My mother wasn’t necessarily cut out to be married to a socially ambitious businessman. In spite of her upbringing and her boarding-school education, she was strong on prairie virtues that were unusual in Short Hills. She was so frugal that at home she’d walk down two flights of stairs to turn off a single light, and so unpretentious that she didn’t care much for the Paris dresses Dad insisted on buying her. I have a photograph from the 1920s that shows her looking lovely and regal in a Short Hills community play. But the way I remember her is as an overworked mother, trying to raise four little kids and manage that big gabled house the way Father wanted it run. She struggled constantly to keep peace among the help and play hostess to all the guests Dad would bring home. But she was very game. One night a stuffy businessman from Switzerland stayed at our house and left his shoes outside the guest room door. “He thinks this is a palace!” Mother said. Then she laughed and polished the shoes herself.

My father owed her a great deal. By the time they met, he had already learned how to dress and how to give a speech, but the nuances of gentle living sometimes escaped him. She helped greatly with that. When we were young, she’d correct Dad’s English, watch his table manners, and caution him not to lose his temper. Her lessons to him could be pretty brisk. After he was making a lot of money in the 1930s, he came home one day and proudly gave her a big diamond ring. It was the first expensive piece of jewelry he’d ever bought—not a really good diamond, just big, as big as an aspirin. It must have weighed two carats. Mother pointed out that it was flawed and that she would have preferred a smaller diamond that was perfect rather than a larger diamond that wasn’t. This stung Dad. He took the ring back and some years later produced one that was equally large, but perfect. It must have cost a fortune.

Mother was short, maybe five feet four, and fairly thin; and she always kept her gray-brown hair long and pulled back into a bun. Her hands were naturally calloused; to make them soft she worked on them every night with a pumice stone. She had a gentle mouth, appealing eyes, and a straight, interesting nose. Even though Dad often overshadowed her, we children always knew she had a powerful streak of fun. When the Charleston was popular, around 1925, she invited some of her friends and had a dance instructor teach the Charleston in our cellar. There were clotheslines strung along the ceilings that Mother and her friends held on to to steady themselves as they practiced.

Because she was more handy than Dad, Mother did many of the “man’s” chores around the house. When a fuse blew, she changed it; when coal needed to be shoveled, she did that too. Much later she told me that this arrangement started soon after they got married. They were going to bed one night and she said, “You ought to go look at the furnace.”

Dad said, “Why?”

“Because my father always looks at the furnace before he goes to bed.”

That must have rubbed Dad the wrong way. He was still a little profane in those days and he said, “The hell with the furnace I” So Mother went downstairs and checked the furnace herself, not knowing what she was looking for. Later that week she had someone come in to teach her all about it.

Our worst family disaster happened on a cold February night in 1919 when this division of labor between my parents didn’t stick and Dad burned down the house. He was trying to break in a new houseman and said to Mother, “Carlo doesn’t know how to build a fire. I’ll show him.” So he piled the fireplace high with kindling and wood and touched it off. An hour or so later I started wailing upstairs. I was only five and often cried after being put to bed, so Dad said, “Now, Mother, I’ll settle that young man.” He started up the stairs and heard me yelling, “I see a funny light in my room!” The fire was right outside the window: sparks from the chimney had set the whole shingle roof on fire. Mother never blamed Dad for that, even though the fire burned up all her heirlooms from Dayton.

Until I went to boarding school when I was fifteen, Mother was the biggest presence in my life. She was much more accessible than Father, and always made us feel protected and loved and wanted. I think she understood that at the root of my odd and mischievous behavior was a lack of self-esteem, because she was forever inventing ways to get me involved and interested in the world. When I joined the Boy Scouts, earning merit badges gave me a boost, and Mother was pretty deft at capitalizing on this civilizing influence. For instance, one day I decided to go for a cooking merit badge and she went with me out to the vegetable garden. I built a fire, got a couple of potatoes, and threw them in. She stayed right there with me, watching the whole procedure. It takes an hour, so we walked around a bit. Finally I took a black, charred potato out of the fire and broke it open. I didn’t even have a spoon; I used a stick. Potatoes taste quite sweet baked that way. I gave her a piece. “Oh” she said, “Tom, it’s wonderful.” That was the beginning of my love of cooking.

