw, and sing.
K
W hen it came time to go home we were sent to the cloakroom
O

to bring out our coats, hats, leggings, and overshoes. A girl named
Annabelle Harding sat in front of me. She lived two doors down the
BO

street from us and was plump and pretty, and I was in love with her.
Once when she was putting on her coat, she laid her bonnet on the
seat, and a ribbon came through and I put my foot on it. I simply
EX

meant to keep her from picking up the bonnet but she pulled it
sharply and the ribbon broke off and I was mortified.
D

One day I was playing on our porch with some rubber alphabet
IN

stamps, and I decided to print a letter to Annabelle. I told my mother

what I was doing and a moment or two later asked her how to
spell “ kiss." I was aware of a certain reserve as she told me. She need
not have worried, for my romance was short-lived. The Hardings
left Susquehanna “ between two days"— that is, during the night to
escape the Sheriff.
Annabelle’ s place in my affections was taken by a little blonde
girl from W est Hill. She went to a different grade school, but I saw
her at dancing class, which met in a small room with a hardwood
floor over Henry Perrine's furniture store. W e dressed up— though
it was probably past the time when I wore a Little Lord Fauntleroy

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suit— and were on our best social behavior, the boys sitting on one side
of the room and the girls on the other side. In one ceremony a girl
stood on a chair and held out a burning candle. The boys marched
around in a circle and jumped and blew at the candle as they passed,
and the one who blew out the candle danced with the girl. My little
blonde friend always lowered the candle so that I could blow it out
easily. She was very pretty, and although she often had bad breath,
I was in love. A song by Victor Herbert with the words “ I’m fall­

PS
ing in love with someone” was then popular, and I whistled the tune
and sang the words around the house hoping that my brother would

U
tease me about my pretty friend on W est Hill. Alas, her family, too,

RO
soon left town.

G
W e g o t o u r f i r s t c a r , a Ford, in 19 10 from a dealer in Great Bend.
S
It was painted black, but there was a great deal of brass on it. The
K
radiator, with the word Ford in raised cursive letters on the front,
O

was all brass, and so were the frame of the vertical windshield, the
upper half of which could be folded down so that the driver could
BO

enjoy the breeze, and the long rods which braced it against the
wind. W e polished the brass almost daily, using a special white paste
and sponges from my grandfather's barn. W e usually rode with the top
EX

down but put it up when it rained, and if it rained hard we put on

black side curtains which were held in place with twisting tabs. The
D

curtains had small isinglass windows.

IN

The unpaved roads were dusty, and you maneuvered to be ahead

of or far behind other cars when the dust was bad. W e wore linen
coats called dusters, and caps and goggles, and my mother wore a
scarf over her hat. Driving at night was a hazard because the gas lights
were not very bright. The gas was generated in a tank on the running
board. W hen it grew dark, you stopped the car and opened a cock
on the tank which allowed water to drip onto calcium carbide. The
resulting acetylene was piped to the headlamps, and you waited until
you could smell gas and then touched a match to the little Y-shaped
outlets, usually getting a small pop.
The horn had a large black rubber bulb. (A later invention, the

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Klaxon, was operated by pushing on a plunger; it made a lou^j

raucous noise.) The tires had no tread, and since there were naih|
from carriages and wagons in the dirt roads, there were many puncture*
and it was necessary to know how to repair them. M y father once paid
two men to come to our garage and inject our tires with a fluid saidL •
to contain powdered rubber, which would flow into any hole and stop
a leak. W e still had punctures.
To start the car you inserted a crank in the front end until it

PS
engaged the crankshaft and gave it a turn or two. After the first few
explosions you raced around to the steering wheel and moved t h e '

U
spark and throttle levers up and down to “ catch” the motor. My

RO
father once failed to disengage the crank quickly enough when the
motor started, and the crank spun around and broke his arm.
The spark was advanced or retarded depending on whether the ;

G
engine was knocking, especially in going uphill. There was a long
hill south of Hickory Grove that we called the Hog’s Back, and it was
S
my father’s pride that he could take it without shifting into low gear.
K
He would get a running start and then carefully work the throttle and
O

spark as the car lost speed on the grade. The tension was great, and once,
BO

just as we were reaching the top still in high, he bit his pipestem
in two.
A garage, approached by a driveway on the upper side of the house,
EX

was built near the rear of our lot. To avoid backing out or turning
around, my father had a second door cut into the far side so that the
car could be driven right on through and around the back of the lot
D

and out another driveway. A car that had smooth tires and was hard
IN

to start in cold weather was worthless in winter, and it was left in the
garage, jacked up on wooden blocks to save the tires.
W e bought our gasoline at the coal yard, driving onto the plat­
form on which wagonloads of coal were weighed. The gasoline was
pumped from a drum in the office and brought out in a ten-gallon
pail. The front seat of the Ford was removed and a large funnel put
into the top of the gas tank. The funnel had a chamois stretched
across it, and a few blobs of water remained on it when the gasoline
had gone through. W e liked to stand up in the back seat of the car
and lean over to smell the gasoline as it was poured.

* * *

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I saw m y f ir s t on Saturday morning, September 16, 19 11.

a ir p l a n e

W e got up rather late that day, and my father was later than usual in
shaving. I was in the bathroom as he lathered his face and began
to strop his razor. Suddenly we heard a strange clatter and, looking
out the window, we saw the plane. It was over the river, almost on
a level with our house. The pilot had written ahead to ask the post­
master to mark a white arrow with cloth or flour to indicate where he
might land. The only possibility near Susquehanna was Beebe's

PS
Flats, and there indeed, he landed. W e got in the Ford and drove
over.

U
It was a biplane, mounted on three small bicycle wheels, with

RO
canvas wings and wooden struts and a web of wire braces. The engine
turned a propeller at the rear, and the pilot sat in front and operated a
wheel on a stick. A crowd had gathered, and the town constable was

G
walking slowly around the plane with all the dignity he could muster,
keeping people back out of reach of it, but I managed to touch a wing.
S
The pilot, Jimmy W ard, was in a coast-to-coast race for which
K
William Randolph Hearst had offered a prize of $50,000. He was fol­
O

lowing the Erie Railroad. His wife arrived by train and their warm
BO

embrace when she joined him on Beebe’s Flats was talked about
by my mother and her friends for a week.
There was a good deal of discussion about taking off from the
EX

Flats and a good deal of pacing off of distances. Except for the part
that was a baseball diamond, the ground was not very smooth, and
to get the advantage of a slight wind Ward would have to take off to­
D

ward the western end of the field, where there were tall trees and
IN

beyond them the superstructure of the bridge over the river. He ate
some lunch and then had the plane pulled as close as possible to a
cornfield at the eastern end of the Flats and got aboard. A few men
pushed on the rear edge of the wings as the plane started and it
bumped across the field, bounced into the air, and cleared the trees
and bridge.
Later that year I went with my grandfather and grandmother
Burrhus to watch a race between a motor car and an airplane at the
fairgrounds in Binghamton. My grandfather pointed out that the
plane was not keeping directly above the track at the turns.

* * *

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A y e a r a f t e r I w a s g r a d u a t e d from college I wrote a “ Historical-

Religious” note recounting my religious education. It is probably
more accurate than my present recollections, with which it does not
always agree:

The first religious teaching I can remember was at my grandmother

Skinner’s. It was her desire that I should never tell a lie, and she at­
tempted to fortify me against it by vividly describing the punishment

PS
for it. I remember being shown the coal fire in the heating stove and
told that little children who told lies were thrown in a place like that

U
after they died. Not long after that—I could not have been more than
five or six—a neighbor asked me whether a certain man was my uncle,

RO
and I said, “ Yes.” I found out later that he was a great-half-uncle and
I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I had told a lie.
It may seem horribly absurd but I actually suffered torments over that

G
incident. Some time later I went to a magician’s show the final act of
which concerned the appearance of a devil. I was terrified. I questioned
S
my father as to whether a devil just like that threw little boys to Hell
K
and he assured me it was so. I suppose I have never recovered from that
O

spiritual torture. Not long afterwards I did tell a real lie to avoid
punishment and that bothered me for years. I remember lying awake at
BO

night sobbing, refusing to tell my mother the trouble, refusing to kiss

her goodnight. I can still feel the remorse, the terror, the despair of my
young heart at that time. .. .
EX

Several years later I visited in Buffalo with my parents, and they

took me to see a Passion Play. I went, fearing to go, fearing to refuse.
D

There was terror in me as we approached the outdoor theatre.

IN

My formal religious training, which covered many years, was

much less frightening. W hen I was quite small I was sent off to
Sunday school with five cents tucked into pocket or mitten. Mrs.
Tisdell and her daughter held the primary school in the social quarters
of the church. They passed out colored cards showing landscapes and
costumes of the Holy Land. W hen I was older Miss Graves met a
class of six or seven boys every Sunday for many years. The service
began with songs by the whole school— “ Rock of Ages” (cleft for me)
or “ Ship Ahoy” (hear the cry, oh, haste to the rescue today)—and
the Lord's Prayer, and then our group would assemble in one corner
of the church under a colored-glass window bearing the name of

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Frazier, the donor. W e had materials supplied by the Presbyterian

church, and it took us years to get through the Pentateuch. I received
a gold-and-enamel pin testifying to the fact that I had not missed one
Sunday in five years, except for medical reasons.
Miss Graves was a liberal who told us that the miracles reported
in the Bible could be taken as metaphors. This helped to relieve the
sense of sin I had acquired from my grandmother, but I was not yet
in the clear, and that rather turgid historical-religious note reported

PS
that “ before I had satisfied myself in unbelief I was torn by the inbred
tradition in me, I remember one incident in that period: ashamed of

U
myself for being afraid of a God I did not believe in I went about

RO
saying to myself, ‘God damn Jesus Christ, God damn Jesus Christ.' ”
I was never physically punished by my father and only once by
my mother who heard me use a bad word in talking with my brother.

G
She took me to the bathroom, put soap and water on a washcloth, and
washed my mouth out. It was a ritualistic gesture, and I wondered at
S
the time how she knew when my mouth was clean. I must have
K
been punished in other ways because my parents’ disapproval was
O

something I carefully avoided. I can easily recall the consternation

when, in second grade, I brought home my report card on which
BO

under “ Deportment” Miss Metzger had marked “ Annoys others,”

M y mother was always quick to take alarm if I showed any deviation
from what she called “ right,” but she needed only to say “ Tut tut,”
EX

or to ask “ W hat will people think?”

W hen I was perhaps no more than four or five I took a quarter
D

from my grandmother Burrhus’s open purse and spent it at Miss

IN

Nugent’s candy store, and when Miss Nugent reported that I was
spending beyond my accustomed means, I was questioned and
readily confessed. There was a family conference about appropriate
measures, but I was merely lectured and told the dangers of a
criminal way of life. Years later I went with my family to Montrose,
and my father took me through the county jail, which was connected
with the courthouse. Three or four men were sitting around in a
bare space behind bars, and I remember a little sign with a tin cup
asking for contributions to buy tobacco. And once when we were on
vacation, my brother and I were taken to see an illustrated lecture on
life at Sing Sing showing prisoners in black and white stripes working

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on piles of rock with sledgehammers. I don’t believe this was done to

frighten us, and I never knew where the Susquehanna jail was
located.
In whatever way it was accomplished my ethical and moral train­
ing was effective and long-lasting. When I was perhaps thirteen I
saw some periscopes for sale in the five-and-ten in Binghamton. They
consisted of tin tubes with holes near the ends on opposite sides.
I picked one up and mistakenly pulled off the cap pressed on one

PS
end. A small mirror came out and I could not put it back properly. I
was afraid to tell my parents, and I had no money of my own, so

U
I put the mutilated periscope back in its bin and moved away. I felt
guilty for days.

RO
Once at a Halloween party at the Presbyterian church someone
dumped a bowl of apples into a wash tub full of water and walked

G
away. I knew w’hat was to be done and immediately dunked for one.
I got it in my teeth and walked off eating it. Then I discovered that
S
you were supposed to pay for the chance to dunk, and I thought I
K
saw another child reporting my theft. I had no money and could not
O

return a half-eaten apple, so I stayed guiltily away. Once I saw a

chipmunk sitting on a fence post, and I threw a stone and quite
BO

unexpectedly hit it. I was unhappy for a week. M y father once brought
our Congressman home to supper. He asked me a few questions, and
I replied as impressively as I thought the occasion demanded. Had
EX

I ever been in Washington? “ No,” I said, “ I never were.” I knew

“ were” was not right, but I made no effort to correct myself, and I
D

suffered for a long time from the memory of that slip.

Another part of my early training could be summarized in
IN

“ Waste not, want not.” When I was perhaps twelve or thirteen I had
a generator taken from an old-style telephone. I was cranking it rather
aimlessly one day when my father warned me that it would wear out.
I protested that it was built to last a long time, but he said, “ It will
only last a certain length of time, and every minute it is cranked will
be subtracted from that time.” I never wore it out, of course, but I
no longer had much fun playing with it.
Unwilling to punish me, my parents showed some skill in finding
alternative measures. I was round-shouldered. It was partly a matter of
anatomy, for I was bom with a long neck and sloping shoulders, but

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I also drooped a little, and my family worried. M y father would slouch

across the room, his hands dangling in front of him like an ape's, to
show me how I looked as I walked. There was talk of shoulder braces,
but a different remedial step was taken: I was given an Irish Mail—
a kind of car steered with the feet and driven by pushing and pulling
a crossbar which stuck up in front of the seat and turned a wheel
geared to the back axle. It moved forward or backward depending upon
the position of the driving arm, and there was a dead center from

PS
which you escaped only by giving a little push with one foot. It could
not be driven up a steep grade without getting stuck in dead center

U
or suddenly and violently going into reverse. It no doubt meant

RO
excellent exercise for the back and shoulder muscles, but it was the
only one in town and attracted a lot of attention, and I confined my­
self to Grand Street when I took it out.

G
S
K
M y was extraordinary. In Binghamton I saw a
in n o c e n c e a b o u t s e x
O

vaudeville show featuring living statues, in which a curtain was lifted

BO

to reveal groups of people painted or powdered white and arranged in

classical poses. In several of these it was quite clear that the women
had no penises, and when I got home I experimented with myself to
EX

see how they could have tied their genitals out of sight.
I drew no conclusions from animals. I saw bulls and cows copu­
lating and, like everyone else, was embarrassed by the occasional sight
D

of two dogs stuck together. (Copulating cats were quite unsexual in

IN

their fighting and caterwauling.) I never saw horses copulate, al­

though in a blacksmith's shop I saw a man stroke a stallion’s penis to
show a friend how big it became. Occasionally a carload of horses
would be delivered at the station and driven through the streets on
their way to a country market, and I once overheard my mother com­
plain of the use of a lead horse to manage stallions en route; I was
not sure what it meant but knew it had something to do with sex.
My brother and I once inadvertently discovered our parents'
hypersensitivity about sex. One day when they were out we decided
to play a trick on them. W e stuffed stockings, knickers, and a shirt with
dirty clothes and added shoes and some kind of improvised head, and

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put the “ body” on one of our beds. W e wanted to put a rather large
nail file with a silver handle in it as a dagger, but the only place we
could find where it would stay upright was just below the belt in the
open fly.
W e were out when our parents came home, and when we re-
turned and asked my mother whether they had seen the dead body,
she looked very black. W e slowly realized that they had supposed that
the nail file was meant to be a penis, and when we told her it was a

PS
dagger, she dashed off to explain to my father.
One day my mother was entertaining some of her friends on our

U
front porch. A neighbor’s property was held in place by a retaining

RO
wall, and below the wall, out of sight of their parents but in full view
of our porch, their two children, a small boy and girl, were examining
each other’s private parts. Someone called my mother’s attention to

G
this, and she sucked in her breath and said, " I f I caught my boys doing
that, I would skin them alive!”
S
The nearest I came to being caught was when I was perhaps four
K
or five and several boys and I were in the hayloft of a neighbor’s bam,
O

examining and talking about our penises. The mother of one of the
BO

boys heard us, and when she asked him about it later he confessed.
She telephoned my parents, and I was called on the carpet. I lied my
way out: I said I had not been doing anything myself, I was merely
EX

watching.
I must have been punished in some way for very early sex play,
perhaps even as a baby, because I was once sent to bed without my
D

supper and felt unjustly treated, and I clearly remember saying to

IN

myself, “ If they do that, then I ’ll do this,” and I began to play with
myself.
I learned the technique of masturbation quite by accident, when
I was perhaps eleven. Up to that point sexual play had consisted of
undirected handling of genitalia. One day another boy and I had
gone out of town on our bicycles and walked up a creek, beside which
we were later to build a shack. W e were sitting in the sun engaged in
rather idle sex play when I made several rhythmic strokes which had
a highly reinforcing effect. I immediately repeated them with even
more reinforcing results. I began a steady movement, making an ex­
cited comment to my companion, and then, although I was too young
to ejaculate, I had my first orgasm. The only effect was that my penis

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began to hurt badly. I was panic-stricken: I had broken it! I got up and
walked down to the ledge of rocks alongside the creek in despair.

S i n c e m y b r o t h e r was two and a half years younger than I , there was

little competition between us. Following my mother's practice, I often

called him “ Honey” and was once ridiculed for doing so as we were

PS
pulling our sleds up Grand Street. “ Is he made of honey?” said a boy
contemptuously. Once when he was being kept indoors with a cold,

U
I was working in the little shop back of the kitchen. W e had received

RO
a new supply of kindling wood from the grocery store, and it included
a number of orange crates, the ends of which were beautiful squares
of clear white pine. W ith a brace and bit I could drill holes in the

G
comers (the shavings rising in lovely helixes) and drive in sticks to
make a stool. I brought one to my brother, and he was so delighted
S
that I went right back and made a second one, and this pleased him
K
so much that I went back and made a third. M y mother eventually
O

had to stop me, as the stools piled up.

Our sibling affection was memorialized by Delly Harding, Sus­
BO

quehanna's bachelor photographer, who posed us when I was per­

haps six, in a series of pictures in which we wore: (1) stiff black oilcloth
raincoats and hats, (2) Indian costumes with fringed sleeves and
EX

headdresses with turkey feathers, (3) primitive Boy Scout uniforms

with stubby staffs, leggings, and wide-brimmed hats, (4) bathing suits
D

in the current mode with tops and short skirts, (5) baggy overalls,
IN

one shot from in front, another from behind, and (6) our Sunday
clothes— white coats, socks, and patent-leather slippers.
That a change in our relationship eventually took place is sug­
gested by the inscription on the flyleaf of my copy of Alice in W onder­
land. I had written:

From Grandma Skinner

To Frederic Skinner
Dec. 25 1913

But below this, in my brother’s hand, is to be seen:

Your a
BOOB

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When my father and mother were away on business, we usually

stayed with Mr. and Mrs. B. Here are two of my brother’s letters on
such an occasion:

Dear Mother,
How are you getting along? Frederic is feeling fine. We got your
card but we didn’t get any potatoes and frankforts [marzipan]. . . . If
you could I wish you would bring me a bird book. Miss Graves says

PS
that we ought to have one because there are going to be a lot of birds
over. Bring Fred something in place of that. Four kisses a day

U
Ebbe

RO
Dear Mother,
W e got your frankforts and potatoes. W e had one session [sec­

G
tion?] today. Did Papa win the case? We are anxious to know. How are
you getting along? I am feeling fine. Miss O’Malley died this afternoon
S
at 12 o’clock. Don’t forget (if you will) get me a bird book and the
K
others things.
Ebbe
O

P.S. Eight more than you had (kisses).

BO

000000000000

My grandmother Skinner was not to be left out and we oc­

EX

casionally stayed with her, sleeping in the isolation of a massive V ic­

torian bedstead on the second floor. (A t Mr. and Mrs. B ’s we enjoyed
the security offered by a one-floor apartment.) She always gave us
D

oyster stew for supper. The grocer kept oysters in a large, unrefrigerated
IN

crock, from which he would dip out enough to fill a small cardboard
pail with a wire handle. My grandmother served the soup in shallow
bowls with yellow lily pads of butter floating on the surface, and we
sprinkled oyster crackers among them as we were not allowed to do
at home.
There were no checkers, dominoes, or playing cards at my grand­
mother Skinner’s, but there was always the bam to be explored with
its hayloft converted into storage space. Not much could be done with
those parts of stove polishers, but the white rubber tubing was useful
until it grew brittle with age. I discovered the principle of the siphon.
My grandmother had some large butter crocks, and on the back porch

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and cellar door I made elaborate hydraulic systems in which water

flowed, miraculously it seemed, up out of one crock and down into a
lower one and up out of that and down into one still lower.
M y grandmother also had a bottle of camphor, used for moth­
proofing, and I made camphor boats. I would cut a small piece of
cardboard in the shape of a boat with a nick in the stern, and when it
was floating in a tub of water, I would drop a crystal of camphor at
the base of the nick, breaking the surface tension and sending the

PS
boat forward.
M y grandmother could fold a piece of toilet paper over a comb

U
and hum or sing through it with the dramatic result later exploited

RO
by the kazoo. She also collected jelly glasses, and by choosing different
sizes and filling them with different amounts of water, I could get an
octave or so of pleasant tones, to be played like a xylophone.

G
S
K
We had o th er w a y sof making noises. A blade of grass held taut be­
O

tween the knuckles and bases of the two thumbs could be blown to
produce a powerful squawk, and a smooth leaf laid across the circle
BO

of thumb and forefiriger would pop when struck with the other hand
shaped like a cup. W e made willow whistles, and we had small snare
drums, and the sweet potato or ocarina was as much a mark of the life
EX

of Susquehanna as of any primitive culture.

Among our toys the stone blocks gave way to Erector and Mec­
D

cano sets. I was given the Erector set, with which you could build
IN

large structures, but I much preferred my brother’s Meccano set, be­

cause its strips of metal with equally spaced holes could be bolted to­
gether to create much more intricate devices.
I also had a small steam engine, perhaps ten inches high, with a
piston and flywheel and a tiny whistle. It contained an alcohol lamp,
and spilled alcohol was the first thing to burn when the lamp was
lighted. W hen the pressure built up, you gave the flywheel a spin and
it turned by itself, often running merrily for some time.
Mechanical engineering eventually gave way to chemistry and
electricity. Solutions changed color when mixed, and bits of string,
dipped in a solution and dried, burned like fuses, but there was not

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PARTICULARS OF MY LiFE

much else to be done. A friend, Otis Chidester, and I did try to design
a system for getting oxygen out of sea water, because a submarine
making a practice dive off Long Island had got its nose stuck in the
mud and the crew had died before they could be rescued, and we took
the idea to Professor Killian, then principal of the school, but it
appeared that there would be no room in a submarine for the equip­
ment needed. Electricity was more interesting. You rubbed a block
of resin and then transferred the charge to metal disks held on insulat­

PS
ing handles. A pith ball or a bit of charred match hanging on a thread
would swing rapidly back and forth, transferring a charge from one

U
object to another.

RO
I had a simple electric motor that ran on a dry cell. Three equally
spaced bosses on the rim of a flywheel passed between two coils, and a
strip of copper served as a brush to energize the coils at just the right

G
time to pull the bosses into their field and then release them. The
brushes could be bent to get the best timing, and the whole operation
S
was beautifully obvious.
K
I had a magic lantern with light supplied by a small kerosene
O

lamp. The slides were strips of glass bound with passe-partout, each
with perhaps six scenes. They were made in Germany and the stories
BO

they told were unintelligible, but the swift, effortless movement of

the lantern image about the walls of a room never lost its magic.
There was nothing to be done with the magic lantern except
EX

show again and again those puzzling Teutonic scenes, but later I was
given a stereopticon which had two electric bulbs and could project
D

scenes from postcards, and I began to arrange travelogues, using cards

IN

collected in New York— the Flatiron Building, the Statue of Liberty—

or on our automobile trips. W hen we got a Brownie camera I
dreamed of telling a story with a series of still pictures (in the manner
of penny-arcade machines) and photographed several sets and actions,
but my mother thought the camera too expensive a hobby.
One Christmas I was given a miniature theatre with cut-out
figures to be moved back and forth in grooves while a text was read,
and later I made similar theatres out of spare boxes. I discovered how
to fasten two curtains to a string passing over a pulley so that a
single pull opened or closed both curtains. I cut out figures from mag­
azines and pasted them on cardboard, and arranged to move them on

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sticks. I also made a shadow theatre, with colored transparencies that

cast images on a screen from a candle.
I never learned to whip a top because tops had gone mechanical—
spring-driven or, in a large metal version which hummed musically,
spun by pumping a twisted metal strip through a slot. Our jackstraws
were miniature rakes, spades, and hoes, all made of wood because
plastic had not yet been invented. W e played tiddlywinks, jacks, and
marbles. W e had some of the better marbles— migs and glassies—but

PS
the game we played most often was called “ How Many Birds in a
Nest?” One player held out his hand closed about a few marbles and

U
the other guessed the number. He got them all if he was right but

RO
made up the difference if he was wrong.
W e played mumblety-peg, hopscotch, and hide-and-seek. W e
roller-skated in groups, usually in the evening. W e clamped our skates

G
to our shoes with a key kept on a string around our neck. The first side­
walks in Susquehanna were flagstones from the quarries nearby, and
S
we learned to hop over the uneven joints and take effective strokes on
K
the bigger flags. Early concrete walks were not well constructed and
O

rang hollow under our feet, though we could work up greater speed
on them. W e had to break our descent on the hills by running into
BO

the grass and stumbling to a stop or holding out our arms and swing­
ing around a tree, and skating usually meant skinned knees and torn
knickers.
EX

Bob Perrine and I sometimes skated in the dance hall above his
father’s furniture store. The skates there had wooden wheels and we
D

could take broad strokes and cut figures with a wild abandon.
IN

I s p e n t t w e l v e y e a r s of grade and high school in one small brick

building on Laurel Street. In cold weather steam circulated through
long horizontal pipes at the rear of each room, and there were a few
minutes each day, as Mr. Shaughnessy stoked the furnace in the base­
ment, when the pipes pounded as if pistols were being fired. Each
room had rows of desks fixed in place, and the students stayed in their
seats and were fairly quiet. W e had our secret diversions. There were
no screens and in warm weather we were bothered by flies. In third

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grade the boy who sat across from me and I began to shoot flies on the
floor between our desks with long rubber bands. W hen we had killed
a few, the carnage attracted others, and the floor was eventually red
with gore.
There had been no sewer in the street when the school was
built, and we continued to use large, smelly outdoor toilets in all kinds
of weather. The play space in back of the school was divided between
boys and girls by a solid fence, and there was no playground equip­

PS
ment. W e might organize a game of pom-pom-pullaway, or someone
might bring a ball and bat for a game of one-o’-cat, but that was all.

U
I was embarrassed on my first day in third grade when I turned
in a perfect arithmetic paper and Miss Brosnam took me and the

RO
paper across the hall and Miss Metzger put her arm across my
shoulder, held up the paper, and told the second grade how proud she

G
was of the wonderful job I had done on my first day in third grade.
W e took our report cards home at the end of each month, and my
S
father signed mine with that characteristic flourish, but I do not
K
remember that he commended me for high marks. It was assumed
O

that I would do well.

I was chosen as the subject of two educational experiments.
BO

Someone from the County School Board suggested a new way to do

subtraction, and my teacher tried it on me. Instead of borrowing one
from the minuend, I was to add one to the subtrahend. I don’t
EX

remember that my performance improved, and I soon went back

to the old way. I was also urged to try the Palmer method of hand­
D

writing. W e had all learned Spencerian, and we perfected our hands

IN

by writing copybook maxims, each one a dozen times, but someone,

possibly Miss Graves, showed me how to write r and final t in
the Palmer style, together with a set of block capitals. The r was
easily confused with v or some other carelessly written letter, and I
eventually returned to Spencerian, though I kept the block capitals.
The school was being prodded to do something by way of manual
training, and so in fifth grade we brought cigar boxes or other light
wood to school and worked with scroll saws, staying after school and
littering the floor near Miss Coyle’s desk. There was no supervision,
and I had much better supplies and equipment at home.
No one taught singing beyond the second grade, though we all

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sang in weekly assemblies, and there was no orchestra or band. Miss

Graves did her best to find a little time for drawing and watercolors.
A few students made personal appearances before the assembly, and
the high-school students put on a play once a year, but the rest of my
schooling was strictly curricular.

PS
T h ere w as n ever that Susquehanna was a railroad town.
a n y doubt

Its life was paced by the Shop whistle as the life of a religious com­

U
munity is paced by a bell. Stores opened and closed and meals were
prepared and put on the table when the appropriate whistles blew. An

RO
early-morning blast warned the populace that the day was about to
begin, and a second blast half an hour later got it fully under way. If

G
you were near the Shops, you heard them grind into action. A single
shaft running the length of the building was driven by a steam
S
engine, and leather belts from wooden pulleys, slapping loosely and
K
often smelling of ozone, drove lathes, saws, planers, and milling ma­
O

chines. W hen the whistle blew at noon the clatter ceased for an
hour, and other blasts marked the beginning and end of the after­
BO

noon’s work.
The whistle was also used as a fire alarm, sounding a two-digit
number which identified the part of the town in which a fire had
EX

broken out. A card giving locations and coded numbers was posted in
every home, usually near the telephone, and we all knew the most
D

important numbers by heart and would listen and count when the
IN

whistle began to blow.

A Master Mechanic was assigned to the town as a bishop to a
diocese, and his arrival and departure were appropriately honored.
He lived in one of the better houses on Grand Street, owned by the
Railroad. The children of the incumbent in my day were city-bred
and more sophisticated than the rest of us.
Everyone knew the numbers of the passenger trains. A remark
like “ I came back last night on twenty-six” needed no further ex­
planation. W hen the Transcript reported that “ the happy couple,
showered with rice and ancient shoes, departed on train seven for
points in the W est,” everyone knew exactly when they left. My

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mother’s salutatory address was called “ The Block System"; she used
the way in which signals were operated as a metaphor for life in
general.
At grade crossings, like everyone else, we followed instructions
painted on a great X and stopped, looked, and listened. In the distance
we might hear an engine blowing its grade-crossing signal— a slow
hoo-hoo-too-hoo— and at the crossing itself bells would start to ring
and if there were gates, they would start to fall. Then the train would

PS
come in sight, its cowcatcher plowing through imaginary animals and
debris, its cylinders leaking steam, its pistons and driving shafts oscil­

U
lating, its smokestack breathing in short, asthmatic puffs, its engineer
in goggles and a visored cap leaning out and looking clear of the side

RO
of his engine, the fireman shoveling coal into a glowing firebox of
which we might catch a glimpse, and then a long string of cars, a

G
hundred or more if they were empty freight cars, bearing names from
all over the country— Baltimore and Ohio; Chicago and Rock Island;
S
Missouri, Pacific; Milwaukee, St. Paul; Atchison, Topeka, and Santa
K
Fe— and at long last the little red caboose, with the chimney of its own
O

stove and a rear platform from which a brakeman might wave at us.
W e who lived in a railroad town knew more about trains than
BO

that. W e were familiar with the towers in the “ yards" and the great
levers that operated the switches that shifted trains from one track to
another. W e knew all the signals that blocked or cleared the tracks.
EX

W e watched the water tower filling the tanks of engines, and we heard
about a scheme on the New York Central in which water was scooped
D

up from a mile-long trough as the train sped along without stopping.

IN

W e knew the sound of the domino shock wave that ran the length
of a train of a hundred empties when the engine started to pull or
push, and we dreamed of riding on the handcars pumped by the track
crews, which had to be lifted off the track quickly when a train was
heard or spotted in the distance. W e never hopped freights because
we had been told about boys whose legs were cut off when they slipped
and fell, but we put coins on the rails and crouched nearby to watch
the wheels flatten them.
W e saw the tramps and hoboes who dropped off the trains when
they slowed down on entering the yards, harmless, dirty, poorly
dressed, middle-aged men who called at kitchen doors for a handout
and were said to leave a secret mark on fence or gate to indicate a

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sympathetic housewife. They congregated in a glen west of Susque­

hanna and they heated beans or soup in tin cans just as they were
pictured as doing in the funny papers.
Susquehanna had its great day as a railroad town when the M att
Shay arrived. It was the most powerful steam locomotive ever built.
There were three of them and we called them all Matt Shays although
only the first— # 5 0 14 —was so named in honor of the oldest living
Erie engineer. They were over a hundred feet long, weighed nearly a

PS
million pounds, and carried sixteen tons of coal and more than eleven
thousand gallons of water. Three cylinders on each side drove sets of

U
four great wheels. The boiler was never able to make enough steam to

RO
fill all those cylinders at high speeds, but the engine had the power
needed to push a train of any length up that grade to G ulf Summit.

G
S
The u p w e l l i n g o f l o c a l t a l e n t in the ’90s had subsided by my
K
day, though I once heard the daughter of our washerwoman (my
O

mother “ had hysterics” when she heard that she was said to be known
in New York as “ Sunshine” Barnes) recite a number of dramatic
BO

poems in a performance at the Methodist church. But movies were

coming in, and every Saturday afternoon in my grade-school and early
high-school years I went to the Hogan Opera House. It was a barn-like
EX

structure below the Main Street level reached by going down some
stairs next to a saloon and walking along a dark alley. I paid ten cents
D

to the cashier, the wife of the projectionist, and took my customary

IN

seat on the left side about five rows back. I was almost always early,
and I read and reread the advertisements for local stores painted
around the proscenium arch, while eating shredded coconut or a
chocolate bar.
Eventually Miss Dooley came down the aisle and took her place
at the piano, and she would join us in looking toward the balcony in
the rear where the projectionist was busy with his reels. (He operated
the machine by turning a crank, and it was said that at the second
evening show he often ran it fast in order to get home to his wife.)
At a signal from the projectionist Miss Dooley would start playing,
the lights would go down, and the show would begin.
A program was composed of several movies, each of them one

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or two reels in length. One was always a cliff-hanger. Pearl W hite was,
of course, left in mortal peril at the end of each week’s episode, and in
another serial called The Clutching Hand the hero was once left
enclosed in a metal cylinder, diving and twisting about to avoid being
run through by steel knives which were being thrust through holes.
Later theie was a more sophisticated story called T he Trial of Mary
Page, in which the retina of a murdered man was developed like a
photographic plate to reveal the person at whom he was looking when

PS
he died. There were comedies, of course, and I remember a very funny
three-reeler called Goodness Gracious.

U
When I went on Saturday evening, I saw Mr. McManus, the

RO
Irish tenor, who edged out in front of the screen smiling brightly as
Miss Dooley “ vamped till ready,” his gold teeth flashing in the spot­
light. He sang popular songs with a touch of innuendo. Something

G
special was happening in the shade of the old apple tree or down by
the old mill stream, but I was never quite sure what it was.
S
Once a year we saw the movies of Lyman H. Howe— the Cin­
K
erama of the day. A sound-effects crew back of the screen imitated
O

marching feet, the clatter of wheels on rails, the roar of the wind,
thunder, bird calls, and the like. Once I saw and heard an early
BO

“ talkie.” A wire belt ran from the projector on the balcony over our
heads and through two small holes in the screen to a phonograph
behind it. A demonstrator dropped a plate, and we heard it strike the
EX

floor, and we heard a man play the cornet and a soprano sing.
W e went to Binghamton in 19 16 to see The Birth of a Nation
D

with an orchestra that played “ The Ride of the Valkyries” when the
IN

Ku Klux Klan galloped across the screen. W e took my grandmother

and grandfather Burrhus because he had been in the Civil War, and
he was disgusted— not at the treatment of the blacks, which was not
then an issue, but because the Confederate soldiers were always well
dressed and smart while the Union soldiers were bedraggled and
slovenly.
For many years a stock company made an annual visit to Susque­
hanna and put on a different play each night for a week. The leading
characters stayed at the house of a friend of mine whose mother was
stages truck. I never saw more than one or two plays each year, and I
remember only some kind of drawmg-Toom comedy, but a second

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company turned up one year with more dramatic material. In one

play the heroine was tied to a log and was on the point of being split
down the middle by a very real buzz saw when the hero arrived and
opened the switch.
Another company staged Uncle Tom ’s Cabin. Eliza, the escaping
slave, crossed a river, represented by three or four watery and icy
cutouts pulled back and forth from the wings, by leaping from soapbox
to soapbox between them, with bloodhounds baying but never appear­

PS
ing on stage. In a scene near the end little Eva was glimpsed safely in
heaven. In a minstrel show everyone but the interlocutor was in black

U
face, and the two end men played their standard roles.

RO
Chautauqua was a vast improvement on all this. It was an experi­
ment in public education, eventually superseded by radio and then by
television but influential in its day. It began as a summer institute

G
at Lake Chautauqua in New York State, but in the traveling version
week-long meetings were held in selected towns throughout the East.
S
It was necessary for a local group to guarantee the sale of 700 season
K
tickets at two dollars each, and my father was one of the guarantors.
O

He was also president of the local committee and at the first meeting
BO

always introduced the man or woman who would serve all week as a
director or master of ceremonies.
The chief logistical problem was the speedy transportation of
EX

equipment, crew, staff, and talent, and Susquehanna could have a

Chautauqua because it was on a railroad. The crew arrived on a
Sunday and put up the tent on a vacant lot at the comer of Broad and
D

Grand streets, only a block from our house. Performances were held
IN

every afternoon and evening, and there were children’s meetings in

the morning at which we sang a song confirming our allegiance:

Chautauqua, Chautauqua, the name we love,

The season that’s best of the year.
For its joys, girls and boys,
Ga-ther here.

At one meeting we were asked to promise to clean our teeth twice

each day, and I refused. W hen the director asked why, I said, “ Because
I might forget.” (I had had too much trouble with Divine Sanctions.)
“ If you forget, you will be forgiven,” he said, as if he were sure of it,

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and I reluctantly promised. “ I respect you for that," he added, to my

embarrassment.
Musical programs reported in the Transcript included the “ Soirée
Singers/’ a Florentine band with a soprano, a tenor who, I remembei;
sang “ Oh, no, John, no, John, no,” the Brooklyn Boys Choir with a
famous boy soprano, a pianist, and the Tyrolean Alp Yodelers, who
also rang bells. Each year there was a light opera. I remember T he
Chimes of Normandy, The Bohemian G irl, Pinafore, and The Mikado.

PS
There was a chalk talk, and I remember one picture of a gloomy
forest with a river and a house all very dead and lifeless until, with

U
a single vertical stroke of a block of yellow chalk, the artist put lights

RO
in the window and reflections in the river, and was roundly applauded
There were lectures: one on the north woods by a descendant of
Daniel Boone, one on the conquest of the Arctic at which Whiskers,

G
a dog hero, made a personal appearance, one on “ Life in the Trenches"
by Captain Vicker, “ who has in his head a German bullet and a strong
S
lecture/’ and one by Judge Kavanaugh, introduced by my father.
K
I remember best of all a lecture on science. In one demonstration
O

two large nails were put together in a crucible and some powdered
material was added, thermite perhaps, together with something that
BO

could be ignited by a few drops of water. The lecturer carefully wiped

a piece of ice and held it above the crucible until a drop fell and the
powder flared. He put on dark glasses, peered inside, and reported that,
EX

yes, the two nails were fused, as we should see a little later when they
had cooled. He also demonstrated sympathetic resonance with two
D

large tuning forks, one of which was connected with a tower of light
IN

wooden boxes. W hen he struck the other fork on the other side of the
stage, the boxes tumbled down. He also had a powerful gyroscope,
riding on wheels on a tight-wire, and when a weight was added to the
end of a long arm, the arm rose.
There was a magician, and in one of his tricks he used two parallel
rods about a yard long as a channel in which three balls rolled. He
held the channel out at arm’s length, the balls at rest near his hand,
and then, as he turned slowly around, he commanded the balls to roll
out one by one and to return one by one, and they obeyed. I saw that
it was done by using balls of different weights and altering the speed
of revolution or inclination of the channel, and I made a similar gadget

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the next day and reproduced the trick. M y father was impressed and
checked it out with Mott Jones.

F were staged for various benefits. One began with a

a ir s o r p ic n ic s

parade in which Jack Palmer as marshal rode one of the more spirited
horses from his livery stable. It ended at the Hogan Opera House,

PS
where the seats had been removed and booths installed. The most
popular booth was called the W heel of Fortune— the only legitimate

U
gambling enterprise in town.

RO
Bigger fairs were held on Beebe's Flats and the most exciting
thing for me was the merry-go-round. It belonged to Billy Main and
was stored disassembled in a wing of the blacksmith shop behind our

G
house. On the day before a fair the parte were carted over to the Flats
and bolted together. A round platform supported by a number of
S
wheels turned in a circular track, and each wheel drove a crankshaft
K
that rocked a colorful wooden horse above it. The edge of the platform
O

was grooved like a giant pulley, and a steel cable went around it and
passed over the capstan of a wood-burning steam engine which had
BO

two great brass balls spinning on its governor— a magnified version of

my toy engine. A barrel organ was operated by the movement of the
platform.
EX

W e bought as many tickets as we could afford and took the most

attractive horses we could find. As the platform began to turn, the
D

horses came to life, the barrel organ came slowly up to tempo, and a
IN

man came around collecting tickets. There was a device alongside

which held metal rings, one of which could be pulled free with a
crooked finger as one passed, and an occasional ring was made of brass
and was worth a free ride, but it was easy to fall off a horse while
reaching for a ring and I was forbidden to try. If the engineer was
busy stoking the fire or talking to a friend, we had a long ride, but
sometimes it seemed terribly short. W e could feel the horse begin
to slow its stride, and the barrel organ would go into a slow rallen-
tando. If we had another ticket, we would scramble for a better horse
and stay aboard.
At a Labor Day picnic for the benefit of the hospital, a balloon

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ascension and parachute drop were announced, and I was one of

several boys who were asked to help. The balloon was made of dirty
gray cloth, and it was filled with hot air and smoke from an oil burner.
W e held on to ropes fastened to the side to steady it and keep it over
the fire. Attached to the bottom and stretched out on the ground at
one side was the parachute, like a great folded umbrella, its ropes ex­
tending still farther to a trapeze bar lying on the ground.
The balloonist was dressed in the tights of an aerial artist, and he

PS
seemed nervous as he helped his partner fill the balloon, for it was not
lifting well and it was getting late in the day. Eventually he took his

U
place on the bar, holding it under him like a seat, and we were told to

RO
let go. The balloon went up, and the balloonist, shaking the ropes and
parachute clear of the ground, ran forward and put his weight on the
bar and went up too. But not very fast. The wind began to carry the

G
balloon toward a hill. It was not gaining much altitude, and the
partner on the ground saw the danger to the guaranteed fee and
S
yelled, '‘Jum p!” and we all took up the cry. The balloonist was evi­
K

dently supposed to do some acrobatics before jumping, but he merely

O

waved his hand in the standard gesture of an artist who has just
finished a difficult feat and pulled a rope which cut the parachute
BO

loose. He dropped, the parachute opened, none too soon, and he hit
the ground. The balloon turned over, black smoke pouring out of its
neck, and shriveled and fell on the top of the hill.
EX

W e had a balloon ascension of our own every Fourth of July.

During the day we did the usual things— slung torpedoes against the
D

sidewalk, ground sons-o'-guns under our heels, ignited small white

IN

snakes, lighted strings of tiny firecrackers in the Chinese manner with

our sticks of punk, held somewhat larger firecrackers tightly by the
bases at arm’s length until they exploded, and blew tin cans into the
air with three-inch salutes. In the evening we had sparklers, of course,
with the wire stems bent so that we could whirl them in circles, Roman
candles that lofted half a dozen glowing balls in a succession of soft
plosions, small skyrockets launched from a wooden trough, and at last
the fire balloon— made of tissue paper in red and wrhite sections with
a small alcohol lamp at the base— held until it was buoyant with hot
air and then released. My father always launched it from the top of
a stepladdcr, as if to give it a slight head start. It went up gracefully

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and glowed in the distant sky' until the alcohol burned out, an incendi­
ary threat throughout its voyage.
Small circuses came to Susquehanna and set up their tents on
Beebe’s Flats, and special trains bearing flamboyant labels stood on
a siding while they were in town. Once my parents took us to Bing­
hamton to Barnum and Bailey’s, the main feature of which was a
small automobile that ran down a steep track, flipped over in a loop-
the-loop, and landed on a ramp at the bottom, its passenger unhurt.

PS
A day or two before the thirtieth of May, when three or four
veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic, seedy and unkempt,

U
would come to school to tell us about their wartime experiences, we
sang Civil W ar songs. There were many of these in the little green

RO
books supplied to the school by the Cable Piano Company (with an
advertisement for the pianos on the back cover)— “ Marching Through

G
Georgia,” “ Just Before the Battle, Mother,” “ Tenting on the Old
Camp Ground,” and “ There W ill Be One Vacant Chair” —but we
S
also sang from a hard-cover songbook with less commonplace selec­
K
tions. There was a particularly moving song about the brave men who
O

lay sleeping— “ under the laurel the blue, under the willow the gray.”
Our most famous veteran, the highest-ranking officer in the area,
BO

was Colonel Telford, who lived on Broad Street just back of the school
building. He had once run a furniture store but was now bedridden,
and a few students would go to his house, stand on the front lawn, and
EX

serenade him. Once he was wheeled out onto a small balcony over
the porch to acknowledge our salute.
D

The cemeteries were decorated on Memorial Day and since we

IN

lived next to one, we saw a great deal of that. Flags were put in the
little metal standards bearing the letters G A R at the bases of the graves
of veterans, and fresh flowers were put in glass jars on the graves.

My fath er began to the lack of a summer cottage. C. Fred

feel

Wright, by all odds the most prestigious member of the community,

had one, of course— the biggest and best. It was on the site of the old
Forest House Hotel, which had burned— a mound-like hill once an
island in an earlier course of the river and now covered with pines.

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The large, attractive house at the top was called Pinecrest. Clarence
Wright, a nephew, had a cottage nearby, and there was a row of
houses in Columbian Grove, one of which, owned by E. R. W . Searle,
was said to be the site of poker parties and a good deal of drinking.
Elsewhere along the river there were small, rather ancient cottages
bearing proper names, such as Dun Rovin, Dew Drop Inn, or Linger
Longer. A few former residents of Susquehanna brought their families
back to spend the summer in newly built cottages.

PS
My father dealt with the problem in an unfortunate way: he
bought a newfangled portable canvas house and set it up three miles

U
from town in a pasture near the river. My grandfather Skinner helped

RO
him bolt panels together to form a floor and set up a prefabricated
frame of two-by-two’s which was covered with a dark brown creosoted
canvas. The interior was divided by canvas walls into four very small

G
square rooms, two at each end (one used as a kitchen, the other three
as bedrooms), and a central living space containing camp chairs, a
S
round table, and a small phonograph. Our Ford could not be left
K
outdoors overnight in bad weather without putting on the side cur­
O

tains, and so a small portable garage of the same brown canvas was
also set up.
BO

Housekeeping was difficult. M y mother cooked on an oil stove,

and water was brought from a farmer's well. There was no plumbing;
we used a chemical toilet and buried its contents along with garbage
EX

a little distance from the house. When the Transcript reported that
Attorney Skinner's cottage was attracting a good deal of attention, it
D

was not exaggerating. Anyone who could claim any acquaintance with
IN

us managed to find an excuse to come and look us over and often

stayed for a meal, in spite of the awkward kitchen facilities.
Thunderstorms were a more serious problem. W e saw lightning
strike on the opposite side of the narrow valley, and we could spot
trees that had been hit. W e were probably not in any great danger
because two great shagbark hickory trees within a few yards of our
cottage must have served as lightning rods, but the storms were none­
theless terrifying. A flash could be seen through the canvas, revealing
the very ribs of the house, and there was nothing to deaden the
thunder. The curved wall of the valley on the other side of the river
focused the sound on us like a parabolic reflector. During a storm

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my mother would sit biting her lips, struggling not to show fear for
the sake of my brother and me, and my father would try to reduce the
tension by playing the Victrola. W e often played a piece called “ Glow
W orm,” but I doubt whether we ever noticed the irony of the singer’s
appeal to “ shine, little glow worm, glimmer, glimmer.”
One storm was a “ cloudburst,” and the river rose to the floor of
our cottage. Albert Hillborn, the son of the man who owned the
land, put on hip boots and waded to our door to make sure that we

PS
were all right. N o one knew how near we were to floating off in a
modern version of Noah’s Ark. The next morning the river was back

U
in its channel and there was only one casualty. Our cat, frightened by

RO
the lightning, had gone under the house and had been trapped as the
water rose. W e missed him for a week before we began to detect his
fate and had to probe for his body under the floor.

G
John Hillborn, who owned the land, was a descendant of one
of the first families in the Harmony region, from whom the Erie Rail­
S
road bought part of its right-of-way. He was pious, punctiliously
K
dressed, rather crotchety and litigious. W hen the railroad broadened
O

its roadbed and in doing so built up the bank on the other side of the
BO

river, Hillborn went to court, claiming that the channel would be

changed and his land eroded. It was said that he had been offered
$100 for a single tree— a bird’s-eye maple— in the woods back of his
EX

farm and that he had loftily refused. Albert, his son, who kept house
for him and ran the dairy farm, wore work clothes, was overweight,
and wheezed softly as he moved about. His brothers had gone to
D

Kansas, to “ real farms,” and he envied them. He was a lonely man

IN

and grew fond of my brother and me. W e watched him as he sat on

a little three-legfcwd stool milking his cows. He would wipe the udders
clean with a wet cloth and rapidly fill a pail with foamy milk as he
worked his two hands in alternation, once in a while directing a stream
at our bare feet. Later we watched him pour milk into the great
steel bowl of a separator, and as he turned a crank, a trickle of cream
came out one spigot and skim milk poured from another to be taken
to the pigs. Sometimes we watched him operate a churn and salt and
pack the butter in earthenware crocks. He gave us some of the butter­
milk to drink before it, too, went to the pigs.
W e worked the grindstone in his yard, sitting on the small metal

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seat and pedaling it like a bicycle, and we followed him into his ice­
house, thrusting our bare feet down through the wet brown sawdust
until we struck ice. The piles of sawdust near lumber mills were also
wet below the surface, but they were hot— sometimes scalding hot—
from the “ slow, smokeless burning of decay.”
My brother and I fished near our cottage with bamboo poles,
baiting our hooks with nightwalkers and angleworms, and watching
the bobbers on our lines. W hen a bobber sent out little waves, we

PS
knew we had a nibble, and when it dipped smartly we had a bite
and pulled quickly. W e ate the sunfish and perch w-e caught, but the

U
sucker, a bottom fish with an ugly mouth, we believed to be a scaven­

RO
ger and never ate. Once in a while we caught an eel, three or four
feet long, and we killed it with a baseball bat and skinned and cut it
up into sections, but even in the frying pan the sections wove back

G
and forth with what we thought was a trace of life.
M y father fished for pickerel and bass, and his favorite spot was
S
the Big Rock across from our cottage. It was a huge boulder which
K
was said to have rolled down the side of the mountain in the memory
O

of people still alive, leaving a trail of broken trees before plopping into
BO

the river. It was a natural dock, and around it grew a great deal of
what we called eel grass. It was a favorite haunt of long, sleek pickerel.
For bait my father caught minnows with a net in the shallow water
EX

near our cottage. He would put a hook through the back of a live
minnow (I never watched him) and throw the struggling creature over­
board. The minnow sometimes took revenge by weaving in and out
D

among the eel grass so that the line could not be pulled in without
IN

breaking it, but once in a while a pickerel would take the bait and my
father would make his catch.
Our boat was especially designed to take account of the fact that
my father could not swim. Swimming was one of those things he had
never had a chance to learn in his restricted childhood, and he tried
hard to catch up. He would take off his glasses, two crimson patches
glowing on the bridge of his nose, and wade out into the river up to
his waist. He would stoop and take a few strokes and come up cough­
ing. He even submitted to using our waterwings. But it was no use.
Fortunately, my mother did not swim either and had no interest
in learning.

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The carpenter who built our boat had given it a very broad flat
bottom, but as it turned out safety was not even then assured. One
evening my father was rowing my brother and me back from the Big
Rock when a motorboat bore down upon us, driven by three or four
men wrho had been at a drinking party in a glen upstream. My father
stood up and waved frantically to catch their attention, and they saw
us just in time and swerved to one side. W e clung to the sides of the
boat and held on as we rocked with the waves.

PS
A second year of this was enough, and a slightly used portable
summer cottage with garage came on the market. I daresay it was sold

U
at a loss (it was never seen in the area again), but the whole enterprise

RO
was a good investment, for it led my parents to think twice about a
summer place, and no other effort was ever made to find one.

G
S
M y f r i e n d s a n d I enjoyed a peaceful co-existence. W e were not
K
physically aggressive toward each other, or toward more distant ac­
O

quaintances. W e had wrestling matches which sometimes led to a

BO

bit of meanness, but I do not remember ever striking anyone or being

struck. It was unthinkable that Raphael Miller or Bob Perrine and I
should ever come to blows.
Our culture permitted certain conventional forms of aggression,
EX

however. The archetypal pattern of an April Fool joke was the pocket-
book or wallet placed on the street and pulled away by a concealed
D

string when someone reached for it, but I never saw it done. Putting
IN

salt in the sugar bowl was a household version, and I came down before
breakfast one morning to try it on my father, but my mother was not
going to have cream wasted in salty coffee and archly told my father
that he could not have much cream in his first cup. He pretended not
to draw any conclusion, but I knew that I was the one being fooled.
Our evil spirit was more active on Halloween. W e were not
familiar with the convention of “ trick or treat.” W e simply played
tricks, and there was no way to buy us off. W e moved porch furniture
from one house to another, or hoisted a chair or two into a tree with
a length of clothesline someone was thoughtless enough to leave
outdoors. W e jammed toothpicks into doorbells so that they rang

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continuously, and ran away before anyone could reach the door. W<
also used a spool nailed loosely to the end of a stick, with a string]
wound around it. The outer flange had been notched, and when we;
held it against a windowpane and pulled the string, the windowpane'
vibrated raucously. W e also tied tin cans in groups of three or four
and concealed them on opposite sides of the sidewalk with a string
running between them high enough to catch the ankle of an unsus­
pecting pedestrian.

PS
U
RO
I r e m e m b e r t h e w i n t e r s in Susquehanna as long and cold, with
shoulder-deep snow continuously on the ground. W e wore knitted
caps and gloves and heavy belted coats called mackinaws, with leggings

G
rather like those of the soldiers in the World War. They were laced,
and ice would form on the lacings and under the instep band which
S
held the legging to the shoe.
K
The unpolluted river froze to a safe depth and was excellent for
O

skating when free of snow, but a small pond south of the town was
BO

safer and more often clear. Ice skates, like roller skates, were clamped
to our shoes and tightened with a key. My first skates had double
runners, each skate consisting of two miniature bobsleds, and I never
EX

learned to skate well on single runners. W e had skis but with nothing
more than a single leather strap over the toe as a binding, and great
knobs of snow and ice would build up under our heels so that the
D

skis twisted to the side. There were plenty of hills to ski down as long
IN

as we were willing to climb back up, using the prescribed but taxing
herringbone pattern, and we were more inclined to ski across country.
In a town built on hills the major winter sport was coasting, and
we all had sleds. There were still many heavy wooden bobsleds about,
with steel runners, many of them no doubt made on company time
in the Erie Shops, but younger people had Flexible Flyers, on which
you could sit up and steer with your feet, or ride "belly-floppers” and
use your hands. On a bobsled you leaned forward on both hands,
sitting on one hip, trailing a leg like a rudder.
The street in front of our house had a long, steady grade and was
particularly favored by coasters. The standard call for road clearance

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was “ Yi-yi,” and when the coasting was good we heard it all day long.
Just in front of our house was a “ thank-you-ma'am” — a small depression
across the road intended to divert rainwater into the ditches— and in
going over it a Flexible Flyer or bobsled would lift and sometimes
leave the ground and land with a thud.
The most sophisticated coasting was done in the evening by
young employees of the Shops and their girl friends. They used a great
sled called the Dutchman, composed of two long planks separated by

PS
vertical blocks of wood, the top plank well padded. A bobsled was
fixed at the back, and another in front could be steered with a wheel

U
borrowed from a freight car. A large bell, also probably borrowed
from the Railroad, was fastened under the seat and was operated

RO
by pulling a rope. As many as ten or twelve people could sit astride
the Dutchman, and lying in bed my brother and I would hear

G
them talking and laughing as they pulled it up the hill. At the top
it was turned around and mounted, someone gave it a long push and
S
hopped aboard, and we heard it coming down, the bell ringing and the
K
riders yelling “ Y iJ” It would go over the thank-you-mafam with a great
O

clatter and screams of terror and delight.

My grandmother Skinner once rented a horse-drawn cutter from
BO

Jack Palmer for an hour or two and took us for a ride. W e sat under
lap robes smelling of the stable, and we smelled the horse itself. Bells
on the harness jangled, hooves clopped on packed snow, and a whip
EX

jiggled sinuously in its socket. The hooves of the horse threw snow
dust in our faces, and we breathed it in and allowed it to melt on our
D

lips and eyebrows. The smooth glide of runners over snow was very
IN

different from the crunching, slipping, and jolting of wheels, and the
sleigh was so light and so tightly linked to the horse that we felt
each forward thrust.
W e made “ angels" by falling against snowbanks and leaving
multiple imprints of our outstretched arms, and quite elaborate
snowmen. W e built igloos, either by hollowing out great piles of snow
or using bricks made by packing snow into a bread tin as a mold. W e
also made forts: ringed walls in which snowballs were stacked in piles
like the cannon-balls near the Civil W ar guns on village greens—
though there was no land flat enough for a village green in Susque­
hanna.

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In the spring the ice melted first in the shallow water near the
banks of the river, and the great sheets in the middle, still quite thick,
began to move downstream. Word would run through the town—“ The
ice is out!” — and we went to watch it come over the Lanesboro dam,
huge sheets reaching out many feet before breaking off and falling
into the water below with great splashes, or we stood on the bridge
and watched the sheets strike the stone supports, which were shaped
like the prows of ships pointing upstream, to turn the blocks aside or

PS
split them in two.

U
RO
W hen I w a s n i n e , someone organized the Junior Boy Scouts in Sus­
quehanna and I joined. I got a khaki coat and knee-length britches,

G
with cloth leggings, and a red scarf to be tied around the neck. M y hat
had a flat brim and a crown dented in four places, like the hats of
S
K
soldiers. It was all vaguely military, and when the war broke out in
Europe, the military aspects were not overlooked. W e drilled with long
O

staffs, we had a special salute, and we recited an oath. W e marched in

BO

numerous parades. (Once while crossing the bridge from Oakland to

Susquehanna in formation with the Erie Band, we all began to stagger;
we had forgotten to break step, and our right-left rhythm had set the
EX

heavy iron structure in oscillation.) Eventually, as America became

involved in the war, we began to participate in Red Cross and Liberty
Loan campaigns.
D

The ostensible function of Scouting was much more peaceful: we

IN

were to prepare ourselves for an attack on the wilderness. W e carried

big jackknives containing corkscrews, bottle openers, and curved
blades with which we could ream holes in leather. W e carried hatchets
in special holsters fastened to our belts, and, observing a standard set
forth in the Boy Scout Handbook, we kept them sharp enough to put
a point on a pencil. W e were also supposed to do one good turn
each day— or presumably oftener if the occasion arose; that was
“ service,” a red-letter word in our house.
I passed the Third Class or tenderfoot examination and joined
the Beaver Patrol, but I was unable to earn any merit badges and never
moved up to First Class. I once tried to get a merit badge for campfire
cooking. I took some bread dough along on a hike, and I put it on a

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stick and held it over a fire, turning it until it developed a brown crust,
but the inside was still doughy, and I failed the test.
W e had trouble finding Scoutmasters, and no one held the job
for much more than a year. Usually the summer camp was his un­
doing. W hen the Reverend Mr. Hinks, rector of the Episcopal church,
who boarded at Gran'ma Graham's, was Scoutmaster, we camped
beside the river below Great Bend. After we had been there a day or
two, it rained, and the river rose during the night. W e prepared for

PS
evacuation, but the rain stopped and the water receded, and we dis­
covered that the only damage was the loss of some supplies which had

U
been cached in a grove and had washed away. Several large beefsteaks

RO
were found still in place, however, and when Mr. Hinks smelled
them to see if they were still good, he vomited.
Mr. Hinks once took us on an early spring walk in the woods to

G
gather flowers to be put in the cemeteries on Memorial Day. W e
despoiled the countryside and returned with huge masses of mountain
S
laurel, dogwood, honeysuckle, columbine, and small, quickly wilting
K
bouquets of trilliums, jacks-in-the-pulpit, and arbutus. A photograph
O

showing us with our loot, taken in Delly Harding's studio, was pub­
lished in the Transcript.
BO

M y mother saved some of the letters my brother and I wrote

from camp, and they show reasonably well what the Boy Scout move­
ment meant to me. I was eleven when the first one was written and
EX

my brother two and a half years younger. My father and mother were
taking advantage of our absence to spend some time in Atlantic City:
D

Boy Scout Camp East Lake RFD New Milford, Pa

IN

July something
Dear Mother and Papa,
We are certainly having some time—great eats 'n everything. Just
finished a supper of hash, crackers and cheese, bread and butter and
peaches—some feed!
Everything runs like clockwork. This afternoon we had water races
and tomorrow a quoit tournament. Thursday we have a game of “ lost
battalion” and Friday we are going to give a show and invite the people
around the lake. Not an idle moment.
We have sentry duty and Ebbe is on to-night. He's getting along
fine. All Vve done so far is K.P. (kitchen police).
Armstrong is strict and this morning we nearly stryped naked out

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in the dew and had calisthenics. Then later he inspected us and our
tents. It’s great and nobody kicks.
There is so much going on outside TU have to close, wishing you
are having as good a time as we. Us at $8 per wk. and you, 10 bucks per
day.
Lovingly,
Fred

PS
My brother reported the beginning of another fairly successful
week three years later:

U
July 15 1918 Susquehanna, Pa

RO
Dear Mother,
W e arrived here safely about nine. When we got here we put up
the tents and then built and fireplace. Then we went in swimming.
G
While we were there James Smith was drowned but was safed by
George Larson and John Springsteen done the artifical respiration on
S
and he is now living, My address is Boy Scout Camp, RFD No 2,
K
T homposon, Pa. I will write you again.
O

With love,
Ebbe
BO

Don'i forget to write and tell me the news, xxxxxxxxxxxx etc

Trouble was brewing, however:

EX

Boy Scout Camp RFD No. 2 Tomposon, Pa.

D

Dear Papa,
IN

How are you? I am awfully sunburned and do not feel good. Are
you going away anyplace? This is a nice place to camp. I wish you
would come up and see me and Fred. It is awful hot here. I am in the
largest tent, No. 1 . . . . Tve been fishing 3 times and have not caught
much. The kids made so much noise I could sleep good last night, but
John Springsteen says that they won't make so much noise to-night
so I think I can sleep. It is nearly dinner time so I will have to close.
Give my love to mothers. D ont forget to write soon and come up to
see me.
With love,
Ebbe
Tell Mother I will write her again, w r i t e s o o n

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P a rtiI

I added further details:

July 9, 3 o/clock
Dear Mother,
W e aren’t having a very good time after all. All day today the
wind has blown very hard and one of the tents fell in. The eats are not
appetizing and I can’t eat. If I don’t get something good pretty soon
Til starve. All I have had to eat in five meals is one dish of cereal, two
small potatoes and six crackers. My stomach is all out of order and

PS
yesterday I vomited twice and last night we had a circus. I woke up in
the night and heard Raphael Miller vomiting outside the tent. That

U
started Bob Perrine’s and he had to throw up suddenly. He could not

RO
reach the door in time so he vomited all over me, in my eyes, and
mouth. Then I started in again.
Ebbe has a canker sore and if things don't improve I think Til
come home.
G
Don't tell anybody about this for I don’t want them to think I am
S
always raising a fuss.
K
They haven't given us a full meal since we've been here. Today
they had half boiled potatoes, weak coffee and bread. I didn’t eat any
O

dinner or breakfast so I feel pretty weak.

BO

If I had a good excuse I’d come home but I don’t want them to
think I’m homesick or anything like that.
I've only had about eight hours sleep in the last too nights.
EX

Lovingly,
B. F. Skinner
D
IN

M y m o t h e r o c c a s i o n a l l y p l a y e d and sang for her own pleasure

or rehearsed for an exceptional recital and, of course, Iheard her.
Like our lullabies, her songs were sentimental and often rathermorbid.
Bartlett’s “ A Dream” ended:

I dream’d thou wert living, my darling, my darling,

I dream’d that I held thee once more to my breast,
While thy soft perfumed tresses and gentle caresses
Thrilled me and stilled me and lulled me to rest.

Another of her favorites, “ The Mission of a Rose/’ was the story of a

rosebud that longed to brighten the day of a sick child, but, alas,

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when “ the bud was a rose at the dawn of day . . . the soul of the child
had passed away." Eugene Field's Little Boy Blue puts his toy dog and
soldier away for the night, saying, “ Now, don’t you go till I come.”
He dies in his sleep, but his “ little toy friends” are true!

Ay, faithful to Little Boy Blue they stand,

Each in the same old place,
Awaiting the touch of a little hand,

PS
The smile of a little face.

U
Fortunately, life seemed to grow brighter as the years passed,
and I heard things like Carrie Jacobs Bond’s “ A Perfect Day” or even

RO
“ The Sunshine of Your Smile.”
The phonograph brought a different kind of music into our life.

G
A neighbor had an early wax-cylinder model with one or two pieces
I liked— one of them from W illiam Tell. Our Victrola brought waltzes
S
— “ Millicent,” “ Hesitation,” and “ The Missouri W altz” — and songs,
K
one of them, “ Mississippi,” sung with a coy lisp:
O

It yutht to be tho hard to thpell

BO

It yutht to make me cwy

M, I, eth—eth, I, eth—eth, I, P, P, I.
EX

Later we went classical. M y father was fascinated by coloratura

sopranos, and we had Galli-Curci’s records of the Mad Scene from
Lucia di Lammermoor and the Bell Song from Lakme. The Victrola
D

was faithful to flutes and sopranos imitating flutes, but the great
IN

musical thrill of my life was our Red Seal record of Nellie Melba sing­
ing Tosti’s “ Goodbye.” I must have listened to it a hundred times.
Possibly no greater nonsense has ever been set to music:

Falling leaf and fading tree

Lines of white in a sullen sea,
Shadows rising on you and me,

The swallows are making them ready to fly,

Wheeling out on a windy sky—
Goodbye, summer, goodbye, goodbye,
Goodbye, summer, goodbye.

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What are we waiting for? Oh! My heart!

Kiss me straight on the brows! And part!
Again, again! My heart! My heart!
What are we waiting for, you and I?
A pleading look—a stifled cry—
Goodbye, for ever, goodbye, for ever,
Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.

Single phrases taken out of that puzzling context were exciting

PS
dramatic material, and Melba made them spine-tingling. The great
wooden horn into which she sang mercifully softened the s on brows

U
and discouraged inquiry into how trees fade or what it was that the

RO
swallows were preparing for flight. I once took the record to school,
where it was played for morning assembly. The principal explained
how lucky we all were to be able to hear a great soprano and in­

G
cidentally mentioned that the record cost three dollars.
For a year or two I studied the piano with Harmey Warner, in
S
whose orchestra my father had played cornet. He was now an old man
K
who sucked Sen Sens and jabbed me in the ribs with a pencil to call
O

my attention to mistakes. I learned the names of the notes on the

scale by spelling words—writing "cabbage,” for example, as a melody.
BO

I practiced monotonously on a piece called “ Morning Prayer,” said to

have been composed by Streabbog but actually, Professor Warner told
me, by a man named Gobbaerts, who, for good reason, concealed his
EX

identity by spelling his name backward. My father did not think much
of professional musicians and was glad to let me give up my piano
D

instruction after about a year lest I be tempted in that direction.

