Miss Adams

Of the very many teachers I have had in my long life, one sticks out in memory:  Miss Adams, my kindergarten teacher. Her kindergarten class was quite famous, and rightly so

She had, in the first place, lots of energy, and in the second place, what she did with it was to give herself two rooms, a sitting-down classroom and a block room. In the block room sat piles of commissioned blocks made out of two-by-fours. So they were big blocky blocks, they weren’t these little chintzy things with letters.

That’s what made me think about the culture of the period. I remember that we used to have a record, or maybe it was a whole album, called “Building a City”,[Hindemith’s “Wir Bauen Eine Stadt” ?] and it’s all physical construction: “We’re building a city, We’re building a city, digging and pounding, we’re working all together.” It was Popular Front Socialism. The workers of the period were physical workers. I’m thinking of the politics of early childhood then, which were intense, really. You wanted the kids to attach to physical construction. For ages they had been trying to get kids out of the dirt, and to sit down a practice their penmanship; that was the big Victorian period kids’ activity. Here there was the reverse. You didn’t want the kids fiddling around making nice curves, you wanted them building, building. And then I was thinking about what got lost out of that. It wasn’t just penmanship; it was politics, and money, and banking, the less physical parts of the whole process, which we have come to realize (to our sorrow), are quite important, and that was willfully kept out of it.

I don’t know what Miss Adams thought about it. Maybe she would have been creative enough to think of something to do about it, but she wanted the kids to look at the city as a physical thing. I think in those days, and always, there’s a big thing about taking kids out to see the Firemen. They adore the fire truck, and the firemen, who generally have very little to do, are quite pleased to show off the fire truck, so a trip to the firehouse has been a standard for ages, but Miss Adams’ walks included all sorts of other stuff, but nothing politicky or banky. They were things like stores and loading docks and stuff like that, but she did like to take the kids around the city.

It was also the state of mind. Rather than stressing the excitement of the fire truck, (which has got its problems for young kids, because you want them to love the firemen because they are the quintessential first responders, but on the other hand you don’t want them obsessing away about fires). What they did was to take the kids out (and these were very young kids} in a gaggle, to look at the city, and then (and I don’t know if she realized how clever this was) the kids took the blocks and built, in blocks, a replica of what they’d seen, so that she was also teaching them how you abstract and represent something in another medium.

It was the University of Chicago Lab School, and that’s relevant too. It was thought of as a laboratory for practicing practical thought. It was founded by John Dewey, a major American philosopher, and the quintessential American philosopher, because he had this pragmatic, this useful information thing. The Laboratory School was, maybe not his creation, but something that he commanded. He had some idea that it would lead to practical intelligence. How you would do it, I doubt if he had much of a clue, but Miss Adams was the perfect person for the job. I don’t know if Dewey picked Miss Adams, or if they were just at the same point in history, but they were on the same wavelength. I came to understand that she really was a genius. What it really takes in early childhood education (besides resources, and it helps a lot to have twenty kids in the room instead of forty, and stuff like that) you need a decisive idea. Miss Adams had a strong and correct idea, and a thought of how to put it to work.

I’m trying to think of why it left such an impression. One reason was, it was a good idea. It was a good idea partly because it gave the kids something that they could do but it was also a good idea because it was powered by an ideal, an ideal which was the popular leftism of the period. Without that, the blocks by themselves wouldn’t have stuck in my head so much. I think that I understood that I was a part of something moral.

Park, Booker T Washington, and the Man Farthest Down 2 – Park

If you were going into the thing thoroughly you would want to know more about Park, what his life was. I suspect that Park’s life was quite a bit wilder than advertised. There was this girl around my age, named Bonno, Bonno Hyessa, who was sort of hanging around my grandmother’s place. I don’t know how she came to be part of the family, but I think that several of us had our suspicions. [editor’s note: probably not; she was probably the slightly mysterious but well-regarded “girl who calls herself  Bonno Hyessa” who was thought to be the daughter of Dr. Charles Eastman, an Indian activist. Lisa remembers that Park knew Eastman through the University of Chicago’s projects and studies on the Indian reservations. Lisa wrote her master’s thesis on one of these projects.] I’m just saying. He was wild. I’ve talked about my parents – they were following a generational position. In the case of my grandparents, she was not the instigator, but she adored going on trips, and her character Johnny Doodlebug from the brim of her hat was describing all the exciting places they were going. He was interested, fascinated by any exotic subject, and would tell you all about it.

A family photo.

Thank you, Julia!

