The Boy in Wisconsin
AS my boyhood, reckoned through high school, ended nearly sixty years ago, I find it hard now to think of the boy as me. It is not that we are enormously different in our values or our personalities. (Physical appearance, alas, is another matter.) He was already pretty well shaped and even aimed before he left Milwaukee, beyond major redirection. But now, at this great distance, I see him in my mind’s eye from outside, as “the boy.” It will be easiest if I talk about his first seventeen years that way.
Answers to a few passport questions will introduce the boy and his family:
Born: June 15, 1916, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in a rented flat, but soon (1918) moved with his family to a modest frame house owned by his parents in a middle-class neighborhood of the West (that is, the German) Side.
Father: The boy’s father, Arthur Simon, was born on May 21, 1881, in Ebersheim, Germany, to Joseph Simon and Rosalie Herf, the seventh generation of a line of vintners and wine merchants; Jews, but by some dispensation, landowners (or landholders) a century before Napoleon overran the Rhineland. Arthur graduated in electrical engineering from the Technische Hochschule of Darmstadt and emigrated to Milwaukee in 1903. Employed as an engineer by Cutler-Hammer Manufacturing Company, and later also engaged in private practice as a patent attorney. Active in professional and civic affairs; awarded honorary doctorate in 1934 by Marquette University.
Mother: The boy’s mother, Edna Marguerite Merkel, was born on January 20, 1888, in St. Louis, Missouri, a second-generation descendant of German ’48er immigrants from Prague (Goldsmith, Jewish; Dahl, Catholic) and Cologne (Merkel, Lutheran). Her grandfather Alexander Goldsmith was a Civil War veteran, wounded at Chickamagua, afterward a whiskey salesman. Her grandfather Louis Merkel was a piano builder. His son Charles, after the family business failed, became a piano tuner, who migrated, during the difficult economic times at the turn of the century, first to St. Paul and then to Milwaukee. Edna attended Milwaukee public schools and the Academy of Music. A piano teacher until she married in 1910, then a homemaker. Active in local musical clubs.
Other Close Relatives
Brother Clarence Joseph, five years older, graduated in law from the University of Wisconsin and practiced law in that state. Fond and usually protective of his little brother, he was absorbed in sports and restless at school. In these things, he was not at all the younger boy’s role model.
Grandma Ida Merkel and Grandpa Charles lived at first two blocks away and then in the boy’s home—grandfather until his death in 1928, grandmother through a long life to 1943.
Great-grandmother Anna Goldsmith (Omah), who died in 1921, played checkers, dominoes, and Old Mill (a slightly complicated form of tic-tac-toe) with the small boy for hours on end.
Uncle Harold Merkel, Edna’s younger brother, who died at age thirty, in 1922. Graduated with distinction from the University of Wisconsin in law. A student of the economist John R. Commons and a La Follette Progressive, he worked subsequently for the National Industrial Conference Board. The copies of The Federalist Papers and William James’s Psychology on the bookshelves at home had been Uncle Harold’s. When the boy later was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, he inherited and wore Uncle Harold’s key.
THE BOY AT FOUR
The boy was standing not far out on the wooden pier at the resort of Washington Island’s West Harbor. Washington Island is the dot off the end of Door County peninsula, the thumb of Wisconsin that separates Green Bay from Lake Michigan. He had come on the overnight Goodrich Line steamer from Milwaukee, with his father, mother, brother, and his German grandmother. That summer, 1920, he had his fourth birthday. They had landed at South Harbor, for even then West Harbor was too shallow to accommodate the large lake steamers. Now, several days later, he was playing by himself on the small pier.
So far, all of this is reconstruction. The next is a vivid memory, his earliest. He was falling; he was falling off the pier and would surely drown. A memory of sheer terror. Then he was standing waist-deep in the water, undrowned and unhurt—but sobbing. Of course, the whole thing is no longer a memory, just a memory of having once had such a memory. Memory and memory of the memory have probably been confabulated for at least sixty years.
Other memories, or memories of memories, of the Washington Island holiday remain. The family took a walk from the resort into the woods, which were dense and forbidding, the father in the lead. After some time, when they must have penetrated deep into the forest, the road took a turn and the resort buildings loomed up just ahead. They had never been more than a quarter of a mile away.
If the memory of the memory were not so clear, we would suppose that the whole story was made up after a reading of Proust’s account of the Sunday walks in Combray. The memory even seems to incorporate—but that is surely a fabrication—the father’s quiet satisfaction at having produced this surprise to cap the expedition. Perhaps that detail was added to the memory many years later. Perhaps all fathers smile with quiet satisfaction on safely and suddenly bringing their flock home again.
Then there was the strawberry patch episode, which also seems to belong to Washington Island. Whether during his fourth summer or on some later occasion, the boy was among a party picking wild strawberries. The others filled their pails in a few minutes; there were only a few strawberries in the bottom of his. How could the others see the berries so easily amid the closely matching leaves? That was how he learned that strawberries are red and leaves green, and that he was color-blind.*1
Since the year of Washington Island was the year the boy’s Grandma Simon visited, her presence tags other specific memories of it. Knowing no German, he memorized a little German poem that he recited to her, sitting on her bed, on the morning after her arrival. During the course of the year, he heard lots of German in the home, learned a little of it, and acquired the ability, which he retained, of speaking German without too strong an American accent.