IN

R a p h a e l M i l l e r ’ s m o t h e r had once painted, and presumably named

her firstborn in honor of an artist. One or two of her paintings hung

on the walls of their house— dark green and black forests with water­
falls rather too white. Mrs. Pritchard, the wife of the Presbyterian
minister, painted china and held classes, and the living room of the
manse was warmed in winter by a large kiln. A Japanese aTtist once
came to school and painted pictures which we bought for a few cents
each; brush strokes suggested blades of grass or broken reeds and a

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bit of color was blown on with an atomizer bulb. W hen my mother

gave a party she sometimes ordered place cards from Miss Graves,
who painted delicate little watercolors of violets, roses, and tulips.
I do not remember a single one of the pictures in my parents' or
grandparents’ homes. At school we bought Copley Prints in black
and white or sepia, and books and magazines had an occasional il­
lustration in color, but the color was never very good. W e had, never­
theless, the materials needed to produce works of art— crayons and

PS
watercolors, pads of paper with all edges sealed, and raffia and colored
yams. The word Prang, the name of a company supplying these ma­

U
terials, meant Art. I tried unsuccessfully to work with papier-mdche,

RO
but I succeeded in making a small loom by driving nails along the
edges of a square block of wood and wove mats of colored yarn and
string.

G
I had my father’s old drafting equipment. There was a thick slab
of glass with a shallow depression in which I made India ink by rub­
S
bing a block of black material in a few drops of water, and I could
K
draw perfect jet-black circles with large and small brass compasses
O

adjustable for width of line. I had stencils, and I used a pantograph

BO

to enlarge illustrations from magazines or books. I liked to draw a

holly leaf as two scalloped arcs meeting at the tips, and a landscape
with a river tapering sinuously into the distance with a succession of
EX

overlapping hills along its banks suggesting depth. I must have drawn
a hundred copies of the Dutch girl with wooden shoes who “ chased
dirt" in the advertisement for Old Dutch Cleanser. In high school
D

my most impressive production was a watercolor copy of a full-page

IN

advertisement for Palmolive soap, showing Cleopatra on her barge. I

worked over Cleopatra’s face so many times that the paper became
soft and a satisfactory version impossible.

I b e g a n t o W R tT E s t o r i e s and poems at an early age. I had a printing

press which used standard type and printer’s ink, but it was hard to
set the type and only a very small text could be printed at any one
time. An old typewriter of my father's was much closer to what was
needed. It was kept in the sewing room, which contained, in addition

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to my mother’s sewing machine and a large golden-oak secretary, the

space for coats and overshoes which would normally have been found
in an entrance hall. An oak settee with a large mirror and a seat in
which rubbers and overshoes were stored served as my desk. The type­
writer was an early model, and I could not see what I was typing until
I turned up the platen, but 1 hunted for and pecked most of the right
keys and typed fairly extensive things. I often tore paper along a line
I had wetted with a camel-hair brush to produce a deckle edge, and

PS
I bound pages in small booklets.
The things I wrote were no more original than the pictures I

U
copied with stencil or pantograph, but it would be harder to discover

RO
the controlling sources. Edgar Guest or Sam W alter Foss may have
been responsible for a poem I published in a magazine issued by an
organization called the Lone Scouts. You became a Lone Scout simply

G
by subscribing to the magazine, and almost all the material it pub­
lished was written by members. As the number in parentheses in­
S
dicates, I was ten years old when I made this contribution.
K
O

THAT PESSIMISTIC FELLO W

BO

By Lone Scout B. F. Skinner, 433 Grand St.,

Susquehanna, Pa. (10)
EX

When you’re getting ready for a hike

And the weather’s looking fine
And you've got your eat kit packed chock full
D

With your fishing rod and line,

Who’s the fellow that steps up and says,
IN

“ It surely looks like rain” ?

He’s the pessimist and joy killer.
I don’t believe he’s sane!

When you’re planning for a camping trip,

And you’ve packed your tent and duds
Who’s the fellowr that steps up and says
“ You’ll surely die of bugs
And skeeters and snakes and everything
That’ll come around your camp” ?
Don't you know him? He’s the pessimist.
That doggone, doggone scamp.

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For a year or two my brother and I sold the Saturday Evening

Post and the Country Gentlem an, mostly to our relatives and neigh­
bors, for a nickel a copy, and in addition to the Literary Digest we
subscribed to G ood Housekeeping. My mother occasionally brought
a book home from the town library, and there were a few novels in
our sectional bookcases, two by a Winston Churchill who was not the
British statesman, and one called The Trail of the Lonesome Pine,
which, my father complained, mentioned rhododendrons too often.

PS
Most of the space in the sectional bookcases was taken up by sets—
W orld’s Great Literature, Masterpieces of W orld History, Shake-

U
speare’s Plays Illustrated, and so on— purchased from aggressive book

RO
salesmen. 1 never saw my parents reading any of this, nor until my
later high-school years did I find any of it of interest. I was once look­
ing for something we could use in a small theatre we had set up in a

G
neighbor’s woodshed (admission: five pins) and I looked in vain at
the Divine Comedy.
S
I enjoyed the funny papers— Little Nemo, Buster Brown, and the
K
Katzenjammer Kids. In Grownup Land adults wore children’s clothing
O

and children adults’, and the children ran the show, and I liked that
BO

best, W e were given books like Black Beauty, which I never read, and
Laura Richards’s Captain January, which I kept for years before finally
reading it and was then greatly moved by it. I liked Robinson Crusoe
EX

and particularly Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island bccausc of the theme

of self-sufficiency, Jules Verne's characters cemented two watch crystals
together with pitch, filled them with water, and used them as a
D

burning glass to start a fire.

IN

At one time I collected little books. I had a dictionary not much

larger than a small matchbox. E. Haldeman-Julius was selling Little
Blue Books for five cents each, and a few small books bound in limp
imitation leather by Elbert Hubbard’s Roycrofters were sold with
miniature bookends. 1 ’hough I did not care about most of the con­
tents, I could hold several of these treasures in my hands— with a
sense of possessing knowledge which, if not secret, was at least easily
secreted. They were just the right thing for a small reading room which
I made at that time of an old wooden packing case. The case was
large enough so that by crossing my legs I could sit wholly inside it,
and I turned it on one side and fitted a curtain across the open end.

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I built small shelves to hold my little books within reach and a bracket
for a candle. Both the isolation and the miniaturization appealed to
me, but the almost feta! position was not consoling; on the contrary,
it was uncomfortably cramped.
I spent many hours with a large puzzle book by Sam Lloyd, in
which many solutions called for algebra and geometry, and odd bits
of space were crammed with sophisticated conundrums. I read the
sentimental continued stories appearing in the newsprint magazines to

PS
which Mr. and Mrs. B subscribed, and discussed each episode with
them. Through them I also came to read things like James Oliver

U
Curwood’s Kazan and Gene Stratton Porter’s G irl of the Limberlost.
Myrtle Reed’s Lavender and O ld Lace painted life in fresh colors.

RO
I knew what early spring was like, but I was not prepared to read that
“ tiny sprigs of green were everywhere eloquent with promise.” I knew

G
what early autumn was like, but not because “ as lightly as a rose
petal upon the shimmering surface of a stream, summer was drifting
S
away, but whither, no one seemed to care." I thought I had been in
K
love more than once, but love had not “ made the air vocal with raptur­
O

ous song or wrought white magic in my soul.” W ould some girl and
I ever walk “ by the silvered reaches of the River of Dreams” and un­
BO

knowingly rise “ to that height which makes sacrifice the soul’s dearest
offering as the chrysalis, bound and unbeautiful, gives the radiant
creature within to the light and freedom of day” ? The badinage be­
EX

tween Miss Reed’s lovers is a possible clue to some passages in a

novel which I started to write when I was perhaps thirteen. It begins:
D

The fire in the old log hut burned low. Outside the low moaning
IN

of the forest and the haunting screech of the owl gave the interior a
still greater atmosphere of solitude and the nearness of—death.
The monotonous crackling of the dying fire was interrupted by a
raking cough from Pierre, lying on a low bed of hemlock, then followed
by a comparatively deeper silence.
“ Joan,” Pierre broke the silence.
“ Yes, Father.”
“ Joan, tomorrow ye will go after supplies to Little River. Joan,
Joan, art ye listening? [Almost all the “ you’s” in the first draft were
crossed out and replaced with “ ye’s.” } Ye know the way?” he asked for
the sixth time that night.

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"Yes, but I will not go till ye are better, Father/7

"Oh, pshaw!” said Pierre, summoning all his strength. “ It is
nothing but a cold. Please get me a drink.”
“ Yes, Father, but I shall not go till ye are well,” she said, leaving
the room.
“ Till I am well,” mused the old man, “ God knows that that will
never be.”
“ Here, Father,” announced Joan, holding a dipper of water. “ Sit
up.”

PS
"Ah, that is strengthening. That water will make you rich some­
day, Joan,” said Pierre.

U
“ And you, too, Father.”

RO
"Yes, yes, and I, too. It is wonderful water, minerals and salt in it,
with sulfur. Someday you must go to the cities and raise companies.
They will come, dig wells, sell the water, and you will be rich.”

G
Pierre dies after instructing Joan to burn the cabin and his body
S
and to leave for the city to claim the property. But there is a heavy
K
fall of snow and she struggles against the elements and falls exhausted.
O

She is awakened by a fight between an Indian, Jim Cobolt, and a

naturalist, John Newman. The Indian has recognized the girl and
BO

has decided to kidnap her and demand ransom from her father. He
wins the fight, drives Newman away, locks Joan in his cabin, and
leaves to look for Pierre, but Newman returns and frees the girl, and
EX

they set out together for town. They get lost and make a camp “ under
a windfall,” and John watches while Joan sleeps the sleep of pure
D

exhaustion.
IN

As she slept John noticed the beauty of his companion. Born and
raised in the forests she was slender, lithe in limb with dark hair and
eyes. With her clear complexion these latter produced a contrast which
was both startling and beau. Sleeping peaceably she made a pretty pic­
ture. She had not as yet told her story nor he his. When she awoke he
determined to question her.
"See here young lady,” he started.
“ Me thinks ye need not talk to me that way,” she interrupted,
smiling.
“ I beg pardon,” with a mock bow, “What I meant was that ye
have never even introduced yourself and neither have I.”

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“Well?" she said teasingly.

“ I am John Newman, naturalist. I agreed to spend the winter with
Cobolt. On the way here we ran across thee and Jim was going to kid­
nap thee and we fought/'

Joan then explains what she has done in burning the cabin and
concludes:

PS
“ Ye know the rest/'
“ Happily I do/'
“ Why 'happily'?”

U
“ Because I met ye/’

RO
Joan blushed.

John brings out some food.

“ Ye are a wonder," she complimented, G

S
“ Oh, you flatter me,” mocked John. “ Now which will you have?
K
Oyster cocktail, champain, or—”
Joan, laughing, smothered the rest with her hand over his mouth.
O
BO

The books we were given for birthdays and Christinas, after the
era of the Bobbsey Twins, were about boys who were invariably
successful in their undertakings. One of them won a baseball game
EX

by making a difficult catch, falling head over heels but “ holding the
ball aloft." Another was separated from his companions as they ex­
D

plored an uncharted territory and found himself caught on a ledge

of rock, where, realizing the special carrying power of certain vowels,
IN

he called “ Hello" rather than “ Help" and was heard and saved. Tom
Swift was, of course, a remarkably successful inventor, and I read
about many of his projects, and Luke Larkin, Mark Manning, and
Chester Rand all worked hard, their clothing carefully mended by
their widowed mothers and, as Horatio Alger, Jr., reported, their
merits recognized by affluent older men.
But I wrote little or nothing about successful boys, no matter
what their fields. Instead I wrote a story about a young man who
foolishly mistakes a Chinese restaurant for an opium den, though I
had never been in a Chinese restaurant in my life, and another about a
greedy sheriff in a Western called “ Wanted for Murder."

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I was getting stuff of this sort from the movies, of course, and I
saw no reason why I should not put it back. I bought a book tellii
how to write scenarios and win fame and fortune. I learned all aboi
close-ups (C U ), iris out, and long shots. In one of my scenarios a
butler breaks a valuable vase, which is later reassembled and restored
to its pedestal unbeknownst to the butler. Here is a sample:

PS
(30) e x t e r io r b ed r o o m d o o r — s e m i -c u — Marion comes out with

vase—looks up and down hall—exits—

(31) s t a i r w a y — l o n g s h o t (showing portion of room at foot)—

U
Marion comes down—sees Mr. Rocks coming—sets down vase

RO
—dusts a bit—exits as Mr. Rocks enters—
T I T L E : M R. GOLD N. ROCKS WHO THINKS HE OWNS THE VASE.
(32) Mr. Rocks— picks up vase— looks
f o o t o f s t a i r w a y — s e m i -c u —

G
in direction of drawing room—exits in that direction with vase—
(33) d r a w i n g r o o m — s e m i - c u — Mr. Rocks— enters with vase— puts
S
it where it originally was—admires it—exits— ( i r i s o u t o n v a s e )
K
T I T L E : THAT NIGHT
O

(3 4 ) STAIRW AY SHOWING A PORTION OF M AIN ROOM— LONG SHOT— but-

ler enters—lowers lights—exits towards drawing room—
BO

(35) butler enters— touches button near

d r a w in g r o o m — l o n g sh o t—

door to lower lights—a stream of moonlight lights up the vase

and pedestal—
EX

(3 6 ) d r a w i n g r o o m — cu — vase—
(37) d r a w i n g r o o m —cu—butler—sees vase—horrified—thinks vase
is a ghost come to taunt him—
D
IN

I also wrote the words of a song and sent it off in answer

to an advertisement and was told that I had a possible hit and that
music could be written and the song published for, I think, $200.
M y father was not willing to stake me to fame and fortune in that
field.
I dreamed of better things— things that might appear in sets of
the World*s Great Literature in the libraries of the future. I wrote a
morality play called “ Christmas Spirit” with characters named Greed,
Youth, Gluttony, Adventure, and Jealousy. Greed wants to foreclose a
mortgage and hires Youth to delay the final payment. Here is a sample
of the text:

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(Enter Youth followed at a distance by Adventure.)

Greed: Here boy. I’d have a word with you.
Youth: Yes sir, pray tell what can I do?
Greed: A favor, sir, but first you’ll swear
To not repeat a word you hear?
Youth: Yes sir, I promise.
Greed: Very well
What e’er I say no word you’ll tell.

PS
Tomorrow night a man will ride
Down on the lofty mountainside.
My favor, sir (and w7ell t’will pay)

U
Is that you this old man stay.

RO
Hold him up! Keep him there
Till noontime bells next day you hear.

G
The dastardly plot is foiled and, as the prologue had already
promised,
S
K
Into this sleeping valley
O

There came a spirit bold

Awakening dormant conscience
BO

And loosening crime’s tight hold.

The village woke again to right
Put down all crime and greed
EX

And since that day there’s none in wrant

And not a soul in need,
D

(I was aided in my creative struggles by a rhyming dictionary which

IN

appeared as an appendix in a book in that small library at Mr, and

Mrs. B ’s.)
I saw myself in print a second time in a Letter to an Editor.
W hen I was old enough to drive my grandfather Burrhus’s car, I
often drove my grandmother into the region south of Susquehanna,
where many of her relatives still lived. In Jackson there was a hotel
which had an old but still functional soda fountain with an unusual
number of plungers delivering syrups of various colors and flavors. I
would choose my flavor for the day, and my grandmother would take
Moxie. One day we went on toward Gibson to visit an Aunt Luize
who lived on a farm with a large sugar bush. The sap was running,

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and they had tapped the trees and were making maple syrup. Small
piles of snow were still about, and Aunt Luize boiled some syrup until
it was so thick that it formed a kind of taffy when poured on a panful
of snow. It would stick your teeth together if you were not careful, but
it was delicious, and I wrote a letter about my experience to the Editor
of the Toledo Blade, to which Mr. and Mrs, B subscribed, and it was
published. Unfortunately, no copy survives.
(The trees in front of our house were sugar maples, and I once

PS
tapped them and collected sap in little tin pails. A kettle of sap sim­
mered or boiled on the kitchen stove depending upon the condition

U
of the fire. The syrup was sweet, but those tin pails had collected

RO
more than sap, and its color was a sooty gray.)

The I n d ia n s h ad, o f co u r se,

G
long since been driven out of the valley
S
of the Susquehanna, and the elaborate wooden statue in front of the
K
cigar store on Main Street could scarcely be said to have been erected
O

in their honor, but we all had Indian costumes, including head­

BO

dresses made with turkey feathers, and we occasionally found arrow­

heads surviving from that Stone Age.
A wagonload of gypsies would from time to time stop on the
EX

outskirts of town and women and children in brightly colored dresses

would invade the stores, putting the shopkeepers on the alert for theft.
Only one “ Chinaman” ever lived in Susquehanna and my father
D

once wrote a letter to the Transcript memorializing him—a letter

IN

which tells perhaps as much about the writer as about the subject:

Wing Lee’s receipt for laundry delivered consisted of one half of

a slip of pink paper upon which had been scrawled with a brush
Chinese characters and the rule was that unless you returned the cor­
rect half of the slip which would fit the other half you got no laundry.
It was Wing who coined the phrase “ No tickee, no shirtee” He
smoked a pipe with a stem at least a yard long and a bowl the size of a
thimble. Three puffs from real Chinese Tobacco constituted one
smoke.
Wing never adopted American styles. His cue hung below his hips
and the cloak which he wore to church was a real specimen of Chinese
art. His work shoes were flat slippers which he skillfully kept on his

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feet although they had no uppers except a small cover over the toe. He
could sprinkle a whole basketful of clothes with one mouthful of water.
This he would emit in a fine spray which if touched by the sunlight
would produce a beautiful rainbow.
He grew beautiful lilies from bulbs placed on bare stones in a dish
of water.

In my day there was only one black. He worked around the rail­

PS
road station, and at a fair on Beebe’s Flats he willingly participated by
sticking his bead through a hole in a sheet of canvas and allowing

U
customers to throw baseballs at him from a distance of about twenty

RO
feet. Three throws cost ten cents. He had a certain freedom of move­
ment and could dodge a ball fairly well, and he was seldom hit, and he
seemed to think the whole thing as amusing as the customers. W e

G
all believed that blacks had very thick skulls, and that although it
might sting a bit if he were hit, he could not be seriously hurt.
S
I played with a black boy briefly when the first stretch of
K
macadam road was put in, between Oakland and the state line. The
O

operator of one of the pieces of heavy equipment was black, and he

boarded at Gran’ma Graham’s. His wife helped in the kitchen, and
BO

they had a boy named Victor, who came over to play with my brother
and me. M y mother had just discarded an old mattress, and we were
specializing in tumbling tricks. Victor was especially good at them,
EX

and again we believed he could not really hurt himself. During the
war a Negro troop pitched its tents for one night on Beebe’s Flats,
D

and we went over and had our pictures taken with the soldiers.
IN

There were two Greeks, Mike and George Zaharias. Mike, the
elder, owned the Sugar Bowl, and his brother worked for him. They
served sodas, milkshakes, and sundaes. M y favorite sundae was a
“ Mexican” — a cone-shaped scoop of vanilla ice cream covered with
chocolate sauce and sprinkled with peanuts to suggest a Spanish hat.
From a kitchen in the basement George would bring up great trays of
fudge cut into squares and peanut brittle cracked into irregular pieces.
There were several Jews— my mother's friend Dora Scheuer and
her family until they moved away, the Eismans and Hershes, who ran
the drygoods store, and the Hersh children, and Bill Ernestone, the
tailor, and his wife. Mrs. Eisman was the only woman in Susquehanna
who could knit socks, helmets, and sweaters for soldiers faster than

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my grandmother Burrhus, and Pauline Hersh was valedictorian in my

father's class. Sidney Hersh married a girl from Binghamton and
they moved into a new house just off Grand Street, but his wife
never adjusted to life in Susquehanna. At one time she slept a
great deal, and her behavior was attributed to sleeping sickness.
Bill Ernes tone began to make suits for my brother and me as
soon as we were old enough to have our suits made. They were
usually of serviceable tweed, but during my last summer in Susque­

PS
hanna he made the tuxedo that I took with me to college, and he
made one suit for me after I had gone on to graduate school.

U
There were a few Germans and Scandinavians, including my

RO
father’s business associate Frank Zeller, the brewer, and several
barbers. (M y father w’ould occasionally use a mangled German ex­
pression, such as “ Nix come harrows.” ) At one time two or three

G
German families came to Susquehanna and rented a house on Church
Street. They appeared in the streets as a German band, playing brass
S
or woodwind instruments and a drum. They could not make a decent
K
living and soon left. The only time they attracted my attention was
O

when they slaughtered a pig. W e heard it screaming and rushed to a

BO

back fence to see what was happening. The pig had been hung on a
tree by its hind legs with its throat cut, and blood was being col­
lected in dishpans to make, we were told, blood sausage or blood
EX

pudding.
The main ethnic groups were the Italians, the Irish, and the
Anglo-Saxon Protestants or W ASPs. Two or three Italian families had
D

come to the town in its early days, and they spoke English with no
IN

accent and lived in the better sections. One of them ran a fruit store
(Bob Basso, a son, played in the theatre orchestra we organized when
I was in high school), and another repaired shoes. But most of the
Italians spoke almost no English and lived in “ Little Italy/' a long
block of unpainted tenements on East Main Street beside the rail­
road tracks. I often saw pregnant women standing in doorways with
babies at their breasts and groups of idle men calling numbers and
throwing out fingers in a game of morra. A woman in peasant dress
moving across our backyard with a knife and a basket collecting
dandelion greens was a familiar sight.
The Irish either started farther up the ladder or, not handi­

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capped by a different language, moved up faster than the Italians.

Among the Irish were a lawyer, a doctor (who served as Mayor for
many years), a hotelkeeper, two or three grocers, the owner of the
Hogan Opera House, the manager of the movies shown in it, a coal
merchant, and many of the more skilled machinists in the Shop. On
my way to and from school I passed the house of a prosperous young
Irish family to which a new member was added every year until there
were twelve. There was always one at the right age to run across the

PS
street to walk a bit with me and say, “ Gimme a pinny” — a verbal
response I intermittently reinforced. The older Irish had a rich

U
brogue. I once offered to do an errand for an old woman—a matter of
carrying something to a store on my bicycle—and as I started off

RO
she called out, “ God bless you” —both the intonation and the ex­
pression from a different world.

G
The violinist in one of our amateur orchestras was an Irish girl,
and I was walking home with her one night after a rehearsal in a rather
S
heavy fog. A figure loomed up ahead of us near a streetlight, and my
K
companion grasped my arm and whimpered in terror. She confessed
to me afterward that she had thought the figure was a witch. That
O

was not the kind of thing a W A SP ever did.

BO

W e had our superstitions, of course. If you mentioned good

fortune, you knocked on wood at once lest mentioning it bring bad
luck; you never walked under a ladder; and if you spilled the salt, you
EX

threw a bit of it over your left shoulder. W e all believed that if you
stared hard enough at the back of a man’s head, he wrould eventually
D

turn around and look at you. Susquehanna was not far from the
territory of the Fox sisters, and we sometimes sat around a table with
IN

our splayed fingers touching, waiting for knocks. But this was very
different from banshees or goblins. (The town was apparently too
young to have ghosts or haunted houses.)
The unchallenged leader of the local W A SPs was C. Fred
Wright. He was associated with the Republican machine in Penn­
sylvania led by Senator Boies Penrose and served as Congressman from
1900 to 1906. He refused to run for another term “ because of pressing
business.” In announcing his decision he asserted that being a Con­
gressman was “ not, as many supposed, a sinecure” but practically a
full-time job. He had had to write 30,000-56,000 letters during his

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first five years in office. “ Pressing business" included his interest in

the First National Bant, the local water company, and the remaining
timber in that part of the great hardwood forest. In 1906 my father
went with him to Milford, on the Delaware River, where he was
involved in the sale of the timber rights on 8000 acres of land for
$200,000, then a very large sum of money.
Congressman Wright had already found young Attorney Skinner
useful. He never had much work for him, but a prestigious figure

PS
could play an important role as a model. My father could not have
acquired any useful professional behavior by emulating his father

U
or either of his half-uncles, but C. Fred Wright was a man of great

RO
distinction, wealth, and influence, and my father saw or heard about
him every day. It is probably relevant that I was named B. Frederic
rather than Frederic B.

G
The Wright house was the finest in town, but it was located on
W est Main Street, fairly near the business district, and hence in­
S
creasingly subject to the smoke and soot of trains and Shops. Mr.
K
and Mrs. Wright were not conspicuous in the community. W hen
O

my mother was young, she appeared in a businessmen's carnival, and

BO

she wore “ Mrs. Wright's riding habit," but I doubt whether Mrs.
Wright ever appeared in it herself. Branches of the family, however,
reached into the life of the town, composing almost all the small
EX

congregation of the Episcopal church, as well as the directorship of

the First National Bank.
Wright Glidden, an officer of the bank, lived with his wife on
D

Grand Street. They had two sons of the same ages as my brother
IN

and 1, and there was always a subtle, slightly invidious comparison.

The Gliddens had a full-scale pool table in their living room with
balls and cues and green chalk, where we had something about the size
of a card table with wooden rings in place of balls, which we knocked
about with much smaller cues. The Glidden Victrola was larger and
more swollen than ours, and they owned the sextet from Lucia with
Caruso, which cost seven dollars, whereas Nellie Melba's “ Goodbye"
cost only three. Wright Glidden drove the only Packard in town,
while we were still driving a Ford.
On one occasion we were invited to call on the C. Fred Wrights
at Pinecrest. It was a fine afternoon, and we sat on the porch, and I
think the grownups had tea. A granddaughter of the Wrights climbed

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into my lap. I was perhaps twelve at the time and embarrassed, but
the child was four or five years old, and it occurred to me that our
ages were not greatly different and that when we grew up, she and I
might fall in love and marry.
At the other end of the Anglo-Saxon scale were the Cronks,
husband and wife, and their two grown children, a young man who
wore dirty clothes and a cap and a girl who was a slut. They lived
above the laundry on East Main Street at one end of Little Italy, and

PS
nothing too bad could be said of them, but, so far as I know, their
only crimes were filth and occasional drunkenness.

U
Also near the other end of the W A SP culture were a young
motorcyclist and his girl who seemed to have no friends in town but

RO
came and went frequently. They lived much of the time in a shack
some distance back from the river four or five miles north of Susque­

G
hanna. At one time it was obvious on their forays into town that the
girl was pregnant, but eventually that condition cleared up. There was
S
no baby, but there was talk.
K
In between the Wrights and the Cronks were most of the doctors,
O

lawyers, and bankers, and a good many of the merchants of Susque­

hanna. There were also the pastors of half a dozen Protestant sects
BO

and a surprising number of widows with daughters— like the Tisdells,

who taught the primary Sunday school in the Presbyterian church,
and the Houghtons, who lived on our street and did sewing. Almost
EX

all the farmers in the area were Anglo-Saxon Protestants— some of

them affluent, most of them pious and conforming. (I was once
D

surprised by a glimpse into their lives. One of my classmates in fourth

grade was the son of a farmer, and when Miss Brosnam asked him
IN

why he had been absent, he said, “ The horse died and I had to help
my father grind it up for chicken feed.” )
There were also a few oddballs. A native contortionist came
back to Susquehanna briefly from time to time; he could lock his
legs behind his neck and was said to have syphilis. The son of the
Justice of the Peace went away and returned something of a fop, com­
ing to a party in white tie and tails, for which Susquehanna was never
to be ready.
Minority groups were favorite materials for jokes. There were
funny stories about Pat and Mike, with plenty of “ begorrahs,” and
on a Victrola record we had a monologue called “ Cohen on the

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Telephone/’ in which a tenant tries to explain to his landlord that a

“ carPENter” is needed to replace a “ shuttah” which has blown off in
a high wind. ("A shuttah—a SH U T T A H —No, I didn’t say ‘Shut
up.' ” ) On the other side of the record a monologue called “ No News”
poked fun at a presumably black chauffeur. Someone at Chautauqua
recited a poem in Italian-English, each stanza of which concluded
with a slightly aggressive “ I gotta da rock.” But minority groups
laughed at each other, and children laughed at their un-Americanized

PS
parents, and there was nothing vicious about it. Someone once
discovered an A PA sticker on the back of a folding chair at the

U
Chautauqua. The American Protective Association was an aggressive

RO
anti-immigration, anti-Catholic organization, and it was feared that
Catholic support of the Chautauqua might be lost, but the sticker
had clearly been attached at an earlier location, and, so far as I know,
there was no local activity of that kind.
G
S
K
O

R e l i g i o n d r e w a s h a r p e r l i n e . The Presbyterian and Catholic

BO

churches stood side by side on a promontory looking out over the

river at the foot of Jackson Avenue on land given to both congrega­
tions by the same man, and the eastern half of the town was hence­
EX

forth called Church Hill. Both churches were of red brick and solidly
built, but the Catholic was much the larger. Their physical proximity
never brought the two congregations very close even though Father
D

Broderick, whose regime covered my entire life in Susquehannna, was

IN

a tolerant priest, if something of a martinet with his own flock. In

public he wore a frock coat and a top hat and carried a gold-headed
cane, though I used to see him scurrying from the rectory to the
church in his priestly garb. He was a good friend of my father’s and
often on the speakers’ platform with him, especially during the war.
(W hen I was born, another friend, Father Hoolihan, gave my
father and mother a relic to be put on a string around my neck to
protect me from harm. It was contained in a disk of kidskin with a
crocheted border, and my parents saw no reason why I should not
profit from a foreign religion and actually kept it on me for a time.)
Most of the Italians were separated from the Protestants by their
language and style of life, but the Irish were practicing separatists,

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they dominated the church. Almost all Catholic families sent

r children to the Laurel Hill Academy, a parochial school run
mns, and, so far as I know, no Catholic boy ever joined the Boy
uts, although the movement had no religious features. One year
maiden daughters of Dr. Peck, a Protestant, organized a town-wide
y Festival or Kermis in which young people were drilled in various
< dances. I was eight at the time and danced as a Rheinlander. M y
>ther was in a kindergarten polka, and there were a Japanese dance,
Swedish dance, a wooden-shoe dance, and a Maypole. It was an

PS
imenical enterprise, but the promoters found it hard going and did
t try again.

U
I saw Catholic children bringing home strips of palm leaf on

RO
ilm Sunday, and my Catholic teachers turned up with dirty fore-
;ads on Ash Wednesday. Catholic boys wore medals on strings
ound their necks when they went swimming, and Catholic girls

11 G
ore crosses on necklaces and dressed in white for confirmation. They
called the nuns “ Sister/’ of course, and the priest “ Father/’ and I
S
ras never quite sure whether I should do so too— whether I would not
K
omehow be disloyal to my own religion or, worse, mar the sanctity
O

>f Catholicism.
BO

I once took a message to Father Broderick from my father and

:aught a glimpse of the rather drab interior of the rectory in which
he lived, and once in Lannon’s grocery store on Main Street some
EX

nuns came in to pay their monthly bill, and when Mr. Lannon gave
them a generous supply of payday candy, making a large cornucopia
of a sheet of paper and filling it with chocolate drops, I was rather
D

startled by the nuns’ delight, for I had supposed that their life was
IN

much more austere.

There was one convert to Catholicism— a Mrs. Demander,
whose husband was a stonecutter and lettered the monuments set
up in the cemeteries. She stalked through the town in the company
of the nuns, with all of whom she remained conspicuously on the best
of terms. M y father and mother thought she was ridiculous. She
seems to have specialized in Belief. My friend Bob Perrine went on
believing in Santa Claus for a year or two after the rest of us knew
better because Mrs. Demander had shown him a photograph of Santa
Claus which she insisted she had taken in front of her very own
fireplace.

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Any slight crumbling of the wall between Protestants and

Catholics surprised me. Father Broderick once called my attention
to a traffic sign which said, “ Go slow/' and asked me if I approved
its grammar. I was pleased by his interest, but amazed that he should
have spoken to a Protestant boy in such a friendly way. W hen Dr.
Condon, the Catholic Mayor, drove several of us Boy Scouts back
from a Liberty Bond campaign in a neighboring town, we sang some
songs, and at one point he said, 'T h a t ’s very nice, boys/’ and I was

PS
surprised that he would say anything good about Protestants.
I felt the barrier between Protestants and Catholics most keenly

U
when it came to girls. There was a dance hall over a garage in Oakland,

RO
and once a week a Mr. Donnally came up from Binghamton and held
dancing classes late in the afternoon. A pianist played, and Mr.
Donnally danced with each of us to improve our style in the waltz,

G
the two-step, and the fox-trot (the tango was a little too complicated).
One day Margaret Murphy, the daughter of the owner of the
S
garage, came to dancing school, and she and I began to dance to­
K
gether. W e had a marvelous time. She was perhaps two years younger
O

than I, but it didn’t seem to matter. There was no flirtation, no sexual

BO

innuendo—we simply laughed, talked, and danced. It was all so

wonderful that we stayed on through suppertime and I paid admission
to the real dance, with an orchestra, that Mr. Donnally ran in the
EX

evening.
But I never spoke to her again. The ethnic and religious barrier
had lifted for a day, but only by accident, carelessness, or neglect.
D

She was not a girl I could invite to the parties or dances I went to,
IN

and she was part of a group in which I would be equally alien. I am

not sure that I ever saw her again.
I made a more determined effort to invade the Catholic culture
with a girl named Lillian McGuane. Her mother was a widow who
lived on W est Hill. For some reason Lillian did not go to parochial
school, and I therefore began to see her. An older daughter was said
to be fast and to have been seen in a Binghamton hotel with a man,
but Lillian was very proper, rather pretty, and I was smitten. W hen
I decided to go to a Halloween party as the figure in the Fisk tire
advertisement, showing a young boy in a nightdress with a tire around
his shoulder carrying a candle (“ Time to re-tire” ), I asked Lillian if

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uld borrow a nightdress. I went with her to her house to get one,
her mother took a very dim view of the project and made it
:e clear that I was not welcome.
Nevertheless I was in love and talked to my parents about Lillian,
nee asked my mother if she did not think that she had a sweet
e, and she agreed, but with marked reserve. I used to play
binstein's “ Melody in F ” while thinking of her. She soon took up
:h an Irish boy named Red McHugh who lived on lower Broad
eet and it was clear that I was permanently cut out.

PS
There were rather similar barriers among the Protestant sects. In
dition to a Presbyterian church, there were a Methodist, a Baptist, a

U
Dngregational, and, mainly for the spiritual welfare of the W right

RO
'nasty, an Episcopalian. At one time an evangelist named Crabell
ime to Susquehanna. He was sponsored by the Protestant churches,
id before he arrived a tabernacle was built on Grand Street. It was

G
large structure of unpainted pine boards, with a platform and
enches, and a “ sawdust trail” down the middle. A few Protestants
S
id not approve. They called the building the Grab-a-nickel because
K
if the ill-concealed financial aspects of the operation. M y father
O

vas one of them, and in an interview he was quoted as saying that

‘the house of God is not a fitting environment for theatricals.” An-
BO

Dther was the father of a friend of mine who was an electrician. He

was electrocuted during the campaign while working on a telephone
pole, and Crabell had the bad taste to imply that this was God’s
EX

vengeance on a dissenter. “ He was a fool to question the work of the

Lord,” he said. The dissident Protestants countered with a Biblical
D

quotation: “ He that calleth his brother a fool is in danger of hell fire.”

IN

When the tabernacle was being built, I wras in fifth grade and
there was a girl in sixth grade with whom I thought I was in love,
although she paid no attention to me. She was a Baptist and lived in a
duplex near my grandfather Skinner’s. One afternoon she came to
drive a nail into the tabernacle to symbolize her support, and when
I heard of this I was heartbroken and abandoned my suit.
Although my mother frequently sang in the Episcopal church be­
fore her marriage, and conversion might have been a useful move for
my father in the direction of the Wright family, they were born and
remained mere Presbyterians. Even so, that put them a cut above the

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Methodists and Baptists. Once we were driving along a rather narrow

dirt road when a car overtook us and honked its horn. My father slowed
down and pulled over to allow it to pass, and the driver sang out,
“ Thank you/’ as he went by. It was the Baptist minister, and his
passengers were some of the ladies of his church. My mother made
some contemptuous comment, and my father murmured his agree­
ment.
As for my further religious development, my historical note

PS
records that Miss Graves’s class

U
acquired a glamour which marked it from other classes. We studied,

RO
over several years, most of the Old Testament, and reached finally the
story of Christ.
We reached the story of Christ just when the sex urge had made

G
itself felt in me. I was twelve or thirteen. Another boy and I had built
a shanty on Hillborn’s Creek. They were free, natural days. I was begin-
S
ning to read and think and come in contact with earth. Religion and
K
religious ideas bothered me and I thought a great deal about them. I
had never associated freely with other boys and now my doubts about
O

things and my sex shame drove me almost to solitude.

BO

I sensed strongly the injustice in the world. I must have been jeal­
ous and resentful. It was an uneasy age. But gradually I worked out a
theory of compensation: I began to suspect that punishment or reward
EX

in afterlife brought to a balancc the imbalance in this world and the

theory was practical so long as I believed it. For a year at least life was
perfectly happy for me. I believed that all my trouble simply made way
D

for compensating happiness. My jealousy was not discarded (I see this

IN

now) but was rather satisfied: the happiness of my companions which

I envied, simply meant, I was sure, that they would have trouble later.
It was at this time that I came to believe that I had received a
divine message. The fervor of that revelation is yet possible to me as I
recall the day. I had lost my most valued possession, a silver watch.
I was filled with the shame and self'resentment that I had been taught
to feel when I made a mistake. I escaped from home and went to
our shack on Hillborn's Creek. I w'as alone, thinking. Suddenly I
thought I had a great revelation. I cannot now remember the sub­
stance. Probably the sudden complete realization of the “ truth” in my
theorv of compensation. At any rate I became very happy and started
to walk home. Along the path, carefully placed on a bed of dry grass,
lay my silver watch. At that moment I felt what must have been the

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st ecstasy possible. God has spoken to me, I thought. I have

him rightly and he has returned my watch as an indication of his
ire.
A^hat a blissful combination! Born and bred with the tradition of
>efore God, then suddenly to become intimate with him, to have
»peak to me—
f told no one. I wrote the experience, in Biblical phraseology, on a
I piece of paper which I hid in a match case. I remember now that
3 a second “ miracle” but I have forgotten what it was.
I cannot, now', trace the dissolution of this idea. I entered high

PS
ol. A senior gave me pamphlets on theosophy which I never read.

U
Susquehanna was close to Joseph Smith country. W hen Smith

RO
the Golden Plates from the Hill of Cumorah to Palmyra, New
he was persecuted by a mob, and it was clear that he would
to go elsewhere to translate them. Concealing them in a barrel

G
with beans, he is said to have brought them with him when he
: with his wife to Harmony. He bought a house from his father-
S
*v two or three miles from the spot where Susquehanna would
K
be founded. There he is said to have translated the plates, dictat-
O

:he Book of Mormon to two scribes from behind a curtain.

BO

Smith was laughed at by the local people, and a few scurrilous

ies survived to my day. I heard that he had pretended to walk on
er by building a platform just below the surface but had moved in
EX

wrong direction and fallen off. That was not unlike the stories
ng written about perfectionist movements in the nineteenth
itury by Mark Twain, Artemus Ward, Josh Billings, and the author
D

Aunt Samantha Among the Brethren.

IN

I took certain religious principles seriously. Faith could move

>untains, and when I was about twelve years old I tried to demon-
ate it by levitating. I stood on a beam scale and tried to make my-
If lighter. My failure was especially disappointing because I often
lydreamed of astonishing people by flying around a room, like the
lying Yorkshireman. (In the same mood I used to imagine jump-
ig from cloud to cloud, as if they were great balls of cotton wool,
c did not seriously stretch my imagination, for I often jumped into
nowdrifts, haystacks, huge piles of autumn leaves before they became
»onfires, and mountains of sawdust near lumber mills.)
M y only scholarly effort to prove the value of my religion ended

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in failure. My grandmother Skinner subscribed for a year to a maga­

zine published by the Presbyterian Church, to which I planned to
contribute an article proving the value of the Presbyterian religion
by showing that many great composers had been Presbyterians. When
I began to check biographies, however, I could not find any com-
poser who had been Presbyterian. Worse still, many had been
Catholics.
An important part of my religious training was the novel Quo

PS
1
Vadis. It was not assigned by Miss Graves, and must have stumbled
on it in the town library. Sienkiewicz no doubt intended it to be a

U
convincing statement of Christian principles, and the description of

RO
Peter’s appearance at Ostianum covers a great deal of ethical self-
management with which I wras familiar and which I continued to
practice, but the book miscarried, because I admired and agreed with

G
Petronius. After Ursus saves Lygia from the aurochs in the Colosseum
and the populace insists that Caesar spare the girl, Petronius com­
S
ments, “ Possibly Christ saved Lygia, but Ursus and the populace had
K
a good deal to do with it.” Sienkiewicz had prepared an answer by
O

having Ursus testify that prison had weakened him and that only a
BO

supernatural power permitted him to kill the aurochs, but Petronius’s

point impressed me. (Perhaps I should have been even more a pagan
if I had known that the Roman general in charge of another Christian
EX

in the novel, St. Paul, was named Burrhus.) In any event, when I
began to see that my newr testament was to go no further, I told
Miss Graves, when 1 met her one day in the hallway of the high
D

school, that I no longer believed in God. “ I have been through that,

IN

too,” she said.

My father may have suspected that my religious faith was
slipping. The master of ceremonies at Chautauqua that summer was
Hunt Cook, and before he left he gave me a paperback copy of
Francis Thompson's “ Hound of Heaven” —
I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine wrays
Of my own mind. . . .
My guess is that my father had taken his problem to Mr. Cook and
that this was his attempt at a solution.

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* * #

began to u se the Ford to go farther and farther afield, though

ng was still rather hazardous. At first it was a fairly am-
us project to go to Windsor, ten miles away, even though
of the road on the Oakland side of the river was paved. Dust in
weather was no less a problem than mud in wet. One Sunday
jot stuck in the mud between Great Bend and Hickory Grove,
re was a farmer leaning against the fence in front of his house,

PS
1 a team of horses already in harness grazing near at hand. He
nected the team to our car and pulled us out of the mud for a

U
, and before we drove off we saw him leaning over the fence again

RO
iting for the next car, the team still in harness on the lawn.
There were very few garages to supply gasoline or make repairs
pump up deflated tires, but we were sustained by our faith in the

G
.mina of our car. W e sang a song about “ the little old Ford" that
jst rambled right along" where more elegant cars were often in
S
juble. Ford owners had a kind of esprit de corps and tooted their
K
>rns when passing. W e sometimes counted the number of cars we
O

issed, and the numbers grew more amazing as the years went by.
peeds were low— thirty miles an hour was relatively fast—and there
BO

ms time to play wayside cribbage. M y brother would take one side

f the road and I the other, and wre scored points for the horses,
:ows, and other designated items we pointed out as we passed.
EX

M y father thought it was educational for my brother and me

to see factories. In Windsor we saw horsewhips being made, a
D

tapered stick of wood and leather descending through a complex

IN

weaving device which covered it with a patterned cloth skin, ending

in a few inches of cord with a tassel at the end. On a professional trip
with my father to Honesdale, in another county, we visited a shirt-
and-sweater factory. W e also went to Milford on the Delaware River
and to Afton in New York State to see the county fair, and on one
journey we stopped at a cut-glass factory.
There were as yet no marked routes, and on longer journeys we
used a Blue Book, which gave detailed directions for getting from
one town to another, describing bridges, churches, barns, and other
prominent features along the route, with distances in tenths of a mile

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from one to the other, which we carefully checked on the speedometer.

W e visited Aunt Alt and her husband first in Beerston, where
Uncle Norm took us to see the “ acid factory” in which he worked.
Great logs were enclosed in ovens and hot fires built beneath them,
and the alcohols and “ acids” driven off were collected, and what re­
mained was sold as charcoal. The factory had the acrid smell of the
remains of a wooden building that has just burned down.
Aunt Alt and Uncle Norm soon moved to that pleasant house on

PS
the Delaware River in Walton, New York, where we visited them
every year, taking my grandmother and grandfather Skinner with us.

U
M y grandfather Skinner, by far the biggest of the passengers, sat in the
front seat, and my grandmother and mother and brother and I in

RO
back, one boy on a small folding chair between the seat and the lap-
robe bar.

G
On one of our trips to Walton the motor stopped halfway up
a hill. My father got out and cranked, but to no avail. He took a
S
small can and went down a bank to a stream and came back with
K
water for the radiator, but a shortage of water was evidently not the
O

trouble. The car simply would not start, and there seemed to be
nothing to be done. My father continued to crank, with time out to
BO

rest his arm, while my grandfather— not the cranking type— touched
various bits of equipment on the steering wheel or dashboard. Sud­
denly the motor turned over briefly. M y grandfather had touched the
EX

switch on the magneto, and when he held it in place again, the car
readily started. The switch simply needed to be tightened. This was a
D

great triumph. The story was told again and again that afternoon in
IN

W alton as neighbors and friends came in, and each time my grand­
father responded with a chuckle.
M y father was really at home at his Aunt Alt’s and very much
the self I seldom saw anywhere else. Aunt Alt was warm and jovial,
amused by the foibles of her sister, and genuinely hospitable. I re­
member her buckwheat griddle cakes at breakfast, and her chicken
dinners, with small glasses of her dandelion wine for the men and
homemade maple mousse and ladyfingers for dessert especially for
my brother and me. They raised their own chickens and Uncle Norm
would catch one and chop its head off as I watched. He knew how
to set it dow’n on the ground so that it would run a few steps, headless,
before falling dead.

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W e made a more extensive tour to Watkins Glen, where I bought

postcards of the rock formations to show with my stereopticon in a
travelogue. Later we drove to Albany and stayed overnight en route
at a small hotel, in the lobby of which I talked with two beautiful
Cuban girls who showed me how' to fold a square sheet of paper to
make a pigeon. It was a remarkable piece of origami, because when
you pulled the pigeon's tail, it flapped its wings.
In Albany we stayed with old high-school friends of my parents,

PS
and on this occasion I was to see a bit of statecraft rather than indus­
try. M y father took me to a constitutional convention of which Elihu

U
Root was chairman. W e climbed to the balcony and looked down on
the assembly, and my father pointed to Senator Root and whispered,

RO
“ There is the next President of the United States.”
As local attorney for the Erie Railroad Company, my father got

G
annual passes which permitted us to travel free, and we often went
to Binghamton on a Saturday afternoon to shop and see a movie.
S
Except for the suits made by Bill Ernestone, we bought almost all
K
our clothing at W eed’s in Binghamton, and my mother and father
O

shopped extensively in the department stores. Occasionally we drove

the Ford to Binghamton and loaded it with staple groceries from a
BO

wholesaler. None of this promoted the economic welfare of Susque­

hanna, but my father was apparently unaware of the effect it must
have had on his business friends.
EX

In Binghamton we saw movies made by Thomas H. Ince, often

in sepia, and, unlike the Hogan Opera House, the theatre had up­
D

holstered seats rising row on row from the screen and a pipe organ
instead of a Miss Dooley at the piano. After the movies we went to a
IN

white-tiled restaurant near the station for supper. W e always had

omelets, and I had the impression that that was all the restaurant
served, but I suppose it was merely the cheapest meal we could get.
After supper we went to the station and waited for No. 26. It
was usually a long wait, even when the train was on time, and it was
painful to stay awake sitting on the slippery wooden benches. W e
might enjoy two Chiclets dispensed from a machine in a glassine
wrapper for a penny, and I was intrigued by a large sign reading,
“ Girls, Girls, Beware, the W hite Slave Trader Is Everywhere,” but
I did not want my parents to see me reading the small print and I
never found out what was so threatening about the white slave trader.

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No. 26 stopped three or four times between Binghamton and

Susquehanna, and the pain of sleepiness continued, and after we had
reached the station we still had to walk a mile or more to our house.

My Raphael Miller. I cannot remember

c l o se st bo yh o o d f r ie n d w a s

exactly when our friendship formed, and it would be hard to define

PS
it. He was a few months younger than I and a year behind in school
and college. I called him Doc because his father was a doctor and he

U
intended to become one too.

RO
His father was a homeopathist. His office was in his house, and
it contained great jars of very small sugar pills to which he added
minute amounts of medication when he gave them to patients. Doc

G
and I occasionally sampled the unmedicated ones. His father was a
dedicated practitioner who made himself available throughout the
S
countryside at any time of day or night. He was the last professional
K
man in Susquehanna to drive a horse. (In the Glidden barn next door,
O

the Packard stood alongside stalls which still contained licked blocks
BO

of salt and bins holding a few oats. ) When Dr. Miller eventually got
a Ford, he nearly killed himself. In trying to turn around on the road
near the Blue Ridge Metal Manufacturing plant in Oakland, he
EX

stepped on the reverse pedal instead of low gear, and the car shot
backward out over a concrete cellar hole and dropped into shallow
water, but it remained right side up and he was unhurt.
D

The quality of my friendship with Doc was touched by the fact

IN

that his father and mother were religious. They not only belonged to
the Presbyterian church; unlike my father and mother they went to
church every Sunday. After Sunday school Doc would stay on to join
his parents. Moreover, he could take communion and I could not.
(M y father had decided that I should not be baptized until I under­
stood what it meant, and that time never came.)
Doc and I did many things together, but we never took any great
delight in doing them. Harmey Warner gave us piano lessons at the
same time and we bought and practiced a couple of duets, but our
greatest satisfaction lay in reaching the last measure at the same time.
Patients who came to see the doctor at night could speak to him

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through a speaking tube which ran from his bedroom to the front door,
and Doc and I used to play with it. You blew on the tube to sound
a whistle, and then pressed a lever to open it to talk. Later we set up
a telegraph line between our houses. W e strung odds and ends of
wire along the back fence, including an enormously long spring which,
when stretched, kept a slight spiral twist. Tire line was not very satis-
factor)' and my father, as secretary' and treasurer of the local phone
company, had the company electrician run a better one down the poles

PS
in the street for our use.
Doc’s telegraph had a device in which metal disks with patterns

U
of teeth could be used to send messages at different speeds for instruc­
tional purposes, but w7e never developed a good “ fist” or ear. In the

RO
early evening I would hear my telegraph clattering away upstairs and
would go up and answer, and Doc would then send a message and I

G
would send one in return. They were often confusing and it was not
unusual for one of us to call the other on the telephone to find out
S
what he w>as trying to say.
K
One summer Doc and I went into the elderberry business. Elder­
O

berries grew7 plentifully below the Lower Road from Susquehanna to

Lanesboro. They tasted like bitter huckleberries and were used in pies
BO

or “ sauce.” W e gathered them in large clusters and stripped or shook

the ripe berries into a basket. But the unripe berries came off too, and
we made a device to separate the green from the ripe. W e bent a sheet
EX

of metal to form a shallow trough into which we shook the berries.

Water from a garden hose ran down the trough and carried them into
D

a pail. The green ones floated and were carried over the edge to be
thrown away, and the ripe berries sank and w;ere washed clean of the
IN

dust from the Lower Road. W e carried the berries from door to door
and sold them to housewives interested in elderberry pies.
Although the first sexual play in which I was discovered took
place in the hayloft of Doc's barn, there was never anything of that
kind between us again. Doc acquired a rather medical attitude toward
sex from his father, and once passed on a comment about some man
who was walking in an awkward way because he had engaged in some
unspecified sexual activity and had picked up some unspecified disease.
Doc never w;ent with girls or talked about girls or went to parties
where games were played with girls, and somehow it added to my

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strong feeling of admiration and awe that I supposed him above all
that. But a lovely cousin of the Gliddens used to come to visit, and
as a next'door neighbor Doc got to know her. Slowly— and to the
amazement of us all— a deep relationship grew up between them
which lasted until his tragic death.

PS
M any p e o p l e e s c a p e d from the heat of the city by spending a month
or two in the country, which often meant simply in small towns, and

U
Susquehanna had a fair share of summer folk. M y father’s uncle and
aunt came from New York City with their children and boarded with

RO
relatives on lower Grand Street. Ed Dumble had all the sophistication
that his half-brother, my grandfather Skinner, lacked. He dressed

G
nattily and told slightly risqué jokes, often to the embarrassment of
his beautiful wife, who carried herself with great distinction. Their
S
daughter, Helen, was lovely but had a wreak heart. Their son, Paul,
K
was slightly older than I and did not spend much time in Susque­
O

hanna, but once when we wrere both quite young, wre were playing
horse, and I was driving him up and down the road in front of our
BO

house with some improvised reins, and he quite innocently enlarged

upon his role by peeing in the road as horses so conspicuously did.
Frances Carr was a sophisticated girl from Albany who stayed
EX

with her mother’s sister near us on Grand Street for a month or so

each summer. Somehow or other it was naturally supposed that she
D

and I went together when she was in town. When we were quite
IN

young, we played a game in which a girl would tickle a boy on the

knee while saying, “ Tickle, tickle on the knee, If you laugh you don’t
love me.” I never laughed when she tickled me, and I was proud of
my stoicism, but, so far as I know, that U'as my only declaration of
love. Her father was a distinguished lawyer, and on that trip to
Albany we went to call on him, and Frances and I swung on a great
rotary bookcase in his study.
The Keffer boys came from Bayonne, New Jersey, to stay with
Gran’ma Graham, and they called her Gran’ma to her face, as I did
not. W e spent a good deal of time together and I knew the backyard
of the Graham property as wrell as I knew our own. One year they put

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up a large tent. W e all had tents of various sizes and shapes, and it
was not always clear what function they served. On hot days they
were uncomfortable, and a heavy rain could drive a fine mist through
the canvas, but they had the merit of isolating us. W e could lie on
cots or on the odorous bruised grass and talk about a world of our own.
The Keffers were city boys, and they brought to Susquehanna my
first pre-adolescent dirty stories. Harry Keffer told one about a travel­
ing salesman who asks a farmer to put him up for the night. The

PS
farmer has a beautiful daughter, and an episode in the middle of the
night depends for its humor on the fact that the salesman's name is

U
Johnny Fuckfaster. My brother was beginning to tease me at the time,

RO
and that evening at supper he said, “ Tell them the story about
Johnny.” I said I couldn’t remember it but added inconsistently that
I wouldn’t tell it if I did. My brother could not very wrell remind me,
and my parents tactfully let the matter drop.
G
S
K
O

T h e h e a v y b e n c h in the woodshed behind our kitchen held a vise,

a saw, a hammer, a brace and bit, and a screwdriver, and I often made
BO

things. Unfortunately, my grandfather Burrhus never gave me any

instruction. He never came to our house except on special occasions,
and he had no tools of his own in any of the houses he lived in. (I
EX

did not know, for example, that you first drilled a hole before using
a wood screw, and I remember the strain and frustration of trying to
D

drive one into an oak plank, the screwdriver eventually splitting the
IN

slot or leaving at least a jagged edge which tore my skin.)

The kindling wood from the grocery store included parts of boxes
and crates, good for making small objects like the stools I made for
my brother, and we had a large supply of boards, painted red, of
seasoned white pine free of knots, from a fence that had been replaced
between our lot and the cemetery. They were just right for building
benches, tables, and small houses. Long oil-soaked oak planks from
the Erie Shops, destined to be saw’ed into pieces for our fireplace, were
ideal for slides, teeter-totters, and merry-go-rounds.
There was an old rose arbor in our backyard and for many years
a lawn swing with facing seats which one set in motion by pushing

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PARTICULARS OF MY LIFE

against a slatted floor. As the years passed, my mother and father

grew too busy to spend time in a garden, and my brother and I had
the space to ourselves. It became a shambles. The soil was pure brown
sand left either by the river or by one of the glaciers which had rounded
off the local hills. You could dig holes six or eight feet deep before
striking hardpan. W e dug branching tunnels which fortunately did not
collapse on us. W e dug cellars beneath the small houses we con-
structed of those red boards, and once wc added a second story to give

PS
three levels.
W e made vehicles of various kinds. If we lost one roller skate,

U
we made something of the other, possibly a scooter. For use on snowy

RO
slopes we made a kind of scooter of a large barrel stave. W ith the
wheels and axles of discarded baby carriages we made steerable cars
in which wre coasted downhill in summer as on sleds in winter. Some

G
we steered with our feet on the front axle, but on one I rigged a steer­
ing wheel. It had the curious property of turning the car to the left
S
wrhen you turned the wheel to the right and vice versa, and I never
K
acquired the behavior needed to race down Grand Street at high
O

speed without incident. The stored energy of the flywheel fascinated

me. I would turn my bicycle upside down and pump the back wheel to
BO

a frenetic speed, and I dreamed of a car that stored energy in a fly­

wheel as it came down one hill and used it to go up another.
I also dreamed of an endless source of energy. I designed a per-
EX

petual-motion machine in which water flowing from a reservoir lifted

a float against a spring, the spring acquiring enough energy to pump
D

the water back into the reservoir for a second cycle. I never put it to
IN

the test of an actual construction.

It was too early for good model airplanes, since the only available
engines were twisted rubber bands, but we did what we could. W e
conquered the air most successfully with a device said to go back to
the fourteenth century. W e cut a propeller out of a tin Nabisco box,
and punched two small holes near the center. It was slipped over
two headless nails on one end of a spool, which was held on a nail on
a stick. String was wound around the spool and when pulled, the
spinning propeller rose off the nails and into the air. W ith only a
slight twist of the blades the propeller hovered and whirred for a long
time almost within reach; with a sharp twist it rose above houses and
trees but quickly stopped spinning and fell straight down.

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For weapons we made or bought peashooters, bows and arrows,

water pistols, and slingshots. W e made a water pistol from a length
of bamboo, with a pinhole in the natural diaphragm at one end and a
piston of rags wound around a small stick pushed into the other end.
W e read how the Indians made their bows and arrows and tried to
find ash trees and season young saplings to follow their example, but
we were never very successful. W e tied real feathers on sticks to make
true arrows, but the simplest ones we split from a cedar shingle,

PS
fastening the head on the thick end and catching a notched slip of
light cardboard in a crack in the thin end. There were plenty of forked

U
branches to be used in making slingshots and plenty of old inner
tubes for the elastic bands.

RO
Our most ambitious piece of ordnance was a steam cannon made
from a discarded hot-water boiler. The boiler lay on its side in the

G
badly kept garden at the rear of our lot, held off the ground by a few
stones and bricks, and a fire was built underneath to boil the small
S
amount of water inside. All but one emerging pipe were sealed off.
K
W e forced plugs of potato or carrots into the remaining pipe, and
O

they shot out like bullets when the steam pressure reached the right
point.
BO

Some boys had air rifles, but my father and mother thought they
were dangerous, because you could put an eye out with one. The
Gliddens had a twenty-two, and I remember some carefully supervised
EX

target practice at their summer place along the river. I may have taken
a shot or two myself, and if so it was the only time I have ever fired
D

a gun.
IN

W e subscribed to the Philadelphia Inquirer, a good Republican

paper, which carried Rube Goldberg’s cartoons with his outrageous
contraptions and his Foolish Questions. Goldberg’s influence can be
detected in a gadget I built to solve a personal problem having to do
with hanging up my pajamas. I had a bedroom of my own, and in
the morning I often left my pajamas lying on my bed. W hile I was
eating breakfast, my mother would go upstairs to check, and when she
found them there, she would call to me, and I would have to stop
eating, go upstairs, and hang them up. She continued this for weeks.
It did not make me any more inclined to hang them up before
coming down to breakfast, but it was nonetheless aversive, and I
escaped in the following way. The clothes closet in my room was near

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the door, and in it I fastened a hook on the end of a string which

passed over a nail and along the wall to a nail above the center of the
door. A sign reading “ Hang up your pajamas” hung at the other end.
W hen the pajamas were in place, the sign was up out of the way,
but when I took them off the hook at night, the sign dropped to the
middle of the door where I would bump into it on my way out.
A device concerned only with positive reinforcement was not so
successful. I was not allowed to smoke, but I tried to see whether the

PS
supposed pleasures of smoking could not be enjoyed in other ways.
The important thing seemed to be playing with smoke, blowing it out

U
in various patterned sequences, and so I built a device in which a

RO
lighted cigarette could be “ smoked” by drawing air through it with an
atomizer bulb. I could blow smoke rings and do other tricks, but noth­
ing seemed to be gained. Blowing soap bubbles was more fun.

G
S
K
W h e n w e h a d o u r s u m m e r c o t t a g e on the river my brother and
O

I and some of our friends explored Hillborn’s Creek. It came down

BO

out of the hills, and we drank its clear, cold w’ater without fear. Not
more than half a mile up the creek from the highway we could find
dark, mossy sections completely under the cover of trees reaching out
EX

from both banks, but there were also broad ledges of rock over which
the water took shallow zigzag courses and sparkled in the sun. W e
knew the creek in summer when it was a small stream, but its banks
D

were strewn with the debris of spring floods—with high-water marks

IN

of matted grass and leaves caught against tree trunks, and uprooted
bushes bleaching on the rocks, with an occasional board or fragment
of furniture to remind us of civilization.
One spot was particularly good for camping, and we occasionally
took our Boy Scout pup tents and stayed there overnight. W e dammed
up a small section of the creek with stones and sod and made a shallow
swimming pool, in which I learned to swim. W e shared the pool with
a water moccasin, a kind of snake we believed to be poisonous, and
which we also occasionally saw in the river, especially at dusk, as it
swam with its head out of the water, leaving a long V-shaped bow
wave if the water was quite still.

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Somewhat later I began to see more of a new friend, a year older

than I, named John DeW itt. He suggested that we build a shack on
Hillborn’s Creek near the old campsite. W e started with the boards
we picked up along the creek and on the banks of the river, and we
brought other material from town strapped to our bicycles. W e got
a pane of glass from a hardware shop, together with a glass cutter
and advice on how to use it, and a small roll of tar paper for the roof.
The shack was big enough for two bunk beds, one above the

PS
other, and a small fireplace. W e put in a few staples—ground coffee,
potatoes, and crackers— and we picked up frankfurters and spent a day

U
or two at the shack on a weekend.

RO
There was not really very much to do. W e did not smoke cig­
arettes, because we were forbidden to do so, but we smoked com silk
and certain kinds of dried leaves, and if we could afford it, we bought

G
a pack of cubebs, which were sold to people who had catarrh or
asthma. The Java pepper from which they were made had a rich
S
aroma and possibly some psychedelic properties.
K
O
BO

My f a t h e r h a d b e e n w r o n g , of course, in pointing to Elihu Root

as the next President of the United States, Root was an internation­

EX

alist and had won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1912, but he was the wrong
man for the hour and Charles Evans Hughes was nominated as the
Republican candidate to oppose Woodrow Wilson. My father was
D

undaunted. He began to give political speeches in favor of Hughes.

IN

At a rally at South Gibson, said the Transcript, “ Mr. Skinner declared

. . . that the country had had four years of a namby-pamby wishy-
washy administration that had made men with red blood in their veins
hang their heads in shame. . . . He predicted Hughes’ election and w'as
greeted by vigorous applause when he announced this.” He was wrong
by only a few votes. Wilson w'as re-elected, in part because “ he had
kept us out of war,” but within a month after he assumed office for
the second time, war was declared.
The Erie Railroad was particularly important to the war effort
because it had been built as a broad-gauge track and then converted
to standard gauge in such a way that it took “ wide loads.” It was the

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only railroad from the Midwest to the Atlantic seaboard that did so,
and its most vulnerable point was the Stone Bridge. Troops were
moved in to guard the bridge around the clock.
W e were all looking for saboteurs and spies, and within a couple
of months a suspect named Love was found and brought before my
father, the United States Commissioner. According to a Philadelphia
paper:

PS
[Love] was arrested in his room at the hotel last evening by members
of the detail of the 13th Pennsylvania Regiment which is doing police

U
duty in Susquehanna and vicinity. On account of the military censor­

RO
ship, little information is being given out. It is learned, however, that
the arrest was made upon information from Philadelphia and other
cities where it is charged that Love's activities have been such as to

G
show that he is in the employ of the German Government. . . . Love
was kept under military guard last night and this morning was given
S
a hearing before United States Commissioner William A. Skinner.
K
O

Military censorship apparently did not apply to the Transcript,

which told the story in the following way: “ A well-dressed, obviously
BO

cultured man who has been about the city for several days exploiting
medicines in tabloid form and securing orders from several well-known
local physicians, attracted the attention of Sergeant Carlson of the
EX

State Police some days ago by his strange ways and methods in doing
business.” He was placed under arrest by the sergeant at the local
D

post office and brought before my father. “ An examination of his

effects in the Commissioner’s office revealed among various other
IN

things six green notebooks written in various languages and dialects,

also several looseleaf maps. . . . His vehement explanation of his
extreme loyalty to the ‘Old Flag’ and his many times repeated claim
of his pure American blood and birth did but little to convince Com ­
missioner Skinner that he was the extremely loyal citizen he pretended
to be.” It was then that he was turned over to the military authorities.
Some of the maps the man had in his possession were of the
night skies, and my father brought them home and asked me to take
them to school next day to see whether Miss Graves could tell whether
they were genuine or were perhaps something to be used in deciphering

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codes. I took them to Miss Graves, feeling very important, but, alas,
she thought they were genuine maps of the stars.
At a patriotic celebration at Hallstead my father urged the pass­
ing of the bill before the House authorizing Theodore Roosevelt to
lead a unit to the fighting line in France immediately. Teddy Roose­
velt, back in favor, was helping to save face for the Republicans, who
were now required to support Wilson. W e wage war, said my father,
quoting Roosevelt, not to make the world safe for democracy (that

PS
was Wilsonian nonsense) but “ to defeat the men responsible for
murdering our men, women, and babes.” And speaking to the Sons of

U
Italy, “ Attorney Skinner made a ringing eloquent speech which elec­

RO
trified the large crowd and reached beyond telling. . . . He told the
Italians they were worthy heirs of Garibaldi. The audience stood and
cheered when he described the battle of the marines at the Marne.”

G
His concluding sentence was in Italian, translated for him by Joe
Radicchi, the shoe repairman. My father had written out a rough
S
phonetic transcription and he went over it again and again before the
K
meeting.
O

He spoke at dozens of Liberty Bond rallies and was, I think, up­

BO

staged only once— at a big meeting in the Hogan Opera House. A

representative of the American Hardware Manufacturers Association
was scheduled to speak. The band was on the stage, and my father
EX

came out from the wings to make some introductory remarks. Shortly
after he began someone brought him a note. It was from the hardware
man: he would need plenty of time and my father was to be as brief
D

as possible. M y father looked offstage over his pince-nez glasses, a

IN

withering gesture he had found effective in cross-examination.

The theme of the speaker for the evening had to do with the
babies who had been pinned to cathedral doors in Belgium with knives
manufactured by the German cutlery industry. Would we ever again
buy knives manufactured in Germany? Certainly not! The speaker
wanted each and every one of us to sign a pledge saying that for the
rest of our lives we would always buy American knives, as well as
shears, skewers, and anything else that could be used to pin babies to
cathedral doors. Then he rolled his trousers above his knees to wade
right in, he said, and put over the biggest subscription to Liberty Bonds
in the history of the town.

