Chapter 2 SO YOUNG
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John Wallace Stevenson
Age 4 1956
Chevy Chase, Maryland
My first really clear memories of my very early childhood are fragmentary; they are nighttime views of the cavernous interior of the sweepback roof and rear sofa seat of an old nine passenger green DeSoto automobile. As it memorializes the househunting car trip my mom made with us kids it is possible to pinpoint this first memory in time as just about at the time of my third birthday, February 17, 1955.
We went from Lake Geneva, Wisconsin to Washington, D.C. It was then, when I was just three, that she and my dad divorced. Hence the househunting trip.
I was so young.
Why Washington, D.C.? Well, my mom had a bitterness for my father - matched only by my father’s for her - and she wanted to put as much distance between him and her as possible. She pulled out the old Rand McNally Road Atlas, something most everyone seemed to have in those days. She found that the farthest she could get away from Dad by going in a straight line East and West looking for a place which might provide her a future was limited by the two shining shores. She spotted San Francisco in the West and Washington, D.C. in the East.
I asked her once why she chose Washington instead of San Francisco and she said “The Democrats gave your father a job in the heart of the depression. I went to Washington because I thought the government was there and I would be able to get a government job.” Don’t blame me, Ron; for her “govamint” wasn’t the problem, living money was.
I am sure she was also influenced by the marvelous film based on the L. Frank Baum book The Wizard of Oz.
In The Wizard of Oz the picaresque heroine from The Midwest and her (mostly) intrepid associates follow a wonderful road virtually paved with gold to go to the dollar green city and ask the frauds at the controls of the society to make their lives complete.
Mom is not a figure of derision in this. She is, rather, like the soldier General Patton kicked in the ass and asked what he was doing when Patton found him sleeping on duty. When the soldier told him he was sleeping the General sent him back to sleep because he was the only person around there that knew what he was doing.
Mom knew what she doing. She was right. The government did give her, a divorcee, a job. She struggled all of her life with that work.
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Mom as Washington D.C. Professional Working Woman
National Institutes of Health
1960
A lot of her work was interesting, as work in the Washington, D.C. area tends to be.
• She served as the Special Rapporteur for the President’s Commission on Multiple Sclerosis, the official body which first recognized MS as a disease ( a prerequisite for many types of research and funding eligibility).
• Her boss there was in fact the Presidential Commission at The National Institutes of Health. He was appointed by President Nixon. He hired Mom and called in various consulting experts in the medical field as necessary. One day Mom took me in to her office on the main campus of NIH in Bethesda, Maryland, across the street from the U.S. Naval Medical Center, “Navy Medical” or just "Navy Med" to us where the President was treated. to meet her boss. He was sort of Earl Butz-like, to mention a famous comparison. He told me “Keep your nose clean. Don’t work anywhere, any one job more than seven years. In seven years you’ll have used up whatever any one position can offer you. Keep your nose clean.”
• Mom also worked in the interesting office of the Library of Congress which was then named Special Services and is now named The Congressional Research Service. The principal original purpose of that office was to fulfill requests by Members of Congress for special research on topics supposedly requested by their constituents. You see, the resources of the Library, as part of The Government, were to be used for the benefit of, you know, The People.
• One fine stretch of this Capitol norm was explained by Mom to her Methodist Women’s Guild one Sunday Afternoon as they sat in our
living room at home having tea. All fine older suburban women, many of them a good bit more Republican than Mom. Holding their teacups
by the handles with the little finger out I am sure they were pleasantly titillated to hear Mom tell of the request for a translation of a
document in the French language requested by the then flamboyant Congressman from Harlem, New York, The Honorable Adam
Clayton Powell.
• It seems Congressman Powell had made some Foreign Relations trips to Paris while in the Congress and, well, found more than facts. He found a piece of . . . well, I can’t say it, but it was French, I can tell you that much. Subsequently, his French friend sent him a carte d’amour in French, which he sent to Mom (!) to have translated. (No point in having any official translators over at the France Desk of The State Department bothered with a little thing like this. Just send it over to Kathryn Stevenson running the Congressmen’s private Special Services Section at the Library founded by what is often called the gift of Thomas Jefferson’s personal library.)
