Returning to the farm in Canaan for the summer after graduation from college in June 1956 was not my preferred choice. I was ready finally to leave home, and in retrospect that is probably what I should have done. I had long envied Olaf his independence. He stopped coming home summers as soon as he got to college in 1951, working a variety of jobs, including one driving a Howard Johnson ice cream truck in Boston. Olaf, however, was not dependent on Mama for his tuition. The arrangement I reached with Mama in June 1956 was that she would pay my tuition for graduate school at Columbia in the fall in return for my working on the farm all summer. Having no real insight into her financial affairs, which she divulged to no one, I did not realize that the farm was already in serious financial difficulties at the time.
The summer of 1956 sticks in my memory as a season of grueling farm work. In this our third summer on the farm Tempy and I, with help from Mama, did all of the milking, cleaning, and haying, including mowing the grass, raking and baling it with our machinery, and — with some outside help — transporting the hay back to the barn, transferring it to the hayloft via conveyor belt, and stacking the bales in the loft. I also remember the summer of 1956 for listening, not without self-reproach for giving in to such a low-brow temptation, to the music of Elvis Presley, especially, “Don’t Be Cruel.” I had never heard such immediacy and undisguised sensuality in song before and would not have a similar experience (without the same self-reproach, to be sure) until hearing Bob Dylan for the first time five years later.
In September, after an end-of-the-summer visit to the Russells in Washington, DC, I was off to New York for graduate school in the German Department at Columbia. However, it was not a career decision to which I was sufficiently committed. I came to exactly that conclusion in a long introspective entry in my journal on October 23rd 1956:
Why am I in grad school? At the end of my senior year I had intended to either get a job or go into the army. Grad school was out of the question because I had not gotten a fellowship (for which I forced myself to apply). But when Mama offered to help me through grad school over the phone just before graduation, I jumped at it. I had been completely unsuccessful in trying to get a job, and I began to think that only by continuing my education would I be putting my time to good use. It is important, too, that at the time I accepted Mama’s offer, studying intensely was far behind me. The last month and a half of college was a time of almost continuous loafing, and I felt very much like returning to studying. By the same token, I felt very cool toward grad school during the early spring, when I was writing my thesis and preparing for orals. Another strong incentive toward grad school was the urge to see another university and try my luck at getting good marks there. In a sense, then, I felt I would be missing out on something, I would not be taking full advantage of my training, if I did not go to grad school. There was no impelling drive, no certain goal – it is not because I want to teach or do literary criticism that I went to grad school, but because it seemed silly not to when the way was so easy.
For roughly the same reason I went into German literature. At Harvard I was genuinely interested when I started out, but my interest tended to decrease rather than increase. Nevertheless, it was the field that I was most prepared to do successful graduate work in, and I certainly preferred literature to history. Now I feel a much greater urge to study English and American literature, but I doubt whether I would have been accepted as a graduate student in these fields anyway. It is likewise doubtful whether I would have been accepted as a comparative literature student at Harvard, which is of course the field I would have preferred. Columbia , on the other hand, did not have a comp. lit. department as such anyway. German was the only choice.
I definitely preferred Columbia over Harvard even though I know the department here to be less astute, and the whole university much less so. To spend a year in the city was one of the main side ambitions of going to grad school. But I am somewhat disillusioned about all of it so far. The city has hardly been exciting, the work has been, as usual, monotonous and unstimulating, and worst of all, I feel tired of and out of sorts with grad school altogether. My financial straits intensify this feeling, but they are not the cause. I simply do not enjoy this sort of thing, even though it comes fairly easily. The less work I have to do, the more I like it. The prospect of spending several more years at this purely mechanical way of life is discouraging. And yet at a distance it had seemed so appealing, and probably will again. At this point it seems almost certain that I will not continue for a PhD.
On the other hand, if I’m going to teach as a career, I would like to do so on as advanced a level as possible. If I teach in a secondary school, which I might not mind – although I certainly won’t feel myself psychologically ready for that for several years – I would definitely want to teach history, or English – but not a language. Right now I lean more and more toward writing as a career, but I don’t dare make a serious start of it.