The closer I got to my mother, the more upset I was at the way I thought Dad treated her. This was when IBM was at a critical stage, demanding a lot of Dad’s attention. In his office he could press the button on his desk, a fellow would come in, Dad would say, “Send a letter,” and boom, it would happen. When he wasn’t thinking, he expected Mother to obey him in the same way. She found that hard to put up with, so in the years when Dad was most intense about his work, there was enormous tension in our household. I remember incessant arguments between them. The door to their bedroom would be closed but my brother and sisters and I would hear angry, muffled voices rising and falling. Father would be rude to her, and then half an hour later he’d give us a lecture about how we ought to be good to our mother. I never had the guts to say, “Then why aren’t you?”

Father would sometimes act as though he’d completely forgotten how much he had depended on Mother in the early days of their marriage. He’d call from the city and say, “Now, Jeannette, I’ve asked all the district managers to come out tonight for a little supper.” That would mean eight guests, and this news would be delivered at three in the afternoon. Mother, who didn’t have nearly his stamina to begin with, would get physically fagged. He was also becoming active on the social scene in New York, and often pressed her to go with him to dinners or the opera. Another big source of strain was money. It was torture for Mother, as frugal as she was, to see the style in which they were living and the debts he was running up.

Then, after about ten years of strife, around the time I was fourteen and the other children scaled down to nine, Mother suddenly seemed to capitulate. This shocked me—I thought she’d stopped standing up for herself. But many years later she confided that, in fact, she had asked Dad for a divorce. “I told him I couldn’t stand it any longer,” she said.

This was terribly poignant for me to hear. I said, “What happened?”

“Tom, he looked so shocked, so upset, that I realized how deeply he loved me—and I never brought it up again.”

After she made that conscious decision to preserve the marriage, she never complained. When a crowd of guests would suddenly arrive and she had no one to help in the kitchen, she’d simply smile and say, “The cook is off today, but we have some sandwiches and fruit.”

Everybody seemed to get along better when we were away from Short Hills. Father and Mother were constantly rounding us up, along with any friends or cousins who might want to come, for trips to Washington, to the seashore, to great exhibitions. Often we’d travel in a two- or three-car caravan, and descend like a wild tribe on relatives or IBM managers along the route. On weekends we’d drive out to Dad’s Oldwick farm, and in summer we’d go to the Pocono Mountains or Maine, where Dad would join us on weekends. Being on the road gave Mother freedom that she lacked at home, and she loved it. As for Dad, he had started out as a traveling man and never really stopped. Throughout his life the simple motion of a car or train calmed him down and made him less demanding.

In spite of the hundreds of thousands of miles they covered, my parents chose to leave the pioneering of air travel in our family to me. My lifelong passion for flying began before I was even old enough to ride a bicycle. I used to love our visits to Mother’s family in Dayton, because Dayton was the home of the Wright brothers and the Army Air Corps had an airfield there. In that area, airplanes were almost as common a sight as cars. I have an old newspaper photograph of Mother and her sister that bears the heading “The First Aerial Callers.” It shows the Kittredge girls posed not far from their country house with two spindly-legged army aviators who are lolling against the framework of a stick-and-canvas contraption called a Wright Flyer. Aunt Helen was being courted by an aviator named Major Kirby. They never got married, but I thought he was tremendous because he talked airplanes.

Dad became scared of airplanes during a Sunday outing to a county fair in the early 1920s. We passed a field where there was a Jenny, back from World War I, and a pilot taking people up for five dollars. Since he’d spent so many years in Dayton, it would have been odd if Dad had never been curious enough to go up. He’d even met the Wright brothers. So he bought a ticket and joined the line. But as he stood there waiting, we kids started yapping at him, “You promised to buy us ice cream!” Father said we were right, and asked the flier if he could come back in half an hour for his ride. By the time we came back, the plane had crashed and three people had been killed.

