If I Put My Clothes In A Bag

In this Christmas photo from 1951 (posed in future graduate of University of California-Berkeley tee shirts) are Bob, Bill, Dave and Mom in back, with Steve at age two in Dad's lap. As is obvious by her expression, Mom was pleased to have more children. For the rest of her life she would gloat how she tricked Dad into continuing the production of offspring.  Had Steve been a girl his name would have been Helen Elizabeth after the aunts back in Neenah. When Mom asked if Dad was disappointed with having another boy, he replied, "When you got a good thing going, why change?" 

NOTE: The posts in Chapter II follow the events leading up to my father's return to Neenah as I saw them. If you are just beginning to read this blog you may want to go back and start with the first post HERE. For those of you who are reading because they love stories about Neenah, I'm certain you'll find this chapter engaging and an important part of a moving human drama that has everything to do with Neenah, its history and the six degrees of separation that link link us all together.

CHAPTER II, Part 3

In addition to the general household chaos, my brother Bob was proving to be a square peg in a round world, particularly when it came to school. At virtually every grade level, getting an education was an endless sea of frustration for him, Mom and Dad, and especially his teachers. In elementary school while all the other children were learning to print their names, Bob tried his hand at writing in braille, and when the teacher objected to that, he worked on standard printing that could only be read upside down in a mirror.  The same was true when it came to learning rudimentary math: he did his work in Roman numerals. At the start of one school year his new teacher - a man and fresh out of school himself - promised Mom to make Bob his special project, only to concede defeat by the second parent-teacher conference:

"Some day someone is going to teach Bob something. It just isn't going to be me." 

The problem, of course, wasn't limited to school. At home Bob began in the kitchen, where he methodically made every cake in one of Mom's cookbooks to better understand the process. He then moved out to the garage where he progressed from  crystal sets to Heathkits to sufficiently powerful transmitters that started the neighbors on a rampage for the interference he caused with their television reception. In high school Bob and a friend even got a hold of a surplus Navy radar system that was eventually confiscated by War Department officials, in this case for interfering with operations at a new missile base on nearby Angel Island. Invariably the odd man out in any social situation, Bob was nevertheless an essential component in my brothers' ever expanding circle of friends. For while Bill had the power to attract followers like an adolescent Pied Piper, Bob's highly tuned engineering skills made it possible for them to assemble soap box derby cars, construct a simple but effective backyard roller coaster, or connect the entire neighborhood's collection of electric model trains into a single domestic transit system that on a dare ran through every room of our house.

Mom and Dad weren't entirely on their own when it came raising their family. For the first 20 years of their married life Mom's widowed mother lived with them or very near by, helping with the meals, cleaning, child care and whatever else was needed.  The relationship between these two ladies, as can be seen here, was at best cordial. A school teacher by training, Grandma openly favored Mom's older sister, Angela, the superior student, taking little or no interest in Mom's extraordinary artistic and musical talents. Having lost everything in the Depression, Grandma was at the same time financially dependent on Dad, whom she thoroughly disliked in spite of his advanced degrees and academic awards. And while she was unfailingly treated with the customary respect of those times, it was never enough to make her happy. After weekend visits to Angela and her husband George, Grandma inevitably made a point of telling Mom how instead of being put to work they treated her like a queen. 

In keeping with all this turmoil was Bob's beloved cat Tatter. The embodiment of domesticity at home, Tatter would turn feral outdoors, becoming fiendishly aggressive when it came to dogs. Undeterred by their larger size and greater ferocity, Tatter would roam the streets in search of canine prey, enticing them to chase him back to the tree in our front yard. From there this cat would launch a surprise attack, dropping down from the branches onto his unsuspecting adversary, biting and digging his claws into the hapless dog's back. Frequently bested but never deterred, Tatter spent the better part of his surprisingly long life in a condition consistent with his name, often at death's door from extensive injuries, with Dad serving as veterinary nurse.  In this capacity Tatter became the one remaining positive connection between Dad and Bob as my brother's intensely challenging intellect - in deadly combination with his teen years - pushed their relationship to the breaking point.

And while most other mothers under these circumstances would have seen the wisdom of drawing the line at three children, Mom wanted more. Dad, however, did not. At least that was his official position. When Bill came home from school in tears one day because his friend Brian was being taken to an orphanage, Dad immediately got on the phone and confirmed the report as true, learning that the boy’s widowed mother Sally had suffered a breakdown, lost her job and no longer had enough money to take care of them both. A few more calls and Dad had arranged for Brian to live with us until his mother was back on her feet. He then found her a secretarial job that paid more than the one she had lost. “Jesus knew I that I was in need and He sent your father and mother to me,” Sally told me decades later, kissing my cheek in their absence. At Dad's funeral Brian wept openly:

"He was the only father I ever knew."

On the issue of adding permanently to the inventory of Adams children, Mom's mother took sides with Dad. "They're all going to end up in prison," she predicted on more than one occasion. Grandma had lived with Mom and Dad off and on for years, and when we moved to San Anselmo she came too, renting a second floor garage apartment nearby. While accustomed to acting as a geriatric au pair, in San Anselmo Grandma had found part time work as a book binder at the public library and had started taking art classes at night. She enjoyed this new found independence, and so the idea of resuming her role as caregiver to a houseful of unruly boys (not to mention a predatory cat) was anything but appealing. She relented with my brother Steve, born in 1949, but when Mom discovered four years later that she was once again pregnant, this time with me, Grandma was fit to be tied. She told Mom in no uncertain terms that at 78 she wanted no part of any more babies. Mom would just have to tough it out on her own. I was the last straw.



At the hospital the nurses all proclaimed that I was a particularly adorable baby. Here just past my first birthday I am a curly-haired  Cupie Doll, ecstatic over the brief privilege of being allowed to sit in the soap box derby cart I had been watching my brothers build in the garage under Bob's direction. My brothers would later tease me by saying I was adopted, but with time I came to realize I was the only one of us who bore any resemblance to Dad.