Two weeks later the presidential election brought back memories of election eve at Harvard four years before. On November 6th, 1956, I wrote an entry in my journal, which, though entirely self-absorbed, says something about the “strait-jacketed fifties” as well:
Election day evening! What I remember most about election evening four years ago is my acute consciousness at the time that by the next presidential election I would be graduated from Harvard and well-launched on a career. It seemed a huge, hardly fathomable thought at the time. I remember thinking, yes, in four years I will be somewhere. And at the same time I thought, how short is the time and how aware one has to be of every moment in order to get the most out of it. I spent that evening in Sy’s room, playing cards, drinking beer, doing nothing, and wishing and pretending I were doing something. A few things stick out – Sy disowning New Jersey [which went for Eisenhower], the burning of the Stevenson poster, Sy’s Spanish exam in the morning, Vern and Paul Steveken for Ike. Sy put away his big Stevenson button for ’56. This seemed to me funny and absurd. ’56 seemed like an inconceivable distance, not so much because of the time, but because so much had to transpire before then. How could one logically grasp the existence in the bureau drawer of the Stevenson button, quietly waiting, while four years at Harvard passed? One has the same feeling sometimes when one goes to bed before a big event the next day and simply cannot conceive of the same time tomorrow night when it would all be over. So much will have changed!
And how little actually has changed. Some education, a few more concepts, meeting Paul (probably the most important item) – but in the end the same listless, restive, frustrated feeling, only more so, because on a wider scale, and because older. Then I could find relief in the thought of being in the first year of college with so much more to come, with ’56 as a glorious goal, even though not really enjoying the present. Now relief is not so readily available in thoughts of the future, and present activity. At that time I had never had a real “date,” feeling insufficient and looking again to the next few years to correct this. Well, now where am I? I have met many girls, I can conduct myself easily with them, and I am conscious of being attractive enough. But still the same trouble: I felt myself attractive enough then too, but – and not despite it, but because of it – I felt incapable of “handling” a girl I liked, although I intensely desired it. I felt myself unable to carry out the expected things as expected. I am beyond the original stage now, but that same actual feeling is more deeply entrenched now. I have only kissed one girl, and that was in no way stimulating. I have felt incapable of kissing a girl, even though (or in fact because) she was expecting it, prepared for it, ready to enjoy it – that is the main reason for the Madge failure. And yet I can intensely desire to kiss a girl at the same time that I consciously decide I can’t.
Four years later, then, I have the same trouble. I have the objective – Nancy and Nicki – and still that gnawing feeling of insufficiency. Not exactly that, though, because I know that I would suffice, if I could only bring myself to act. Inertia, it is, the more frustrating because of the over-zealous imagination which so urgently wants me to act. All it takes is an act of will, Paul said. True, but what does it take to take this act of will? I do so much better in unusual situations, when nothing is expected, when things are not “done” in a certain way. I can’t get close to girls because I continually think of it as playing out a dating pattern. There is something delicious in having a date, because you are sure of her for a while, but also something crushing and stagnating because flirtation isn’t possible, real inter-probing, penetration, because there are certain things one does, period. And I can’t understand how a good-night kiss could ever be natural.
My personality has not changed, though a few things have happened. The remedy was as clear then as now, and still I have not cured myself. All one has to fear is fear itself – this is true not only of politics. The line is pointed, but how to go about it? And so off to Betsy’s.