Grandma Simon was a kind and genial woman, not at all religious. But she was a little shocked that the boy was allowed to play with the Russian Jewish girl next door. In spite of the language gap, the two boys became very fond of their German grandmother. One day, she took them to the circus ground, where the tents were being erected for the next day’s performance. A roustabout offered Clarence a dime to carry two pails of water to the elephants. Not understanding the conversation, Grandma Simon dragged Clarence away, and eventually brought two howling children back home. Uncle Max made up for it by taking them to the circus the next day. And a final memory. The circus parade always passed their house on its way from railway to circus ground, the elephants and a steam calliope bringing up the rear. The military parades also came down that street (I don’t know why; it wasn’t a main thoroughfare): the still-young veterans of World War I, then the middle-aged Spanish-American War veterans, and finally, the blue-coated veterans of the Civil War, some walking and some riding in cars.
THE HOUSE
The house in which the boy lived from his third year until he left for college was a modest wooden structure on Juneau Avenue, in a thoroughly middle-class neighborhod, but just a block from Highland Boulevard, where stood the large mansions of the Davidsons (Harley-Davidson motorcycles), the Pabsts (beer), and other leading industrial families. The children of these wealthy families mostly attended the same public schools as the boy and his middle-class cronies, played football and baseball with them, and otherwise participated in the same classless (juvenile) society. But the boy’s parents and their neighbors had no social relations with the Highland Boulevard families.
The long-time Socialist mayor, Dan Hoan, lived in a small house just around the corner, an acquaintance of the boy’s parents. Since no horns emerged from Dan Hoan’s head, and the Milwaukee city government operated precious few Socialist enterprises, the term socialism took on a very mild and benign meaning for the boy.
On its second floor, the Simon house had five bedrooms, one each for the boy’s brother, his parents, his grandmother, his grandfather, and himself. On the third floor was the maid’s room. There was always a full-time maid, the only departure from middle-classness and a concession to the father’s European past. The maid was always a country girl, usually from a northern Wisconsin farm. If she stayed any length of time, and most did, for the boy’s mother was a kind and democratic person, she became a member of the family, which assumed a certain responsibility for her morals and her future. Several of our maids married well and corresponded with my mother to her last days.
The maids baby-sat for the boy and his brother when they were small, sometimes adjudicated their quarrels, and occasionally had to take them down a peg or two when they became uppity. One farm girl, when exasperated beyond endurance, sometimes used a pungent retort that has become a part of my democratic credo: “Your shit don’t smell like ice cream neither.” But mostly they were warmly liked aunties or older sisters to the boys.
In the winters, the second floor bedrooms received only such heat as escaped from the first floor; it was healthy to sleep in cold rooms and with the windows always open at least a crack. On arising in the morning, one made a quick dash from the icy bedroom to the heated bathroom. Homework (it never took him very long) was usually done in the warmth, downstairs at the dining room table. (Many years later, the boy’s children had to endure unheated bedrooms—to be sure, in a climate milder than Milwaukee’s—because it never occurred to the boy, now a man, that people might sleep in heated rooms.)
The boy’s room faced south, on Juneau Avenue, shaded by the great elm trees that arched over the street. It was a pleasant, small room, but he does not remember spending much time in it except to sleep. On summer mornings, he would often waken at or before dawn, dress, and trot out to Washington Park, a half-mile away. There he would find a crotch in a huge willow tree in which he could sit and read his book until it was time to return home for breakfast.
In addition to the holiday parades that passed along Juneau Avenue, there was also the daily parade of Harley-Davidson workmen who lived in the neighborhood and walked the half-mile to the company’s main plant. The preschool boy liked to sit on his front steps and watch them, each with a metal lunchbucket and many smoking pungent pipes. They trudged westward at 7:30 A.M., then back again at 5:00, occasionally in pairs but often solitary. On Saturdays, they worked only until noon.
The blocks had alleys, many of them wide enough for baseball and touch football games, and there were still a few vacant lots in the neighborhood. The boys did not have to travel far or be accompanied by adults to play their games. Cars had mostly replaced horses and buggies for private transport, but Frankie Faulkner’s grandfather (real estate) still drove his buggy, housed in the stable along the alley (and suspected by the neighbors of attracting rats). On a few occasions, the grandfather took Frankie and his friend Herbert for a buggy ride.
Horse-drawn carts delivered milk, ice, and breakfast rolls. Joe Rinello, the vegetable man, also came on his daily rounds with his wagon. In summer, his horse, Nellie, wore a straw hat with holes poked through it for her ears. In any season, Nellie was fond of sugar lumps, nuzzling the boy’s palm with her wet nose as she took them. At Christmas, Joe brought a jug of red dandelion wine as his gift (these were Prohibition days).
For a few months, Joe’s brother Frank appeared instead. A car had hit the wagon and injured Joe. He sued for damages, but was cheated by an ambulance-chasing lawyer, and then arrested and jailed for a short time after he appeared at the lawyer’s office carrying a gun. That was the only break I remember in his long and reliable service. The gun incident was almost the sole “criminal” event that affected the neighborhood—except, perhaps, for the rare stolen bicycle. Houses were not often burglarized, pedestrians were not robbed, violent family brawling did not seem to have been frequent.
Of course, not all of Milwaukee was quite so peaceful. It was not supposed to be safe to walk at night through the Third Ward, three miles from his house. The boy never tested to see whether that warning was valid.
SCHOOL
At school, the boy soon learned that he was smarter than his comrades, and that became important to him. Although conscientious in his studies, he never had to work hard at them or to neglect friends or sports for schoolwork. I have two sets of recollections of him that are hard to assemble into a single, consistent piece.
