An explanation to our sons about their Grandparent’s decision to move to the most remote part of the Eastern Shore of Maryland.
Dear Sons, July 27, 2006
My parents seemed to do little planning. This was best demonstrated in their retirement years.
While I always thought we were rich there was a time in Greenwich when our only car was a VW Beetle. It looked pretty puny in front of the Big House. That was about the time four of the six children were either in college or private schools. Later, Dad bought a ’56 Corvette to add to our garage. That kind of spiced things up. He, and I, loved that car. The house sat on the highest (only) hill in Bruce Park. The Mead family built the house. They were founding fathers of Greenwich, as well as founders of the New York, Hartford & New Haven Railroad. The addition of a beautiful large library with walnut paneling brought from a Revolution-era Connecticut home with bedroom above was built for Wendell Wilke’s visit when he ran for president. The title of the property gave us use of a private beach down the road. It wasn’t much of a beach. But the house was magnificent. Seven bedrooms that we used, two that we didn’t. I think it had six fireplaces, in the bedrooms, living rooms, dining rooms, the whole thing sat on two+ acres. Dad bought it for a song and sold it the same way. It was a careless sale. But he wasn’t one to jawbone. He hated buying cars, for example, as do I.
When I was a junior at Toledo they sold the place. My youngest sister, Mary, was the only child still there. I was crushed. Until they told me the move would be to Manhattan.
In 1965, my Dad and Mom lived at 65th Street & 2nd Avenue in Manhattan. It was a terrific apartment; three bedrooms, very large living room/dining room, smallish kitchen, all in a brand new building. And it was a great time to be in NYC. At least your Mother and I thought so. My Dad, however, had grown tired of both work and New York. He was sixty-two, Mom sixty. He had commuted to and from Greenwich on decrepit New Haven RR cars with little air conditioning for too many years. And now the city was wearing on him, just as the commute had. He complained that his friends would wait until their sixty-fifth birthday, retire, and then drop dead. He wanted a few years of retirement. Pam reminds me that my Mom mentioned to her that she was concerned that Dad would not live long. He lived another twenty-five years. I think my Mom reluctantly agreed on the move. After years in the BH in Greenwich, plus following Dad to Venezuela, she found the City exciting. She would go to matinee concerts and museums and dress up in suits she bought at Bergdorf’s and go to lunch by herself. She soaked up the city.
I was working at Bunker-Ramo at 75 Varick Street; this was located in what is now trendy Tribeca. At the time it was no more than warehouses and low rent factories. To get home I took the cross-town bus on Mulberry Street, through Little Italy, then the Second Avenue bus up to our apartment. I loved watching the children play in front of their four story homes and to peek into the Italian food shops. Mom taught at Great Neck High School to which she commuted from the city. After returning from our Bermuda honeymoon we lived at 65th Street for a while. From Idlewild (later JFK) we took a cab and showed up at my folk’s door. Much to their surprise. They had anticipated that I would have arranged for an apartment after our marriage. I was a doofus. Later we moved to 226 East 23rd Street, a three-flight walk up. We loved it. It was very small so we bought a pullout sofa at Macy’s that must have weighed 400 pounds. You should have seen us bringing it up the stairs. Matt was born shortly thereafter. A year later we moved to a larger place in Stuyvesant Town.
My aunt Helen (my Mom’s youngest sister) and Uncle Hack lived in Peter Cooper Village (it was dubbed Peter Rabbit Village due to the numbers of children), next door to Stuyvesant Town. Your Mom would take Matt over to visit Helen during the afternoon then drive downtown with Helen to pick up Hack at 2 Broadway. Hack had had a heart attack so could not navigate the steps of the subway. He loved seeing Matt in the evening. Their apartment became the family’s Lower Eastside headquarters during this time. We played cards there, learned to drink scotch, ate Helen’s pot roast and listened to Hack’s stories about Sweden. Hack’s sister was in the CIA. Once on Cape Cod I started kidding her about her job; she always said she worked at the Commerce Department. I jokingly said yeah, sure, you mean the CIA, right? I fell off the chair when she said yes. She later moved back to Sweden to take advantage of their medical system.
But the general headquarters for the family was 65th and Second. On Sundays we would go for dinner. This meant we’d show up around lunchtime. All sorts would show up. Hack and Helen would be there, my brother Dave lived there for while after returning from the Army. A visiting Aunt from Cleveland may be staying for while. Aunt Connie would come over from her place on 64th Street with some of her friends. Connie attracted a polyglot of folks. Alvin Nuremberg was an Assistant DA in Manhattan and had great stories about crime in the city. Alvin’s Mother lived on Orchard Street on the lower East Side. This was the center of the immigrant invasion during the first part of the last century. It was full of foreign smells and tiny shops selling fabrics, suitcases, sausages, umbrellas, teas, everything. Storeowners spoke with heavy accents and bargaining was expected. We once visited Alvin’s mother and he was horrified to see she had covered all the furniture with white sheets. She was protecting the vinyl slipcovers. Connie once had a cocktail party and Alvin asked if his pal could come. So, Roy Cohn shows up. If you don’t know his name you should Google it. He may be one of the most infamous lawyers of the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s.