One of the attractions of moving to New York was that my sister Betsy lived there, in an apartment on West 86th Street (later on W 87th), as I recall, and I often went to her place for supper. We would polish off a loaf of fresh-baked Jewish rye with honey before even sitting down to supper! Betsy was finishing her studies at Barnard, financing her education entirely on her own, as Mama refused to provide any support after her marriage to David Rothenberg. Unfortunately, their marriage was now breaking down. David moved out that fall and got a place of his own, although he maintained friendly relations both with Betsy and me. Both Betsy and David began dating other people, and it seemed only a question of time before they would get divorced. Yet I managed to keep on good terms with David, who at one point called me the closest male friend he had at that time. Perhaps that was because I often defended him to Betsy, not necessarily because I thought he was right, but because he needed defense so badly. David was thoroughly disillusioned with marriage. “When you’re married you’re typed,” he told me; “you become the Rothenbergs – a unit – you’re not people anymore. Marriage is the most lonely institution.” Then he compared his situation to mine:
Life is really interesting. I never had a home, my parents never liked me – they told me that they would have had an abortion if it hadn’t been too late, and that’s why I’m a roamer, I have the option to pick and take whatever pleases me, and to reject and avoid what doesn’t. I think you’re kind of in the same boat. You had a home, but I think you were always kept at arm’s length. We have no roots, no compulsion to do a certain thing, nothing to fall back on. It can be both a handicap and an advantage.
Meanwhile, I was losing ever more interest in my studies, while at the same time indulging a hopeless infatuation with a pretty Italian-American girl by the name of Nicole (Nicki), who worked in the comptroller’s office and delivered the monthly pay checks to the Columbia Business School, where I held a part-time job. Betsy made fun of me for my completely fantasized romance and sexual naiveté, and I was envious (and critical) of her for the very real nature of her romantic relationships. The most telling barb she directed at me (as recorded in my journal) was, “Live a little, Lodi! You’ll learn something.” That struck home. Here I was at Columbia graduate school with a Harvard degree and had never even had sex with a woman, beyond the permissible boundaries of “petting.” In college, Paul and I were very aware that we were the last generation to be so “up-tight” (a term that would not enter the general vocabulary until the sixties) about sex. We very much regretted not living in an age in which sexual intercourse would become as routine as kissing a girl goodnight – an age we felt sure could not be far off, but would come too late for us.
Much of my social life in New York took place in the Lion’s Den, the student lounge on the Columbia campus, where a diverse group of Betsy’s friends gathered every day. More and more, however, as the semester wore on, the locus of our get-togethers shifted to the West End Bar on Broadway. This was the scene of some heavy drinking on my part over the course of the next few months as I recklessly plunged into “real life” after sixteen years of “book learning.” One evening at about midnight the bartender paid me a dubious compliment: “We opened two barrels of beer tonight – one for you, and one for the rest of our customers.” Trying to account for my excessive drinking in my journal, I blamed it on my hyper-nervousness, noting that “my stomach leaves me in perfect peace when I’m drunk.” I did meet some interesting people there, including the Juillard student Albert Fine (1932-1987), to whom I gave the only copy of my Beethoven paper to read at his request, but unfortunately I never got it back.
The effects of my dissipation soon became apparent in my academic performance and in my attitude toward school. In my journal entry for January 3rd, 1957, I tried to sort out my future plans:
My present turmoil is on what to do next term. Whether to ask Mama for money to finish, which I know she would provide – although it would be an immense chore to get it? I feel several conflicting sentiments. One, of course, to finish and make the year worth it, and be relatively secure. The other, to get completely away from studying, to work, make money, have an apartment, live better, have leisure. Lesser, but guiding sentiments: not to ask Mama, to, in effect, declare independence – despite the fact that I know to continue school would be safest, and most worthwhile not to leave Columbia, to pursue the Nicki disease to its end, rather than escape. To take Mark Van Doren’s course. To try for the Information Service, which wants MA’s. To be here in the spring. But I must face the fact that I hate to study, that I have not enjoyed any of my courses this fall, that I have befriended no professor, that I have not once visited Deutsches Haus, that I am, in fact, languishing and floating.
On what criteria to decide? Mere personal preference won’t suffice, because it is ambiguous and nebulous. I don’t know what I prefer, quite bluntly, and it is as much this as anything that I have to find out. It is not a question of deciding what is best for me, only insofar as it influences my wishes, desires, ambitions.