There was the introverted boy, who had no difficulty amusing himself with books or toys or collections of stamps or (later) beetles. I see him sitting in the living room on a fall Saturday afternoon—all his friends are at the movies—with a chessboard and a chess book in front of him, feeling rather lonely. He spent many hours that way. With a five-year age gap between his brother and him, he was nearly an only child. Although the boy was affectionate, he did not share his thoughts much with adults. He preferred to ask questions of them and listen to them. Suppertime was a time for conversation. His father enjoyed serious table talk, and the rules permitted vociferous argument. Politics or scientific subjects were frequent topics.
I can also see the boy with his father at the basement workbench, “helping,” but mostly watching, while his father constructed a radio, the first in the neighborhood, or a model sailing sloop. Perhaps the father was impatient, or his youngest son lazy, for the boy never acquired any great skills in such crafts, although he liked to watch.
I see him curled up on the leather couch in his father’s den, at the age of perhaps ten, proving to himself that he could understand The Comedy of Errors. The eleventh edition of the Britannica was there for him, too. The long bookcase in the den also contained many shelves of Proceedings of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, which the boy never tried to explore; and the multiple volumes of The Historians’ History of the World, of which he read a little but which he did not find terribly interesting.
He kept his education entirely in his own hands, seldom asking for advice. The encyclopedia had an index, and the public library, a card catalog. In books left by his uncle or his brother, he studied economics, psychology, ancient history, some analytic geometry and calculus, and physics. Well before he was twelve, he had discovered the public library and museum, housed together in a building about three miles from his house. On Saturdays, he often trotted (no one jogged then) down and home again—allowable as long as he returned in time for meals. He knew every exhibit in every room of the fine museum, and in his high school years received permission to enter the stacks in the science room of the library.
Summers were spent mainly in Milwaukee, except for a two-week family vacation, often in the North Woods. Since many of his friends were away during the summer, he was even more solitary than usual then. One summer, when he was about fifteen, he set himself the task of reading Dante’s Inferno (with Gustave Doré’s haunting illustrations), Milton’s Paradise Lost, and a textbook on ethics; and he translated into wretched English doggerel Schiller’s Das Lied von Der Glocke.
Many other solitary summer hours were spent collecting and identifying insects. He began to focus on beetles (color wasn’t important in identifying them). Somehow, he became acquainted with the entomologists at the public museum—he probably took some specimens to them for identification—and received the privilege of working with them “backstage.” His special sponsor was young Hy Rich, still completing his studies at the university, whose particular interest was an obscure family of tiny water beetles, the Haliplidae. Often during the summer, the boy accompanied Rich on collecting expeditions along the streams near Milwaukee.
Hy Rich was a semi-pro hoofer, having financed much of his education during the Depression by dancing in vaudeville. One noon he was giving a demonstration of his skills when the redoubtable department head (Reptiles and Invertebrates), Mr. Tower, returned early from lunch. I believe that Rich was forgiven, but the moment was vividly embarrassing. The boy’s work as a volunteer at the museum continued for several years, especially summers, but produced no memories more indelible than that one. The boy, to his disappointment, discovered no previously unknown and unnamed species of beetle.
In fact, in all these activities there are few examples of what could properly be called “creativity.” One summer the boy wrote some adolescent essays on “infinity” and “the existence of God,” but there was only one brief period of poetry writing, no attempt to compose music, no stab at the great American novel. He did not draw or paint.
The boy did not often take clocks apart, much less put them together again. By the time he finished high school, his chess game was moderately strong, but bookish. He was a student, who prided himself on being able to master anything, independently, and who was often able to make good his (private) boast.
His schoolwork was mostly enjoyable—there were almost no courses he actually disliked—but it did not call for much originality. He did know the difference between memorizing and understanding, and did not give up on a topic until he understood it clearly. Physics and math were probably his favorite high school subjects. The physics was classical physics, well taught by Mr. Ehlman, but it seemed to him a “finished” subject, not leaving room for new discovery.
Two incidents in algebra left clear memories that may shed some light on his attitudes toward knowledge. While working some examples in his first algebra class, he discovered inductively the formula (x + y) (x − y) = x2 − y2. The beauty of it delighted him, and he showed it proudly to his teacher, Miss Thomas. When she challenged him to prove that his inductive formula would work for all x and y, he did not succeed.
In a subsequent algebra course, he was troubled by the fact that some quadratic equations had two solutions, some had one, and some none. The irregularity seemed ugly, although he could see the reason for it graphically. He was pleased to learn a little later that by adding complex numbers to the reals, all quadratic equations could be provided with exactly two solutions.
Similarly, he was at first bothered to learn that equality in the numbers of equations and variables was not a sufficient condition for a set of linear equations to have a unique solution—conditions on the rank of a determinant had to be added. These aesthetic reactions to regularity and irregularity seemed to reveal something of a Platonist within him, a desire to find pattern, and preferably simple pattern, in the world around him.
If the boy had a claim to creativity, it lay in the realm of politics. In about the fourth grade, he drew up a school constitution (students’ rights!) and presented it, with the greatest trepidation, to stern Miss Walsh, the principal. Much to his surprise, he was praised rather than punished for his attempt at insurrection. After that, he was a great reviser of club constitutions and bylaws.
The boy knew that his father was an inventor and held many patents. He did not once ask, “Papa, how do you make inventions?” Perhaps he thought it would be “cheating” to ask, that it would be no fun to invent if you had been told how. Being told how was different from reading in books; in the books, you had to dig it out for yourself.