Without Grandma, Mom had no time with a family of four to indulgently savour the prospect of having a new baby. Dad, however, off again on yet another round of meetings and hotel rooms somewhere, found himself alone, contemplating what it meant to be a father. In a break from his schedule he wrote home to Mom how he had come to realize that these four boys were an important part of his life and for the first time he was looking forward to the child waiting to be born. It was a letter Mom wore out reading and rereading, as she had begun - now entirely on her own with her children - to doubt the wisdom of large families. To her surprise Dad had even picked out a name, something he had never done before: Peter - for the late U.S. Senate chaplain Peter Marshall, whose biography, "A Man Called Peter," Dad had just read - and James for his own father, a man Dad had grown up without ever knowing.

As for Grandma, she pretty much stuck to her guns.  She did not come over when Dad took Mom to the hospital (one of the neighbor ladies assumed that responsibility), nor did she call or visit Mom, or come to see me, her newest grandchild, during our four-day hospital stay, the standard of that era.  Mom was certain this meant the breach with her mother was permanent, but when Dad brought us home and turned in the driveway, there was Grandma waiting on the stoop, as she had every other time in the past, in a freshly laundered white apron. Without comment or discussion she came over to the car, gathered me up in her arms and carried me inside - having shooed out the interloping neighbor and  once again taken charge, getting everything and everyone cleaned and organized for the arrival of the newborn baby. 

And as the neighborhood kids came over to stare in amazement at this latest addition to our family, one in their number was Mark - the boy who was an albino to the world but just another kid at our house. An only child, Mark looked me over carefully and then went up to Mom and asked her where babies came from. Not seeing his education on the matter as a responsibility she wanted to assume, Mom explained that she had packed a bag of clothes for the baby, gone to the hospital and brought me back home with her. Giving this answer the serious consideration only a child can muster, Mark asked one further question. "If I went home and put my clothes in a bag, would you bring me home from the hospital?"

CHAPTER II continues HERE.

Teetering On The Edge



In this photo taken in the early 1950s, the neighborhood boys mug for the camera, using candy cigarettes, wax teeth, fake moustaches, and what looks to be some kind of prosthetic tongue to assume an imagined adult male persona. My brother Bill, standing third from the right, embraces classmate Brian who was one of his many best friends and for a time lived with us when his widowed mother was facing financial hardships. My brother Steve, born in 1949 and at this point thrilled to be included with the big boys, kneels on the left next to Mark, the boy with achromasia who wanted to be part of our family.  Within a few years time Steve would have gladly traded places with Mark. 

NOTE: The posts in Chapter II follow the events leading up to my father's return to Neenah as I saw and learned about them. If you are just beginning to read this blog you may want to go back and start with the first post HERE. For those of you who have been enjoying the background stories about Neenah and its millionaires, I promise you'll find this chapter just as engaging and part of a moving human drama that has everything to do with Neenah, its history and the six degrees of separation that link us all together.

CHAPTER II, Part 2

On Brookside Drive my brothers spent most of their childhood out on the street with plenty of friends and - with the exception of Mr. Burleigh's shaking fist and voluble imprecations - little in the way of direct adult supervision or timely intervention.  Footballs flew into Mrs. King's garden and decapitated her prize roses, a running hose was surreptitiously stuck through an unguarded open window at the Shaul's house, and at a nearby construction site several kegs of nails were turned over, on this occasion precipitating a visit by the police. And these being the days before leash laws, the frequent discovery of a dog pile inevitably led to its being thrown at any other children who happened to be in close proximity - usually but not always foreign to the neighborhood. 

At our home, to which these boys frequently retired (more often than not when retreat was the better part of valor), the activities had a decidedly more creative bent, due in large part to Bob's less aggressive nature and more fertile imagination. In the back yard there might be a hole being dug to China, or an expedition being conducted into the dark recesses of the crawl space under the house. Coming inside they might run the front loading washer with the door open just to see what would happen, or bring in a dead cat to be autopsied, or get the car horn stuck after being expressly told not to go in the garage.  And while all this might evoke images of Beaver Cleaver or Opie Taylor, Mom, being the principal caretaker, had a slightly different take on things. 

"Someone was always kicking, biting, crying, scratching, throwing up or looking for something to eat," she would later recall.

A portion of this chaos was due to Dad, who in spite of the number of children he had fathered was not much interested in taking an active role in raising them.  He was focused instead on the resumption of his deferred teaching career at the San Francisco Theological Seminary, an ivy-covered Presbyterian institution which in spite of the name was located across the bay in San Anselmo. Dad was a graduate of the seminary and had been a teaching assistant there when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Now five years later, with the war over and pastoral service in the coastal farming community of Watsonville behind him, he was back teaching speech part time and working on a doctoral degree that would open the door to a professorship, tenure, and for Dad the highly attractive perquisite of faculty housing (having no compelling interest in home ownership as part of his make up).

Dad took a more active interest in his children only at the point when they were old enough to share in his enjoyment of fishing and hunting, which eventually included some of their friends and even a few of their fathers. As these bonds of trust and friendship deepened, the excursions evolved into pack trips up into remote tracts of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, a perspective that would shape the outlooks and life goals of all these boys. Dwain, for example (shown here with Bill and Dad after an early and less demanding hunting expedition), told them he wanted to become a forest ranger, a career that countered his mother's expectations but that he eventually pursued. When I look at photos like this one it become clear to me that these are the only occasions where Dad smiled with such genuine peace and contentment. 

The seminary also provided Dad with the opportunity of developing its groundbreaking religious broadcasting program,  first in radio and then later television. This involved travel to Chicago and Hollywood to attend classes in scriptwriting and broadcasting at the University of Chicago and the Columbia Broadcasting School. After that came setting up the curriculum, organizing an international church news wire service, and stumping around the country for donations to underwrite the construction of studios in the seminary’s new multi-million dollar library. As the youngest member of a faculty made up of old men at the end of their academic careers, Dad was the golden boy and young turk, and as such the protégé of seminary president Jesse Baird. Pretty heady stuff for anyone still in his early thirties.