I also had an all-too-ready rationale for not pursuing what I claimed to be my strongest ambition:
I have a loathing for the second-rate, the mediocre – that is one reason why I don’t start writing seriously. Only when “second-ratism” is inherent in the thing to be done itself, and the very best execution cannot make it first-rate – as for instance the work at the Busy School, or any work I might get now – is it tolerable. Writing is intrinsically first-rate, it requires the finest in talent and skill.
And so I looked for a job, with no particular field in mind and no further aim than to make some money. Money alone was not the object, however. Otherwise I would have applied for one of the many executive trainee positions that filled the classified ads every day. But I knew that I didn’t want to go into the corporate world as a career. On January 4th I wrote:
Tomorrow I have an interview for a job, which was advertised in the Saturday Review. It is apparently a “remedial reading” teaching job, at different prep schools in the east. I was, of course, wary and unsure immediately on hearing that it was a teaching job, for which I feel myself so inadequate. But I’ve made up my mind to muster as much interest and enthusiasm for it as I can. As Mrs. Lister [a secretary at the Business School] said about her new job, it will do a lot of good even if nothing comes of it.
Two days later I added:
My interview for a job went fairly well. The salary offered is low enough to give me a good chance. The fact that he gave me the only copy of the textbook to read and asked me to come back next week is encouraging. If I get it, I think I will do it. To tear myself away with spring coming is going to mean a few depressed, regretful hours. And to miss Mark Van Doren’s poetry course too.
The job, in fact, was to teach “speed reading,” a growing fashion that was destined to generate a lot of profits for proliferating self-styled “developmental reading firms” in the next decade or so. The most famous and financially successful of these would be Evelyn Woods’s mass discount speed-reading program before it exhausted the market and faded away in the late 1960s. “Speed reading” caught the public mood in an expanding economy deluged by printed materials in the late 1950s as schools and businesses sought to gain a competitive advantage by equipping their students and executives with time-saving skills. My employer, Ken Baldridge, then in his late 30s, was one of the pioneers of this field and had written the only existing textbook on how to increase one’s reading speed without sacrificing comprehension. Ken was a dynamic entrepreneurial type who insisted with messianic fervor that improving reading skills was an essential key to a successful professional or business career. When I met him in early 1957 he was starting his own firm, Baldridge Reading Services. His idea was to offer six- to eight-week “developmental reading” courses by trained specialists at school sites using the latest technological devices, including mechanical “flashers” that would supposedly train students to read in phrases rather than word-by-word, and “reading pacers,” screens that descended the page at adjustable speeds to force the reader to read faster. Ken envisioned a time when a certificate of having completed such a course would become a prerequisite for college admission. His program was aimed toward private college preparatory schools, the only secondary schools with a clientele that could afford the at that time rather expensive rate of $100 per student for the 30-hour course. Classes were to be kept small to ensure individual attention. I was to become Ken’s first employee in a business destined to grow rapidly over the next several months. As an Ivy League graduate with an east-coast accent (which earned me Ken’s sobriquet, “the voice”), I fulfilled the major qualifications Ken was looking for. My skepticism about the need for or value of “speed reading” was no impediment at all. I soon discovered that we could safely guarantee to double a student’s reading speed. Making a conscious effort to read as fast as one can is all that is required to enable average readers to significantly increase their reading rates. The only real challenge we faced was to convert such deliberate effort into a lasting habit. In that sense the courses we offered were part of a widespread trend toward the kind of motivational training that came into its own in the economic boom years of the late 1950s and the 1960s.
