Mary S. Eaton memoirs: Hawken and Traveling 1955-1960
Traveling/Hawken 1955-60
Not long after I married, my father-in-law, of whom I was very gond, took me to the Plaza Hotel in New York for lunch. Such good advice he offered, “You must keep studying, keep learning about everything as yu grow older.’ All through the years he encouraged me to broaden my outlook, especially through books and travel. The books he gave me to read were generally of a philosophical nature like Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not A Christian.” Then, wanting Cy and me to learn all we could about Shorthorn Cattle (he kept a heard on his property in Northfield where he lived), he sent us to Perth, Scotland to buy cattle at the huge International auctions there. During those years, he also asked me to be his hostess when he entertained Russian diplomats at his home. Along with my friends and many Clevelanders, I thought that rapprochment with the Russians was unthinkable. But, of course I agreed to do as he asked, and I was never sorry.
In 1955 after one of our trips to Perth, for business reasons Cy and I returned by way of Copenhagen where I learned about the curative powers of _________?______. Just in time! From there we flew to Dusseldorf, Germany. What a time to be in Dusseldorf. Carnival—just like New Orleans. But far more important than our celebratory evening on Rosa Montag at Mal Kastin, was our meeting Nanni and Hermann Brandi (Hermann, a submariner in WWII, had a long scar on the side of his face) at a dinner party the Kemnas gave for us. Eventually the six of us—the Kemnas, the Brandis and we became close friends. Their children visited us, and we traveled with them to Italy in 1956 and to Spain in 1958. These people meant so much to me that I struggled to learn the German language, not an easy feat. Being able to read Ruth Kemna’s letters, written in German, gave me such pleasure. Nanni, who made me promise to read Anne Lindberg’s Gift from the Sea, wrote often and in English. Erich, who sent us a great German-English dictionary and Durant’s Oriental Heritage, wrote in both English and German. The wonderful relationship with these people (with whom we were at war only twelve years earlier) ended on such a sad note. Hermann—probably not yet sixty—died suddenly of a coronary. Unable to continue without him, a year or so later Nanni, alone in their hunting lodge, committed suicide. Erich’s and Ruth’s daughter, Christa, wrote us that the reason Erich could not respond to my birthday letter was that he was in the hospital dying of cancer. Several years later Ruth sent some lovely family pictures. All this forty years ago.
In the late ‘50’s, when Elizabeth would have been six and ready for first grade, a funny feeling kept nagging at me, “Is this all there is?” How could anyone with so much—four healthy children, a caring husband, lots of travel, and even a swimming pool,.ask, “Is this all there is?” Nonetheless, something in my life was missing.
. Then, one day in 1960, a letter came from Headmaster Richard Day of Hawken School asking for parents to volunteer in a new reading program. I applied and stayed for thirty-three years.
I don’t recall a return of that nagging feeling after 1960 when my years of teaching began. Reading Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique in 1963 helped me to understand the reasons for that restless feeling before Hawken days. Although Catherine Barrett’s husband, Harvey, argued that a woman’s place was in the kitchen, I knew that being a teacher was the right path for me. Today, reading an Alice Munro short story in the 2/29&26, 2001 New Yorker “What Is Remembered,” I revisited that feeling “Is this all there is?”
Young husbands were stern, in those days. Just a short time before, they had been suitors, almost figures of fun, knock-kneed and desperate in their sexual agonies. Now, bedded down, they turned resolute and disapproving. Off to work every morning, clean shaven, youthful necks in knotted ties, days spent in unknown labors, home again at suppertime to take a critical glance at the evening meal and to shake out the newspaper, hold it up between themselves and the muddle of the kithen, the ailments and emotions, the babies. What a lot they had to learn so quickly: How to kowtow to bosses and how to manage wives. How to be authoritative about mortgages, retaining walls, lawn grass, drains, politics, as well as about the jobs that would have to maintain their families for the next quarter of a century. It was the women, then, who could slip back—during the daytime hours, and always allowing for the stunning responsibility that had been landed on them, in the matter of the children—into a kind of second adolescence. A lightening of spirits when the husbands departed. Dreamy rebellion, subversive get-togethers, laughing fits that were a throwback to high school…when he wasn’t there.