That was what she liked in Grandpa. It was exciting I saw letters from him to her before they were married – you would expect them to be love letters. They were not. They were long disquisitions about local trends and such, what he had in his head, it wasn’t lovey-dovey, and I think she liked that. And she had her wonderful rooftop apartment, and gave wonderful parties there. It’s true they were academics, but academics weren’t what they are now. Tuskeegee was a sort of an adventure. It didn’t provide him status, but on the other hand, part of his life was trying out different places. He was the father of modern sociology. He created an idea of what sociology was – which ran aground on the modern tendency to want only things which could done numerically. So this sociology department, which I grew up in, and which was congenial to my family, consisted of exploring things, going places, hanging out. They no sooner hit their stride than the craze for classification took hold, and if you couldn’t count it up, forget it! And so the department then was subject to a takeover by the quantifiers, so they really lost out. I know there was a lot of ill-will, and probably there still is. There was much to be said for the quantifiers, but it was not enthusiastically received by the snoopers and experiencers.

Park, Booker T Washington, and the Man Farthest Down 1 – The book

 

We last encountered Robert Park in his childhood home of Redwing, North Dakota, where his father had a grocery business. How he got from there to excursioning around with Booker T. Washington, I don’t know. I do know that, at least according to my mother, they had been around the world twice. But who was paying for it, under whose auspices, was it a lecture tour, or if he just went from speaking engagement to speaking engagement, I don’t know. They must have had people who booked him. Booker T Washington was the star of the lecture tour whatever its characteristics were. Park was Booker T Washington’s secretary, yes. No, people didn’t think it was odd. [a black man with a white secretary in 1911] Booker T Washington was news, because he wasn’t only aspiring, but a black intellectual. They wrote a book [The Man Farthest Down] about the trip, yes. I don’t know much about the history, but I would guess that it was the abolitionist movement in its paler version. There was an uplift-blacks movement; it was some part of that. What you would really want to know was who was paying the bills and what the agenda was.

How did they get to know each other? It didn’t really require much, because my grandfather was infinitely curious. He was interested in everything. I remember going on a trip with him somewhere, and he took me to some little piney-woods church. He wanted to look at what was left of Black communities after the civil war had taken the plantation structure away. He was just interested in people who were stirring. Booker T Washington was sort of an exemplar of the “We’re Rising” Negro. It was the sort of thing that when you got Black Power they decided that was altogether too feeble, but he wasn’t.

My grandmother was along on this trip, too, I think, or at least on quite a bit of it. She wrote us the most marvelous letters; where they are now, I don’t know. They were letters from Johnny Doodlebug, who was a doodlebug who lived on the brim of her hat, and traveled along, so you got the travels as witnessed by Johnny doodlebug. I should think that my grandmother was also doing portraits at the same time. It was like Tepoztlán; what you would think was a serious piece of research turns out to have been a family picnic.

They were not professionals, they were not academics. Booker T Washington was involved in a black college [Tuskegee]; he was an educated black with aspirations; my grandfather loved people with aspirations. Was he taking it seriously? He probably was in a way; he thought of his fellow Negroes, as they were in those days, as aspiring, and he liked to speak up for their aspirations. More than that I don’t know.

They claimed that their guiding theme on this trip was to decide who was the man farthest down. So they looked at some people who were living in a cave, a not very nice cave, and various other situations of deprivation. They eventually decided that the man farthest down was somebody they met in London, and it wasn’t that his conditions of living were particularly onerous (actually they were better than those in these damned caves), but this guy had in his mind all the people on top and ahead of him; he had in his mind all the people who were better off than he was. That was the point of it. I think they were just traveling around having fun, but they were trying to dictate a central theme, and this was the theme. It was a theme that would encompass a lot of different settings and people.

I think they had a good time… that’s the main thing.

 

My parents

I’m not sure where they met, I think perhaps at the University of Chicago. My father went to law school, and he had a job, actually, in a law office. And he thought it was terrible, really a bore. I think it was his father-in-law, Robert Park, who told him he ought to become an anthropologist. I also think, I’m not sure, that it was Park’s idea that he should study a village in Mexico. That was the most innovative thing of all, because up to that time everybody who did anthropology was out in the the Trobriands or somewhere truly exotic. What my father did was to study a village in Mexico, and that was his PhD. research; he wrote a book called “Tepoztlán” By the time he went to Tepoztlán he was most certainly married, because he brought two children along. I was two and some, and Tito was, I think, six months old.

Here I should make a sort of a general characterization. The relationship between my two parents was in some respects the reverse of the traditional one, because it was my mother who liked to go camping, it was my mother who had hiking boots. And my father was sort of inducted into camping. He was brought up on those mowed lawns [The Estate].

And so, in truth, just as traditionally at the period marriage was a way in which young girls got to escape all those frills, and got to be a part of the exciting masculine world, trailing along, it was the reverse with my parents.