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As a Boy Scout I sold bonds, mostly to my parents and grand­

parents and to neighbors with no Boy Scout sons, who would have
bought them anyway. The government was aware of family favoritism
and gave medals only to Scouts who sold to “ ten or more families.”
I also sold and bought thrift stamps, which were pasted in books to be
exchanged for bonds. W e went on motor cavalcades to neighboring
towns. The Erie Band played “ Over There” or “ Tipperary,” and my
father or someone else made a speech. Dennis Horrigan, the band’s

PS
star tenor, or the bandmaster’s son, a boy soprano, sang patriotic songs
and we passed out subscription blanks. Driving home at night, we

U
sang the more easily harmonized songs— “ Keep the Home Fires Burn­

RO
ing” and “ There’s a Long, Long Trail A-winding.”
When a few local boys were leaving for Camp Meade, they were
given a great parade. Jack Palmer rode his least controllable horse as

G
marshal, the Erie Band marched, and so did the Boy Scouts, together
with some high-school girls dressed as Red Cross nurses. Speeches
S
were made, and the departing soldiers received small presents, among
K
them trench mirrors made by the Blue Ridge Company.
O

Troop trains brought soldiers from the W est on their way to the
BO

coast and Europe, and they often spent an hour or two in town, and
girls gave them coffee and kisses. I think the bars were off limits, but
I once saw a soldier go into a drugstore, buy a bottle of a well-known
EX

tonic, and come out and drink it down without taking the bottle out
of his mouth.
M y mother was active in the Red Cross and she added new
D

economies at home. She saved fat and made a harsh laundry soap by
IN

mixing it with lye. She flattened tin cans and put them on the coals
in the kitchen stove on the assurance that some additional heat was
extracted from them. She canned all available food unless it could be
dried; drying was a new technique and never worked very well. My
grandmother Burrhus knitted—helmets, sweaters, socks, and mittens.
My grandmother Skinner tried to knit too, and she used and re-used
the same varn
j
manvj times without success.
Eventually it was all over. Early on the morning of November 1 1 ,
1918, word spread that an armistice had been signed, and the Tran­
script printed a single sheet of blue paper and distributed handfuls
along Main Street. The brief text concluded with these words: “ The

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ending of the World W ar, like the beginning of the Christian Era,
marks a new epoch in the progress of man for it ends for all time the
menace of militarism/’ Within a few hours an effigy of the Kaiser was
strung up at the corner of Erie Avenue and Main Street, soaked in
gasoline, and set on fire.
A month or two later my father was a member of the reception
committee for returning veterans, and still later the bodies of Sus­
quehanna boys killed in action came back one by one and were un­

PS
loaded onto freight trucks at the Erie depot in their tightly sealed
boxes. I was by that time a member of the band and participated in

U
the military funerals. W e marched at a slow step— a foot forward on
one beat but held above the ground until the next beat; then another

RO
foot forward, and so on. W e played mournful funeral marches as we
moved from the station very slowly along Main Street, into East Main

G
and Little Italy, and then up Broad and Church streets to the Catholic
church. On one occasion it was bitter cold and during the long march
S
saliva not only collected in the brass instruments but froze.
K
I had my first glimpse of the interior of the Catholic church. As
O

we took our places some members of the band genuflected, and I faced
the old problem— should I do likewise? And up by the altar I was
BO

surprised to see some of the tougher kids in town in lace costumes,

behaving like little angels. High Mass was sung with the help of
priests from neighboring communities. Mrs. Mooney played the organ,
EX

and afterward my father commented on the fact that she ran up or

down the keyboard very lightly to discover how far the priests had
D

changed the pitch.

IN

S e v e n t h g r a d e w a s t a u g h t by Miss Donovan, a strict disciplinarian

who disciplined herself and walked in from Lanesboro every day, no

matter what the w'eather. She was on the point of retirement, and in
eighth grade we had Miss Keefe, a redhead in her late twenties. She
may have been related to the Irishman who was killed by Joe Frank;
in any case she and I did not get on well. I was constantly arguing with
her and, tactlcssly, correcting her. In physiology she told us that the
hairs in our nostrils fanned particles of dirt out of our nose while we

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were breathing in. I insisted that they simply caught the particles and
held them until we breathed out. She took the matter to the principal
and had to come in the next day and admit that I had been right.
W hen we were diagramming sentences, she argued that we should say
“ He objected to me going” and I insisted that it should be “ He ob­
jected to my going.” Again she checked with the principal and had to
correct herself. It did not make for a good relationship. Once when I
was leaving the room, I tripped on the doorsill, and when I came back

PS
she bawled me out for kicking up my heels to attract the girls. Not only
had I not done so, I wras offended by the implication that it was the

U
kind of thing I would have done.

RO
The saving grace in eighth grade wras our English class, taught
by Miss Graves. W e met in another room across the hall, and the
class was always lively. It grew especially lively when I became a

G
Baconian. W e were reading As You Like It, and one evening my
father happened to mention that some people thought that the works
S
of Shakespeare had been written by Francis Bacon. That was enough
K
for me, and the next day I announced in class that Shakespeare had
O

not written the play we were reading. Miss Graves said that I didn't
know what I was talking about. That afternoon I went down to the
BO

library and found a copy of Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence’s Bacon Is

Shakespeare, which I read in great excitement. The next day, to Miss
Graves's dismay, I knew only too well what I was talking about. Act V
EX

Scene 1 of Love's Labour's Lost contains the long word honorificabili-

tudinitatibus, and Durning-Lawrence proved conclusively, I thought,
D

that it wras a code, and that if you rearranged the letters, it became the
IN

Latin for “ These works, F. Bacon’s offspring, are preserved for the
world/’
A few days later things became even more exciting when I dis­
covered that the same act and scene in As You Like It was also cryptic.
Touchstone is disputing with the simple William (who else but
Shakespeare?) for the possession of the fair Audrey (wrhat else but the
authorship of the plays?). Would Shakespeare himself have given his
name to a dolt? Hardly. And the clincher was that William says he
was born in the Forest of Arden, and Shakespeare’s mother’s name was
Arden. (Oh, the lovely adolescent obscenity of that “ forest” !)
I must have made life pretty miserable for Miss Graves for the

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next month or two, but she may very well have let me go on for the
sate of the classroom excitement. In any case, in my defensive zeal I
read biographies of Bacon, summaries of his philosophical position,
and a good deal of the Advancement of Learning, the Essays, and
Novum Organum. This was stretching my abilities pretty far, and I
doubt whether I got much out of it at the time, but Francis Bacon was
to serve me in more serious pursuits later on.
I was not always that studious. In fact, it was at about this time

PS
that I went through a silly stage. A new boy had moved onto Church
Street and v/e began to walk home from school together. I started

U
to carry single volumes from that set of Gems of Humor in our library

RO
and there were things in them by Artemus W ard, Josh Billings, and
Mark Twain, and my new friend and I would read them to each other
as we walked, often laughing so hard that we staggered about the side­

G
walk unable to go on reading. When, in something of Mark Twain’s,
a tenor “ let out another length of his neck” we rolled on the grass,
S
tears streaming from our eyes.
K
Sex remained something of a mystery for a long time. There were
O

allusions and innuendoes that I could not understand. In seventh

BO

grade we looked up sexual and excretory words in the large unabridged

dictionary, often passing the news along to our friends when we found
something juicy, but there wasn't very much juice in dictionaries in
EX

those days. W e saw pregnant women and pretended that we did not
know what that meant. There were jokes about intercourse with
animals and, as a matter of fact, my brother reported that he saw a
D

boy we knew, who lived on a farm, actually demonstrating the act

IN

with his pony.

There were one or two men in Susquehanna whom my mother
called “ old fools/' An attractive young wife from Lanesboro had a job
in the Erie Shops and walked to and from work, a distance of about
two miles. Her route lay past Jack Palmer’s livery stable, which was
slowly being converted into a g2rage, and Palmer once offered her a
ride home in his car, and this became a standard routine. Her husband
did not seem to mind. Another man had an “ affinity” who lived above
my grandfather Skinner's house on Jackson Avenue. She was also
married and her husband aware of the relation. Sitting on my grand­
father's porch on a Sunday afternoon, we would see him walking up

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to spend the afternoon with his friend, and my mother could scarcely
contain herself. (Jess Haller, who boarded with Gran’ma Graham,
presumably cohabited with her daughter, but they were friends of ours,
and Jess was never called an old fool.)
During the war we used to hang around the soldiers who were
guarding the Stone Bridge, and one day I went into a small station
belonging to another railroad and saw a woman who lived not far from
my grandfather Skinner on Jackson Avenue who was suspected of

PS
being a madam. She had one of her girls with her, and they were
talking provocatively with a soldier. The stationmaster went to a tele­

U
phone, and the officer of the day soon turned up and took the soldier

RO
away.
Girls’ legs excited me. I never dared buy a copy of the Police
Gazette, but I could look at the front pages spread out in Charley

G
Wagner’s news-store window. The Gazette was printed on purple-
pink paper and specialized in bathing beauties with a small expanse
S
of bare thigh above glistening stockings. I was not prepared for reality,
K
however, and when a line of real chorus girls came on stage in a show
O

at the Hogan Opera House with legs bare almost to their hips, I was
BO

stunned. One of the girls was young and pretty, and I went about for
days imagining that if I could only get to know her, she would turn
out to be a very nice girl.
EX

During my high-school years a silk mill was started in an effort

to bring another industry to Susquehanna. The intention was to
employ the daughters or wives of the men working in the Shops, but it
D

was necessary to import girls to work in the mill. Half a dozen of them
IN

boarded with Mrs. Smith, the widowed mother of a friend who lived
next door to us. They were city girls, rather uninhibited by local
standards. W e got to know them, and at one time I worked out a way
to send messages from one upstairs room to another by holding up
cutout letters in our windows. That was all innocent enough, but
one warm afternoon John DeW itt and I were lying around in our back­
yard when one of the more attractive girls came out to clean some
shoes. She sat in a chair and when she saw that we were looking at
her she pulled her skirts up and spread her legs wide apart. She had
pants on and we saw very little, but it was pretty clearly a sexual
overture, and John and I were rather shaken. I doubt whether she was

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interested in more than a little fun; we were young and innocent, and
she wondered what we would do. But Mrs. Smith told a neighbor
that she could tell from the condition of the sheets on the girls’ beds
that when they entertained men in their rooms, objectionable things
went on.
I worried about the effects of masturbation. There was a kind
of sex manual in my father’s library which mentioned the subject in
what, for the time, was a liberal way, but it was not encouraging be­

PS
cause it said that every boy masturbated briefly but soon gave it up
for life. The Boy Scout manual, in a short paragraph headed “ Con­

U
servation,” warned against practices which might “ result in the loss

RO
of vital fluids.” Masturbation was supposed to drive boys crazy, and
I rather admired a slightly younger boy wrho told my brother that,
whether it did or not, he liked it and was going to go ahead anyway.

G
I once overheard my mother telling my father that a boy down the
street masturbated. “ It makes a boy so stupid,” she said, and my father
S
mumbled some kind of vague agreement, but he knew better, and
K
so did I.
O

I didn’t worry about stupidity or insanity, but I did worry about

getting caught. By the time I was in high school Mr. and Mrs. B had
BO

moved to a house on Broad Street, and I used to drop in to see my

grandmother almost every afternoon on my way home from school.
W e played Pedro, rummy, or dominoes, but I also used to go to the
EX

bathroom and masturbate, sitting on the toilet looking at a large

plant in a pot of very wet soil which resembled a miniature grove of
D

palm trees in a swamp. Since I did this every day and stayed rather a
IN

long time, my grandmother concluded there must be something

wrong with my kidneys. She urged my mother to take me to a doctor
for an examination. When I heard about it, I no longer had to go to
the toilet in the afternoon, and nothing further was done.
W hen I began to play in a dance orchestra, the violinist, consider­
ably older than I, once said that masturbation led to poor eyesight,
and since I wore glasses I was alarmed. Could there be other signs?
W hat about my pimples? I began to go to a barber near the station
who gave “ facials.” A hot towel was thrown over the face for a few
minutes and a pink Pompeian Massage Cream was then spread on
the skin. A little later it was rubbed off in little rolls, the blackness of

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which certainly seemed proof that it was cleaning the pores and thus
preventing blackheads and pimples. Later I even had one or two mud-
pack treatments.
I discovered that the concealment of sex varied among ethnic
groups. I was once crossing a bridge over Drinker Creek just outside of
town and saw ten or twelve Italian boys who had been swimming and
were now sitting naked on some warm rocks along the bank. They
were handling their genitals and the oldest boy was being greatly

PS
admired for the size of his erection. The younger were doing their
best to emulate him. There was no homosexual contact, and it is pos­

U
sible that the voyeurism, in which I was of course taking part, wfas
scarcely more than curiosity. Nevertheless there was a surprising

RO
openness. I can remember only one comparable example among
Protestants of that age. At the time I was also swimming in Drinker

G
Creek and my attention was called to two or three boys some little
distance away. 1 joined them and found that they were gazing in
S
wonderment at a particularly large erect penis. The owner was
K
embarrassed by the attention and soon buttoned his pants.
One evening in the bathroom I was cleaning my teeth while my
O

brother was taking a bath. A shower had been installed in one corner
BO

of the bathroom, with a base of Keene’s cement and a white curtain

on a curved rod. I had an erection and noticed that the light was
casting my shadow on the shower curtain. I stood in such a way that
EX

the erection was conspicuous and called to mv brother. He made

some exclamation and pulled the curtain aside, but I quickly closed
D

my bathrobe and picked up a nail brush, which he then supposed

I had used to fool him. Later in my room I told him that it was not
IN

the nail brush and that my penis had actually grown large. He wanted
to see it and I showed it to him, and he started to plav with it. There
was no particular sexual excitement on the part of either of us. At
that age, to ejaculate was to be slightly demeaned or defeated, and he
was planning to put himself in a superior position. I told him that I
could take that kind of stimulation for any length of time without
having an orgasm, and he stopped at once, rather petulantly. It was
the only sexual activity between us.
* * *

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As t h e e p i s o d e i n d i c a t e s , our relation was changing. He was be­

ginning to tease me. I oncc read an advertisement which claimed
that the little heart of each peanut was removed in making a particu­
lar brand of peanut butter because it wras bitter. I brought the subject
up two or three times in conversation and this was too much for
my brother. Whenever we had peanut butter, he would ask me about
the little heart of the peanut and roar with laughter.
My father's secretary was named Miss Sykes. I once had to tele­

PS
phone her, and since there were other daughters in the family I asked
for “ Miss Jessie Sykes.” This was a new name to my brother, who may

U
have thought I was putting on airs, and it threw him into stitches.
He rolled on the floor, gasping, “ Miss Jessie Sykes, Miss Jessie Sykes.”

RO
He discovered that he could tease me bv repeating what I said.
He would start with a remark he thought rather silly, and if I then

G
said, “ Oh, stop it,” he would simply echo me: “ Oh, stop it.” If I tried
to save myself by saying, “ I don't care if you do that,” he would say,
S
“ I don’t care if you do that.” My protests only supplied him with
K
further material, and my silence was his victory.
O

Perhaps he was only getting back at me for a trick I had played

on him years before. In the pasture near our summer cottage there
BO

were what we called cow pics, the droppings of cows. These baked in
the sun and became quite hard. W e were walking barefoot in the
pasture one day wrhen I noticed a very large cow pie. It had already
EX

developed a dry crust and I put my foot on it and pretended to put

weight on it. M y brother followed my example, and his foot went in
D

up to his ankle.
IN

Some of the things my brother teased me about were matters of

serious concern to my parents. I was moving beyond their interests,
and I lived much of my life with them rather carelessly. Various
faults were blamed on a temporary absencc of mind. In one of the
Liberty Bond rallies at the Hogan Opera House a dozen of us were
lined up across the stage in our Boy Scout uniforms. At one point we
were to bring our right hands across our breasts and a moment later
drop them again to our sides. Much too late, I discovered that my
hand was still across my breast. It was the kind of thing that worried
my father and mother but that my brother found hilarious.
He was absent-minded too, but he knew how to laugh at himself.
One evening we were all in the library sitting around a fire. My

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brother went into the kitchen, and then came back laughing almost
hysterically. He had got up to go to the toilet, but instead had gone
to the kitchen and had found himself starting to urinate into the coal
scuttle. W e all laughed, but not at him as he laughed at me.
He was closer to my father and mother than I, and enjoyed more
overt expressions of affection, in part because I was older and less
demonstrative. As a younger child he wras also treated more leniently.
M y father used to keep a revolver in the chiffonier by his bed, possibly

PS
to frighten a burglar, but certainly not to shoot one. (W hen he once
took a few practice shots near our cottage, with a small bull's-eye

U
fastened to a large shagbark hickory, he could not control the recoil
and did not even hit the tree.) One day my brother, alone in the house,

RO
got out the revolver and was examining it when it went off, drilling a
neat hole in the front of the chiffonier. M y parents were overjoyed

G
that he had not hurt himself and never disciplined him for playing
with the gun.
S
In spite of the fact that my brother “ plagued” me, I was never
K
aware of any rivalry. W"e did not compete in the same fields. My
O

father and mother were devoted to both of us, and there was plenty
of affection to go around. If the lack of sibling rivalry is disappoint­
BO

ing, I can at least report a partial identity crisis. When I was perhaps
fourteen or fifteen I woke up one morning and could not find my left
arm. I groped for it in panic. It was nowhere to be found in the bed
EX

on the left side of my body and my left shoulder seemed rounded off
like a stump. Eventually I discovered the arm crossed under my neck
D

and twisted so sharply at the shoulder that all circulation had stopped.
It was cold and completely without feeling. W ith my right hand I
IN

put it in place, like the arm of a fresh cadaver, and massaged it back
to tingling life.
M y brother was much more athletic than I, and the favorite
local sport was basketball. A semi-professional team played in the gym­
nasium at the Y M C A . The two-handed dribble was legal then and
Susquehanna had a player who could move about the court at will
with the ball oscillating rapidly between his hands and the floor. He
was our only local sports hero. Our school had no basketball court,
but my brother and several other boys organized a team at the Y. They
called themselves the Boys Five and challenged all comers from

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neighboring towns. In the only game reported in my mother’s scrap­

book they were defeated by a score of 77 to 5. If that was not a mis­
print, a coach was evidently needed.

M y f a t h e r r e a d a b o u t , and yearned for, a good father-son relation­

ship, but he did not know how to enter into one. He loved my brother

PS
and me and gave us all the advantages he could, and he was proud
of us, but there w'as never a really w’arm friendship. It was part of the

U
price he paid for that forced childhood.

RO
Except when visiting his Aunt Alt, it was only with his father
and his Uncle Ed that he was a relaxed and happy man. When his
uncle was in town, the three of them would go fishing for a day. They

G
would assemble poles, lines, and bait, including minnows in a pail
with an inner wire basket that could be hung over the side of the
S
boat, and they took lunches and drove to Page’s Pond. By evening
K
they would be back laden with bass and bullheads, which they spread
O

out according to size on the grass by the garage. They told stories
of the little adventures of the day, and my father was always especially
BO

pleased to tell something to the credit of his father. But it was not
long before my mother would say something about cleaning the fish
or putting on some other clothes for supper.
EX

My father had business associates, and he was probably pretty

much himself with Frank Zeller or Sid Hersh, but these were not
D

close friendships. I do not knowr how he behaved with his “ affinities,”

IN

but I never saw him at ease in mixed company. His conversation was
forced and he laughed too long at his own jokes.
He hoped that his sons would play baseball, and we had all the
necessary equipment—balls, bats, catcher's mask, and catcher's and
fielders mitts— and plenty of space in our backyard, where we played
three-o’-cat, yet my father never played writh us. He himself played
indoor baseball and apparently played it well, for the Transcript once
reported that “ the feature of the game was a triple play made by the
business men when Attorney Skinner caught a line drive and assisted
by E. K. Owens and Carrington retired the side.” But playing with my
brother and me, he would have been ill at ease, praising us too much

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for a good play or showing us a little too didactically how we could

play better.
It was more his style to take me to Binghamton to see a World
Series game on one of the animated boards in use before the days of
radio. W e watched small figures move about on a large diamond ac­
cording to information received by telegraph as the game was being
played. The audience sat staring at the inactive board while the tele­
graph clickcd away behind the scene, and then the figures began to

PS
move and the audiencc cheered or groaned.
W e were watching a game between Cleveland and the Brooklyn

U
Dodgers on October 10, 1920, when the system was strained beyond
its powers. The telegraph clattered away and then stopped, and we

RO
could hear the operators discussing how to show us what had hap­
pened. Finally a man came out to confess that it could not be done.

G
The Cleveland second baseman, Wambsganss, had made a triple play
unassisted. W ith men on first and second bases he had caught a line
S
drive, stepped on second, and then chased the runner back toward
K
first and tagged him out. It remains the only unassisted triple play
O

in W orld Series history.

I began to play tennis on the court of the Kane sisters, who lived
BO

just off Jackson Avenue about a block from my grandfather Skinner’s.

Madelaine and Annetta Kane worked as clerks in the Erie Shops.
They were Irish and slightly older than I, and I should never have
EX

known them if a W A SP friend, Ward Palmer, had not worked in the

same office. Madelaine, the younger, seldom played tennis, and I
D

never got to know her. Annetta was small, wiry, quick-spoken, witty,
and an excellent player according to our standards. She was the first
IN

intellectual Catholic I had ever met, and she quoted G . K, Chesterton,

often with telling effect. Both sisters eventually became postulants in
a religious order, and Annetta went on to become a nun.
The Kane court war in a depression just behind their house, and
Ward and I more or less took care of it. On a Sunday morning we
would roll it, mark it with lime, adjust the net, and then play a few
sets. W e had no professional instruction and were not strong players.
When Ward and I once drove to Binghamton to see an exhibition
match between Bill Tilden and Vincent Richards, it seemed to be a
different game. But we talked tennis, kept our rackets in presses, had
them restrung when necessary, and occasionally organized a tourna­

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ment. I once played against the editor of the Transcript. He was as

old as my father and I should have beaten him, but he was very clever
in placing the ball, and he eventually wore me out and won.
Ward Palmer was perhaps ten years older than I. He was small,
spare, and muscular, his skin was bronzed even in winter, and he smiled
easily. His father was a free-lance automobile mechanic who loved
cars and was perfectly content to spend his life working on them.
W ard’s mother had some connection with the Wright dynasty and

PS
maintained an appropriate bearing. His sister also moved in slightly
superior circles— the semi-intellectual world of Binghamton. A short-

U
story writer who lived there was known for dining out, and W ard

RO
relayed to me one of his witty remarks: in passing a dish of peas to
his neighbor at a dinner party he had said, “ Do you vibrate to peas?”
In spite of the Wright connection, the family lived in an un­

G
pretentious rented duplex on lower Jackson Avenue. The small living
room contained two large easy chairs and a magnificent Victrola.
S
Ward had all the opera records then available, together with The
K
Victrola Book of the Opera, which gave the plots, and we went
O

through them many times. W e were above the “ best-loved” pieces

like the Quartet from Rigoletto or the Sextet from Lucia and even
BO

somewhat above things like “ Celeste Aida” and “ Vesti la giubba.”

W e immersed ourselves in the dramatic solos and duets which were
EX

meaningful only when you knew the story— things like Cassio's
dream (“ Era la notfe” ), “ O terra7a d d io ” “ PiangiTpiangi, fanciulla,”
and “ Povero Rigoletto **
D

I once pointed out that a theme which would shortly dominate

IN

the music could actually be heard— faintly, or partly masked, or in

fragments— at an earlier stage. I told Ward, as if I knew, that the com­
poser did this to make the emerging theme all the more effective, and
I was surprised at how readily he accepted me as an authority.
I heard opera live when my parents took my brother and me to
New York. W e stayed at the Martinique Hotel, which was then quite
posh, with a headwaiter in tails. M y father got tickets— the best box
seats available— for Geraldine Farrar in Carmen at the Metropolitan.
My brother and I had just had new suits made by Bill Emestone.
Fortunately, we had graduated from knickers to long trousers, but our
salt-and-pepper tweeds with jackets belted in the back were still
scarcely the thing for box seats at the Met.

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W e arrived early, and my father insisted that my brother and I

sit in the front of the box in order to get the full benefit of the opera.
Two women arrived later and took the remaining seats at the back.
The box at our right suddenly filled with chicly dressed girls— from
a finishing school, I suppose— who were obviously amused by the
country' bumpkins. W e held doggedly to our front seats, returning to
them after being no less conspicuous in the crowds between the acts.
But we heard Carmen, for some of which I had been prepared by

PS
Ward Palmer’s records, I felt much more comfortable the next night
when we saw Ed W ynn in T he Perfect Fool.

U
RO
I b e g a n t o p l a y m u s i c again a year or two after I stopped taking

G
lessons. I drifted back to the piano and picked out bits of my mother's
sentimental music— the slower and easier things like a song called
S
“ Forgotten” or Sir Arthur Sullivan’s “ Lost Chord.” I began to do so
K
in earnest when I fell in love because all my early loves were hopeless,
O

and sentimental music was a great solace.

I also took up the saxophone. An Italian, Joe Demase, had had his
BO

jaw crushed in an accident in the Shops, and my father had got him
some kind of compensation (not at that time a common practice).
W hen he was well enough to play the saxophone again, he vol­
EX

unteered to teach me. I began with a C-melody saxophone and worked

on things like the Intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana, or Handel’s
D

“ Largo,” or the “ Evening Star” from Tannhduser.

IN

W hen I had acquired a reasonable skill, my father bought me a

B-flat soprano saxophone and arranged for me to play in the Erie
Band. In perhaps a dozen of the Shops along its route the company
was paternalistic enough to give men time off for weekly rehearsals,
and once a year to hold a contest. The high school let me take Tues­
day afternoons off and I went down to a large room above the
Carpenter Shop. (M y grandfather Burrhus would hang around near
the foot of the stairs to say hello.)
There were some excellent musicians in the band. W e all stood
in awe of an Italian clarinetist called Teddy. (He eventually lost
status, but for an irrelevant reason: he came home early one day and
found his wife in bed with another man and was afraid to do any­

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thing about it.) The director of the band was Art Brower, the freight-
master. He played the baritone— a lovely instrument somewhere be­
tween a French horn and a tuba in size and pitch— and one of our
shorter selections was a baritone solo called “ A Night in June,” which
he played while conducting. W e played marches (“ Washington Post,”
‘‘Stars and Stripes F orever'), medleys of Irish songs or war songs,
and the overtures of von Suppe (“ Light Cavalry," “ Morning Noon
and Night in Vienna," and, of course, “ Poet and Peasant” ).

PS
I played in two contests— one in Hornell, New York, and an­
other in Galion, Ohio. Each of the competing bands played a short

U
curtain-raiser— say, “ Night in June” — and then a major composition

RO
— say, “ Morning Noon and Night in Vienna” — and in one contest
the soprano saxophone was the only instrument scored to go “ tweet
tweet” at an important point. The meeting in Galion was in the fall

G
of 1920, and we heard Warren Gamaliel Harding reading a “ front
porch” speech in his campaign for President. I worked my way up
S
close to the platform and watched the reporters following their copies
K
to make sure that he read it all as written.
O

Before I left for Galion my father got around to giving me a sex

BO

talk, but I was ahead of him on the few details he could bring himself
to mention. He told me that he had once been invited to join some
young men who were going to a “ house of ill repute” and had refused,
EX

and that one of those who had gone had acquired a disease from which
he still suffered and which would eventually prove fatal. No further
details were given.
D

He had not prepared me for crossing another ethnic line. There

IN

was a young Irish boy in the band, about my age but already working
as an apprentice, who shared an upper berth with me on the sleeper.
W e took off our band uniforms— they were of heavy material with
gold braid and hard to store overnight without wrinkling— and it was
then clear that my new friend assumed that as a matter of course we
would play with each other sexually. I never discovered whether this
was standard practice among the Irish boys of the town, and when
we returned to Susquehanna our relationship was once again simply
that of nodding acquaintances.
Joe Demase, who was beginning to flourish as an instructor on
the saxophone, organized a Boys’ Band, and a surprising number
of boys turned up. To my embarrassment I was made assistant

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director. The Transcript gave the venture loyal support, and we

inarched in a few parades and played a few concerts. At one rehearsal
Joe suddenly handed me the baton, and I had to stand up and conduct,
but except for the first beat, at which most of the players began to
play, there was little evidence that I was having any effect.
I began to take the saxophone seriously. W ith a piano accom­
panist I played at various recitals. (I could never play with my mother,
even in rehearsal, because she never accompanied me; she played right

PS
on, letting me follow, and although I protested again and again, I was
never able to convince her that it was I who was playing the solo.)

U
When our musical friend from Binghamton, Mrs. Taylor, came
to our house, she played my accompaniments, and it was a tremendous

RO
experience. She recommended a saxophone teacher in Binghamton
named Livingston. He had entertained soldiers during the war with

G
a vaudeville act in which he wrote the alphabet forward with one
hand, backward with the other, added a column of figures, and
S
answered questions— all at the same time. It gave him a headache. He
K
had invented a special mouthpiece for the saxophone on which the
O

position of the reed could be adjusted with a small screw. I bought

one and he appointed me his agent in Susquehanna, but I never made
BO

a sale.
It was not easy to find serious music for the saxophone. There
were collections of cornet solos which I could play on the soprano
EX

sax, but only a few elementary things for the C-melody, and I searched
the music stores of Binghamton for vocal solos that might serve, but
D

in vain. I ordered the scores of Carmen, Aida, Faust, and I Pagliacci,

however, and I began to work on the tenor solos. W hen Mrs. Taylor
IN

organized a recital for the Episcopal church in Susquehanna, she asked

me to play, and I played the aria “ Salut, demeure” from Faust. Ap­
parently reassured, she invited me to play at the annual recital of her
pupils in Binghamton.
It was the spring of my senior year, and I prepared several tenor
solos, including '‘No, Pagliaccio non son” and “ Vesti la giubba” from
I Pagliacci, and uCeleste Aida,” studying Caruso’s performances on
W ard Palmer’s records. My father and mother drove me to Bingham­
ton and the performance went off without an unscheduled squeak.
Someone in the audience said that she thought she could hear
Caruso in my performance, and that was tremendously reinforcing.

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Afterward Mrs. Taylor wrote to thank me and added a complimentary

note on my sang-froid, and I was far enough along in French to be
impressed by the actual use of the language.
Mrs. Taylor had seen the kind of sentimental stuff I was
playing on the piano, and she sent me without comment a copy of
Mozart's Third Sonata. I played it bit by bit, beginning with the
easier bars in no particular order. Later I put it all together and much
later bought all the Mozart sonatas, and I went through them each

PS
year in a kind of ritual for decades.
M y interest in classical music and in the potential of the saxo­

U
phone in imitating the human voice was swept away by commcrcial-

RO
ism. I began to play in a jazz band. An established institution in the
dance halls of Susquehanna was Holleran’s Orchestra, the established
core of which was Holleran himself at the piano and Leo Sullivan

G
on the trap drums. Other players (never more than a total of four)
came and went. In my day they had an excellent violinist but needed
S
a saxophonist. Leo Sullivan knew me because he played the snare
K
drum in the Erie Band, and he asked me to join Holleran’s group.
O

Holleran played with an impeccably steady tempo. There was

syncopation—the great discovery— but no rubato. He thumped the
BO

keys, the fingers of his stubby hands scarcely visible, and the volume
never changed. Although he played many pieces hundreds of times,
he continued to read music, and this was fortunate bccause I could not
EX

memorize. I simply read the music over his shoulder, while the violinist
moved about in enviable freedom and Leo improvised with bass
D

drum, snare drum, cymbals, wood block, and wire brushes.

IN

W e played two or three times a week, very often until two or

three in the morning, either at the Laurel Athletic Club or in the
dance hall over Murphy's Garage in Oakland. My cheeks would be
painfully tired by two o’clock, and afterward, if we were playing in
Oakland, I had a long walk home. A cold night could be cruel because
I had to carryr my C-melody saxophone in its case. Coming into a
house already cold, I usually went to the kitchen to get a glass of
milk before going to bed. I would stir in some flavoring and sugar
to make a kind of milkshake.
Bigger and better movies were coming to the Hogan Opera
House, and Ryan, the proprietor, began to replace Miss Dooley at the
piano on Friday and Saturday evenings with a theatre orchestra.

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Three of my friends and I organized and competed for the job. The
distributors sent ahead of each film a detailed schedule, specifying
the kind of music required for each scene with the precise number of
seconds it was to be played: one minute and ten seconds of a romantic
theme, followed by twenty-three seconds of mysterioso, followed by
fifty seconds of a military march, followed by the romantic theme
again for twenty-five seconds, and so on. My friends and I took all this
seriously, and we searched our limited repertoire for appropriate

PS
music. Our drummer, Bob Basso, went beyond the script, and by the
second show on Saturday night he was using the wood block, cymbal,

U
or bass drum to add blows to the jaw, pratfalls, and collisions, giving
the audience an advanced taste of sound films.

RO
My musical history in Susquehanna reached its climax when I at­
tended a performance of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Bingham­

G
ton. I was working for the Transcript, and when I told the editor that
I was going, he turned to his typewriter and struck off a note to the
S
management: “ Please give the bearer two tickets to the Boston
K
Symphony Concert as per our agreement." The Transcript had ap­
O

parently run a free notice. I picked up the tickets at the box office at
the Kalura Temple in the afternoon and turned up early for the
BO

performance in the evening. M y seat was in the third row center, all
of which was reserved for the press. The Temple slowly filled up and
eventually was completely packed except for the third row, in which
EX

I sat alone.
Pierre Monteux conducted Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3, Rimski-
D

Korsakov’s Caprice on Spanish Themes, Schubert’s Incidental Music

IN

to Rosamunde, and Wagner’s Overture to Rienzi. The thing that

impressed me most was the length of the pieces. Our Victrola records
were limited to the four minutes or so available on one side of a disk
at 78 rpm, and the pieces the Erie Band played were not much
longer, but the Eroica Symphony seemed to go on forever.

In m y j u n i o r a n d s e n i o r y e a r s I discovered another small world of

art. There were two news-stores in town and both had unexpected
treasures in their darker recesses— sheets of colored cardboard and

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drawers full of camel-hair brushes and show-card pens and inks. There
were shading pens that would draw a line almost half an inch wide,
perhaps a third of which would be darker than the rest, and other
pens that drew parallel lines. There were bats of Dennison's crepe
paper and rolls of passe-partout.
Most of this apparently had lain untouched for years, but I dug
it out and went into the business of making show cards. I bought a
book of lettering styles and began to make placards for dances, re­

PS
citals, and an occasional store window. Someone in town did the
bigger signs and could put gold-leaf letters on shop doors and win­

U
dows, but he was apparently not interested in the small jobs I had

RO
taken over.
I continued to do watercolors, and I learned a bit about charcoal
drawing from W ard Palmer, who had begun to make large copies of

G
pictures from The Victrola Boofe of the Opera. I also moved into stage
design. M y brother and I were occasionally taken to New York to
S
see shows. In addition to Ed W ynn in The Perfect Fool I remember
K
a musical called The Night BoatT Robert Benchley reading “ The
O

Treasurer’s Report" in Irving Berlin’s Music Box R eview , and W . C.

Fields doing the tissue-paper-with-sticky-finger bit. I had no success as
BO

an actor, but I began to build scenery for home-talent plays in the

Hogan Opera House. M y brother played a small part in something
called Jimmy's Aunt Jane, and I used my stereopticon unsuccessfully
EX

to highlight a touching scene in a plagiarized version of a popular play

called Strongheart.
D

In setting the stage for a kind of Chinese or Japanese extrava­

IN

ganza called The Feast of Singasong, I made many trips back and
forth between the opera house and Charley Wagner's supply of crepe
paper and, possibly as a result, came dow'n with the Spanish influenza.
It wras the year after the great epidemic, when the Transcript had sent
out a call for people to “ help in the current health emergency/’ but
cases were still severe, and I had a bad one. Dr. Denman was said
to scare his patients and it is true that he told my parents I was
developing a heart murmur and that I would at some stage go “ out
of my head." He was wrong about that, but I had a high fever for
a week, and much of my hair came out. W e had a new Victrola record,
a saxophone sextet playing uLa Paloma,u and I listened to it dozens

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of times as I lay stretched out in bed. Near the end of the week Bob
Perrine called and brought me a bag of chocolates, and I was embar­
rassed by the speed with wrhich my mother carried them off into the
little attic near my room, in order to keep them cool, without offering
one to Bob or me.

PS
I l i k e d h i g h s c h o o l . It wras the custom for students to congregate
outside the building until a bell rang and the doors were opened, but

U
I would arrive early, knock on the door, and ask Mr. Shaughnessy,
stone deaf with boilermaker’s ear, to let me in. He had been told

RO
to keep students out, but he would shrug and open the door just
enough to let me through, as if in squeezing through I was not really

G
coming in. Alone on the second floor, I would go to the library, or
examine a collection of bottles of gum arabic, nox vomica, and various
S
minerals which someone had given the school but which were never
K
mentioned by our science teachers, or simply sit at my desk with my
O

books. When the bell rang and the other students came trooping in,
I would make myself as inconspicuous as possible and pretend that I
BO

was just arriving too.

Science was taught in a room containing a chemistry bench and
a cabinet full of apparatus and instruments. Mrs. Sullivan taught
EX

physics. A student pumped the air out of a bell jar so that a feather
fell as rapidly as a penny. W e measured quantities of hot and cold
D

water and ice and mixed them in brass calorimeters and observed the
results with a thermometer. W e proved that air had weight by
IN

weighing a football bladder before and after inflation. And we rolled

balls down an inclined plane, or rather an inclined gutter, the ball
rolling from side to side as well as down and leaving traces in a
sprinkling of talcum from which we could determine both the time
and the distance to prove that Galileo was right.
Miss Keefe had been promoted and was teaching chemistry, and
she remained my nemesis. At the chemistry bench one day I was doing
a bit of placer mining by directing a fine stream of water from a
rubber hose at some debris, and I called to another boy to look. Miss
Keefe thought I was pretending to urinate and reprimanded me

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severely. Once I deserved a reprimand. W e were discussing fatty acids,

and one of the more buxom girls in our class was at tbe blackboard.
I whispered to another boy, “ There is a fatty acid!" and Miss Keefe
heard me and took the matter up with the principal. The curious thing
was that I saw the point of the remark only as I said it.
Miss Werle taught four years of Latin—grammar, Caesar, Cicero,
and Virgil. I rather liked Virgil and dug into it well enough to feel
that I was occasionally thinking in another language.

PS
W e studied botany and collected and pressed various kinds of
leaves and flowers. Our text, How Plants Grow, contained a passage

U
about the life cycle of the radish that impressed me, quite possibly
because of my father’s talk about progress and my mother’s about

RO
service, and I copied it out and have kept it among my notes:

G
So the biennial root becomes large and heavy, being a storehouse of
nourishing matter, which man and animals are glad to use for food. In
S
it, in the form of starch, sugar, mucilage, and in other nourishing and
K
savory products, the plant (expending nothing in flowers or in show)
has laid up the avails of its whole summer's work. For what purpose?
O

This plainly appears when the next season's growth begins. Then, fed
BO

by this great stock of nourishment, a stem shoots forth rapidly and

strongly, divides into branches, bears flowers abundantly, and ripens
seeds, almost wholly at the expense of the nourishment accumulated
EX

in the root, which is now light, empty, and dead; and so is the whole
plant by the time the seeds are ripe.
D

Our principal, Professor Bowles, had gone to Valparaiso College

IN

but had never taken a degree, and he often talked defensively of his
early disadvantages. He was a big man who walked as if he were mak­
ing his way through a crowd, and he gave the impression of being much
more aggressive than he really was. His wife was a timid little woman,
and his children seemed scared of him. His instructional methods
evoked something of the same response.
He taught mathematics, and it was our practice to assemble for his
classes in the front row of the large hall, where we waited for him
to leave his office. He would w-eave and stalk in, and we would brace
ourselves. He might march straight toward a trembling girl, point
his finger at her, and shout, “ W hat’s the product of the sum and

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difference?” But he took us through four years of mathematics, using

textbooks by Wentworth, a writer who was unaware of the need for
relevance. W e studied algebra, plane and solid geometry, and trig­
onometry, and I loved it all. Plane geometry was my favorite, be­
cause I had my father s old drafting equipment and was particularly
fond of constructions. I stood up to Professor Bowles (and this was
probably only what he expected from all his students), and he began
to show a special respect for me. He once brought me a newspaper

PS
clipping which reported someone’s solution to the problem of tri­
secting the angle and told me to find out what was wrong with it.

U
Once we were both embarrassed by a silly prank. A student was
passing out tablets, and for no particular reason I managed to get

RO
an extra one and slipped it into my desk. It turned out that tablets had
been missing, and on this day a careful count had been kept. The

G
teacher went to M t. Bowles's office, and he stormed into the room.
“ Someone took an extra tablet,” he shouted. I immediately put up
S
my hand and said, “ Yes, I did." He was completely deflated. He
K
knew that I had not been stealing tablets and that the wrong person
O

had sprung his trap, and he passed the matter off as quickly as possible.
From Professor Bowles I learned the delight to be found in
BO

bringing order out of chaos. I had been impressed by a book of my

father's containing a game of checkers called, as I remember it, Old
One Hundred, in which all moves, or at least all reasonable moves,
EX

were analyzed and answered in such a way that if you moved first you
could win or draw. So much for pushing pieces about on the board in
D

the course of ordinary play; in fact, so much for checkers as a game.

On one of his trips to Montrose my father met someone who always
IN

won a much simpler game. Pennies were arranged in rows of three,

five, and seven. A play consisted of removing any number of pennies
from any one row, and the object was to make the other person take
the last penny. M y father thought it remarkable that the man could
always win if he moved first, and I was challenged. I worked out all
the possibilities, starting with certain winning arrays, such as two rows
of equal numbers or three rows of one, two, and three respectively.
Eventually I, too, could always win if I played first, and it was then
no longer a game.
Professor Bowles liked mathematics, but I am not sure he liked

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teaching it. In any case he escaped from doing so for part of every
period by embarking upon long-winded digressions. Something would
remind him of a bit of local gossip, and that would remind him of
something Carl Schurz, a favorite of his, once said, and that would
remind him of the shocking fact that coffins were often made with
glue and quickly came apart in moist ground, and that would remind
him of a poem of Sidney Lanier’s, and so on. Eventually he w'ould get
back to mathematics, and he always saved face by mentioning the

PS
point which had led him into the digression. One day I jotted down the
things he talked about. As luck would have it, he embarked upon a

U
second digression that day, and when he came to the end of it he

RO
saved face by returning to the topic which had set him off on the first
digression. That seemed to me an important discovery, and I took my
records to Miss Graves. She was amused and suggested that I show

G
them to Professor Bowles himself. I did not do so, but not, I think,
because I did not dare. I thought it might embarrass him.
S
One of his favorite topics was petting, and he strongly advocated
K
the principle of N oli me tangere, which he translated for the benefit
O

of those who might be getting poor grades in Miss W erle’s classes: “ I

BO

do not want to be touched!” He was a good Catholic and frequently

discussed theological points with me privately. He was occasionally
rather defensive. Catholics were not encouraged to read the Bible, he
EX

said, because parts of it were not suitable (he meant too sexual) for
the ordinary reader. He argued that confession was good for the
soul. Like my parents, he may have suspected that I was becoming an
D

agnostic if not an atheist, and he lent me a book called G od or Gorilla,

IN

which ridiculed paleontology and current efforts to reconstruct the

anatomy of early man from a tooth or a bit of a jawbone.
Shortly before I was graduated he called me into his office and
in a very serious tone said, “ I just want to say one thing. You were
born to be a leader of men. Never forget the value of a human life/'
and he dismissed me in some embarrassment. I could not imagine
what he meant. I had certainly shown no sign of leadership. I played
on no team over which I could have exerted any control, I had no rank
as a Boy Scout. W hen Joe Demase first turned the baton over to me
as assistant director of the Boys’ Band, I began to beat time and the
band started to play, but I followed. W ith my two or three close

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friends I was an equal, but with John D eW itt rather a follower. My

brother would have been a better bet for personal leadership, or Bob
Perrine, who went on to W est Point.
I suspect that Professor Bowles simply wished that I would be­
come a leader. He had gone about as far as he could go in education,
and he may have felt that his only hope of emerging as a great teacher
lay in the future of one of his students. He respected me and enjoyed
our brief intellectual exchanges and he may have felt that I was his

PS
best bet. Raphael Miller once said to me, “ You liked Professor Bowles,
didn’t you? I never did,”

U
Miss Graves taught reading, and that meant A Tale of Two

RO
Cities, Macbeth, Ivanhoe, Silas Marner, T he Idylls of the King, and
The Last of the Mohicans. The high-school library had a set of the
Harvard Classics— not the full five-foot shelf, rather more like three

G
and a half feet— in which I read Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle. (In
the town library I found a battered copy of Darwin’s Expression of
S
Emotion in Man and Animals, and I spent a great deal of time
K
trying to imitate that French actor who could put horizontal, vertical,
O

and diagonal wrinkles in his forehead at the same time.) I also read
the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, and I was impressed by
BO

Cellini's zeal as he threw his best plate into the melting pot to get
enough metal to finish a statue, as well as his good luck in getting a
fever which, with its natural version of diathermy, cured him of a
EX

venereal disease. I did not read Adam Smith’s W ealth of Nations or

a volume by Edmund Burke bearing on the spine the surprising title
D

of On the Sublime and Beautiful French Revolution.

IN

I tried to move from history to destiny by depositing a bit of the

future. The top shelves in the high-school library were filled with huge
volumes about the Civil W ar— routine histories of local regiments, sold
to veterans or the children of veterans, no longer of interest to anyone
and probably given to the school in the belief that it was the most
likely time capsule in which history would be preserved. In some of
these volumes I planted slips of paper offering a reward of ten cents
for their return. I have never received any, and I daresay the volumes
have long since been destroyed.

* * *

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M a r y G r a v e s a n d I w e r e , so to speak, promoted through grade and

high school at about the same rate, so that she taught me a bit of
drawing through all twelve years and reading through the last six.
Her father, James Graves, had begun life as a teacher, interested in
astronomy and botany. He taught briefly in the “ Little Red School
House” made famous by the popular naturalist John Burroughs, who
was one of his pupils. Later he became a stonecutter, working in
marble, and came to Susquehanna as such, but he continued his intel­

PS
lectual interests. He was a member of the Asa Gray Memorial Associa­
tion, published articles in various journals, and corresponded widely

U
with botanists. He championed unpopular views. He was a staunch

RO
defender of Darwin and evolution, and with the same fervor he
debated lesser issues. He had insisted, for example, that the year 1900
was the last year of the nineteenth century, and that the town should

G
wait a year to celebrate the birth of the twentieth. He was also the
village atheist, a fact which the editor of the Transcript tactfully con­
S
cealed in reporting his death:
K
O

All his life he was a seeker of truth. His mind was ever concerned
with the great question of Being and his views were based on his inter­
BO

pretation of nature. It is typical of his whole mental makeup that in

the days of his early manhood, his interest inclined to astronomy and
the vaster fields of human thought. In his prime he directed his atten­
EX

tion to the concrete earth he saw around him; and in the evening of
life he turned again to his Universe and reached out to the Infinite.
D

He never lost his interest in teaching. If he came across a boy

IN

or two on his way home from work, he would stop to point out
features of the night sky while his wife and children waited supper.
He also impressed his views on his family. His wife, ten years younger
than he, is said to have resented his didactic measures, but at least
one of his children accepted them and gained from them.
An early photograph of Mary Graves shows an attractive young
woman with dark, penetrating eyes and full lips, hair gracefully waved
before being drawn back and held with a clip at the back of her head.
I remember her much later, when her eyes were still bright but her
lips had grown thin and were easily pursed. She was then what was
called a homely old maid. She could have sat for the portrait in the

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Prado of "L a Venerable Madre Jeronima de la. Fuente” by Velásquez.

She usually wore patterned shirtwaists and dark skirts reaching
to the ankles of her black buttoned shoes, and her graying hair
was drawn back in a tight bun.
As a young woman she kept a notebook, in which she would
devote a whole page to an exact description of a caterpillar and an­
other to an account of how it constructed a cocoon, using a leaf but
only after anchoring it securely to the branch of the tree. Other pages

PS
of her notebook listed the birds and flowers she saw.
The family enjoyed an intellectual life far beyond anything else

U
in Susquehanna. On those evenings when my father and mother were
rehearsing their roles in Esmeralda, the Graves family was reading

RO
aloud from the Waverley novels, Shakespeare, Emerson, Goldsmith,
or Thoreau. Even so, her father and mother were not college

G
graduates, and Miss Graves seems to have been aware of short­
comings. As a teacher she attended annual enrichment conferences in
S
Montrose and kept careful notes of the lectures she heard, recording
K
the punctuation of foreign words and names and the definitions of
O

unusual terms.
She began teaching in primary school, and at the end of the first
BO

year sh e,wrote in her diary:

A year's teaching past. A very pleasant and profitable year. Teaching

EX

grows more beautiful to me—teaching!—who am I that I can teach?

I feel more and more after the year’s work how responsible I am for
D

what I teach. I commenced the w'ork last September with a very blind
feeling but the work has opened to me more and more and I have
IN

been blessed with some success, enough to make me wish to strive

harder and harder for more. . . . In June the School Board re-elected
me primary teacher at an increase of salary—$37.00 per month instead
of $32.00. I am very glad of course. I want to spend it wisely and well.
Much for the family needs, some for necessaries of my own, and a little
for luxuries—a long-wished-for book perhaps; and save some.

That w'as to be essentially her program with a meager salary

throughout her life. Her father was often out of work and died when
she was young; her brothers went off to New York, and she was left
as the main support of her mother. They lived in a house at the corner

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of Broad and Oak streets. (The kitchen door opened directly on Oak
Street; perhaps the house was built before the street was formally
laid o u t) On the Broad Street side there was a large yard which
needed more care than Miss Graves could give it7 and in which strange
trees and bushes collected by her father grew almost wild—a “ leather”
tree with a flexible but very tough bark, and an “ iron” tree the wood
of which I could not cut with my knife.
The living room had been closed off, and I doubt whether the

PS
rotting front porch which ran alongside it would have borne a heavy
man’s weight. I alw’ays entered by the kitchen door and almost never

U
did so without finding Mrs. Graves there at work.

RO
The only other room in use on the first floor was probably built
as a dining room, but it now held a long table, a golden-oak secretary,
a bookcase with a glass front, and a few chairs. Here I spent an occa­

G
sional Sunday afternoon talking with Miss Graves—her mother, very
small and gray, sitting silently at the window at the far end of the
S
room. There were treasures in the house, and I suppose I eventually
K
saw them all, but they were husbanded carefully, and no more than
O

one was ever shown to me on a single Sunday. I recall an illustrated

BO

Sinbad, various shells and pieces of rock, and— treasure of treasures—

a letter from the Prince of Monaco to Miss Graves’s father offering
to exchange botanical specimens. There was also an unfired clay head
EX

modeled by a brother who had gone off years before to become an

artist. His wife had left him and come back to Susquehanna, to keep
house for the aging photographer Delly Harding, and to serve as librar­
D

ian, but Miss Graves always spoke of him with pride when she spoke
IN

of him at all. She told me once that he was a specialist in perspective

and that other artists often came to him for help in laying out tile
floors on their canvases. She once gave me a broken clay figure he had
left behind, and I softened the clay and made a plaque of Venus
rising from the sea.
On a Sunday afternoon Miss Graves sometimes took her Sunday-
school class for a walk in the pasture and woods back of the Laurel
Hill Academy. There was a spring in the pasture, a real spring with
clear, cold, drinkable water. She taught us to spot birds and flowers, and
showed us how to find sassafras (we chewed the bark and dug up bits
of the root to take home) and how to identify the birch with the bark

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that tasted like birch beer. The world she showed us was fascinating,
and she was often embarrassed by our excitement.
It more than made up for the embarrassment we all felt when
we exchanged gifts in the Presbyterian church on Christmas Eve. She
and her mother could not afford substantial gifts for five or six boys.
One year we did get small, nicely bound copies of Charles Kingsley’s
Greek Heroes (possibly she managed to pick up half a dozen copies
at a special price), but in general her presents were mere tokens, and

PS
she would wince as we opened them and simulated our delight.
She had a way of passing on curious bits of information. She

U
told me that Sarah Bernhardt painted her ears so that they looked
translucent, that a Hindu could steal a blanket from underneath a

RO
sleeping man by using a feather to get him to roll from side to side,
that Robert Louis Stevenson spent as much as twenty minutes on a

G
single sentence, and that a pianist, whose performance before a king
had been interrupted when dinner was announced, remained so uneasy
S
at the table that the king asked him what was wrong, and he begged
K
permission to go back and play the last chords of the composition.
O

She also told me that when a monk finished copying a long manu­
script, he would add the Latin for “ Finished, thank G od,” and I
BO

have often wondered whether she interpreted the significance of that

expression correctly.
Miss Graves, spinster, loved small children. She wrote stories for
EX

her nephew and niece, and, like a fond parent, relayed the bright
sayings of a neighbor’s child whose older sister used to bring him to
D

see her. Until I reread Silas Marner, the only bit I remembered was
IN

Silas's ineffectual discipline— the child’s comment, “ Effie in de toal-

hole,” and Silas's refusal to continue punishment— and I suspect I
remembered it only because of the warmth and affection with which
Miss Graves must have discussed it.
W ith older students she found teaching difficult. The books we
read were evidently chosen to sample life over a period of many cen­
turies and, I think, had that effect, though I was to reread most of
them years later with greater understanding and enjoyment. They
were not relevant to life in Susquehanna (we were not yet “ ready”
for them) and the tougher boys paid little or no attention. One or two
were even more refractory, and the principal would have to be
called in.

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Her influence was felt outside the school. In that small Pennsyl­
vania town she stood for culture. She kept up with things. She once
confided to me in a conspiratorial tone, as if it were something dis­
reputable, that she was reading “ the strangest book—it is called
Lord Jim .” She organized and ran the Monday Club, an afternoon
literary society to which my mother belonged. Miss Graves carefully
prepared for its meetings, looking up the pronunciation or meaning
of difficult words in the things they were reading. (They spent much

PS
of one winter on A Doll's House.) In the town library she selected
most of the new books the town could afford, and for a while on

U
Saturday morning she read to groups of children— from Uncle Remus
and Kipling.

RO
She subscribed to serious magazines like the Outlook and brought
her copies to school. I have good reason for not forgetting that fact.

G
Once a week the whole school assembled in the high-school audi­
torium, which could be enlarged by opening two great doors into a
S
side room. One morning someone who was scheduled to perform was
K
ill, and Miss Graves and Mr. Bowles called me aside and showed me
O

a copy of the Outlook. It contained a short article about an island in

the Pacific which had come under the jurisdiction of the United States
BO

at the end of the war, and they asked me to read it to the assembled
company. I had no time to go through the article but took it out onto
the stage. I glanced at it, looked out over the audience, and in a loud
EX

voice announced its title: “ Yap.” Harold Craft was the first to laugh.
As early as 1903 Miss Graves had gone to a nursing home in the
D

Adirondacks in New York State to recover from tuberculosis. There

were other attempts at a cure, one of them paid for by grateful mem­
IN

bers of the Monday Club, but by my junior year it was evident that
she was quite ill. She began to take a short-cut through a back lot to
school rather than walk around by way of Myrtle Street and Jackson
Avenue. She brought milk and snacks to be eaten between meals, and
she was embarrassed when I once came upon her as she was drinking
milk on the far side of the chemistry table in the science room.
By the end of my senior year she was forced to resign. Summer
came and I heard very little about her, though I knew she was dying.
Near the end of June I called on her for the last time. It was a quiet
evening, and in the kitchen I found her mother, then eighty-four and
tinier than ever. She understood at once why I had come, asked me

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to sit down, and disappeared upstairs. I waited for a long time, and
eventually she came down to tell me I might go up.
I have said that Miss Graves would have been called a homely
old maid. I was always glad to see her but almost not as a person. She
was someone who listened to me, answered my questions, and almost
always had something interesting to say or a suggestion of something
interesting to do. Perhaps it was not until I went into her bedroom
that summer evening that I really saw her as a human being.

PS
There was no light in the room, and it was beginning to grow
dark, She was sitting in a rocking chair by a window where I could see

U
her in profile. She had on a kimono of some figured material which

RO
seemed almost festive. There was a rug across her lap, and her hands
lay on it, white but very graceful. She motioned me to a chair which
had been placed at the far side of the room. She may have been afraid

G
of contagion or she may not have wanted me to see the ravages of
her illness. She had, however, and possibly for the first time in her
S
life, given some thought to her appearance. She had made herself
K
attractive. Fever had rouged her cheeks, and her eyes shone brightly.
O

Perhaps she knew this. Had her mother held a mirror for her? In any
BO

case she could have read the truth in my eyes: for once in my life, for
a brief moment, I thought she was beautiful.
Teaching is sometimes represented as a kind of infection. W e
EX

say that the teacher infects the student with an interest in art or a
love of Shakespeare. As a teacher I have been required to have a skin
test for tuberculosis, and I have always given a positive reaction,
D

though my lung X-rays are clear. Did Miss Graves indeed infect me
IN

with more than a love of literature and art, with more than a sense
of the Bible as literature? Somehow I rather hope she did. But where
is the test that will show the other infections?
And how important to Miss Graves was her effect on me? She
lived not only for others but for herself. In her notebook she copied
this from Thoreau: “ In proportion as one's inward life fails, we go
more constantly and desperately to the Post Office. You may depend
on it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number
of letters, proud of his extensive correspondence, has not heard from
himself this long while.”
But she was proud of the role she strove so hard to play in the

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lives of her friends and acquaintances, and she marked this passage
in her copy of W alden :

An elderly dame, too, dwells in my neighborhood, invisible to most

persons, in whose odorous herb garden I love to stroll sometimes,
gathering samples and listening to her fables; for she has a genius of
unequalled fertility, and her memory runs back farther than mythology,
and she can tell me the original of every fable, and on what fact every

PS
one is founded, for the incidents occurred when she was young.

U
But my guess is that the best clue to what was important to her
is to be found in a quotation from Emily Dickinson which she copied

RO
into her notebook:

They might not need me—yet they might.

I’ll let my heart be just in sight;
A smile so small as mine might be G
S
Precisely their necessity.
K
O
BO
EX
D
IN

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PS
U
RO
G
S
K
O
BO
EX
D
IN

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k^/OMEHOW IT HAD ALWAYS BEEN ASSUMED that I WOuld gO to College,

U
but neither my father nor my mother nor any of their close friends
was a college graduate or knew how one went about choosing a college

RO
or getting into one. The single exception was that classmate who now
lived in Albany. He had been valedictorian of his class and had gone

G
on to become a German teacher, and when my parents turned to him
for advice, he suggested Hamilton College.
S
W hen I applied for admission, I discovered that I needed two
K
years of a modem language. The high school had thrown out German
O

during the war and had never replaced it. Although some schools were
BO

putting in Spanish with an eye on our neighbors in Central and

South America, Susquehanna High School had no modern language
at all. The college said that it would accept a passing grade on a New
EX

York State Board of Regents examination in second-year French, and

so at the beginning of my senior year I started to study on the side.
Miss Werle knew some French and offered to help.
D

I bought a text, a copy of Sam Fam ille, and a rather large dic­
IN

tionary with pronunciations indicated in the International Phonetic

Alphabet. Every afternoon I came home from school and worked for
an hour or two. I sat in a new overstuffed chair in the living room,
with a lapboard my mother used for sewing resting on the arms. In
the light from a bluish “ daylight” bulb in a new bridge lamp, the
fringed shade of which was made of blue cloth, I laboriously com­
posed sentences, translated texts, and memorized irregular verbs. I
had no chance to speqk French or hear it properly spoken. Late in
May I went to Binghamton to a designated high school, where after
considerable search I found someone who knew what I was there for,
and took the examination. I passed it, but with nothing to spare. As
it turned out, Hamilton College was filling out its roster that year

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with many unqualified students, and I suspect I could have been

admitted on condition, if I had known enough to ask.

E a r l y in m y I also began to study law. M y father

h i g h -s c h o o l y e a r s

had been taken in by still another book salesman: as a leading lawyer

in the community he could distribute two scholarships offered by a

PS
correspondence school, the recipients of which were required to pay
only a small fraction of the usual cost of the course. Possibly because

U
my father had read law himself when just out of high school, the
proposition had not seemed too absurd. One condition was that two

RO
candidates be found, and he persuaded a boy related to his Aunt Nell
Dumble to take the second scholarship. I received a copy of Black-

G
stone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England and a first batch of
questions to be answered and submitted to the school. Abe Lincoln’s
S
life was changed when he accidentally came upon a copy of Black-
K
stone, but mine was unaffected. M y father must have realized the
inadequacy of my first answers, and the whole thing was quickly
O

dropped.
BO

I also accidentally embarked upon another career in literary

scholarship. I particularly liked one of those little Roycrofter books
in limp imitation leather called The Ballad of Reading Gaol. (W hen
EX

I told this to the Reverend Mr. Pritchard, he quickly said that he

was quite sure that Oscar W ilde had repented, but he did not say of
D

what, and I was led to wonder for the first time just why Wilde had
been in jail.) I happened to see an advertisement of an English book­
IN

seller in which a “ bibliography of Oscar W ilde” was offered for sale

for a pound or two. I looked up “ bibliography” in the dictionary and
misunderstood the definition: I took it to mean the complete works
of a writer. I was pleased by the prospect of owning all of Oscar Wilde,
and I bought a money order for what I figured to be the dollar
equivalent of the price as given in pounds. Before mailing my order
I discovered that I had miscalculated and was sending a little too
much, but I added a note explaining that the rest was to cover postage.
In due time the book arrived. It was indeed a bibliography, edited
by Stuart Mason (the pen name of Christopher M illard), and it was

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full of pictures and cartoons and, even though not what I thought I
had ordered, quite interesting. One picture showed Oscar Wilde busily
at work on Salome with French grammars and books on French verbs
lying about. Another showed him wearing a sunflower as a bouton­
nière. And so I was now an authority on two literary figures— Bacon,
author of the works of Shakespeare, and Oscar W ilde, author of The
Ballad of Reading Gaol.
In my studies of the plays attributed to Shakespeare I had, of

PS
course, read Bacon’s essays. They were the easiest of his works to
understand, but still much less relevant to my daily life than those of

U
Dr. Frank Crane, which were appearing in a Binghamton paper. In

RO
a volume published in 1919, consisting of newspaper columns, Crane
developed such themes as these:

G
Clean up your thoughts; don’t have a waste-basket mind.
Don't believe because you can’t disprove.
S
Your competitor can be your friend.
K
Happiness is shy; look for it.
Be a futurist.
O

Anger is poison.
BO

If it’s impossible, let’s do it.

Tomorrow is your friend.
EX

I was at the right age for this perennial stuff and took it seriously. I
tried my hand at writing some of the same, but ran into a grammatical
problem at the very start. I wanted to say that “ manners are (is?)
D

the glass through which others see us,” but I could not decide between
IN

“ are” and “ is," and as a result this great idea was not given to the
world.
I did publish one other work during my high-school years. When
we were in New York, I bought a copy of either Judge or the old
comic L ife which was running a tall-stories contest. The assignment
for the week was to answer the question: “ W hat would you do if you
found yourself locked in a room with a mad dog, a rattlesnake and a
maniac?” On a free postcard supplied by the hotel I wrote, “ Fd sic
the dog on the maniac and rattle the snake for help,” and added
my name and address. Two weeks later, back again in Susquehanna,
I got a check for five dollars.

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There was no bookstore in Susquehanna and with the exception

of those little books from the Roycrofters and E. Haldeman-Julius
and my bibliography of Oscar Wilde, I was not accumulating a library.
W hen Mrs. Taylor sent me a few dollars as a graduation present, I
invaded the depths of the Williams Stationery Store again and found
a copy of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury with a padded red-leather cover.

PS
H only a small part of my energies during those four
ig h s c h o o l u s e d

U
years. M y father had always believed that I should work. M y first job

RO
was selling the Saturday Evening Post and Country Gentleman, but
I moved on to other things. I mowed our lawn, and one or two of the
neighbors hired me to mow theirs. Lawns in Susquehanna were always

G
a problem, with their steep, eroded banks. Power mowers were un­
known, and it was usually impossible to push a mower up a bank or
S
even to allow it to run down while in a cutting position. You had
K
to mow sideways, and the mower tended to slip toward the bottom.
O

In high school my father gave me a serious job collecting tele­

BO

phone rents. He continued to be treasurer of the local company and

had trouble finding collectors at a low salary. His secretary gave me
great batches of pink slips bearing the names and addresses of sub­
EX

scribers and their charges, and I went from door to door asking for
payment. It was often obvious that I was not welcome, and in any
case I was always embarrassed. I began to stammer as I said, “ I came
D

to collect the telephone rent.” Some people ran up bills for long­
IN

distance calls which it was hard to persuade them to pay.

To make matters worse, I mixed the money I collected with my
own funds and began to find myself short when it came time to report
collections and turn over the cash. I began to pretend that a payment
or two had not been made. In short, I embezzled. W hen I got further
and further behind and it became difficult to juggle the accounts, I
confessed to my father that I was in trouble, though I claimed to have
lost some money. He lent me $25 to cover my shortages and agreed
not to tell my mother. W e drew up an IO U on a slip of paper. I once
repaid $ 10 and my father duly entered it on the IOU with his signa­
ture, but there were no further payments, and nothing was ever said

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about it again. I hated the job and someone else soon took it over.
Another job my father gave me was serving legal papers. I looked
up a man in Oakland, whom I found working in his garden. I asked
him if he were so-and-so, handed him a paper— a divorce summons,
I think—and then asked him if he acknowledged service. I was aware
that I had dealt him some kind of blow, and fortunately my father
did not ask me to do much of that kind of thing.
At one time John D eW itt and I planned to go into business. Our

PS
bicycles took a great deal of our time, and we knew them well. W e
could take a New Departure coaster brake apart and put it back

U
together again, take a link out of a chain, and true the rim of a wheel

RO
by tightening or loosening its spokes. Wre could mend a puncture by
inserting a rubber band dipped in rubber cement into the hole with
an awl-like device. (W e never mastered the method in which a brass

G
disk was inserted into the tire through the puncture, and a second
disk was screwed tight on its stem on the outside.)
S
W ith this experience we decided to open a shop to sell bicycle,
K
parts and make repairs. A small building, once a barbershop, on a
O

side lot on Broad Street next to my grandmother Burrhus’s could be

BO

rented for almost nothing because it was in disrepair and had no

services. (W e could go to the toilet or wash our hands at my grand­
mother’s.) W e also found that we could order supplies on thirty days’
EX

credit, or so we thought. W e intended to put in a supply of parts and

sell them at a profit in time to pay the bills when they came due, and
meanwhile we would repair bicycles and make a lot of money.
D

It was not a very business-like plan, and it came to an abrupt halt.

IN

I had kept the whole thing secret from my family, but my brother
heard about it and brought it up at dinner one noon by asking a few
leading questions. W hen I finally explained what we were going to
do, my father, alarmed no doubt by the thought of the bills for which
he would be legally responsible, said flatly that I was going to do
nothing of the sort. I left the table and went into the living room and
sulked. There would be another unpleasant scene when I had to con­
fess to John DeW itt that I was not to be allowed to go through with
our carefully laid plans.
As an aspiring writer I went to work for the Transcript, the editor
of which was a jovial extrovert named Ulysses Grant Baker. M y first

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duty was to go down to the newspaper office before school in the

morning and crib national or world news items from the Binghamton
morning paper. I also did “ literary” things. There were some large
bound volumes of earlier Transcripts, and I wrote a series of reminis­
cences of Susquehanna. I was told not to mention the roller-skating
rink because some still-remembered marital difficulties had originated
there. I had office space in a small room upstairs, off the job-printing
department, and felt very much like a journalist. Once in a while I

PS
would be given a story to cover, such as a concert or a meeting, and
I also wrote a few advertisements, including several very swank ads

U
for a new ice-cream parlor that I patronized.