Well, as Mom related it to her ladies, the central passage fairly squealed with longing for some Congressional Relations. You’ll have to imagine the French accent I’m afraid but the gist of it was what his lady friend so wanted.
“Gendarme - hurry back to Gay Paree and beat me with your big black baton!”
For Mom, however, the General Schedule Grade 7 salary she earned was barely sufficient to live a suburban middle class life on. Yet she lived out her life on her own whist.
The car ride from L.G. to D.C. was a great one for me. Several of my older brothers and sisters - I can’t recall which - were in the car. The only sibling I can be sure was not in the car was my oldest brother who was off at college.
Even I can see in my photos from that time that, so young, I was cute as the dickens. All of my family members would hold me cuddled up under their arm and we talked and slept the night away.
My mom was driving, driving straight through the night, through the snows, through the mountains of Pennsylvania, West Virginia and down through the gentler ones of Maryland. Through the Appalachian Passes through which John Chapman, the real legendary Johnny Appleseed, had followed the earliest pioneers rolling West. Johnny Appleseed had given them apples for pie so it became a watchword for what was American. Two hundred years later I lived in Upstate New York, still dotted with the small apple orchards I believe were planted by him on the glaciated hillsides of the Tully Valley. There is a fine old classic cartoon, that is an animated feature length film, of Johnny Appleseed made by Walt Disney I think which shows a fine rendition in animation of these scenes.
Many of them had been abandoned to be overgrown by families desperate during the worst of the snows and financial freezes of The Great Depression. From Syracuse to Rome to Ithaca - all classical names from ancient Greek and Roman times because the first Military Governor of the region after the Revolutionary War had been a classicist - the distinctive slightly funny locals accent is still called The Apple Knockers.
We were Americans in The Cumberland Gap.
Going East.
To the Emerald City.
This was a nighttime memory. There is a special quality to those events which take place at night. Perhaps the most preached-upon text in the hundreds of thousands of little churches that spread across America is the text about Nicodemus, one of the greatest of Israel’s religious scholars mentioned in the New Testament Gospel.
So Nicodemus was called by Jesus of Nazareth, who held no formal position within the scholarly religious establishment at all. He it was who said to Nicodemus “You are Israel’s Teacher.”
Yet the peculiar, famous conversation about being “born again” which took place between Israel’s Teacher and The Son of Man - the favorite name of Jesus for Himself - is introduced by the Gospel writer by the fact that Nicodemus “came to Jesus at night.”
This nocturnal fix is repeated several times in later historical references by various of the New Testament writers. It is in fact one of the central defining statements about Nicodemus. And so it has been unceasingly preached on.
It is beyond cavil that the general tone of the overwhelming majority of the preaching casts a slightly furtive or pejorative sense on the at night.
Nicodemus is often pictured sort of slinking like a shadow, or skulking furtively like a person hiding his identity.
I prefer the explanation, which bears repeating under the giving “Equal Time” standard of fairness made famous by the Federal Communications Commission in the regulation of the television airwaves, of the Reverend Dr. Lloyd John Ogilvie, the present Chaplain of The United States Senate.
Formerly the Senior Pastor of The First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood, Lloyd married my mother in 1979. To another man, of course! Among other things he did while at Hollywood Pres, in 1989 Lloyd recommended me for acceptance as a Member of The Gideon International.
He was not a close friend of mine or anything like that; I don’t mean to imply that by referring to him as Lloyd. Everyone called him that. He is close to being one of those few great figures broadly-educated people usually recognize merely by their first name, like Ike, Mao, Sir Winston, Eleanor, Golda, Mahatma and Indira, Abraham, Martin or Bobby.
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Lloyd’s preaching was memorable; he was telecast as he preached from the well, the open floor at the front of the great sanctuary at Hollywood Pres. So, many who never attended the services there have seen his distinctive face, which seemed to become more Scots as he grew older, and heard his sonorous voice.