This is Cohn with Joe McCarthy, the senator from Wisconsin who turned the country upside down with his endless search for commies.
Cohn came to the party with two models, probably to dissuade anyone of homosexuality. Years later he died of AIDS.
Cohn in 1981, still snarling shortly before his death.
On Sundays we would all play bridge, fan-tan, crazy eights or canasta for nickels. We would keep score for weeks on a piece of paper, and when we ran out of room on the paper we would pay up. We would watch football, drink and have dinner followed by pots of hot tea with sugar. On weekends when we needed relief from the city we would all go up to Aunt Jane and Cal’s in Westport. We loved that trip to their tiny cottage. Dad and Jane would cook and we would take walks around the estate on which the cottage stood. Your cousins, Mike and Mark were young boys and Jen and Matt, babies, about the same age. We’d play ball. These were great times. These were family times at its best. Having my sister Kathy around would have competed the picture.
Dad seemed to spend what he earned. So when he went to see the president of McCann Marshalk and told him he was leaving the guy asked what kind of retirement he’d need. Imagine! Dad worked for them over 30 years, was a Senior VP and President of South America and he had no defined retirement benefits. It was pretty much decided in that office. The president offered Dad $18,000 a year. Dad said, nah, that was too much, he wouldn’t need it. So they settled on $12,000. Thankfully, during his retirement the company kept increasing the amount. And with interest rates then over 15% a little savings went a long way. They threw Dad a small retirement party in a conference room. He asked me to come to it. It was one of those embarrassing moments when everyone wished there was liquor. About fifteen people came and gave Dad some gifts. He made a short speech, he was always great at that, and we went up to his office to clean out his desk. The company sent over a couple of boxes several days later. Dad and I walked from the Time Life Building back to 65th Street. Thirty years later I would work across the street from that building.
Some months earlier my Mom had read in the NY Times of a house on the Eastern Shore of Maryland that was for sale. It sounded charming; 18th century frame house close by the water, pond and gardens. Mom drove down to see it and I remember her calling to give Dad a report. It sounded perfect. I don’t remember Dad going to see it but he must have.
Remember, this is a high time in New York. Things were happening. Race riots, Mayor Lindsay, Central Park “happenings”, electrical black outs, Truman Capote’s Black & White Ball at the Plaza, Andy Warhol all over the place, poetry readings in the Village, Beats everywhere, the beginnings of Vietnam, the heyday of the New Yorker magazine, The Herald Tribune, Jimmy Breslin, people making serious money, poverty above 96th street, etc. The place was alive. We could not believe our good fortune to be young, have jobs, with most of our family around us and to be living in Manhattan.
So your grandparents decided to move to Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
Last week it was with anticipation, seriousness, excitement and some anxiousness that your Mom and I retraced our forty year old steps and found their Maryland house. Or what is left of it.
The roads in that part of Maryland are in terrific shape. All seem to be newly surfaced and lined. We headed south on Rte 50 and slipped through Cambridge without stopping and dipped south. Then on to Rte 335 then to a narrowing Rte 336. We had been here before, three times. When Mom was pregnant with Matt we rented a car and drove down for the weekend. I remember that my Mom had been busy hooking rugs and had our bedroom covered with them. We threw out the last of those when we moved to North Carolina. When Matt was three months we packed up our new 1966 Volvo (stick shift! on the floor!!); Matt, in the back seat, in the carriage top that popped off the pram. He screamed a lot and I wouldn’t let Mom pick him up for fear of an accident. Finally, she justifiably ignored me and we had a better trip. My Mom and Dad fawned over the boy.
Our last trip was when Dave was ill. He contracted a mysterious infection that really had us all worried. He was a sick puppy; even after surgery to drain pockets of puss from his arm and back. Mom had come up to NYC, stayed with Hack and Helen, to see after Dave then they flew to Salisbury where Dad picked them up. He was going to convalesce in Bishop’s Head.
This captures the bleakness of the day as well as the terrain. On each side of the road is marsh. This is a famous wild life refuge where tens of thousands of geese congregate twice a year on their seasonal migration. But there is nothing, nothing else.
There isn’t much here and what is there is bleak. That is the second time I have used the word. I should open my Thesaurus. There are houses that time has forgotten, trailers that have fallen off their cinder blocks, Methodist churches boarded-up, and graveyards untended.
