1 Nothing in Gertrude Tompkins’s early life or upbringing would hint that this well-bred girl would grow up to fly fighter planes. She came from a wealthy family with roots deep in New Jersey’s Hudson River villages. The Vreeland farm was settled around the year 1658 by Gertrude’s Dutch ancestors on her father’s side. Gertrude’s mother, Laura Towar, was born in 1878 into the well-off Bentley and Towar families of Jersey City Heights, both involved in finance in New York City. Laura’s grandfather, Thomas Towar, who died in 1903, had a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, an expensive position purchased by a privileged few.
As a child Laura yearned for adventure, and she confessed that once she had wanted to become a missionary in China. “She was very strong minded in some ways, but was brought up in a repressive era,” Laura’s daughter Elizabeth Tompkins Whittall recalled years later. “She had an easy life and was provided with servants all her life. Maybe she didn’t feel useful…. Mother was nervous and had poor eyesight. She had to drop out of school. She had what she called nervous headaches.” This undercurrent of depression and anxiety would continue to surface in Laura in the years to come.
Gertrude’s father, Vreeland Tompkins, was a graduate of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. In 1894, at age 23, Vreeland was working for John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company as a chemist. Because he stuttered badly, Vreeland was quiet and shy. He threw himself into his work. Each night he returned to his father’s home at 533 Communipaw Avenue in Jersey City and in the basement puttered with chemical concoctions. Vreeland patented one of these mixtures. With a loan from his father he formed a company called Smooth-On to manufacture the compound, leaving Rockefeller’s employment in 1895. Smooth-On Iron Cement was ideal for repairing leaks in cast iron and quickly became the industry standard for maintenance and repair. A contract with the US Navy for boiler repairs assured his fortune and the family’s future. (Smooth-On Inc. is still in existence in Macungie, Pennsylvania, making molds and materials for a variety of applications, including special effects for motion pictures.)
It’s uncertain how Vreeland Tompkins met the prettily freckled Laura Towar, but it is known that when he proposed to her in writing, she turned him down in writing. She felt she couldn’t live with Vreeland’s stuttering handicap. Later she changed her mind, and he agreed to leave his Dutch Reformed church to join her Episcopal church. They married on May 18, 1904, and purchased a three-story house at 113 Bentley Avenue in Jersey City. Its living room was big enough for their baby grand piano, which Laura loved to play. On the second floor were three bedrooms and two baths, one attached to the master bedroom.
Their first child, Stuart, died at birth, which tipped Laura into a lasting depression. “After she lost her first child, maybe it was just too much,” her daughter Elizabeth later said. Life went on, and Margaret Tompkins arrived in 1906, blonde and bright-eyed. The witty Elizabeth was born in 1909. Gertrude, whose name in German means “strong spear,” was born October 16, 1911. She was the last child born in the family.
From the beginning Gertrude had golden strands in her otherwise dark hair, a sure sign of her good fortune, her father said. To make certain the children were not spoiled, Vreeland and Laura maintained some distance from them. The parents were not demonstrative, leaving the care of the children to the servants. Vreeland and Laura routinely dined separately from their children.
By age four it was apparent that Gertrude was having difficulty with her speech. She had trouble getting her words out. Vreeland believed she must have inherited her stutter from him, and he felt both guilty and sorrowful.
Friends and family volunteered explanations for her stuttering. “It happened because you cut the child’s hair before she said her first words,” a relative insisted. “The child was frightened as a baby. Make her hold nutmeg under her tongue,” suggested the family cook and nanny, Maggie. She and her husband, Thomas, who served as handyman, chauffeur, and gardener, occupied quarters on the third floor of the house.
Vreeland took a special interest in his youngest daughter. He had had difficulty being listened to when he was growing up. “S-s-someone else always said what I wanted to say long before I could get it out,” he complained. He insisted that everyone patiently wait as young Gertrude shyly spoke.
The definition of stuttering is to speak in such a way that the rhythm is interrupted by repetitions, blocks or spasms, or prolongations of sounds or syllables, sometimes accompanied by contortions of the face and body.
Specialists believe that stuttering can be managed through various therapies but that looking for a cure for stuttering is generally not realistic. A number of famous people are stutterers. The actress Emily Blunt and National Football League running back Darren Sproles manage their stuttering. Other stutterers include Marc Anthony, Nicole Kidman, and James Earl Jones. Winston Churchill and Marilyn Monroe were stutterers.