Lloyd preached that Nicodemus came to Jesus at night because that was when, as the Jewish rabbinic tradition differs from the Christian ministerial one in that rabbis generally work at a full time occupation other than their religious one to earn their living, much as shown by the crossover New Testament example of the Rabbi Saul of Tarsus who is also known as Paul who wove cloth during the daytime hours of commerce and manufacture, after the customary Mediterranean siesta (which when I served as a SAR EL Civilian Volunteer in the Israeli Army in 1995 found was still pretty much observed in Israel) the rabbis could reserve the evening hours of quiet for long careful study of the Scriptures of The Law by the light of oil lamps. Sir Winston Churchill - a great little napper himself - did the same thing he said for the simple reason that it created two eight hour workdays out of one day and so doubled work productivity. To use a good old American example, it was the study of the law by the light of candles, like Abraham Lincoln.
Mom. Mom drove straight through at night for several reasons.
• First, she saved the expense of a hotel that night. The kids could sleep just as well that one night on the big old style soft sofa seats of the Desoto.
• Second, and this is the real reason as well as being at the heart of this chapter, she herself didn’t need much sleep.
She and Dad married each other in 1933. She was 17, he was 24. She was in flight from the stifling confines of the small Iowa town parsonage with six brothers and sisters. They eloped (!) on the back of his American made Indian Motorcycle. From a small town in Iowa to Chicago. That is something about my parents, now both long gone, which I just love.
After honeymooning in the 11th floor Bridal Suite of my father’s father’s Lake Shore Club overlooking Lake Michigan, they made their home in the windy City of Chicago, which I believe was hosting the 1932-33 World’s Fair at that time.
Mom was soon working as a haute couture clothing model for fashion designer classes at The Art Institute of Chicago, one of the great art museums of the world.
Now she was divorcing Dad. Mom was born August 17, 1916. Born during World War I. She lived through the Great Depression and World War II, with all of their terrors.
The greater terror that washed over her body and from there through her heart and mind with overwhelming floods of the natural but volatile hormones, adrenalines and epinephrines of menopause and emotional chaos and uncertainty, that was what kept her going.
She not only did not need to sleep, she probably could not sleep the night away.
OK Mom.¹
I write this now as I look back 45 years. I am just turning age 48. This year is the year of worldwide gaudy celebrations 2,000 years after the birth of a Jewish carpenter who never wrote anything that “got published” nor held any official position yet has turned the world on its head. Mom was 38 when I was so young I had just turned three.
I never even knew we had left the Midwest. I do not have now - and as a child seemed not to have had - any memories of life at home with my father and our whole family united prior to this car trip.
I do have a specific though visually blurry memory of being infant baptized by my morfar (to use the Norwegian word for one’s maternal grandfather; morfar - mother’s father) in his church in Iowa.
It is a funny fact of my adulthood that the two small midwestern towns of my mother’s father’s role in my background have both appeared as the filmed locales for great movies.
Grumpy Old Men, a comedy starring Jack Lemmon, Walter Mathau, Ann-Margret and Daryl Hannah was filmed in Stillwater, Minnesota, a small town on the banks of the St. Croix River about twenty miles outside of Minneapolis. Not long after the film was released, all unknowing, I visited Stillwater. That was the summer, 1993, that the Mississippi River flooded the Midwest.
As I have always had an interest in good architecture, when we drove through Stillwater’s town streets my attention was caught by a midsized complex of handsome older buildings which had been sleekly modernized and turned into resort condominiums with darkened glass windows and that yuppie look termed “gentrified” when found in an urban neighborhood.
I had never known my mother lived in Stillwater, but it was explained to me then that those buildings I was admiring were in fact the house in which my mother lived as a child and the attached larger section was actually the church and education buildings of which mom’s father had been the Pastor those long years since.
Well, I could see The Session of the church had been Presbyterian enough to get their money out of the old church property when the time came for that. Still, I can see the pleasure in having Ann-Margret or Daryl Hannah there.
The Bridges of Madison County is a gloriously beautiful, luminous film based on Robert James Waller’s best-selling book. It is the story of the deep, long-denied wonderful love of a man and woman which as it was adulterous had to be kept hidden during the lifetimes of the man and woman.
Only after her death did the woman’s adult children find a writing about it by their mother. This was a kind of variation on the fine Jewish tradition of the Ethical Will one should prepare at the final maturity point in one’s life when the things that are most important in one’s experience are to be distilled into a written document left behind for one’s family. This has been developed and refined over the long millennia of the Judaic tradition to be a carefully crafted written work.