RO
On a day when I was not in school I could watch my stuff coming
out of the linotype machine in slugs, to be locked up in the frames
that ran under the rollers of the press, and later, with the noisy press

G
shaking the whole building, I could see my very own words falling
into a bin, copy after copy, in print.
S
I often helped out in the job-printing department. I learned to
K
set type and knew the disgrace of having it pied. I set only small jobs
O

— things like business cards or letterheads, or my bookplates ( the first

of which went into my copy of the Golden Treasury)—but I learned
BO

to feed sheets of paper into a job press one at a time and get them
out again without smudging them with printer’s ink or pinching my
fingers.
EX

A large paper-cutter was used to sheer off the edges of thick blocks
of paper. You put the blocks on a flat bed and brought a plate down
D

to put them under pressure. Then with a long iron handle you lowered
IN

a very sharp horizontal blade. The handle remained upright while you
put the paper under pressure, and one day I discovered that the latch
which held it in place was defective. The handle could easily have
fallen and sheared off both my hands. I always recall this in my wrists.
Otis Chidester worked in the job-printing department, and he
and I embarked upon a small and unsuccessful business career. W e
invented a game, called Tenniball, in which players batted a toy
balloon back and forth across marks laid out on the floor. W e printed
instructions, and offered them for sale, together with a few balloons
and a piece of white string as a marker, in a Sunday paper in Elmira,
New York. W e received no orders.

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* # *

T h e m o s t s e r i o u s j o b during my high-school years was in the Econ­

omy Shoe Store. The owner, George Harding, must have come to
Susquehanna rather late, and his judgment that a new shoe store was
needed was only the first of many mistakes. He was politically liberal.
He admired Woodrow Wilson, whom my father could not abide, and
subscribed to a weekly edited by W ilson’s confidant, Colonel House.

PS
Perhaps it was a touch of W ilson’s idealism which led Mr. Harding to
specialize in the inexpensive, rugged work shoes manufactured by the

U
Endicott-Johnson Company located in two small cities near Bingham­

RO
ton and owned by the philanthropic industrialist George F. Johnson.
(There was another great industrialist in the Binghamton area at that
time named Thomas J. Watson, and it has been said that the differ­

G
ence in their subsequent histories is to be explained by the fact that
Johnson kept his eye on the welfare of his workers while Watson kept
S
his on the welfare of his stockholders, but there was undoubtedly a
K
greater future in business machines.)
O

Mr. Harding’s first store was on Erie Avenue and it did not thrive,
BO

even when a laundry was added, with packages of shirts and collars
processed in Binghamton filling the shelves in the rear of the store.
Prohibition made it possible to move into more promising quarters
EX

when the Oakland Hotel, no longer supported by its saloon, was con­
verted into a business building. The space was not ideal, because the
windows were much too small to display merchandise effectively.
D

Nevertheless, I helped George Harding make his move.

IN

It was not difficult, because the back door was just across the
street from the old store, and the stock was far less extensive than I
should have guessed. All the shoe boxes above a certain height in the
old store were empty. Since there was less shelf space in the new store,
the old empties were thrown in a great pile on the floor before being
jammed into a baling machine. Once, at the top of a ladder, throwing
empty boxes to the floor in great abandon, I said, “ I’d make a good
Bolshevik.” I probably remember this because Mr. Harding laughed.
It was something he seldom did.
I would go down to the Economy Shoe Store before school and
sprinkle oily green perfumed sawdust on the floor and then sweep it

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up together with the dust it adsorbed. Later, as the word “ economy"

took on another meaning, I used plain sawdust which I wet before
strewing it about. I made a gadget to spread the sawdust— a tin can
with a crank, operating a little like a coffee grinder.
After school I went down and worked as a clerk, joining Miss
Dooley, who was hired not so much for her skill in salesmanship as
for the fact that she was an Irish Catholic and thus gave an ecumenical
touch to the establishment. Since she played the piano at the movies,

PS
she could not work at the store on Saturday afternoons or evenings,
and Saturdays were therefore long, long, tiring days for me. But I

U
got to know all about shoes— lasts, welts, counters, vamps, the dif­

RO
ference between oxfords and bluchers, and different ways of lacing
shoes.
W hen Mr. Harding put in a line of arch supports and foot pow­

G
ders, I took a correspondence course and became a Practipedist, with
cards to pass out to my customers.
S
K
O

d u ate A m e r ic a n S c h o o l o f P r a c t ip e d ic s
BO
EX

B. FREDERIC SKINNER
D
IN

WITH
G. A. HARDINO SUSQUEHANNA, PA

I made only one practipedic sale. W hen I was alone in the store,
a spinster came in with her aging mother complaining that she had
flat feet. W e didn’t have a support of the right size to fit her shoe, but
there was equipment for cutting down a larger size, and although I
told her it would be a gamble and expensive (something like $ 5 ), she
authorized me to do the job. I hacked away at the supports, put them
in her shoes, and watched her hobble out of the store. Mr. Harding
added a little something to my pay that week as my share of the profits.

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Empty shoe boxes were thrown into a small cellar, and it was
part of my job to bale them. I hated to operate the baling machine
and tended to allow the cellar to fill up. Once I heard Mr. Harding
baling boxes himself, clearly angry with me for not doing my job but
unwilling to complain. In general, however, I think I was a useful
clerk. I worked hard and loyally. Since all the prices in the store ended
in .48 or .98, the cash register had a great cache of pennies, which
were never counted, and once in a while, alone in the store, I would

PS
filch five of them and dash next door to the Sugar Bowl for a bag of
peanuts, but otherwise I was scrupulously honest.

U
George Harding was a tall, gaunt man, suffering from chronic

RO
indigestion, who stooped as if he were afraid his head would strike
the ceiling, and who approached a customer with a soft “ Good
afternoon" which was often frightening rather than cordial. He

G
forced himself to carry on as a businessman. W hen his credit with the
Endicott-Johnson Company wore thin, he would get a loan from the
S
First National Bank and order a batch of shoes. They would arrive
K
at the depot, and the local drayman would bring them down to the
O

store in his horse-drawn wagon. If the day was clear, we unpacked

BO

them on the curb and brought them in and put them on the shelves.
New models were put in the windows on the same old off-white
pedestals.
EX

Occasionally we had a sale. I lettered big show cards for the win­
dows, and circulars were sent to the surrounding countryside. Mr.
Harding had the use of an addressograph machine with stencils cov­
D

ering the subscribers of the Water Company, owned by C. Fred

IN

Wright, a fellow Episcopalian, who had taken offices upstairs in the

new building. I would run off a few hundred envelopes and stuff them
with circulars. Once a small sample of leather was to be included to
show its toughness and flexibility. The samples were shaped like the
soles of shoes and had been stamped out of scraps at the factory. Some
of them were indeed of very good quality but others were quite thin
and easily torn. Presumably the merchant was to sort out the samples
to be sent with the circulars, but it was typical of Mr. Harding that
he neglected to do this.
I worked in the shoe store till the beginning of my senior year,
when life became much too complicated and some simplification was
needed.

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* * *

D u r in g m y I got to know many girls, four of

h ig h s c h o o l years

whom represented rather different kinds of relations. Marion Knise

(we pronounced it K-nice) was the temptress. Her father was a barber
with a shop on the corner of Grand Street and Jackson Avenue. He
must have cut my hair once a month for more than ten years, but I
do not remember that he ever said a word while doing so. He was a

PS
chain smoker and interrupted his clipping at regular intervals to pick
up and puff on a cigarette which burned on a tray in front of his

U
mirror.

RO
The family lived in the same building and opened a small ice­
cream parlor on the Jackson Avenue side. Marion tended the parlor
after school, and I was a steady visitor if not always a customer. W e

G
sat at the table in the far corner and talked about sex. The main ques­
tion was how far a girl should let a boy go. W ith Marion this was a
S
simple matter of geometry. Between customers I was allowed to go
K
three inches above her knee. She wore silk stockings, which girls of
O

her age did not often wear at that time, and she would sometimes
wear two pairs to produce an interesting moire effect. They were
BO

delightful to touch, but I never got above the line which defined my
territory. W hat I should have done if I had suddenly been allowed to
“ go all the way,” I doubt whether I knew. There was a suggestion
EX

that other boys had lines above and below mine.

Marion’s conversation was full of innuendoes many of which I
D

did not want to admit that I did not understand. She had gone on
IN

dates with boys from out of town who were much faster than the
local boys, and one of them, she once told me, forced her to do some­
thing by threatening to scar her with a lighted cigarette. W hat it was
she did not specify, but she said that she no longer had any respect
for him. In spite of many hours on the subject, I learned very little
about sex from her.
The big love of my high-school days was a friend of Marion's
named Margaret Persons. She was a tall, willowy redhead who so
obviously enjoyed life that it was a pleasure just to watch her. She
had gone to grade school on W est Hill, and I met her when she first
came as a freshman to the high school on Laurel Street. I was then a

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junior, and we went together for about a year. I took her to parties
and dances and walked her home afterward. W e would stand leaning
against a tree in front of her house. W e embraced tightly but our hands
did not move about, and we kissed but it was not what was then called
4‘sour7 or “ French” kissing. It was enough for both of us just to be
together.
After dinner on Sunday I would comb my hair, walk down Grand
Street and the Long Stairs, stop at the Sugar Bowl on Main Street to

PS
buy half a pound of chocolates, and then walk out to Margaret’s
house, which was at the very end of her street on W est Hill. Mrs.

U
Persons would let me in the kitchen door (her husband was, I believe,

RO
living separately), and Margaret never kept me waiting. In good
weather we might go for a walk, and when it was rainy we spent the
afternoon in her front parlor. Like all parlors, it was rarely used, but

G
there was a piano, and Margaret played the mandolin a little, and we
played a few simple pieces together. She was not a good student, in
S
music or in school, and I am afraid I tried to improve her.
K
Though a close friend of Marion Knise’s, she seems never to have
O

picked up Marion’s curious approach to sex, and in the end it was sex
BO

that broke us up. I became more sophisticated and one afternoon

when we were sitting on the bank of the river near Canavan’s Glen
I put my hand on her leg for the first time. She stopped me, and we
EX

embarked upon a long argument, at the end of which she seemed to

capitulate. She said she would let me do what I wanted, but she
added that she would then kill herself by jumping into the river, be­
D

cause she could never face her mother again. I was stunned and never
IN

made any further advances. ( “ She wouldn’t have, you know,” said
Marion Knise, when I told her the story later.) But Margaret began
telling me that I was getting tired of her, as I may have been, and
there were tears. After I moved away from Susquehanna I did not
see her again. She became a teacher, married the principal of the
school in which she taught, and died young of tuberculosis.
Another girl whom I greatly admired but did not see very often
was Leslie Gilbert. Her father was my dentist, a small, distinguished-
looking man with a tiny gray beard, and she worked as his assistant.
She did not, I think, come to high school, and I doubt whether she
went to the Laurel Hill Academy. Her mother wrote poetry and the

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Transcript reported the publication of a poem called “ In the Valley

of the Grand Pré/’ Since there were no accents on the linotype, my
mother read it as “ Grand Pree,” and there were shrieks of laughter and
unsuppressible giggles when she related this to her friends.
The Gilberts lived in an apartment over one of the stores on
Main Street. This in itself was enough to set the family apart from the
normal life of Susquehanna, where almost everyone lived in a house.
Possibly because of the social freedom which this gave her, Leslie went

PS
with an Irish boy, and I always suspected that they had a mature
sexual relationship. She flirted with me much more openly than other

U
girls. She would make it clear that she saw that I was looking at her

RO
legs, and once alluded, or so I thought, to the fact that I had an erec­
tion as I danced with her by repeating a word I had used with a special
intonation, saying “ Brother?" while glancing down toward our legs.

G
I called on Leslie one evening. Her father and mother were in
the kitchen at the back o£ the apartment, and we went into a small
S
side room at the front, in which a hammock was installed as a kind
K
of settee. She read me a poem called “ Frost Tonight” :
O
BO

Child, take the shears and cut what you will,

Frost tonight—so clear and dead-still.
EX

This was better than most of the poetry I heard in Susquehanna, and
I may even have sensed some allusion to the possibilities in our eve­
ning together. W as I being exhorted to gather rosebuds? But, alas, I
D

was still at the stage so well defined by Marion Knise. I made no

IN

effort to embrace or kiss her; it was a matter of finding out how far
I could go up her leg, and the evening ended in a violent, unskillful
wrestling match in the hammock. If I had abandoned the attack on
her thighs, if I had shown some signs of affection—who knows? I
might have married her.
A rather different relationship emerged, much to my surprise,
in my senior year when I met Charlotte Bennett, who lived on the far
side of Lanesboro beyond the Starrucca Viaduct. I met Chi, as I came
to call her, one evening at a dance in the Odd Fellows’ Hall. W e liked
each other immediately, danced together a good deal, and talked, and
I walked her home, or rather to her cousin's home, where she was

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spending the night because it was nearer Susquehanna. Even so itwas

a walk of nearly two miles, most of it along the Lower Road.
W e had not flirted while we were dancing, and we did not hold
hands as we walked, and there were no sexual allusions or innuendoes
in our talk. W e were laughing and enjoying ourselves. Nevertheless,
I had an erection all the way and was terribly embarrassed. It was
moonlight but not too bright, and I turned slightly away from her
as I walked.

PS
W e joined her cousin and a friend, who had gone ahead of us,
on the back porch of the house, and the four of us sat around for a

U
while. I doubt whether I kissed Chi that night, and there was cer­

RO
tainly no necking. I began to see her almost every Sunday afternoon,
and I continued to be embarrassed by sexual excitement, though I
continued to maintain a romantically chivalrous attitude, A popular

G
song at the time was called “ Nona,” and it was “ our song.” I played it
on her piano, and she sang.
S
Some kind of mature sexuality had made its appearance, but I
K

was puzzled by it, and I suspect that Chi was puzzled too bymy ex­
O

traordinary innocence and lack of initiative.

BO
EX

My m a l e f r i e n d s and acquaintances were also of two kinds. W ith a

friend like Raphael Miller my behavior was easy, natural, and wholly
uncontrived. It would never have occurred to us to examine the efFects
D

we were having on each other. But with more distant acquaintances

IN

my behavior was rather calculated. There is a good deal of evidence

of this in a diary that I began to keep near the end of my junior year.

M Y DIARY

B. Frederic Skinner
Afternoon of May 27, 1921
Busy for me, these are dormant times for most of the people here.
The Shops are closed, which means that a large percent of residents
are without work. Many are taking advantage of their time and are
painting homes or improving the grounds otherwise. But many that
are laid off are doing nothing (characteristic of many). As for me, as I
have said, the times are busy. To enumerate my duties, some of which

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PARTICULARS OF MY LIFE

are somewhat neglected, I have five “ jobs” upon my hands, viz., going
to school, which, however, will soon be over, working for G. A. Hard­
ing, reporting for the Transcript, acting as agent for F, H. Livingston
of Binghamton [unsuccessful distributor of his reed-adjusting device],
and playing in the Opera House two nights a week and often playing
for dances other nights. Monday and Tuesday of this week I played
for the moving picture “ The Inside of the Cup,” a powerful picture
and presenting a fine chance for good music. The orchestra I play in is
the "Symphony Four,” composed of Bob Basso (drums), Joseph Hick­

PS
ey (piano), Lawrence Larrabee (violin), and myself (melody saxo­
phone). W e organized about a month ago and so far have played for

U
three two-day features. Our rivals in this business are the “ Venetian
Five” organized about three months ago by Chipman. We play the

RO
first two nights in the week and they the last two. The V.V. is a windy
orchestra with dress suits when on dance jobs and the greatest of

G
bluff. . . . Our Symphony Four is to play for the roller skating every
Friday night beginning a week from tonight. Tuesday night the dances
S
are held, and I don’t know what music is to play. School is busy with
K
tests although w'e have not had our finals yet. . . .
This afternoon Steve Holleran came up to school to see me. Steve
O

wants me to play in L.A.C. Hall Monday night, but I am supposed to

BO

play at the movies. I don’t know how it will turn out. I would make $6
at the dance and only $2.50 at the show.

Wednesday evening, June 1st, continued

EX

Thursday evening, June 2nd.

I passed in Cicero. Now for the other tests which come Monday.
D

We are making the Seniors’ motto for commencement. It is silver

letters on old rose background reading “ En Avant.” Margaret Jones
IN

and Helen Jones take the honors this year. Helen’s address promises to
be the same old “sweet girl graduate” stuff that is sickening. The
seniors were not satisfied with the way we were making the motto but
we refused to make it any other wav and they calmed down and capitu­
lated. We are planning now on a canoe trip here to Harrisburg a dis­
tance of three hundred miles through fifteen counties. If we go, my
dear diary, you will soon contain an interesting account. . . . I am
working at the store yet but have told Mr. Harding I will quit in the
Fall. I will make enough money by my music to save up some and by
quitting it will give me more time to read and write. I am planning
on taking six subjects next year and this means work. This year I am

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taking five. Physics, Geometry (Plane), English, Cicero, and Ameri­

can History. Next year I want to take English, Mathematics (solid
Geo.), and Economics, Virgil, Chemistry, English history.

Thursday evening, June 16

. . . This is the first evening I have had to myself for a full week.
To itinerate, Monday and Tuesday the 6th and 7th we played at the
opera house after being disappointed at our Friday night job at Har­

PS
rison's Pavillion. It was a damp night and we waited until 9 o’clock
for a car from there to take us out. None came and Harrison did not
even let us know that he had called the dance off. By this we lost

U
another job for we could have played at the opera house substituting

RO
for the V.V. However, it turned out for the best as this orchestra could
not get any substitute and Ryan got mad and gave us the Friday and
Saturday job. . . .

G
Procrastination stole the time I had meant to put to studies for
tests and I went to them unprepared. However I stood—Physics 83,
S
Cicero 88, English 93, History 96, Geometry 97. Played at the Opera
K
House Friday and Saturday night and Sunday night went to the Bac­
O

calaureate sermon. . . . Tuesday I played at the Opera House after a

hard day at the store. As this was payday night I was supposed to work
BO

but got Ebbe to work for me. The boss is running a sale Tuesday,
Wednesday, and Thursday and it was a busy night so I hated to leave
him. He was good, though, and let me off willingly. Last night I went
EX

to the commencement, playing in Holleran’s orchestra and reporting

for the paper. I got 108 lines on it making $1.08 + what I made for
playing.
D
IN

M y account of the canoe trip begins with some business details

and then continues:

Monday the 11th my father and I took all the baggage down to
the railroad bridge below the lower electric dam. The other four
[Leonard Titus (whom we called the Admiral), Don Berkett, Doc
Miller, and Bob Perrine] went to Lanesboro and brought the canoes
down. Coming out of the binnacle Doc tipped over, the only spill on
the trip. At the bridge we waited a long time, and finally they came,
carrying the boats over the half-built dam. They paddled down, and
we loaded up. I took my canoe alone and when all was set, we shook

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P A R T IC U L A R S OF MY L IF E

hands goodbye and sailed off never dreaming of all that lay ahead of
us.
The first few miles were rather shallow and to us the riffs in some
places were bad. We soon came to consider such as those mere trifles.
We ate a lunch at dinner time by the riverside and at 4 o’clock
arrived at Binghamton with a storm coining up. I hastily wrote a card
and ran to a mailbox and dropped it in. The storm came on. It looked
like a bad thunder shower, and we paddled swiftly. The rain came,

PS
but the storm had blown over, so in a drizzle we paddled on looking
for a place to camp. We finally found a place on the side of a hill. We
drew the canoes up in some brush and up above them set our camp.

U
We turned in as soon as possible. . . . Next morning I cooked some

RO
bacon for my breakfast while the others went to town for theirs. They
stayed over an hour looking around, but when they came back we set
out. The morning brought a terrible sun, and before we could reach

G
Owego we were all burnt. I soaked my shirt in water and put that on
but to no avail. My skin was getting literally baked. Finally, after the
S
worst torture I ever went through, we came to Owego. We stopped
K
and three of us went into town while two stayed with the canoes. I
O

bought a light shirt in place of my flannel one and some cold cream
for my sunburn. After having a dinner I went back out Front Street
BO

toward the canoes. I found the other two fellows on the porch of a
Mrs. Loring. She was an elderly lady who was being kind to us. In
her house I put the cream on and then sat on her porch in misery.
EX

Later in the afternoon we left and sailed to a place a short ways down
the river and made camp under some trees near on oat field. The
mosquitoes were terrible, and next morning the Admiral was to be
D

found way out in the oat field away from them. . . .

IN

[The following night we slept in our canoes and were drenched

by a sudden shower.]
The next day (Friday) we paddled on with no events until after­
noon. All along the river we had gone by eel racks. These occur where
the river drops rapidly in riffs. They are walls of rock built in a V
shape that cause a swift current to pour out of the point. Some of them
take nearly the whole river, while some are smaller. We had been
going around these, which was usually in a shallow slow flow of water,
and we finally decided that it was safe to shoot the V. The Admiral
and 1 were together in a canoe at the time, and we headed for the
mouth. It neared, and too late we saw large rocks in the opening. Then
bang, scrape, bang, bang, bang, bang, smash. Ten small holes in the

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bottom. We beat it for shore and discovered that we could push the
splinters back in place and get along all right with a slow leak. Farther
on we dried our blankets and things on a sunny beach just above the
mouth of the railroad tunnel near Shamokin. Then followed some of
the most beautiful stretches of scenery on the trip. The tunnel frees
the bank from railroads and all traces of population. The long curve
which looms constantly ahead of you is a rare speciman of the pri­
meval. At the right looms Mt. Mehoogany, rocky and towering. Its
almost perpendicular wall bears scragglv trees and a sprinkling of

PS
shrubbery, Halfway around the long curve we scared an eagle who
swooped down the valley ahead of us. Farther on to the left a white

U
crane stood fishing and then flew away at the sound of our paddles. It

RO
was nearly sunset and we were forced to hurry through the six-mile
stretch in order to make Tunkhannock for supplies. Sunset came on,
gloriously and glowing. The river was swift, and we coasted lazily on

G
the purple reflecting water till the town was reached. A few supplies
bought, we rejected an island as a camping place and finally settled
S
on a ledge of low rocks just across the river. The ledge comes up from
K
the water and is perhaps ten feet above the river. We cooked a supper
O

in the dark and spread our still damp blankets. Next morning each
of us independently experienced a conscious phenomenon. Probably
BO

Admiral was the first to see it, but when I awoke, Don and Doc were
still asleep and probably Bob. The rocks have been washed by many
rains and their surface is rippled. With the early morning light upon
EX

them and with one looking from a low level, it appeared as if there
was water running over them. The previous night was still distinct in
my memory, and I reached out to feel of a part of my inside jacket
D

that was exposed. I thought that it had rained and that water was
IN

running over the rocks. My blanket was wet. I raised up a bit. There
were no other indications of rain but still the water on the rocks. I
reached out and touched them. Dry! My blanket had not dried from
the night before. It was still early morning so I turned in again, and
awakening later I found that everyone had been deceived by the same
thing. . . .
About two p.m. we set sail and made Nanticoke by evening. Doc
and I went into town and got a telephone call through to Doc’s folks.
When we got back the three were having a hard time w-ith the canoes
and a lot of tough kids, but we set out finally and in due time came
to the Nanticoke dam. We were forewarned and forearmed. I was
alone in my canoe and somew’hat behind when we came to the broken

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PARTICULARS OF MY L IF E

out structure. Doc and Bob went to one side and Don and Admiral
to the other to look things over. They reported everything okay, and
without getting out I headed toward the big opening. The water passing
through the break drops swiftly for a short space, slows up in a little
pool, and then tumbles over rapids of rocks and railroad ties. The first
swiftly flowing current was all I foresaw, and I shot that easily, and
then ahead of me I saw the rapids. I prepared for a spill. It was im-
possible to stop. I must go over. I entered the rough dashing area and
first thing the bow of my canoe grounded on a rock. To the right and

PS
ahead of me was a swift yet deep V-shaped current that led into a
maze of rock-broken streams. I planned to back off the rock and drop

U
into the V. With a heavy stroke I backed. The stem of my canoe
was caught in the current, and the boat was whipped around tail end

RO
first. It was a ticklish predicament. Above me I could see the other
two canoes passing through the opening, and below me I pictured,

G
although I could not see, the rocks and the broken stream. Unable to
guide my canoe I gave up, tossed my paddle on the pack in the middle
S
of the boat and grasping the gunwhales with my hands, I endeavored
K
to balance the craft. Dextrously the current carried me through the
treacherous maze, and I sailed out into calm water. Recovering myself
O

I watched the others. Bob and Doc came through safely. The Admiral
BO

and Don were having trouble. They were grounded on a rock. Admiral
carefully climbed out on the end of an upright railroad tie that was
fast between the rocks. His shoes only went under the water until the
canoe swung around and knocked him in up to his waist. The two
EX

finally came through with no other mishaps than a pair of drenched

trousers, and we camped on the shore just below the dam across from
D

a little settlement where I went for bread and water.

IN

W e reached Harrisburg but with no time to spare for an excur­

sion to Gettysburg. W e visited the state capitol, and I shopped in a
bookstore, and we put our canoes on a train and came home.

S h o r t l y a f t e r t h e e n d o f t h e w a r it began to be obvious that Sus­

quehanna was a dying town. Railroads were changing, and there was
no longer any need for repair shops at short intervals along the route.
The steam locomotive was soon to give way to the diesel, and within
another ten years the great Matt Shays, never very efficient, would be

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dismantled. A town built on hills did not attract other industries.

(The Blue Ridge Metal Manufacturing Company had been located
out over the Susquehanna River on the Oakland side, and the silk mill
had been squeezed into the narrow valley of Drinker Creek.) A re­
duced payroll in the Shops affected other businesses. Houses went
unrepaired and, in spite of an annual Clean-Up Week, the town grew
grimier and more littered.
Editor Baker continued to exhort his readers to “ keep firm your

PS
faith in Susquehanna/' Good times would return. He had once seen
a ray of hope in George F. Johnson, the philanthropic shoe manu­

U
facturer, who had built up the towns of Endicott and Lestershire, in
return for which Lestershire had been renamed Johnson City. He had

RO
come to Susquehanna during the war to conduct a Red Cross rally
and had predicted at the start of the meeting that the audience in

G
the Hogan Opera House would that day subscribe $3000. W hen the
pledges were tallied, they had done exactly that, but it then appeared
S
that Johnson himself had contributed the $1300 needed to bring the
K
total up to the predicted amount. This was Editor Baker’s cue. W hy
O

could Susquehanna not become a shoe town? The Transcript ran

headlines across the whole of page one:
BO

GEO. F . JOHNSON IS NOW IDOLIZED HERE.

He Came to Susquehanna, He Was ‘One of Us’ and Ever Will Be.

EX

No Such Act of Generosity as His Ever Recorded Here Before

D

Johnson may have been tempted. The Transcript reported that he

IN

came back for a second visit. He arrived on No. 4 and was met by a
committee that took him on a tour of inspection of the Erie Shops and
local industries. He was then “ tendered a complimentary dinner” at
the Oakland Hotel, during which an orchestra played. “ Mr. Johnson
was cheered to the echoe [sic] as he was introduced and all stood and
applauded him as he arose to speak.” The Erie Band gave a concert
in front of the hotel and then marched to the Odd Fellows' Hall,
where, at a public reception, everyone had "an opportunity to meet
and grasp the friendly hand of the gentleman who has brought glad­
ness to the hearts of thousands of thousands of people.” But, alas,
Johnson was not to be caught
M y father remained a "booster." As chairman of the guarantors'

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committee of the Chautauqua he continued to work to bring culture

to the town; he had been president of the Auto Club and the
Transcript reported his remarks “ favoring macadamization” at a
meeting of the Good Roads Association; and when at the end of the
war there was a false rumor that the Shops were to be expanded, he
served on a committee to found a Building and Loan Association
which would “ give Susquehanna a building boom.” He went to
Harrisburg to meet with the Governor about the possible gasification
of coal to be used in lighting, and again to promote the growth of the

PS
highway system; and he went to New York to remind the officers of
the Erie Railroad that the company had been given special tax ad­

U
vantages when it came into Pennsylvania in the nineteenth century

RO
and therefore had good reason to maintain and even expand the
Susquehanna Shops. But it was no use; the town was in decline.
The story can be read in the history of the library. In 1859 a
G
newly founded Young M en’s Literary Association established a
library in a company boardinghouse, and when the Shops were built,
S
the company set aside space for a library and later appropriated $450
K

for books. It also fitted out a large lecture hall for the use of the
O

Literary Association. By 1870 the library had over 3000 volumes.

BO

W hen the company became less paternalistic, the Literary Association

disbanded, and the books became part of the town library, which I
first knew when it occupied the quarters on Erie Avenue later taken
EX

over by the Economy Shoe Store. W hen rents went up, it moved
into the basement of a private house on W illow Avenue, which could
be entered directly by going partway down the Long Stairs. It was
D

there that I did most of my exploring during my high-school years.

IN

As subscriptions fell off and its fortunes declined, the library moved
to a single room in an office building, and when that could no
longer be maintained, the books were sold, and the town had no
library at all.
M y old boss George Harding bought a good many books at the
final sale for a few cents each, and when I saw him once during my
college years and recalled having read Darwin’s Expression of Emotion
in M an and Animals, he said he had it and gave it to me. He also
gave me Sir Charles Bell's The Hand, Its Mechanism and Vital
Endowments, as Evincing Design and Thomas H. Huxley's On the

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Origin of Species: ory the Causes of the Phenomena of Organic Nature,

both of which were among the first books acquired by the association.
Also among the first were Thoreau’s Yankee in Canada and his
Letters, first editions which I bought for a few cents during the sale.
George Harding was part of the story of the town, too. His
business slowly failed, and the bank loans grew smaller and smaller.
One day, as he left for work, he called back to his wife: “ Good luck
to you today in everything you do,” and walked down Broad Street

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and lower Grand Street to the Long Stairs and down to Erie Avenue
and Main Street and his store. He put a sign on the front door

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took a length of rope he had bought at Ned Owens's hardware store
six months earlier, and hanged himself.
Ned Owens was part of the story, too. He once came to consult

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my father about getting a divorce from his flirtatious wife, and my
father talked him out of it. Years later he found another way: he
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took a shotgun from one of his shelves, went into the basement, and
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blew his head off.
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My f a t h e r ' s p r o f e s s i o n a l l i f e was not expanding. He continued to

take local cases which were no doubt interesting but could not have
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been very profitable. According to my mother’s scrapbook, he repre­

sented the Commonwealth against an Italian in a stabbing case,
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against a man who resisted an officer, against a man accused of cheat­

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ing a woman (the man committed suicide while in jail), and against
four boys for stealing a car. He asked for suspended sentences for a
group of gamblers and defended a yeggman. He appeared in court to
oppose the granting of a liquor license in another city, but represented
a friend who had been denied a license in Susquehanna. He frequently
appeared before the Superior and Supreme courts of Pennsylvania
and New York State, but even so his practice could not have been
said to be lucrative.
A case we frequently discussed at home had to do with two
families living on Oak Street. M y father represented a man named
Brenchley who complained that his neighbor had built a driveway

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which blocked the flow of groundwater and flooded Brenchley’s base­

ment. The neighbor was represented by two lawyers who were my
father’s arch rivals, and the case was bitterly fought. The jury came
from Montrose to the Brenchley cellar to see that water began to flow
out of the cellar when a block was removed from the driveway. The
case was taken to a higher court (I was working at the Transcript
when the “ books"— the transcripts of evidence taken in the lower
court— were printed), and eventually Brenchley won, but he had very

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little money, and my father told me afterward that his fee was only
$300.

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He continued to speak at political meetings, and he made one last
try by running for Republican State Committeeman. It was a minor

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office, but one in which he would not be opposed by the Democratic
Irish vote. He was jittery about the outcome and, on the evening of

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the election, asked me to go to the poll, in a barbershop, to ask how
the count was going. The man in charge was a friend, and my father
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thought he would tell me. I knew it was wrong, and I am sure my
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mother did too, and why she didn't stop me I don’t know, but I went
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and rapped on the door. Inside I could see four people sitting around
a table counting ballots. No one responded to my knock. I knocked
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again and my father’s friend shook his head without looking up. I
turned and walked away, and two or three young people sitting on a
bench outside the building laughed and made some comment about
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my father's likely loss of the election. And lose it indeed he did.

Since judges continued to be elected, my father would never be
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Judge Skinner, and unfortunately he had a taste for the office because
as U.S. Commissioner he was called upon to act in a judicial capacity.
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He would have been a good judge and it was the kind of success he
deserved, but he would never make it. In every professional direction
he had gone as far as he could go.
His personal and social life had reached the summit too. He was
an Odd Fellow and always hoped to be a Mason, which was much
more prestigious, but someone— someone who had lost a case against
him, perhaps, or simply did not like him— had always blackballed
him. He had made progress in one direction, however : he had reached
the level of the Wright dynasty. In December 19 16 he attended a
dinner of the Pennsylvania Society in New York City with C. Fred

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Wright and Wright Glidden. (Senator Boies Penrose, the leader of the
powerful Pennsylvania Republican machine, was at the speakers' table.
Sir George Foster spoke, and he warned would-be United States
peacemakers not to “ butt in by advising peace to Canada . . . until
those vital principles for which we strive have been fought out and
won. )
My father had also drawn the will of another member of the
Wright clan, Miss Clara Falkenbury, and as executor of her estate he

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found himself rather in command of the fortunes of a nephew,
Clarence Wright, the principal beneficiary. Clarence was easy-going

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and moderately successful in real estate and insurance. He had mar­
ried a socialite from Montrose who was never very happy in Susque­

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hanna, and he was always short of money. He would come to my
father asking him to advance more than Miss Falkenbury’s trust

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authorized. M y father followed the letter of the will and I rather
suspect that he took some satisfaction in exerting this much control
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in the W right family.
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I glimpsed a bit of the decline in the family when a scion,
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Miller Wright, a young man with little ambition who worked in the
bank, asked me to show him something about the saxophone. He had
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married a girl from Philadelphia, and together they made the best of
living in Susquehanna. I went one evening to their house, which
stretched along the top of a bank on lower Grand Street. In the
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living room there were comfortable chairs and a divan in slipcovers,

with soft light from table lamps, which were not yet very common.
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He had bought a C-melody saxophone and an instruction booklet, and

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he wanted a bit of practical advice. W e spent a very pleasant evening,

but somehow this little world, almost completely isolated from the
culture of Susquehanna, seemed pathetic.
Though my father had pulled abreast of the W right family, he
was still in awe of the social life to be found elsewhere. During the
war my mother was invited, as chairman of a Civilian Relief Com ­
mittee, to a luncheon at Fernheim, the estate of the Warriner family
from Philadelphia, near Montrose. It was a beautiful place with
many signs of affluence. My mother was nervous about her appearance
as my father drove her up to the door, and in awesome tones he
pointed out the importance of what we were seeing.

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W ith little support from my mother, he promoted friendly

contacts with Mrs. Taylor’s daughter, Elisabeth Lamb. She took us
one Sunday afternoon to call on some friends in Binghamton—a.
young civil engineer employed by the city and his extremely attractive
wife. My father’s efforts to live up to the occasion— to be witty and
just a shade risqué—were embarrassing to everyone, and I sensed my
mother's malaise. Mrs. Lamb came to Susquehanna once with a
friend who was a dealer in Hudson cars, apparently intent on making

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a sale, possibly with Mrs. Lamb's collusion. He took us for a drive
in a “ coach”— the first enclosed car that I had ever been in. He

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demonstrated the beauty of the mechanism by shifting smoothly

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into second gear while moving at a high speed. My father told me
later that he had seen that trick before, and he did not buy the car.
M y parents occasionally went to Binghamton for a dinner party

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and a play (after a dinner in Binghamton in January they astonished
my brother and me by reporting that they had had fresh strawberries),
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and they spent short vacations in New York City, Philadelphia, or
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Atlantic City, but these were excursions, not daily life. Professionally,
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socially, and personally, they had exhausted Susquehanna.

M y mother was, of course, not untouched. She had done her
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part for the town. She was president of the Ladies’ Auxiliary of the
hospital and gave benefit teas at our house. At a meeting of the
Town Council she spoke for the Civic Club “ for a bigger and better
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Susquehanna.” She did all this while managing a family in a far

from convenient house. Once or twice an advertisement appeared in
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the Transcript for a girl to work during the day, but I remember no
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such person, and my mother continued to make the beds, cook the
meals, mend our clothes, clean the house, and put up fruits and
vegetables in Mason jars and eggs in waterglass.
She was overworked and showed it, and she may also have
reached the menopause. She would blow up when things went wrong.
A Cemetery Association was organized by a former citizen who was
dismayed by the condition of the cemetery next to our house, and
my mother became secretary. It was her duty to send out literature to
members. She bought a crude duplicating system, consisting of a
gelatin pad and a special typewriter ribbon. The typed copy was
placed face down on the wet pad and the typing was thus transferred

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to the gelatin. One could then lay moist sheets of paper on the gelatin
and pick up copies. But the copies were scarcely legible, and my
mother broke down and cried. She had tried to economize, but it
had not worked out.
She complained of small details of my behavior, and I resented it.
One day in the kitchen, when she was behind in her work and things
were not going well, she made some critical remark, and I replied that
others were guilty of the same thing. I had meant my mother, of

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course, and she got the point. She turned toward me, opened her
speechless mouth, raised both hands like claws, and came at me. I

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held my ground, and she stopped before she reached me. She tore off

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her apron and dashed out of the room and went upstairs. My father,
in the living room, quietly suggested that I go and say I was sorry.
I found my mother sobbing on her bed and said I was sorry. It was

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upon this kind of occasion that she would say, “ Someday you will
understand.”
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For my mother, as for my father, something had gone wrong.
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Life was progress, but they had stopped progressing. To live was to
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improve oneself, and they had come a long way beyond their parents,
but further improvement seemed unlikely. Instead, decay might be
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setting in.
They could not look for a solution by moving to another city.
A successful merchant can sell out and start again elsewhere. A doctor
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can buy the practice of another doctor who has retired or died. But
a lawyer, before the day of the big law firm, was tied to his local
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reputation and good will, and my father seemed caught in a trap.

IN

S u d d en ly and q u it e he was able to escape. He was

u nexpected ly

offered the position of junior associate to Mr. James Torrey, General

Counsel for the Hudson Coal Company in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
The offer came about through a series of accidents. In 1920 Susque­
hanna County increased the tax assessment on anthracite-coal proper­
ties in the southern part of the county, and the coal companies op­
posed the increase. Mr. Torrey came to Forest City to represent the
Hudson Coal Company, and my father appeared for another com­

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pany. Mr. Torrey saw my father in action and liked his energy and ef­
ficiency. It may also be relevant that Mr. Torrey had recently lost a
son, also a lawyer and also named W ill, whom my father was said to
resemble. W hen, two years later, he was looking for a Junior Coun­
sel, he remembered my father and offered him the job. There was a
strong implication that upon his retirement my father would become
General Counsel, and Mr. Torrey was then seventy-one years old.
The job and the salary— far more than he had ever made in a

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year—were precisely what my father needed to restore his faith in
himself, and there was no doubt that the offer would be accepted.

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M y grandfather Skinner beamed when my father told him about it,

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and my grandmother did her best to understand.
Only my grandmother Burrhus had reservations. W hy should we
make a change? W e were comfortable and bappy in Susquehanna,

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and we belonged there. W hy could I not apprentice myself in the
Erie Shops like other boys— or study law if I must— and be content
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with a good life?
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The Transcript trumpeted my father’s appointment and ran his
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picture:
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W. A. SKINNER
ACCEPTS FIN E
APPOINTM ENT
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Will Become Counsel for Hudson Coal

Company with Offices in Scranton
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I, too, welcomed the change. I was never aware of the control

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exercised by my family or my associates in Susquehanna, but it was

nonetheless irksome. During the day I was a committed scholar, but
the rest of my time was not spent in interesting ways. M y various jobs
were routine, and playing the saxophone had become work. I had
friends—but the pattern of friendship had been established in pre­
adolescent days. I accepted all this as I had been taught to do; I had
never learned to protest or complain or even to try to find out what
was wrong. And so, although college would take me away from my
old world for a substantial part of each year, a move to another city
would make a much greater difference.
In Harrisburg I had bought a book called O. Henry Prize Stories

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of 1920, and it contained a story by Frances Noyes Hart called

“ Contact!” using the word as aviators used it during the war. It was
a sentimental story with supernatural overtones, but I liked the flyer's
account of his experience as he buckled the strap about him and
laid his hands on the stick.

It’s waiting—waiting for a word—and so am I and I lean far

forward, watching the figure toiling out beyond till the call comes

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back to me, clear and confident, “ Contact, sir?” and I shout back, as
restless and exultant as the first time that I answered it—“ Contact!”

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And I am off—and I’m alive—
And I’m free!

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That was my mood. College and Scranton meant a new world!
I was second in a class of seven graduating seniors. (Both my

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father and my mother were second in their classes in the same high
school.) The class was supposed to choose a motto, and we con­
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sidered several of the old standbys, such as “ Ad astra per aspera”
without enthusiasm. I suggested “ Contact!” and it was accepted. The
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junior class, according to tradition, lettered it on a panel decorated

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with crepe paper in our class colors, “ gitane and white,” and it ap­
peared above us at graduation.
In the commencement exercises I played “ Celeste Aida” — with
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Robert Perrine, soon to go off to W est Point, at the piano.

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T he m o ve to S indeed a sweeping change. W e left

cranto n w as

that old ramshackle house at 433 Grand Street, next to a graveyard,

its rooms awkwardly arranged, its conveniences primitive, and its
stucco turning gray in the soot of a railroad town, and moved into a
clean white house in the fairly prestigious Green Ridge section of
Scranton, with a laundry in the basement and a maid’s room on the
third floor, instant hot water at any time of day or night, a kitchen
with a gas stove and a refrigerator rather than a coal stove and an ice­
box, a two-car garage with its own gasoline storage tank (never used),
and a professionally groomed lawn and garden. W e sold the old up­
right piano with its scrollwork over faded gold velvet and its ornately

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carved legs and bought a Stein way baby grand and put it in the en­
trance hallway with its top propped up for show. Except for a recently
acquired dining-room suite and some bedroom furniture, everything
in the house was new—fire screens, drop-leaf end tables, upholstered
chairs and divans, and Oriental rugs. W e turned in our open
Chevrolet and bought a Packard sedan.
My parents joined the Country Club, which, with its eighteen-

PS
hole golf course, was within the city limits, only a few blocks from our
house, and my father bought clubs, knickers, patterned socks, and
golf shoes. M y mother left her sewing machine in Susquehanna and

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turned to a Madame Berg, who selected clothes for a small clientele,

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and from that day forth was chicly dressed. M y father continued to
come home at noon but it was to eat “ lunch” ; we ate dinner at night.
W e had a uniformed maid, or rather a series of maids, toward whom
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my mother showed no trace of the Lady Bountiful, and to cap it all,
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they were to call me “ Mr. Frederic” and my brother “ Mr. Edward.”
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Most of these changes were due to my mother, who probably
overestimated what needed to be done because she was frightened. In
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Susquehanna her place had been secure, but now everything was
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strange, and she approached her new life timidly. The moving van
brought the pieces of furniture we had salvaged, together with pots and
pans and books and linen, and delivery trucks came out from the
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central city with our new purchases, and the house began to look
furnished; but it was still only a house. And when one day the wife
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of our real-estate agent came to the front door and hoo-hooed, my

mother was tremendously relieved, and she often said that that “ hoo-
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hoo" saved her life.

She was not a social climber: she made no effort to get to know
the “ right people” ; but she wanted to be like the right people and so
she bought the kinds of furniture and draperies described in G ood
Housekeeping and House and Garden, and she read Emily Post’s
Etiquette and worried about table service and what she and my father
should say and do at receptions and banquets. She ordered engraved
calling cards for all of us, although it was not clear how we should
use them, and in place of the Monday Club she joined a book club
in which once a week a woman summarized and read parts of a recent
book, so that she could pass for being well read.

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M y father went along with this, though he felt no great need for
it. He was immensely pleased with his success: he had gained an ex­
cellent position in a large company, he owned a good house in a
desirable section of a large city, he drove a Packard, and he played
golf with friends who talked about politics and the stock market.
That was enough.
M y brother was not much affected. He went to Central High and
immediately made a host of friends. He played basketball much

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better than the score of that game in Susquehanna suggested, and
he was soon elected to a high-school fraternity. Later my father

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bought him a small Overland runabout, which undoubtedly increased
his popularity, but he was the kind of person who was instantly liked

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anyway, and I doubt whether anyone could have detected any great
change in him between Susquehanna and Scranton.

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I was exposed to our new life only briefly before going to college.
I discovered that there were tennis courts at the Y M C A in the
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central city and I joined the Y in order to play on them. A tournament
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was held in the Green Ridge section, and I entered that. I played
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against an older man, a doctor, whom I should have beaten, but he

used the same strategy as U. G. Baker and eliminated me.
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I spent much of the summer preparing for college. Bill Ernestone

made a tuxedo, but I needed other clothes and at Samter’s, a men's
store in Scranton even more fashionable than Weed's in Binghamton,
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I seemed at once to be an old and favored customer. I bought a

large wardrobe trunk which opened up to become a chest of drawers,
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with coat hangers on a rack. A new portable typewriter could be fitted

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into the shoe compartment. I bought a large suitcase, and a fiber

mailing case which carried my laundry back and forth between
Hamilton and Scranton for the next four years.

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I T A y f i r s t l e t t e r home from college begins with some local de­
tails because my father and mother were out of town on the day I left.

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North College HaU

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Hamilton College
Clinton, New York
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Tuesday, September 19, 1922
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Dear Folks,
. . . Monday morning I got up about seven and took Ebbe down to
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school, then I phoned a cart man and sent the trunk down, went down
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and checked it to Utica and also checked my sax at the parcel room. As
that was all 1 had to do I spent a long morning reading O. Henry. I
got to the station and got the sax but found the train about a half hour
late. It turned out to be a whole hour behind time. J met a fellow from
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Owego on the train which was packed with college boys and girls
mostly going to Syracuse.
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Changing cars at Binghamton we gained a quarter of an hour on

the scheduled time and made up another on the road. [Railroading was
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still in my blood.] I met a fellow on the train who was going to Colgate
which is near Hamilton. After he got off I met two Hamilton fellows.
One of them is a Weed of Binghamton whose father died this sum­
mer and who has studied baritone singing in New York for several
years. [He knew or at least dropped the names of many people con­
nected with the opera in New York, including Gatti-Casazza, the im­
presario of the Metropolitan. 1 brought up the fact that I had seen
Geraldine Farrar in Carmen, but he quickly spotted me as an amateur
and put me in my place easily enough.] I also met another fellow on
the train named Davies. He and I got off at New Hartford and took a
trolley there which was shorter than from Utica. The other two fellows
took care of our trunks at Utica.

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Ebbe would have had the time of his life on the trolley car. It went
quite fast—both forward and back and forth. Everybody in it would
lean way over one way then fall the other. The straps slapped back and
forth against the ceiling and a variety of noises came from the engine
and wheels. It was worse than the Toonerville trolley.
W e got to Clinton and took a taxi which took me to the Chi Psi
(pronounced kye sigh) fraternity house. Paul Olver met me there and
after playing the sax for a while in a get up orchestra and playing rum­

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my I went to bed. Some of the fellows at Chi Psi are fine. One short
guy with red hair that acts like Napoleon (the fellow not the hair) is
really funny. At breakfast this morning someone was talking about an

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abandoned swimming pool at the gym. The fellow said, “ The water

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ran out as fast as they put it in.” Napoleon asked without smiling,
uWhy didn’t they put it in faster?" Another junior there just bought a
Ford. He said it was in perfect condition. One little thing though

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bothered, he said. That was the fact that it boiled over which wd« due
either to the fact that the brakes dragged or to the fact that the radiator
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was out of commission. He also added the batteries weren’t working
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good so I haven’t figured out what part of the car was in perfect con­
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dition. [i believe I thought that these anecdotes would amuse my par­

ents and my brother; I cannot believe that they were a reflection of my
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own tastes. I was playing the role of a dutiful son.]

This morning I got up at seven and took a walk around the campus
and it is really beautiful, much larger and nicer than I expected. I
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reported my arrival and filled out my course card. After having dinner
at the Chi Psi’s I went for a room in a dormitory and got one in North
Hall. [7 went only after being abruptly pressured by someone at the
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fraternity. They had looked me over carefully. I had played the

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saxophone, told them the sports I played, and described the school I
had gone to, and they evidently found me wanting.] This is the oldest
hall here and of course not very modern. It is, they say, the best
heated and has the best showers. I haven’t eaten at the Commons
table yet but will breakfast there tomorrow. I visited the Psi U house
where Davies lives and I met all the fellows there. Their house is the
newest and biggest here. It has a mammoth living room with fire
places and a grand piano. Its dining hall is of the old Anglo Saxon
architecture and is really beautiful. I have been invited to the Psi U
house for lunch tomorrow so will soon know how they eat there.
At the Chi Psi they have a man chef and butler who is a facsimile
of the movie butler. He is a fine fellow and they have good meals

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there. I had a wonderful dinner at the Beta Kappa house tonight. A

fellow I met invited me down and Stewart Brownell who wrote to me
lives at this house. The meal was great and served with the neatness
and care of a fine hotel. The fellows there are the best natured bunch
1 have met yet. I have a standing invitation to eat there again when
I wish. . . .
I am going to have a physical exam tomorrow morning.
So far everything is fine but I will be glad to see you all Christmas
and would be pleased if you could drive up some day. Yet I am not

PS
homesick and I think I am going to enjoy my four years here.
Lots of love,

U
Fred

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P. S. The real name of North Hall is William H. Skinner hall so I
feel at home.

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S
B e t a K a p p a invited me to join and I quickly accepted. The fraternity
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occupied a remodeled frame house at the foot of College Hill. That
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meant a long climb up the hill to classes in the morning and down
again for lunch and up again for afternoon classes and down again for
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dinner and up and down again for any evening activity, but Susque­
hanna had prepared me for that The living room was furnished with
heavy oak furniture, a small grand piano, and two large colored prints
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by Maxfield Parrish. Freshmen slept in a small dormitory, and there

were several studies with desks and Morris chairs, which freshmen
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shared with seniors.

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To a good fraternity man I had made a mistake. I had joined a

local (though Beta Kappa “ went national” a year or two later when
it became a chapter of Lambda Chi Alpha) and Hamilton was an
extremely strong fraternity college. I did not immediately feel any
lack of status— two or three of the national fraternities also had re­
modeled private houses at the foot of the hill— but certain disad­
vantages became clearer as my four years passed, and after I had
graduated I was often embarrassed when a new acquaintance familiar
with Hamilton would ask me w h a t“ crowd” I had belonged to. (Per­
haps I had picked up some of my mother's social aspirations. I told
an upperclassman in my fraternity that I thought I could “ get into

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Utica society by my senior year.” I doubt whether I knew what I

meant.)
M y life in the fraternity turned out well enough. M y so-called
brothers remained friendly after I was pledged. Rather than haze
or otherwise mistreat their freshmen, they helped them find them­
selves on campus, warning them of difficult courses and steering them
into rewarding activities. The house was comfortable if not beautiful,
but the food fell far below the standard I had reported at that dinner

PS
when I was being rushed. It was plentiful but greasy and unappetizing,
and I developed a bad mid-morning candy habit, going into the college

U
store for two Schrafft chocolate bars with vanilla-cream centers and

RO
three nut meats on top of each.
Fraternities compared their grade averages (another local, the
Emerson Literary Society, was always at the top) but ranked them­

G
selves mainly according to extra-curricular accomplishments. I was
urged to “ go out” for everything within range. M y only sport was
S
tennis, and I made an abortive try for the team. I quickly discovered
K
that I was a poor player, and that the game I had learned in Susque­
O

hanna was not a foundation upon which a skilled performance could

BO

be built. I tried out for the Charlatans, the student theatre, and was
actually chosen for a part, but my performance at the first rehearsal
was so bad that I was dropped. My last chance was the instrumental
EX

club. I took my saxophone one evening and went up the hill to a

small building in which I could hear tryouts in progress. I could
scarcely force myself to go in. I considered returning to my fraternity
D

and reporting that I had failed, but I did try out and made the club.
IN

F r e s h m e n , c a l l e d “ s l i m e r s , ” were required to wear small green knit

caps and to say hello to everyone they passed on pain of some un­
specified punishment. There was a scheduled wrestling match with the
sophomore class after chapel one morning and a tug of war across
a small pond in the middle of the quadrangle through which one class
or the other was dragged.
The year before I came to Hamilton there had been a tragic
hazing accident, when a freshman, asleep in his bed, had been dumped

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onto the floor by his fraternity brothers and had struck his head and
died, but in spite of this there was still some rather vicious hazing.
One evening I was captured by two sophomores and taken into a
classroom, where I was tied to a seat with clothesline. I did not
resist; I simply let my captors tie me up without protest. Fortunately,
I had secreted a razor blade in one of my rubber heels for just such an
emergency, and I managed to get it out and cut myself free. (In my
sophomore year I was captured by two freshmen as I left the fraternity

PS
house and strung up against a clothes pole with my arms stretched
out and my thumbs wired to a crossbar. There I should have stayed

U
all night and quite possibly lost a thumb or two if a friend, who had

RO
seen the attack, had not come and cut me down.)
Classes at Hamilton were run strictly on schedule. At the begin­
ning of each period the bell in the chapel tower tolled twelve times.

G
If you were not in your seat on the stroke of twelve, you were marked
late or absent, and only a small number of absences were excused. A
S
student racing to class across the quadrangle would cry, “ Hold that
K
bell!” and not entirely without effect if the student who was ringing
O

the bell was in a sympathetic mood. Every weekday morning the

bell tolled for compulsory chapel, and a topcoat thrown over pajamas
BO

was an acceptable dress, though uncomfortable and ridiculous in warm

weather. Church service on Sunday was also compulsory.
All this regimentation was balanced by a surprising freedom in
EX

our examinations. Following an honor system, we signed a statement

at the end of a paper or an examination to the effect that we had
D

neither given nor received help. Taking a breather during a three-

IN

hour final examination, we might discuss the fairness of the questions

and mention the ones we were finding difficult, but we never gave
each other any help.
Hamilton was not at the time an outstanding college. Only a
few members of the faculty had Ph.D.’s. (They were called Doctor as
a mark of distinction, while all the rest were called Professor.) Only
one or two carried on scholarly activities. But almost all were dedicated
teachers and we got to know them personally. In a survey of com­
parable men's colleges in the East, Hamilton was then distinguished
only by the amount of time its students spent on modern languages.
In reporting this fact to the college, the President said, “ It is nice to

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know that Hamilton is outstanding in what has always been regarded

as the mark of a gentleman.” But we were not there merely to become
gentlemen.
I had trouble with my courses my freshman year. I went into
Intermediate French on the strength of that bare pass on the Regents’
Examination and was in real trouble. On the first day “ G igi” Wisewell
dictated a few sentences, and since I had never heard French properly
spoken, my transcription was far from adequate. “ Bugsy” Morrill’s

PS
General Biology was not very interesting because botany and zoology
were then merely systems of classification. Bugsy saved his more

U
interesting materials— such things as a dried, partially dissected body

RO
of a young girl and a bear’s os penis— for his advanced courses. He was
interested in the health of his students, and when there was an
epidemic of colds, he would come into the classroom with an oily

G
mixture smelling of eucalyptus and put drops into all our upturned
noses. One day Gardner W eed had the misfortune to cough two or
S
three times, and Bugsy left the room and returned with a microscope
K
slide on which he had scooped up a large lump of Vaseline. He asked
O

W eed to open his mouth and scraped the lump off on his teeth, telling
BO

him to hold it in his mouth as long as he possibly could. Weed was

the aesthete of the freshman class, and we divided our attention for
the rest of the hour between Bugsy's lecture and Weed's efforts to
EX

control himself.
I don't know why I took Greek. I had had four years of Latin
in high school, but another classical language must have been re­
D

quired. The first year was taught by “ Bull” Durham, not a very clas­
IN

sical type, but I rather enjoyed it. Public Speaking, on which Hamilton
prided itself, was compulsory for four years. Professor Lewis, known
as “ Cal,” had written the freshman textbook, with pictures of a
middle-aged female in a turn-of-the-century costume demonstrating
speech sounds with her far from lovely pharynx. Our instructor was
“ Swampy” Marsh. The class met in the chapel and a few students
spoke at each session. Once in a while someone would flick a penny
onto the platform. At my first rehearsal Swampy made suggestions
and noted them on the copy of the speech I had memorized. In my
first paragraph I was to clarify the pronunciation of the a in “ eco­
nomic abyss” and the o in “ European.” At the beginning of the second
paragraph I was to shift my position on the stage. I was to emphasize

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the word “ incredible” and not swallow the “ is” in “ so far as recent
American history is concerned.” I was to be sure that “ history” had
three syllables. In all these courses I got B ’s, but in mathematics
“ Brownie,” as we called Professor Brown, gave me A ’s both semesters.
The course covered algebra and trigonometry, and I had been well
prepared.
The course I enjoyed most during my freshman year was “ Smut”
Fancher’s English Composition. Smut was a man easy to view with

PS
contempt, but he was responsible for perhaps more of the better
features of Hamilton College life than any other faculty member.

U
He was homosexual and had made advances toward a student or two,
but no one would testify against him, and the administration had

RO
allowed him to stay on, doubtless with stern warnings.
He conducted the college choir and was one of those who, like

G
“ Doc” Davison of Harvard, elevated college singing above the level of
“ The Bulldog on the Bank.” He also directed the Charlatans, the
S
productions of which suffered because female parts were played by
K
male students— a tradition perpetuated perhaps a little longer than
O

necessary because of Smut’s predilections.

He encouraged us to believe that he knew literary people and was
BO

himself a writer. I never saw any of his work, but he knew how to
teach writing. His senior class read, criticized, and graded freshman
themes, Smut himself reviewing the seniors’ comments and grades
EX

and adding comments of his own. (He was a stickler for spelling and
deducted one letter grade for each misspelled word.) In class he
D

read one or two papers each day and discussed them at length. The
IN

first of mine he read was a report of a lecture on Petrarch by a visiting

scholar, and I was astonished at how effectively he did it: “ . . . Pe­
trarch’s life was spent in learning: and when this varied, unconven­
tional, politically involved, yet artistically inspired career was snuffed
out, they found him— with his books.” Fancher hammed that last
line beautifully.
A week later, assigned “ One of My Interests,” I wrote preten­
tiously about the opera, with some shameful faking.

You are in a magnificent theatre, large and richly decorated.

You sink into a soft chair, glance through a program, notice the occu­
pants of the boxes with which you are familiar [those girls from

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PARTICULARS OF MY LIFE

finishing school!], then, as the curtain rises, surrender yourself to the

author and composer. You are his for a few hours. . . . With the least
exertion on your part, thoughts and emotions are put in your mind
that in no other way could become yours so easily.
Opera does not affect everyone in this manner. Before you can
taste of its pleasures, you must go through tedious hours of study
and tolerance of what may seem to you at first to be “ noise. . . . ”

The tedious hours were, of course, the hours I spent listening to Ward

PS
Palmer’s records and playing bits of the scores of three or four operas
on my saxophone.

U
RO
in Pennsylvania to a long-

G
T he t r a n s it io n fro m a sm all tow n

established college in New York State was not without its problems.
S
In Susquehanna the older Irish had a rich brogue, and a bit of it
K
survived in their children and even grandchildren. Most of the Italians
continued to speak broken English, M y grandfather dropped his
O

aitches and said automobill, and Miss Graves said something close
BO

to ruff for roof, but in general we all spoke what I thought was standard
English. Until I reached Hamilton College.
W hen I first met with Cal Lewis to rehearse an appearance in
EX

Public Speaking, he asked whether I had ever had speech therapy.

Among other things, he mentioned the way I emphasized connectives.
D

I tended to say, "W hat is man that thou are mindful of him?” and
only with concentration could I say, “ W hat is man that thou art
IN

mindful of him?” I used a great many unnecessary up’s— I did not

clean my room, I cleaned it up; I did not wrap a package, I wrapped
it up. Brownie's wife, who called herself Mrs. Seeley-Brown, once
commented on the fact that I used yet for still. (In my diary I wrote,
“ I am working at the store yet.” )
In Susquehanna most words ending in -dous were pronounced
-jous. I grew up saying tremenjous and stupendous and continued to
do so through college. Forehead had two strong syllables; it did not
rhyme with horrid. Creek was pronounced crick. Much of my vocabu­
lary was acquired from books, especially in art and music, and when in

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class one day I referred to music by the composer Du-vor-ok, Gardner

Weed whirled around and exclaimed, “ Dvorzhak!”
Been we pronounced ben, and my professor in American Liter­
ature, “ Chubby” Ristine, once tricked me by asking me to comment
on Whittier’s

For of all sad words of tongue or pen,

The saddest are these: “ It might have been!”

PS
He asked the class what was wrong, and when my hand shot up, he

U
called on me, knowing perfectly well that I should have made the

RO
words rhyme. I replied that it could have been “ might have bean/' and
that evoked Chubby’s dry little laugh.
I was learning a new life in other ways, not all of which gave me

G
any great assurance. M y roommate, “ Stew” Brownell, was a sardonic
S
teacher. W hen I began to smoke cigarettes, it took me some time to
K
learn how to hold one and once, walking on a street in Utica, I threw
a butt in the gutter and stopped to grind it under my shoe. Stew was
O

with me, and he said, “ That’s right, Fred. Be sure you put it out.” In
BO

Albany on the way to a football game he and I went to a barbershop

and I had a haircut, shampoo, and facial. As I paid and left, there were
puzzling glances and smiles among the barbers, and outside Stew
EX

said to me, “ I suppose you give a big tip for a job like that.” I had
never tipped a barber in my life.
D

I was slow in making another adjustment. In the Susquehanna

High School our teachers were our friends; they were not out to prove
IN

us wrong, nor were we out to harass them. And we were friends

among ourselves. Those who answered questions were not suspected
of currying favor. W e knew nothing of the leveling practices which
keep members of a large class in line, and it never occurred to me
that other students would censure me for volunteering an answer.
But most of the freshmen at Hamilton had come from large high
schools in which a student who answered too often was punished in
one way or another by his peers. I was slow in discovering this, and
unfortunately, sensing my inadequate preparation, I was particularly
anxious to display what I knew.
One day in Freshman Composition, Smut read something from

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P A R T IC U L A R S O F M Y L IF E

a paper containing the expression “ very interested” and looked out

over the class quizzically. My hand shot up. “ I was taught to say very
much interested,” I said. It was a lie. I may have read something i
about treating past participles as adjectives, but I had not had that
kind of instruction, and it was quite true that I was advancing my j
own interests unfairly. The class no doubt punished me, although ;
I do not recall the murmur or groan that the comment deserved.
The result of my insensitivity to the counter-control exercised

PS
by my fellows was a reputation for conceit. This was my father’s old
problem, and with him it arose from similar circumstances. I did not

U
feel that I was superior to my fellow students; I simply wanted to make
it clear that I was not inferior. And were we not all there to better

RO
ourselves?

G
S
H a m il t o n C was a mile from the small town of Clinton
o lleg e
K
and nine miles from the city of Utica. I occasionally walked into
O

Clinton to mail or retrieve my laundry case or get my hair cut, and

I sometimes joined a friend on an excursion into Utica on the trolley
BO

i. — to see a movie, perhaps, and to have a good dinner at Harding’s

t Restaurant. But it was then just a matter of taking the trolley back
to Clinton and walking to the Hill. One or two of the better fra­
EX

ternities had social connections in Utica, but Beta Kappa was a

Johnny-come-lately.
D

Sexual activity was largely verbal. It was confined to dirty jokes

and allusions to old conquests. There were a few copies of La V ie
IN

Parisienne around, in the cartoons of which girls were sometimes

drawn with bare breasts. There was a pulp magazine called Captain
B illy s W hiz Bang, but the naughtiest story I remember was this:
A man sits down beside a woman on a train and they both doze off
a bit, and when the man leaves the train, he says goodbye and adds,
“ I hope to sleep with you again sometime.”
Those who took advanced Latin with “ Trot” Chase had access
to some really juicy stuff, and I learned from one of them about the
device called a dildo. W e occasionally received titillating advertise­
ments for books by Aphra Behn, de Sade, and Masoch, and I sent for

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one or two, but they were so heavily bowdlerized, or my understand­

ing so inadequate, that I got nothing out of them. Later I bought a
copy of Ben Hecht’s Fantasius Mallare, in the decorative line drawings
of which phalluses could be identified and in which someone was
characterized as a pisser-against-the-wind. The book had drawn a jail
sentence for Hecht, and the sexual hunger at Hamilton can be esti­
mated from the fact that when I lent it to a friend in another
fraternity, he returned it months later dog-eared and with a broken

PS
spine, after having gone the rounds of all his brothers.
Fall and spring house parties were almost our only chances to be

U
with girls. Our guests stayed in the Beta Kappa house, which had

RO
been cleaned for the occasion, while students doubled up with friends
in the dormitories on the Hill. For one party I decorated the hall with
silhouettes of musical instruments. W e were on our best social be­
havior. In the evening we wore our tuxedos, and I began to smoke
Pall Mall Ovals, which came in a red-and-gold box and made me
G
S
K
feel very distinguished. There was almost no drinking.
For my first party the cousin of a roommate was found as my
O

date. As soon as I had a chance, I opened up with my leg-feeling

BO

technique but was staunchly resisted. The girl explained vaguely

that she was “ sick/' but I did not understand her, and she did not
understand why I did not. Could she mean venereal disease? It was
EX

only after the party was over that my roommate explained that his
cousin had been menstruating. It was the first time I had heard of
the problem.
D
IN

On into Utica I wandered

o n e o f th o s e l o n e l y S a t u r d a y e x c u rs io n s

into a bookshop on the third floor of a building on Bleecker Street.

The shelves were painted a soft blue, and on a table near the front
window were current books, most of them from a world I found brave
and new.
The shop was run by Mary Ogden, the wife of a Utica business­
man. She was attractive and sympathetic, and she served tea. I eventu­
ally read some of my poems to her. She asked me if I had heard about
a man named Freud and spelled out the name. I thought she was

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referring to a cartoonist in the New York W orld named Frueh, but

she corrected me, and explained a little of what Freud was writing
about. She also told me about the Saunders family, whom I was to
meet the following year when they returned to Hamilton. Professor
Saunders, she told me, went to symphonies not so much to hear the
music as to observe the conductor’s style. I was greatly impressed.
I bought a few books— a deckle-edge copy of some poems by
Stephen Crane, bound in heavy gray cardboard, a copy of Ethan

PS
Frome, a boxed and autographed special edition of W illa Cather’s
One of Ours, which had just appeared, and Louis Untermeyer’s

U
M odern British Poetry with the editor's name inscribed on the flyleaf.
I also bought a book called Homes in America containing a few

RO
colored plates, and sent it to my parents with a rather maudlin
inscription of which I was soon ashamed, I wrote a short short story
about it two or three years later:
G
S
Father and mother had laughed at Henry’s first letters. Prosaic
K
descriptions of college, the food, and his health, but with them an
occasional unguarded note of homesickness. This pleased father and
O

mother. They felt proud and happy that being away from home was
BO

hurting their son. It proved to them something they had sometimes

doubted: that he really loved them.
His overtones of homesickness increased as the months passed
EX

until a book came, carefully planned to reach home on mother and

father’s wedding anniversary. It was a large book, a gift edition in blue
and gold, called Beautiful Homes of History. On the first page was
D

carefully written:
IN

"To father and mother, whose home surpasses the beauty and
holiness of any of these. Henry.”
Mother read it with moist eyes, and hated to have father smile at it.
She did feel a little uncertain about it; but then, it was so unexpected!
It really wds dear of Henry! They both felt peculiarly happy. But after
it was put on top of the bookstand, father occasionally laughed at it;
and sometimes mother smiled too, although it made her feel guilty.
Two months afterward Henry came home for the holidays. But
during the first hour when he told them his joyous history, no one
spoke of the book. No one even spoke of homesickness. Mother
looked at the boy before her, and wondered about Beautiful Homes.