He did often dream of discovery—or perhaps it was only the glory he dreamed of, and not the discovering. Such dreams captured much of his thought as he walked the half-mile to and from grammar school and, later, the mile to high school. For a long time, Napoleon was his greatest hero. And he resented Columbus for foreclosing the discovery of the New World.
Although he didn’t ask his father how to invent, he enjoyed accompanying him on Saturday visits to industrial plants arranged by the Engineers’ Society: to the Allis Chalmers factory, where the great generators for Hoover Dam were made; to the electrical generating station at Port Washington; to a research laboratory where a Tesla coil produced high-voltage electrical sparks across a twenty-foot gap; to a steel mill; and to a coke oven.
These visits left indelible impressions on him of modern industry, of the heavy, sometimes dirty and dangerous, tasks of blue-collar labor, of the cleverness of machinery, of the deftness of skilled machinists, of cranes lifting heavy weights and wafting them the length of the factory aisle. Did these visits put him in awe of engineering? Despite his enjoyment of them, they never suggested to him the idea of becoming an engineer.
FRIENDS
This picture of the introspective, bookish, and sometimes lonely boy who was proud of his independence in learning shows nothing of the sociable boy who appeared at other times—fond of games and sports and his friends, a great joiner and organizational politician. During grammar school years, the time after school was for sandlot baseball and football during good weather, and for indoor games or sometimes skating during the cold and dark of the Wisconsin winter.
He was not much of an athlete. Because he had been “skipped” three half years, most of his friends were several years his senior; besides, he was more left-handed than right-handed and, as he often said by way of apology, “ambiundextrous.” When teams were being chosen for baseball, he was among the last to be called by one of the captains, usually to inhabit right field. This often embarrassed him, but did not keep him away from the field.
His sociability did not often extend to fistfights. Since he was both small and rather timorous, he seized upon a saying attributed to the Revolutionary War guerrilla General Francis Marion: “He who fights and runs away will live to fight another day.”
During high school, the sociable boy expended his energy in two directions. He was an active and enthusiastic Boy Scout, with a special love for camping and all manner of outdoor activities, summer and winter. The student clubs at his high school provided his second social arena. He was active in a debating society, a science club, the Christian Endeavor (while insisting on his agnosticism), the Latin club, and the student council, serving as president of most of them at one time or another. He took no part in high school team sports.
He was much attracted to girls, an attraction he experienced even as a kindergartener. The earliest in his memory was Mary Mueller, a blonde-haired, round-faced little Saxon girl who could have been the model for an angel in an Albrecht Altdorfer nativity scene. One of her successors was Mary Mitchell, by whom he was smitten at age thirteen on a visit to her family estate in Virginia, a visit I will describe shortly.
The boy’s other grammar school memories have less to do with girls than with a little boy’s discovery of his own sexuality, and of the proper street language to use in referring to it. Girls were theoretical rather than actual objects; when the game of “spin the bottle” was proposed at birthday parties, it produced more embarrassment than pleasure. (He was only twelve when he finished the eight grades of grammar school, and this was a time when children still came equipped with much ignorance and many inhibitions in this regard.)
High school was another matter. He could not keep his eyes off pretty girls. At first most of the worship was from a distance, because he was too shy to get on a dance floor with them and, usually, to date them. Besides, he was two years younger than most of his classmates, so that they tended to treat him as a younger brother.
It was easiest to talk to girls who were outgoing and intelligent but not pretty, because he could behave in a natural way with them, much as though they were boys. But in the presence of a pretty girl, his social skills fled immediately. Conscious of his (undefined) desires, he could not treat a pretty girl as a person.
In high school, imagination had to stand in at first for actual amorous experience. He became a voracious consumer of the vapid love stories that filled Collier’s and the Woman’s Home Companion. The heroines were usually wholesome (but very pretty) girl-next-door types with “tip-tilted” noses. The illustrations taught the boy how a tip-tilted nose looked. These heroines kissed the heroes (at the end of the story), but never climbed into bed with them, certainly not before marriage.
There were two girls in his school, both very pretty and one also very bright, who had the reputation of being “fast.” Oddly, one of the pieces of evidence usually cited was that they did not always go home from parties with the same boys who brought them. The reputation, quite apart from any facts, was enough to single them out for his distant attention. He hardly ever spoke to them, or had occasion to, and was understandably startled when, at a school meeting, during a vigorous dispute about arrangements for the June commencement, the bright one turned to him and said intensely, “You don’t really hate me, do you?” Somehow, she had noted that the boy paid attention to her when they passed in the halls, and mistook the meaning of his glances.
The boy’s first real love was Ginnie, whom he met on a nature hike when he was about sixteen. She was a couple of years younger than he, just entering high school. Ginnie had Irish beauty—black hair, blue eyes, and a boyish, athletic figure, just budding. Perhaps because she was young and natural, not yet fully aware of her beauty, he did not freeze in her presence. They had a fine, close friendship for about two years, in which they hiked, swam, went to parties (no dancing—he didn’t dance) and meetings of church and social groups, and even took an occasional horseback ride together.
He had no exclusive rights, and Ginnie’s mother had larger aspirations for Ginnie’s upward social mobility than she thought it likely the boy could satisfy. But the relation (there were no “relationships” then) was smooth and extremely pleasant. The boy especially liked helping Ginnie with her homework, sitting close to her on a sofa or porch swing with an arm around her, occasionally glimpsing firm young breasts as she leaned forward to write something. It never went beyond that and some kisses, but both of them evidently found that just fine. He learned Mozart’s “Piano Sonata in C Major,” the familiar and easy K545, because he could then imagine Ginnie, who was a good pianist, playing it.*2
How was he viewed, this sociable boy, by his friends and classmates? First, he was a “brain,” but evidently modest enough about it so as not to offend. Besides, it counted for him that he was not a “grind.” But he had a sharp tongue and an appetite for verbal swordsmanship. It was unpredictable whether one would get a compliment or a jab from him. He grew reasonably thick skin, to take the blows, verbal and physical, that were offered in return, but he became unsure about others’ feelings toward him and shy about opening himself to them. For a time, he took as his hero Coriolanus, the Roman too proud to court the “mob.”