In Dad's absence the only dependable adult presence at home was Mom, who had grown up with only an older sister and had little understanding of how to handle the mob of grammar school boys that were regularly encamped at our house. Her job as a de facto single parent was made no easier by my brothers who were not in the least bit afraid of her - that is until the time Dad had been flown out for the better part of a week, ending up in New York City. Calling home to report that he was staying at the Waldorf Astoria (while she had been home tending to the ever increasing bedlam) Mom lost it - or rather she discovered an inner chamber in the private recesses of her demure soul that gave her immediate power over the world around her, a power that proved to be handy from time to time throughout her life.

Grabbing Bob and Bill by the scruff of their necks while in the midst of what was escalating into a particularly fierce pitched battle between siblings, she dragged the two of them into the room they shared and made them lay out their best clothes. From there she marched them back to the kitchen, yanked open the knife drawer, and directed them to go kill each other out in the garage. "I'll hose the blood out into the street and then call the undertaker, and when he gets here I'll show him where your bodies are and let him know where to find the clothes to bury you in." Left standing alone in the ominous silence of a darkened garage, each with a knife in hand, my brothers barely uttered another sound until Dad returned home, happy to receive any punishment he would dole out for their bad behavior as a fair price for being rescued from the clutches of a mad woman. To this day they recall the incident with a respectful silence.




Dad was temperamentally guarded and a hard man for anyone to connect with on a personal level, especially other men.  Through the friends of his kids, however, he fell in several fathers who liked to fish and hunt as much as he did.  One of them was Dwain's step-father, Walt Lampson.  A veteran of World War II and chief mechanic at a Pontiac dealership, he and Dad developed a mutual respect and real enjoyment of each other's company, the closest Dad ever got to having a best friend. Walt even installed a replacement bumper on our car because the old one was rusty, and Dad respected Walt's opinion enough to buy the Pontiac station wagon, the only car Dad ever bought new. Not long after we left Brookside Drive, however, Dwain ran away from home and showed up on the doorstep of our new house on the seminary campus. Thinking it was the right thing to do, Dad called Walt to let him know where Dwain was and to say that he could stay with us until they worked things out. Dwain eventually returned home, but Walt never spoke to Dad again.  The sudden and inexplicable loss of Walt's friendship was a painful slap in the face which Dad never forgot. 

But even when Dad was home, life at Brookside Drive could begin teetering on the edge of chaos in less a moment's notice. A case in point was the Christmas Mom decided to let my brothers participate in decorating the house for the holidays. Following the precepts of an article she read on the subject in a women's magazine, Mom bought a small tree and some unbreakable ornaments so they could do the decorating themselves. It was soon apparent, however, that whoever the author was he or she did not have any children. For while Bill and Bob were capable of placing the ornaments, Dave only succeeded in knocking everything off, which resulted in yelling and shoving, which in turn toppled the little tree over, and that followed by more shoving, yelling and then crying. After six or seven rounds of this, Dad stomped off to the garage and upon his return he nailed the ravaged fir to the floor with a spike. 

Then on Christmas Day, with beautifully wrapped presents from the aunts in Wisconsin piled high around the little tree, the pandemonium began in earnest.  At some point during these proceedings, both Mom and Dad stepped momentarily out of the room (a common story element in most of their accounts of domestic tragedy).  In their absence my brothers decided to be helpful and clean up the mountains of rumpled wrapping paper by stuffing them into the fireplace. This gave Bob the idea of lighting a match, without the requisite appreciation that the damper in the chimney needed to be open. In a matter of moments the house was filled with billowing smoke and the sound of screaming children, the festive holiday coming to an early conclusion when Dad stormed out onto the front porch and pitched the bedraggled little tree out onto the front lawn.

 

CHAPTER II continues HERE.

The Preacher And His Kids

A three bedroom post war ranch is not what most people would expect a Kimberly-Clark heir to call home. The life my family led here was far removed from the finger bowls and uniformed maids of the house on East Wisconsin Avenue, but even so the world of Neenah's industrial families was inextricably woven into the very simplicity of this house and the people it sheltered. That said, Mom and Dad were not June and Ward Cleaver, my brothers were nothing like Wally and the Beaver, and no problems were ever solved in thirty minutes. You've been warned.

NOTE: The posts in Chapter II follow the events leading up to my father's return to Neenah as I saw and learned about them. If you are just beginning to read this blog you may want to go back and start with the first post  HERE.  For those of you who have been enjoying the background stories about Neenah and its millionaires, I promise you'll find this chapter just as engaging and part of a moving human drama that has everything to do with Neenah, its history and the six degrees of separation that link us all together.


CHAPTER II, Part 1


My concepts of home and family began just across the Golden Gate Bridge in what was then the unincorporated town of San Anselmo, in what is now tony Marin County - the very name evokes California chic and sophistication, but back then was a very different sort of place.  Our address was 212 Brookside Drive, part of a failed Depression era subdivision on the outskirts of town that only started filling up with small ranch houses after World War II. Primarily a blue collar mix of young families, retirees and veterans, it was not a particularly welcoming neighborhood, at least not when my family moved there in 1947.  At issue was Dad, or rather Dad’s profession. 

“He’s a Presbyterian minister, so you’ll have to shape up.” 

That was the dire warning issued by the seller to her neighbors immediately upon closing the deal. Only who she meant to impress is not exactly clear. The Jewish widow up the street? The doctor whom everyone thought was an abortionist? The couple who blamed each other for their only child being born albino? My money is on the neighborhood drunk, the improbably named Burleigh MacDonald, who lived right across the street. “Mr. Burleigh,” as he was generally known to his neighbors, always reeked of tobacco and alcohol, and made his presence known by either yelling at his wife Agnes or the children playing out in the street and blocking traffic.