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There was something incongruous there, between the inscription and

Henry.
That night before she went to bed she went to the bookstand
and ran her fingers over the cool gold letters on the blue cover. She
read the words in a whisper: “ Beautiful Homes of History.” Then with
a little swell of feeling she lifted the cover.
But the first page had been removed with a sharp knife.

PS
M y sexual naïveté led to an embarrassing moment one day at
the Book Shop. One of Mrs. Ogden's friends was there, and I was

U
presented to her as an “ aspiring young poet” from the Hill. I had
been reading T he Diary of a Young G irlr a book published, I think,

RO
anonymously which I associate with Vienna via either Schnitzler or
Freud. In it the young diarist tells of seeing a couple making love, and

G
I felt very liberated as I reported to the two Utica matrons that she
said that they kissed each other “ all over." I was immediately aware
S
that I had said more than I knew.
K
The following summer the Literary Digest, to which we still sub­
O

scribed, asked readers to submit lists of the ten best American novels
of the first quarter of the century. The following October it reported
BO

that
. . . B. Frederic Skinner, of Scranton, Pennsylvania who is not yet out
EX

of college sends a list “ mainly to cast a vote for ‘Ethan Frome/ ” Mrs.
Wharton’s most widely appreciated story. “ It could easily have been
cluttered with trite New England characters,” says this admirer, “and
D

made to fill over 400 pages. Thanks to heaven that it wasn’t!”

IN

1
I don’t remember the other nine on my list. don't believe Ï had read
ten modern American novels, if you excluded Kazan, Lavender and
O ld Lace, A G irl of the Limberlost, Booth Tarkington's Penrod, and
a few things by O. Henry.

I w as e a r n in g that as an “ aspiring young poet," for

d e s c r ip t io n

I was turning out a good deal of (albeit pretty maudlin) stuff. Nothing
in Fancher’s course could have encouraged me along that path. For
one assignment I submitted a sonnet beginning:

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I sometimes think the everlasting pine,

Endowed with strength and long enduring grace,
Is boastful of its nature-favored race
And seeks out isolation by design. . . .

W ould it not exchange its ever-graceful state “ for one short month of
summer’s ornament” ? “ Too many end-stopped lines” was my senior's
only comment, which Smut allowed to stand.
More helpful influences were my autographed copy of Unter-

PS
mever’s Modern British Poetry and my slim volume by Stephen Crane.
In another assignment for Fancher I had written a letter to the

U
editor of the Dial commending him for publishing something of

RO
Crane's, adding, “ I hope that I may go on with his work, feeling, as
do many of our Modems, that conventional forms of poetry are
capable of improvement.” But I was far from demonstrating any
capability.
G
Fortunately for the historian of literature, all my freshman work
S
can be identified because it was typed with a blue ribbon, and more­
K
over I often put down the date of composition. February 1, 1923, will
O

long be remembered as the day I wrote:

BO

The wind is sad—

Mournful is the wind.
EX

In the silver night

Swift, winding veils of streaming snow
D

Enshroud the trees.

Caught in the agonies of death,
IN

They stretch
Their arms to heaven,
And are wrapped
In sifting shrouds.

Only six days later I was again visited by the divine afflatus with
this result:

HELEN

If I could understand
The molten blood

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Pan IV

That drips from the ladle of the moon,

Or the voiceless mists that rise
From a frozen sea;
Then, Helen,
Might I understand thee, too.

and on the same day this:

A CINQUAIN

PS
Three things
Reflect the fire

U
Of ages: * * moonlit pearls * *

RO
Deep rubies near a candle flame * *
Your eyes.

1 was looking for things to be poetic about,

York State supplied an example: G and winter in New
S
K
THE ICICLE
O

It grew with the moon .. .

began like a silver needle
BO

when the moon was young.

Each night I saw it . . .

how each day it grew and stopped
EX

at dusk when the moon came.

On my floor, in the criss-cross shadows

D

that the lattice made,

IN

it cast a figure . . .

And when the moon was grown

it was large . . . gigantic . . .
like a glass tree growing downward.

Then in the waning

it withered . . . shrank all day
and at night wept steadily . . .

Half maddened I lay . . . listening

to the drip of its tears . . . then
. . . a crash . . .

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The shadow sped to the window

and out . . .
and down to itself.

“ Oh, coward/’ I cried,

“ you were not brave enough to face
slow death. . . . ”

I was not in fact much moved by the demise of that icicle, but

PS
another death touched me deeply. In January of my freshman year
my grandmother Burrhus became seriously ill. Starkweather’s flannels

U
could not save her, and she died. I went back to Susquehanna for my
first close experience with death. She was laid out in the spare bed­

RO
room, and people came to call and murmur their expressions of
sympathy. A friend arrived with a small daughter who had lived up­

G
stairs in the duplex on Broad Street. The child had been fond of my
grandmother and was puzzled by what she saw, but everyone seemed
S
embarrassed, and no one tried to explain. Finally I said to her, “ She
K
is asleep/’ and that satisfied her. I was aware that I was behaving as
people behaved in the books my grandmother had read. W hen I went
O

back to Hamilton I wrote a poem which, for once, expressed some­

BO

thing I really felt—and perhaps for that reason was one of my worst:

CHRISTMAS CACTUS
EX

Oh, ugly, loutish, selfish thing,

She cared for you
When you were naked, flowerless,
D

The whole year through.

IN

But each Noel you gave your gift,

A blood-red flower:
and selfish, too, it scarcely lived
A transient hour.

Long year on year, she gave to you

A mother’s care.
Then one Noel—your blood-red gift
You did not bear.

Oh, ugly plant, did you discern

What was to be?

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Knew you that soon she could no more

Keep watch o’er thee?

She went, but you remembered all.

In her last hour
You bore to her, most gratefully
A blood-red flower.

I had written little or nothing in Susquehanna from which one

PS
might have predicted the volume or the character of the poetry I wrote
during my freshman year. The chance to publish in the Hamilton

U
Literary Magazine— two of my poems were judged worthy that year—

RO
made a difference, of course, but it does not explain the mawkish
sentimentality. I was not homesick, nor was I, strictly speaking, love-
lorn. But there were no girls in my daily life and I missed them.

G
The few who lived in Clinton were either pre-empted by upperclass­
men or closely guarded by their parents or reputed to have venereal
S
disease. I remember walking the streets in physical pain from the
K
lack of someone to put my arms around. Poetry may have helped.
O
BO

I spen t m y E aster traveling with the glee club. W e per­

v a c a t io n
EX

formed in a number of towns where there were Hamilton alumni,

usually staying with Hamilton families. The tour ended near New
York City, and I came by sleeper to Scranton on Sunday morning, a
D

week after Easter. M y brother and I took our parents to church (they
IN

had begun to go oftener than in Susquehanna) and then drove down­

town, where we joined a friend of his, Alex Clark. W e all had sundaes
in a drugstore and then drove back to our house.
M y brother asked us to wait in the car while he went in to the
toilet. After a rather long time he came out in great distress and said
he had a very bad headache and had taken several aspirins. He went
back into the house, and we followed him upstairs. He was in great
pain and frightened. He lay down on his bed and cried, “ Get a doc­
tor!” Since we had so recently moved to the city, we had not acquired
a family doctor, but Alex knew of one nearby and phoned him, and
he came within fifteen minutes. Meanwhile my brother had become

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unconscious. Food was flowing out of his mouth, though he was not
retching or actively vomiting. W hen the doctor arrived, I said, “ My
brother has fainted.” He took off a shoe and stocking, stroked the
sole of my brother s foot, and said, “ It’s a pretty deep faint.”
I told him my father and mother were in church and asked
whether I should go for them, and he said I should. I drove to the
church, about two miles away, and asked one of the ushers to tell my
father and mother to come out. I told them that Ebbe was ill, but

PS
spared the details, and then drove them home. I drove very fast, and
my mother, not knowing how serious the matter was, complained of

U
being jounced about.
W hen we reached the house, our maid was standing on the front

RO
porch, wringing her hands and crying, “ Ebbe’s gone! Ebbe’s gone!”
W e rushed into the house and upstairs and found the doctor arranging

G
my brother’s body. It was true; he was dead. M y mother threw her
arms around the still warm, soft body, and my father in a kind of
S
trance walked from room to room saying, “ For heaven's sake, for
K
heaven’s sake.”
The Presbyterian minister had noticed the disturbance at the
O

back of the church and made inquiries. He came out to see if he could
BO

be of help. He asked if we would like a little prayer. No one of us

felt any particular need for it, but we dutifully said yes, and he prayed,
quietly and possibly to some effect.
EX

There was an autopsy, and the cause of death was given as acute
indigestion. Vomiting was a conspicuous symptom, and there was
D

some inflammation of related organs. But it was nothing more than

a routine check of parts of the abdomen by a “ pathologist,” and a
IN

medical friend to whom I showed the report many years later threw
it down in disgust. His best guess was that my brother had died of a
massive cerebral hemorrhage, possibly due to a congenital weakness
in a blood vessel.
His death had a devastating effect on us. M y grandmother
Burrhus’s death was not unexpected; this was an entirely different kind
of thing— utterly senseless and almost impossible to accept. M y grand­
father Burrhus and my grandfather and grandmother Skinner came
from Susquehanna and were as stunned and disoriented as my parents.
M y grandfather Skinner was proud of my brother and me and liked to

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see us enjoying ourselves, but it was not in his nature to be actively

affectionate. Nevertheless, he loved us, and standing by the body of
my brother as it lay in its coffin, I heard him say, “ If I could only
change places with that boy!" I have not the slightest doubt he would
have done so if he could.
Dozens of cars full of people came from Susquehanna for the
funeral— even Mr. and Mrs. C. Fred Wright. A score of friends my
brother had made in less than a year at Central High in Scranton came

PS
too. My father bought a plot in a cemetery not far from our house,
and there my brother was buried. And when it was all over my grand­

U
parents went back to Susquehanna and I to Hamilton College.

RO
Several years before, Clarence W right had persuaded my father
that it was only good business to take out insurance on his sons. He
was going to spend a good deal of money on their education and

G
should be protected against loss. A month or two after my brother’s
death my father received a check from the insurance company. Cash­
S
ing it was one of the most painful acts of his life.
K
Poorly prepared for almost everything he did, my father was
O

totally unprepared for sorrow. He soon plunged into writing a book,

BO

which became the standard authority on workmen’s compensation law

in Pennsylvania, and dedicated it:
EX

In Memory
of
My Son Edward
D

This work was undertaken to afford distraction

IN

from the effects of his untimely passing.

The following summer he came home from his office one noon
when I was playing the piano. He sat with my mother on the divan
in the living room waiting for lunch to be served. I began to play
Rimski-Korsakov's “ Song of India,” and after a few moments my
mother called softly. I turned and saw that my father had fallen over
sideways on the divan, as a doll might fall, and was weeping.
Just as I allowed myself to be tied to that classroom seat by two
hazing sophomores, so I submitted to that tragic loss with little or
no struggle. At one moment on a fair Sunday morning I was telling

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P A R T IC U L A R S O F M Y L IF E

my brother about my college experiences (he was pleased when I told

him that I had let my sideburns grow, though I had shaved them back
that morning in the washroom on the sleeper), and fifteen minutes
later he was dead. There was nothing I could do. It was Alex Clark
who called the doctor, and when he came, I could only stand by and
watch. The doctors who performed the autopsy asked me about the
symptoms, and I described among other things the rather strange way
in which my brother vomited—with no coughing or retching. They

PS
told my father that my objectivity was helpful. W ith the same ob­
jectivity I had watched my parents as they reacted to the discovery

U
that my brother was dead.
But I was far from unmoved. I once made an arrowhead by bend­

RO
ing the top of a tin can into a flattened cone. I fastened it to the end
of an arrow, and when I shot it straight up into the air, it fell back

G
and struck my brother in the shoulder, drawing blood. Many years
later I remembered the event with a shock when I heard Laurence
S
Olivier speaking Hamlet’s lines:
K

. . . Let my disclaiming from a purpos'd evil

O

Free me so far in your most generous thoughts,

BO

That I have shot mine arrow o'er the house,

And hurt my brother.

M y brother and I had never competed for the same things. Our
EX

tastes, intellectual interests, and avocations were different. He was

much closer to my father and mother, but even so I had been, if any­
D

thing, too close. Escape had been the dominant theme in my de-
parture for college. And now, with my brother’s death, I was to be
IN

drawn back into the position of a family boy. It was a position I had
never wanted, and it was to become increasingly troublesome in the
years ahead.

I n o u r f i n a l f r e s h m a n t h e m e , Smut asked us to describe the

change we had undergone during one year in college, and here is
part of what I wrote:

In the fall of 1922, a boy was matriculated at Hamilton College.

He was from a small town, reared in a sympathetic home, and trained

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in a school of interested teachers. Intent upon building a well-trained

brain, he eagerly anticipated the new life and the Great Change.
To this boy college was to be four years of earnest study in
subjects he enjoyed. His home and school, he thought, had shown him
the necessity for certain kinds of knowledge, and now the work of
building his mind was before him. What a joyous task it was to be!
With what interest he would watch his mental powers expand, growing
proficient in the things he wanted to do!

PS
Eight months later, indifferent to the world, the boy looked upon
a broken air castle. College had proved a disappointment. The Great
Change was far from the change he had expected, and bitterly he

U
wrote:

RO
“The only broadening one year of Hamilton has given me is the
enlargement of my own self-centered microcosm; the only agility of
mind I have acquired is wasting itself in a ruinous flight toward
selfishness.”
G
It needed barely one month of the first term to show the boy he
S
had misjudged college. There was no majority of students who enjoyed
K
study, who frequented the library' voluntarily. He found that he was
O

almost alone in his pursuit of literature, and that he was actually

jeered at for spending time on a book when other boys were supporting
BO

athletics. But as he stayed longer, he began to see the cause of it all,

and even began to feel his own desire for study leave him. . . . He
wrote:
EX

“They’re making me do too many things I don’t want to do. They

say these are things that I need; yet, while they may know a lot about
what the average person needs, they don’t know half as much about
D

me as I do.”
IN

. . . In his fight to retain his individuality, and with his mutated

notion of college, the boy rapidly changed his point of view toward
other subjects. He looked upon himself as isolated. He became critical,
almost cynical. His tastes changed. He had fits of brooding over heavy
music. He read pessimistic or morbid books. He became unable at
times to appreciate humor. He came to derive his only pleasure from
lonely walks and poor verse writing. . . .
The Great Change has been wrought. The college, anticipated as
an incentive, has become a burden; the new world has proved too
unsympathetic; the boy’s view- of life—

Fancher kept these papers and gave them back to us in our senior
vear.

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PARTICULARS OF MY LiFE

# * *

I cam e back to S a total stranger, and my parents had not

cranto n

yet come to know many people through whom I could make friends.
Mr. and Mrs. Torrey took us to dinner, but they were in their seventies,
and we saw little of them. My father played golf with the company's
chief mining engineer, a man of considerable distinction whose wife
was brilliant but incapacitated by asthma. An older daughter was

PS
married to an expatriate in Paris whose name I was to hear again,
but the younger daughter was not a promising companion. I was

U
invited to a rather swank party at her home, and during the evening
she took me to her room and showed me a small jewel case half full

RO
of the fingernail and toenail clippings she was saving.
The company surgeon, Dr. Fulton, did not play golf but we

G
were occasionally invited to his house for Sunday-night supper. The
Fultons had two daughters, one of whom, Nell, was studying the
S
organ with Charles Courboin, and through her I met a few musical
K
people. Courboin was well known in international circles, and it may
O

have been through his intercession that Nell was asked to play a piano
quintet with the Flonzaley Quartet when it came to Scranton. She
BO

was not up to Flonzaley standards but the performance went off with­
out incident. (Nell had less luck the following year when she gave a
recital at the Century Club and found herself trapped by a faulty
EX

memory. She kept going back to an earlier point in a piece and was
finally compelled to leave it unfinished and walk off the stage.) I went
D

to a reception for the Flonzaley Quartet the evening after their con­
cert and made some condescending remark to one of the players
IN

about Scranton audiences, and he dismissed me quite appropriately

by saying that music depended upon audiences.
M y parents were far happier with their old friends in Susque­
hanna and they began to invite eight or ten of them down for a day,
perhaps to spend the afternoon and have dinner at the Country Club.
M y father first met the Jewish problem when his old friend Sid Hersh
asked whether he and his wife would be welcome at the Country
Club. Fortunately they were, although they probably could not have
joined at that time. I too turned to old friends that first summer and
went back to Susquehanna two or three times. I stayed with the Skin­

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Part W

ners but saw more of Mr. B and my distant cousin who was keeping
house for him. Gran’ma Graham was bedridden, and my mother in­
sisted that I call on her. Jess Haller and Nellie Graham were taking
care of her, but there were no longer any boarders.
I saw some of my old girls, especially Chi Bennett, who had
gone to Pennsylvania State College. She had always been slightly more
sophisticated than I, and she held the advantage as we grew older. It
was she who taught me how to kiss properly. Another old girl had

PS
“ had to get married,” as my mother put it, and since I had never been
able to make any progress with her, I was surprised and retrospectively

U
jealous.

RO
My cousin invited a friend to visit her, and Kenny Craft and I
took them out in my grandfather’s car. The friend and I sat in the back
seat, and when we parked on a dark road, we began to kiss. I was still

G
concentrating on the leg, and for the first time I met no resistance. My
hand went all the way up. But it did not seem like the right occasion
S
for copulation, and I did not know what else to do. W hen I saw my
K
cousin and her friend the next morning, it was clear that the evening
O

had been discussed and that I had been dismissed as an ignorant and
BO

fumbling lout.
I started to play golf, largely because my father urged me to do so.
I bought knickers, elaborately patterned woolen socks, and shoes with
EX

soft cleats. I bought a driver, a brassy, a midiron, a mashie, and a

putter, and a heavy bag to carry them in. W e hired caddies (carrying
one’s own golf bag was just not done), and I played only with my
D

father and his friends.

IN

W e were not yet very clear about our social position in Scranton.
W e were upwardly mobile but we had not yet discovered how far we
were to go. Certain limits revealed themselves when we took a short
vacation together. W e decided to go to the seashore. W e had heard
about Asbury Park, and we drove there and checked into one of the
large hotels. It was a noisy place; the dining room was crowded; the
food was poor and badly served; and the beach was dirty. W e left after
a day and drove south along the coast. At Spring Lake we passed the
Essex and Sussex Hotel, and my father went in and found that we
could get rooms.
It was certainly not like Asbury Park. Most of the guests were

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PARTICU LARS O F MY L IF E

women and children whose husbands and fathers spent the summer in
W all Street and came down for weekends. There was a large lounge^
in which a trio of piano, violin, and cello played tea music in the
afternoon and dinner music at night. The beach was not good, and
no one seemed to swim, but there was a walk, of wooden slats, along
the dune-like shore. Most of the guests were well known by the em­
ployees, who quickly decided not to know us.
The dining room was under the control of a despotic headwaiter.

PS
At dinner one night I noticed a rather attractive young wife with two
children at an adjacent table. She caught me looking at her and

U
seemed annoyed. W hen she caught me a second time, she spoke to
the headwaiter, and at the next meal we were put at a different table.

RO
One evening I came to dinner wearing a buttoned sweater, and as we
left the dining room the headwaiter said to my father, “ Please have

G
the young man wear a coat in the dining room.” My mother smothered
a cry. W e had made a mistake.
S
There was absolutely nothing to do. There were one or two un­
K
attached girls, but they were not attractive. In any case, I did not know
O

how to approach them, and I knew that if I did so, my parents would
want to meet them a little too soon. I envied a smart young man who
BO

drove up to the hotel in a sports car and turned it over to the door­
man, to whom he flipped a large coin and from whom he got an
appreciative “ Thank you, sir." W hile my mother had her nap, my
EX

father and I took our bags and drove to a golf links which was open
to guests of the hotel, but that covered only a small part of the day.
D

In the evening we walked along the shore on that slatted walk and
IN

then sat in the lobby and listened to the trio until we could decently
go to bed.
I was as miserable as I have ever been, and I am sure my father
and mother were scarcely less so. They stayed on because it seemed
to be the way in which successful people took a vacation. It is not so
easy to say why I stayed with them.

My was a great step forward, even though only two

so p h o m o re y e a r

courses were interesting. I began to get something out of Greek. W e

read the Iliad, and the text was printed in a style of Greek letter which

2 14
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Part IV

has always seemed to me particularly beautiful. Professor Fitch's nick­

name— “ Little Greek"—was no doubt acquired when he was a junior
member of the staff. At each meeting he would punctiliously write
out our assignment on the blackboard— so many lines, to be found
on such-and-such a page—and at the next meeting we translated
them. Some students used a “ trot/' but I dug out the Greek and
reached a stage— as with the A eneid in high school— in which I
read and thought at least fragments of a classical work in the language

PS
itself. Somebody had set up a prize for sight-reading Greek. W e were
given a passage from a part of the Iliad we had not covered and were

U
asked to translate it without benefit of a dictionary. M y translation

RO
could not have been very accurate; it was certainly not distinguished
for its style; but I won.
I got much more out of a course on the French theatre taught

G
by “ Bill Shep.” W illiam H. Shepherd, a specialist in Provençal, was
the most distinguished scholar on the faculty— so distinguished, in
S
fact, that real French scholars came to visit him. He was a lean, angular
K
man who whistled softly when speaking French. I was recovering from
O

my inadequate preparation and was enormously impressed by the

dignity and poise of Corneille and Racine. W e read Molière as well,
BO

and Marivaux with his marivaudage, and moderns like Hervieu and
Bernstein. I liked the archetypal pattern of Hervieu’s La Course du
flambeau: one generation receives the torch from the preceding and
EX

passes it on to the following. That was my father’s notion of progress,

my mother’s of service, and Asa Gray’s of the radish, and it was be­
D

coming my own.
IN

I particularly liked Rostand. I was fascinated by Cyrano de Ber­

gerac and went to see Walter Hampden in Brian Hooker’s translation
in New York that winter. For my final term paper (en français) I
analyzed Rostand's La Princesse lointaine. I usually studied during the
day, almost always in the morning and almost never in the evening,
but in writing that essay I stayed up all night, busily consulting gram­
mar and dictionary to bolster my far from idiomatic French, looking
a little like Oscar Wilde writing Salome in that cartoon I had seen in
my bibliography.
“ Bob" Rudd, who taught a General Introduction to English
Literature, was not at all like Miss Graves. He was a perennially
boyish enthusiast who occasionally told slightly risqué anecdotes

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PARTICULARS OF MY LIFE

about the people we were studying. I also took a course called “ PhiL
1- 2 , Psychology, Logic" with "B ill" Squires, who had taken his degree
under the great psychologist Wilhelm W undt, at Leipzig, but who
called himself a philosopher. He dressed impeccably in dark gray, in
a rather antique style, and strutted about the campus in a posture
which suggested that he was just on the point of falling over backward.
The only psychology in the course was a brief demonstration of the
two-point limen, in which Dr. Squires applied a pair of dividers

PS
to his forearm and quickly returned them to his desk drawer. By way
of logic we memorized the Scholastic mnemonic for types of syllogisms

U
which begins “ Barbara, Celarent, Darii, Ferioque,” and it was im­
plied that we were thus prepared to solve any logical problem that

RO
might come our way. Dr. Squires's favorite course was on Kant, and,
for all I know, he taught it well. One final examination paper was so

G
nearly perfect that he went to Utica and had a jeweler engrave HH
(High Honor—the Hamilton equivalent of A) on a small disk of
S
gold, which he gave to the student.
K
O
BO

M y m a i n a d v a n c e in my sophomore year was extra-curricular. The

student who had been killed in the hazing accident was W illiam
Duncan Saunders, the charming and brilliant son of the Dean, who
EX

was also Professor of Chemistry. After his death the Saunders family
took a year’s leave and during my freshman year were in Paris. W hen
D

they returned, they asked Brownie to suggest someone to tutor their

son Blake in mathematics, and he suggested me. I called on Mrs.
IN

Saunders for an interview and was accepted. Blake, who was then
appropriately called "Frisk," was a sophisticated twelve-year-old who
wore tweed shorts and roamed the countryside with the Saunders
scotties. His room contained aquaria and vivaria of various sizes and
kinds, and he was not much interested in mathematics, but I got to
know the Saunders family and the house, and it was an entirely
new world.
Because Professor Saunders taught chemistry the students called
him “ Stink,” and somehow that unbecoming name acquired affec­
tionate overtones. I took his course that year and it was not exciting.

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Stink’s great love was peonies, and the house was hal£ surrounded by
great peony beds. He hybridized many beautiful types which are still
prized by fanciers. He also liked astronomy and on a clear night a long
brass telescope might be set up among the peonies and we would
look for Saturn's rings or the moons of Jupiter.
He also played the violin, and every week players came from
Utica for an evening of string quartets, to which I began to be in­
vited. A large music room with a fireplace at one end had been added

PS
to the house, and it was furnished in a nondescript style with pictures,
sculptures, great bowls of peonies in season, books, stacks of music,

U
and magazines I had never heard of, such as Broom. I remember

RO
seeing a letter from Ezra Pound about George Antheü, together with
a page from the score of Antheil’s Ballet mécanique with the words
“ c o m p l e t e l y p e r c u s s i v e ” printed diagonally across it. Stink was an

G
old warhorse of a violinist, and he led whatever players he could
assemble through a vast collection of quartets, with an occasional
S
piano quintet. W hen they tried something he had not played recently
K
or at all, he would call out a comment on a particularly good bit or
O

spot a resemblance to something else as he played. Once when they

were playing something by Mendelssohn, he shouted, “ Rotten de­
BO

velopment!” sawing away without stopping.

EX

E ach year M rs. S aunders took in two or three young people and
D

tutored them for college. One was Cynthia Ann Miller, the daughter
IN

of a Utica banker, with whom I fell passionately in love. W e went for

long walks through the Root woods, and when we came back we might
stop in to see Grace Root, the wife of Edward Root, who taught art,
and a close friend of Cynthia Ann’s, or have tea before the fire in the
Saunders music room. Cynthia Ann admired Katherine Mansfield to
the point of cutting her hair in Katherine Mansfield’s style, and she
read me some of her stories. I read her some of my poems, including
a sonnet about a string quartet.
An older student was interested in Cynthia Ann, and I came
into the music room one evening to find Stink and Frisk singing a
song Stink had picked up in a music store called “ Somebody Stole

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My G a l/’ under the title of which Stink had written: “ as sung by

George Perrine.” Unfortunately, this romantic idyll was not long-lived.
After a certain amount of unskillful sexual fumbling, Cynthia Ann
wrote me a long letter breaking off our relation, and I went for months
in an agony of unrequited love. I watched for her everywhere, and
my loneliness was excruciating. She went on to Radcliffe the following
year, and it was a long time before I saw her again.
M y love for Cynthia Ann was deep and painful but it was not

PS
primarily sexual. Indeed, I must have seemed sexually backward. An
episode at a house party in the spring of my sophomore year makes it

U
pretty obvious that sex was still a kind of game. W hile visiting a
fraternity brother in Freeport, Long Island, I had met some of the

RO
girls he knew there, and we invited two of them to Hamilton for a
house party. Eleanor, a pretty but rather chubby girl, was my date.
She was a devout Catholic, and Professor Bowles would have been
G
proud of the way she observed the principle of noli me tangere and
S
thus blocked the only courtship ritual I knew. Frances, my friend's
K
girl, had more chic and was obviously more liberal. Since I had driven
my mother from Scranton to be one of the chaperones, our Packard
O

was available, and at one point I persuaded Frances to go for a short

BO

drive. W e parked, and I began a kind of verbal seduction: should we

or shouldn't we? Eventually she said all right, we should, whereupon
I put my arms around her, gave her one dry kiss, and then released
EX

her and started the car to drive back. “ W as that all you wanted?” she
said, greatly surprised. Evidently it was; apparently I was simply prov­
D

ing that I could kiss my friend's girl.

I continued to make lonely safaris into Utica, and once I found
IN

a pretty young girl in charge of the Book Shop. I was so smitten tthat
I wrote an account of the meeting the next day, somewhat in the
manner of Samuel Pepys by way of Christopher Morley, whose col­
umns I read in the Saturday R eview :

To Utica this morning where I spent two hours till lunch with
Claudia Hatch in Mrs. Ogden's bookshop. I had never met her but we
fell to talking easily. She has read widely and evidently hurriedly and
talks on everything whether she knows about it or not, but she is so
frank that it is delightful superficiality.

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She is slim and attractive though rather young. Talked very

seriously about the “ aristocracy of intellect” and assured me that from
personal experience she knew there was no “ pure love.” She said she
was in love now but wasn’t true to him.
She makes herself attractive to the occasional patrons of the shop
with such a naive affectation that it is delightful to hear her. I listened
intently each time someone came in and once found that I had been
listening to her and making out at the same time to be intensely

PS
interested in some children’s book.
I sketched Cyrano for her, since she has not seen it, and I read a
couple of short lyrics I have just written. At the end of one she said it

U
was very good and asked me if I didn't think so. She was very anxious

RO
that I should because she had admitted that she herself was egoistic
and wanted company, so I said I thought it was very good. The truth
is, I do.

G
As we became acquainted, we grew less guarded. She became very
frank about sex literature and remarked that her mother was very mid-
S
Victorian, comparing her to Stuart Sherman's Cornelia. She said she
K
thought Sherman “ laughed” at his Cornelia but upon my suggestion
O

changed it to “ smiled." I told her I wanted a book very “ Russian”

to read. She seemed to interpret that freely and recommended Jurgen,
BO

which, as I have never read it, I took.

Joined John Gregory at lunch and over the orange pekoe he told
me about Claudia. Was so charmed I walked up and down the street
EX

afterwards for a half hour trying to think up an excuse to go back to

the shop.
D
IN

Tn t h e f a l l o f m y s o p h o m o r e y e a r I had several attacks of what later

proved to be appendicitis, a high incidence of which at Hamilton was

popularly blamed on the very hard water. I would lie on my bed in
agonizing pain, foolishly pounding my gut. In Scranton at Christmas­
time I told Dr. Fulton about it and he examined me and took my
appendix out. As a result I missed my fall-term finals and had to take
make-ups in the months which followed. Under the extra work I
developed tachycardia; my heart would suddenly begin to beat 130
to 140 times per minute. I called my father and, no doubt moved by
my brother's death, he urged me to come home at once. “ Come home

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and be my chauffeur/’ he said—a curious suggestion but I think an

affectionate one. I stayed at Hamilton, however, and got through the
make-ups and back on schedule during the spring term.
Fatigued by extra work and possibly concerned about my health,
I began to reconsider my bold announcement to Miss Graves that I
no longer believed in God. I heard bits of the King James Bible read
every morning in chapel, and some of the Sunday sermons were in­
teresting, though seldom theological. I liked many of the hymns.

PS
Kipling’s “ Recessional"—“ Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet/Lest we
forget, lest we forget” — was as meaningless as Nellie Melba’s “ Good­

U
bye/’ but almost as spine-tingling. Inevitably I argued religion with

RO
other students. In one of my papers for Smut Fancher I denounced
the cowardice and deceit of that religious man Friar Lawrence in
Rom eo and Juliet, but he was a Catholic. Bugsy Morrill, a scientist

G
I admired, taught Sunday school! Uneasy about all this, I went to Bill
Squires, who often took morning chapel in his most pompous manner.
S
W ith a voice quivering with emotion I said that I was worried be­
K
cause I had “ lost my faith.” He did little to help.
O

The Saunders family led me out of the difficulty. Stink could

BO

enjoy a chorale, oratorio, or cantata as secular music, and he “ took”

morning chapel and read bits from the Bible as literature. It was said
that he himself had conducted a secular funeral service for that bril­
EX

liant son killed in the hazing accident. I recovered my strength and

the issue gradually faded.
D
IN

In m y f r e s h m a n y e a r I had contributed only to the Hamilton Liter­

ary Magazine, but students could also publish original work in the
Royal Gaboon, specializing in college humor, and a column in the
student newspaper, Hamilton L ife, called “ Carpe D ie m " In one of
my Public Speaking assignments I criticized both of these, and near
the end of my sophomore year or possibly at the beginning of my
junior year a rejoinder appeared in “ Carpe D ie m " with an allusion to
Cynthia Ann. It was signed by Jay Kay, the nom de plume of John
K. Hutchens.

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Part IV

Sir Burrhus Goeth Forth

And he cometh upon a fair ladie. And the ladie was Farina, the
Miller’s daughter. And Sir Burrhus was fain to speak, thus:
“Dromoundes maugre percloos poynt paltockes rechate.”
Whereate first of all, the ladie Farina blusheth exceeding, for
Sir Burrhus had spoke ille indeede . . .

PS
I countered by submitting to “ Carpe Diem” a manual on how to

U
write puns for the Royal Gaboon. The battle line was drawn, and
there were skirmishes between Jay Kay and Sir Burrhus de Beerus

RO
during our junior year. An account by a third party appeared in
“ Carpe D iem ” :

G
Loud clanks armor as the stout knight rides,
S
Deep sink his rowels in his charger’s heaving sides,
K
Gold rimmed spectacles bouncing as he goes,
Upon the freckled bridging of his literary nose,
O

Deep eyes flashing 'neath his forehead pale—

BO

Burrhus is seeking his imaginary Grail I

Burrhus is challenged, as he leams right soon,

EX

Jay Kay charges with a “Till Death, Gaboon!”

Forward rushing on his gaily mottled ass,
Fool's bells dragging through the campus grass;
D

Poet and Jester clash on Carpe’s Field. . . .

IN

I was writing fewer poems, and the themes were changing. My

unhappy love affair had given rise to a certain cynicism:

LYRICS OF HATE
I. C.A.M.

I came to you with a weary heart

Faithless, and in fear.
I thought, “ This is a place apart/'
I thought, “ Love wanders here.”

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You were to me a holy place

With a white god above—
Until upon the pavement's face
I read, “ Here lieth Love.”

II. Triolet

You had the right to kill

Even so coldly.

PS
Bitter the death—but still
You had the right to kill.

U
Love's fate was yours to will,
Killing so boldly.

RO
You had the right to kill
Even so coldly.

G
In my freshman year I had sent some poems to a little magazine
S
and received an encouraging reply from a young woman on its board
K
of editors (it may have been Babette Deutsch). Another note, in the
spring of my sophomore year, was more exciting:
O
BO

College Hill
EX

Dear Fred,
On Saturday afternoon (the ljth ) Edna Ferbery Alex. Woollcott
D

and F.P.A. are to be here for tea. Hope you will be able to come in
then as 1 think you might be amused by them and I certainly know
IN

I should be glad to see you.

Sincerely yours,
Grace Root
14 May 1924

I was about to meet some great writers personally! I had run into
Woollcott briefly when he was staying at the Saunderses’, but Edna
Ferber and F.P.A.! Of course I went, and shook hands, and balanced
my teacup successfully. There was no very stimulating conversation
and I had no witty remarks to pass along to my friends, but at last
I knew what it was like to be “ in."

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Part IV

* * *

F o r a v a c a t i o n in our second summer in Scranton my parents rented

a cottage in Columbian Grove. It could scarcely have been less like

the Essex and Sussex. The Grove had once been a rather pleasant spot
on the bank of the river, but it was now heavily wooded and dark and
damp, and the cottages were rotting, moldy, and uncomfortably fur­
nished. The one we rented had a “ backhouse” as a toilet, opening off

PS
the kitchen.
I am not sure how much of this my father knew when he took

U
the place, but it would not have greatly mattered because he was

RO
insensitive to differences between his past and present styles of life.
He was not only loyal to Susquehanna, he remembered it with uncriti­
cal pleasure.

G
The vacation was again a disaster. At my parents’ suggestion, I
invited two girls who had been friends of my brother's to come for a
S
weekend. Not only were the house and its facilities primitive, there
K
was no boat or beach on which one could swim comfortably, and the
O

girls had scarcely arrived before I discovered the problem of having

absolutely nothing to do. I drove them into Susquehanna for a sundae
BO

at the Sugar Bowl, proud of being known there, and then in the
other direction to Windsor, but the whip factory had gone out of
business. Most of the time we simply sat around disconsolate. I was
EX

embarrassed by the ease with which I sped my parting guests when

they left.
D
IN

In m y j u n i o r y e a r I took Introductory Spanish, in part because my

friends liked Professor Super, who taught it. “ Supe” was an eccentric
bachelor who lived at the Faculty Club. He could be drawn from
the day’s assignment by questions about certain well-known events
in his life, and he enjoyed the digressions as much as his students.
I needed the course for a minor in Romance Languages, and I took
English Literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with
Bob Rudd as part of a major in English Language and Literature.
W ith some vague idea that I might go into law I took Political

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PARTICULARS OF MY L I F E

Science 1-2 . It was a happy choice. The field was American govern-
ment, and a teacher from Brooklyn was replacing the regular pro­
fessor, who was ill. He gave me my first glimpse of a political liberal.
W e took out student subscriptions to the N ew Republic and he
assigned liberal books— one a discussion of the misuses of “ national
honor” during the war. He described ward politics, and told us how
he had been tricked as a watcher at the polls when ballots for his man
were invalidated by someone with a concealed stub of pencil while

PS
they were being counted for a different candidate. W hen I relayed
some of this to my father, he began to fear that I might be moving

U
in the direction of socialism, and a month or so later I received a
paperback defense of capitalism called, as I remember it, The Things

RO
That Are Caesar's.
Early in the year it was clear that my major interest was literature.

G
I was not a great reader, in part because I was a slow one. I did not
take Cal Lewis's course in the novel because I could not imagine
S
covering the assignments. But I was learning to write.
K
M y skill at that time was evaluated— favorably but rudely—by
O

Cal Lewis himself. W e were to submit an original paper to be read

9
in Public Speaking (Junior Discussion), and I wrote a personal essay
BO

called “ The Confessions of a Puzzle Eater/' It began

My friends noticed a change: I was becoming indifferent, I went

EX

about my work lost in thought, I kept to my room. When finally one

of them spoke to me about it, I confessed, I had become addicted to
D

Crossword Puzzles.
IN

At the end I signed the usual declaration, “ This is my own work,"

and left the paper in Cal's box in the chapel. W hen I got it back, I
found he had made a few editorial changes on the first page—good
changes—but had then stopped and in large letters on the last page
had scrawled, “ See me about this. Bring its original with you. I read
it just the other day. Apparently you have cut generous chunks from it
and transplanted them bodily to your paper."
He may well have read something of the sort, but it was certainly
nothing I had ever seen. I am inclined to believe that the paper was
better than he expected and that he claimed to have read an original

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Part ÎV

in order to see how much I had indeed plagiarized. He was accusing

me of a gross violation of the honor system, and if his charge had been
valid, I could have been put on probation or expelled.
I went to see him, and told him that I was a crossword-puzzle
fan, that I had read what others had written about crossword puzzles,
but that the essay was my own. He accepted my explanation and
apologized.
During my junior year I spent most of my Christmas and spring

PS
vacations in New York seeing plays. W alter Hampden's Cyrano had
been a highly reinforcing experience, and it had brought my course

U
in the French theatre together with the real stage. Since I had not yet
made many friends in Scranton, there was nothing to keep me from

RO
checking into a New York hotel and picking up tickets for a bout of
theatre-going. A matinee made it possible to see two plays in one day.

G
I saw W hat Price Glory? and Jeanne Eagels in a revival of Rdin. I
saw Lunt and Fontanne in The Guardsman, and Joseph Schildkraut
S
in The Firebrand. I saw Congreve's W ay of the W orld at the Cherry
K
Lane Theatre and Katharine Cornell in Candida with Clare Eames
O

as Prossy. I saw George Arliss in O ld English and Blanche Yurka in

Ibsen's W ild D uck. (I saw Candida again the following year with
BO

Peggy W ood, who was married to a Hamilton man, John V . A.

W eaver.)
A curious result was a sudden bout of dramaturgy. In a single
EX

day, scarcely leaving my room in Carnegie Hall, I wrote a three-act

play. I had not planned to do so, nor had I been speculating about the
D

theme. I simply came back from breakfast one day and began to write
IN

— in pencil on unlined paper. A few parts of the third act are merely
sketched in— I was running out of steam—but otherwise it is com­
plete. It is a blend of Ibsen and Shaw, on the theme of the clever wife
who promotes an affair between her husband and an old school friend
who has come to visit her; it is done for the sake of her husband but
only the friend is aware of what is happening. It was very close to
automatic writing, and I was not to experience anything like it again
for many years.

* * *

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I w a s p u s h e d f u r t h e r in the direction of literature as a career by

John Wright, an alumnus of my fraternity, who occasionally came
back to the Hill on his travels as an insurance agent. He tried hard to
be a successful businessman, but he wanted to be a writer. W e dis­
cussed literature and the literary life, as well as life in general, which
he found difficult. He lent me Upton Sinclair's Boofe of Life and told
me about a place in New England designed as a recuperative environ­
ment for neurasthenics, with the implication that he and I were the

PS
kind of people who needed such an environment from time to
time.

U
He was much attracted to the daughter of the president of his
company, which was based in Vermont, and he told me about the

RO
Summer School of English at Bread Loaf, which she attended. He
urged me to go there the following summer, and I applied and was

G
accepted. I met Jack in Rutland, and he drove me to the school.
The property had been given to Middlebury College by Colonel
S
Battell, an eccentric bachelor who had built a summer hotel on a
K
30,oooacre tract of land. It was a large wooden building with a
O

veranda on two sides, to which an auditorium and a few small class­

rooms had been added. Battell had resisted the automobile and for
BO

many years had brought his guests from a point nine miles away by
horse and carriage, but now cars were allowed. One of the conditions
of his gift was that cornmeal mush be served once a week in the dining
EX

room. Accordingly it was available as a side dish every Sunday evening,

and we all loyally ate it and said we liked it. Battell had written a
D

book called E llen , or the Whisperings of an O ld Pine, copies of which

IN

were to be found in all the rooms. It consisted of the musings of a

romantic old man as he explained various things, including mathe­
matics, to a charming young girl.
I took a course in stagecraft with Donald Oenslager, of the
Provincetown Playhouse, shortly to begin teaching at Yale. I took a
course in creative writing with Sidney Cox, who, like John Hutchens,
came from Missoula, Montana, but was teaching at Dartmouth. Other
interesting people on the staff were available for discussions, and a
series of guest lecturers turned up from time to time. I played a game
of croquet with Rollo W alter Brown, and he gave me some helpful
advice: a whole paragraph, he said, could be made or destroyed by

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Part JV

one word. (W hen I went back to Hamilton I mentioned him to

Chubby Ristine, who spoke of him rather contemptuously. They had
been students together at Columbia, and Chubby thought that Brown
was hanging around Cambridge in the forlorn hope of joining the
Harvard faculty.) A former Middlebury professor recited from mem­
ory an hour's worth of Browning's “ The Ring and the Book"—inter­
esting as a tour de force but as a recital dull.
Carl Sandburg came and Sidney Cox cornered him for an evening

PS
with some of the more liberal students. Sandburg told a story about
Jesus Christ and St. Peter in a Chicago saloon. S t Peter suggests

U
rolling dice to see who will pay for the drinks and when Jesus puts

RO
six dice in a cup and rolls six sixes, St. Peter says, “ Now, wait a minute,
Jesus, roll them again and none of your Cod-damned miracles.” I
found that story a new and refreshing kind of religious freedom.

G
John Farrar was a visiting lecturer, and so was Kenneth Murdock,
S
whom I was later to know at Harvard. Another was Louis Untermeyer,
K
whose autograph adorned the flyleaf of my copy of M odern British
Poetry. Jean Starr Untermeyer, whose poems were to be found in his
O

M odern American Poetry, was with him, languid and bored. I was
BO

one of a small group who met with the Untermeyers and was struck
by the number of words he used (like “ morganatic’') which I had
never heard before.
EX

Living nearby was William Hazlett Upson, who wrote the Earth­
worm Tractor stories for the Saturday Evening Post, and Jack W right
D

spoke of him with awe as a man who supported himself with his
typewriter. There was another man living nearby who was unable
IN

to do so. Robert Frost had been associated with the Bread Loaf school
for many years, and Sidney Cox was a close friend, and when Frost
came to the school, Cox asked me to have lunch with him.
M y first contact with Frost had been embarrassing. I had gone
to the empty lecture hall the previous afternoon to play the piano.
I had played only a few bars before someone broke through the door
at the back of the hall and hurried toward me. “ Stop playing,” he
cried, “ Robert Frost is reading poems.” I followed him back into a
small conference room where there were twenty or thirty adoring
students with Frost holding a book in his hand. As we sat down, he
started to read and then broke off. “ I’m sorry, I've lost it,” he said,

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PARTICULARS OF MY LIFE

and turned to another page. But at lunch that noon with Sidney Cox
he was friendly. He asked me about my work and my plans and sug­
gested that I send him some of my stuff.
Extra-curricular life at Bread Loaf was equally exciting. The
daughter of the president of the insurance company was registered,
and she had made friends with a beautiful Southern girl with whom
I quickly fell in love. I wrote an account of the affair shortly after

PS
the summer school closed:

U
I first saw Ellen as I drove up to the Inn with J.W . She was standing
in a doorway looking curiously at me. She wore a black and white

RO
striped dress with a black bodice-like jacket with a soft white shirtwaist
with long sleeves and a ruffled collar. I noticed her hair, black, drawn
tightly in a knot in the back curving gracefully along each side of her

G
head. I was busy with arriving and I saw her only as one of the many
things about the place which struck my eye. I mentioned her to J.W.
S
with a remark about Bohemian atmosphere.
K
I soon discovered that she was by far the most attractive of the
O

women there. The fellows talked about her a lot, especially the young
men who worked in the office of the Inn. She would stand and talk
BO

with them for long periods and seemed to be generally affable and
agreeable. Then I discovered that she was married and had a boy four
years old with her. One of the fellows talked with the boy and learned
EX

that he had no father. This was eventually proved a fiction. The child
was unattractive at first, almost repulsive. He had a pugnacious nose
D

and broad forehead. His hair was dark but in no other way did he
resemble his mother.
IN

At dinner the first evening I sat with J.W . and two other fellows
in such a position that I could watch Ellen. She was wearing a yellow
dress, flowered with red and black, and her attitude at the table was
perhaps matronly. She paid little attention to the chow and had a way
of looking at other guests without lifting her head. I talked about her
to the fellows exclaiming how beautiful she was, with which they
agreed. Not once during the meal did I catch her eye.
I did not meet her that evening but saw her a lot as I followed her
half consciously. It was afternoon of the next day before I met her.
She was in a room next to the office telling fortunes to the Reynolds
sisters. With each new discovery the three would laugh loudly but
the most distinct laugh was Ellen’s, a high-pitched clear laugh that

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later affected me in various ways according to my mood. I knew the

Reynolds girls and as I approached they introduced me. In a moment
she was telling my fortune. The touch of her hand was glorious and as
she drew a slender finger along each line I was faint with ecstasy. She
discovered that my love arises from jealousy and that I am stubborn.
We talked for some time and later she began a letter to her husband.
“ Dearest,” it began, “ it was so thoughtful of you to send the cigarettes
as there are none obtainable here."
That evening I started a bridge game with Ballou and Louise H.

PS
I made occasion to ask Ellen and she gladly accepted. For several
evenings we played together up until school began; I was furious when

U
Ellen suggested we change partners so that she and Ballou could play

RO
together. In a day or two we changed back. She liked Ballou at first
but later he made some remarks about the impoteucy of the South
which stopped any intimacy there. In the meantime Ellen was just as

G
friendly with the office fellows and other students as with me. Either
she suspected that I was in love already or else my persistency brought
S
us together too often for she avoided me for a time.
K
When registration time came I persuaded her to take the courses
O

I was taking so that we might be together. She agreed but it showed,

I think, no special desire to be with me. We had had moments to­
BO

gether when we had discovered common likes and we gradually found

each other's company satisfying. In the meantime I had got to like
the child, Bradford, rather well. He finally made friends with me in
EX

order that I might swing him around and give him piggy back rides
as often as he desired. This I think helped my case with Ellen since
she had a real affection for Bradford.
D

Shortly after school began Ellen agreed to go walking with me

IN

to “ Widow's Clearing” across the sheepfold from the school and

along a climbing wooded path up the opposite hill. I found numerous
occasions to take her hand to help her and usually insisted on keeping
hold of it all the time. She laughed as though the idea were foolish,
but permitted it. We reached the clearing and tried to go back an­
other way. With my conscious effort we succeeded in getting lost. In
a pine grove on swampy ground we were forced to stop. I drew Ellen
to me and tried to kiss her but she would not even let me put my
arms around her and she started back immediately. Uncertain of my
actions I followed. She, however, was not angry; we talked lightly on
the way back, picked flowers and laughed. I felt peculiarly relieved
and happy. As we neared the Inn Ellen said, "W e can't go walking

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PARTICULARS OF MY LIFE

any more together." I persuaded her to take back the statement even
if she wouldn’t change her mind then. I wanted her to feel free to
change it later without being obliged to explain away so positive a
statement.
About two days later we went again. As we started she went in for
a hat and came back pulling it on her head. It was a black straw hat
and I suddenly realized that she looked like my mother. Almost im­
mediately the thought occurred to me. I behaved very well on the
trip, did nothing but hold her hand. When we returned I went to my

PS
room and wrote this note:

U
TRAGEDY

RO
He waited for her, leaning against a pine, with his face
toward her door. She had gone back for a hat, but she would
be out again in a minute. Then they were going to walk

G
together. He had so much to tell her!
“You poor boy . . . ” Oh, but he would show her how
S
absurd it was to call him that! She must forget that he was
K
only 21, and that she was married. They must forget every­
O

thing but themselves—and that he loved her! . . .

She came out to him, her heels striking a little heavily
BO

on the steps as she came down them. She was pulling on a

black straw hat.
Strange, but she reminded him of his mother. . . .
EX

I gave it to Coxy, my creative writing professor, that evening, and

D

the next morning he said, “ Have you any objection to my reading

IN

this?” Foolishly enough I said, “ No, of course not.” Ellen was in the
class but she was not the only one who recognized the implication.
From then on she never wore the hat. I think she wanted to be angrv
with me but she had a strong sense of humor and rather excused me
on my age. I protested that I had had the subject noted in my note-
book for three weeks but for a long time she amused herself with
acting very maternal toward me and saying, “And I remind you of
your mother?” Almost a month later we were sitting together before
a fire with several others singing, and someone began a song, “You
remind me of my mother.” Ellen whispered to me in a soft whisper,
‘That was what you said about me, wasn’t it?”
The first two weeks went by and we had become nothing more

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Part IV

than friends. Ellen spoke often of her husband and I, who by this
time protested my love almost continuously, said I was not jealous of
him. This annoyed her; and later when I confessed I was jealous she
was triumphant and pleased. I would wait for Ellen to come from the
dining room after each meal, talk with her and follow her with my
eyes. She would sit in the high backed bench on the veranda, and
usually a little group collected there. The talk about us was becoming
so thick that we were compelled to stay apart some of the time and
pretend to be indifferent. I occasionally turned myself to A. McK. or

PS
Louise H. to ward off suspicion, but I was undoubtedly lovesick and
the fact was generally known. I would stand in the gate to the sheep-

U
fold for hours at night without moving a muscle. I would hear people

RO
on the veranda talking about me.

The account breaks off at that point, but the story was not quite

G
finished. Ellen made it pretty clear that I should abandon hope. At
times she was very considerate of my feelings, but at other times
S
K
rather careless. Of course I wrote poems, and again there was a touch
of cynicism.
O

But cynicism could not save me from the sheer physical pain
BO

of being in love. I would lie awake at night suffering acutely. W e

eventually spent some time together in the evening, although our
sexual behavior remained largely verbal. She asked me, rather timidly,
EX

if I masturbated after being with her, and I learned from her that
girls did that sort of thing too. W e planned to spend the last evening
at Bread Loaf together. M y roommate had spent the summer finish­
D

ing a long novel, and Sidney Cox had arranged to have it read con­
IN

tinuously by several readers, the audience coming and going as it

pleased. Ellen and I planned to attend the reading but to leave early
in the evening. W e left at separate times, but our friends and a few
gossips no doubt knew it was by arrangement.
Jack W right had come to drive me back to Rutland, and I bor­
rowed his car, and Ellen and I went for a drive and parked. It was
a cool evening and she was wearing a rather heavy coat. I struggled
with one of the buttons, and she said, “ You can break it if you want.”
I was still inexperienced, alas, and Ellen did nothing to educate me,
and after some not fully consummated action, I drove her back to
the Inn.

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* * *

D o n a ld Oe n s i .a g e r , who was to become a leading stage designer in

the New York theatre, lectured on modern stagecraft. W e heard all

about Gordon Craig and Jessnertreppen and M ax Reinhardt, and we
built scenery, made costumes, memorized parts, and put on plays. I
wrote a one-act play which Oenslager staged. It was a comedy about
a doctor who has discovered how to control temperament through
the administration of hormones, a subject which was just then coming

PS
to the attention of the press. A man arrives to ask the doctor for some­
thing to cure his wife of being flirtatious, but it appears that his wife

U
has previously seen the doctor and has given him something to make

RO
him jealous. Now she arrives to ask for a prescription to cure his
jealousy. Another patient enters who so conspicuously agrees with
everyone that the others suspect that she has been treated for a
G
tendency to argue. Her husband arrives and confirms the suspicion. He
S
demands something to counteract her present submissiveness. There
K
is a general melee, and the disillusioned patients take powders and
syrups from the doctor's cabinet and mix a large potion which they
O

force down his throat. “ He sinks into his chair registering as meaning­
BO

less an expression as possible, as the curtain falls.”

On the last day of our course in Creative Writing, Sidney Cox
read something of mine and then went out of his way to point out that
EX

all my contributions during the summer had been deeply moral. He

was no doubt trying to offset rumors, and he may have had in mind
D

the attitude of Professor Davidson, director of the school. A prissy

bachelor, worshiped by the aging schoolteachers who attended Bread
IN

Loaf to pick up credits toward an advanced degree, he seemed to be­

lieve that Ellen and I were casting a shadow on his school with what,
erroneously, he took to be adultery.
W e flung our last defiance at him as we left. Ellen and her son
needed a ride to Rutland, and Jack and I asked her to join us. W e
loaded our baggage in the back of Jack's car, and all four of us crowded
into the single seat, with the child on Ellen’s lap. Professor Davidson
was standing on the porch as we drove off, and we waved and gaily
called goodbye, but he did not acknowledge our friendly salute.

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* * *

A f t e r I r e t u r n e d t o S c r a n t o n , my parents organized a kind of house

party. M y father's old friend John McGinty, who had closed his hotel
with the advent of Prohibition, had converted a large brick farmhouse
on the road to Windsor into a kind of hotel and had put in a nine-
hole golf course. My father gave him a good deal of advice about lay­
ing out that course and, as the Transcript reported in Editor Baker’s

PS
best style, was the first man to lose a ball on it. W e went with two
couples who were friends of my parents, and their daughters. The

U
hotel was not particularly convenient or the golf course very good,

RO
but as usual my father was blinded by his loyalty and no doubt to
some extent by his desire to have his friends in Susquehanna see some
of his more affluent Scranton friends, one of whom was a multi­

G
millionaire. W hile we were there I dropped into the office of the
Transcript, and the next day the paper reported that I was planning
S
a literary career, the editor noting that I had got my first experience
K
on the Transcript.
O

T he decision was by no means final, but when I went back to

BO

Hamilton I clearly moved in that direction. I had signed up for

Bacteriology with Bugsy Morrill— a course given primarily for pre­
medics— but Hutch persuaded me to shift to Smut’s Senior English
EX

Composition. I hated to tell Bugsy that I was making a change. I

owed him a great deal, for he had given me a lot of personal attention.
(One day I jammed my finger in a microtome, exposing a bit of the
D

bone, and when Bugsy saw that I was growing faint, he hastily pre­
IN

pared a laboratory cocktail of equal parts of absolute alcohol and

distilled water, which he offered to me in a small beaker.) W hen I
went to tell him of this last-minute change, I found the class already
assembled, and there was nothing for it but to announce my decision
before the whole class. Bugsy winced as he tried to tell me that he
understood.
In Senior Composition we corrected freshman themes and sub­
mitted work of our own, which we discussed in class. I discovered
that Smut lacked a sense of humor. He had complained that my
stories, though a sensitive commentary on life in general, lacked plot,
and so I submitted a story called “ The Klondike Kills.” Two prospec­

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tors have accumulated a great hoard of gold, but find themselves

trapped in their cabin for the winter. After a bitter quarrel, neither
man dares to go to sleep because he is afraid the other will murder
him. They both struggle against sleep and when one finally gives in,
the other immediately does so too, and the fire goes out and they
both freeze to death. It was an obvious parody, but Smut took it
seriously and read it to the class, to the barely concealed amusement
of my friends.

PS
I took Anglo-Saxon, Chaucer, and Shakespeare with Chubby
Ristine. It was rumored that Chubby's courses were simply second­

U
hand versions of the courses he had taken under Brander Matthews

RO
at Columbia, but he was a meticulous teacher and had evidently kept
good notes. For a term paper in Chaucer I wrote a translation of “ The
Pardoner’s Tale,” using a shorter line to allow for the syllables which

G
had grown silent with the years. Naturally, I talked about the Baconian
theory, and Chubby asked me to take one meeting of the class in
S
K
Shakespeare to present it. I worked up a very convincing case. It
was Parents' Day and there were several parents in the room. Chubby
O

explained that I would take over and then added, “ Of course, no

BO

sensible man today takes the Baconian theory seriously.” I lacked the
courage of my convictions and explained to the class that I was
going to present the theory as it would be presented by one who be­
EX

lieved it.
D
IN

H utch editor of the Royal Gaboon, and I was

had b e e n e l e c t e d
associate editor. The name came from a call often heard late at night
on the quiet campus: someone would sing out, “ Roy-al Ga-boo-oon,”
the “ — oon” falling to a minor third, and someone else might echo it
from a distance. The magazine had published typical college humor,
but we decided to make it more intellectual, combining it, indeed,
with the old Hamilton Literary Magazine. The undertaking soon ran
into financial difficulties.
I wrote book reviews— of T he Professor s House by W illa Cather,
The Venetian Glass Nephew by Elinor Wylie, and Replenishing
Jessica by Maxwell Bodenheim— and a short note about Mrs. Ogden’s

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PartlV

bookshop, which was just moving into new quarters. M y main con­
tribution was a long article on Ezra Pound, a "great Hamilton
alumnus” practically unknown to Hamilton men. I could quote Carl
Sandburg that someday the college would put up a tablet reading
"Here came Ezra Pound.” I printed excerpts from a letter of Pound’s
to Stink Saunders about his last appearance at Hamilton, when he, like
everyone else, was taking his turn in Public Speaking. "[I] produced
a near riot. Heine W hite, I think, pitching pennies on the platform
floor (or perhaps that is a fantastic detail). I believe I disparaged

PS
‘orrratory.' ” I could relay Robert Frost's story of Pound's quarrel with
Lascelles Abercrombie. Pound became thoroughly disgusted with

U
Abercrombie, and finally wrote to him: “ Stupidity, carried to a certain

RO
point, becomes a public affront. I champion the public in this quarrel.
M y seconds will wait on you.” There was an anti-climax. Amy Lowell
claimed that she asked Pound if he supposed Abercrombie would
G
choose swords; and when he replied, “ Of course,” she pointed out that
S
Abercrombie knew Pound was a clever swordsman and would un­
K
doubtedly choose pistols. Pound, according to Miss Lowell, was so
frightened he nearly left England. I argued that Pound's Vhomme
O

moyen sertsuel might well be a Hamilton man, quoting:

BO

Tell me not in mournful wishwash

Life's a sort of sugared dishwash!
EX

(Let him rebuke who ne’er has known the pure platonic
grapple
Or hugged two girls at once behind a chapel.)
D
IN

— though why I thought that was characteristic of Hamilton men I

cannot say.

O n e e v e n in g e a r l y in th e Hutch and I were in my

fa ll term
room making plans for the new magazine. W e were talking about
Smut Fancher, who loved to drop names in the world of the theatre
and who claimed to be involved with play writing, and we thought up

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P A R T IC U L A R S O F M Y L IF E

a hoax at his expense. W e designed a poster, and I sent it to Otis

Chidester, who had taken over the newspaper in Windsor, and he
printed up a batch on bright orange paper. The poster read:

SPECIAL LECTURE,

CHARLES
PS
U
CHAPLIN RO
G
S
K
O

THE FAMOUS CINEMA COMEDIAN

In Person, Will Deliver His Lecture
BO

“MOVING PICTURES
EX

AS A CAREER”
In the Hamilton College Chapel
D
IN

FRI., OCT. 9 AT 8:15 P. M.

. The College regrets that previous notice has aat beea f i T t n , but Mr. Chaplin baa been compelled
to
p uadm forthe
t a t ua date of his lecture (which was originally set for Nor. 13) on account of a hurtled de»
Evrope.
The lecture h** been arranged tk n the cwrteay of Prof. Fancher.
THERE WILL EE MO CHARGE OF ADMISSION

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Part IV

At two o'clock on the morning of October 9 Hutch and I went

down to Clinton, moved around the square out of sight of the
constable, and pasted the posters on telephone poles and shopwindows.
W e threw a few in the doorways of apartment houses and came back
and went to bed. The next morning Hutch phoned the Utica Observer-
Dispatch to say that the President had announced the lecture in
chapel that morning. The paper dug out an old photograph of Chaplin
and ran the story, including Hutch's embellishments, as follows:

PS
America's fun maker comes to the college through the efforts of

U
Professor P. A. Fancher who became acquainted with him at the time
of the Hamilton College Choir Recital at the Booth Theatre in New

RO
York. At that time Alexander Woollcott, Hamilton 09, invited most
of the literary, stage, and screen celebrities to hear the concert. The
audience included besides Mr. Chaplin, Ring Lardner, Percy Ham­

G
mond and Heywood Broun. A promise given Professor Fancher by
the comedian at that time is now to be redeemed.
S
K
News reached the campus before noon, and the administration
O

reacted promptly. Police were stationed on roads approaching the

BO

Hill to advise all drivers that the lecture was a hoax, but about four
hundred cars got through. A Friday-night football rally was in progress
around the gymnasium, and the visitors assumed that the crowd was
EX

waiting to see Chaplin and naturally joined it. Hutch went into the
chapel to turn on the lights, hoping to get the crowd in there, but
the authorities were waiting for that move, and he escaped through
D

a window. The next day we ran an editorial in Hamilton L ife saying

IN

that “ no man with the slightest regard for his alma mater would have
done it.”
W hen I quite openly admitted to Stink Saunders that Hutch
and I were the guilty ones, he exclaimed, “ Oh, for heaven’s sake,
Fred, keep it quiet. The President is up in arms and is planning to
expel the students who did it.” A detective was hired and I began
to worry. Had we covered our tracks? Windsor was a long way away,
and it was not likely that the source of the posters would be discovered,
but we had neglected to say that the lecture would be free, and I had
typed small slips reading, “ There will be no charge for admission,”
and pasted them on many of the posters. Could my typewriter be

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P A R T IC U L A R S O F M Y L IF E

identified? It was early in the term and I had not yet submitted any
papers, but I would be submitting some soon. I decided to disguise my
typewriter. I bent several letters slightly out of alignment and filed
corners off one or two with a nail file. Fortunately the detective got a
wrong scent; the trail seemed to be leading to Jack Chase, Trot's son,
and the matter was dropped.
Hutch and I had not correctly foreseen the effects of our plan.
The story and poster had seemed to us so obviously phony that no

PS
sensible person would be taken in, but we had misjudged the local
climate. And there was one result of which we were both ashamed:

U
the Utica paper had guessed at Chaplin's schedule, and at train time
the station was full of children waiting to see him.

RO
G
In m y s e n i o r y e a r I occasionally took over the “ Carpe Diem ”
S
column. There were certain standard themes to be found in all college
K
magazines— girls, necking, speakeasies, and spiked beer—but there
O

were local topics as well. Though I had criticized Jay Kay and the
other contributors to the RoyoZ Gaboon and uCarpe D iem ” for their
BO

reliance on parodies and puns, I was not above seeking the same
kinds of help as Sir Burrhus de Beerus.
EX

The shades of night have fallen fast

And now are wholly gone at last,
D

To Commons then, with weary feet,

To find in place of Shredded Wheat,
IN

Excelsior!

This was followed by a far from exaggerated parody of Cal Lewis

commenting on the performance of a class in Public Speaking:

I wish you men would put a little more time on your . . . discus­
sions. . . . I can remember the day when men . . . men like you . . .
no great literary ability . . . no great literary capability . . . used to feel
that a chapel oration . . . or a chapel declamation . . . was more than
. . . was something to be . . . something to . . . Now you men can put
your rubbers on when I’m through . . . and not until. . . .

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Part IV

* * *

H am ilton C ollege was almost an adjunct of the Root family. The

Chairman of the Board in my day was Elihu Root, the man my
father had pointed out to me in 19 15 as the next President of the
United States. His grandfather had taught mathematics at Hamilton,
and the students had called him Square R o o t His father also taught
mathematics and was called Cube. The Root homestead was across

PS
the road from the campus, and beyond it the family owned a large
tract of land.

U
In my junior year I took a course in art with Elihu Root's son,
Edward, whom I had first met through Cynthia Ann Miller. He had

RO
built a small studio near his house, and we met there for our class. He
collected modern art, but most of the pictures we studied were the

G
indifferent colored prints available at that time. Nevertheless, we
learned to spot schools and painters, and to talk about color and light.
S
In my senior year Edward Root encouraged me to paint and
K
offered me space in his studio and the use of his equipment and sup­
O

plies. I had my own easel, and I began with charcoal on beautiful

(and expensive!) sheets of hand-laid paper. He taught me how to
BO

put canvas on stretchers and to clean brushes. He set projects; one

of the first was to paint a tin cup, and I was still naive enough to
ask him about paint that looked like metal. One day I grew expansive
EX

and tried a winter landscape with snow drifting around a gnarled tree
trunk, painting all the shadows in gray, but he warned me against
D

overlooking the essentials and brought me back to set projects. I

IN

never told him of one project— a life-size charcoal nude on the wall of
my room at the Lambda Chi Alpha house copied from a print of
Titian or Giorgione.
There was little about Hamilton at the time to promote an
interest in music. The string quartets at the Saunderses’ were, of
course, an exception, and so was Smut's choir. Once or twice a year
there was a musical program in the chapel. (I remember Georges
Barrere playing the flute.) But the phonograph was still primitive,
and I knew no one with a collection of records. I once took Cynthia
Ann to hear the Utica Symphony Orchestra— paying for a taxi both
ways— but I remember only that I had just had my hat dry-cleaned

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PARTICULARS OF MY LIFE

and that because the night was cold and the windows were closed, the
taxi filled with a strong odor of cleaning fluid. In my senior year my
fall house-party guest was Helen Olheim, who later sang at the
Metropolitan. She was the sister of one of our freshmen and she came
and sang, and I played her accompaniments, and it was all quite
wonderful.
Throughout all four years, in the name of physical education, I
was forced to play games. Good players were allowed to play basket­

PS
ball with us, ostensibly to show us how, but in fact to improve their
own game by throwing us over their hips in defense or bouncing balls

U
off our craniums before shooting baskets. On the hockey rink, pursuing

RO
a puck with wobbly ankles and leaning on my stick for additional
support, I would have my shins cracked by sticks that got to the
puck ahead of me. I rather liked fencing, but it was only "single­

G
stick” ; the class never advanced to épée or saber.
Soccer was one of the games I had to play, but fortunately no
S
one insisted upon football. In high school I had written a story
K
about an unathletic boy, possibly crippled, who sent his school’s foot­
O

ball team on to victory by analyzing plays mathematically, calculating

the time it would take each player to reach a given position and the
BO

time it would take an opponent to reach the same position. (I am not

sure I was not anticipating the future of the game. )
M y fraternity brother Dietrich Towne was one of Hamilton’s
EX

stars. He was thickset and powerful and could plow doggedly through
an opponent's line. He was equally good on defense, and that was
D

important because one set of players played the whole game (a player
IN

who left the game was not allowed back during the same h a lf). As a
freshman I learned the Hamilton cheers and yelled my lungs out
whenever it was Towne who had made a first down. But Hamilton
won very few games, and after another year the coach was threatening
to resign. Towne had been elected captain, and he asked me to write
a letter, to be signed by the whole team, giving the coach their solid
support and pleading with him to stay on. I wrote a suitably emotional
appeal, and it was successful, and thus in a way I played out my
fantasy of the unathletic athletic hero.