Ken started his business with his young wife Dusty from his home in Ossining, NY, a few miles north of the city, although he used a Pleasantville address on his business letterhead, perhaps because Ossining was too well known as the home of the notorious Sing Sing penitentiary. Later that spring he acquired an old residential building at 47 Arch Street in Greenwich, Connecticut, and converted it into the Baldridge Reading Services business office. Meanwhile, my Harvard classmate Dick Shader, who was attending medical school at NYU, invited me to share his two-room apartment on Charles Street in Greenwich Village while I was in New York between my private school assignments. This enabled me to avoid rush-hour traffic by reversing the usual commuting pattern: rather than driving from the suburbs to work in the city like most people did, I had an easy drive in the northbound lanes from the city to my work in Greenwich and an equally easy return to the city in the afternoon. That spring I bought my first real car. I had briefly owned a miniature Crosley with a 2-cycled engine in college. It had died on the road on my way home for Thanksgiving vacation in 1954 when a piston rammed through a cylinder head with a terrifying bang. The car that I bought in 1957 was a fairly late-model Oldsmobile, but with around 100,000 miles, most of them put on by the dishonest dealer from whom I bought the car. The carburetor needed repeated repairs. Dick Shader expressed puzzlement at my recurring mechanical troubles. “Humans are unreliable and unpredictable,” he said; “machines are not.” This seemed like a revelation to me. “Mechanically challenged” as I was (in today’s lingo), I had always thought of machines as inherently unreliable. The notion that with proper care and attention they could actually be more dependable than people was a novelty to me.
Dick Shader also introduced me to the guitar, which I learned well enough to accompany the folk songs that I picked up from Weavers records or Pete Seeger’s well-worn print collections. Folk-singing was the typical mode of expression of mildly alienated youth in the conformist 1950s, combining a yearning for authenticity with a sense of community (the appeal of the sing-along) and an unabashed sentimentality with mostly unfocused social protest. It was not yet the personal, political, and highly creative art form that it was to become under the influence of Bob Dylan and the social liberation movements of the 1960s. It did not occur to me that I should at least try to write my own songs. That would presume that I could improve on the standards and traditions of the past.
My first assignment as a “developmental reading” instructor was at St. George’s School in Newport, Rhode Island, in April and May 1957. Because Ken had so many contract proposals to prospective client schools to complete, we didn’t leave Ossining until about midnight, driving through the night and getting about two hours of sleep at a motel in Newport before meeting our appointment for breakfast with the headmaster at 8 a.m. The developmental reading course at St. George’s was a great success. The work was easy, students and faculty were congenial, and my living quarters in one of the dorms were comfortable and private.
One of the teachers at St. George’s, Chip Ludlow, who went on to a long career at Kent School (where he became one of my daughter’s teachers in the 1980s), told me he would not want to trade places with me, because by spending only six to eight weeks at any one school I never got to see my students develop over the years, but this lack of real responsibility for their intellectual growth was one of the attractions of my job to me at that time. My favorite activity after classes was to ogle the mansions on Ocean Drive, especially one that was open to the elements and in disrepair, with all the furnishings still in place from the time it had been abandoned many years earlier. I used the weekends to visit Paul and Sy in Boston or to meet up with Tempy, who was completing his freshman year at UConn. What I did not do was use my plentiful leisure hours in any literarily productive way, despite my intention to start some serious writing that spring.
There was even more time to waste on my second assignment, at Germantown Academy in Philadelphia in June and July 1957. I had only two morning classes and the rest of the day to myself. Ken had asked me to write a training manual for the rapidly growing number of new Reading Services instructors in my extra time, but this took only a minimum of effort. The rest of the time I lay, naked and sweating, on my bed on one of the top floors of the YMCA building where I was housed, listening to music or baseball games on the radio. The heat in July was intense, and the highlight of my day was to have supper in an air-conditioned cafeteria. I also did a lot of walking through the city, hitting all the historic Philadelphia landmarks. An entry in my journal on the 4th of July expressed my mood at the time:
My life in Germantown has been a do-nothing one, and yet I’ve enjoyed it. I like being able to loaf. One gets sick of loafing, but one gets sicker if one doesn’t have the privilege of choosing to loaf. Of course, I’m dissatisfied that I don’t have interesting things to do, people to see, but one can live happily for a long time in a world where things are “possible”. In a very disciplined kind of life there are no such possibilities. Much of the pleasure I currently get out of life is anticipating – and dreaming – but it is pleasure, nevertheless.