Incensed  by the impending arrival of a preacher and his family, Mr. Burleigh located a pinball machine and set it up in his front window, certain that such a coarse and loathsome device of lowbrow entertainment would shock the delicate sensibilities of a milk toast pastor, his mealy-mouthed wife and their anemic children. Of course, Mr. Burleigh had no idea who he was dealing with. During the war Dad had served as interim pastor of a  Presbyterian church in Watsonville, California near Camp McQuaide, Fort Ord and a string of Navy air fields all operating on high alert. Transformed almost overnight into a staging ground for the war in the Pacific, the area was soon flooded with military personnel and equipment, all arriving in a 24-hour schedule of droning transport planes. Still only in his twenties, Dad took turns watching the night sky for enemy attack, drove the town hearse due to the wartime shortage of able drivers, and married endless young soldiers and their brides whose future together was measured in days and sometimes hours.

An accomplished amateur photographer, Dad took this family shot just before they moved into the house on Brookside Drive. Unfortunately, he didn't think to pull up his socks. From the left is Bill (5), Dad (31), Dave (2), Mom (31) and Bob (8). For all appearances this stained and damage image would appear to capture your typical post-war suburban family, which we were not. Developing a brilliant mind early in life, Bob also exhibited a form of attention deficit disorder, which no one knew anything about back then, creating endless turmoil at school and at home. Mom served as a buffer between Bob and the world, while Bill and Dave gravitated towards Dad, as clearly expressed here in their body language. Their expressions speak volumes.

Adding to the chaos was an influx of Japanese Americans who were rounded up by the thousands and brought to a nearby rodeo fairground, where the stables and sheds had been called into service as housing until the detainees could be shipped off to internment camps being built in Arizona. As a great many of these Japanese were local people with farms and businesses, Dad organized other pastors into a response team that helped record and store their personal property in a church gym appropriated to serve as a warehouse for the duration of the war. And as a result of their efforts, several of the good citizens of Watsonville - or more probably some of the tens of thousands of soldiers flown in every day from around the country - egged the house where my family had been living, made harassing phone calls, and even threatened to kill Dad, Mom and my brothers (the oldest being no more than five at the time) for providing aid to the falsely accused enemy among us. 

Mr. Burleigh had Dad all wrong, not to mention Mom and my brothers.

Upon their arrival at Brookside Drive it was my brother Bob who took immediate command of the situation with a direct retaliatory assault. Establishing a beach head on the nearest street corner, he and my brothers stood there for the better part of an afternoon yelling “shit ass” at every passing car. Bob had learned this verbal weapon of choice in Watsonville on the playground at Mintie White Elementary School (click on the link if you think I made this name up). The phrase, he found, had a similar impact as the atomic bomb when said to adults (or at least it did when used on the adults leading the Sunday school where Dad was pastor). And like a good drill sergeant, Bob insisted on correct pronunciation, giving his full attention to Dave, who as a 2-year-old was having difficulty with the staccato letter T.

"It's not shi ass," Bob insisted. "It's shit ass. Say it. Shit ass. Shit ass. Shit ass." 

Mom, as always, was horrified about what the neighbors would think when she learned what had been going on, but somehow she had the presence of mind to ask Bob if he even knew what he was saying. "It means a grunt donkey," he replied, surprised that he had to explain anything as self evident as this to his mother. As for her concern for the neighbors, Mom's fears turned out to be baseless. When word of the incident got around, the pinball machine quietly disappeared from view, and my family was soon universally welcomed into the neighborhood. Other parents it seems were relieved to know that a preacher's kids could be as great an embarrassment as their own, while the children living in and around Brookside Drive were indebted to my brothers  for effectively lowering the expectation of decent behavior.

CHAPTER II continues HERE.

A City of Mill Owners

The impressive Alexander Syme House, built in 1882, is believed to have been designed by noted Milwaukee architect Edward Townsend Mix, whose work included Villa Louis and the Alexander Mitchell home (what since 1898 has been Milwaukee's prestigious Wisconsin Club). The Syme home's splendid isolation on Doty Island made this a spectacularly bold statement for the first mansion built on East Forest Avenue. Syme, however, was soon forced to sell the house when his highly profitable Menasha flour mill was condemned (for less than fair market value, Syme claimed) as part of a federal improvement project to that city's dam and waterpower. The Syme house was subsequently purchased by William Gilbert Sr., founder of the Gilbert Paper Co., whose own lucrative mill site was made possible by the federal rebuilding of the Menasha dam.

CHAPTER I, Part 8

Understanding Neenah's second neighborhood of millionaires requires a brief and painless geography lesson, followed by a small dosage of early history. So first the geography. At the northern end of Lake Winnebago, the Lower Fox River flows north out of the lake in two branches around roughly a square mile of land, forming what is known today as Doty Island.  Now the early history. Long occupied by various Native American peoples, settlement of the general area by Northern Europeans began first with Neenah on the south channel of the river. A few years later, a group of disgruntled founding settlers set up the rival settlement of Menasha on the north channel. Ultimately the two communities established municipal jurisdiction over their own one half of Doty Island, although Menasha had modest but more meaningful connection to it than Neenah. Menasha had two bridges across its channel, while Neenah had just the one until a second was constructed almost 100 years later in the 1950s.  

This MAP  of Doty Island and the surrounding area will help you picture what's going on here.

The significance of these geopolitical origins and linkages is that when Menasha aggressively pursued railroad development in the 1860s (envisioning its future as a major transportation hub), city leaders issued bonds to underwrite the cost of the local improvements, which in turn created an indebtedness that Neenah leaders had successfully avoided. The resulting threat of higher taxation in turn drove Menasha's leading industrialists to cross the municipal boundary into Neenah, where they built their homes on the tax haven side of Doty Island. In this way Neenah became known as a city of mill owners (and Menasha a city of mill workers), reputedly with more millionaires per capita than any other city in the United States - a claim no resident ever thought necessary to prove and no visitor ever considered worthwhile to challenge.