* * *

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Part IV

I w as oneof four seniors who were attracting attention as writers.

Jack Chase, Trot's son, was the editor of the newspaper Hamilton L ife,
and he had a brother, Cleveland, in the literary swim in New York.
John Hutchens edited the Royal Gaboon, and had worked on his
lather’s paper, the Missoulian, in Montana. Joe Vogel was contributing
to a communist magazine, the New Masses (and also doing pen-and-
ink drawings, much more original than anything of mine, with Edward
Root). I had at least my summer at Bread Loaf as a credential. The

PS
four of us met frequently, controlled the local media, and were
active in what could be called political discussions.

U
Stink Saunders, Brownie, and Trot Chase thought that this

RO
intellectual activity deserved some extra-curricular support and they
sponsored weekly meetings. It was an ecumenical step, designed to
bring faculty and students together, and hard to evaluate at this

G
distance. Hamilton's faculty was good-natured and well disposed
but it was not friendly. Now we were meeting a few professors man
S
to man— as if the generals had dropped in to have dinner with the
K
troops. One evening in the music room at the Saunderses’ we were
O

discussing sex, and I said that it was a mistake to make a moral issue
of it; it should be looked on in the same light as a good meal. “ W hat,”
BO

said Brownie, “ three times a day?” and we all laughed a little too
hard.
I have a different reason for remembering a dinner meeting at
EX

the Chases’. Dr. Fulton, N ell’s father, had tried to interest me in

medicine, and he had lent me two books on the medical aspects of
D

outstanding figures in history. In one of them Joan of Arc was said to

IN

have had some kind of hormone problem, and I brought this up at the
Chases’, forgetting that Mrs. Chase was a devout Catholic. She
went into action at once, saying she had read all the original protocols
of the trial and that there could be no question of a neurosis or
psychosis in St. Joan. I made no attempt to defend my authorities. I
do not remember the other issues we discussed at these meetings; we
were emulating the Round Table at the Algonquin, with results which
were probably no more productive.
One of the more conspicuous figures at the real Round Table
was Aleck Woollcott, a familiar visitor at the Saunderses’, who padded
about the house in dressing gown and slippers without attracting

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PARTICULARS OF M Y L IF E

attention. Other well-known people came for an hour or two following

a lecture. I saw Sandburg again and, to my delight, he rem em berej
me from Bread Loaf. i
I continued to write poetry, my verses becoming free not only i a
form but in content: I

VACANT STORE |

Behind your dusty windows, J

PS
Like the second meaning in the eyes of an abandoned i
woman,
Your beckoning:

U
For Rent.

RO
I cannot now remember whether I was aware that the following
dealt with masturbation. I had not yet read Freud, nor were the

G
literary critics I read writing about psychoanalysis. (It was said that
the New York W orld had reviewed James Branch Cabell’s Jurgen
S
without spotting the sexual symbolism.) I believe that my title indi­
K
cates, however, that I knew what I was doing.
O
BO

CONCUPISCENCE

An Old Man, sowing in a field,

Walks with a slow, uneasy, rhythm.
He tears handfuls of seed from his vitals,
EX

Caressing the wind with the sweep of his hand.

At night, he stops, breathless,
Murmuring to his earthy consort,
D

"Love exhausts me!”

IN

I also wrote a skit of about 150 lines to be given at a fraternity

banquet. The subject was Salome and some of my compatriots carried
out the action as I read about Salome’s request for an unusual part
of John’s anatomy:

Oh, joy to Salome, oh bitterest hate!

Oh, pity for John for his terrible fate!
With a flash of her eye and a curl of her lip,
She stands before Herod with disjointed hip,
"Oh, king, thou hast spoken, now hear what I wish” :
So saying she speaks in a whisper: “Pish, pish."

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Part IV

Old Herod at first gives a grunt of surprise,

Then strokes at his beard, then closes his eyes,
And thinks till it hurts of the words she hath quoth,
Then looks for a moment, then says to her “ Both?”

I began to write An Anthology of a Small College, patterned after

Edgar Lee Masters. I changed names but I was talking about real
people. Hamilton had once had a small observatory and a real astrono­
mer, about whom I wrote the following:

PS
SAM UEL W INTERS— ASTRONOM ER

U
I lived an eternity of nights
With the stars.

RO
I was a discoverer;
But though I searched the heavens
And found new stars and asteroids,
There was one thing
I never found in all space: G
S
When a student asked me,
K
“ Do you see God out there?”
O

I could answer only,

“ I see—Law.”
BO

During the year I occasionally contributed an editorial to Hamil­

ton Life. I wrote a long criticism of the Phi Beta Kappa “ key-chaser.”
EX

“ The college man,” I contended, “ knows perfectly well that a man

of very ordinary intelligence may win a key. . . . If a man elects those
courses in college which he considers most necessary for his develop­
D

ment, and in the pursuance of those courses does such work that he
IN

is elected to a Fraternity which honors genuine scholarship, that is

one thing; if he elects those courses which will make it easy for him
to obtain high marks, and devotes his time and energy to his courses
with the sole outstanding purpose of getting a Phi Beta Kappa stand­
ing, it is quite another thing.”

I f o u n d that Jack and Hutch had another interesting connection—

with Utica's famed red-light district. They invited me to join them,
and one evening we drove into a quiet residential area in their battered

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PARTICULARS OF MY LIFE

car and went to the door of a darkened house. W e rang, a light

appeared, and a little old lady opened the door. She was holding a
large angora cat and she greeted us pleasantly, and we went in. She
went immediately to the telephone and I heard her say, “ W e’re hav­
ing a little party. W ould you care to join us?" She gave us very small
glasses of Prohibition wine, and in a few minutes a buxom, rather
attractive girl came in. She might have been a waitress or a salesgirl
now engaged in a bit of moonlighting. A record was put on the Vic*

PS
trola, and we danced briefly with her. Then Jack went upstairs with
her, and when he came down, I went up. I asked her, rather apologeti­

U
cally, if she minded my using a condom, and she replied brightly that

RO
it was much the best for her too, and she took my two dollars and
stuck them in her purse.
This was my first unencumbered sexual intercourse, and it was

G
over fairly quickly. The girl said that I had obviously enjoyed it more
than my predecessor, but it had been surprisingly unexciting. I was
S
no doubt a little scared, but was this indeed what I should have found
K
if I had been successful in all those attempted seductions? W as this
O

what lay at the top of Marion Knise's leg? Would this have been the
BO

prize if I had won my wrestling match with Leslie Gilbert or had

persuaded Ellen to have an affair with me? I dressed quickly and
went downstairs, pleased that my absence was attracting no more
EX

attention than if I had gone to the toilet. Hutch took his turn, and
we all drove back to the Hill.
On another trip we found that the nice old lady already had £
D

guest— a tough, middle-aged woman who drank a glass of wine witl"

IN

us and who, I was afraid, was to be offered as our fare for the night
But another girl was on the way. She was young and attractive, bul
evidently supposed that her first duty was to seduce us, because sh(
danced in a most lascivious way and whispered words into my eai
that I had never heard a girl say before.
On another occasion we tried a regular dive. Two girls came t<
our table and we ordered drinks, and as we took them up the long
well-lighted stairs, the regular customers watched with amusement

* * ★

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Part TV

As I e n t e r e d t h e l a s t t e r m of my senior year, I could no longer

postpone a decision about a career, and I wrote to my family telling
them that I should like to spend a year writing a novel. I would live at
home, and the novel would have Scranton as a background. It was a
decision my father had no doubt feared. He talked it over with my
mother and then wrote me a long letter in his strong, clear, energetic,
economical hand.

PS
Dear Frederic,
Y our very interesting letter has been read and discussed by mother

U
and me. W e naturally are deeply interested in your future. In no
circumstances would we want to say or do anything to discourage you

RO
in following out your ambition. I am convinced and have been for
many years that a young man should if possible follow out the line of

G
work which appeals to him. No one makes a success of any business
or profession in which he is not deeply interested and one cannot do
S
good work at a job which he dislikes. I have witnessed too many
K
failures among boys who have been forced into professions by their
parents against the inclinations of the former and because the latter
O

wanted to do the thinking for the boy. W e do not propose to do this.

BO

On the other hand we want to gjve you the benefit of our ob­
servation and experience. You will find that the world is not standing
with outstretched arms to greet you just because you are emerging
from a college—that the real rough and tumble world is not the world
EX

pictured by college professors who are constantly dealing with the

theoretical and not the practical affairs of life. I am yet to be convinced
D

that it is possible for you to make a living as a writer of fiction. I

thought that you had become convinced of that from your contact
IN

with writers at Bread Loaf. Not that I am thinking of any cost to me

but for your own sake I want to see you become self-supporting.
You will someday have to rely upon yourself for the necessities
and luxuries of life. By luxuries 1 do not mean yachts, costly estates,
and so on, but some of the things which people fairly well off are in
the habit of having, some of the things we have enjoyed in a moderate
way.
Now if you don’t equip yourself to get into some line of work
where you can make enough money to have these things—and they
dont come easy—what will you do?
I dont want you to become one of those hermits who live in a

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garret on a crust of bread in order to revel in the beautiful (?) thought

that his art? his music, or his ideals are so far above the comprehension
and tastes of the common people that he will not condescend to get
down to earth and mingle with the common trash or be as others are.
You must bear in mind that for the past four years you have been
away from us most of the time. Y our first two vacations home were
spent under circumstances where we did not have the best opportunity
to think things out and get to thoroughly understand each other after
you had grown up. The third summer was spent in Bread Loaf.

PS
W e are very proud of you and have no doubt that you have been
a splendid student and followed our instructions to “get out of it all

U
there is in it.” While the studies you have pursued were not calculated

RO
to fit you for any particular occupation (except writing) I did not
object because after all such things are mostly for mind development.
I believe you are versatile—I believe you have the ability—to study

G
and master about anything you care to undertake. W e have lots of
confidence in your good judgment and common sense and in your
S
character. But even if I was a good critic I have no way of judging
K
your literary ability except a few small samples of your writing which I
have seen and the reports from college. These reports seem to back up
O

your idea that you have special talents. Mr. Welburn [the Presbyterian
BO

minister] was in yesterday and he reported what had been told to him
by some of the faculty. Everything looks splendid and I don’t want
to appear to be throwing cold water on your plans but do think it
EX

highly desirable that the matter be considered from all angles.

Suppose for instance that your dream does not come true. Are you
going to be disappointed and feel sour and enter other lines with lack
D

of interest and distaste?

IN

Have you stopped to consider that at the present time there are
so many nationalities represented in this territory and so many con­
flicting interests that no single class or number of classes are typical—
a picture of which would represent the community or industry? The
predominant race (according to Mr. Welburn) is Irish—and mining
does not make them any different than railroad work in Susquehanna.
Have you made up your mind to work on your book as earnestly
and religiously as you would at a regular job and not treat the writing
as a thing to do when you feel like it and when it does not interfere
with other things you would like to do? How are you going to account
to your friends for a year’s apparent idleness and the impression that
would give them that you were lazy, etc.?

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Are you willing, if business doesn’t go very good with me, to get
along on a small allowance?
How long will it take and when it is finished what will you do?
Unless you produce a “ best-seller” you cannot live by writing books
alone. If you will not write short stories, columns, nor articles which
pay, how are you to get along?
it seems to me you ought to look beyond the first book—What
is to follow? If it is a success, all OK but if notwithstanding your own
satisfaction with it it doesn’t happen to “ take," then what?

PS
These things I wish you would think about and we will talk them
over when you come home.

U
I still think you are tackling the job wrong end to—I can’t feel

RO
that if you have the talent and genius to write something worthwhile
that you would lose it by writing lighter stuff for a while. Maturity can­
not help but be beneficial.—If you establish a reputation as a writer

G
of short stones and so on then this would help at once in the recep­
tion of something bigger and provide the wherewithal while you were
S
doing the big thing and do away with the feeling that you must hurry
K
—W e are not in a position where we can retire and devote our time
to literary pursuits.
O

I repeat I am not thinking of the money cost to me. All I have

BO

is for mother and you. I am thinking of your future. You have acquired
a taste for the finest literature—this will be a source of joy for you as
long as you live—but you wifi find that this must be enjoyed in your
EX

moments of leisure, but that other hours must be spent on the most
practical things. Appreciation of art, music and literature is a great
asset for college professors, librarians, and teachers generally but it
D

will not put any “butter on your bread ”

IN

Please do not view this letter as a mere composition! Nor pass

it off because it is made up of old-fashioned platitudes, nor because it
reads like “Letters from a Self-made Merchant to his Son."
While writing this letter mother telephones me about your letter
saying you had been elected a member of the journalistic branch (?)
of the PBK and that you want a check for $15. Enclosed. This is fine
and we congratulate you. All of these things go to prove that you have
talent and increases our wish to give you the opportunity to develop.
The only and big question is how is it best to be done. Let’s go slow
and sure. Let us figure out not only what is the best way to put it over
but what must be done in the way of casting out an “ anchor to lee­
ward” to provide for your future financial necessities and independ­

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ence. Let us arrange some plan whereby you can support yourself,
get married when the fever strikes you, have a good home life, and
when these things are provided for then go to it and if your talents
enable you to do something big and startle the world no one of course
will rejoice more than your mother and I who have our whole life
centered in you and your success.
With love,
Father

PS
Naturally I showed the letter to Stink, who was very careful about

U
the advice he gave me. W hen I told him that my father was a Babbitt,
he reminded me that Babbitt longed for a better life too. I suggested

RO
that if I were to live in Scranton I might be able to improve it cul­
turally, but he was doubtful of anything to be gained in that direction.

G
Should I first become a successful lawyer and then turn to writing?
He wondered whether my interest would survive or whether I would
S
find myself trapped.
K
I had never made an important decision about my life, and it
appeared that I was now about to do so. It was not long, however,
O

before I received another letter which left no doubt of the course I

BO

should follow.
EX

I h a d r e s p o n d e d to Robert Frost’s offer to look at some of my work

D

by sending him three short short stories when I returned to Hamilton.

In April I received an answer:
IN

Ann Arbor, Michigan

Dear Mr. Skinner:
My long delay with these stories has given you time to think of
some things about them for yourself, alternating between doubt and
confidence. It has probably done you good: so I wont apologize for it.
You know I save myself from perfunctory routine criticism of or­
dinary college writing on purpose to see if I can't really help now and
then someone like you in earnest with the art. Two or three times a
year I make a serious attempt to get to the bottom of his work with
someone like you. But it's all the good it does. I always come a long

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way short of getting down into it as far as the writer gets himself. Of
course! You asked me if there is enough in the stories to warrant your
going on. I wish I knew the answer to that half as well as you probably
know it in your heart. Right at this moment you are very likely setting
your determination to go on, regardless of anything I say, and provided
only you can find in a reasonable time someone to buy and read you.
Vd never quarrel with that spirit. I’ve a sneaking sympathy with it.
My attempt to get to the bottom of a fellow writer's stuff this time
put this into my head: All that makes a writer is the ability to write

PS
strongly and directly from some unaccountable and almost invincible
personal prejudice like Stevenson’s in favor of all being as happy as

U
kings no matter if consumptive, or Hardy’s agtimt God for the blunder
of sex, or Sinclair Lewis’ against small American towns, or Shake­

RO
speare’s, mixed, at once against and in favor of Ufe itself. 1 take it that
everybody has a prejudice and spends some time feeling for it to speak

G
and write from. But most people end as they begin by acting out the
prejudices of other people.
S
Those are real niceties of observation you’ve got here and you’ve
K
done ’em to a shade. “ The Laugh" has the largest value. That’s the
one you show most as caring in. You see I want you to care. I don't
O

want you to be academic about it—a writer of exercises. Of course, not

BO

too expressly, overtly caring. You’ll have to search yourself here. You
know best whether you are haunted with any impatience about what
other people see or don't see. That will be you if you are you. I am
inclined to say you are. But you have the final say. I wish you’d tell me
EX

how you come out in thinking it over—if it isn’t too much trouble—
some time. I ought to say you have the touch of art. The work is clean
D

run. You are worth twice anyone else I have seen in prose this year.
Always yours,
IN

Robert Frost
Belief, belief. You’ve got to augment my belief in life and people
mightily or cross it uglily. I’m awfully sure of this tonight.
April 7, 1926

The letter was waiting for me when I came down the hill at
noon, and after lunch I went directly to the Saunderses’ and showed
it to Stink. It was very different from my father’s, of course, and
carried a different message. I thought it was all the evidence my family
had any right to ask for. I should be allowed to try my wings. Stink

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was inclined to agree. I knew something about Frost's own history,

his long struggle for recognition, his success in England before he was
appreciated by his own countrymen, his continuing financial troubles.
It was not easy. W as I prepared for something like that, too? I thought
I was. (I did not know then the depth of his bitterness.)
The letter also seemed to show that I was mining a promising
vein. The three stories were “ psychological," with traces of Chekhov,
Maupassant, and Katherine Mansfield. The one Frost liked best, “ The

PS
Laugh," began as follows:

U
As Edsel Brock approached the door of his farmhouse, he saw his
wife scrubbing the wooden step in front of it. When he was so near

RO
that his rubber boots and tucked-in blue overalls caught her eye, she
stopped scrubbing without looking up and held her brush in the mid­
dle of a stroke. Then in a voice harsh from deafness she said,
G
“ I seen you talking with Jim. What's he want?"
Instantly Brock was angry with her. She held her brush as if she
S
meant, “ Well, go on, walk on my step if you’re going to, and let me
K

get cleaning it up!” Then asking what Jim wanted—as if he and Jim
O

had a secret, as if he was doing something with his money unknown

to her!
BO

“ Frank Sykes's wife's got a baby!" he said contemptuously.

“ Frank Sykes?" she asked sharply. “You say a baby?”
Brock went in, closed the door, and pressed his face against the
EX

screen.
“ Yes, a baby!"
D

“ Can’t have!” she said. “ I saw Zelda day before yest’d’y. . . .

She wasn’t going to have no baby."
IN

“ Well, if you know all about it . . . God, I never seen a woman

like you, Ide. Call me a liar. Like Jim never told me that. Like I made
it up."
“ Mebbe you did.”
“ All right, then. A-all right. Only don’t ask me again.”
He left the door and went to the far side of the room where he
put his back against the wall and stood, legs spread, watching Ide
scrub. After a minute she took the pail of dirty water and with all her
force threw it against the step to rinse it, her shrunken arms twitching
with anger. Brock was amused.
People, Brock knew, called him a hard husband. No one said he

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beat his wife, or starved her, or worked her to death; no one ever
named one thing he did to her. Everyone saw simply that she was
miserable, and that she hated him. But a good many people hated
Brock—because of his big jeering laugh, a laugh that made people
uncomfortable, made them lose their temper, and lose an argument.
It was not surprising that his wife too hated him because of it.
Just then Brock wanted some excuse to laugh.

PS
And he is lucky. Sykes turns up with the news that his wife has
had twins. Brock can scarcely contain himself, but he must hold his

U
laugh until he can be alone with his wife. Sykes stays on, however.
There is talk of a golf course and money to be made from their land.

RO
Will Brock agree to hold out for a price? Brock is slow in getting rid
of him. Then—

G
He was gone at last! For a minute Brock stood looking from the
S
door. Twins . . . a good joke. Yes, he told himself, it was a good joke
K
on Ide. A good joke.
He turned and sauntered out to the kitchen. He saw his wife
O

looking into the oven, crouched as if waiting for a whip lash. He put
BO

his hands on his hips and drew a deep breath through his teeth. But
it was too late; to save him, Edsel Brock could not laugh!
“Damn Frank Sykes!” he said aloud.
EX
D

A t B read L oaf I had not only practiced the art of writing, I had
IN

talked about writing as a craft. I continued to do so, but with very

little profit. Fancher was not strong on analysis. Mr. Torrey had given
me a copy of The Genius of Style, written by a classmate of his named
Brownell, and I read it doggedly but to little effect. In the college
library I found Percy Lubbock’s The Craft of Fiction, which I read
with the same determination and no greater profit. Edgar Allan Poe's
The Philosophy of Composition was more concrete, but scarcely more
helpful. Robert Louis Stevenson’s principle of the sedulous ape, ac­
cording to which the aspiring writer was to begin by writing in the
manner of various well-known authors, had been the heart of Cal
Lewis’s Junior English Composition, but I had not taken that course.

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Herbert Spencer was helpful, though I did not care whether the
English or French order of adjective and noun was psychologically
superior. Polti's Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations was advertised as
describing all possible plots, but I found that it applied to the works
of men like Corneille and Racine rather than the writers whom I
intended to emulate.
I never actually planned my stories. I began with a quick im­
pression— of a character or an incident—and developed it to make a

PS
small point, often not clear to me until I looked back upon it much
later. That was particularly true of my most ambitious story, which
began with a fragmentary personal contact. Nell Fulton, resigned to

U
spinsterhood, had worked out an elaborate rationalization. She once

RO
lent me a book called Apologia proVita Monastica which expounded the
virtues of an essentially monastic, though not religious, life. In practice
she collected friends who specialized in simple living. She once took
G
me to a farm near Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, where two or three
S
couples and their children xaised gladioluses. W e went into one of
K
their houses, in which the tiny living room was almost filled by a
grand piano. On another occasion we visited a young couple who had
O

left the city to run a small farm. A great deal was made of the sim­
BO

plicity of their lives, but it seemed to me that “ simple" often meant

“ inconvenient/’ and my impression that the young wife was not
happy grew into a story called “ Elsa.” The theme was already domi­
EX

nating my life and was to become critical within the year, though I
was not to discover the relevance of the story to my own problem until
D

many years later.

The setting is just such a farm. It is late afternoon and Elsa has
IN

spent the day canning vegetables. W ill, her husband, is haying in the
back field and will be home soon for his supper. Suddenly three old
college friends of Elsa’s turn up for a surprise visit, anxious to see how
her strange life is working out. W ill returns, and he and Elsa show
off their house. In the kitchen—

Mary Lou had gone to the sink, and she began to work the pump.
“ Selma, look!” she cried. “ Isn’t this the quaintest thing! Watch
out! It splashes!”
“ You pump it backwards when you want hot water,” said Will
dryly.

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“ You do?” Selma turned quickly.

“Don’t let him fool you, Selma!" said Elsa.
“ But where do you get hot water?”
“ Here,” said Elsa, opening the reservoir in the stove. “ You dip it
out.”
“ Elsa!” said Mary Lou with real enthusiasm. “ I think this is just
wonderful. You have a lovely little home. You must be very happy.”
Elsa felt suddenly in love with her!
“ But you must remember,” said Will, as if this made all the dif­

PS
ference in the world, “ the water is never hot in the morning!”
“ Think of it!” said Elsa dramatically. “ W e have to wash in cold

U
water. Isn’t that terrible?” W ill’s humor was delightfully subtle, but

RO
sometimes it was best to help it out a little.

That night Elsa stays up after W ill goes to bed. She is tired and

G
unhappy. Her life is by no means as bright as she has told her friends
and she now decides that she cannot go on. But she is afraid to face
S
W ill, because he will argue too persuasively. And so she starts to write
K
a letter which she will leave for him after he has gone off to the back
O

field the next day. In it she tries to tell W ill the truth, but she feels
that she is being unfair, and, weeping, she tears up the letter. She
BO

will write it properly the next morning before she leaves. The next
morning:
EX

It must be very late, Elsa thought. Will was up, and the bedroom
was already warm and dry. Nine or ten o’clock, perhaps.
D

She slid out of bed and went to the window. The bam and sheds
glared in the sunlight and hurt her eyes. Yes, it was late; Will had let
IN

her sleep. She dressed quickly, half ashamed of herself, and hurried
down to the kitchen. Will was outside, working on the car—whistling,
off-key.
Elsa pumped water into a basin and sprinkled her face and neck
with it, shivering in the sharp chill. Then she washed more thoroughly,
and dried her face with a rough towel until it glowed comfortably.
She saw Will at the door, pressing his face against the screen.
“ Hello, Will,” she said.
“ Morning, Elsa. Cold water seems rather good in weather like
this, doesn’t it?”
Will was right. Will was always right, wasn’t he?

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That year Alexander Woollcott and Grace Root established the

William Duncan Saunders prize for creative writing, in memory of
the boy killed in the hazing accident. The prize was $200— then a
substantial sum. I submitted “ Elsa.” One of the judges was Cynthia
Ann M iller’s father, who told me that my story made him realize
how' much he had imposed upon his wife when they were first married.
Hutch also submitted a story, and it was generally believed that one
of us would win, with Joe Vogel a dark horse. Hutch and I decided
to reduce the anxiety and agreed that the winner should pay the loser

PS
$75. I got the $75. I was not shaken; there was no doubt that Hutch
was good.

U
RO
I C D and worked out a
w as c h a ir m a n of th e lass

G
ay c e r e m o n ie s

program that was clearly designed to make a joke of the college. In

Edward Root’s studio I made a series of charcoal caricatures of mem­
S
K
bers of the faculty. I emphasized Smut's ovoid head and called the
cartoon “ The Triumph of an Egg/’ after a story by Sherwood Ander­
O

son. I was working on it when Edward Root walked in, and he immedi­
BO

ately said, “ Have you quarreled with him?”

A freshman, Alf Evers, a far better artist who later became a well-
known illustrator, added some less vicious portraits. I mounted them
EX

all on the walls of the gymnasium in which the Class Day ceremonies
were to be held and assembled a three-piece orchestra which played
a single selection, “ Acfr, du lieber Augustine/ ’ at intervals during the
D

ceremonies. A Chinese student gave a Salutatory Address in Chinese.

IN

It was customary for the class to give the college a present, and
a large crate on the stage was opened with a great deal of trouble and
found to contain nothing. The caricatures were auctioned off, osten­
sibly to pay for the orchestra, and were sold at figures which could be
taken to represent the values we placed on the professors they depicted.
The first amount bid for the picture of Cal Lewis was snapped up as
if the bidder were out of his mind.
My mother and father came for commencement, and the Saun­
derses invited us to tea. It was the first time my father and mother
had met the Saunderses, about whom I had so often spoken, and it

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was a difficult moment for all of us. Stink showed my mother a few
peonies in the garden, and then we went into the music room and sat
near the fireplace, where tea was served. My father tried to say the
kinds of things he supposed appropriate. He was naturally very curious
about the Saunderses' way of life, but he did not try to conceal his
own. He remained himself. My mother, on the other hand, tightened
up and spoke rather airily. The Saunderses recognized the situation
(it was old stuff to them) and did their best, searching for suitable

PS
things to talk about.
I found it very hard going. I had developed two verbal repertoires,

U
appropriate to very different audiences, and now the two audiences

RO
had come together and there was little I could say that was appropriate
to both. I did my best by telling them about the role I was to play
that evening in the Clark Prize Exhibition, giving them a sample of

G
my oratory, with a few key sentences and gestures.
The exhibition was an important event in a college which boasted
S
of its emphasis on public speaking. Each year seniors were encouraged
K
to submit “ orations,” and six were chosen for the exhibition. The
O

participants memorized their contributions and drilled under the

direction of Cal Lewis, picking up appropriate gestures, working on
BO

timing and pacing (always start with the right foot when moving to
the right), and so on. It was my understanding that Jack Chase, Joe
Vogel, Hutch, and I were to turn the evening into a hilarious farce
EX

by submitting orations which could at the last moment be converted

into sheer bombast. W e were to “ disparage orrratory.” But something
D

went wrong and I was left holding the bag. Jack and Hutch were on
IN

the program with standard orations, and I was stuck with an im­
possible travesty. One of the suggested titles was “ Plymouth Rock
and Ellis Island in American Life,” and my oration consisted of an
ultra-conservative attack on immigrants. I pictured the old Puritan
coming to America in search of religious freedom and contrasted him
with recent immigrants lured by the almighty dollar. M y last sentence
was: “ The doors to Ellis Island must be shut if Plymouth Rock is to
remain the heritage of American life.” W ith the help of Cal Lewis, I
worked out an appropriate gesture: I took a step forward with my right
foot and, on the word “ shut,” threw my arm straight out at the
audience with the palm up like a traffic cop's. I demonstrated this

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stirring conclusion together with a few other passages at the

Saunderses'. But my father and mother were rather puzzled by the
laughter.
That evening, when it came my turn to speak, Dean Saunders
rose from his accustomed place in the left front balcony and quietly
retired into the shadows. I must give Fancher his due. He was one
of the few who saw the joke. When I passed him as I was leaving, he
looked at me and shook his head. Trot Chase, who knew me well

PS
enough not to be taken in, nevertheless said, “ Skinner, I thought
you'd do better than that."

U
The Chaplin hoax, the Class Day caricatures, the Clark Prize
Orrration— these were a kind of intellectual vandalism that I never

RO
stopped to analyze. My college education proved to be surprisingly
useful, and it had made no taxing demands upon my time, but I had

G
spent four years under moderately irksome conditions, such as com­
pulsory attendance at all classes and at morning and Sunday chapel.
S
(As one of the monitors who took attendance at chapel during my
K
senior year, I would mark an absentee present in exchange for a pack
of cigarettes, and I felt no guilt because I thought attendance was an
O

outrageous requirement.) There was little entertainment on the Hill

BO

apart from sports, and very little “ culture," and the Hill was a long
way away from the rest of the world for those who had no cars. W e
had girls only at fall and spring house parties and then under strained
EX

conditions. Fraternities strove for social prestige and I belonged to one

at the bottom of the totem pole— which, by my senior year, meant
D

the bottom of College Hill, because the other fraternities that had
been there my freshman year had moved to new quarters at the top.
IN

Today I should no doubt be protesting. I should be storming

the President’s office carrying placards reading: “ Down with Morning
Chapel!" or “ Voluntary Attendance at Classes!" or “ Make Hamilton
Coeducational!" or “ Decent Quarters for Non-Fraternity M en!" But
that was not the fashion, and I was to leave the college without ever
trying to tell myself or anyone else what was wrong with it.
Commencement morning was lovely and the campus as beautiful
as ever, and the chapel was soon filled. The seniors sat in the first rows,
their families and other students in the rest of the hall and balcony.
Some members of the faculty had seats facing the audience, and in

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one of them sat old President Melancthon Woolsey Stryker, who had
composed “ Caríssima,” one of the loveliest of college anthems. He
was now almost stone deaf, and as the audience grew quiet before the
ceremonies began, he turned to his companion and in the hollow
voice of a deaf man boomed out, “ It’s a lovely old hall, but it's getting
a little sm all” The audience laughed sympathetically.
It was my lot to open the proceedings with a Latin Salutatory. I
had written it in such a way that at least a few phrases would be un­

PS
derstood by non-Latinists. I addressed the President as “ Praeses
suaviloquens,” a characterization repeated many years later when his

U
successor described him to a friend of mine as “ a mealy-mouthed son
of a bitch,” and I continued» “ Ave, Caesar, nos m orituri te salutamus.”

RO
I called the trustees, among other things, “ possessores automobilium
fulgentium.” W e had a college song with the phrase, “ Out, out in the

G
cold, cold world” and I pictured our professors weeping as their
favorite class uin mundum frigidum frigidum exit.” And inevitably, of
S
course, I addressed “ virgines dulcissimae,” admitting that “ ad op-
K
pidum sub colle venimus, vidimus, sed vos ipsae vicistis” ("to the town
O

below the hill we came, we saw, but you conquered” — a generous

tribute considering the fact that during my four years at Hamilton I
BO

had never had a date with a girl who lived in Clinton or Utica). It
was all as pathetic as it was predictable.
There was a good deal of unseemly spirit during the first part
EX

of the ceremony, and the President sent word during the intermission
that we should quiet down or risk losing our degrees, and we returned
D

to our places somewhat shaken. W e had rehearsed the procedure for

getting our diplomas. A student's name would be called out, and he
IN

would go up the steps at the left of the platform, cross over to the
Dean and the President, who would hand him a rolled diploma and
shake his hand, and then leave by the steps at the right. W hen a few
students had done this, old Prexy Stryker turned to his companion and
boomed, “ W hy don't they make a bow?” A little later he boomed
out again, “ W hy didn't someone tell them to make a bow?” W hen
my turn came I took my diploma and bowed deeply. The audience, I
am ashamed to say, laughed at this cheap joke. W hen it was all over,
and the ceremonial applause had died down, Stryker turned to his
companion and boomed, “ Only one man made a b o w ”

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There was an alumni luncheon that day at which my father's

hero, Elihu Root, spoke, but I was just barely an alumnus, and we
did not attend. Instead, we went back down the hill to the Lambda
Chi Alpha house, stashed my belongings in the back of the Packard,
and drove off.

PS
E a r l y i n t h e p r e c e d i n g f a l l , my father and mother had driven

to McGinty's for a week’s vacation, but news had come that Mr.

U
Torrey was seriously ill, and they had immediately returned to
Scranton. W ithin a day or two Mr. Torrey died. M y father had always

RO
regarded himself as a kind of understudy who would take over as
General Counsel upon Mr. Torrey’s retirement or death, but now

G
it appeared that that was not the view of the company. He had been
in Scranton only three years and his experience in corporation law
S
was not extensive. Workmen’s compensation was only one field,
K
and a minor one at that. Rumors began to circulate that a Judge Kelly
O

was to take Mr. Torrey’s job and that my father would remain a
junior member of the legal department. He went to New York to
BO

talk it over with company officers and came back with a distressing
story. They had indeed made it clear that he was not to be appointed
in Mr. Torrey’s place, and when he hinted that he might be com­
EX

pelled to resign, they had simply said, “ W e must accept the situation
as you make it.”
D

My father talked things over with his friends. He had been

elected to the Kiwanis Club and went to all the weekly meet­
IN

ings; he had been made a director of the Scranton Trust Company;

and he and my mother had begun to make other friends, some of them
affluent. He got the impression that there was a good deal of law
business going around and that some of it might be turned his way.
It was no doubt hazardous to start a private practice on his own
again and to give up a handsome annual salary, but if he stayed on as
a junior member, he would lose face. And so he resigned.
The Transcript did its best in reporting what had happened.
“ Following the death of Mr. Torrey,” it said, “ Mr. Skinner was
offered a number of legal positions, but declined them to re-enter

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general practice. W ith his added experience gained in Scranton,

coupled with his training and natural ability, his future in general
legal circles in Lackawanna County seems bright.” This was no
doubt what he had told his family and his friends in Susquehanna,
but there had been no other offers, and his future was actually quite
obscure. (His letter to me about my own career is remarkable for
having been written when his own career had taken this ominous
turn.)

PS
He had good luck in finding an office. Three lawyers about his
own age—Ralph and Leon Levy and Frank Lynch— had a suite in

U
one of the better downtown buildings, and they were looking for

RO
someone to take the space left by a man who had just died. They
maintained a joint library, and this was particularly attractive because
my father had sold some of his books when he left Susquehanna. He

G
moved in, taking with him his secretary from the Hudson Coal
Company, and on January 1, 1926, opened an office for the practice
S
of law.
K
His associates seem to have understood him and his situation
O

and to have treated him remarkably well. He appeared in a few cases

jointly with the Levy brothers and Frank Lynch. Judge Smith, back
BO

in Montrose, appointed him receiver for a company in bankruptcy.

But he was not busy. He had managed to save money on his Hudson
Coal Company salary and was in no immediate danger financially, but
EX

he spent hours sitting in his office simply waiting for someone to come
in with a case. He continued to play golf and see his friends, but
D

their assurances of business to be turned his way— assurances he

IN

may very well have exaggerated— never bore fruit.

He was fifty years old and a newcomer to the city, and he began
the long process of attracting attention in an ethical way. During
the year he spoke at a rally at the Second Presbyterian Church and
gave his old speech on the trial of Jesus to two church groups and
the Lions Club. He addressed the Abington M en’s Club and spoke
on Prohibition enforcement at a Bible class of a Methodist church.
He addressed a group of high-school parents, and spoke on com­
pensation law at a meeting of the Northeastern Pennsylvania Society
of Engineers. The Scranton Republican published a long letter from
him on criminal law, in which he argued that laws favoring defendants

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were responsible for the failure to convict. He wrote a letter to the

paper complimenting those who had kept a baseball team in Scranton,
though he almost never went to a game himself, and he became an
elder in the Presbyterian church and participated in a special canvass
of members. The society page of a Scranton paper reported that my
mother gave a “ large bridge luncheon" at the Country Club.
News items about my father often referred to a law degree but
he had never, of course, completed the requirements. He was evidently

PS
disturbed by this dissembling, and he went to see the Dean of the N .Y.
State University Law School, which had taken over the college he had

U
attended. He took a copy of his book and presented other credentials,

RO
and asked whether he might not now receive a full LL.B . degree. He
was dismissed out of hand. The Dean may have thought he was
proposing that they give him an honorary degree, and my father

G
knew so little about academic matters that if he had been asked, he
may well have said that that was what he was suggesting. He also
S
proposed that his publishers call his book Skinner’s W orkmen s
K
Compensation Law in the manner of the classic legal texts, rather
O

than W orkm en’s Compensation Law by William A. Skinner. They

refused at first, although they came around by the third edition.
BO

At one point, desperate at having nothing to do, he turned to a

lawyer he had known for many years and said essentially this: “ Look,
I am not under any financial strain at the moment, but I simply can’t
EX

stand being idle. Have you got some case that I can work on?” The
friend dug up a case that had been lying around for a long time in
D

which he had very little faith. It involved a rather large sum of money,
IN

and my father spent a good deal of time on it and concluded that

something could be done. But this did not bring in any new business,
and by the time I had graduated from college, he was thoroughly
depressed and would come home at noon, eat his lunch silently, and
go into his bedroom and weep.

A ll hard on my mother, who had not yet fully

t h is w a s o f co u r se

adjusted to Scranton. She developed some kind of stomach pain,

which she began to believe was a sign of cancer. Unfortunately she

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not only worried about her husband and herself, she was being sorely
tried by her father.
The letter my grandmother left to be read after her death no
doubt disturbed my mother, with her strong views on sex, and the
rumors which now began to circulate must have been very painful.
The niece who had come to keep house for my grandfather was not
the companion he needed, and he had taken to seeing a Mrs. Craft.
She was a widow who had supported herself and her two sons, friends

PS
of mine, by taking in boarders. She was cheerful and uninhibited, but
when I was young there was a rumor that she was the “ woman in

U
black” who had been seen on the streets late at night
M y grandfather began to see her every evening, often having

RO
supper at her house, and there was, of course, gossip. U. G . Baker,
hoping for a scoop, perhaps, or just out of curiosity, once asked me

G
whether they were going to get married, and I am afraid I made some
rather cynical remark such as, “ W hy should they?” But the only
S
evidence of sexual behavior was meager. M y cousin Lynn Burrhus and
K
Mrs. Craft's son Kenny used to take them for rides in my grand­
O

father’s car. They sat together in the back seat, and since it was an
open car, a lap robe was in order, and Lynn once told me that he
BO

and Kenny suspected that something was going on under the robe.
From evidence I later collected, it could not have been much.
The problem was solved at the time of my graduation. Just before
EX

my father and mother came to Hamilton, Dr. Fulton removed my

grandfather’s prostate, and when we returned to Scranton the patient
D

was moved to our house. A fistula had been made a little below the
IN

navel through which urine slowly flowed, to be absorbed by cotton

pads. The pads had to be changed frequently, and that was my job.
According to Dr. Fulton’s calculations, the fistula would eventually
close and my grandfather would then be able to urinate normally, but
little progress was made. By mid-July he caught a cold and came down
with pneumonia. I spent a good deal of time with him. Near the end
he ‘‘babbled o' green fields.” He pointed to a clothes tree on which
his bathrobe was hanging and asked, “ W hy has that woman been
standing there all day?” Soon his cough became a rale, and my arm
was around his shoulders holding him up when he died.
He may have been killed by his lechery, or rather his lack of it

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under that lap robe, because in his wallet I found two advertisements
for pills guaranteed to increase potency and among his effects some
unused pills. A pill of one color was to be taken on Sunday, followed
by one of a different color on Monday, and so on. They were probably
strong irritants of the urogenital tract, possibly cantharides or Spanish
fly, and they may have been responsible for the inflammation which
led to the operation and the subsequent pneumonia.
When I picked up his effects in his office, I found a few girly

PS
pictures under the glass on the top of his desk. I had never discussed
sex with him, but he once defended himself against some rumors by
telling me that they had been circulated by his son's mother-in-law,

U
Mrs. Outwater. But it was she, he said, who had invited him to her

RO
house and had pulled her dress up above her knees.

G
S
I s e t t o w o r k to become a writer. M y first move was to build a study
K
■— the space in which I would write. Our house had a third floor with
a maid’s room at one end and an enclosed attic at the other. In be­
O

tween there was an area with a south window, and a wall and a door
BO

were put in to convert it into a room. I bought lumber and made

myself a small bookcase and a work table, which I covered with green
felt. I bought a filing case for the manuscripts I was going to produce.
EX

I fell into a routine. After breakfast I went to my attic study. I

forced myself to work on a story in progress or rework something I
D

had thought I had finished. In a short time I would turn to reading

“ literary" things which, I could argue, would further my productivity.
IN

I had been, I think, a charter subscriber to the Saturday Review of

Literature. I also subscribed to the Dial, the American Mercury, Ezra
Pound's Exile when it appeared, and Samuel Roth’s Two Worlds
M onthly, which began to pirate Joyce’s Ulysses. A writer’s monthly
kept me in touch with my putative market. I took a weekly newspaper,
edited by the E. Haldeman-Julius of Girard, Kansas, who published
the Little Blue Books. It was strongly anti-clerical, with Joseph
M cCabe carrying on the tradition of Robert Ingersoll, “ the Great
Agnostic.” Near the end of the morning I would escape from my study
and go downstairs— to play the piano, perhaps, or go out to the garage

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for a spot of carpentry, making something I could argue I needed for

my work.
After lunch, when my father had gone back to his office and
my mother was taking her nap, I would settle myself in a comfortable
chair in our living room. One of the things I had made was a rack
which held a book in a convenient position across the arms of the
chair. I sat close to our new radio— the volume turned low enough
not to wake my mother— and while reading I listened to K D K A from

PS
Pittsburgh or W E A F from New York City, both stations so weak and
so far away that the signal faded a good deal. W hen I grew bored,

U
I would take the Packard and drive to a neighborhood drugstore for
a chocolate soda. There were three stores nearby and I used them

RO
in rotation to avoid being too conspicuous as the young man who had
no job.

G
It was not easy to get books. The Scranton library had almost
nothing I wanted, but later I found that I could borrow from the
S
Hamilton College library by mail. A secondhand bookstore was not
K
very productive and new books were expensive, but I bought and
O

read The Brothers Karamazov, Tristram Shandy, Wladyslaw Rey-

mont’s four-volume The Peasants, and Proust’s A la Recherche du
BO

temps perdu, beginning with the volumes available in English and

moving into French for the rest. By this time I had become a
pipe smoker and had acquired a large meerschaum with a brass cap
EX

over the bowl. In my study I occasionally took a small nip from a

bottle of cognac that I had found in my grandfather Burrhus's cellar
D

and smuggled home. T o all external appearances, then, I was a

IN

writer.
But nothing happened. Anything as ambitious as a novel was
out of the question. I wrote or started to write a few short stories
like those I had sent to Frost, but I finished only one or two of them.
Nothing in my history had led me to take a position on any im­
portant current issue, and the topics I wrote about continued to turn
up by accident. In the courthouse square there was a statue of John
Mitchell, a labor leader, standing with friendly hand outstretched,
and I wrote a sonnet eulogizing him. I did not show it to my father,
who was anti-labor, but I also wrote a parody of a poem by Louis
Untermeyer about miners in which I ridiculed the demands of their

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P A R T IC U L A R S O F M Y L IF E

union. The truth was, I had no reason to write anything. I had notl*
ing to say, and nothing about my life was making any change ia
that condition.

B y t h e e n d o f t h e s u m m e r it was clear that I had made a terribk

mistake, and I eagerly seized upon a chance to escape. It would meat

PS
a substantial change of plans and I explained it in a note:

W H Y I A M DESERTING WRITING FOR SEVERAL YEARS

U
The opportunity offered me to make a great deal of money in the

RO
next, say, three years, is exceptional. I shall not find the same chance
again, and I need money. I need money because my family ties pre­
vent my living simply alone, “ struggling to write." I am not avoiding
a stringent mode of life. G
My family ties prevent me, not because I have a great deal of
S
devotion and respect for my father and mother, but because they have
K

suffered very much in the last four years and because my leaving them
O

would increase their present anxiety to an unbearable degree.

Thus they are unwittingly forcing me into my present course.
BO

True, they have offered me a year to stay at home to write. But

if the first three months of that year are exemplary, this will be the
condition:
EX

My father and mother will be patently ashamed to explain to

friends what I am “ doing.” I have already felt the sting of implied
D

“ You ought to go to work. If you were my boy—.” My father will

assume that I am doing nothing. He will come home at noon and
IN

scowl at me in my smoking jacket and slippers. He will tell me to do

this around the house or that with the car with the implication: “ You
have nothing to do—.”
Mother will say at least once a day, “ It’s going to be pretty hard,
son, for you to settle down to work when you can't play the piano for
an hour after breakfast, or read all afternoon.”
If I go for a walk Mother will ask meaningly: “All alone— ?” To
be alone in Scranton is a sin.
Father will laugh with half-veiled disgust if I make a date to go
walking with a girl at half-past eight in the morning to discuss Dos­
toevski.

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I will accept an invitation to a piano recital with tea afterwards

and Mother will say, "Don’t you think that’s so effeminate?"
I will ridicule a sermon, with the parental rebuke,“ It isn’tright
for you to do that! Those are the men who get things done in the
world.”
Without ever inquiring into my ideas father will flutter his hand
in the air and talk of my “highfalutin theories.”
I will spend evenings being civil and courteous to people with

PS
whom I have nothing in common and whose only claim upon me is
that of guest to host.
I will make plaster of paris plaques and paint them. Upon my

U
showing them to Mother she will exclaim, "Frederic! Do you think

RO
you ought to waste your time like that?”
I could go on. But that would be pathetic.
It is enough to say that Scranton and my Scranton in particular

G
is ready to quench any ideas of my own I may have. It is exceedingly
inhospitable to anything new, and takes pains to make itself un­
S
pleasant.
K
I am too sensitive to my surroundings to stand it.
O

I could do little or no creative work during a year here. It was a

big and important mistake that I ever thought I could. At the end of
BO

that year according to my agreement I would admit (outwardly)

failure and go to work.
As I say, I could not equal the present opportunity then and since
EX

I see failure ahead I might better go to work now, spend three years
in acquiring money, and if at the end of that time I am yet spiritually
alive, then begin to live.
D
IN

I do not remember what that “ opportunity to make a great deal

of money” was, but it vanished as suddenly as it had appeared, and I
found myself committed, with no hope of reprieve, to what I came
to call the Dark Year.

W I c o u l d w r i t e , I could at least write about writing,

h eth er or n o t

and some rather turgid analyses of what literature was all about began
to appear in my notebook. Here are some examples:

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DESIRE TO WRITE

I am convinced that an essentially false desire-to-write is necessary

to any author. Whether it be the desire to make money, the desire to
be known as a genius, the desire to get one's name in the paper, or
some mystical desire to “ express oneself,” it does not bear analysis
without resolving itself into a mean satisfaction of a mean instinct.
By “ false” and "mean” I do not intend to condemn exactly. I mean

PS
simply that the same desires quite as often prod a man into big busi­
ness or eccentricity or acrobatics or driving automobiles at excessive

U
speeds or marriage. . . .
The facile liar has a great deal in common with the artist who

RO
is expert in embroidering detail.

G
OBJECTIVITY

Is Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov subjective?

S
Can a writer be entirely objective? I have read about 250 pages
K
of Miss Garnett's translation of The Brothers Karamazov. I attempted
to read it two years ago, understood nothing of it, and dropped it. This
O

time I am reading it with as great an interest as I ever gave to a novel.

BO

Perhaps this is because I have become Russian in my habit of thinking

so much about life and find in these real people someone to talk with
about God and death and sorrow. Ivan’s confession to Alyosha is
EX

wonderful.
The thing which has gripped me most strongly, however, is
Dostoevsky’s technique. Have I found at last a near perfect compro­
D

mise of sub- and objectivity . . . Chekhov claimed to be objective. He

IN

could produce little more than short stories which, considering them
as a whole, expressed no philosophy of life, If he succeeds in expressing
anything it is that nothing exists which is worthy of serious expression.
It remains for someone to produce a great amount of interpretation
or philosophic thought by the objective method. Flaubert, as Hutchens
says, could not help being subjective. True, in several senses.

MRS. FISKE’ S “ GHOSTS”

Yesterday I saw Ghosts with Mrs. Fiske as Mrs. Alving. It was

probably played exactly as Ibsen would want it—highly dramatic,
beautifully modulated tempo, a great deal of importance put upon
Dr. Manders’s self-deception and upon the sham of ideals in general

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. . . probably an Ibsen performance at its best. [Mrs. Fiske was idolized

by my fellow Hamiltonian Alexander Woollcott.]
But what of Ibsen? Important? Yes—for his time. He saw the
cruelty of convention, of old ideas and ideals; and he strove to sup­
plant them with his doctrine of freedom. This freedom was not a
matter of degree. It was a real identity. A man had it or had it not.
This substantializing of an abstract quality is the fate of any idea
in the hands of a zealot. Philosophy deals with or rather plays with
objects of its own creation. Ibsen was essentially a philosopher in his

PS
habits of thinking. The desire for order led him, as it leads all of his
ilk, to defining, to delimiting, an aspect of life into a word and hence

U
to deal with the word rather than with the aspect. . . .

RO
But life is far too subtle to be defined and explained and illus­
trated. You do not know life, you feel it—with all your senses. Art
should be vicarious experience; if Ibsen, by experience, came to feel

G
some vague injustice, why did he not, as the Russians do, put life
before us, turn our eyes to it, and let us come to feel as he has felt?
S
. . . One can only feel; one can make others feel. The tragic ques­
K
tion is why should we make others even feel?
O
BO

T he I was “ philosophizing” about in this way could

l it e r a t u r e

scarcely have been farther from the “ literature” I was producing. The
EX

morning paper ran a column called “ This Foolish W orld,” and I be­
gan to contribute to it as I had contributed to “ Carpe D iem ” in
D

Hamilton L ife, signing myself Sir Burrhus. One issue contained a

poem of mine (of ninety lines, but fortunately very short ones) called
IN

‘'Romance in Hogan’s Alley” — an ethnic piece consisting of a con­

versation between a Mr. O’Grady and a Mr. O’Toole. Another had
this:

White with rage a college youth paced

In and out the bathroom door,
While a crumpled tube of toothpaste
Lay dejected on the floor.

“ You may use my dental cream,” he

Cried, (I quote him literatim.)

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“ But if you at all esteem me,

Press the damn tube at the bottom!”

I tried to develop a standing feud similar to my interchange with

Jay Kay. I brought up the fact that the editor of the column was a
Colgate man and I referred to Colgate football scholarships and, of
course, toothpaste. M y sallies were heavy-handed, and were turned
against me with devastating effect:

PS
It appears that we did Sir Burrhus (Hamilton, ’26) grievous
wrong in assuming that his first letter was written in a spirit of badi­

U
nage. He is in deadly earnest; and here he comes riding astride a hum­

RO
mingbird, with his little lance in rest and his hom rimmed spectacles
glaring defiance.

G
— clearly a demotion from my role as the stout knight in that poem
in “ Carpe D ie m ”
S
In desperation I played my last blue chip— and lost. I had
K

never worn my Phi Beta Kappa key. I really did not believe in
O

displaying supposed signs of superiority, but I almost certainly got

something out of not wearing a key, because I could then fancy myself
BO

superior to those who did. In one of my heavy-handed challenges to

the editor of the column I proposed that we should list the number
of keys we were entitled to wear but had never worn! I was boasting
EX

of not boasting.
I was an anonymous contributor, but later in the year, when I
D

had given up, the column contained a thinly veiled allusion to a local
IN

figure who was devoting himself to the production of the world’s

great literature in his attic study.
The Writer's Monthly conducted contests, and I won three dol­
lars with my characterization of a flapper: “ Age withered her and
custom staled her to infinite satiety.” I contributed two “ Americana”
to the American Mercury. One was from the Scranton Republican. A
subscriber had written in to ask why such a big word as “ television”
was used for the new (still experimental) medium, and the editor had
explained that “ tele” stood for the part told and “ vision” for the part
seen.
Toward the end of the year a second evening newspaper was

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started in Scranton, and because I knew Nell Fulton and, distantly,

Charles Courboin, I was asked to serve as music critic. I was utterly
unqualified, but that did not stop me, and I attended a number of
concerts and sent in my copy. Of an aspiring young tenor I wrote:

Mr. Jones possesses a strong, clear voice, used with ease and grace.
His attack is confident and accurate, his enunciation careful. If he
sings perhaps too continually in full voice, it is because he cannot,
apparently, resist the sheer joy of singing. While he showed his greatest

PS
ability in the work from the oratorio, he appreciated accurately the
operatic manner, and although last night gave no indication of

U
dramatic ability except for a good stage presence, it is clear that Mr.

RO
Jones can turn to the fields of oratorio, opera, or concert, at his own
choosing.

G
It did not take any musical expertise to write stuff like that.
I began to write a column, called "Ends and Odds,” for Otis
S
Chidester's newspaper in Windsor. Perhaps half a dozen of these, in
K

my best imitation of Christopher Morley, were published. They con­

O

tained some of the poetry I had written in college:

BO

She let me take a book on love;

She told me she enjoyed it—but
She must have read it hurriedly:
EX

I found some pages yet uncut.

D

This was dredging up the past, not writing anything new, and
what was new was sorry stuff. I invented a character named Colonel
IN

Splashton and went farther than my mother had ever gone in being
amused by people who mispronounced words and misunderstood
literary allusions.
I lacked an audience for anything better than that. I wanted to
write for people like Robert Frost, Stink Saunders, and a few literary
friends, but where could they read what I wrote? I thought of pub­
lishing an occasional private letter, which I would duplicate and send
to what I hoped would be a growing list of subscribers interested in
reading what I had to say about books and life in general. But that was
simple fantasy.

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♦ * #

I i n d u l g e d b r i e f l y in a different fantasy. W e still subscribed to the

Transcript, and one day it reported that Robert Sherman, the dis­
tinguished playwright, had retired and was returning to Susquehanna
to spend his last days in his birthplace. He was planning to develop
the old homestead on upper Jackson Avenue. I visualized him at once
as the kind of writer I had occasionally seen lecturing at Hamilton

PS
College— distinguished, cultured, a lover of quiet living. I began to
imagine that he had a daughter just a bit younger than I. She and I

U
would walk along country roads in the late afternoon, returning for
tea before a fire in the library of the refurbished Sherman home. All

RO
this was nourished by the Transcript’s subsequent romanticized ac­
counts of Sherman’s activities.

G
When I went to Susquehanna to visit my grandparents, I called
him up. I told him I wras interested in becoming a writer and asked if
S
1 could come to see him that evening. He set an hour and I was on
K

time. The “ homestead” was a small, nondescript frame house, and he

O

had developed it to the extent of planting some bushes, putting some

large whitewashed rocks along the edges of the driveway, and building'
BO

a small concrete retaining wall. He met me at a side door in his shirt

sleeves. W e sat down beside a dining-room table bearing the remains
of a supper and had coffee. There was nothing very distinguished
EX

about him nor, as it turned out, about his plays. The)7were written for
traveling stock companies and amateur audiences and were sold in
D

pamphlet form to schools and clubs. He w^as proud of his sales and
IN

said that New York playwrights had chosen the wrong market. If I
wanted to get on, I should follow his example.
There was no daughter, but there was a wife, said to be a former
actress, who, after an hour or more, called to her husband from the
kitchen, where by arriving on time I had unwittingly trapped her,
evidently en déshabillé. She now wanted to go upstairs and would
have to pass through the dining room. I solved her problem by taking
mv leave,7 all illusions dashed.
j

A fragment of my literary past turned up in a letter from Rollo

W alter Brown asking if I knew of any Scranton organization that
might be interested in having him come to lecture. He had apparently

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Part I V

kept lists of useful names, and mine was one of them. I was not
above taking advantage of the same tenuous connection. I called the
program chairman of the Century Club and asked whether or not
she would be interested in a lecture by “ my friend" Rollo Walter
Brown. She was, and he came and gave a lecture, but I did not see
him, because he made no effort to look up his old friend.
Brown's lecture was probably typical of the current literary fare
in Scranton, for the Century Club was at the mercy of the lecture

PS
bureaus. I heard Hugh W alpole give for perhaps the hundredth time
a lecture on the English novel, tossing off an apostrophe to that great

U
novelist Sir W alter Scott with just the right style and timing to bring
a round of applause.

RO
I heard something much better from a young Frenchman who
had come to Scranton in the forlorn hope that he might make a

G
living by teaching the language. Someone had tried to be helpful by
organizing an afternoon lecture in French. He and his wife had taken
S
a rather dingy furnished apartment near the center of the city, and
K
the curtains had been drawn to conceal the shabbiness of the furni­
O

ture. The lecturer greeted us cordially en français, and his wife came
out from a bedroom and timidly shook hands, her eyes red with
BO

weeping. There were perhaps a dozen of us (I was the only man)

and we sat down on folding chairs.
The lecture was excellent. It was a discussion of the French
EX

novel from Benjamin Constant to Maurice Barres and le culte du moi.

Some of the older women in the audience probably followed the
D

French more easily than I, but I enjoyed it and was led to read Con­
stant’s great novel Adolphe and to buy Barrés and two or three of the
IN

other modern writers he mentioned. It was like old times— Bill Shep,
in fact— and I was desperately hungry for intellectual stimulation. It
was only too clear that my world in Scranton was as drab as that
darkened room.

I w as e a s il y from my life as a writer. Anything that

d ist r a c t e d

yielded quicker and more substantial rewards took possession of me.

There was a bench in our two-car garage, with a small vice and a few

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tools we had brought from Susquehanna, and I began to make ship

models. I bought some small C-clamps, some glue, and a few small
cans of Duco paint, and I made a fairly large model of a Barbary
Pirate ship with a tier of oars and a lateen rig. I also built a rather arty
model of the Santa Maria, painted to simulate copper patina. Nell
Fulton took a photograph of me sitting by the pirate ship smoking my
meerschaum pipe and gave it to me with the inscription, “ To the
maker of ships on his birthday.”

PS
I made more plaques of plaster and gesso and covered them with
gold paint and touches of color. Stink had liked J. M. Barrie’s M y Lady

U
Nicotine, and I made up a packet of my best tobacco in heavy tin­
foil and lettered a wrapper “ The Arcadia Mixture” and sent it to him.

RO
A lf Evers came to visit me in Scranton, and on a trip to New
York I went to see him at the Art Students League. I asked someone

G
where I could find him, and when I opened the door I found myself
about five feet from a nude female model. I must have been rather
S
conspicuously startled because there was a good deal of laughter
K
from the students at their canvases. Alf quickly rescued me and we
O

went to Greenwich Village, It was as unlike Scranton as possible,

and I began to talk of moving to the Village, perhaps opening a small
BO

ship-model shop in a basement hole-in-the-wall.

Later that day I bought pastels, a few blocks of linoleum with
a set of gouges, and oil paints and brushes—but brushes, Alf pointed
EX

out to me later, such as no artist ever used, because they had varnished
handles. Back in Scranton, following a suggestion of Edward Root’s,
D

I bought some very fine sandpaper to draw pastels on, and with the
oils I painted a portrait of Lindbergh, based on the well-known photo­
IN

graph showing him in a leather helmet.

A friend asked if I would help her with the decorations for a
Christmas party at the Y W C A , and I went into action on a grand
scale. There was space for a number of large panels, and I bought
rolls of paper and thumbtacks and show-card inks and brushes, and
painted rather stylized Biblical murals featuring the star of Beth­
lehem.
Music was also an avenue of escape. I spent a good deal of time
playing that grand piano— the Mozart sonatas, a number of things by
Debussy, and some little preludes and fugues and two-part inventions
by Bach. W e had not brought our Victrola from Susquehanna. The

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phonograph was improving, although reproduction was still mechani­

cal, but my memories of W ard Palmer's records had been dimmed by
a comment of Stink Saunders's, When I first told him that I liked
Verdi (no doubt pronouncing it Vurdy), he had agreed that he was
a talented composer, but as for the phonograph he did not like
“ canned music." I settled for the radio, primitive as it was.
I was hearing good organ music, and a concert series was held
in a downtown theatre. One evening I went to hear Wanda

PS
Landowska. There was a large harpsichord on the stage, and when a
woman in a period costume came out and went to the instrument, we

U
all began to applaud wildly, but it turned out that this was
Landowska's companion, checking the height of the stool and the

RO
position of the instrument. Landowska herself eventually appeared
and was wonderful. (In a similar series several years before, I had
seen Pavlova dancing The Dying Swan.)
G
Another useful distraction was the Drama League, which staged
S
three or four plays during the year at the Century Club. W e put
K
on The Romantic Age by A. A. Milne, and I was one of the Christians
O

in Shaw's A ndrocles and the Lion. It was a walk-on part, but I was
scheduled for the male title role in a play called A dam and Eva. An
BO

attack of influenza saved me from what would have been a disaster.

I spent a good deal of time designing scenery, and I constructed
a particularly elaborate set for a scene in Barrie’s Dear Brutus. It in­
EX

cluded a large mossy bank on which several birch trees were growing.
The trees were realistically round, but the mossy bank creaked slightly
D

when the hero of Dear Brutus sat on it.

IN

I also spent two days helping Jean Gros and his company with
their marionettes. They did Maeterlinck’s Bluebird and Alice in
W onderland, in the pepper scene of which the head of the Duchess
was Mme. Gros’s, grotesquely large in comparison with the other
figures. I learned how to operate marionettes and to appreciate a good
performance. Jean Gros did not think much of his audiences: a
clown juggling three or four balls in the air was applauded as a great
achievement, but it could not compare, he said, with getting just the
right inclination of the head of Mytyl or Tyltyl at a particular point in
a dialogue.
* * ★

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was only occasionally rewarding. Big parties were in

M y so c ia l l i f e
full swing at Christmastime (the stock-market crash would put an end
to them soon), and the professional party arrangers called on me as
an eligible male. Families of marriageable daughters gave thés
dansants at the Country Club or larger evening parties at the Century
Club. The most lavish were those of the two daughters of Worthing­
ton Scranton. Name bands were brought from New York, and
elaborately catered suppers were served, amid masses of flowers freshly

PS
supplied each evening lest something be recognized as left over from
a previous party. You signed for dances, and I usually found the

U
books of the few girls I knew already filled by friends who had known
them longer, or had gone to dinner parties with them, or belonged in

RO
more exclusive circles. I spent most of my time in the stag line with
a few other young men with the same problem.

G
My father took me to Kiwanis Club luncheons and introduced
me to his friends with great pride, but there was nothing I could talk
S
with them about and my efforts to find something must have con­
K

firmed their suspicions that I was not a chip off the old block. I once
O

found myself sitting next to an officer of the telephone company and

tried to make conversation by asking him whether people requested
BO

certain kinds of numbers because they were easily remembered or

easily dialed; but that question was not raised in his branch of the
company, and he dismissed me with, “ Yes, I guess there’s something
EX

like that.”
Dr. Fulton and his wife remained friends of ours after my father
D

left the coal company, and they occasionally came to call. A serious
IN

problem arose because my father was growing deaf and the doctor
mumbled. For two or three hours he would tell stories of which my
father heard very little. W e all struggled with fatigue on those oc­
casions, and when, of an evening, my father saw the Fultons approach­
ing our house, he would groan.
Alone, however, I found Dr. Fulton reasonably good company.
He had wanted a son, and I was a substitute. It was his habit to go
for a walk with his Scottish terrier or hole up in his den as a gesture
of independence from his wife and daughters. (He often complained
that women were trying to move out of their natural sphere, and he
suspected that this was true of dogs because he had seen a bitch lift

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her leg and urinate on a tree. ) He began to invite me to join him. W e

would take his Packard coupé to Lake Scranton, a beautifully wooded
part of the city's water supply, not far out of town, and time our­
selves as we walked around the lake, a distance of about four miles.
The scotty went with us, darting in and out of the woods.
Dr. Fulton was rather careless about his appearance, and he once
told me with a laugh that a woman patient whom he was about to
examine had said, "N ow you wash your hands!" As a surgeon he was

PS
said to be not only careless but irascible. When a nurse handed him
the wrong scalpel during an operation, he threw it back at her in a

U
rage. And once when an intern started to leave the operating room
without excusing himself, he went after him, caught his arm at the

RO
door, and turned him around, resuming the operation with his now
unsterile hand.

G
He tried to interest me in becoming a doctor, and one strategy
was to invite me to watch him operate. The first operation I saw was
S
for osteomyelitis. I washed up with the doctor, had a gown and mask
K
put on, and went into the operating room. The patient’s leg was ex­
O

posed, and the doctor took a scalpel (not too sharp, he explained to
me, because a sharply cut wound does not heal quickly), and cut a
BO

great arc from knee to ankle, blood spurting out to be mopped up

by a nurse. I had already been affected by the ether, and this great
cut was too much. I turned away and the doctor nodded to a nurse
EX

to take care of me. W hen I came back, a great flap of skin had been
drawn back exposing the tibia, at which the doctor was hacking away
D

with mallet and chisel, like a sculptor. It is hard to staunch the flow
IN

of blood from bone, and the operation was a bloody affair, but I stuck
it out and at the end watched the doctor sew up that great flap,
obviously proud of his skill as a seamster.
The operation he performed on my grandfather was not a com­
mon part of his repertoire, and I knew him well enough to detect a
certain reservation when he told me that the fistula through which
urine was leaking onto those pads would eventually close.
I spent some time with a girl who was a graduate of Goucher.
Her mother was dead, and she lived with her father, who was a
doctor. She was small, athletic, highly verbal, with a sense of humor
and great style. She drank heavily and liked to tell about the night

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she came home and fell into some broken glass and her father had to
pull glass slivers from her fanny. She was a sun worshiper and acquired
the darkest possible skin every summer. She stood for the personal
freedom of the twenties, but there was nothing particularly warm
about her, and I do not remember ever having kissed her.
She decided to redecorate a room on the top floor of their house,
and we painted it together. W e ran the floor color up on the wall in
one corner and brought the wall color down onto the floor in the

PS
opposite corner and painted the ceiling to match. The walls were off-
vertical stripes, and the room appeared to be tilted. The only furniture,

U
a number of large cushions, gave no conflicting cues. Our intention
was to make the available supply of Prohibition alcohol as effective

RO
as possible.
In spite of having read Jurgen and Ftmtasms Mallare, I lacked the

G
sophistication needed to appreciate many literary allusions. One day
an old friend of my mother's who had moved to California came to
S
see us with her niece, who was not only attractive but extremely in­
K
telligent. I had left some avant-garde magazine lying around, and my
O

mother's friend picked it up and read a bit of verse aloud. M y mother

was flustered and exclaimed, “ Oh, these young people!” and hastened
BO

to talk about something else. Later, alone with the niece, I said I was
puzzled by my mother's behavior. “ I suppose it was this,” she said,
and she read the line: “ There shall be no hot ichor shooting through
EX

my veins.” I then saw the possible allusion, and I also immediately

regretted that my new friend would be leaving so soon. She was obvi­
D

ously emancipated; a sexual advance might not be repulsed.