The document this woman in The Bridges of Madison County left for her chidren starts out with a wonderful statement, that she wanted to be known for all that she was. This is something like the scene in the film Meet Joe Black where Bill Parrish says his last words ever to his daughter he loves "so much", a short verbal film version of an ethical will, that she should have "no regrets", as the fine actor Jeffrey Tambor put it a scene or two earlier in a dialogue with Joe Black "no secrets, let the others in your life know the best and the worst about you, then you are free, free to really love". To be known for all you are. This is a great thing all of us can learn and take to heart. To be known for all you are.
A person’s Ethical Will is to be left for and studied by loved ones when, as Ronald Reagan fittingly said at the memorial service for the families of the crew of the Space Shuttle Challenger which exploded in flight (this moment, captured in the Millenium Mix Auld Lang Syne band of Kenny G’s Faith CD, was it in 1987?) - the worn out one setting out On The Great Adventure “slips the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God”.
The Bridges of Madison County film starred Academy Award Winner Meryl Streep. She was nominated for her tenth Oscar for her wonderful portrayal of what I think of as the beauty in all the senses in which that word may be employed of the woman in this film and to know her for all she was and to appreciate the complexity, passion and beauty of that even if it may seem to go against some of our most treasured customs, worst sins, mores or taboos. Clint Eastwood directed and together with Kathleen Kennedy co-produced this film. Clint Eastwood in his still hunky middle years also starred in the role of the man who came into the woman’s life late.
The title reference is to the old covered bridges still found in rural America, romantic holdovers from the days when teams of horses pulled wagons full of valued people and valuable crops across the bridges spanning rushing streams.
The roaring white water of the streams could frighten the horses.
The team might rear up and plunge the families and goods of the hardworking farmers into the freezing waters.
So they covered the bridges, leaving for us picturesque, secreting shrines of America’s rural past. The heart he ended up shooting with a never-ending love was situated inside himself, while the covered bridges the National Geographic photographer portrayed by Clint Eastwood was shooting are situated in Madison County, Iowa.
James Madison, the author of many of The Federalist Papers, was of course the true great genius behind the drafting of the separation of the Legislative, Executive and Judicial powers and the other checks and balances built into the U.S. Constitution. Many fine streets, towns, cities and counties in America are justly named for this greatest of all political thinkers, Madison County, Iowa being one of them.
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I love that movie.
It has helped me to know myself for all that I am.
As I sat watching the credits roll by at the end of the film, I saw at the end it had been filmed not just in Madison County, but in Winterset, Iowa, a small town in Madison County.
When my mother’s family left Stillwater (I have heard it was in 1927 when my mom was eleven years old), they moved back to Iowa where she had been born, where my tip-moroldefar, that is my mother’s father’s father, my maternal great-grandfather Loehr had been the first settler to come to Lone Tree. As I understand from family histories, he built a large home in Lone Tree which still stands there to this day.
And so I understand, piecing together family recollections as well as I have been able, my morfar - by a long road - homed in one may say to become the Pastor of what I think may be today the Winterset (now) Congregational Church, set in the quietly unremarkable beautiful, beautiful country one may enjoy today “on video”, Madison County, Iowa.
All that is neither here nor there and not strictly part of this story, but it is wonderful and full of love. So now I have shared it with you.
All I remember of the car trip East is the warmth of the great car - you know, they are not made just that big inside anymore - swooshing through the night and snow on big bias ply tires towards a new life in a new world, which was, somewhat Oz-like, a big, bright place indeed.
I was so young.
¹ The author credits Herman Wouk’s fine book Inside Outside where this phrase sentence form is used about Mr. Wouk’s father as his inspiration for the use of this two word phrase sentence.
Chapter 3
MY TOYS
The old DeSoto disappeared and so did the Old Man. A sunny yellow 1953 Oldsmobile convertible and my older sisters boyfriends and fiancés replaced them.
It was a lovely, wonderful time for me. It always seemed to be nice in the steeplechase, that is rolling green foxhunt country, of the old Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. The sky was so often blue. The sun was happy and shining most of the time. The air was soft. The nights were dusky and starlit. I did not yet have my first bike.