This second neighborhood of industrialists, like its East Wisconsin Avenue counterpart, extended along Doty Island's East Forest Avenue and was similarly clustered but generally with more land and open space between each of the homes.  Surrounded by woods and fields - with some farmland and orchards thrown in for good measure - the residents of this far more secluded neighborhood were able to build even more lavish homes than their counterparts across the Neenah channel of the river. Beginning in 1882 with the flamboyant Alexander Syme house, the distinct neighborhood character was established by multiple members of the Whiting, Gilbert and Smith families, all of whom were leading industrialists of Menasha. With one or two exceptions, most the houses built here were similarly designed by Oshkosh architect William Waters, more than half outfitted with the regulation tower.

While not on East Forest Avenue proper, the Whiting Boathouse is the most dramatic example of the more indulgent lifestyle enjoyed by the residents of that secluded neighborhood. Begun as a two-slip boathouse in 1932, Frank Whiting transformed the structure into a sumptuous Mediterranean party villa - complete with a rooftop terrace for dancing al fresco - while still in the very midst of the Great Depression. Show here circa 1939 with the original Nauti-Gal, a second significantly larger cruiser of the same name necessitated construction of a second floor over the slips to accommodate the second boat's much greater height. The remodeling, which took place in 1946, included a small apartment designated for the hired skipper, but which also reputedly outfitted a mirrored ceiling in the bedroom.

As a neighborhood well removed from the prying eyes in town - and perhaps more significantly its churches - residents of East Forest Avenue were generally less inclined to conform to the social norms as the more visible residents of East Wisconsin Avenue. A clear majority of Menasha industrialist living on the Neenah side of the island felt perfectly comfortable either changing wives with some regularity, or when widowed taking up with women that others viewed as their social inferiors. They and their families were similarly subject with far greater regularity to blackmail, breach of promise law suits, and even direct attacks on their persons and property. The second wife of Charles R. Smith, for example, was assaulted in broad daylight by a disgruntled Menasha Wooden Ware employee, while William Gilbert Jr.'s steam yacht, the Tia Juana, was torched and sunk at its moorings by a mysterious arson.

Such things were completely unthinkable on East Wisconsin Avenue.

The lawsuits and attacks on Doty Islanders may have been due in part to the neighborhood's relative isolation, but an equally valid explanation could have been the general inclination of these residents to indulge themselves in a far more conspicuously opulent lifestyle. Cars were one of the distinctions. George Whiting had not one but three limousines: a Rolls Royce, a Minerva and an Isota Fraschini. As for tennis courts and pools (both virtually unknown on East Wisconsin Avenue), Charles R. Smith's athletic daughter Sylvia installed a pool and tennis court when taking over her father's estate, to which she then added a squash court and the state's first privately owned indoor tennis courts. Further down the street and not to be undone, the Mahlers had a pool of filtered lake water created out an abandoned stone quarry - for which they hired a lifeguard and sent out engraved invitations announcing the designated times for general neighborhood use.

Frank Whiting, however, outshined them all, if not in substance than in style. In his backyard he created a preserve of Wisconsin flora and fauna, the later being made up of tame deer, raccoon, geese and at one time a small bear, which ended up getting loose and terrorizing the neighborhood. At the same time he turned his boathouse on the Neenah channel of the Fox River into a Mediterranean party villa, estimated to have cost when completed more than $100,000 in Depression era dollars. In addition to this he held onto his father's house just down the street from his own - maintaining gardens the senior Whiting had created on the lots opposite the house so they could be enjoyed from the front porch - commencing with his father's death in 1930 to his own in 1952.

And for much of that time the senior Whiting house was empty.

CHAPTER I continues HERE.

For more pictures and stories on the homes of Neenah's East Forest Avenue, as well as the Frank Whiting Boathouse, visit the Photo Album - The Mansions page.

A Promise Fulfilled

Aunt Nell and Aunt Betty in the Gold Room with their friend Mary Orbison wearing a dress from one of the trunks in the attic.  The photo was taken to publicize a home tour in the 1960s benefiting the local chapter of the American Association of University Women, of which Aunt Nell was a founding member.

CHAPTER I, Part 4

While Aunt Fan may have won us over completely during our visit to Neenah, Aunt Betty was no slacker in seeing to it that her guests were properly entertained. She had organized a trip for my brothers out onto Lake Winnebago in a speed boat, as well as a visit to one of the local paper mills to see how paper was made. As I was considered too young for either one of those activities, a play date had been arranged for me with a local boy my age whose family was known to Aunt Betty through the First Presbyterian Church, where she and Aunt Nell were life members. And when it was learned that a tour had taken place at Aunt Fan's (albeit primarily for Mom’s benefit), there was nothing but that Aunt Betty would lead a similar tour of for us boys.

Only odd fragments of that tour come back to me now some fifty years later, and then only in images that no longer retain distinct focus. Most of them center around the parlor, which with its gold damask upholstery and gilded chairs was appropriately called the Gold Room. Dad said he always referred to it as the "padded cell" because the wainscoting was entirely comprised of tufted brocade. As an accomplished artist Mom expressed an equally jaundiced opinion (although not within Aunt Betty’s earshot), finding fault in the bird and a nest of eggs depicted in one of the pastoral scenes of the hand-painted Limoges fireplace tiles.

“It looks like she laid her eggs in some old tire,” Mom said.