IN

M y f a t h e r w a s m o v i n g into his second year in private practice and

still spending a good deal of time waiting for clients. He never had
any secrets from my mother, and now he also took me on as con­
fessor. One day he came home unusually disturbed. A lawyer in an­
other city had referred a case to him for which he had been paid by
the client, and that morning the client had stormed into his office
and accused him of reporting the fee incorrectly and of sending less
than the proper amount to the other lawyer. He was apparently quite

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abusive and talked of instituting disbarment proceedings. His figures

were correct, and my father protested that it had been a mistake and
that he would adjust the matter at once, but he was shaken. He was
in no desperate need of money, and I doubt whether he had been
openly unethical, but the situation was no doubt one in which it was
easy to make that kind of mistake.
M y mother continued to be his main support, but there was
little she could do. Her assurances had once been plausible; she could

PS
alleviate his sense of failure when he lost a case by telling him, “ You
can’t win them all,” but what could she say now? At times she fell

U
back on open criticism, as she had done successfully when they were
young, but the only result now was that my father tended to withdraw

RO
from her.
M y presence made matters worse. W hen I was a child my mother

G
had occasionally rubbed my head, and she still did so from time to
time. If I was lying on the sofa in the library when she was sitting in a
S
chair at the head of it, she might start to massage my scalp. It was
K
quite possibly a kind of affection which she no longer gave my
O

father; indeed, she may never have given it, because it would have led
in a direction she found distasteful. Once when we were alone and
BO

she was rubbing my head, she said that she thought my father was
jealous, and she giggled, but it was not a giggling matter.
M y father still dreamed of a good father-son relationship but
EX

still did not know how to achieve it. It was clear that I never really
enjoyed playing golf with him and his friends. Dr. Fulton was obvi­
D

ously a rival. I once spent a good deal of time polishing his car and
cleaning out the interior; it was something I never did with our
IN

Packard, and I made a great show of this devotion. WTtiy did my

father not inspire something like it? That I was miserably unhappy
only added to his growing despair.
He made a few efforts to bring matters out into the open. He
noted that I played Mozart sonatas a great deal, and he once asked
me rather hesitantly why I preferred such— well, childish— music.
And one evening sitting in the library he commented on the fact that
I had remained completely motionless for at least fifteen minutes. I
could not tell him why because I did not know. I was in fact dis­
playing two curious “ symptoms” on those long evenings. Sometimes I

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would cross my legs and with the toe of my free shoe describe a pattern
a little like the profile of a pipe with a curved stem. Sometimes I ;
would, as my father had observed, sit absolutely motionless in a kind ;
of catatonic stupor. I finally said that I thought I should see a psy­
chiatrist, and I am afraid that my father’s first response concerned
the cost. He told me that his old friend Sid Hersh had once gone to
New York to a “ life extension institute” and had been advised that
he needed psychiatric help. He had spent a lot of money and got

PS
nothing out of it.
M y father never complained; he never raised his voice. When a

U
girl I was interested in asked me to drive her to a fairly distant city

RO
for the day so that she could do an errand (look up a boy she could not
reach by phone, as it turned out), he did point out how much the
trip with the Packard cost, but said nothing more. And once when I

G
drove over to Dr. Fulton’s, I was unaware that one of the back doors
of the car was swinging open, and as I drew up alongside the curb,
S
the door caught a telephone pole, and an expensive body job was
K

needed to repair the damage. My father's reaction was closer to

O

despair than anger. One day when he had gone into his bedroom
after lunch and was weeping on his bed, I went in and told him that
BO

I would go out and get a job and start to earn money, but he protested
that he would work it out somehow himself.
Life was almost too much for him. The move to Scranton had
EX

been a great mistake. Ebbe had died, he had quickly lost his prestigious
position, he might never acquire a reasonably lucrative private prac­
D

tice again, and now his other son, whom he had never really under­
IN

stood, seemed to have lost all interest in life. M y mother was afraid
that he would commit suicide. “ Others have done it for less,” she
said to me, and she was right. But other men had not believed so
strongly in progress or had been so richly rewarded when they proved
to their parents and friends that progress was possible. M y father was
too proud to kill himself; he could not confess failure that way.
Before the year was out his luck had changed. The president of
a small coal company had found him useful and put him on an annual
retainer. It was probably not entirely irrelevant that when the presi­
dent had dined at our house he had noticed our buxom Polish maid
and that he later met her in the street and began to telephone her

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when he knew we were not at home. She wras amused and flattered
by his attentions, but she was afraid that either her boyfriend or the
man’s wife would find out. Nevertheless, she finally agreed to go to his
house, and I wrote down her account of the visit.
"There were his eyes/’ she said, “ and after a while his hair was
all mussed up. 'Gee, I like you/ he said. ‘I like you.' Then he kissed
me and loved me up. ‘I like you!’ He was walking back and forth. ‘I
don’t know if we ought to. Should we or shouldn’t we? Should we or

PS
shouldn’t we?’ He was all excited and kissed me and loved me up some
more. ‘W ell, seeing this is the first time you've come here, we’ll let it

U
go at that. I like you!’ ”

RO
He gave her an envelope, in which she later found ten dollars, and
told her he would give her “ some present” if she would go away for a
while with him. “ I was just wondering where he would take me,” she

G
said, “ and would his chauffeur drive us?” He asked her about me,
and when she protested that I was “ one nice fcoy,” he said he wouldn’t
S
let a chance like that slip by him.
K
M y father did a good deal of work for the company, although it
O

was nothing in which he could take any great pride because, as he told
me later, the company’s mines were running out and the officers were
BO

keeping them open mainly to pay their own salaries. The company
had not paid dividends for years. I do not think there was ever a
stockholders’ suit, but my father dealt with lesser claims against the
EX

management. It was not the kind of thing to restore his faith in him­
self. It was not the kind of triumph that would ever be memorialized
D

in the American Magazine, a publication of the time devoted entirely

IN

to success stories. But it was something to do, and it meant an income

he could count on.

My y e a r was not quite the intellectual desert that might be inferred

from my publications and my diversions. There were articles in the

Dial, that remarkable magazine of arts and letters published during
the twenties, which excited me, and I did some other serious reading.
But there was no one with whom I could talk or even correspond
seriously. I was confined to the autistic, not to say auto-erotic, satis-

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factions to be found in a notebook. I talked with and wrote letters to

myself. W hat I said shows all too clearly that I needed someone to ask
for definitions, explanations, and proofs. M y notes also show idiosyn­
cratic usages and turns of phrase which suggest the auto-didact
One of the first serious books I began to read in that Dark Year
was Bergson’s Creative Evolution. Here is an example of my com­
ments:

. . . philosophy, fortified, reinforced by science, comes to an

PS
impasse. This desire to know everything (helplessly on the wrong track
until Darwin and Huxley) has burned brightly in recent years as the

U
Universal Secret has apparently begun to crack, but it has suddenly

RO
grown dim again. The oil of self-exaltation has run out; for man is dis­
covering his place in the world, but he has discovered that it is a mean
place. Above all else, perhaps, but not far above. Finalist or mechanist,

G
which gives the greater place to man? Which exalts him?
Bergson’s tertium quid may prove interesting. I have read a little
S
over 120 pages so far. It is filled with unconvincing analogies, but the
K
central theme seems valid. The idea of the original push suggests the
O

potentiality of the fertilized human ovum, but this does not simplify
matters for me. It is difficult enough to conceive the latent power in a
BO

fertilized egg which can produce a mature organism, but to conceive, as

Bergson apparently does, of a potentiality which produces a material
whole which is only one of many possible wholes since this existing one
EX

is the single result of overcome resistance, is too much.

I shall read the rest of Bergson with as open a mind as possible,
but I have little hope of finding any acceptable view of life in him.
D
IN

Another stimulus to serious thinking was E. A. Burtt’s just pub­

lished Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science, which
I borrowed by mail from the Hamilton library. Here are a few samples
of my comments:

Man can know only those things which with his senses he per­
ceives.
The present greater knowledge of life is no more than proportion­
ate to the extension of man's sensory power; and there is no reason to
believe that could we be sensitive to life in its entirety we could under­
stand it. True we should eliminate a great many superstitions and fears

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which are bom of ignorance; but above and apart from pure sense
knowledge we should probably know no more of the secret than a
child who has finally explored the innermost stuffings of his doll. . . .
We think beyond words. The artist, since he strives to present
meaning by creating a similar meaning, comes nearer actuality than
the philosopher who strives to give words to meaning. Meaning cannot
be expressed by words because that would necessitate as many words
as there are meanings, which are countless. An approximation of a

PS
meaning can be reached by a piling up of words describing it, but this
in turn defeats the . . . end by a loss of spontaneity. Warning: my
assertions must be understood to come from no authority but my own

U
feeling. . . .

RO
The extension of man’s experience has led to comparison which
is in itself only an extension. Evidence of the influence of comparison
upon man’s thought is clear in the present use of the word compara­

G
tive. Comparative religion has extirpated superstition from the modem
mind; comparative anatomy (together with paleontology) made likely
S
the “ discovery” of evolution.
K
O

The notebook provided no stimulating exchange, and that was

a pity, but it encouraged self-observation—something I had up to
BO

that point rather carefully avoided. I justified keeping a notebook as

a means of self-analysis in a preliminary note:
EX

I want to check my mental progress, something which is difficult

to do merely by day to day self-observation; I want the discipline in
D

thinking that comes with writing one’s thoughts; I want to know how
much mood plays a part in my thinking; do my attitudes toward
IN

problems vary in intensity and even in substance according to my

mental (and physical) condition?; and finally I want the record simply
for a record.

I began to look at myself as a person:

W HAT I ACHIEVE I DESPISE

A few examples first. High marks at college, for instance, seemed

to me at one time to be an indication of a kind of greatness. Had I
never gone to college I would no doubt have continued all my life to
admire the man who could be elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Now that I

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have been there, with, I hope, as few culpable tactics as possible, the
illusion fades, and I see Phi Beta Kappa as a sort of reward for un­
imaginative plugging and large sacrifices on the side of freedom of
mind.
At one time I admired the clever man, the man who could turn
a brilliant remark now and then. I set out to achieve such a reputation.
But though I never became a Christopher Morley or a Michael Arlen,
I got far enough along to find that cleverness is the reward for a good

PS
deal of sacrifice on the side of sincerity and orderly thinking. And be­
cause I saw my way clear to achieving cleverness if I consented to the

U
sacrifice, cleverness lost its glamour for me. Until at present nothing
sets me against a man more than that he be clever. . . .

RO
But why should I despise the things I attain? Is it because I am
secretly conscious of my inferiority and feel that if I achieve a "great”
thing I must have been mistaken as to its greatness? I think not. I

G
think rather that I feel that greatness is merely the result of a happy
combination of trivial influences, that the great man cannot help being
S
great, the poor man cannot help being poor. My ability' to trace my
K
own development shows this to me again and again. My only satis­
O

faction lies in discovering that I am wrong about my "inexorable

evolution”—that perhaps I have imagined it.
BO

I Ask of Life—
1. Pleasurable satisfaction of desire.
The cardinal necessity in obtaining this is restraint. We are
EX

creatures of desire, filled with hundreds of evolved cravings, and the

satisfaction of all of these is neither possible nor would it be desirable.
D

We must make use of our knowledge and intellect to choose those

desires which will give us (in the sum total) the greatest pleasure. . . .
IN

Desire may move the world but intellect may mold desire. But intellect
molds desire only when desire desires to be molded. . . .

The retreat was now a rout:

Nothing is worth doing. But we have the instinct to do, and we

should be wise enough to do the thing which is most nearly worth
doing.
The world considers me lazy because I do not earn bread. The
world expects of me that I should measure up to its standard of
strength, which means that if I "got a job” for eight hours of office
work (minus the time spent in being friendly to the other employees,

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Part IV

in arranging for a party for the evening, in arguing the merits of a

baseball scandal, etc.), [if it] constituted a day and paid me respectable
money, I should be a man. It’s not so much my “ being a man" that
people desire, it is my being one of them.
I see clearly now that the only thing left for me to do in life is
to justify myself for doing nothing.

PS
B u t I c o u l d n o t g o o n doing nothing much longer. My year was

U
drawing to a close, and I had not forgotten the terms of my contract.
I had proved beyond any doubt that I could not make my way as a

RO
writer, and my father’s recent experience had made the law still less
attractive as a profession. W hat was I to do?

G
If I could have answered that question, I might have brought the
Dark Year to a close much sooner. I did not make a break because I
S
saw no alternative. It is true that I had never learned to protest or
K
revolt. I never fought with my friends and only rarely quarreled with
O

my family or teachers. I let the hazers at Hamilton College have their

way without a struggle and I stayed a full week with my parents at the
BO

Essex and Sussex Hotel.

It is also no doubt significant that in my story Elsa's husband’s
name was W ill. M y mother called my father W ill, but Elsa’s story was
EX

mine, not hers. I lived it again and again during that year: no day
seemed bad enough to justify the turmoil of an open break.
D

It would have made a great difference if there had been some­

IN

thing I really wanted to do, but as the year now drew to an end I was
no closer to anything that appealed to me. I had spent some time draw­
ing floor plans of a country house— such a house as a writer might
live in cheaply but comfortably with a lovely and sympathetic wife.
It was not exactly the setting for a vita monastics but it had some
of its virtues. But how could I support myself? I had sent for some
literature about chicken farms in California which showed how one
could raise chickens and much of the food they needed on a single
acre of land and make a living selling eggs and poultry. But it was a
busy life and I was not sure that it would give me much time to think
and write.

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Better might be the physically disciplined life then being recom­

mended by T . E . Lawrence. The army was his solution, but it was
not mine. I considered getting a job simply as a chauffeur. Actually I
settled for something even farther down the socio-economic ladder. A
landscape gardener named Baumann took care of our lawn (and of
the lawns and gardens of Scrantonians who were richer than we but
not rich enough to have gardeners of their ow n). His nursery and head­
quarters were not far from our house, and I hired myself out as a

PS
laborer at thirty-five cents an hour.
I justified the move to my family, and they to our friends, by

U
pointing out that I was in poor physical condition. I had not played
golf, of course, during the winter, and had only occasionally walked

RO
around Lake Scranton. A job out-of-doors—temporary, naturally—
was just what I needed to put me in the pink. T o myself I gave my
reasons in a sardonic sonnet:
G
S
H YM N TO LABOR, OR
K
ACTION AS THE SOLUTION OF DOUBT

(This the farewell to my discontent:)

O

Awake, my soul, from the dull seizure

BO

Of the sweet hasheesh of Too-Much-Leisure

And of the sin of sorrow now repent!
(This, the farewell to my Love of Sorrow:
This the God-be-with-you to my doubt
EX

Which henceforth I must learn to do without.)

Now rings the wild alarm! It is tomorrow!
Gird on, O Soul, your most assuring armor,
D

Finding in labor strangely occult meaning!

IN

Forget not yet the glory of the farmer,

And at the Angelus, rest you from your gleaning!
O Man of Labor, lean upon your hoe:
Christ died for you, O Volga boatman, Yo!

Since I had no skills in gardening, I was put to rolling lawns (as

I had rolled Annetta Kane’s tennis court) and digging up and
transplanting shrubs. I left our house early every morning with my
dinner pail and went to Baumann's garage, where with perhaps a
dozen other laborers I climbed into the back of a truck. W e were
dropped off in twos and threes with our equipment at various prop­
erties throughout the city. I spent many hours practically harnessed

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to another employee. The weather was unseasonably warm and I soon

learned what it was like to work all day under a hot sun. One man I
worked with was an old, uneducated Irishman whose verbal responses
proved to be completely predictable. W e would push the roller across
a lawn, then swing the handle over to the other side and push it back,
moving slightly off the previous track. If, as we reversed our course, I
made a slight hopping step, as if my toe were close to the roller, he
would inevitably say, “ Watch it.” A younger man with whom I rolled

PS
more difficult lawns with steep terraces showed greater variety. He
would point to every passing girl and ask, “ Would you, for a dollar?”

U
and he told me how he wrestled with his wife and laughed as he re­
counted the damage they did to each other. Some of the other work­

RO
men were the kinds of people I had known in Susquehanna. One day
in the nursery the foreman staged a race between two skilled Italians

G
as they dug trenches in the deep soil with their spades. It was not
railroad work, but it had a nostalgic ring.
S
I began to look into the possibility of landscape architecture as a
K
career. Simply to be in touch with it was enough to arouse my interest
O

because there was nothing else in sight. I consulted Baumann, and he

told me with great pride that graduate study in the field took six years.
BO

I was saved the trouble of making a decision. I spent a day transplant­

ing barberry bushes, carrying great armfuls from one part of a nursery
to another. At home that evening I discovered that my chest was a
EX

brilliant red. I had unwittingly pricked myself thousands of times

with the sharp spines of the barberry plants. At that season the air
D

was full of grass pollen, and I had apparently given myself thousands
of minute injections, for within a week I developed a severe grass
IN

allergy. It put an end to any outdoor activity when grasses were in

flower. W hen I went to see Baumann to tell him that I was quitting,
he told me that I was just on the point of getting a raise, but my career
as a landscape architect was over. And once again there was nothing
for me to do.

A I was spared the need to make a decision. M y father

n d o n c e a g a in

came home one day and asked if I would be interested in writing a

digest of decisions of the Anthracite Board of Conciliation. In 1904

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there had been a bloody coal strike in the anthracite region, and Pre
ident Theodore Roosevelt had set up a Board of Conciliation to sett!
grievances brought by unions or companies. Since then, hundreds c
decisions had been handed down, and they were increasingly cited s
precedents in new cases. The company lawyers could work more effe»
tively if these decisions were digested for quick reference. It was had
work, but it was a kind of writing, and I readily agreed to take the jol
I had never been in a coal mine, of course, but that did not seem t

PS
matter. W ithin a month or two, without leaving my desk, I became
kind of authority on jackhammers, airways, blackhead, bottom mei

U
check weighmen, gobshutes, docking systems, hoisting engineer

RO
monkey headings, nozzlemen, peat rock, thin veins, and squai
topping.
I began work in the outer office of my father’s old suite at tl

G
Hudson Coal Company. It was dull and monotonous. I made fr
quent trips to the water cooler and struggled to avoid dozing off. A
S
eight-hour day was much too long for that kind of work. Since I w;
K
still suffering from hay fever, I suggested that I take the work with u
O

to Bread Loaf, where in the pure air of the Battell Forest I would I
BO

more comfortable. I found that I could get a room in one of tl

annexes of the Inn without being a student at the school. Unfort
nately, there was a field of alfalfa in full bloom just outside my roor
EX

and I found myself spending the morning working on the diges

sneezing, blowing my nose, and spreading wet handkerchiefs arour
the room to dry. It was the worst possible place, but my romant
D

experience at Bread Loaf two years before kept me there for mo

IN

than a month. Then I went back to Scranton and finished the bo<
by the end of the year.
It was privately printed under the title A Digest of Decisions i
the Anthracite Board of Conciliation. M y father was listed as c
author but for prestige only, and it was copyrighted in my name,
was no doubt intended to give the coal companies an advantage, bi
the union lawyer who prepared all the cases for the miners had
copy within the year, and some kind of balance was thus restored.
Writing the book was not a total loss. I read 114 8 grievanc
and summarized the umpire’s decision in each in a short paragrap
About 700 were classified according to the eleven awards and agre

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ments of the original commission, but I had to work out a system of

classification for the rest in terms of grievance committees, rates, re­
lations between employer and employee, and a number of miscel­
laneous topics. It was not far from a Baconian classification of sci­
entific facts.
The money I made on the Digest opened fresh prospects for a
career. I began to consider graduate study. M y life at Hamilton, as
I looked back on it during that Dark Year, had been good, and I

PS
began to wonder whether I might not return for an M.A. in English.
The college had no graduate program, but it had occasionally taken on

U
a student for further work. I have forgotten whether I abandoned
this effort to remain a fledgling for still another year or was rejected.

RO
It does not matter because I was beginning to consider an entirely
different field.

G
S
K
O
BO
EX
D
IN

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U
RO
G
S
K
O
BO
EX
D
IN

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U
RO
G
S
K
O
BO
EX
D
IN

a lavd

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U
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G
S
K
O
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D
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PS
X h a d a p p a r e n t l y f a i l e d as a writer but was it not possible that

literature had failed me as a method? One might enjoy Proust’s remi­

U
niscences and share the emotional torment of Dostoevski’s characters,

RO
but did Proust or Dostoevski really understand? Annetta Kane, my
intellectual Catholic friend, had once quoted something of Chester­
ton's which came back to me with great force. The passage occurs in
a preface to Dickens’s O ld Curiosity Shop.
G
S
There is an odd literary question which I wonder is not put more
K
often in literature. How far can an author tell a truth without seeing
O

it himself? Perhaps an actual example will express my meaning. I was

once talking to a highly intelligent lady about Thackeray’s Newcomes.
BO

We were speaking of the character of Mrs. Mackenzie, the Cam­

paigner, and in the middle of the conversation the lady leaned across
to me and said in a low, hoarse, but emphatic voice, “ She drank.
EX

Thackeray didn’t know it; but she drank." And it is really astonishing
what a shaft of white light this sheds on the Campaigner, on her
terrible temperament, on her agonised abusiveness and her almost
D

more agonised urbanity, on her clamour which is nevertheless not open

IN

or explicable, on her temper which is not so much bad temper as

insatiable, bloodthirsty, man-eating temper. How far can a writer thus
indicate by accident a truth of which he is himself ignorant?

That was my cue. I was interested in human behavior, but I had

been investigating it in the wrong way. A lf Evers had said to me,
“ Science is the art of the twentieth century,” and I believed him.
Literature as an art form was dead; I would turn to science.
It was too big a change to come about all at once, and for a long
time I was clearly ambivalent. At times I was quite violent: literature
must be demolished. I wrote a note called “ The Polemic Against Liter-

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attire.” But I continued to read poetry and fiction (the last volume of
A la Recherche . . . had not yet appeared). I could justify that as
pleasure; to get down to business I would turn to science.

The that concerned itself with behavior (animals or human)

s c ie n c e

was said to be psychology’, about which I knew very little. “ Phil. 1 - 2 ”

PS
with its brief demonstration of the two-point limen had not been in­
formative, but the subject matter was not unfamiliar. As a child I had

U
had many opportunities to observe animals in the wild, and I had a
few glimpses of what might be done with them in captivity. I once

RO
overheard Jack Palmer explain that the bronco buster in the rodeo
stopped short of "breaking the will” of a horse so that it could be

G
ridden again in the next show. A friend and I once tried to get pigeons
drunk by soaking corn in whiskey. Napier, the Scottish mathematician,
S
is said to have succeeded in doing so, but we failed. Nor was I success­
K

ful as a trapper. Advertisements in magazines like Popular Mechanics

O

told of the money to be made from furs, and I bought two or three
Victor jump-traps (the patent of which was originally held by the
BO

Oneida Community, which would later interest me for a different

reason), and I set them in what were said to be the right places, but
I never caught anything. One of Em est Thompson Seton’s wily ani­
EX

mals not only avoided all traps but showed his contempt for the
trapper by defecating on them, and I sensed a similar battle of wits.
D

I once saw some performing pigeons at a county fair in New

IN

York State. The scene was the façade of a three-story building. Smoke
appeared from the roof, and a presumably female pigeon poked her
head out of a window on the top floor. A fire engine moved in from
the wings, smoke pouring from its boiler. It was pulled by a team
of pigeons appropriately harnessed, and other pigeons with red fire
hats rode on the engine, one of them pulling a string which rang a bell.
Somehow a ladder was put up against the building, and one of the
fire-pigeons climbed it and came back down, followed by the pigeon
from the upper window.
Shortly after we moved to Scranton, I wrote a note about some­
thing that happened one day in our driveway.

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LIFE AND DEATH

I did not see the beginning, but doubtless the Black Bug was the
aggressor, for when I came upon the battle it had fixed its teeth in the
side of the Earthworm and was letting itself be flung about as the
Worm fought. Most of the action of the Worm was lost, but it had one
play which occasionally took effect. It made a loop of itself beginning
at the head and gradually worked it backwards, at the same time toss­
ing about wildly. The loop stroked one side of the worm for its entire

PS
length, and one time in about four it succeeded in brushing the Bug
away. Unfortunately, the Bug almost immediately fastened itself again

U
and it would be some time before the Worm had the luck to get rid
of it with its loop. At each wound . . . a drop of blood would appear,

RO
mingled with the mucus which the Worm secreted at each point of
attack; so that each effort of the Worm to rid itself of the Bug resulted
in a fresh opening and no doubt considerably hastened death. Its

G
movements became spasmodic and feeble; it grew slightly purple in
color as if poisoned. The Bug was now satisfied to proceed from wound
S
to wound, drinking the blood which had come out. Then, apparently
K
satiated, it crawled three or four times about the dead body and then
O

amused itself by crawling back and forth underneath.

BO

M y father, possibly because he never quite understood how to

get on with people, was always watching them, and he frequently
called my attention to their behavior. From his office window he
EX

could watch Wright Glidden park his Packard near the First National
Bank, and he once commented on the great precision with which he
D

did so. At a baseball game he pointed out how our catcher fooled the
IN

umpire, who stood behind the pitcher, by bringing his glove into a
strike position after catching the ball. As a practiced orator he was
alert to verbal foibles, and once told me with a smile that a friend's
wife, trying her hand at public speaking for the first time, had called
for action "at once, immediately, and now!" And he once reported
that a well-known figure in Scranton often ended a sentence with
“ and things and things and things." My research into the digressions of
Professor Bowles may have been inspired by some such remark. He
never showed me his set of Havelock Ellis, but those sectional book­
cases in Susquehanna had contained six or eight volumes on applied
psychology, published by an “ institute." They were attractively bound,

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with white spines and great white embossed seals on their blue covers,
and in one of them, I remember, it was argued that an advertisement
for chocolates showing a worker shoveling cocoa beans into a roast­
ing oven was “ bad psychology.” And almost every day I read the
essays of Dr. Frank Crane in the Binghamton paper.
Any unusual behavior puzzled me. A classmate of my father’s
became totally paralyzed and spent his life in bed, attended by his
wife. W hen he died, however, it was said that his body immediately

PS
lost its rigidity. How was that possible? At some kind of outdoor
church fair there was a booth in which you threw balls at dolls

U
mounted on a rack. The dolls were restored to their place by pulling
a rope from the front of the booth. Once, when the woman who ran

RO
the concession was picking up the balls under the dolls, some wag
pulled the rope, and the woman dropped to the ground in alarm. I

G
wondered why she had confused the sound of the rack with the sound
of a ball being thrown.
S
W hen I was in third grade, our teacher was talking to the fourth-
K
grade class at the other end of the room. I was reading, and suddenly
I put up my hand and waved it to attract her attention. She asked me
O

what I wanted, and I said that I had been reading a certain word just
BO

as she had said it. Both classes laughed, and perhaps I deserved to be
laughed at, but I had noted an important and rather curious effect of
coincidental verbal stimuli.
EX

Once in a rather noisy street I was trying to talk to a friend in a

store window. I shouted to him and then strained to hear his reply,
D

but I could not make out what he was saying— until I discovered that
there was no glass in the window. His voice was reaching me loud and
IN

clear, but I had dismissed it as part of the ambient noise and was
listening for a fainter signal. On our canoe trip, too, I had been
impressed by that "conscious phenomenon” and I tested physical
reality with some care.
W ard Palmer was curious about human behavior. He told me
that his father (as a specialist in automobiles) had once been called
to the phone in the middle of the night about an accident. Half asleep,
W ard had listened to the conversation without really hearing it until
his father said, “ Dead?” whereupon he was instantly wide awake.
In high school I began to write a treatise entitled Nova Principia

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Orbis Terrarum. The project itself—nothing less than a new principle

of the universe— was expansive enough without the Latin title, but
that was, I suppose, my tribute to Francis Bacon. The first two pages
of this work survive. They begin: “ Our soul consists of our mind, our
power of reasoning, thinking, imagining, weighing, our power to
receive impressions, and stimulate actions of our body; and our con­
science, our inner knowledge of write [sic]." This was not a generaliza­
tion based on my own observations, and it is perhaps just as well that

PS
the manuscript soon breaks off.
I gained some important fringe benefits from my advanced

U
courses with Bugsy Morrill. I dissected a cat preserved in formalde­
hyde, and I made quite acceptable slides of a chick and a pig embryo,

RO
but more important, as it turned out, was the fact that Bugsy called
my attention to the writing of Jacques Loeb. I read Physiology of the

G
Brain and Comparative Psychology and The Organism as a W hole,
and I was impressed by the concept of tropism or forced movement—
S
for example, by those creatures that “ loved the light” but swam
K
resolutely into the dark end of a tank when the light was coming in
O

the right direction.

At Bread Loaf, of course, I had written that play about “ the
BO

glands that change personality,” and in my senior year I wrote a

term paper for Chubby Ristine on Hamlet's madness. I discussed the
original reason why Amleth, in the chronicle by Saxo Grammaticus,
EX

had put on his “ antic disposition” and cited other historical examples
of feigning insanity to escape revenge. I argued that the type of mad­
D

ness assumed by Hamlet (somewhere I had picked up the term “ in­

volution melancholia,” and I badly overworked it) was responsible
IN

for much of the controversy about whether Hamlet was really mad.
The stories I had sent to Frost, as well as “ Elsa," were all psycho­
logical, and so was much of my serious reading during that year in
Scranton— from Dostoevski to Proust. There was even a bit of animal
behavior, because the only episode I remember from The Peasants is
one in which a girl takes a cow to be serviced by the parish bull, and
the priest keeps the excited bull away for a time “ to make a better
calf."
Those books Dr. Fulton had lent me which traced the behavior
of famous people to medical problems touched on psychology, and

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when the doctor took out my appendix, I was particularly interested

in how I should lose consciousness when going under ether. I con­
vinced myself that the last thing I sensed was the bending of my right
elbow as someone presumably moved my arm.
Proust was practicing a kind of psychology when he sought to
explain strange recollections, and I myself began to analyze a few
instances of Proustian recall in my own experience. Here is an ex­
ample:

PS
I see my mother writing a note to Mrs. John DeWitt, and the

U
next day, while writing some notes on packing, the picture of a bed­
room flashes into my mind. I am unable to identify it, even to orient

RO
myself in it; and I am ready to conclude that it is one of the few scenes
I have dreamed of but never remember actually seeing. Suddenly it
comes to me that the room is that of John DeWitt, the son of the
G
woman my mother was writing to; and I further remember that the
only time I ever saw it was while waiting for him to pack some clothes
S
in a knapsack.
K
O

A diagram below the note shows two intersecting lines with an arrow
pointing to the intersection, and the words “ Cf. James.” Introspection
BO

also seemed important quite apart from its literary uses. Here are two
relevant notes:
EX

In a railroad car I watch a heavy black smoke blow against my

window. It is not until I smell a very faint odor of coal gas that I revolt
D

at this suffocating sight.

IN

A half-cloudy afternoon takes on the meaning of a rainy one when

a few drops of water are spilled on my hand, although I know it is not
rain.

I was also intrigued by the after-image of movement. I often

rode on the rear platforms of trains and was familiar with the fact that
the track seemed to move toward the train after the train stopped. It
occurred to me that in riding on a straight track there must be some
point in the distance where the after-image of movement just over­
comes the physical recession of the tracks so that a point would appear

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to be standing still, but it was nevertheless a point that was always

changing.
During the year I wrote a long note about my synaesthesia, re­
cording the colors 1 associated with numbers. I thought I could trace
the effect to the colored alphabet book printed on cloth that I had as
a child. “ If this is true a useless meaningless association has persisted
for years."
I began to take psychology seriously as a field. The Hamilton
College library lent me a book on the emotions by MacCurdy, and

PS
somewhere I picked up a book on perception by Parsons.

U
RO
T h e r e w a s t o b e one curious digression. In the Susquehanna library

I had been intrigued by books of arcana, and at Bread Loaf a pro­

G
fessor from Boston University had taken rather seriously a number of
supernatural phenomena, including some photographs that children
S
K
were said to have taken of fairies. I read Ouspensky and Claude Brag-
don, and began to play with their versions of space, time, and the
O

fourth dimension. Here is a sample from my notebook, showing how

BO

far I could stray from the path of science.

Meaning is relation; depending upon, and changing with, time,

EX

space, and space time. It derives from time, space, and space time and
from nothing else. At a given point in time a thing is; and it is, and has
meaning, not because of its component parts but because of their place
D

in space time. The buttercup I am looking at is composed of cells, the

IN

cells of molecules, the molecules of atoms, the atoms of electrons and

protons, and they, for all we know, are of such stuff as life is made of.
The buttercup is and has meaning because of the arrangement in
space time of its parts.

A note would begin with a reasonably interesting observation:

“ I sit in a train at a station and coincidentally with the slow motion
of my head from left to right I hear the slow creak of wheels. Immedi­
ately I perceive that we are moving, and it is a shock to find that we
are not.” But I would then quickly muddy the waters: “ The apparent
movement of matter which is derived from our third dimension is

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realized as non-movement because we have learned the meaning of

m ove.. . . The accumulation of facts created a meaning which was in
effect retrogressive, i.e. . . . , with a two dimensional understanding I
should have taken the meaning of ‘moving' without the correlated
facts.” (In my analysis of Proust's style I noted at one point that he
“ hints at my retrogressive theory.” )

PS
I w a s f l o u n d e r i n g in a stormy sea a n d perilously close to drowning,
but help was on the way. The Dial published some articles by Bertrand

U
Russell which led me to his book Philosophy, published in 1927, in

RO
which he devoted a good deal of time to John B. Watson’s behavior­
ism and its epistemological implications. Here was a different approach
to meaning and a theory of knowledge. I liked what Russell said of
G
Kant: He “ has the reputation of being the greatest of modern phi­
S
losophers, but to my mind he was a mere misfortune.” So much for
K
Bill Squires! As for behaviorism—
O

This philosophy, of which the chief protagonist is Dr. John B.

BO

Watson, holds that everything that can be known about man is

discoverable by the method of external observation, i.e., that none of
our knowledge depends, essentially and necessarily, upon data in which
EX

the observer and the observed are in the same person. I do not funda­
mentally agree with this view, but I think it contains much more truth
than most people suppose, and I regard it as desirable to develop the
D

behaviourist method to the fullest possible extent.

IN

The refreshing thing was how quickly Russell, following Watson,

got around to facts:

The scientific study of learning in animals is a very recent growth;

it may almost be regarded as beginning with Thorndike’s Animal
Intelligence, which was published in 19 11. [It began with his “ Animal
Intelligence: An experimental study of the associative processes in
animals," a monograph published in 1898.] Thorndike invented the
method which was adopted by practically all subsequent American
investigators. In his method an animal is separated from food, which

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he can see or smell, by an obstacle which he may overcome by chance.

A cat, say, is put in a cage having a door with a handle which he may
by chance push open with his nose. . . .

In my copy I underlined the phrase “ which he can see or smell”

and on the following page when Russell refers to the maze “ with
food outside where the rat could smell it/’ I underlined “ where the rat
could smell it.” Russell, again following Watson, was trying to inter­

PS
pret the Law of Effect as an example of the substitution of stimuli.
Russell stated the principle in this way:

U
When the body of an animal or human being has been exposed

RO
sufficiently often to two roughly simultaneous stimuli, the earlier of
them alone tends to call out the response previously called out by the
other.
G
Although I do not agree with Dr. Watson in thinking this prin­
ciple alone sufficient, I do agree that it is a principle of very great
S
importance.
K
O

It was, of course, Pavlov’s principle of the conditioned reflex. It

BO

would be a long time before I saw the mistake which Russell and
Watson were making and in which I concurred when I underlined
those phrases, because the course of psychology as a science of be­
EX

havior was to follow the unproductive path of stimulus-response psy­

chology for many years.
Inspired by Russell, I bought Watson's Behaviorism. I lost in­
D

terest in epistemology and turned to scientific issues. I was back with

IN

Jacques Loeb and forced movements, and I began to glimpse the

possibility of technological applications.
W hen a book by Louis Berman, an endocrinologist, appeared
under the title The Religion Called Behaviorism, I took up the
cudgels and wrote a review which I sent to the Saturday Review of
Literature. They did not publish it, but in writing it I was more or
less defining myself for the first time as a behaviorist.
As I read further in Russell and Watson, I moved from “ phi­
losophy” toward an empirical analysis. I was still using terms like
“ forethought” and “ intelligence” and talking about experiments with
mazes, but I was looking at behavior. For example, I wrote a note on

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P A R T IC U L A R S O F M Y L IF E

the process of learning to pack a suitcase, essentially according to the

Law of Effect. At first one throws things into a suitcase in no order
whatsoever and with the immediate consequence of not having enough
room for everything and the deferred consequence of wrinkled cloth­
ing or a burst tube of toothpaste. Later on, one “ tries another route”
(I was still lost in the maze) and puts the suit in the bottom of the
case carefully folded and packs the tube in soft clothing. I had still
a long way to go, but I was on my way.

PS
And in November 1927 an article by H. G . W ells in the
New York Times Magazine confirmed my decision to abandon litera­

U
ture and turn to psychology. The article was given a headline rather
than a title:

RO
M R . W ELLS APPRAISES M R . SHAW

G
He Contrasts the Contribution of the Playwright
With That of Pavloff, Russian Scientist, and
S
to Whom Does the Future Belong: the Man of
K
Science or the Expressive Man?
I have before me as I write a very momentous book. It is entitled ,
O

“ Conditioned Reflexes,” and it is by Professor Pavloff of Leningrad.

BO

It is not an easy book to read, but it is not an impossible one, and

when one has read, marked, and learned one finds—I find—that one
has at least attained the broad beginnings of a clear conception of
EX

the working of that riddle within us which is perpetually asking us

riddles, the convoluted gray matter of the brain.
D

As W ells read, he was reminded of another great man for whom,

IN

he said, “ I have an admiration and affection as least as strong as I have

for Professor Pavloff, though my admiration is of an entirely different
character, George Bernard Shaw. I recall that Professor Pavloff is one
of the greatest of vivisectors— 'those scoundrels,’ Shaw called them—
and that, according to Shaw, it is his habit to boil babies alive and
see what happens/'
Vivisection aside, Wells was intrigued by “ the remarkable con­
trast of these two eminent figures,” with both of whom he himself
had something in common:

I come somewhere between them, in my humbler measure I par­

take a little of both. I do not know what Pavloff thinks of Shaw,

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Part V

probably about as much as he thinks of the “ proletarian science” of

Moscow. But we have Shaw’s ringing "scoundrel” for Pavloff properly
on record. I have been amusing myself for some minutes with that
amusing game of the “ one life belt.” Probably you know and play that
game. You put it in as a problem rather after the fashion of “ The
Doctor’s Dilemma” ; if “ A” is drowning on one side of a pier and “ B ”
is equally drowning on the other, and you have one life belt and can­
not otherwise help, to which of the two would you throw it? Which
would I save, Pavloff or Shaw? I do not think it would interest the

PS
reader to give my private answer. But while I was considering it I was
manifestly obliged to ask myself, 4‘What is the good of Shaw?” And

U
what is the good of Pavloff? Pavloff is a star which lights the world,

RO
shining above a vista hitherto unexplored. Why should I hesitate with
my life belt for one moment?

G
And why should I hesitate? There was no reason at all. It was
to be graduate study in psychology. But where should I go? I knew
S
nothing about departments of psychology. John B. Watson was no
K
longer teaching. He had been dismissed from Johns Hopkins because
O

of a divorce which had become one of the newspaper scandals of

the twenties. My professor of “ Phil. 1 - 2 ” was not likely to be of help,
BO

but I went back to Hamilton to talk things over with Bugsy Morrill
and Stink.
I went first to see the President, and he had no trouble in giving
EX

me advice. He reached into the bottom drawer of his desk and pulled
out a yellowing mimeographed folder designed to answer just such a
D

question as I had brought to him. He looked up psychology and found

IN

that the two outstanding departments in psychology were at Columbia

and Harvard. I would discover later that neither department was then
outstanding. Evidently the ratings had been made many years before
when Miinsterberg and James were at Harvard and James McKeen
Cattell at Columbia.
Bugsy had been successful in getting many of his pre-medic
students into the Harvard Medical School and recommended Harvard
on the strength of that. (And he had something to show me— a large
black volume called Conditioned Reflexes by the Russian physiologist
Pavlov!) W hen I got back to Scranton, Dr. Fulton strongly sup­
ported Harvard because he had done a bit of post-graduate work there
himself. And so I applied to the Department of Psychology at Harvard

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PARTICULARS OF MY LIFE

for admission as a graduate student in the fall of 1928 and was ac­
cepted the following spring. It is possible that I could have entered in
February if I had known enough to ask, but, so far as I knew, academic
years began in the fall.

M y d e c i s i o n w a s , of course, a tremendous relief for my father and

PS
mother, and in a conciliatory and affectionate mood my father sug­
gested that we go to Europe the following summer. I had had my fill

U
of vacationing with my parents, but Europe might be different, and
I agreed, with the proviso that I should leave early and spend a month

RO
or two on my own before joining them. Even so, four or five months
remained before I would leave.

G
I spent them in Greenwich Village. I had seen the Village with
Alf Evers, but the chance to spend a few months there came through
S
other friends. Early in the fall of ’27 a young woman spoke to the
K
audience at the end of a lecture at the Century Club. She was pro­
O

moting a series of concerts and lectures and she made her point by
reciting a little poem, each stanza of which ended with the line: “ It
BO

isn't your town, it's you,”

I talked with her afterward and made some condescending re­
mark about the poem. She admitted that it was not to her taste either,
EX

and when wfe had talked a little more she introduced herself— she
was Emily W hite— and suggested that I come down that evening to
D

meet her husband, who had come with her to Scranton. After dinner
I drove down to a boardinghouse in the center of the city, where they
IN

were staying.
Norman W hite was a charming man who was then editor of a
house organ called the Glass Container ( “ See what you buy. Buy in
glass"). He had an ironic sense of humor about life in general, and
liked Max Stirner's T he Ego and His Own. They were both liberal
and seemed to know all about contemporary literature. They invited
me to visit them in New York, though they would not be able to put
me up in their small basement apartment.
I went down on a Saturday morning and checked into a nearby
hotel, and that evening I attended my first Village party. There

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P a rtV

were eight or ten of us, and we had Prohibition gin highballs. The
talk was intellectual, with a touch of local politics. I told them I was
going to study psychology, and someone brought up hypnosis. Could
I hypnotize people? I had read something about hypnotism but had
never tried it, but that did not stop me, and I offered to hypnotize a
young woman who had particularly caught my eye. Her name was
Stella, and she was dark, with flashing eyes and a pleasant musical
laugh, and rather resembled Ellen at Bread Loaf. She volunteered to
be my subject. She must have been extremely susceptible because when

PS
I went through some of the standard paces she responded beautifully.
As a post-hypnotic suggestion, I told her that after she had awakened

U
I would adjust my necktie and she would then come over and kiss

RO
me, and, rather embarrassed, I turned to the others and said, “ She'll
hate to do that!” W hen I later tested this suggestion by adjusting my
tie, she did indeed come over and kiss me, but she had evidently

G
taken my comment as part of the instructions and wept and pro­
tested.
S
I talked with her and discovered that she was married. Her
K
husband was in the army and stationed at a fort in New Jersey. She
O

was living in an apartment on Barrow Street. I asked her if I could

BO

come to New York and see her, and she said yes, and we set a date.
After my disastrous year in Scranton that party was terribly ex­
citing. Prohibition liquor was expensive, and we did not get very high,
EX

but the company was delightful, and my first appearance in public

as a psychologist had been a dramatic success. The next morning I
went back for breakfast with Norman and Emily W hite, and they
D

suggested that I come to New York and get a job until it was time
IN

to go to Europe in the spring. I went back to Scranton and talked

it over with my parents, and they were only too happy to agree. I had
a little more work to do on the Digest, but then I could leave
Scranton for good.

As i t h a p p e n e d , two girls I knew were driving, or rather being driven

by their chauffeur, to New York for the weekend of my date with
Stella, and they offered me a ride. I checked into a hotel and turned

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PARTICULARS OF MY L IF E

up at the apartment on Barrow Street precisely on time, carrying a

large gardenia, a flower which Stella, who had spent some time in
Hawaii, had said she particularly liked. She was waiting for me and
we kissed almost at once. I went into the bedroom with her as she
put on some finishing touches. Possibly because of the tour of duty
in Hawaii, there was a slightly Oriental touch to the apartment. She
loved horses, and the ashtrays were cloisonné Chinese stirrups. W e
kissed a bit more, and then, as I had carefully planned, I recalled a

PS
passage in Remy de Gourmont's Nuit au Luxembourg in which the
author speaks highly of “ desire without anxiety,” and I asked whether,

U
as we ate dinner, I could enjoy that emotion. She said I could, and I
was unable to resist trying to take some immediate advantage of

RO
this concession, but she insisted that we go on to dinner.
W e walked over to Marta's, a speakeasy and restaurant just a few

G
steps from Washington Square. Stella was known there, and when
they saw her through the little opening in the door, they let us in.
S
Marta herself sat behind the cash register, and at Stella's request
K
issued a card which I might use to gain admission. It was a business
card, and on the back Marta scrawled a description of me, “ Faccia
O

m agra” to be used by the doorman.

BO

Marta's was the meeting place for the Silent Birdmen, an organi­
zation of aviators who had been in the war, and there was a large
propeller on the wall of the main dining room. W e dined in the
EX

back, however, which was open to the evening sky. Our waiter had
seen Stella before and gave us excellent attention, and we had
D

cocktails and wine with our dinner. Desire without anxiety was all
very well, but I was anxious to get back to Barrow Street, and we
IN

eventually left.
I spent the night with Stella. It meant a great deal to me, and
it was a long time before I realized that it meant much less to her. I
was still unskilled in the art of love. I could offer quantity but not
quality, and Stella was too nice to complain. Perhaps she hoped for
progress. In any case she suggested that when I came to New York I
should room with her. Another girl was actually sharing the apart­
ment, and I could have a cot in a small alcove. Everything would look
all right to her husband on his occasional visits.
W e had a leisurely breakfast, and I went back to my hotel and

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PartV

picked up my things, and my friends met me, and we drove back to

Scranton. I was too proud of my night with Stella not to make it pretty
clear that I had spent the night with a girl. I told my father and
mother that I had arranged to room with a “ family” in New York,
and I could give them an actual mailing address.

I m o v e d t o N e w Y o r k and began life in that strange ménage. The

PS
other girl, Doris, had a nine-to-five job and was up first in the morning
and soon out of the apartment. I would then hop into bed with Stella,

U
who, as a model in a fashionable clothing store, had a more leisurely

RO
schedule. Eventually she would shower and take contraceptive precau­
tions, the nature of which I never fully understood, and dress, and we
would then have fruit, coffee, and toast, and she would be on her way.

G
Alone in the apartment, I played the phonograph. I particularly liked
S
Paul Whiteman's version of Rhapsody in Blue and someone sing­
K
ing “ The Man I Love.” Later in the day I would go out to wander
about Manhattan. I rode double-decker buses from Washington
O

Square to Riverside Drive and Grant’s Tomb (Gulden's mustard was

BO

advertised on the backs of all the seats). I took the subway from
Sheridan Square to Pennsylvania Station or Times Square (the risers
of all the stairs carried red-and-blue advertisements for Iodent Tooth­
EX

paste Numbers 1 and 2).

Occasionally I would answer an advertisement or call at an
D

employment office. One advertisement looked promising: A writer

was wanted for a weekly paper. It turned out to be a vanity racket. The
IN

paper published short paragraphs about likely prospects: so-and-so was

holding a twenty-fifth-anniversary sale in his hardware store on such-
and-such a street; he was well known, one of the community’s most
substantial citizens, and so on, and so on. Hundreds of such para­
graphs were indeed printed, but in a weekly with no subscribers. Each
item was clipped and sent to its subject, who was told that he could
buy copies in quantities at a fairly high price. The editor quite frankly
explained the racket and also quite honestly told me he did not think
I would be happy in the job.
I found all the big employment agencies almost deserted. I was

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PARTICULARS OF MY LIFE

given forms to fill out and told that I would be contacted if a suitable
job arose. I got only one call— from a small agency run by a sym­
pathetic woman. Something had turned up in which she thought I
might be interested, and I went to see her. A rich man had acquired a
fairly large private library, and he wanted it catalogued. She thought
my Hamilton experience would fit me for the job. I was strongly
tempted. Atavistically, I could picture myself working— perhaps living
— in the home of a wealthy family, with plenty of time to write. There

PS
might even be a pretty daughter whom I would get to know. But it
was not clear how long the job would last, and my friends advised

U
me against it.

RO
I continued to see Norman and Emily W hite and met other
friends of theirs. Among them were John and Marion Woodburn.
Harper's magazine had run a short-story contest to which I had sub­

G
mitted “ Elsa,” and the winner was a Princeton student whom John
and Marion knew and of whom they said I reminded them. The
S
parties at their apartment were “ literary” and lots of fun. Since I was
K
the only one who had not worked all day, I could contribute a full
O

share. A kind of shorthand called Speedwriting had just been de­

veloped, and I invented Speedtalking, plagiarizing much of it from
BO

the stereotyped speech of a drunk.

An occasional Saturday-night party would last all night, and
EX

we would go for breakfast to Alice McAlister’s on Eighth Street. At

one such party I met a young Scandinavian whose wife had ambitions
as an actress and had been advised by her agent that au naturel was the
D

secret of her beauty and that she should use absolutely no make-up.
IN

He and I got to discussing geometry, and we tried to reconstruct

Pythagoras's theorem. I suddenly realized the relevance of a problem
in my Sam Lloyd puzzle book. You are to arrange two squares, make
two straight cuts, and fit the pieces together to form one square.
Obviously the one square is the square on the hypotenuse. From this
we worked out the proof.
By this time I had my own copy of Pavlov’s Conditioned R e­
flexes, and I read it while being stimulated in all these pleasant ways.
In doing so I demonstrated the validity of Pavlov's thesis, because the
book took on much of the glamour of la vie bohémienne. The follow­
ing September John Dos Passos would be writing to e. e. cummings

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PartV

from Russia: "Saw Pavlov’s dogs in Leningrad. . . . Most of his work

on the physiology of the brain has been via the salivary glands of a
dog where he can measure the secretions. The whole thing is coming
out in an English translation this year. . . . Everybody says it’ll an­
nihilate Dr. Watson [John] and make Freud look like thirty cents."
But I should not have been bothered if I had heard him that spring,
because Watson had already used Pavlov to strengthen his position,
and I still had no interest in Freud.
I saw something of John Hutchens, who was living on Morton

PS
Street. Hutch and Ï sometimes had dinner at Jimmy's, a speakeasy
on Barrow Street, where you could get a hot rum punchino served in a

U
coffee cup for one dollar, but we went most often to Julius’s, a famous

RO
speakeasy several doors of which had been padlocked by the authori­
ties. It had sawdust on the floor, a stuffed alligator over the mirror,
and a coeducational toilet. Spiked beer was a dollar a glass.

G
One evening Hutch asked me to go to a violin concert. He was
reviewing plays for his paper, but the music critic was ill or out of
S
town and had asked Hutch to take over. He knew I played the piano,
K
and thought I could suggest some useful phrases. W e went to the
O

concert and then to a Western Union office, where Hutch got a type­
BO

writer, and as I talked, he typed out some kind of review, which

went downtown by wire to his paper for publication the following
morning— to be read, I suppose, by that poor devil of a violinist who
EX

had nothing but my incompetent analysis to paste in his scrapbook.

I continued to see Alf Evers, who was still at the Art Students
League. I spent some time at the Metropolitan Museum. At that
D

time Sir Thomas Lawrence's Calmady Children— a beautifully painted

IN

but sentimental picture of two small sisters—was prominently dis­

played, and I spent a lot of time just sitting and looking at it, wholly
under the control of the subject matter. Alf was tolerant, but he was
able to get me interested in the Impressionists, and I bought a repro­
duction of a self-portrait of Cézanne. At the Whitney Museum I
saw a gauzy nude by John Carroll, one of the painters Edward Root
collected, and I priced it, but it was $5000 and that was rather beyond
me at the time. Alf and I went to a performance of Die Walküre.
W ard Palmer had had almost no Wagner, and I was not ready for it,
and I found the stagecraft of the fire scene rather ridiculous.

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* * *

T h e a f f a i r w i t h S t e l l a was not made to last. For one thing, the

ménage was not stable, Doris resented my being there, and prob­
lems arose about sharing provisions. W e bought our supplies at a
grocery store around the corner and sometimes dined together. One
day Doris came in when we were having a small party and went to
the kitchen to get herself something to eat. I told her that I had just

PS
put some eggs in the refrigerator and asked her to help herself. “ Oh,
no,” she said, “ those are your eggs,” and she poured herself a glass

U
of milk and walked into the other room, where she started talking to

RO
our guests. I was disturbed. Her remark was certainly not in the spirit
of community, and I thought it implied that I was not making a
reasonable contribution to the household. I took an egg from the

G
refrigerator, walked in and held it up to her, and said, “ I give you
this egg/’ She flew into a rage. She took the egg and threw it across
S
the room, followed it with the glass of milk, and dashed into the
K

bedroom crying.
O

I moved out of the apartment the next day. My affair with Stella
BO

continued, but under much less propitious circumstances. I had met

her husband when he came to a party or two but never quite under­
stood their relationship. I saw it in a better light one afternoon when
EX

I was at the apartment. Stella was in bed, but I was sitting fully
clothed on a chaise-longue reading to her. Suddenly the front door
opened and her husband dashed into the bedroom. He looked us
D

over, then explained that he had burst in because he had had to go

IN

to the toilet, which he then proceeded to do. After he had left the
room, Stella looked at me and shrugged her shoulders.
Eventually she told me our affair was over, and when I tried to
argue with her, she became quite blunt. She said that she had never
enjoyed sex with me. W hen I reported this to Hutch, he said, “ But
she obviously had,” and I said, “ Y es/' but his comment puzzled me.
I was still strangely naïve. There had been no foreplay in our affair
and, in fact, little affection. It is hard to understand why Stella did
not teach me a few things, simply to improve her own pleasure, but
it was evidently not yet the thing a young woman could do.

* * *

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Part V

I moved into a roominghouse on Morton Street near

F ro m S t e l l a ’s
Hutch's apartment. The quarters were pleasant enough until one
evening I went out and left the gas heater burning by mistake. W hen I
came back the room was very hot, and shortly after I went to bed I
began to be bitten. The heat had brought the bedbugs out of the walls.
This was a new glimpse of life in Greenwich Village, and it frightened
me. I dressed and packed all my clothing in my trunk, and since all
the chairs in the room were upholstered, I sat on the trunk, where I

PS
thought I should be reasonably free of contamination, for the rest
of the night. W hen I complained the next morning to the landlady,

U
she admitted that bedbugs were a problem but said, “ The bed is
clean." I found another room, again on Barrow Street, but far to

RO
the west near Ninth Avenue, a small room with a bare minimum of
furniture, and there I stayed until I left the Village.

G
I had not yet received the money for the Digest and was living
on an advance from my father, and when this began to run out, I
S
started to look for a job in earnest. I discovered that I had been
K
making a great mistake. Those employment agencies so nearly de­
serted in the afternoon were full of feverish activity at nine o’clock in
O

the morning. I began to fight for attention with a lot of rather

BO

desperate people. One agency sent me to the Shubert Theatre Com ­

pany, where I was interviewed by a man who, strangely enough, knew
that Hamilton College specialized in public speaking and who thought
EX

I might therefore be prepared for just the job he had in mind. He

wanted someone to go out and sell blocks of theatre tickets to com­
D

panies that might give their employees an evening at the theatre as an

incentive or bonus. I had none of the instincts of a salesman, however,
IN

and I am not sure which one of us decided that the job was not for
me.
Hutch tried to help by taking me to see Cleveland Chase, Jack’s
older brother, who might have some ideas. I said I had thought of
writing book reviews, and Cleve typed out several letters of introduc­
tion to the editors of book departments of newspapers. I took them
around without much success. I think it was Harry Hansen who tried
to find out why I should want to write book reviews and then got rid
of me by giving me a second-rate volume by a second-rate writer. I took
it home, read it carefully, and wrote a review with the right number of
words and sent it in. I heard nothing further about it.

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P A R T IC U L A R S O F M Y L IF E

Fortunately, one of my friends had learned that a small bookstore

run by the Doubleday, Doran company in McCreery’s department
store on Fifth Avenue needed a part-time salesman, and I applied for
and got the job. I was paid $ 15 a week. On the days I worked I was ;
on my feet steadily from nine to five, except for a short luncheon
break, and I got to know the agony of clock-watching toward the
end of the afternoon. It was a small shop and not very busy, and I
I did not make many sales. My biggest single sale, in fact, was to a

PS
woman who bought perhaps a dozen books but who, alas, turned out ]
to be a “ shopper/’ a person who went from department to depart­

U
ment in the store to check on the skills of the salespeople. I was

RO
called in for an interview and told how I might improve my salesman­
ship, and the books were promptly put back on the shelves.
The manager of the store was a Miss Stahler, who knew very

G
little about books and less about running a store. Representatives
of the company dropped by from time to time to check up on the
S
quantities of new books she was stocking. On the strength of South
K
W in d she had invested heavily in another book by Norman Douglas,
O

and most of the copies had to be sent around to other Doubleday,

BO

Doran stores. She once used my sales drawer in the cash register for a
$2.50 sale while I was out to lunch and actually rang up $52, and I
was called to account for a shortage of $49.50.
EX

I got something out of the job, because there was a copy of

W atson’s Psychological Care of Infant and Child on the shelves,
and I read it bit by bit between customers. I was also invited to an
D

evening meeting to hear about the company’s new books. John Farrar
IN

was there and showed off in his boyish fashion. I told him I had met
him at Bread Loaf, and he looked at me very closely. The company
gave us free copies of books in the hope that we would read them and
promote them, and among them was Aldous Huxley’s Proper Studies,
a collection of essays on psychological and educational problems
which seemed to indicate that he too was turning from literature to
science.
I had become a vegetarian, and I found that a restaurant across
the street from the bookstore served a vegetable-plate luncheon, which
became my daily fare. I started having evening meals at a small din­
ing room called, I believe, the Open Gate. It was run by two

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PartV

women who looked very much like Gertrude Stein and Alice B.
Toklas. Gertrude served in the dining room and Alice cooked in the
kitchen, and they also served a vegetable plate. I had discovered
Chumley’s, where customers still played chess and Go, but vegetable
plates were not on Chumley’s menu, and I deserted the restaurant
with regret.
The job made a big difference in my social life. I was now tired
in the evening and no longer contributed much to the life of a

PS
party. Moreover, my circle of friends was disintegrating. A girl named
Lucille, whose husband was an army officer stationed in Ohio, had
an attractive apartment, and I spent the night there after my blow-up

U
with Doris. There was nothing between us—she was just offering

RO
me an available divan—but, as it turned out, I barely escaped being
beaten up. The following weekend we were having a party at Lucille’s,
and her husband walked in unannounced. He was a burly military

G
type, and the party immediately evaporated. Everyone knew that
S
Lucille had given me a place to sleep the week before, and I was
K
roundly congratulated on my luck. Trouble began when Norman
W hite fell in love with Lucille. Emily left Norman but pulled a
O

diplomatic coup by moving in with Lucille. M y Scandinavian friend

BO

had also left his au naturel wife, and the Woodburns were soon to
separate.
I began to see girls who were not in the group. One was an
EX

artist who actually made a good living as such. She sketched people
who were appearing in plays, and the N ew York Times ran one of
D

her sketches almost every Sunday. She had an old upright piano in
her studio, and I had a chance to play again after a period of drought.
IN

It was not a very Bohemian setting but it was friendly and relaxing. I
persuaded a pretty customer to have dinner with me and then, on a
second date, to go to my room, although when she saw the grimy
building in which I lived, she hesitated and finally consented to go
in only after warning me, “ M y father knows where I am.” I went
boating in Central Park with another attractive girl whom I met in
the store. But spring had come, and I was soon to return to Scranton
and then leave for Europe.
* * *

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I s a i l e d f r o m N e w Y o r k on the S.S. Colom bo of the Italian line,

bound for Naples with intermediate stops in the Mediterranean. The
tourist-class quarters were cramped and the food greasy and un­
interesting, but most of the passengers were students and there were
a social director and a small orchestra and a slightly aging dancer who
wore various exotic costumes and shared a cabin with an older man
whose personal possession she seemed to be. In First Class I discovered
a fellow Scrantonian— a Mrs. Daniel, who was the Jewish wife of the

PS
Scottish organist in the cathedral. She was very bright and witty and I
wished I could have known her during the Dark Year. Unfortunately, I

U
had limited access to First Class and did not see much of her or of the
daughter who was with her on the trip.

RO
My cabinmate was a blustering young Texan named Frank. He
boasted of his sexual prowess with the girls back home, and was par­

G
ticularly proud of the fact that he refused to wear a condom. He
suggested that we shoot craps. I had never played for money but did
S
not know how to refuse. The stakes were not very large, but I had
K
the most extraordinary luck, and won rather a lot of money. The
O

next day he said he would like s chance to win some of it back. W e

played again, and again it seemed impossible for me to lose, and he
BO

never asked me to play again.

He was a hard drinker, and I had not yet learned how to enjoy
my freedom. One night he challenged me to drink champagne glass
EX

for glass and see who went under the table first. I don't know whether
I went under the table, but I did find myself hanging on the out­
D

side of the railing of a loading bay on a lower deck watching the

foamy waves slip by a few feet beneath me. Somehow or other I
IN

managed to climb back and go to bed.

Frank’s sexual prowess remained verbal; he made no effort to meet
girls, although there were many on the ship. I met a graduate student
in psychology at the University of Iowa; she knew much more about
psychology than I, but she was not a behaviorist, and that was that.
There was a makeshift costume party, and I danced with a girl from
Boston who had borrowed a shirt and trousers and was dressed as an
apache. I was rather startled when she said that we must look like
homosexuals, and almost immediately I proposed that we look for
some quiet spot among the lifeboats, but she was not interested.

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I was aware of being an American tourist and of what Sinclair

Lewis, H. L. Mencken, or Ezra Pound would say about me, and I did
my best to act like someone who had crossed the Atlantic many times.
At the costume party I went as a tourist with binoculars slung on one
side and a camera on the other and a Baedeker in my hand, and Ï
talked about the Eeful Tower and must have been thoroughly ob­
noxious. M y French was useless, but I had studied a little Italian
in anticipation of the trip and, since the crew spoke no English, a

PS
few words proved to be useful and gave me a certain international
tone.

U
W e stopped at Gibraltar and Frank and I were shown around the

RO
battlements by a young soldier whom we obviously did not tip enough.
In Algiers there were young men on the dock who were ostensibly
selling postcards which they pressed against visitors’ chests but were

G
actually slipping them under the clips of fountain pens, which they
removed from breast pockets. W e were taken to a rug factory, where
S
we saw very small girls weaving Oriental rugs, tying and clipping colored
K
yarns on huge vertical looms, and we sat on terraces and had drinks
O

while rug vendors at our feet refused to take no for an answer. And,
of course, we visited the Casbah. I went into a small store and said,
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“ Avez-vous de chocolat?” and to my amazement the woman handed

me a chocolate bar. I had used my French on someone who did not
speak English! In a bookstore I bought Le Temps retrouvé, the last
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volume of Proust's À la Recherche du temps perdu. (Tucked into the

volume was an advertisement for Un Souvenir d'enjance de Léonard
D

de V inci by Professor Sigmund Freud.)

IN

W e went on to Palermo, and I went up to Monreale, where I

first saw the art of the past in situ. The great golden Byzantine
mosaics were unlike anything in books or museums, and when I
stepped out into the beautiful cloister, I gasped.
W e went on to Naples, where I said goodbye to my shipmates
and signed up for standard tours to Capri and Pompeii. I was rowed
into the Blue Grotto by an Italian in fisherman’s costume singing
“ O soie mio,” and at Pompeii I was taken, with the other male mem­
bers of the party, into a small room to see a beautiful white marble
statue of a boy with an erect penis piped for use as a fountain. I went
on to Rome by train and saw the Forum and the Sistine Chapel and

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was taken around the city by drivers who whipped their horses un­
mercifully. It was very hot, and Rome was full of Americans, and I
could not pretend that I was not one of them. I escaped by taking the
train across the Campagna to Tivoli. I asked a driver for a hotel where
there were no Americans, and he took me to the Albergo del Plebiscito,
on one side of a square with a church on the other. M y room was
small and rather cramped and I ate my meals alone at a table set up
in front of the hotel. The waiter had once followed his profession in

PS
America and he pointed to my knife, spoon, and salt cellar, and gave
recognizable versions of their English names. I spent my days in the

U
gardens of the Villa d'Este trying to read Descartes in Italian. I had

RO
not quite escaped from America because one evening in the square a
band played “ Over There/' a vestige of the World W ar that we were
not yet calling the First.

G
The train from Naples to Rome had been hot and dirty, and I
decided to go on to Venice by air. Commercial aviation was still
S
primitive, but the plane I flew in was an advanced model and the
K
fuselage was covered with corrugated aluminum rather than canvas.
O

There was space for four passengers. W e did not fly very high, and the
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shore of the Adriatic, which we followed during the last part of the
flight, was beautiful.
In Venice I stayed in a pensione just behind those two bronze
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men who strike the hour with their hammers. I was running out of
time because mvj father and mother would soon reach Paris,' and I
saw little of the city. I flew on to Vienna and saw even less of that.
D

To get to Paris it was necessary to fly to Basel in Switzerland, and

IN

then to Brussels. For some reason I missed my plane to Basel, but the
airline put me on another plane which went by way of Munich. Un­
fortunately, I had no German visa, and this was discovered at the
Munich airport, where we were forced to leave the plane for an hour
or so. I was having a beer when several German soldiers entered the
restaurant shouting, “ Herr Skeenair!” They took me before an official,
where I explained that I was en route to Switzerland and had not even
intended to land in Germany. Nevertheless, I had committed a grave
offense. Fortunately, I was able to get a visa then and there with the
payment of an appropriate sum of money.
At Basel I had lunch with the Dutch pilot who was to fly me to

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Brussels. His plane was a single-engine Fokker left over from the war.
It had an open cockpit and space for a few passengers in the fuselage.
The pilot spoke a bit of English, and when they brought him the
weather report, he looked at it, turned to me, and said, “ Bumps/* I
asked if I could ride in the cockpit, and he agreed, but I would have
to get into the cabin first. There I joined four fat German businessmen
and we taxied out to the end of the airstrip. The pilot motioned to me
to come up through a small door and I strapped myself into the other
seat. W e took off, and the weather prediction was soon confirmed.

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Rain came into the cockpit, and I was soon wet through. Our route
was almost due north, but the wind was from the west and very strong,

U
and the plane was pointing directly northwest during most of the

RO
journey. W e stayed close to the ground so that the pilot could gauge
his drift. The Germans, made uneasy by the “ bumps,” occasionally
knocked on the little door and made inquiring gestures. Before we

G
reached Brussels the weather cleared a bit and, to my relief, the pilot
S
picked up a small microphone and began to talk with the airport.
K
I completed my journey that afternoon as the only passenger
from Brussels to Paris. The two-engine plane had been a bomber in the
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war, and wicker chairs had been installed in the area occupied by the
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bombardier in the front of the plane, reached by passing through the

cockpit. The two engines went in and out of phase, grinding rhythmi­
cally, and we stayed so close to the ground that I could see horses,
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sheep, and even geese and chickens scurrying in all directions as we

passed. W e landed at Le Bourget—a year later than Lindbergh, and
D

after a considerably shorter flight.