I did have a rockinghorse. Funny, I would give a hundred dollars today if I could find it. I also had a doll. These are the two toys that I had in 1955 and 1956 when I was three and four years old, our first years of living in Chevy Chase, Maryland.
My memories of both of these toys occur in the basement. Houses in the East and Midwest of America seem to all have basements, whereas almost none of the houses in Florida, California and the West of America do. My horse was in the basement because it made a lot of noise if I rode it upstairs on the hardwood floors, even if it was on a carpet. I imagine I probably carried the doll around with me to different parts of the house, but as it is the rockinghorse that seems to be the site of these memories, the only doll memories are also in the basement, except one.
I cannot remember the names of either the horse or the doll.
My rockinghorse was red, painted wood. It had some black decorative painting for its eyes, ears, saddle and reins. It was square, if you understand me, it was made from smallish boards fitted together. It was not carved nor, as is usual today, plastic injection molded. It mounted onto a frame bottom piece that set on the floor. The rockinghorse was mounted onto the frame on springs about the size of a ballpark frank.
When I rode the horse back and forth on its frame the springs were springy and noisy. I would give a lot to have it back. It would mean a lot to me to hear the actual sounds of that rockinghorse’s springs from my childhood.
The doll was one of an African American baby. It was made of some sort of hard clay, china or porcelain based material. I can only remember it at a time when a smallish piece of it was broken out and missing. That is how I can say what material it was made from. I recall looking closely at the broken edges of the inch or so diameter hole and seeing the bright light core of the material in contrast against the rich smooth brown tone of the skin.
The doll had a slight forming of hair on the head and that was painted black. There were no actual strands nor a wig of hair. The doll was one of those older time dolls - before Barbie and Ken that were proportioned a little differently. I would call it closer to a realistic chunky proportion, derived from a careful study of people. My doll was a baby.
It must have been from the times when baby dolls were babes not baby dolls for babes to wear when they wanted to get their babe to give them a baby if you know what I mean.
My doll wore only a diaper. It was a simple doll, although the arms and legs could swing up and down and maybe the head could turn from side to side. It was before the time of high-tech dolls. I do not believe it was supposed to be able to do anything like cry, or talk or pee.
Although my doll did not pee, one time I had, unbeknownst to Mom, “fed the baby” from some kind of toy bottle. I fed the baby while it was lying on its back.
Meanwhile, my Mom had her “Ladies Guild” church ladies in the living room having their Sunday Social. This was the era just before the Jackie Kennedy look. In those days ladies were called ladies and they wore dresses and big hats.
I wandered in with my doll cradled in my arms. Standing in the circle of bright-eyed watching women I proudly presented the doll to my mom.
I said “Here’s your other baby! He just finished his nap and asked for his mother. You can wake him up!” Mom picked the doll baby up and held it up in front of her, intending to explain to her Ladies Guild that it was a doll.
Memorable for long years of retelling, amongst the Ladies Guild stalwarts who ran the church basement rummage sale, was the story of “Kathryn’s other baby”. They were always saying to Mom something like “Was that your other baby, Kathryn?” Then they would dissolve into the enormity of American upper middle class women’s knowing laughter.
For as Mom held him up in the air and started to explain to her circle it was not a real baby, it was just a doll, the little swaddling clothes fell away and he was not wearing his diaper. As it came out my baby doll did, after all, pee.
Chapter 4
CHERRY BLOSSOMS
Cherry Blossoms were an important part of my growing up in Chevy Chase, Maryland. The Cherry Blossoms of Washington, D.C. and Kensington, Maryland, where the Diplomatic Corps lived bathed my heart and soul with beauty and helped to set my internal standard for how much of that precious element I need in my life.
I do in fact have a terrific BQ. I need a great deal of beauty in all parts of my life. So, I am often immersed in highly visual original art works, music, beautiful places, religious events, birds, women, cats, sunrises and sunsets, moonlight and starlight and the Pacific Ocean.
My inner heart, or maybe that is my mind, similarly hungers for beauty and is fed more in my Memoirs writing class than in any other venue.
I grew up in Chevy Chase, Maryland, just outside The D.C. Line which separates our federal capital city from the great State of Maryland. The capital city of Maryland, incidentally is Annapolis, which both served for a time as the first home for our national government and also was the site of what is called The Annapolis Convention.