On weekends I always returned to New York, but I didn’t put my time to any better use. Here is my entry on a day at the beach on June 13th:
Spent the afternoon and evening alone at Coney Island, doing nothing but looking, and eating disgusting food. I had a long conversation with a drunk , a Joe Ryan from Boston. I mentioned I had been in Boston, and he asked if I had gone to Harvard. “You look like a Harvard man, but you need a shave.” He was perfectly aware of his alcoholism. He brandished an A.A. card, citing his intention to sit in on a session that very evening. Like most drunks he was extremely friendly, voluble, with a strong leaning toward humor, very much like Danny [Ashman]: a “life is just a bowl of cherries” attitude which his very actions – his drunkenness – denied. He had a little money from his mother, and he was extremely generous with it, tipping a shoe-shine boy heavily and giving it to urchins. I tried to sound him out on why he drank. He was only 38, but looked like 48, with grey hair. He had been married in 1942 to a grand-niece of a cardinal. He was divorced in ’49. He showed me the pictures of his two daughters. His brothers were “upstanding” and successful. A man like that will do anything for his liquor; he is weak as a child and pliable and pathetic.
One place I rarely went that summer or fall was home to Canaan. I did feel guilty when I heard that Tempy had assured Mama that I was coming on a particular weekend because I had said so: “If he said he will come, he will come.” My guilt was for undermining Tempy’s trust in my word. He unintentionally paid me back that fall when I drove from Newport (where I was doing a second six-week stint at St. George’s) to Storrs to surprise him one Saturday only to find that he had left for Canaan shortly before. Mama said that Tempy had been strongly affected by the breakup of our family when all of his siblings went their separate ways. Olaf was now in the army, stationed at the biological warfare lab at Fort Detrick in Maryland, where I visited him in the spring of 1958, shortly after the birth of his first son, John.
John Sleighter Stackelberg, 1959
That year, 1957 to 1958, I formed a strong attachment to Carole Seversen, recently hired as a co-worker at Baldridge Reading Services (BRS). Carole was under some pressure from her mother to get married, as were many young women at that time. Ken later told me that when he first interviewed her she said she’d gone to a coed college, but “nothing happened.” I was not in the least bit ready to get married. This was a function of my own personal immaturity, but also a reflection of the pre-feminist culture of the 1950s, which extolled marriage and child-rearing for young women and thus provided, at least indirectly, an inducement for young men to try to escape the ever-threatening (but always available) “marriage trap” (well-captured in John Updike’s Run, Rabbit, Run). Although it was rarely openly acknowledged, the sexual prudery of the 1950s also bred a subculture among young males that esteemed bedding as many women as possible without (or before) getting “trapped.” In college we regarded with considerable awe and envy (and some incredulity) those of our classmates who notched sexual conquests without taking on any reciprocal obligations. Paul, Sy, and I actually made a pact to buy dinner for the first of us who lost his virginity (without cheating, i.e., without the services of a prostitute), although none of us ever claimed the prize, and it remained a mystery who of us won that particular contest.
Eventually I paid the price for my refusal to make more than an emotional commitment to my relationship with Carole. In Los Angeles, where I had gone to open a California office for BRS in April 1958, hoping and expecting that Carole would eventually follow, I received a “Dear John” letter informing me of her forthcoming marriage to a former boy friend she had been stringing along for several years. She also left me in no doubt that nothing I could now do would change her mind (although I was strongly tempted for weeks, even months, to put that postulate to the test). Not for the last time in my life the moment of loss became the moment of truth.