We hadn’t seen it this way forty years ago. We remember our trips here with fondness. To us the terrain was different and mysterious and after reading Michener’s Chesapeake, years later, we began to feel warmth toward it. Mom and Dad seemed happy and we sure loved having them host us. And they loved seeing us. Mom would cook leg of lamb with a gazillion garlic cloves, Dad would cook a huge sea bass that some “Waterman” swapped him for vegetables. In the late ‘60’s the Watermen were still using a few Skipjacks on the Chesapeake and these were tied up close by the road to the house.
At one time the only way oysters could be harvested was by sailboat, hence the skipjacks. Oystermen were not licensed to catch fish, but they did. And they would swap them for melons.
The house was charming. Like many on the Eastern Shore it seemed to have been stuck together over a couple of centuries. The smallish main room was at least 150 years old, the other parts added later.
For us, their move was a grand experiment. But imagine moving from Manhattan to this remote section of Maryland. When I say remote, it cannot be stressed enough. Electricity arrived in 1949. Dad was fond of saying that his friends were so isolated that they had Elizabethan accents. Indeed, on last week’s trip we saw a flagpole with the US flag on top followed by the British below.
We thought we knew where the house was. But forty years takes a toll on both memories and memory.
We passed fishing docks where skipjacks once moored
It was Sunday so no one was about.
We could hardly believe that Pritchett’s was still there. It was five minutes from the house. Dad would drive over and sit with the locals around a wood-burning stove. This was a man who had his cocktails at Toot Shor’s, or the Rainbow Room in Rockefeller Center. Now he was drinking weak coffee and trying to relate to these heavily accented watermen.
We had several false sightings. The end of Rte 336 downsizes into a gravel road with grass growing in the center. It dead-ends in about half a mile. On the left are huge white pines, on the right is marsh as far as one can see. Mom recognized the place first. “That’s it.” Nah, impossible. There is no resemblance. I turned the car around and ducked in and out of the next few dead-end lanes. We had come a long way not to find it and I was beginning to feel very disappointed. After fifteen minutes, and feeling this was a lost cause I agreed to re-visit Mom’s original find.
The garage was there when they owned it but the “house” is new. There is no sign of the pretty old place, not even a basement or footings. It had disappeared. Why would someone tear down a wonderful antique and replace it with what appears to be a doublewide? Perhaps a hurricane had done it in.
The place has a for sale sign and a No Trespassing sign
This may be the most familiar view to those that were there forty years ago. The pond is way over left, now in woods. The old house faced left, or south.
Pam and I were in shock. I still am. What was it that convinced Mom and Dad this would be a place to live their lives? Grocery stores were forty miles away, neighbor’s non-existent. They had so many choices but they made this one. Why?
Dad figured his mistake pretty early. Up the road and out on a point is a hunt club. It is still there, behind locked barrier, and was then owned by the president of Olin, the chemical and munitions company. At a party Dad had for them the Olin guy suggested that they were looking to expand the club. Dad opined that they should buy his place. And so, about two+ years after they moved in, they moved out. Driven out by swarming mosquitoes and what I now know must have been outrageous loneliness.
We slowly began to drive north, back to Cambridge to pick-up Rte. 50, in wordless wonder. Finally, I asked Pam what had they been thinking? Imagine the moving men picking up on 65th Street and dropping off at the end of the world. Is this where they were prepared to spend the rest of their days? After leaving the warmth of family in New York is this what they wanted? Knowing I would never be here again I wanted to go down yet another lane but Pam said no, get me out of here.
I am afraid I have portrayed the area as ugly. No, no. The vistas are huge, nothing to block your eyes until the Bay. But it is so, so remote, such a lonely feeling. My folk’s place was literally at the end of the road. Next stop…. water.
Interestingly, their next stop was almost city-like. You probably remember that place, houses right next to each other and a busy street just up the road. Compared to Bishop’s Head, St. Augustine was a city.
The six children loved our parents so, so much. Dad was, at times, larger than life. I know you feel he was a curmudgeon and a case can be made for that. But he was a hell of a storyteller, had a very high intellect, had exacting and high morals, and was forgiving of his children’s foolishness and a good businessman. Mom was more of an aesthetic than she was able to demonstrate under Dad’s pretty stern relationship. She would have stayed in New York if Dad had asked. But she re-discovered nature in Maryland and became a good birder as she walked the marsh to discover new species.
As suggested earlier, I don’t think they planned. Probably because they didn’t talk. But in retirement they seemed to have worked that out. Perhaps they needed those two years alone to figure things out. If so, I am grateful they found it.
Yet, the place, the location, and the mysterious reasons for their choice haunt me.
Love, Dad
