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.

The Estate – the people

When I took my early morning walk on the lawn, it had evolved and become complex. There were many Kennicotts living on the other end of Kennicott Grove. They were less classy then my parents. They were in the flower business…..Peonies.

My father was a professor. And his parents had given him and his wife, my mother, the tenant house on their land which they had subsequently put a little money into, and built an extension, and a playroom for me and my brother, and a bigger living room. In other words, they had fancified it.

So the traces of that history were all around. In this tenant house, the original small living room had mementos of the ancestor who had gone to Alaska; it had a fire place, and over the fireplace hung a model kayak and umiak. The new living room was bigger.

This history and its scars were everywhere. In fact, there was supposed to be an Indian buried under the big oaks. We never met this Indian, but it was part of the legendatiosness of this place. We always wanted to dig him up, but our parents wouldn’t let us.

Again, about the history manifest in my childhood, my grandmother, who was an extraordinarily adept and dedicated flower gardener, had this extraordinary perennial garden. And this very beautiful garden was bifurcated into two pieces, and the division was an osage orange hedge. And it wasn’t until I was reading the history of the region that I read that before they had barbed wire, they used to plant fence with osage orange hedges, which are excruciatingly thorny.

The Redfield estate? That was a more recent house that was built with what must have been legal-finagling money. It was my grandmother’s second husband who made some money and caused to be built that new and I thought odious house.

I don’t know who’s managing it now, but the new and I thought odious house, with the balconies, and so on, pretentious features, is now being managed as a business, and they hire it out for weddings. As for the Kennicotts, they’re still doing peonies over yonder, there.

Louise Peattie and the naturalist [Donald Culross Peattie] had been living in France with the idea of living in a literate manner in the south of France, and they didn’t have any money and they had to come home, that must have been humiliating. They lost a daughter, in France, just my age. She got some strep infection, people used to in those days. It was very painful for me too, because she was exactly my age, and when we were very young we used to hang out together. She died when they were in France. I was 12 or 13 when Tito died. My childhood was dotted with death. You wouldn’t see it now. There was a kid who died in the 4th grade sort of over the weekend, and then they gave me her locker. Which they thought was a kind thought, but it wasn’t really that kind. You never hear of children dying, now. People do, but people we know, their kids don’t die.

I never got the family wholly sorted out. There were Aunt Agnes, who was an old aunt, who had an adorable old-fashioned house with stairs so narrow you could barely climb up them, you know the kind of thing, and then there was Aunt Josephine, who had a little bungalow. I know that Aunt Josephine had this little house and Aunt Agnes had this bungalow, and I used to see her because she was half- way between me and the peony Kennicotts, so it was a nice little walk to stop in and see Aunt Josephine, and she had doll dishes to play with; somebody told me, years later, that Aunt Josephine was really an illegitimate daughter of Aunt Agnes’s and they had set her up in this bungalow. I think that’s what they said. That’s what I heard. Anyway, anybody could be an aunt. So Windy Pines consisted of what seems now like a huge piece of land populated by mysterious cousins and aunts and so forth.

It didn’t have retainers. What it had was some money that kept coming in, enough to run the lawnmower. And who put up the lawnmower, I couldn’t say. Where did the money come from? I’m not clear. I know that my grandfather was a lawyer in Chicago and  dabbled in politics and used to take his son around, introducing him as Robert Emmet Redfield and so forth. Whether he was the source of the money, I couldn’t say. They had an Irish sort of attachment of some sort. They weren’t Irish. They were just finaglers. Anyway, the lawn kept getting cut.

The Estate – the land

When I try to call up Windy Pines to my mind what I get is a recollection of getting up early in the morning and climbing out the bathroom window, which was well-positioned for that because there was one of those chimneys from the twenties which widened out so that you could go down the chimney.

So I slide down the chimney, and I’m now on the lawn, and it’s all wet with dew, early in the morning. So what I’m saying is that at that point it feels like an estate. The lawn has been mown, mechanically mown, it’s a good stand of grass, well mown, and I can squelch around on it. It feels like an estate, it feels like that to your bare feet, it’s a great big lawn, and at the end of the lawn is a double row of poplar trees, very estatey-looking.

But it didn’t start out as an estate. Let’s start out with the ecology of the area. It was a grove of oak. Before the whites got onto the area, and you can read all about this, it’s well documented, this part of the Midwest was characterized by oak groves – not contiguous, but occasional, oak groves, and meadows. It was the prairie plains, not the high plains. The high grass plains needed a different plow, a deep-dish plow, and at first it hadn’t been invented. People settled in the groves because the oak groves had loosened the sod, so that you could get into them.

To this day northern Illinois is characterized by places called “Grove”, “Morton grove“, “Downers Grove”, and so on because the earliest settlers were clustered in groves . So this was “Kennicotts Grove” .

The government had given out a certain number of acres, a section, and a quarter section. This patch of land was a quarter section.

In my childhood there was another wing to the estate thing. There was a great big barn and there was a cow in the barn, I think only one. They used to milk and squirt the milk at the cats who were all lined up to receive their squirt. That gave it a more substantial aspect. In fact not in my childhood, but in my father’s childhood, there were horses. The horses were the estate part of it. His father loved to ride and he learned to ride. That gave a sort of an estate tone to it. And these horses inhabited the barn. Well, by the time I was coming along the horses had gone, the woodlots had gone, the horses had gone, but you knew they had been there once. But the barn was still there, and my father once showed me how to make an atlatl out of a shingle and sent it right over the top of the barn, which was quite high. My father, who was a weedy professor, too thin to swim, threw a mean atlatl.

But an estate is there before you, it’ll be there after you. You don’t have to flail around to keep it going, it’s not like a job.

I was devastated when they sold the woods, about 15 acres of wood lot. I’m not sure how it fit with this whole story of decline, but I know they needed the money, and I must have been an early teenager, [around 1937-39, during the Great Depression] and I was still using the woods a lot. My uncle Donald Peattie was a naturalist, so I used to dog after him in the woods.

We didn’t live in Windy Pines all year around, it was vacation time. We’d come out for Christmas sometimes. It was cold you could hear the mice rattling around, and it was a totally different environment, no squishy grass. At some point, I don’t remember exactly when, I think it was after my brother died, we moved out there all year around. We were all in a state of shock.

Joanna went back to see what was left of the house, and couldn’t find it. She went looking for it, and all she could find were some rotty boards. I don’t think anybody was mowing the grass, either.