In many respects, his youth was an asset. He could be forgiven many things in his role as younger brother that he would not have been forgiven otherwise. Throughout the first half of his life, he retained a special affinity for working with men a little older than himself—Sydney Kalmbach, his hiking companion, Milton Chenin at Berkeley, Don Smithburg and Victor Thompson at Illinois Tech, Lee Bach at Carnegie Tech. He was usually comfortable in the second-in-command role, which he preferred to think of as the “power-behind-the-throne” role or, more accurately, the “idea-man” role. In adult life, as he began to work with younger associates, he became an older brother.
I have said that the boy was a good listener. He was often sought out as a confidant, even by adults and even when he was quite young. When family feuds occurred—and his grandmother had some talents in this direction—he often heard each side of the story from the principals. Before he was twelve, he had learned that quite reasonable and truthful people could perceive the same set of events in remarkably different ways. Sometimes he found himself the mediator, interpreting for each protagonist the viewpoint of the other. Whatever view was presented to him, he could see the merits in the opposing view, and often took it up.
In high school debates, the boy enjoyed taking the unpopular, underdog position—free trade, unilateral disarmament, the Single Tax—usually with conviction. His opponents could seldom match his logic or his careful preparation of evidence. Here he learned another important practical truth: You do not change people’s opinions by defeating them with logic. People do not feel obliged to agree just because they cannot reply at the moment. The boy later used that insight many times in his own defense. He never felt obliged to assent to doctrines—whether Platonist, Thomist, Behaviorist, Libertarian, or Marxist—just because the arguments advanced for them seemed, at the moment, unanswerable. He learned to mistrust human realtime logic.
The debates contributed to his education in another way. They led him to read widely and deeply in economics and the other social sciences: Henry George’s Progress and Poverty, Richard T. Ely’s Outline of Economics, Norman Angell’s The Great Illusion. He did not understand all of it, but he learned to read critically, using one book to argue with another.
One unpopular position the boy took in debates, but from conviction rather than cussedness, was in favor of disarmament and strengthening the League of Nations. As a small boy, he was as ready as any of his friends to play cowboys-and-Indians and cops-and-robbers. His father’s .22 rifle and Colt automatic pistol fascinated him, and he was allowed to shoot them a few times in the North Woods. For a time, he had a soldier suit, complete with World War I leggings, which he could never keep properly wrapped. He wore it when his father took him on a visit to New York and left him for a few days at the army post on Governor’s Island, where a noncommissioned officer of the family’s acquaintance lived.
He had many lead soldiers, his favorite Christmas gift, and marched and fought them interminably on the living room floor. He became a battle buff, with a thorough knowledge of Waterloo and of Gettysburg and other Civil War battles (more comprehensible than those of World War I). Even in high school, a vocal pacifist, he wrote a term paper about Civil War battles. (His history teacher penciled a surprised comment on the paper.) His first ambition was to attend West Point, an ambition thwarted by his color blindness.
Some realism was injected into his dreams of military glory in a curious way. The uncle of Allen Schultz, a neighbor boy who was for some time the boy’s best friend, was a surgeon who had served in World War I. He had kept an album of photographs (before and after surgery) of the most gruesome wounds he had encountered. It was a record, I suppose, of his and his colleagues’ surgical skills. The boy and his friend discovered the album, were horrified almost to illness, but could not take their eyes off it or banish it from their nightmares.
The album presented a new view of war, soon eroding the boy’s fascination with military affairs in the concrete, if not in the abstract. It made him receptive to antiwar books, such as The Great Illusion, and set him on the road to pacifism. The pacifism lasted, in turn, until the advent of Hitler. But now I am ahead of my story.
ON BEING PAROCHIAL
Through his vacations with his family and his own hiking and camping trips with his friends, the boy became familiar with most of eastern Wisconsin, but had rarely strayed out of the state before setting out for college. Once, when he was very little, grandmother Merkel had taken him to Chicago by boat. What he chiefly remembers (or was later teased about) was his puzzlement at not seeing the state line when the boat crossed it, and his whining complaints on the return trip that he was being kept up beyond his bedtime.
When the boy was seven or eight, his father took him along on a week’s business trip to Washington and New York. The boy set out to keep a diary of the trip, but either he found himself too busy or the scenes were too hard to describe, for there are hardly any entries beyond Chicago. On the Pullman to Washington, he awoke in the mountains of Pennsylvania, which were far more rugged than any Wisconsin hills he had seen, but still not real mountains, for there was no snow on the peaks.
In Washington, his father did his business at the Patent Office, and then they saw all the usual sights. The boy was especially impressed by the State Department building at 17th and Pennsylvania (now the old Executive Office Building), where the office suites had slatted doors to permit any breeze that stirred in the humid Washington summer air to pass through, and in front of each was posted a dignified black doorman. Nowadays, he recalls with wonder that they passed freely in and out of these buildings with no security checks. They stayed overnight in the Willard Hotel, still in the height of fashion.