Unlike Aunt Fan’s where everything was new and beautiful and expensive and untouched, here the items in each room had a story, and because of that they were great family treasures, regardless of monetary value or condition. Even the broken cut glass globe in the parlor chandelier - the pieces anchored back together at great expense with tiny copper rods - had a story, having been shattered by Dad with a tennis racket while trying to kill one of the many bats that plagued his aunts’ lives each year. The majority of stories, however, came back without fail to Aunt Betty’s father, who had built the house in 1883 and had died more than ten years before Dad was born. “Father always insisted,” Aunt Betty would begin, inevitably ending the anecdote with some reference to the economic value of waiting to buy, and then only the best quality available, the savings being in buying only once in a lifetime - or in this case two. As a result, little if anything of significance had ever been changed.

Far clearer in my mind are the vivid images of what Aunt Betty showed us in the attic. Led up past the maids’ room into a secluded gable, she opened one of more than a half dozen battered old steamer trunks, all covered with stickers of ocean liners and exotic ports. And then searching through this drawer and then that one, she showed us a succession of sacred marvels stored there: her father’s stiff shirt collars and collapsible opera hat, and dresses from her mother’s wedding trousseau, made up of yards and yards of fabric and never worn due to a death in the family. There was even a box of civil war bullets and canon balls ploughed up at the Appomattox farmhouse of a distant cousin. The rest of the attic was similarly crammed with even more treasure, including the side saddle from Aunt Nell’s equestrian days and the cradle each newborn in the family had used, as well as all manner of other hulking mysteries, each of them covered humps of old sheets and grey canvas, a herd of dozing pachyderms.

It was also later that same day that I had the strangest experience of my life. It was in the early evening and somehow I had wandered out unattended onto the verandah. There, standing by the tower, I was listening to the city band playing in the park across the street, when suddenly I was overwhelmed by a single complex thought that came into my head as though being spoken directly into my ear by many voices, not with words so much as just the emotion and meaning behind them. At the same time it was a sense of total being and connection, of feeling surrounded and embraced, a comprehension that standing there was something right and good and meant to be, the fulfillment of something promised. It was a strange sensation, but not one that was frightening. In fact I remember being washed over with a sudden calm, even though my arms and legs and neck were tingling. And then just as quickly it was over, gone, and I went inside and told no one about it until now.

The next morning Dad packed us back into the station wagon to continue our travels, ladened with chicken salad sandwiches, potato chips, and bottles of 7-Up, all thoughtfully boxed and wrapped in wax paper by the cook and brought out to us at Aunt Betty's direction. As we turned out the driveway Mom settled in for our third and final reading "Thunderbolt House," and as we drove off no one looked back but me, from my lowly position in the family hierarchy, out the rear hatch. The weekend was quickly put behind us, and there was no discussion of ever returning.

But we did.

CHAPTER I continues HERE

Had We Ever Been Allowed

   Dad, a poised four-year-old with the first glimmerings of rebellion in 1920.   

Chapter I, Part 3


On our first full day as visitors in Neenah Dad took us out to see the carriage house, what the family called the barn - perhaps because its sole purpose had been to house horses and cows (and at one point a substantial flock of chickens), the carriages and sleighs having been kept elsewhere when not in use. Dad showed us the stables and tack room, where the oats were stored and the hay was kept, and the little fenced area behind the barn which was always referred to as the cow yard. In the process he inadvertently offered up a glimpse of some of the happiest, sun-filled memories of his boyhood. He never spoke about himself at home, but here in Wisconsin he showed us where he had nailed lath inside the abandoned hay chute to make a secret ladder up to the loft, and he talked about how in his teens he had surreptitiously scaled the tower of the house by rope, just to prove to himself that he could do it.

Dad also recalled a terrific electrical storm during one of his many extended visits. He was about twelve-years-old at the time and was up in the house with his mother in the boys' room, one of the bedrooms in back where his Uncle Harry and Uncle George had slept as children and which Dad was sharing then with his mother. The storm had come up as she was in the process of explaining the facts of life to him, and with a sudden clap of thunder a simultaneous bolt of lightening knocked the chimney off the barn. The electricity then powered down the barn's wiring to an inside faucet where the hired man was taking a drink. The electricity threw this poor fellow and his metal drinking cup across the stables, leaving him disoriented but unhurt, after which the electricity then jumped over to the horse stall where the window and porch screens were being stored, punching holes through all 117 of them.

"You don't forget a day like that" Dad said. This one comment was the closest he ever got to having the sex talk with any of his boys, a task he left to our mother. Had I known at the time I would have paid more attention.

Later that same morning we were scheduled to go down the street to visit Dad's Aunt Fan, the much beloved widow of his Uncle Harry. Not having had any children, Aunt Fan and Uncle Harry all but adopted several of their nieces and nephews, or at least so it seemed to the adoptees. In Dad's case Uncle Harry was his namesake and as such he stepped into his nephew's life as Dad's father traveled the country seeking diagnosis and treatment for the early onset of Alzheimer's disease, a nearly unknown disorder at the time that was swallowing him up whole. When Dad's father died in 1929 Uncle Harry's role in Dad's life grew even more significant, but then only briefly. A little more than a year later Harry died as well, unexpectedly, of a massive heart attack. After that there was no one else in Dad's life to take his place.

   The home of Harry and Fanny Babcock, as seen from the gardens, circa 1930.   

In our departure to see Aunt Fan (who had continued living in the sprawling house she and Harry had purchased in 1912) there was a good deal of murmuring and worried looks from Aunt Nell and Aunt Betty. In the car Dad explained that Aunt Fan was 82 and had not been well, and that the aunts thought she was unwise in attempting to entertain us. The facts were sufficiently gruesome to require an explanation and renewed warnings about our best behavior, accompanied by an admonition not to stare. Aunt Fan was not only confined to a wheelchair, but was required to wear a body brace, having bones so brittle that she had broken her back from simply trying to open a window, or so Dad said. She also had one leg that was grotesquely swollen, an edema that Dad diagnosed with astonishingly inaccurate medical authority.

“Elephantiasis,” he said. “She got it down south in Charleston.”