He was very delicate as a child. He spent a whole year in bed with a weak heart. He had a pet chicken, a banty hen.  It used to sit on the head of his bed. They not only had a lawnmower at that estate, they were good at looking after people. They had the resources, and they had the desire.  So he was brought up in this cotton-wooly atmosphere.  One of the underlying themes in this whole thing, is that it seemed very clear that my mother was going to live longer that my father.  He continued to be fragile.

My mother liberated him. Somehow or other, they managed to have a honeymoon which consisted of a walking trip out west.  And when I say a walking trip, it wasn’t that they had a car coming behind.  They walked.  And it was challenging.  They had a map of all these places you might think of yourself as walking to, right? And in truth, there was nothing to prevent you walking there, but half the time it was a dead mining camp that offered you not even so much as a drink of water.

I can tell you, my mother was mad about my father.  Why, I don’t know, but she was. I don’t know if he was mad about her, but she opened the world to him. Cam ping, travel, anthropology, the whole schmear.  She was the handmaiden of her father in this respect.

I think that it would be reasonable to say that it was really Park and my mother and my father.  If it hadn’t been for my mother mediating between them, the thing about men being independent is such that he could have become the satellite of his father-in-law.  It couldn’t have gone on.  He wasn’t really close to my grandfather.  He took Park’s advice, but he got it from Mama.  My father got a lot of scope out of his wife who was, in fact, transmitting what she got from her father.  Park’s specialty was knowing what fascinating things people do around the world, and he thought that everybody he cared about should have a chance to experience the wider world, and my father, obviously, was somebody whose need to experience the wider world was quite easily documented.

My mother had her own magnetism, which was a great contrast to the life out there on the estate; very physical.  She had lots of hair, very thick hair, and she would never cut it.  It was just coils and masses of hairy hair.  She had a body, but not the classic seductive female body, it was the body of an experiencing person. I think it’s quite relevant that my mother would never cut her hair. Not even a little bit.

His mother must have been a problem. When they moved to the grove, she thought that my mother was far too impulsive. I know that one time my mother came out – this was before they were married, and rushed in to see my father, who was naturally her main preoccupation, and his mother thought this was terribly uncouth, rather than gliding in nicely like a lady, which she really wasn’t too much.  She never forgave it

What my father thought about my mother I couldn’t say, but I never saw any competition.  I think she was the most exciting thing that came into his life.

What was hard on her was, he was sort of frail, and he died young, and where to go on from there was hard on her. It left her in trouble, not because (the traditional thing) she needed somebody to support her and so on, but because she was there and he wasn’t.

 

 

The House in the Dunes

Dunehilda was considered my godmother, although I was never baptized. She was a failed opera singer. She was called Dunehilda because she lived in the dunes, the sand dunes off Lake Michigan. She had a marvelous house in the dunes with a big window to look out over the lake. Inside was a big stone fireplace decorated with a rather lewd Balinese frieze. At either end of living room was a spiral staircase leading to a small bedroom on the second floor. There were skin rugs on the floor and a grand piano, in tune I think, for her protégé, a pianist. He would play “Jardin sous la pluie” 

She would serve mint tea from a big brass samovar. There was no road, so the piano and everything else would have had to be carried out there over the dunes.

She had an academic buddy, Ernest Burgess, an expert in statistical projection and failure in marriage. He never married and lived with his sister. They had built a little house next to Dunehilda’s. In between was a little declivity and in it was a little pool, completely circular, with tile edging, and lilies planted naturalistically, the first I’d ever seen planted like that, and moss all around it. She must have gone out and collected and planted all that moss. In the pool she had goldfish, and when she fed them, she would dabble her fingers in the water, and call “fissy, fissy” and they would all swim over. Fish are smarter than you would think.

There were fir trees out on the dunes, and she had named all of the nearer ones after Wagnerian characters. During storms she would address them “Oh Wotan!”

At her dinner parties no one was permitted to get up from the table, not even to go to the bathroom.
It was all elegant, but artistically elegant.
She also had a house in Chicago, over on the South Side , very decayed. Every Christmas she would give a party at which everyone would process in behind a big punch bowl. There was dancing, with Dunehilda shouting “no hopping, no hopping” because there was a big hole in the floor, and if you hopped you were liable to go through the floor. What supported all of this extraordinary artistic stylish lifestyle I have no idea. I think that a guy she married early ended up paying for all of it. That sort of thing used to happen then.
I never understood how she became a buddy of Chicago intellectuals, my parents and Helen and my father, Everett and Helen Hughes and that whole group. They always came to her parties and tried not to hop around.