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I jo in e d m y f a t h e r and mother at the Hôtel des Saints Pères, a

small hotel on the Left Bank then much favored by Americans, with
a charming maître d’hôtel, Monsieur Jean, who spoke English. And
there, whether I liked it or not, I became a typical American tourist.
W e did the Champs-Elysées from the Arc de Triomphe to the Place
de la Concorde. W e went up the Eiffel Tower, M y father placed a
wreath on the grave of the Unknown French Soldier in memory of
two Susquehanna boys who were buried in France. W e went to the

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Folies Bergère to see naked girls and to the Louvre to see the Mona
Lisa and the Venus de Milo. (In the Louvre I broke the routine by
trying a small psychological experiment. As you went up the stairs
toward the Winged Victory of Samothrace and turned to the right,
there stood in those days a primitive bronze statue of a charioteer,
interesting to specialists but not to the general public. People were
streaming up the stairs and on into the galleries, paying no attention
to the charioteer. I began to study the statue in a conspicuous way,

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moving around it, ducking down to look up at it, and so on, and other
visitors were soon curious to see what I found so interesting. After

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I had accumulated four or five people and seen that they in turn were

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attracting others, I walked a few yards away to see how long the
Adoration of the Charioteer would last. It was a matter of minutes
before a short supply of newcomers failed to hold the critical mass,

G
and the charioteer returned to his solitary vigil. )
W e went to American Express and hired a chauffeur and limou­
S
sine to drive us to Château-Thierry, where American boys, some of
K
them from Susquehanna, had fought, and to Fontainebleau and Ver­
O

sailles, where the peace treaty had been signed. The limousine was
luxurious. M y father and mother sat in back and I had a comfortable
BO

jump seat. There was a glass plate between us and the driver with
a speaking tube for communication, but either the tube did not work
or the driver preferred not to hear, for after two or three embarrassing
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attempts, my father and I abandoned the tube and took to rapping

on the glass.
D

Paris was not entirely given over to tourism. Mrs. Daniel and her
IN

daughter were there, and I went with them to the Musée de Cluny.
Mrs. Daniel thoughtfully took me aside and pointed out the chastity
belt. One of the girls I had known well in Scranton was staying at the
Hôtel des Saints Pères with her mother, and she and I had an evening
or two together. One night after dinner we were all having coffee in
the hotel lounge, and I mentioned that at the Sistine Chapel I had
bought two large tinted photographs, one of the Delphic Sibyl and
one of Adam and Eve being driven from the Garden. M y friend
wanted to see them, so I brought them down from my room. My
mother had had a glass of wine at dinner and may have been a little
tipsy— and if so, for the first time in her life— and when she saw

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Adam's nudity, she rather inadequately suppressed a giggle and made

some comment about young people these days. Later, as we drove off
for an evening together, my friend said, “ Fred, you are awfully nice
to your father and mother." She herself had been no great rebel, but
my efforts to adjust to my parents' style had surprised her.
One evening when my father and mother and I were walking
in the Rue des Saints Pères, we ran into Jack Chase and his mother.
Jack was living in Paris at the time, translating a novel of Dumas père.

PS
His brother, Cleve, had published a rather successful translation of
Twenty Years After, the sequel to The Three Musketeers, and Jack
was working on another of Dumas’s books. He and I arranged to

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spend an evening together, and he took me to some of the popular

RO
bars—among them Le Brasserie du Dôme and the Jungle. He intro­
duced me to a girl who, he said, posed for and slept with some of the
best artists. (His French was not fluent; I was surprised at how often

G
he fell back on expressions like “ C e s t la vérité.1') Neither Prohibition
S
gin in Greenwich Village nor that champagne on the S.S. CoJombo
K
had prepared me for Paris, and I drank too much.
Another evening I took a girl who was staying at the Hôtel des
O

Saints Pères to the Dôme. W e sat on the terrasse and I heard two
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young men at a table behind us trying to decide whether I was Ameri­

can or English. I turned around, craning my neck to look at them,
and as I turned back, they burst into laughter and exclaimed, “ Amer­
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ican!” Someone was making a movie, and the street was floodlighted,
and when the girl and I hailed a taxi and got in, someone shouted
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“ Bonne nuit” and there was a great laugh. W e ran into Jack Chase
and went with him to a less fashionable dive where there was some
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kind of floor show. I noticed an attractive girl sitting at the bar, and
Jack, who often took pleasure in getting people into small troubles,
asked me why I didn't speak to her. After two or three more drinks, I
saw that she was still there and went up to her, and the following
conversation ensued:
“ Com bien?”
“ Trois cent francs"
“ Deux cent.”
“ B on.”
She took me around the comer to a very small hotel where I paid

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a man a few francs, and he gave her a key, and we went upstairs. She
held out her hand, and I gave her two hundred-franc notes, and she
tucked them in her stocking. I am not sure how long we were there.
I remember lying in bed muttering, “ fe n suis désolé. Trop de whiskey.
Trop de whiskey. Désolé. Trop de whiskey ” After a while she got up,
squatted on the bidet and washed herself, and got dressed- She waited
to make sure that I was going to get dressed and not occupy the room
all night, and then left. For my two hundred francs I had at least

PS
learned how one used a bidet. Jack had taken my girl home, and I went
back to the hotel alone. I scraped up enough for my taxi fare but had

U
almost nothing left for a tip. There were many coins of very little
value in circulation at the time, and I gave the driver eight or ten of

RO
them. He looked at them with disgust, scattered them across the
sidewalk, and drove off.

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I p e r s u a d e d m y f a t h e r and mother to fly to London rather than take
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the Channel boat. They were not happy about the prospect, but the
company's brochure was encouraging: '‘Every Imperial Airways Aero­
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plane has enclosed and ventilated cabin, two or three engines, lavatory
accommodation, and drinking water/' There was a single row of seats
on each side of the cabin, and a steward was in charge. W e took box
EX

lunches to be eaten en route, but my father and mother were not

hungry and I had my choice of the contents of all three. (Our flight
D

was duly reported in the Transcript when the news reached America.)
IN

In London I became a standard tourist again, and this time there

was no one to save me. W e joined the English Speaking Union and
hired a chauffeur and a limousine and went to Salisbury to see the
Cathedral, and on into Devonshire, where my father tried to find
someone who remembered his father's family, without much success.
W e visited a quaint resort town on the southern coast and bought
souvenirs. Back in London, we went to Westminster, the Tower,
the changing of the guard, and the British Museum. W e also went
to the studio of an artist whom my father and mother had met on the
boat coming over. He had given them his address, although I cannot
believe they seemed like prospective patrons. My father may have

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PartV

been pleased to have me see him in an unconventional setting. But it

was not like artists’ studios in the movies, and we simply had tea in
badly chipped cups. Afterward we went for a walk in Hyde Park, and
my father was rather shocked by some of the more amorous couples.
“ I shouldn't think they’d allow that,” he said. Eventually we took
the train to Southampton and boarded the S.S. President Harding.
It would not have done for my father and mother to travel in
anything less than First Class, and I had carried my tuxedo all over

PS
Europe so that I could return in First Class with them. It was not
much fun. W e met a family from Pittsburgh with a daughter about

U
my age, and for the inevitable costume party she and I swapped
clothing. I borrowed an umbrella and went as Sadie Thompson, with

RO
all the gestures I could remember from Jeanne Eagels in the Broadway
production of Rain. Afterward I danced with girls, but no one men­
tioned any lesbian significance.
G
In Paris I had bought three books by Henri Bergson: L ’Evolution
S
créatrice, Matière et mémoire, and Sur les Données immédiates de
K
la conscience, and late one afternoon, sitting on deck, I was reading
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one of them. Suddenly I was startled by a very loud blast of a bugle. A

member of the crew had come up behind me and had taken this
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customary way of announcing that dinner was served. After dinner I

came back and began to read again. I went down the same page, and
as I approached the point at which I had heard the blare of the bugle,
EX

I could feel perceptual and emotional responses slowly building up.

The very thing Pavlov would have predicted! The summer was over
D

and serious business lay ahead.

W e returned to Scranton, and once again I filled that wardrobe
IN

trunk with clothes, books, and a portable typewriter. I would have a

friend in the Boston area because Raphael Miller would be in his
second year at the Harvard Medical School, but I had only the
vaguest notion of what I should find in the Department of Psychology.
I knew only that I was entering a new world. Susquehanna, Hamilton
College, the Dark Year in Scranton, and Greenwich Village had been
“ precisely my necessity,” but they were behind me. They had left their
mark on that “ new arrival born to Attorney William A. Skinner and
his wife Grace” twenty-four years earlier, but a very different environ­
ment was now to take over.

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ACKNO W LEDGM ENTS

I am grateful to Mrs. Jeanette Brownell for help concerning the

PS
history of Susquehanna and its environs. Mr. Eugene Graves and
Miss Isabel Graves have kindly given me the notebooks and
papers of their aunt, Miss Mary Graves. Miss Annelise Katz of

U
the library of the Department of Psychology and Social Rela­

RO
tions at Harvard and Mr. Frank K. Lorenz of the Hamilton
College Library have given much-appreciated help. I thank Mrs.
Alexandra Huebner for her part in the preparation of the manu­

G
script. I am also grateful to the following for having read and
commented on an earlier version of the text: my wife, Eve,
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my daughters and their husbands (Julie and Ernest Vargas and
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Deborah and Barry Buzan), Harry and Elena Levin, Fred S.
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Keller, Barbara Rossr Wanda Minge-Baucus, and Sister St.

Francis Kane.
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A NOTE ON THE TYPE

The text of this book was set in Electra, a Linotype face designed
by W. A, Dwiggins (1880-1956), who was responsible for so

PS
much that is good in contemporary book design. Although much
of his early work was in advertising and he was the author of the

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standard volume Layout in Advertising, Mr. Dwiggins later de­

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voted his prolific talents to book typography and type design and
worked with great distinction in both fields. In addition to his
designs for Electra, he created the Metro, Caledonia, and

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Eldorado series of type faces, as well as a number of experimental
cuttings that have never been issued commercially.
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Electra cannot be classified as either modern or old-style.
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It is not based on any historical model, nor does it echo a par­
ticular period or style. It avoids the extreme contrast between
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thick and thin elements that marks most modern faces and
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attempts to give a feeling of fluidity, power, and speed.

This book was composed, printed, and bound

by The Haddon Craftsmen, Scranton, Pennsylvania.
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Typography and binding design

by Christine Aulicino
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Critical acclaim for B. F. Skinner’s

autobiography
PARTICULARS OF MY LIFE
THE SHAPING OF A BEHAVIORIST
A MATTER OF CONSEQUENCES

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“ Will certainly be judged as one of the outstanding autobio­
graphies of this half-century.” — L ib ra ry Jo u r n a l

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“ A fascinating journey through Skinner’ s behavior laboratory
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called life.” — L o s A n g eles H era ld E x a m in er
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“ Delightful.” — Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, N ew York Tim es

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“ Fascinating.” — Martin Lebowitz, C hicago S u n -T im es

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“ Charmingly written, evocative.” —Em ily Morison Beck

B oston G lo b e
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IN

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS Cover design by Charles B. Hames

WASHINGTON SQUARE ISBN 0-Ô14 7-7Ô 43-7
NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10003 ISBN Q-fil47-7Ä4h-l set
INDEX BOOKS GROUPS
Este Index não faz parte do livro original. This index is not part of the original book.
The Behavior Analyst 1983, 6, 167-180 No. 2 (Fall)

An Index to B. F. Skinner's Particulars of My Life

Robert Epstein and Janice Kathryn Olson
Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies
Skinner's three-part autobiography is now complete: Particulars ofMy Life (Alfred
A. Knopf, New York, 1976) describes his life from birth until his entrance into
graduate school at Harvard in 1928. The Shaping of a Behaviorist (Knopf, 1979)
continues the story with an account of his years at Harvard, first as a student and
then as a research fellow, and his subsequent years as a faculty member at the
University of Minnesota and then Indiana University. It closes with his return to
Harvard as a full professor in 1948. The final volume, A Matter of Consequences
(Knopf, 1983), covers the years from 1948 to 1983 and includes a brief epilogue in
which Skinner comments on the autobiography as a whole and makes some revealing
and fairly general statements about himself.
The first two volumes have no index, and the third has only a brief index. We
offer the following to make the autobiography more useful for scholarly purposes.
It applies to both the hardcover and paperback editions. Indices for The Shaping of
a Behaviorist and A Matter of Consequences will be published in future issues of this
journal.

A American Hardware Manufacturers Association,

Abercrombie, Lascelles, 235 125
Abington Men's Club, 259 American Literature, 199
American Magazine, 279
"Ach, du lieber Augustine," 254 American Mercury, 262, 268
"Acres of Diamonds," 34 American Protective Society, 106
Adam and Eva, 273 Amesbury, 9
Adam and Eve, 316 Anderson, Sherwood, 254
Adirondacks, 153 Androcles and the Lion, 273
Admiral-see Berkett, Don Anglo-Saxon, 234
Adolphe, 271 Anglo-Saxon Protestants, 102, 103, 105
"Adoration of the Charioteer,"316 Animal behavior, 295
Adriatic Sea, 314 Animal Intelligence, 298
Adventists, 17 Animals, 52-53
Advancement of Learning, 129 Ann Arbor, 248
Aeneid, 215 Anthiel, George, 217
Aesop's Fables, 52 An Anthology of a Small College, 243
Afton, 113 Anthracite Board of Conciliation, 285, 286
Age of Reason, 9 APA-see American Protective Society
Aida, 140 Apologia pro Vita Sua, 252
Ainey, W. D. B., 36 April Fools Day, 83
Albany, 115, 159, 199 Arc de Triomphe, 315
Albergo del Plebiscito, 314 "The Arcadia Mixture," 272
Alger, Jr., Horatio, 97 Arithmetic, 70
Algiers, 313 Arlen, Michael, 282
Alice in Wonderland, 65, 273 Arliss, George, 225
Alleghenies, 3 "The Arrest, Trial and Conviction of Jesus from a
Alt, Aunt-see Penn, Althea Legal Standpoint," 34
Art Students League, 272, 307
Art, 91, 92, 142-144, 239
We thank R. Guarino for help with proofreading. "As you Like It," 128
Requests for reprints should be sent to Robert Ep- Asa Gray Memorial Association, 149
stein, Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies, 11 Asbury Park, 213
Ware St., Cambridge, MA 02138. Atlantic City, 87, 182

167
168 ROBERT EPSTEIN & JANICE KATHRYN OLSON
Atlantic Ocean, 3, 313 Binghamton, 3, 18, 25, 26, 34, 43, 46, 59, 62, 63,
Aunt Alt-see Penn, Althea 74, 79, 108, 115, 116, 136, 137, 140, 159, 161,
Aunt Samantha Among the Brethren, 17, 111 164, 165, 172, 174, 182, 187, 191, 294
Auto Club, 178 Biplane, 59
Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, 148 Birth announcement, 23
The Birth of a Nation, 74
B Black Beauty, 94
Blacksmith, 53
B, Mr.-see Burrhus, Charles Blackstone, 160
B, Mrs.-see Burrhus, Ida "The Block System," 72
Babbitt, 248 Blue Book, 113
Bach, Johann, 272 Blue Grotto, 313
Bacon Is Shakespeare, 128 Blue Ridge Company, 126
Bacon, Francis, 128, 129, 161, 295 Blue Ridge Metal Manufacturing Company, 40,116,
Baconian classification, 287 177
Baconian concept, 128 Bluebeard, 273
Baconian theory, 234 Bobbsey Twins, 97
Baker, Editor-see Baker, Ulysses Grant Bodenheim, Maxwell, 234
Baker, Ulysses Grant, 163, 177, 187, 233, 261 The Bohemian Girl, 76
The Ballad of Reading Gaol, 160, 161 Bolshevik, 165
Ballet mecanique, 217 Bond, Carrie Jacobs, 90
Ballou, 229 The Book Shop, 201-203, 218, 235
Balloons, 78 Book of Life, 226
Baptism, 116 Book of Mormon, 111
Baptist church, 109, 110 Boone, Daniel, 76
"Barbara, Celarent, Darii, Feroque," 216 Booth Theatre, 237
Barnes, "Sunshine"-see Barnes, Bernice Boston Symphony Orchestra, 142
Barnes, Bernice, 42, 73 Boston University, 297
Barnes, Mrs., 27, 42 Boston area, 312, 319
Barnum and Bailey, 79 Bowles, Mrs., 143
Barrere, George, 239 Bowles, Professor, 145-148, 218, 293
Barres, Maurice, 271 Boy Scout Handbook, 86, 131
Barrie, J. M., 272, 273 Boy Scouts, 107, 108, 126
Bartlett, J. C., 18, 89 Boy Scouts, Junior, 86-89
Baseball, 135, 136 Boyden, Joe, 45
Basel, 314 Boys' Band, 139, 147
Basketball, 134, 135 Boys Five, 134
Basso, Bob, 102, 142, 172 Bradford, 229, 232
Battell Forest, 286 Bragdon, Claude, 297
Battell, Colonel, 226 Brandt, Jakey, 32
Baumann, 284, 285 Bread Loaf School-see Summer School of English
Beaver Patrol, 86 at Bread Loaf
Beebe's Flats, 59, 77, 79, 101 Brenchley, Mr., 179, 180
Beerston, 114 Br'er Rabbit, 52
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 142 British Museum, 318
Behavior, 292-297 Broderick, Father, 106-108
Behaviorism, 298-302, 312 Bronson, Mrs., 15
Behaviorism, 299 Brooklyn Boys Choir, 76
Behn, Aphra, 200 Brooklyn Dodgers, 136
Bell Song, 90 Brooklyn, 224
Bell, Sir Charles, 178 Broom, 217
Benchley, Robert, 143 Brosnam, Miss, 70, 105
Bennett, Charlotte, 170, 171, 213 Brother-see Skinner, Edward James
Berg, Madame, 186 The Brothers Karamazov, 263, 266
Bergson, Henri, 280, 319 Broun, Heywood, 237
Berkett, Don, 173-176 Brower, Art, 139
Berlin, Irving, 143 Brown, Professor "Brownie," 197, 216, 241
Berman, Louis, 299 Brown, Rollo Walter, 226, 227, 270, 271
Bernhardt, Sarah, 152 Brownell, 251
Bernstein, 215 Brownell, Stewart, "Stew," 193, 199
Beta Kappa, 193, 194, 200, 201, 226 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 227
Bible, 6, 220 Brussels, 314, 315
Bicycles, 163 Buffalo, 60
Big Rock, 82, 83 Bull Moose Party, 34
Billings, Josh, 17, 129 "The Bulldog on the Bank," 197
Billings, Ward, 111 Burchell, Miss Bernice, 42
 AN INDEX TO PARTICULARS OF MY LIFE 169
Burgess, Thornton, 52 Chase, Jack, 238, 241, 243, 244, 255, 309, 317
Burke, Edmund, 148 Chase, Mrs., 317
Burrhus, Charles, 12-14, 17, 18, 45, 59, 66, 74, 95, Chase, "Trot," 200, 238, 241, 256
99, 100, 119, 126, 131, 138, 208, 213, 261-263 Chateau-Thierry, 316
Burrhus, Charles, death of, 261 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 234
Burrhus, Harry, 21 Chautauqua, 75, 106, 112, 178
Burrhus, Ida, 12, 15-18, 27, 32, 53, 59, 61, 66, 74, Chekhov, Anton, 250
95, 99, 100, 126, 131, 163, 184, 206, 208 Cherry Lane Theatre, 225
Burrhus, Ida, death of, 206, 207 Chesapeake Bay, 3
Burrhus, Lynn, 261 Chesterton, G. K., 136, 291
Burroughs, John, 149 Chevrolet, 186
Burtt, E. A., 280 Chi Psi, 192
Buster Brown, 94 "Chi"-see Bennett, Charlotte
Byzantine mosaics, 313 Chiclets, 115
Chidester, Otis, 68, 164, 236, 269
C Childhood writings, 95
Cabell, James Branch, 242 The Chimes of Normandy, 76
Cable Piano Company, 79 Chinaman, 100
California, 276, 283 Chipman, 172
Calmady Children, 307 Christ, Jesus, 9, 61, 110, 227
Cambridge area, 227 "Christmas Cactus," 206, 207
Camp Meade, 126 "Christmas Spirit," 98
Campagna, 314 Christmas, 31, 32, 152
Canavan's Glen, 169 Chumley's, 311
Candida, 225 Church Hill, 106
Candy store, 55 Church, Mr. 46
Canoe trip, 173-176 Church, Mrs. 46
Capri, 313 Churchill, William, 94
Caprice on Spanish Themes, 142 "Cinderella," 30
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, 200 "A Cinquain," 205
Captain January, 94 Circus, 79
Car, 57-58 City of Stairs, 5
Civic Club, 182
"Carissima," 257 Civil War, 4, 5, 14, 148
Carlson, Sergeant, 124 Civilian Relief Committee, 181
Carmen, 137, 138, 140, 191 Clark Prize Exhibition, 255, 256
Carnegie Hall, 225 Clark, Alex, 207, 208, 210
"Carpe Diem," 220, 221, 238, 258, 267 Class Day, 254-258
Carpenter Shop, 13 Cleopatra, 92
Carr, Frances, 118 Cleveland ball team, 136
Carrington, 135 Clinton, 191, 192, 200, 207, 237, 257
Carroll, John, 307 The Clutching Hand, 74
Caruso, Enrico, 104, 140 Cobolt, Jim 96
Casbah, 313 "Cohen on the Telephone," 106
Cascade Creek, 4, 13 Colgate Cashmere Bouquet, 27
Cather, Willa, 202, 234 Colgate University, 191, 268
Catholic Mayor-see Condon, Dr. College Hill, 193, 203, 226, 244, 249, 256
Catholic church, 106, 127 Columbia College, 227, 234, 301
Catholicism, 106-108, 147, 218 Columbian Grove, 80, 223
Cattell, James McKeen, 301 Commencement, 256-258, 261
Cavalleria Rusticana, 138 Commentaries of the Laws of England, 160
Ceasar, 112 "COMPLETELY PERCUSSIVE," 217
"CelesteAida," 137, 140, 185 "Concupiscence," 242
Cemetary Association, 182, 183 Conditioned Reflexes, 301, 306
Central America, 159 Condon, Dr., 108
Central High School, 187, 209 "The Confessions of a Puzzle Eater," 224
Central Park, 311 Congregational church, 109
Century Club, 212, 271, 273, 274, 302 Congreve, William, 225
C6zanne, Paul, 307 Constant, Benjamin, 271
Champs-Elys6es, 315 Construction, 119-122
The Changing of the Guard, 318 "Contact!," 185
Chapel, 195 Conwell, Dr., 34
Chaplin, Charles, 236-238 Cook, Hunt, 112
Chaplin hoax, 235-238, 256 Copley Prints, 92
Charlatans, 194, 197 Corneille, Pierre, 215, 252
Chase, Cleveland, 241, 309, 317 Cornelia, 219
170 ROBERT EPSTEIN & JANICE KATHRYN OLSON
Cornell University, 20 Divine Comedy, 94
Cornell, Katherine, 225 Divine Message, 110, 111
Cottage, summer, 80-83, 122, 133, 134 Doc Miller-see Miller, Raphael
Country Club, 186, 212, 260, 274 A Doll's House, 153
Country Gentleman, 94, 162 Donnally, Mr., 108
County School Board, 70 Donovan, Miss, 127
Courboin, Charles, 212, 269 Dooley, Miss, 73, 74, 115, 141, 166
Cox, Sidney, 226-228, 230-232 Doris, 305, 308, 311
Coxy-see Cox, Sidney Dostoevski, Fedor, 264, 266, 291, 295
Coyle, Miss, 70 Doubleday, Doran stores, 310
The Craft of Fiction, 251 Douglas, Norman, 310
Crabell, 109 Drama League, 273
Craft, Harold, 153 "ADream," 18, 19,89
Craft, Kenny, 213, 261 Drinker Creek, 132, 177
Craft, Mrs., 261 Dumas, Alexandre, 317
Craig, Gordon, 232 Dumble, Edward, 8, 21, 118, 135
Crane, Dr. Frank, 161, 294 Dumble, Helen, 118
Crane, Stephen, 202, 204 Dumble, Mrs. Edward, 21
Creative Evolution, 280 Dumble, Mrs. William H., 21
Crescent Club, 20 Dumble, Nell, 160
Cronk, Mr. and Mrs., 105 Dumble, Paul, 118
cummings, e. e., 306, 307 Dumble, William H., 8, 21
Curwood, James Oliver, 95 Durham, "Bull," 196
Cyrano de Bergerac, 215 Durning-Lawrence, Sir Edwin, 128
Cyrano, 219, 225 Dvorak, Anton, 199
The Dying Swan, 273
D
E
Daniel, Miss, 316 Eagels, Jeanne, 225, 319
Daniel, Mrs., 312, 316 Eames, Clair, 225
Dark Year, 262-287, 312, 319 Earthworm Tractor, 227
Dartmouth College, 226 Easter vacation, 207
Darwin, Charles, 148, 149, 178, 280 Ebbe-see Skinner, Edward James
Davidson, Professor, 232 Economy Shoe Store, 165, 178
Davies, 191, 192 The Ego and His Own, 302
Davison, "Doc," 197 Eiffel Tower, 315
"The Day Is Ended," 18 Eisman and Hersh Department Store, 40
Dear Brutus, 273 Eisman, Mrs., 101
Death of brother, 207-210 Elenore, 218
Death of Grandfather Burrhus, 261 Ellen, 228-232, 244, 303
Death of Grandmother Burrhus, 206, 207 Ellen, or the Whisperings of an Old Pine, 226
Debussy, Claude, 272 Ellis, Havelock, 46, 293
de Gourmont, Remy, 304 Elmira, 164
Delaware River, 113 "Elsa," 252-254, 295, 306
Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad, 28 Emerson Literary Society, 194
Delphic Sibyl, 316 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 150
Demander, Mrs., 107 Endicott, 177
Demase, Joe, 138-140, 147 Endicott-Johnson Company, 165, 166
Democratic Party, 33 "Ends and Odds," 269
Denman, Dr., 143 English Composition, 191, 199
de Sade, Marquise, 200 English Literature, 215, 223
Descartes, Rene, 314 English Speaking Union, 318
"Desire to Write," 266 Entertainment, 73-79
Deutsch, Babette, 222 Episcopal church, 87, 104, 109, 140
Devil's Punchbowl, 4 "Era la notte," 137
Devonshire, England, 8, 318 Erections, 132
DeWitt, John, 123, 130, 131, 148, 163, 296 Erector set, 67
DeWitt, Mrs. John, 296 "the Erie"-see Erie Railroad
Dial, 204, 262, 279, 298 Erie Band, 86, 126, 138, 141, 142, 177
Diary, 171-176 Erie Company, 14, 35
The Diary of a Young Girl, 203 Erie paint shop, 9
Dickens, Charles, 291 Erie Railroad, 4, 14, 18, 26, 35, 38, 59, 71-73, 81,
Dickinson, Emily, 155 115, 123, 178
Die WalktJre, 307 ErieShops, 25, 30, 36, 84, 103, 119, 129, 130, 136,
A Digest of Decisions of the Anthracite Board of 138, 171, 177, 178, 184
Conciliation, 286, 287, 303, 309 Emestone, Bill, 101, 102, 115, 137, 187
 AN INDEX TO PARTICULARS OF MY LIFE 171
Eroica Symphony, 142 Freeport, 218
Esmeralda, 19, 34, 150 French, 159, 196, 215
Essays, 129 Freud, Sigmund, 201-203, 242, 307, 313
Essex Hotel, 213, 223, 283 Friar Lawrence, 220
Ethan Frome, 202, 203 Friends, 83, 84, 171-176
Ethical training, 60-63 "Frisk"-see Saunders, Blake
Ethnic groups, 100-106, 132, 139 "Frost Tonight," 170
Etiquette, 186 Frost, Robert, letter from, 248, 249
Europe, 302 Frost, Robert, 227, 228, 235, 248-250, 263, 269,
European trip, 312-319 295
"Evening Star," 138 Frueh, 202
Evers, Alf, 254, 272, 291, 302, 307 Fuckfaster, Johnny, 119
Evolution, 149 Fulton, Dr., 212,219,241,261,274,275,277,278,
Exile, 262 295, 296, 301
Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals, 148, Fulton, Mrs., 274
178 Fulton, Nell, 212, 241, 252, 269, 272
F G
"Faccia magra," 304 Gadgets, 119-122
Faculty Club, 223 Galileo, 144
Fairs, 77 Galion, 139
Falkenbury, Miss Clara, 181 Galli-Curci, 90
Fancher, Professor P. A., 197, 199, 203, 204, 210, Games, 66-69
211, 220, 233, 235-237, 251, 254, 256 Garibaldi, 125
Fancher, "Smut"-see Fancher, Professor P. A. Garnett, Miss, 266
Fantasius Mallare, 201, 276 Gatti-Casaza, 191
Farrar, Geraldine, 137, 191 Gems of Humor, 34, 129
Farrar, John, 227, 310 General Biology, 196
Father, letter from, 245-248 The Genius of Style, 251
Father-see Skinner, William Arthur Germanic people, 102
Faust, 140 Germany, 68, 314
The Feast of Singasong, 143 Gettysburg, 176
Ferber, Edna, 222 Ghosts, 266
Fernheim, 181 Gibraltar, 313
Field, Eugene, 90 Gibson, 99
Fields, W. C., 143 Gilbert, Leslie, 169, 170, 244
The Firebrand, 225 Gilbert, Dr., 169
First National Bank, 24, 104, 167 Gilbert, Mrs., 170
Fishing, 82 Giorgione, 239
Fiske, Mrs., 266, 267 Girard, 262
Fitch, Professor, 215 Girl of the Limberlost, 95, 203
Flexible Flyers, 84, 85 Girls, 56, 57, 168-171, 217-219, 311
Flonzaley Quartet, 212 Glass Container, 302
Flying Yorkshireman, 111 Glee Club, 207
Fokker airplane, 315 Glidden, Wright, 104, 181, 293
Folies Bergere, 316 Gliddens, the, 104, 121
Fondant, 31 "Glow Worm," 81
Fontain, Lynn, 225 Gobbaerts, 91
Fontainebleau, 316 God or Gorilla, 147
Force, 23 God, 111, 112, 220
Ford, 57, 58 Goldberg, Rube, 121
Forest City, 183 Golden Plates, 111
Forest House Hotel, 79 Golden Treasury, 162, 164
"Forgotten," 138 "Goldilocks and the Three Bears," 30
Forum, 313 Goldsmith, 150
Foss, Sam Walter, 93 Golf, 212, 213, 214
Foster, Sir George, 181 Good Housekeeping, 94, 186
Fourth of July, 78 "Goodbye," 90, 220
Fox sisters, 103 Goodness Gracious, 74
France, 315 Goucher, 275
Frances, 218 Grade School, 69-71
Frank, 312, 313 "Grampa's cake," 16
Frank, Joseph, 36, 37, 127 Graham, Gran'ma, 41, 54, 87, 101, 118, 130, 213
Frank trial, the, 38 Graham, Miss, 130
Frazier, 61 Graham, Nellie, 54, 213
172 ROBERT EPSTEIN & JANICE KATHRYN OLSON
Grammaticus, Saxo, 295 Harrison's Pavillion, 173
Grand Army of the Republic, 12, 79 Hart, Frances Noyes, 185
Grand Street, 22, 23 Harvard Classics, 148
Grandfather-see Burrhus, Charles Harvard Medical School, 301
Grandfather-see Skinner, James Harvard University, 197, 227, 301
Grandmother-see Burrhus, Ida Hatch, Claudia, 218, 219
Grandmother-see Skinner, Josephine Penn Hawaii, 304
Grant's Tomb, 305 Hazing, 194-195
Grave of the Unknown French Soldier, 315 Health, 219-220
Graves, James, 149-151 Hearst, William Randolph, 59
Graves, Mary, 56, 60, 70, 92, 110, 112, 124, 125, Heart Lake, 21
128, 129, 147-155, 198, 215, 220 Hecht, Ben, 201
Graves, Mrs., 149, 151 "Helen," 204
Great Bend, 3, 57, 87, 113 Hell, 60
"The Great Change," 210, 211 Henry, 0., 191, 203
Great Lakes, 3 Herbert, Victor, 57
Greek Heroes, 152 "Here Came Ezra Pound," 235
Greek, 196, 214 Hersh, Pauline, 101, 102, 212
Greeks, 101 Hersh, Sidney, 40, 101, 102, 135, 212, 278
Green Ridge, 185, 187 Hervieu, 215
Greenwich Village, 272, 302, 305-311, 317, 319 "Hesitation," 90
Gregory, John, 219 Hickey, Joseph, 172
Grey, Asa, 215 Hickory Grove, 3, 43, 58, 113
Grimm Brothers, 29 High School, 69-71, 162, 172, 173, 196
Gros, Jean, 273 High School Principal-see Bowles, Professor
Gros, Madame, 273 Hill of Cumorah, 111
Grownup Land, 94 Hill's Manual, 17
The Guardsman, 225 Hillborn's Creek, 110, 122, 123
Guest, Edgar, 93 Hillborn, Albert, 81
Gulf Summit, 73 Hillborn, John, 81
Hinks, Reverend Mr., 87
"Historical-Religious" note, 60
Hoboes, 72
H Hog's Back, 58
Hogan Opera House, 19, 73, 77, 103, 125, 130,
Haldeman-Julius, E., 94, 162, 262 133, 141, 143, 172, 173, 177
Haller, Jess, 130, 213 Holleran's Orchestra, 141
Hallstead, 3, 6, 19, 125 Holleran, Steve, 141, 172, 173
Halloween, 84 Homes in America, 202
Hamilton College, 159-160, 187, 191ff., 193-201, Honesdale, 113
206,209-211, 218-220, 225, 227, 233, 235-237, Honor system, 195
239-241,248,257,258,261,263,268,270,280, Hooker, Brian, 215
283, 287, 297, 301, 306, 309, 319 Hoolihan, Father, 106
Hamilton Life, 220, 237, 241, 243, 267 Horrigan, Dennis, 126
Hamilton Literary Magazine, 207, 220, 234 Hotel des Saints Peres, 315-317
Hamilton Round Table, 241 Houghtons, the, 105
Hamlet, 210, 295 "Hound of Heaven," 112
Hammond, Percy, 237 House and Garden, 186
Hampden, Walter, 215, 225 House, Colonel, 165
The Hand, Its Mechanism and Vital Endowments, House parties, 201, 218
as Evincing Design, 178 How Plants Grow, 145
Handel, George, 138 "How Uncle Henry Dyed His Hair," 19
Hannigan, 36 Howe, Lyman H., 74
"Hansel and Gretel," 29 Hubbard, Elbert, 94
Hansen, Harry, 309 Hudson Coal Company, 183, 184, 259, 274, 286
Harding's Restaurant, 200 Hughes, Charles Evans, 123
Harding, Annabelle, 56 Human behavior, 291, 294
Harding, Delly, 65, 87, 151 Hutch-see Hutchens, John K.
Harding, George A., 165, 166, 172, 173, 178, 179 Hutchens, John K., 220, 226, 234, 235, 237, 238,
Harding, Mrs., 179 241, 243, 244, 254, 255, 268, 307, 308, 309
Harding, Warren Gamaliel, 139 Huxley, Aldous, 310
Hardy, Sir Thomas, 249 Huxley, Thomas H., 178, 280
Harmony, 3, 13, 81, 111 Hyde Park, 319
Harper's, 306 "Hymn to Labor, or Action as the Solution of
Harriet, Aunt, 41, 42 Doubt," 284
Harrisburg, 3, 172, 176, 178, 184 Hypnosis, 303
 AN INDEX TO PARTICULARS OF MY LIFE 173
I Keffer, Harry, 119
Keffers, the, 118, 119
Ibsen, Henrik, 225, 266, 267 Kellerman, Annette, 47
Iceman, 26 Kelly, Judge, 258
"The Icicle," 205 Kermis, 107
Identity crisis, 134 "Key chaser," 243
The Idylls of the King, 148 Killian, Professor, 68
Iliad, 214, 215 King James Bible, 220
Imperial Airways, 318 Kingsley, Charles, 152
Impressionists, 307 Kinnykins, 6
"In the Valley of the Grand Pre," 170 Kipling, Rudyard, 153, 220
Ince, Thomas H., 115 Kiwanis Club, 258, 274
Ingersoll, Robert, 262 Klaxon, 58
"The Inside of the Cup," 172 "The Klondike Kills," 233
Instrumental Club, 194 Knise, Marion, 168-170, 244
International Phonetic Alphabet, 159 Knise, Mr., 168
I Pagliacci, 140 Ku Klux Klan, 74
Irish, 102, 198
Irish Mail, 63 L
Italians, 102, 198
Ivanhoe, 148 L'Evolution crOatrice, 319
"I Want to Pawn My Dolly," 19 La Course du flambeau, 215
"La Paloma," 143
J La Princesse lointaine, 215
A la Recherche du temps perdu, 263, 292, 313
Jack-see Chase, Jack "La Venerable Madre Jeronima de la Fuente," 150
Jackson, 99 La Vie Parisienne, 200
Jail, 61 L. A. C. Hall, 172
James, William, 301 Lackawanna County, 259
Jay Kay-see Hutchens, John K. Ladies' Auxiliary, 182
Jergen, 276 Lake Scranton, 275, 284
Jessnertreppen, 232 LakmO, 90
Jews, 101, 102 Lamb, Elisabeth, 46, 182
Jimmy's Aunt Jane, 143 Lambda Chi Alpha, 193, 239, 258
Jimmy's, 307 "The Land of the Sky Blue Waters," 46
Joan of Arc, 241 Landowska, Wanda, 273
Jobs, 162-167, 172 Lanesboro dam, 86
Johns Hopkins, 301 Lanesboro, 3, 13, 117, 127, 129, 170
Johnson City, 177 Lanier, Sidney, 147
Johnson, George F., 165, 177 Lannon's grocery, 107
Jones, Helen, 172 Lardner, Ring, 237
Jones, Margaret, 172 "Largo," 138
Jones, Mott, 40, 77 Larrabee, Lawrence, 172
Joyce, James, 7, 262 Larson, George, 88
Judge, 161 The Last of the Mohicans, 148
Julius's, 307 Latin, 145, 196, 200
Jungle, 317 Latin salutatory, 257
Jupiter, 217 "The Laugh," 249-251
Jurgen, 219, 242 Laurel Athletic Club, 141
"Just Before the Battle Mother," 79 Laurel Hill Academy, 107, 151, 169
"Just for Today," 18 Lavender and Old Lace, 95, 203
Law of Effect, 299, 300
K Law practice of father, 179-181, 258-260, 276-
Kaiser, 127 279
Kalura Temple, 142 Lawrence, Sir Thomas, 307
Kane, Annetta, 136, 284, 291 Lawrence, T. E., 284
Kane, Jackie, 26 Le Bourget, 315
Kane, Madelaine, 136 Le Brasserie du Dome, 317
Kansas, 262 Le Temps retrouvo, 313
Kant, Immanuel, 216, 298 Lee, Wing, 100, 101
Katzenjammer Kids, 94 Left Bank, 315
Kavanaugh, Judge, 76 Leipzig, 216
Kazan, 95, 203 Leningrad, 300
KDKA, 263 Lestershire, 177
Keefe, Miss, 127, 128, 144, 145 Letters, 191, 246, 248
"Keep the Home Fires Burning," 126 Letters, 179
174 ROBERT EPSTEIN & JANICE KATHRYN OLSON
Levy, Leon, 259 Marionetteer, 273
Levy, Ralph, 259 Marivaux, Pierre, 215
Lewis, Professor "Cal," 196, 198, 224, 238, 251, Marsh, "Swampy," 196
254-256 Marta's, 304
Lewis, Sinclair, 249, 313 Martinique Hotel, 137
Liberty Loans, 86 "Mary Queen of Scots Confronting Elizabeth," 19
Lie, 60 "Mary Queen of Scots Taking Leave of Her Atten-
"Life and Death," 293 dants," 19
"Life in the Trenches," 76 Maryland, 3
Life, 161 Masoch, 200
"Light Cavalry," 139 Masons, the, 180
"The Light from Over the Range," 19 Mason, Stuart, 160
Lincoln, Abraham, 160 Master Mechanic, 71
Lindbergh, 272, 315 Masterpieces of World History, 94
Lions Club, 259 Masters, Edgar Lee, 243
Literary Digest, 26, 94, 203 Masturbation, 64, 65, 131, 231
Literature, 203-207, 220-222, 234, 235 Mathematics, 197
Little Blue Books, 94, 262 Matiere et mgmoire, 319
Little Boy Blue, 90 Matt Shays, 73, 176
"Little Greek"-see Fitch, Professor Matthews, Brander, 234
"Little Italy," 102 Maupassant, Guy, 250
Little Nemo, 94 Maxwell, 13
"Little Red Riding Hood," 30 May Festival, 107
"Little Red School House," 149 McAlister, Alice, 306
Luize, Aunt, 99, 100 McCabe, Joseph, 262
Livingston, F. H., 172, 140 McCreery's, 310
Lloyd, Sam, 95, 306 McGinty, John, 233, 258
Loeb, Jacques, 295, 299 McGuane, Lillian, 108, 109
London, 318 McGuane, Mrs., 109
Lone Scouts, 93 McHugh, Red, 109
Long House, 4 McKinley and Roosevelt Club, 33
Long Island, 218 McManus, Mr., 74
Long Stairs, 169, 178, 179 Meaning, 297
Lord Jim, 153 Meccano set, 67
Lord's Prayer, 60 Mechanical Engineering Department, 11
Loring, Mrs., 174 Mediterranean Sea, 312
"Lost Chord," 138 Melba, Nellie, 90, 91, 220
Louise H., 229 "Melody in F," 109
Louvre, 316 Memorial Day, 79
Love, 228-231 Mencken, H. L., 313
"Love's Labour's Lost," 128 Mendelssohn, Moses, 217
Love, Mr., 124 Merry-go-round, 77
Lowell, Amy, 235 Metaphysical Foundations ofModern Physical Sci-
Lower Road, 171 ence, 280
Lubbock, Percy, 251 Methodist church, 73, 109, 110, 259
Lucia di Lammermoor, 90 Metropolitan Museum, 307
Lucia, 104, 137 Metropolitan Opera House, 137, 191, 240
Lucille, 311 Metzger, Mamie, 19, 55, 56, 61, 70
Lunt, Alfred, 225 Michigan, 248
Lygia, 112 Middlebury College, 226, 227
Lynch, Frank, 259 The Mikado, 76
"Lyrics of Hate," 221 Milford, 23, 113
Millard, Christopher, 160
M Miller, Cynthia Ann, 217, 218, 220, 239, 254
Miller, Dr., 116
MacCurdy, 297 Miller, Mr., 254
Machine shop, 17 Miller, Mrs., 91
Machinists' Union, 36 Miller, Raphael, 53, 83, 89, 91, 116-118, 148, 171,
Mad Scene, 90 173, 174-176, 319
Maeterlinck, Count Maurice, 273 "Millicent," 90
Magic lantern, 68 Milne, A. A., 273
Main, Billy, 53, 77 Minority groups, 100-106
"The Man I Love," 305 "The Mission of a Rose," 89
Manhattan, 305 "Mississippi," 90
Mansfield, Katherine, 217, 250 Missoula, 226
"Marching Through Georgia," 79 Missoulian, 241
Marian. Cantain. 53 "The Missouri Waltz," 90
 AN INDEX TO PARTICULARS OF MY LIFE 175
Mitchell, A. E., 18 New York World, 202, 242
Mitchell, John, 263 Newcomes, 291
Modern British Poetry, 202, 227 Newman, John, 96
Modern British Poets, 204 Newspaperman, 163, 164, 269
Moliere, Jean, 215 The Night Boat, 143
Mona Lisa, 316 "A Night in June," 139
Monday Club, 153, 186 "No News," 106
Monreale, 313 "No, Pagliaccio non son," 140
Monsieur Jean, 315 Nobel Peace Prize, 123
Montana, 226, 241 Noli me tangere, 147
Monteux, Pierre, 142 "Nona," 170
Montrose County Jail, 61 Norm, Uncle, 114
Montrose, 33-36, 38, 46, 61, 146, 150, 180, 181, North College Hall, 191-193
259 Northeastem Pennsylvania Society of Engineers, 259
Mooney, Mrs., 56, 127 Notebooks, 266, 267, 279-283
Moral training, 60-63 Nova Principia Orbis Terrarum, 294, 295
Morley, Christopher, 218, 269, 282 Novum Organum, 129
"Morning Noon and Night in Vienna," 139 Nugent, Miss, 55, 61
"Morning Prayer," 91 Nuit au Luxembourg, 304
Morrill, "Bugsy," 196, 220, 233, 295, 301 Nutting, 51
Mother-see Skinner, Grace Burrhus
Movies, 73, 74
Moving, 185, 186 0

"Moving Pictures as a Career," 236

Mozart, Wolfgang, 141, 272, 277 "O sole mio," 313
Mt. Mehoogany, 175 "O terra, addio," 137
"The Muckraker and Representative Democracy," 0. Henry Prize Stories of 1920, 184, 185
34 Oakland, 3, 141, 163, 177
Munich, 314 Oakland Hotel, 165, 177
Mtlnsterberg, Hugo, 301 Oakland dance hall, 108
Murdock, Kenneth, 227 "Objectivity," 266
Murphy's Garage, 141 Odd Fellow's Hall, 15, 170, 171
Murphy, Margaret, 108 Odd Fellows, 13, 180
Music, 73-76, 89-91, 137-142, 239, 240, 272 Oenslager, Donald, 226, 232
Musee de Cluny, 316 Ogden, Mrs., 201, 203, 218, 234
Music Box Review, 143 "Oh no, John, no, John, no," 76
"My God, My Father, While I Stray," 19 Ohio, 311
My Lady Nicotine, 272 Old Curiosity Shop, 291
Mysterious Island, 94 Old Dutch Cleanser, 92
Old English, 225
Old One Hundred, 146
N Olheim, Helen, 240
Olivier, Laurence, 210
Nanticoke, 175 Olver, Paul, 192
Nanticoke dam, 175 On the Origin of Species: or, the Causes of the Phe-
Napier, John, 292 nomena of Organic Nature, 178, 179
Naples, 313, 314 On the Sublime and Beautiful French Revolution,
Napoleon, 192 148
Negroes, 101 One of Ours, 202
Nell, Aunt-see Dumble, Nell Oneida Community, 292
Nevin, Ethelbert, 42 Open Gate, 310
New Departure, 163 Operation, 275
New Hartford, 191 "Orange," 4
New Jersey, 303 The Organism as a Whole, 295
New Masses, 241 Ostianum, 112
New Republic, 224 Otsego Lake, 3
New York Central, 72 Ouspensky, 297
New York City, 68, 137, 143, 150, 161, 164, 178, Outlook, 153
180, 182, 207, 215, 237,241,258,263,272,274, Outwater, Leila, 21
302, 304, 305-312 Outwater, Mrs., 262
New York Law School, 12 "Over There," 126, 314
New York State Board of Regents, 159 Overland runabout, 187
New York State, 3, 153, 191, 198, 205, 292 Owego, 3, 174, 191
The New York Times, 311 Owens, E. K., 54, 135, 179
New York Times Magazine, 300 Owens, Nell, 46, 47, 179
New York Voluntary Infantry, 12 Oxford English Dictionary, 7
176 ROBERT EPSTEIN & JANICE KATHRYN OLSON
p Physiology ofthe Brain and Comparative Psychol-
Packard, 186, 187, 218, 277 ogy, 295
Packer's Tar Soap, 27 "Piangi, piangi, fanciulla," 137
Page's Pond, 135
Piano lessons, 91, 140
Pinafore, 76
Paine, Thomas, 9 Pinecrest, 80, 104
Pajamas, 121-122 Pittsburgh, 263, 319
Palermo, 313 Place de la Concorde, 315
Palgrave, Francis, 162 Plays, 73-75
Pall Mall Ovals, 201 "Plymouth Rock and Ellis Island in American Life,"
Palmer, Jack, 77, 85, 126, 129, 137, 292 255
Palmer, Miss, 137 Poe, Edgar Allan, 251
Palmer, Mrs., 137 "Poet and Pleasant," 139
Palmer, Ward, 136-138, 140, 143, 198, 273, 294, Poetry, 93, 170, 203-207, 221, 222, 242, 243, 267-
307 269, 284
Palmolive soap, 92 "The Polemic Against Literature," 291, 292
Palmyra, 111 Police Gazette, 130
"The Pardoner's Tale," 234 Polti, 252
Parent's Day, 234 Pompeii, 313
Paris, 314-317, 319 Popular Mechanics, 292
Parodies, 238 Porter, Gene Stratton, 95
Parrish, Maxfield, 193 Post Office Building, 24
Parsons, William, 297 Post, Emily, 186
Passion Play, 60 Pound, Ezra, 217, 235, 262, 313
Passos, John Dos, 306, 307 "Povero Rigoletto," 137
Paul, St., 112 Practipedist, 166
Pavloff-see Pavlov "Praeses suaviloquens," 257
Pavlov's dogs, 307 Prang, 92
Pavlov, Ivan P., 299, 300, 301, 306, 307, 319 Presbyterianchurch,32,61,62, 106,109,116,152,
Pavlova, Anna, 273 208, 259, 260
The Peasants, 263, 295 Presbyterian Church magazine, 112
Peck, Dr., 107 Prince of Monaco, 151
Pedro, 16 Princeton University, 306
Penn, Althea, 6, 21, 135 Pritchard, Mrs., 91
Penn, Josephine-see Skinner, Josephine Penn Pritchard, Reverend Mr., 43, 160
Penn, Norman, 114 The Professor's House, 24
Penn, William, 5 Prohibition, 165, 233, 244, 259, 276, 303, 317
Penn family, 39 Proper Studies, 310
Pennsylvania, 3, 153, 178, 183, 198, 209, 252 Prostitutes, 243, 244
Pennsylvania Society, 180 Protestantism, 106-112
Pennsylvania State College, 213 Proust, Marcel, 263, 291, 295, 296, 298, 313
Pennsylvania Station, 305 Provincetown Playhouse, 226
Penrod, 203 PsiU, 192
Penrose, Senator Boies, 103, 181 Psychological Care of Infant and Child, 310
Pentateuch, 61 Psychological experiment, 316
Pepys, Samuel, 218 Psychology, 292-302, 312
Perfectionism, 17 Public speaking, 196-197, 224, 235, 255, 309
"A Perfect Day," 90 Publication, 161
The Perfect Fool, 138, 143 Punishment, 61
Perpetual-motion machine, 120 Pythagoras's theorem, 306
Perrine, Bob, 69, 83, 89, 107, 144, 148, 173-176,
185 Q
Perrine, George, 218 Queen Mary, 15
Perrine, Henry, 56 Quo Vadis, 112
Persons, Margaret, 168, 169
Persons, Mrs., 169
Petrarch, 197 R
Peter, St., 112,227 Racine, Jean, 215, 252
Petronius, 112 Radcliffe College, 218
Phi Beta Kappa, 243, 268, 281, 282 Radicchi, Joe, 125
Philadelphia, 181, 182 Railroad Shops, 11
Philadelphia Inquirer, 26, 121 Railroad YMCA, 34
Philosophy, 267-273 Railroad-see Erie Railroad
Philosophy, 298 Rain, 225, 319
The Philosophy of Composition, 251 "Recessional," 220
 AN INDEX TO PARTICULARS OF MY LIFE 177
Red Cross, 41, 86, 126, 177 Saturday Review of Literature, 218, 262, 299
Reed, Myrtle, 95 Saturn, 217
Regnets exam, 196 Saunders, Blake, 216, 217
Reinhardt, Max, 232 Saunders, Mrs., 202, 217, 220, 222, 239, 249, 254,
The Religion Called Behaviorism, 299 256
Religion, 60, 106-112, 220, 227 Saunders, Professor, 202, 216-218, 220, 222, 235,
Replenishing Jessica, 234 237, 239, 241,248, 249,254-257,269,272,273,
Republican Party, 33, 38, 123, 125 301
Revelation, 110, 111 Saunders, William Duncan, 216, 220, 254
Reymont, Wladyslaw, 263 Saunders prize for creative writing, 254
Reynolds, the, 228, 229 "Savior, Comfort Me," 19
Rhapsody in Blue, 305 Saxophone, 138-141
Rheumatic fever, 30 Scandinavians, 102
Richards, Laura, 94 Scheuer, Dora, 41, 101
Richards, Vincent, 136 Schildkraut, Joseph, 225
"The Ride of the Valkyries," 74 Schnitzler, 203
Rienzi, 142 School, 55, 56, 69-71, 127-132, 144-148
Rigoletto, 137 Schubert, Franz, 142
Riley, Reverend E. E., 21 Schurtz, Carl, 147
Rimski-Korsakov, 142, 209 Science, 291, 292
"The Ring and the Book," 227 Scott, Sir Walter, 271
Rip Van Winkle, 7 Scranton, 18, 183-187, 207, 209, 212, 213, 218,
Ristine, "Chubby," 199, 227, 234, 295 219,223,225,233,244,248,258-261,264,265,
Riverside Drive, 305 269-272,278,286,292,293,295,301-303,305,
Robinson Crusoe, 94 311, 316, 319
"Rock of Ages," 60 Scranton library, 263
"Romance in Hogan's Alley," 267 Scranton Republican, 259, 268
The Romantic Age, 273 Scranton Trust Company, 258
Rome, 313, 314 Scranton, Worthington, 274
Romeo and Juliet, 220 Searle, E. R. W., 18, 45, 80
Roosevelt, Theodore, 27, 33, 34, 125, 286 Seeley-Brown, Mrs., 198
Root woods, 217 Self-management, 121-122
Root, Cube, 239 Senior Composition, 233
Root, Edward, 217, 239, 241, 254, 307 Sen Sens, 91
Root, Grace, 217, 222, 254 "September Morn," 47
Root, grandfather, 239 Seton, Ernest Thompson, 52, 292
Root, Senator Elihu, 115, 123, 239, 258 Sex, 63, 65, 117, 129-132,139,168-171,200,201,
Root, Square, 239 203,213,218,231,241,243,244,261,262,276,
Roots, the, 239 279, 304, 305, 308, 312, 317, 318
Rosamunde, 142 Sexual innocence, 129
"The Rosarary," 42 Shakers, 17
Rostand, Edmond, 215 Shakespeare, William, 128, 150,154,161,234,249
Roth, Samuel, 262 Shakespeare's Plays Illustrated, 94
Round Table at the Algonquin, 241 Shamokin, 175
Royal Gaboon, 220, 221, 234, 238, 241 Shaughnessy, Mr., 69, 144
Roycrofters, 94, 160, 162 Shaw, George Bernard, 225, 273, 300
Rubinstein, Anton, 109 "Shep, Bill"-see Shepherd, William H.
Rudd, "Bob," 215, 223 Shepherd, Wiliam H., 215, 271
Rue des Saints Peres, 317 Sheridan Square, 305
Russell, Bertrand, 298, 299 Sherman, Mrs., 270
Rutland, 226, 231, 232 Sherman, Robert, 270
Ryan, Mr., 141, 173 Sherman, Stuart, 219
"Ship Ahoy," 60
Shoe salesman, 165-167
S Shubert Theatre Company, 309
Sienkiewicz, Henryk, 112
Salisbury, 318 Silas Marner, 148
Salomt, 161, 215 Silent Birdmen, 304
"Salut, demeure," 140 Silk Mill, 130, 177
Samter's, 187 Sin, 61
"Samuel Winters-Astronomer," 243 Sinbad, 151
Sandburg, Carl, 227, 235, 242 Sinclair, Upton, 226
Sans Famille, 159 "Sing Me to Sleep," 29
Santa Claus, 32 Sing Sing, 61
Santa Maria, 272 "Sir Burrhus Goeth Forth," 221
Saturday Evening Post, 94, 162, 227 Sir Burrhus de Beerus, 221, 238, 267, 268
178 ROBERT EPSTEIN & JANICE KATHRYN OLSON
Sistine Chapel, 313, 316 Stahler, Miss, 310
Skinner, Edward James, 23, 24, 28, 29, 31, 61, 63, Starkweather, 17, 31, 206
65, 66, 82, 83, 85, 87-89, 104, 113, 114, 119, Starrucca, 5, 8, 9
120, 129, 131-135, 137, 138, 143, 148, 163, 173, Starrucca Viaduct, 4, 170
186, 187, 191, 192, 207, 208, 210 "Stars and Stripes Forever," 139
Skinner, Edward James, death of, 208 State University Law School, 260
Skinner, Grace Burrhus, 18-21, 23, 24, 26, 27, 29- Stein, Gertrude, 311
32, 40-46, 59, 61, 63-66, 72, 80, 81, 87, 89, 93, Stella, 303-305, 308, 309
106,109, 110,114, 119-121,126, 129-131, 133- Stereopticon, 68
135,137,138,140,144,145,150,159,170,179, Stevenson, Robert Lewis, 152, 249, 251
180-183,186,191-193,202,207-210,212-214, "Stink"-see Saunders, Professor
218,223,233,244,245,254-256,258,260,261, Stirner, Max, 302
263-278, 284, 302, 305, 314-319 Stone Bridge, 4, 124, 130
Skinner, James, 8-10, 18, 21, 26, 30, 80, 109, 114, Stories, 92-100, 202, 211, 230, 249
118, 126, 129-130,135-136,184,198,208-209, Strongheart, 143
212, 270 Stroudsburg, 252
Skinner, Josephine Penn, 5-8, 10, 15, 18, 21, 26, Stryker, Melancthon Woolsey, 257
27, 31, 32, 38, 43, 60, 66, 67, 85, 112, 114, 126, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, 46
184, 208, 212, 270 Sugar Bowl, 101, 169, 223
Skinner, William Arthur, 10, 11, 12, 19-25, 29-31, Sullivan, John, 36, 37
33-36, 38-40, 44-46, 58, 61, 64, 70, 75, 77-79, Sullivan, Leo, 141
80, 82, 83, 87, 90, 92, 94, 98, 100, 104, 106, 110, Sullivan, Mrs., 144
112-114, 119,120,123-128,131,133-140,145, Sullivan, Sir Arthur, 138
146, 150, 159, 160, 162, 163, 173, 177, 179-183, Summer School of English at Bread Loaf, 226-228,
186,187, 191-193,200,202,207-210,212-214, 231, 232, 241,244,245,251,286,295,297,303,
219,220,223,233,244-249,254-256,258-261, 310
263-265, 276-279, 283-286, 293,294, 302, 305, Sunday School, 151
314-319 "The Sunshine of Your Smile," 90
Skinner's Workmen's Compensation Law, 209, 260 Super, Professor "Supe," 223
"Slimers," 194 Superior Court of New York State, 179
Slocum, Clayton, 43 Superior Court of Pennsylvania, 179
Slocum, Mrs. Clayton, 42 Superstition, 103
"The Slumber Boat," 29 Supreme Court of New York State, 179
Smith, Adam, 148 Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, 179
Smith, James, 88 Sur les DonnOes immOdiates de la conscience, 319
Smith, Joseph, 111 Susquehanna, 5, 9, 12, 13, 15, 19, 21, 23, 34, 36,
Smith, Judge, 259 37, 39-41, 45, 51, 53, 56, 59, 62, 69, 71, 73-75,
Smith, Lizzie, 55 79, 80, 84, 85, 99-103, 105, 106, 107, 109, 111,
Smith, Mrs., 130, 131 115-119,121,129,130,134, 139-142,149-152,
"Smut"-see Fancher, Professor P. A. 161,162,164,165,169-171,176-179,181-184,
Snow, Phoebe, 28 186,187,193,194,198,206,209,223,246,259,
"Soiree Singers," 76 270, 272, 285, 293, 297, 315, 316, 319
"Somebody Stole My Gal," 218 Susquehanna Depot, 4
"The Song That Reached My Heart," 18 Susquehanna Dramatic Club, 19
"Song of India," 209 Susquehanna High School, 18, 159, 199, 294
Sons of Italy, 125 Susquehanna River, 3, 177
South America, 159 "Susquehanna Talent," 19
South Carolina, 12 Sussex Hotel, 213, 223, 283
South Gibson, 123 The Swamp Fox, 53
South Wind, 310 Switzerland, 314
Southampton, 319 Sykes, Miss Jessie, 133
Spanish, 223 "Symphony Four," 172
Spanish influenza, 143 Symphony No. 3, 142
Speakeasies, 304, 307 Syracuse University, 191
Speaking, public, 196, 197, 224
Speech, 198, 199 T
Speedtalking, 306
Spencer, Herbert, 252 A Tale of Two Cities, 148
Spencerian, 70 Tall-stories contest, 161
Splashton, Colonel, 269 Tannhduser, 138
Sports, 135, 136, 240 Tarkington, Booth, 203
Spring Lake, 213 Taylor, Mrs., 46, 140, 141, 162, 182
Springsteen, John, 88 Teaching, 154
Squires, "Bill," Dr., 216, 220, 298 Teddy, 138
S. S. Columbo, 312, 317 Teddy Bear, 27
S. S. President Harding, 319 Telford, Colonel, 79
 AN INDEX TO PARTICULARS OF MY LIFE 179
Tenniball, 164 Untermeyer, Jean Starr, 227
Tennis, 136, 137 Untermeyer, Louis, 202, 204, 227, 263
"Tenting on the Old Camp Ground," 79 Upson, William Hazlett, 227
Thackeray, William, 291 U.S. Commissioner, 180
That Pessimistic Fellow, 93 Ursus, 112
Theatre orchestra, 141, 142 Utica Observer-Dispatch, 237
"There Will Be One Vacant Chair," 79 Utica Society, 194
"There's a Long, Long Trail A-winding," 126 Utica Symphony Orchestra, 239
The Things That are Caesar's, 224 Utica, 191, 199-201, 216-218, 238, 243, 257
Third Sonata, 141
13th Pennsylvania Regiment, 124 V
Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations, 252 "Vacant Store," 242
"This Foolish World," 267 Vacation, 223
Thompson, 13, 15 Valparaiso College, 145
Thompson, Francis, 112 Varley, 41
Thompson, Sadie, 319 Vegetarianism, 310, 311
Thoreau, Henry David, 150, 154, 179 Velasquez, Diego, 150
Thorndike, Edward L., 298 "Venetian Five," 172, 173
The Three Musketeers, 317 The Venetian Glass Nephew, 234
"Thy Will Be Done," 19 Venice, 314
Tilden, Bill, 136 Venus de Milo, 316
Times Square, 305 Verdi, Guiseppe, 273
"Tipperary," 126 Vermont, 15, 226
Tisdells, the, 60, 105 Verne, Jules, 94
Titian, 239 Versailles, 316
Titus, Leonard, 173-176 " Vesti la giubba," 137, 140
Toklas, Alice B., 311 Vicker, Captain, 76
Toledo Blade, 100 Victor, 101
Toonerville trolley, 192 Victrola, 137, 141, 143, 272, 273
Torrey, Mr. James, 183, 184, 212, 251, 258 "The Victrola Book of the Opera," 137, 143
Torrey, Mrs., 212 Vienna, 203, 314
Tosti, 90 Villa d'Este, 314
The Tower of London, 318 Vogel, Joe, 241, 254, 255
Town History, 176-179 von Suppe, 139
Towne, Dietrich, 240 Voyage of the Beagle, 148
Toys, 66-69
"Tragedy," 230 w
The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, 94 Wagner, Richard, 142, 307
Tramps, 72 Wagner, Charley, 130, 143
Transcript, 18-21, 23, 26, 34, 35, 37, 39, 41, 42, Walden, 155
71, 76, 80, 87, 100, 123, 124, 126, 135, 137, 140, Walpole, Hugh, 271
142,143,149,163,164,170,172,173,177,178, Walton, 6, 12, 18, 114
180, 182, 184, 233, 258, 270, 318 Wambsganss, 136
Travel, 113-116 "Wanted for Murder," 97
"The Treasurer's Report," 143 War, 123-127
Treasures, 151 Ward, Artemus, 17, 111, 129
The Trial of Mary Page, 74 Ward, Jimmy, 59
Trips, 113, 116 Ward, Mrs., 59
Tristram Shandy, 263 Warner & Sperl's orchestra, 20
"The Triumph of an Egg," 254 Warner, Harmey, 91, 116
Trivoli, 314 "Washington Post," 139
Tunkhannock, 175 Washington Square, 304, 305
Twain, Mark, 17, 111, 129 Washington, George, 15
Twenty Years After, 317 WASP's, 102, 103, 136
Two Worlds Monthly, 262 Water Company, 167
Tyrolean Alp Yodelers, 76 Watkins Glen, 114, 115
Watson, John B., 298, 299, 301, 307, 310
U Watson, Thomas J., 165
Waverley novels, 150
Ulysses, 262 Way of the World, 225
Un Souvenir d'enfance de Ltonard de Vinci, 313 WEAF, 263
Uncle Remus, 153 Wealth of Nations, 148
Uncle Tom's Cabin, 75 Weapons, 121
United States Commissioner, 35 Weaver, John V. A., 225
University of Iowa, 312 Weed's, 115, 187
180 ROBERT EPSTEIN & JANICE KATHRYN OLSON
Weed, Gardner, 191, 196, 199 Woodburn, John, 306, 311
Welburn, Mr., 246 Woodburn, Marion, 306, 311
Wells, H. G., 300, 301 Woollcott, Alexander, 222, 237, 241, 254, 267
Wentworth, William, 146 Workmen's Compensation Law, 209, 260
Werle, Miss, 145, 147, 159 World Series, 136
West Main Street, 104 World War I, 123-127, 314
West Point, 148, 185 "World's Greatest Literature," 94, 98
Western Union, 307 Wright dynasty, 109, 137, 180
Westminster Abby, 318 Wright, C. Fred, 79, 103, 104, 167, 180, 209
Wharton, Edith, 203 Wright, Clarence, 80, 181, 209
"What I Achieve I Despise," 287 Wright, Congressman-see Wright, C. Fred
What Price Glory?, 225 Wright, Jack-see Wright, John
Whiskers, 76 Wright, John, 226-229, 231, 232
White, Emily, 302, 303, 306, 311 Wright, Miller, 181
White, Heine, 235 Wright, Mrs. C. Fred, 104, 209
White, Norman, 302, 303, 306, 311 Wright, Mrs. Clarence, 181
White, Pearl, 74 Writer's Monthly, 268
Whiteman, Paul, 305 Writing, 92-100, 241-243, 245-254
Whitney Museum, 307 Writing career, 262-273
"Why I am Deserting Writing for Several Years," Wundt, Wilhelm, 216
264 Wylie, Elinor, 234
Whittier, John, 199 Wynn, Ed, 138, 143
"Widow's Clearing," 229
Wild Duck, 225 y
Wilde, Oscar, 160-162, 215 Yale University, 226
Willard, Judge, 35 Yankee in Canada, 179
William H. Skinner Hall, 193 "The Yam of the Nancy Belle," 19
William Tell, 90 YMCA, 134, 187
William's Stationery Store, 162 Young Men's Literary Association, 178
Wilson, Woodrow, 12, 123, 125, 165 Yurka, Blanch, 225
Windsor, 113, 223, 233, 236, 237, 269 YWCA, 272
Winged Victory of Samothrace, 316
Winters, 84-86 z
Wisewell, "Gigi," 196 Zaharias, George, 101
Women's Auxiliary of the Odd Fellows, 15 Zaharias, Mike, 101
Women's Relief Corps, 40 Zeller, Frank, 25, 40, 102, 135
Wood, Peggy, 225