Given this introduction, it was hard not to stare when Aunt Fan finally came rolling into the front hall of her house - particularly since she made her entrance out of what at first appeared to be a closet but was in fact no less than a personal elevator. With all eyes on Aunt Fan, the body brace was clearly visible under her dress, and one leg was obviously more than twice the size of the other and very much like an elephant's. Seeing the look of horror on our faces, she tapped on the steel hidden by her dress and winked at my brother Steve. “Go on. Give me your best punch,” she said. “I’m tougher than Superman.” Mom alone was shocked by this, fearing I suppose that Steve might take Aunt Fan up on the challenge, but the joke put everyone else at ease. As old and as rich Aunt Fan as may have been, she had a keen understanding of people and human nature, which made it easy to see why she was so beloved.

For her share of our visit, Aunt Fan planned on taking us out to North Shore Golf Club. Uncle Harry had been involved in the creation of North Shore just before his death, and it was one of several Aunt Fan still belonged to in spite of her physical condition. She had booked a private room there for our lunch and - we discovered - instead of set meal had arranged for us to order anything we wanted from a menu that very thoughtfully included hamburgers and hot dogs. Before that, however, she insisted on showing Mom what she had done with the house, having recently redecorated to the latest Architectural Digest standards in spite of her age and infirmity, simply because she could. The tour of impeccably furnished rooms drew very little interest from my brothers, but on the second floor, moving from bedroom to bedroom, none of which appeared to have ever been occupied, I saw Aunt Fan turn to Mom and gesture to the unused accommodations.

"This is where you would have stayed," she said, "had you ever been allowed."

CHAPTER I continues HERE

The Misses Babcock

Miss Helen Babcock, seated, on her 80th birthday in 1953, with her sister Miss Elizabeth Babcock - my Great Aunt Nell and Great Aunt Betty. The simplicity of the photo nevertheless illustrates the complexity of their sisterly relationship, as seen in their expressions and body language.

CHAPTER I, Part 2

While we were out on the road on our cross country trip, Mom had read aloud to us from "Thunderbolt House" by Howard Pease, a Hardy Boys style mystery so captivating that vast stretches of each day passed with only the sound of Mom’s voice and the turning of pages. Through two complete readings back to back, plus a third on the return trip home, we listened to how the life of a small town California family in the early 1900s was transformed by the inheritance of a San Francisco mansion, how each member of the family was brought down by the their ascent into Nob Hill society, and how the only thing that saved them was the earthquake and fire that destroyed the city in 1906.

And so now here we were in Wisconsin, the book freshly closed and set aside, walking up to the door of a mansion as every bit a mystery as the one on the cover.

Ushered inside by a uniformed maid, we passed through heavily upholstered rooms with high gilded ceilings and brocaded walls into the presence of my father’s Aunt Nell and Aunt Betty, or - as they were locally known with grammatically archaic formality - the Misses Babcock. Tiny and stone deaf at 88, Aunt Nell was the first born, oldest living, and long established matriarch of the family. She had ridden a camel in Egypt, taken to the skies as a passenger in one of the first flying machines, and unlike most of her contemporaries had committed much of her life to helping those in need, and to giving unstintingly to all manner of community projects that a town the size of Neenah would not otherwise expect to enjoy. In sharp contrast, her taller but diffident sister Betty was the 79-year-old baby of the family who had spent most of her life under her sister's wing, supporting Nell's good works and taking care of the home.

Neither lady was more than dimly familiar to me as an eight-year-old, but their presence in our lives was far from remote or shadowy. At our great distance away in California we had been showered each year with a formidable array of Christmas gifts, and as each of us turned twelve these Wisconsin ladies marked our transitions into adulthood by substituting presents with an annual check made out for a manly $25, a sum so substantial and impressive at the time (Mom and Dad were given a joint $75) that opening a savings account followed without protest.

Every two or three years the aunts would also come out to San Francisco, at which point we would all be washed and dressed and taken into the city and briefly put on display for them at places like the Mark Hopkins or the Fairmont or the Clift Hotel, institutions of such luxury and privilege that the visits were more like stereopticon views of foreign lands, vaguely distorted and so removed from our own time and way of life that they were easily set aside or forgotten, except as some passing curiosity. It never really occurred to those of us on display that the lives of these ladies were in any way umbilically connected to ours.

Occasionally the two of them might alternately come to our house as part of some larger family gathering, for which Mom would dedicate months to properly stage, first cleaning and reorganizing every corner and cupboard of the house, then preparing an elaborate meal inevitably using the entire Royal Doulton china service Aunt Nell and Aunt Betty had picked out with her at Gump’s of San Francisco, their present to Mom when she married Dad. And when finally welcomed into our home with all the solemnity of visiting heads of state, the two sisters would very kindly comment on how perfectly everything had been arranged, and Aunt Betty in particular would remark on the dinner, noting that she was unable to get their cook to fix more than one vegetable and here Mom had prepared three.

My father, Henry Babcock Adams, walking my oldest brother Bob along the Neenah shoreline during their visit in 1941.  The tension that existed between them all their lives was clearly evident even then.

Mom, however, was certain that both Aunt Nell and Aunt Betty disapproved of her, recounting repeatedly as evidence the events of her first and only other trip to Wisconsin, which had taken place in 1941 when my oldest brother Bob - newly married at the time of our trip - was a rambunctious two-year-old. At lunch on the first day of that earlier visit Mom had taken Bob out of the ornate Victorian high chair that had been set up for his use and let him run around the dinner table as the adults continued to talk. She then took him upstairs to change his diaper and to her horror discovered that while the diaper had been soiled, it’s contents had escaped to parts unknown.