He took that as an omen that he should never fly. I have to admit that in those days there was every reason for him not to. Before World War II airplanes were crashing all the time. Anyone who was a sportsman had to have an airplane, and often the plane would malfunction or he’d make a mistake, and he’d be killed. But Dad’s superstition never made me hesitate. A year after the Jenny incident, a fellow announced with placards that he was going to land an airplane on a golf course near Short Hills. He would perform and then give rides for one dollar per minute. Father was having a district managers’ meeting at our house, and I badgered those men privately and got a buck from each. Although Father was annoyed when he found out, he said patiently, “I’m not going to let you go up in that airplane. I think they’re still getting them improved. But if you’ll give these gentlemen their money back, we’ll go see it.” He took me over and paid the guy a couple of bucks to let me climb in the cockpit and feel the controls. After that I would sit in Mother’s kitchen doing flight simulations using a broomstick and a board balanced under my feet as a rudder.

When Father had business to do in Europe, all of us went; and during my boyhood we made five long trips there. CTR accounting machines were sold in most countries by independent agents, but Father, convinced that Europe was going to be a big deal one day, disliked this arrangement. He gradually bought out the middlemen, bringing foreign sales under the company’s direct control.

Europe had a special meaning in our family. It was the place where all of us could unbutton a little. In London, Mother would take us to the joke store near the Savoy Hotel to buy itching powder. Then she’d try to keep her face straight as we liberally sprinkled the chair of the fat wife of one of IBM’s Scandinavian managers. Dad would make a show of admonishing us not to play hotel slot machines, lecturing about the evils of gambling—and then he’d play them himself.

It was in Europe that my parents finally let me fly. It had to be the greatest thrill of my entire childhood. In Paris in 1924, when I was ten, Dad took us to Le Bourget field and we walked around an air exhibition with thousands of people. I got more and more excited, listening to the roar of engines running up. They were selling rides in a converted French bomber, a great big hefty biplane called a Breguet. It was the same type of plane that the great French pilot and writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry later used to start the first air mail line, from Toulouse to Dakar. It had only one engine but enough room in back to tuck in four seats. The Hancocks, a young couple traveling with us, wanted to go up, and I pleaded to go along. I’m sure Dad and Mother were worried, but they knew how much I wanted to. We bought three rides, and the Hancocks and I got in with one other passenger. Two sat backwards and two sat forwards. The whole cabin smelled of castor oil, then the best lubricant for difficult jobs. The pilot sat up above and forward, where we couldn’t even see his legs.

As we taxied out, the engine, which was probably four hundred horsepower, just rumbled and stumbled. Then he opened it up to take off, and we were engulfed with noise. It seemed to take over, until there was no other sensation. We were rolling on grass, so the undercarriage was bumping pretty hard. Then suddenly everything except the noise stopped, and a terrific smoothness took over. I watched the ground fall away. We had big windows on both sides so we could see everything.

After we went around a few times we headed down. Then the engine noise dropped and was replaced by a singing. Few people today have ever heard that sound—it comes only from old biplanes with many wires between their wings that sing as the wind passes. To keep the engine clear, the pilot opened the throttle every once in a while. As the ground approached, the whistling got quieter and the tail was dropping and dropping. Finally we made a smooth landing and I could feel the wheels thumping on the grass again. I was overwhelmed. I knew airplanes killed people, but the sensation of freedom, the noise, the unseen bumps that pushed the airplane up and down, the ability to choose one’s own angle of bank and make one’s own decision to climb or descend—all these combined to give me a powerful desire to learn to fly.

I pleaded to go right back up. But I had to wait a few years before my second flight, again in Europe, in the fall of 1927. This time I actually went somewhere. I was wandering around a hotel lobby in Basel and saw an air schedule next to the desk. There was a four o’clock flight to Paris! My family was eating lunch nearby with a friend named Mrs. Mangan. I came racing in with this announcement, and before Father could send a negative signal Mrs. Mangan said, “Oh, how thrilling! I’ll go with you!”

We bought tickets and flew. Everyone else was to follow by overnight train. Paris was about two hundred fifty miles away, and the flight took almost four hours. We arrived early enough in the evening for me to go to the movies. As it happened, they were showing The Jazz Singer, the first film with sound. In a single, fantastic day, I’d become the first Watson to travel by air and the first to see a talking picture.