Writing about the experience in my journal helped me to overcome the pain:
On my 23rd birthday [May 8th, 1958], a brief review of the Carole episode, which in the past two weeks has robbed me of all serenity: she had early become stereotyped in my mind as a girl I would “play” with, but never marry. During the past eight months we have gone through many phases of intimate courtship together, and most of the time I had the feeling, “God, this is fun, but how I wish it was ‘for real’.” That it could be ‘for real’ never once seriously occurred to me. And I heeded none of the danger signs: the fact that I missed her inordinately, the fact that I invariably enjoyed being with her. Toward the end, as it now appears in retrospect, this stereotype of a girl at my beck and call whom I would not want to marry, had stuck so fast, that I was completely oblivious to the fact that I had fallen in love. My whole last week and a half in Greenwich was scheduled around Carole, so to speak; I tried to see her at every possible opportunity, I dreaded any activity that took me away from her – and yet I never faced the apparent fact that I loved her very much. This then was one of those affairs where the torture comes later, the torture of chances missed. In the beginning I had decided she was not the girl for me, a) because I was not strongly attracted to her physically, b) because of her provincial, small-town, sorority girl talk and ways. In the end there was no girl to whom I felt more attracted physically, whom I would rather kiss or sleep with; or whose affectionate ways and voluble small talk about this and that, but mostly nothing, were more lovable or dearer to me. But I was blind to it. I just took it and enjoyed myself and warmed myself on her, and gave never a thought to the future. I took her too much for granted, and while I was enjoying her most I lost her, and I didn’t realize that either, until it was too late.
Ken, who of course saw the relationship from an entirely different vantage point, later annoyed me by attributing my infatuation to “the desire for a mate, and Carole was the nearest object.” But my annoyance probably stemmed from the truth of this remark, and also of his well-meaning admonition: “In marriage nothing can be contrived. All the façades come down.”
The desultory dissipation that had begun while I was still at Columbia but grew worse in the course of 1957 (though limited to occasional heavy drinking and smoking cigarettes) eventually took its toll on my health. In January 1958, after spending a couple of nights in the damp unfinished basement at 47 Arch Street in Greenwich rather than returning to the city (thus gaining a couple of hours that would otherwise have been spent driving back and forth), I came down with the flu, which rapidly turned to life-threatening pneumonia. I remember my disappointment at having to turn down Dick Shader’s invitation to join him on a blind double date with all its hidden promise. It remained in my imagination one of those turning points when my life might have taken an entirely different turn, if fate had not arbitrarily intervened. Instead I ended up in the hospital in Ossining for two weeks. On the phone Mama asked my physician point blank whether I was going to die, but he would only say that I hadn’t yet responded to medication. When Olaf called Mama on her birthday, January 20th, to report that his son John had been born that same day, he was stunned to hear from her that I was “in the hospital dying.” Although I felt very sick, I was not aware of how serious my condition was, and the thought that I might die never entered my mind. Only later did I realize that I had been given a wholly unmerited second chance at life. Betsy, Uncle Nick, and my first cousin Ginny Biddle came to visit me in the hospital. The Baldridges greatly assisted in my recovery by welcoming me into their home after my hospital stay and by continuing to pay my weekly salary even when I was unable to work, which they were under no legal obligation to do. Mama told me the Biddles were quite impressed that I was so well-liked by my employers. I had no health insurance, of course, but because of the free room and board I was able to pay off the entire $800 hospital bill before the end of my next school assignment, at Wyoming Seminary in Kingston, Pennsylvania, in February and March of that year.
In early April I left the east coast for California to open a Los Angeles office for our expanding firm. My last phone call to Mama left me reassured that things were going as usual on the farm. She certainly hadn’t lost her sense of humor, as recorded in my journal:
Mama has a new hired man – “the shouter.” He shouts at the cows and lives in the little house, which to him is a castle despite no toilet and no water. “He’s never had them anyway.” He wages an unending battle against the manure, but he doesn’t like it. It’s “too shitty.”
Mama, who had never been west of the Mississippi, said she would love to accompany me just to see the west (her father was born in Prescott, AZ, and her grandfather had been a career military officer stationed mostly in Indian country in Wyoming), but of course she could not get away. I left Greenwich early in the morning in a state of youthful euphoria, intending to drive the entire way. My Oldsmobile did not let me down. Driving sixteen to eighteen hours a day, and sleeping in my car by the side of the road in those pre-interstate days, I reached Phoenix, AZ, via venerable Route 66 in the early afternoon on the fourth day. Here I had an appointment to try to sell our reading program to the head of a private school, before proceeding on to LA and a new phase of my life the following day.