The Annapolis Convention was a meeting held in Annapolis, Maryland which resulted in the issuance of an official resolution which called for a general Constitutional Convention. That Constitutional Convention was held in Philadelphia in 1787 and resulted in the adoption of our present United States Constitution. Without the call issued by The Annapolis Convention, therefore, we would not today have the Constitution under which we live. If I remember correctly, only five men responded to the call for and actually attended The Annapolis Convention. Their mere five votes at that Convention has shaken our world.
Alexander Hamilton was a strong Federalist among our Founding Fathers; he became known as our first great Secretary of The Treasury. Alexander Hamilton was the driving force behind the Annapolis Convention. One may clearly say that if not for Alexander Hamilton, the general Constitutional Convention may have never happened.
Alexander Hamilton was also instrumental in the creation of the first Bank of The United States. Most U.S. History textbooks mention The Bank of The United States being declared unconstitutional by The U.S. Supreme Court. One can easily see that peculiar importance a political order attaches to the matter of money. This may be the origin of another fine old American phrase the influence of big money.
Washington during my childhood was a city of extensive green areas, fields, malls and parks, and gleaming white dramatically beautiful marble buildings. To live there in the 1950s was as if living by the shores of a never ceasing river flowing with beauty.
It is a happier incident in the relations between our country and the Emperor of Japan that the Emperor once gave what is always called Ten Thousand Cherry Trees (although it was actually many thousands more) to our country as a national gift. These were baby trees. We who are Americans and Japanese should take it to heart from this simple lesson of the past that we may have good relations between our two countries always. I will start by implanting this lesson in my own heart first. The baby cherry trees were planted in the most beautiful of possible settings.
The Potomac River esses through Washington, D.C., separating the lower Federal Triangle area where The Treasury sits and Foggy Bottom, where the U.S. State Department sits and my uncle, a diplomat, would report when he returned home from Karachi or Rome or some such place, from the Arlington National Cemetery with its Custis-Lee Mansion and eternal flame for President Kennedy and the Iwo Jima Memorial Statue of The United States Marine Corps made from the famous flag-raising on Mount Suribachi photograph. It is there, too, The Queen of Holland placed her lovely gift of a Tower Carillon, right adjacent to the USMC Memorial, on the mantling hills of the Virginia side.
Lying in the River between the two sides near there is a wonderful good-sized natural area named Teddy Roosevelt Island which is open to the public for hiking.
At this beautiful point is a rounded bay which circles in like a cove on the Washington side. The Tidal Basin.
The Jefferson Memorial, dedicated by President Franklin Roosevelt to memorialize and make a public statement affirming the greatness of Thomas Jefferson, is situated on the peninsular promontory resulting from the coving in of The Tidal Basin.
This place is just known as The Tidal Basin. There are many such tidal basins in various places around the world, yet if you mention the words The Tidal Basin, almost anywhere in the world a person who once visited Washington will turn to you with a dreamy look in their eye and say “Yes, The Tidal Basin.” Sometimes they may add the single word “Lovely”.
The curving banks of The Tidal Basin have been walled, probably to preserve the area from erosion caused by tidal currents. Gentle old men fish from its curving bank in the summer dusk.
It is here the cherry saplings long ago took root. Their arbors line each walkway and The Tidal Basin waterfront. Each Spring about at the time of the Passover and Resurrection Sunday holiday time they create an enormous wonderland. Overarching lanes and byways of gracefully lush white blossoms merge into the glorious white marble memorial to Thomas Jefferson rising up on its promontory headland in the river.
Some of Thomas Jefferson’s finest words are inscribed in mural sized portions of the Memorial.
The one sentence which remains always accessible to my memory, however - and it increases the wonder to stand in that light open air beautiful rotunda and slowly turn oneself completely around as one must to complete it - is that one sentence which is inscribed around the top where the walls meet the ceiling.
“I have sworn upon the altar of Almighty God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”
Sometimes the setting for a triumph in architecture or spirit is essential for its greatness, sometimes not. In this case it is a marvelous setting.
Like marble on white jade, Thomas Jefferson on Cherry Blossoms.
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John Wallace Stevenson
Age 4 1956
Chevy Chase, Maryland
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