Her father vowed to get her the help that he had never gotten for his own speech difficulties and decided to send her to a doctor in Jersey City who claimed he could cure stuttering. The doctor put Gertrude through a brief speech exercise, slapping her cheek each time she stumbled over a word.
“If we do this every time she stutters, she’ll eventually stop,” the doctor said over the crying of the little girl. “I’ll need to see her three times a week.”
Her father fled in outrage, Gertrude in tow.
Another doctor in New York City examined Gertrude and said her tongue was too short. He offered three devices guaranteed to cure stuttering. The first was made of silver, inserted in the mouth, and worn around the neck. The second was a narrow, flattened tube of silver that fit across the roof of the mouth. Finally, there was a disk with a projecting silver tube that was placed between the lips. They were to be alternated until the cure was complete.
Vreeland considered these gadgets and may have tried them with Gertrude. Being a skeptical inventor and lifelong stutterer, he didn’t have much faith in them.
The next specialist they visited was James Sonnet Greene, medical director of the National Hospital for Speech Disorders in New York. Greene believed that stuttering was not a speech disorder but a nervous disorder. To Vreeland, this sounded too much like her mother Laura’s mental illness, and he would not have his daughter branded as mentally deficient. As a stutterer himself, he felt this diagnosis reflected on his own mental health, and he was not prepared to accept this notion.
Then they found Samuel Potter, a medical doctor and also a stutterer. Following his guidelines, Gertrude spent two to three hours daily on breathing exercises and vowel-consonant practice. Vreeland patiently helped his daughter and hired a special nurse to provide the required therapy. Nothing seemed to work.
Despite the challenges that came with Gertrude’s stuttering, she also experienced some joyful times as a child. She became close to the household’s two live-in servants, Maggie and Thomas. They came from Virginia, and they held Gertrude and her sisters spellbound with their stories. Gertrude could sit for hours listening to Maggie’s tales, and she watched with amusement as Thomas fell asleep in the middle of doing just about anything, including peeling potatoes. Her sister Elizabeth later wrote that the Tompkins girls never knew the last names of “this dear, sweet” couple.
Christmas brought excitement and joy that broke through the atmosphere of formality in the Tompkins household. After a breakfast the family trooped up the street to the home of the girls’ grandmother Rosaline, Laura’s mother. The living room door was closed, but through a crack they could see the glint of a bicycle or the wheel of a doll carriage. When the whole family was assembled according to age (youngest first), Laura played a march on the piano, and the children entered the room. Stockings were hung in a line across the marble fireplace. Only one gift was opened at a time. It was an hour of feverish excitement and fun for young Gertrude. After that, the family attended services at the Episcopal church.
Following a bountiful turkey dinner, they gathered in the parlor and played charades and word-guessing games. They also peered at Roman ruins through a stereopticon, a device that gave a three-dimensional appearance to specially printed photo cards. Christmas evening ended with a game of musical chairs, the family laughing and jostling for seats. On several Christmases, relatives of Thomas and Maggie joined them.
Gertrude became attuned to nuance, dialect, and lively expressions at a young age. Elizabeth noticed how Gertrude was able to repeat snatches of poems and songs without stuttering. Gertrude sang, “Things are seldom what they seem, skim milk masquerades as cream.”
The family continued to search for stuttering cures. The book Stuttering and Lisping by Edward Wheeler Scripture had appeared in 1913. Using Scripture’s guidelines, Gertrude was diagnosed by yet another doctor as having a type of stuttering caused by anxiety. Anxiety wasn’t quite the same as Greene’s “nervous disorder,” and Vreeland could accept it because he knew from experience that stuttering and anxiety went hand in hand.
As part of Scripture’s regimen, mild tonics of arsenic, quinine, and strychnine were given to little Gertrude. Many medicines of the day contained lethal as well as addictive ingredients. A nurse provided cold rubs, lukewarm or cold baths, sprays, moist packs, and massage. Gertrude was taken to Atlantic City for sea baths.
Despite some moments of joyful respite, the constant rounds of doctors and treatments during her youth made young Gertrude unhappy, everyone in the family agreed.