Not long after I married, my father-in-law, of whom I was very gond, took me to the Plaza Hotel in New York for lunch. Such good advice he offered, “You must keep studying, keep learning about everything as yu grow older.’ All through the years he encouraged me to broaden my outlook, especially through books and travel. The books he gave me to read were generally of a philosophical nature like Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not A Christian.” Then, wanting Cy and me to learn all we could about Shorthorn Cattle (he kept a heard on his property in Northfield where he lived), he sent us to Perth, Scotland to buy cattle at the huge International auctions there. During those years, he also asked me to be his hostess when he entertained Russian diplomats at his home. Along with my friends and many Clevelanders, I thought that rapprochment with the Russians was unthinkable. But, of course I agreed to do as he asked, and I was never sorry.
In 1955 after one of our trips to Perth, for business reasons Cy and I returned by way of Copenhagen where I learned about the curative powers of _________?______. Just in time! From there we flew to Dusseldorf, Germany. What a time to be in Dusseldorf. Carnival—just like New Orleans. But far more important than our celebratory evening on Rosa Montag at Mal Kastin, was our meeting Nanni and Hermann Brandi (Hermann, a submariner in WWII, had a long scar on the side of his face) at a dinner party the Kemnas gave for us. Eventually the six of us—the Kemnas, the Brandis and we became close friends. Their children visited us, and we traveled with them to Italy in 1956 and to Spain in 1958. These people meant so much to me that I struggled to learn the German language, not an easy feat. Being able to read Ruth Kemna’s letters, written in German, gave me such pleasure. Nanni, who made me promise to read Anne Lindberg’s Gift from the Sea, wrote often and in English. Erich, who sent us a great German-English dictionary and Durant’s Oriental Heritage, wrote in both English and German. The wonderful relationship with these people (with whom we were at war only twelve years earlier) ended on such a sad note. Hermann—probably not yet sixty—died suddenly of a coronary. Unable to continue without him, a year or so later Nanni, alone in their hunting lodge, committed suicide. Erich’s and Ruth’s daughter, Christa, wrote us that the reason Erich could not respond to my birthday letter was that he was in the hospital dying of cancer. Several years later Ruth sent some lovely family pictures. All this forty years ago.
In the late ‘50’s, when Elizabeth would have been six and ready for first grade, a funny feeling kept nagging at me, “Is this all there is?” How could anyone with so much—four healthy children, a caring husband, lots of travel, and even a swimming pool,.ask, “Is this all there is?” Nonetheless, something in my life was missing.
. Then, one day in 1960, a letter came from Headmaster Richard Day of Hawken School asking for parents to volunteer in a new reading program. I applied and stayed for thirty-three years.
I don’t recall a return of that nagging feeling after 1960 when my years of teaching began. Reading Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique in 1963 helped me to understand the reasons for that restless feeling before Hawken days. Although Catherine Barrett’s husband, Harvey, argued that a woman’s place was in the kitchen, I knew that being a teacher was the right path for me. Today, reading an Alice Munro short story in the 2/29&26, 2001 New Yorker “What Is Remembered,” I revisited that feeling “Is this all there is?”
Young husbands were stern, in those days. Just a short time before, they had been suitors, almost figures of fun, knock-kneed and desperate in their sexual agonies. Now, bedded down, they turned resolute and disapproving. Off to work every morning, clean shaven, youthful necks in knotted ties, days spent in unknown labors, home again at suppertime to take a critical glance at the evening meal and to shake out the newspaper, hold it up between themselves and the muddle of the kithen, the ailments and emotions, the babies. What a lot they had to learn so quickly: How to kowtow to bosses and how to manage wives. How to be authoritative about mortgages, retaining walls, lawn grass, drains, politics, as well as about the jobs that would have to maintain their families for the next quarter of a century. It was the women, then, who could slip back—during the daytime hours, and always allowing for the stunning responsibility that had been landed on them, in the matter of the children—into a kind of second adolescence. A lightening of spirits when the husbands departed. Dreamy rebellion, subversive get-togethers, laughing fits that were a throwback to high school…when he wasn’t there.