In New York, he went to the top of the Woolworth Tower and visited the Statue of Liberty. As I mentioned, during the days his father was busy, he stayed with family friends at the army post on Governor’s Island. It was a trip to remember, which apparently satisfied most of his needs for distant travel almost until his college days.
He strayed once more from Wisconsin, during the summer of 1929, months before the stock market crash. On a Caribbean winter cruise his parents had taken a year or two earlier, they had befriended a couple named Noble, belonging to a branch of the Reynolds tobacco family, I believe. The Nobles invited the Simons to visit them at their Virginia home, near Hampton Roads, and this was the boy’s introduction to the Very Rich.
They were met, the boy and his brother and parents, at the train station in Norfolk, and taken by chauffeured car to the wharf, where they were ushered onto a sizable steam yacht. The yacht proceeded directly to the dock at the Nobles’ bayside estate, where several sailboats and other craft were also moored. The Nobles had a son who was brother Clarence’s age and a daughter, Mary Mitchell, who was the boy’s age, and with whom he fell immediately in love.
The children enjoyed two idyllic weeks of swimming and sailing in Chesapeake Bay and a posh birthday party at a neighboring estate. They were chauffeured to Yorktown and to Williamsburg, just then under construction. Servants, all black and respectful, of course, were everywhere in the house and on the grounds of the Nobles’ estate. With no trouble at all, the boy could transport himself backward a hundred years and experience the Old South. It gave him a queer feeling. It would be nice to report that he was morally offended by the plutocracy and racism that surrounded him, but there is no evidence that he was. What he mainly remembered were the pleasant times, especially the sailing and the trips on the steam yacht.
That same summer the boy and his parents drove to the Black Hills, on the dusty, partially paved roads of that era. (Those mountains didn’t have snow either, but at least they were officially called “hills.”) It, too, was a pleasant excursion, but not nearly as dramatic and eye-opening as the trip to Virginia. He did not leave Wisconsin again until 1933.
ON BEING DIFFERENT
Even when the social activist held ascendancy over the loner, the boy saw himself as different from his friends. His left-handedness, his brightness, and his color blindness set him a little apart.
One other difference was that the boy was conscious of being a Jew—not a religious Jew, for he had not been inside a synagogue, and he attended Congregational Sunday school through his grammar and high school years*3—but a Jew nonetheless. Sometimes he wished he weren’t, although he hardly admitted that to himself, but mostly he felt proud of it and was always careful that his Jewishness be known to others around him. He didn’t want to “pass.” If there was any disadvantage or penalty in being a Jew, he would accept it rather than deny his Jewishness.
Coming from a minority culture, he could not be ethnocentric. And, since his red and green were not the red and green other people saw, he understood that the real world out there was not identical to the perceived world. Hence both ethical and epistemological relativism came easily to him.
His feeling of being different did not translate into rebellion against authority. Although corporal punishment had not been abolished in either his home or his school, he did not experience it often in the former or ever in the latter, and his memories of it are not vivid. It could usually be avoided by staying out of serious mischief. Being a good student gave him a large credit balance that could be traded against minor misdemeanors. It also gave him freedom to use his time as he pleased, even in school.
On a few occasions he felt his principles challenged. During the years he attended the Congregational church, communion services were held monthly. The minister would ask, “Will all members of this church please rise?” Two-thirds of those present would get to their feet. Then the minister would ask, “Will all Christians please rise?” Only the boy remained seated. It was very difficult, but he would have felt ashamed if he had falsified his beliefs publicly.
His high school class voted for the boys to wear white flannels at the graduation ceremony. He decided (it being during the darkest days of the Depression) that this was unfair to the boys from poorer families and persuaded many students to sign an agreement to wear their regular suits. On graduation night, he and two classmates appeared in their dark suits; all the others had somehow forgotten their pledges and found means to buy the white flannels. He felt a little betrayed, but proud that he had not yielded.
GRADUATION
The boy graduated from high school in 1933 at age seventeen. It had been, on the whole, a happy boyhood and adolescence. He had had to make almost no decisions, except to take what the world offered him, and the world had been generous. There were no hard choices at the branches of the maze.
But his picture of the future was vague. His answers to “What do you want to be?” had gone from “soldier” through “forest ranger” and “lawyer” to “scientist.” His private answer was “intellectual.” He calculated that if someone were to endow him with $50,000, he could live quite comfortably for the rest of his life doing what he did best—learning. Perhaps the most unusual feature of his boyhood, as it influenced his future career, was his exposure, thanks to the books and the example left behind by his long-dead uncle, to the idea that human behavior could be studied scientifically. He saw, if dimly, the challenge of bringing to social science or biology the mathematical thinking that had been so powerful in physics.
The next branch in the maze, the choice of a college, was not much of a decision, either. The University of Chicago’s New Plan for general education appealed to the generalized intellectual in him. Students at his high school had a fine record of success in its competitive scholarship exams, which he took in physics, math, and English. One of the teachers from his school always went to Chicago for the ceremony at which winners were announced, and this time somehow (momentary inattention?) she did not hear the boy’s name when it was called.
The news that he had not won a scholarship crushed him. He had thought he had done very well on the examinations and was usually a good judge of his performance. Apparently, he could not compete in the league to which he had imagined belonging. He spent a week in despair, and poured out his anguish to his friend Syd Kalmbach on a long walk they took together. A few days later, he participated in a formal debate between the school’s two teams, in the school auditorium. Just before the debate, the principal, having received a wire from the University of Chicago, announced to the assembled students that the boy had won a scholarship, a full scholarship, to the University. What he felt at that moment he does not now recall.