How the errant turd escaped from both the diaper and Bob's clothing remains a mystery, but during her ensuing search of the intricate patterns of oriental carpets and parquet flooring, Mom was approached by Aunt Betty who readily offered to help, assuming the hunt was for nothing more offensive than a missing earring. When apprised of the real objective, Aunt Betty turned white, then quickly mustered all available hands into a bucket brigade outfitted with mops, pans, cleaning fluids and flashlights. Eventually the wayward excreta was found on the dining room carpet, remarkably untrammeled given the number of parties involved in its recovery. And shortly thereafter, to Mom’s everlasting chagrin, a nurse was hired to take charge of Bob for the remainder of their visit so that Mom could relax more during her stay. From this Mom inferred that she had been cast as nothing less than an unfit mother.

Now some twenty years later there were four children in tow, all seated in that very same dining room around a table set with linen, china, crystal and sterling, being served fried chicken by a procession of maids in white organdy aprons, each carrying some part of the meal on silver platter perched upon little white cushions trimmed in tatted lace. Sitting next to Mom, I mumbled something about wanting ketchup and was shushed with a little more emphasis than I had normally come to expect. Moments later, however, a tiny silver pitcher of the stuff was set at my place, summonsed through the oracle of Aunt Betty’s attentive ear and a buzzer to the kitchen hidden under the carpet.

And while it seemed to me in the moment that nothing could have been more amazing than that little pitcher of ketchup, when the dinner dishes were removed each place was next set with a finger bowl of warm scented water, for any of us who might have used our fingers to pick up a chicken wing or leg. This fastidiously thoughtful interlude, preceding the apple pie and cheese, was no less astonishing and exotic to me than had a band of whirling Dervishes come spinning around the table.

I had never seen anything like it before - and never would again.

CHAPTER I continues HERE

The Journey Begins

The Havilah Babcock House circa 1908, Neenah, Wisconsin.

CHAPTER I, Part 1

In 1962 when I was eight years old, my family set out on a cross country road trip from our home north of San Francisco to the East Coast and back. Mom, Dad, me, three older brothers and a yellow Pontiac station wagon. Bill, a sophomore in college, sat up in front and took turns driving with Dad, while Dave and Steve, both in their teens, divvied up the window seats in back with Mom. As the smallest and least significant, I rode behind everyone else with the luggage, where the only unobstructed view was out the rear hatch. From this position in the family hierarchy I seldom had any idea where we were going but always had plenty of time to think about where we had been and what we were leaving behind.

Dad’s original idea in taking this trip was for us to see the country, only once we were out on the road making good time became more important than having one. “We can always see that kind of thing on the way back,” he said about Yellowstone and the Badlands, both of which had been vaguely promised but were no where near the route we were on. Driving each day until the dead of night, we stopped only at greasy cafés and dusty gas stations until finally, pushed to the brink of exhaustion, Dad would turn in at some dimly lit roadside motel where the neon vacancy sign flickered ominously. As he walked over to the office to register, Mom would call out, “Make sure it’s clean.” Minutes later, following what could only have been a cursory inspection of the premises, Dad would return to make his report.

“Well,” he’d say, “it’s not flossy."

While the best of these places smelled of moth balls and disinfectant, and had white chenille bedspreads and sanitary paper tapes across the toilet seats, the majority were part of what must have been a vast Bates Motel franchise, complete with worn-out linoleum rugs, rusty bathroom fixtures and bare exposed light bulbs dangling from the ceilings. No TV, no pool, no air conditioning, no nothing. Except once there was an oil derrick that groaned all night outside the only window that opened. That was the motel where there weren't enough rollaways for all of us and Dave volunteered to sleep in the bath tub because Dad didn't want to pay for two rooms.

Years later I learned that a road trip like ours had been one of the few happy memories Dad had growing up. His was in 1931 when he was fifteen years old, two years after his father had died of Alzheimer’s disease, the same year his mother had been diagnosed with inoperable cancer. His mother had promised that when his older sister Mary graduated from high school the three of them would go to Europe, only when the time came it was the middle of the Depression, and his mother felt such an extravagance would be in very poor taste. So instead she bought a touring car, hired a driver and took them all on a three-month circumnavigation of the continental United States, revisiting all the places that had been important in her life.  

The bird bath in Aunt Nell's formal gardens, being fished by Dad's Louisville cousins George, Harry and Blandina Babcock, circa 1935.


Like us they started out from California, only the first part was by train, arranging for the driver to follow along in the car and meet them in Chicago after they had spent a week or so with Dad’s aunts in Wisconsin. For Dad this first stop was the high point of the entire three months. His aunts had no children and the three of them were devoted to their nieces and nephews, making Wisconsin the only place Dad ever thought of as home - not his mother's house in the foothills of Berkeley, nor any place he ever lived with us for that matter. Even as an adult Dad visited these aunts every chance he got, taking side trips to Wisconsin whenever he passed through Chicago. Our own trip was no exception.

I don’t remember driving up into Wisconsin out of Illinois or continuing north from Milwaukee to Neenah, but what does come back clearly begins on the edge of town, where Dad pulled into a drive-in on Main Street, bought us all milkshakes and announced that for the next three days we were to be on our best behavior. No discussion, no debate, and no threatened consequences because there was no alternative to full compliance with whatever Dad expected of us. His fury, when unleashed, could be volcanic. Only Dave, with whom Dad never uttered a harsh word and therefore enjoyed certain liberties the rest did not, ventured to voice his opinion.

“Looks like we're spending the weekend in church.”

From the drive-in we continued on into town over railroad tracks, past old mills, and through a handful of commercial blocks that made up a rather ordinary Midwestern downtown, emerging finally at the other end on a wide, elm-shaded avenue of houses that quite suddenly became spectacularly grand and impressive. The street then came up along side a little marina of boats formed out of a bend in a river, and there, without fanfare or warning, Dad turned in at one of the largest and most impressive of the houses - a brick Victorian mansion that looked something like a Tudor castle, complete with an imposing tower, sprawling stone verandah, formal gardens and a carriage house that was bigger than our home in California.

This, it was safe to say, was flossy.

CHAPTER I continues HERE