Although 1 have tried to describe the boy in terms of concrete events in his life, generalizations and interpretations have crept into the account. I have an excuse for this: The boy himself was incorrigibly introspective. The generalizations and interpretations I have set down are almost all the boy’s own generalizations, quite self-conscious and explicit, and arrived at during the time when these things were happening to him.
THE BOY’S FATHER
Until the boy was about a dozen years old (the term teenager had not yet been invented), he felt closer to his mother than to his father. She was less stern, enjoyed being hugged and kissed, and in winter wore warm fur coats and carried fur muffs that were beautifully soft when he buried his face in them. He loved his father, but also feared him a little. When discipline was needed, it was the father’s role to supply it, and although the boy seldom received physical punishment or even severe scoldings, he witnessed his brother’s frequent bouts with domestic authority. Although his father had resolutely turned his back on his German past, in subtle ways he was still German while his mother was American.
What was it to be German? A certain formality in manner. Sternness and a belief in discipline. Cultural breadth, with an interest in all things intellectual, artistic, and political. Professional work was important and challenging, but life was more than work. It even included skillful carpentry and other handiwork about the house, and serious gardening—tastes and talents inherited from the parental vineyard.
While there were many aspects of contemporary American life that drew the father’s criticism, and even ire, he did not indulge in “in-the-old-country” comparisons to which émigrés are so often prone. If he did not much like American movies or automobiles, living on borrowed money, or the flapper style of the 1920s, it was because they conflicted, in some way, with his basic values, not because they violated his memories of Germany.
Excesses of patriotism, especially when excited by selfish motives, angered him. He could inveigh against “two hundred percent Americans,” and he liked to point his finger at the veteran who rode a white horse in the Memorial Day parades, who in fact had been recruited into the navy in order to keep him on his job in Milwaukee as a skilled machinist. He never belonged, I believe, to an ethnic organization, or a Jewish one, unless its purpose was to aid refugees.
The grammar and style of his written English was impeccable, as was essential for his patent work, and the grammar of his spoken English was nearly perfect. A couple of years after his death, his son (now a grown man) had a dream of him, in which he spoke with a distinct German accent, to the son’s immense surprise. The next morning he mentioned it to his wife. “Of course he had an accent,” she said, “a strong one.” As a boy, his son had never noticed it.
The boy’s father was an intellectual. His German engineering curriculum had a somewhat stronger mathematical and scientific foundation than American curricula of that era. Beyond that, as a young engineer, he sought to extend his scientific knowledge, studying the books of General Electric’s engineering genius Charles Proteus Steinmetz and the idiosyncratic English electrician Oliver Heaviside, and a textbook on vector analysis. His main professional work was designing complex switchgear (terms like servomechanism and control theory had not yet come into vogue) to control mining machinery, theater lighting systems, lathes, and battleship gun turrets. Among the papers he left behind were several dozen patents granted for his inventions.
At Cutler-Hammer, he constantly urged the company to do more research as a basis for new product development, and, at about the time of World War I, he was put in charge of a newly created Research Department. The department seems to have been abolished during the deflationary crash that followed the war, whereupon he moved over to the Patent Department, where he remained. Although the boy never heard him speak about it, this history having been created from indirect evidence, the dismantling of the Research Department was evidently a traumatic episode in his life that turned his deepest interests away from Cutler-Hammer. In later years he encouraged companies with whom he consulted to set up research programs, but his advice was not often followed.
Professionalism, for him, went far beyond employment. He was very active in the local Engineers’ Society and its community programs, for example, helping design the first electric street-lighting system for Milwaukee. He was active, too, in engineering education, serving in advisory capacities at Marquette University and the University of Wisconsin. He opposed vocationalism in engineering education, fearing it would make engineers no more than hired hands, and as a result his attitudes toward employers and business generally were equivocal. Whether he was a liberal or a conservative is hard to say; he would probably have been most comfortable as a Bull Moose Republican, but whether he voted for Bob La Follette for president in 1924 is unknown. (The boy was certain that La Follette—a long-time figure in Wisconsin politics, and besides, a hero of his uncle—would win in 1924, because everyone in Wisconsin seemed to be for him. La Follette did in fact carry Wisconsin, but no other state. The interminable balloting at the Democratic Convention that year, transmitted by the new radio, made a great impression on the boy, who listened to it by the hour, like a new kind of baseball game.)
Finally, the boy’s father was sociable, if not social. He never joined a social club in Milwaukee, other than the Professional Men’s Club, a luncheon club that met weekly. Probably he was not welcome in the Aryan clubs and had no interest in the Jewish ones.
The family entertained and was entertained fairly often, and the parents went frequently to concerts and plays. Mother Edna’s friends were often fellow musicians, and Arthur’s, engineers or patent attorneys. Doc Stoeckel, a talented chemist who developed his own business, was his closest friend, and there were others, like the patent attorney Edwin Tower, and the owner of the Milwaukee School of Engineering, Otto Werwath. But none of these men could be described as cronies.
Early on, the boy’s father had a passion for yachting, which proved incompatible, apparently, with raising a family. So his small sailboat, the Cricket, was sold before the boy was born. But poker and golf were not among the father’s recreations. As his patent practice developed (his contract with Cutler-Hammer permitting him an outside practice), he spent many evenings at home in the den doing legal work. Gardening and house improvements occupied much of the rest of his leisure; the sun porch he had built onto the front of the house allowed his gardening to continue through the Wisconsin winter. And he always enjoyed a foray into the countryside.
Perhaps his most unaccountable behaviors were the Sunday rides that often replaced visits to friends and neighbors after the family acquired a Studebaker in 1928—“unaccountable” because it is hard to see how this pointless roaming on crowded highways meshed with his other values. Perhaps this was his way of spending time with his wife without needing to converse. But Edna was a timid person (who succeeded in transferring many of her fears to the boy), in a state of continual tension while riding in traffic.
How did the boy’s father appear to other people? Clearly, he had respect in the community, and his high moral standards were evident. His community service and character account for the honorary degree bestowed on him by Marquette, a Catholic university. By all accounts, he was universally trusted, perhaps even regarded as a bit “innocent.” He was easy in his relations with people, not stand-offish or shy, but his intellect showed through a little too much for people always to be at ease with him. After he received his honorary degree, people found it natural to address him as “Doctor.” He was not quite one of the boys.
It is most unlikely that he was ever unfaithful to his wife, and most probably the thought never entered his mind. Since sex was not a topic of conversation when the boy was growing up, he had few clues about his father’s views toward it. He gave the boy only one piece of advice before he went off to college. Standing on the front porch of the house as a dog ambled down the street, his father said suddenly, “Don’t feel that you have to be like one of those, and chase every bitch you see.” The boy was too embarrassed to reply. His father had a repertory of anecdotes, but none of dirty jokes, and he had never before used such language in front of the boy.
Arthur was very protective of his wife, who was more than a little neurotic (especially when conjoined with her mother, grandmother Merkel). In the 1920s there was a period of strained relations between Arthur and Edna, caused by the temporary residence in their home of an egotistical young man from Germany, the son of one of Arthur’s college friends, who was doing his apprenticeship in Milwaukee. Edna thought (probably correctly) that he was trying to demean her in Arthur’s eyes, and there were stormy scenes and threats of suicide. Except for this interval, the marriage was serene, and Arthur and Edna behaved like people who loved each other deeply.
In 1936, a diagnosis of cancer followed by colostomy made Edna a permanent semi-invalid, staying at various times in a sanitarium. She was continually worried about the prospects of social embarrassment from her infirmity, but actually managed quite well with it and traveled extensively by herself for years after Arthur’s death. During the twelve years from the onset of her illness to his own death, Arthur never complained, and was wholly supportive, often urging his two sons to be patient with their mother. He was Spartan in accepting a burden that she bore less quietly. On the few occasions when he was mildly critical of her in conversations with his sons, he attributed her deficiencies to her mother’s influence.
This was, of course, a generation that had not heard of feminism—or had heard of it only in its 1920s guise. Conversations at social affairs separated men and women, and Arthur probably never expected, or even dreamed of, intellectual companionship with his wife. Edna was a good homemaker; they raised two boys together. They enjoyed concerts and plays. There were all sorts of things to do at home or elsewhere that didn’t call for much conversation. At the dinner table, two conversations could always go on at once—one between father and sons, the other between mother and grandmother. Certainly the boy’s father had little patience with the gossip that formed much of the women’s conversational stock.
Was the father lonely? There is no way to answer that question. His generation (and the boy’s) did not wear hearts on sleeves. They did not search, at least openly, for their “identities.” They did not demand “self-actualization.” In the privacy of their diaries, some people expressed these needs. Stendhal’s self-questionings, echoing nearly two hundred years down the corridors, sound wholly contemporary. But Arthur kept no diary. He went his equable way (especially in later years), kept his financial and other worries to himself, died instantly in 1948, at the age of sixty-seven, while seated in his office chair conversing with a friend—and probably led at least as happy a life as the great majority of mankind.
Did he have financial worries? Just before the Great Depression, his salary rose as high as $7,500—a good upper-middle-class income, approximating at least $75,000 in 1991 dollars. But when the Depression hit, he came very close to losing his Cutler-Hammer job (after thirty years’ service). Only the intercession of influential friends persuaded the company to retain him, at a much-reduced salary.
The boy was more than a little innocent of these matters. When he won his scholarship ($300 a year), the University of Chicago suggested that he decline it if he did not need it; the boy thought he should decline and was a little embarrassed that his father insisted that he accept it. He wasn’t aware that his father was putting two sons through college on less than $4,000 a year. (Similarly, I had no reservation about asking help to buy a house in 1948, and was shocked, after my father’s death later that year, to learn his true financial status and his worries about being able to support himself and his wife in retirement. Fortunately, he carried a good deal of insurance, and his estate was sufficient to permit my mother to live comfortably and independently after his death.)
He was a very private man. I hope he was mostly a happy man; I know he was an uncommonly good one.
I have painted my father as an admirable person. As I matured, my respect and love for him deepened, while I became more distant from my mother. Today, I think often of him, less often of her. My values today are hard to distinguish from my father’s values as he expressed and lived them while I was growing up. My brother, too, for all the conflict during his school days, became more and more like my father in his adult years. Although his interests were narrower and he was less genial as a person, he held similar basic values—even a love of fishing and carpentry, which I never acquired, and an unmovable honesty, which I hope I have also.
Notes
*1. In a surprising coincidence, a biography of the distinguished geneticist Hermann Muller mentions that the geneticist A. H. Sturtevant was also color-blind, and had learned of his defect in the same way—at a strawberry patch (Carlson [1981], p. 55).
*2. To this day, the man whom the boy became cannot hear or play that sonata, especially the slow movement, without a pleasant memory of Ginnie—or, more likely, a memory of a memory of a memory.
*3. The Grand Avenue Congregational Church was a social center for many of his schoolmates, especially during the boy’s high school years, and he early became a regular participant in activities there.