You will be able to prove that you are an expert on the topic of Katharine Graham Personal History after reading this book. Lots of people think that they know enough about Katharine Graham Personal History , but it takes a true expert to know every single detail about the topic. You can become an expert by reading this book! This book has all the information you need to know. If you do not end up feeling like an expert after reading this book, then perhaps you are not actually interested in the topic of Katharine Graham Personal History . That is unfortunate if so, because this book will teach you so much! So much stuff! And it’s all about Katharine Graham Personal History !
In ‘ Katharine Graham Personal History ‘, you will find all the information you need to know about Katharine Graham Personal History . This book is a must read for anyone who is looking to learn more about the subject. The author has done a great job of explaining everything in a clear and concise manner. You will definitely improve your knowledge by reading this book! I love this book. It is one of the most interesting books I have ever read and is one I would recommend to anyone interested in [topic]. The author breaks down the topic into easy to understand sections and teaches you everything you need to know about [topic].
The captivating, inside story of the woman who helmed the Washington Post during one of the most turbulent periods in the history of American media.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography
In this bestselling and widely acclaimed memoir, Katharine Graham, the woman who piloted the Washington Post through the scandals of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, tells her story—one that is extraordinary both for the events it encompasses and for the courage, candor, and dignity of its telling.
Here is the awkward child who grew up amid material wealth and emotional isolation; the young bride who watched her brilliant, charismatic husband—a confidant to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson—plunge into the mental illness that would culminate in his suicide. And here is the widow who shook off her grief and insecurity to take on a president and a pressman’s union as she entered the profane boys’ club of the newspaper business.
As timely now as ever, Personal History is an exemplary record of our history and of the woman who played such a shaping role within them, discovering her own strength and sense of self as she confronted—and mastered—the personal and professional crises of her fascinating life.
Read less
Katharine Graham Personal History PDF Book Details
Product details
ASIN : 0375701044
Publisher : Vintage (February 24, 1998)
Language : English
Paperback : 642 pages
ISBN-10 : 9780375701047
ISBN-13 : 978-0375701047
Item Weight : 1.39 pounds
Dimensions : 5.15 x 1.35 x 8 inches
Best Sellers Rank: #52,362 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
#9 in Book Publishing Industry
#116 in Journalist Biographies
#184 in Communication & Media Studies
Customer Reviews:
758 ratings
About the Author of Katharine Graham Personal History PDF Free Download Book
Editorial Reviews
Review
Riveting, moving . . . a wonderful book. –Nora Ephron, The New York Times Book Review
Disarmingly candid and immensely readable. –Time
Captivating . . . distinguished by a level of
introspection that ought to be, but rarely is, the touchstone of autobiography. –Newsday
From the Inside Flap
Winner of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Biography
An extraordinarily frank, honest, and generous book by one of America’s most famous and admired women, Personal History is, as its title suggests, a book composed of both personal memoir and history.
It is the story of Graham’s parents: the multimillionaire father who left private business and government service to buy and restore the down-and-out Washington Post, and the formidable, self-absorbed mother who was more interested in her political and charity work, and her passionate friendships with men like Thomas Mann and Adlai Stevenson, than in her children.
It is the story of how The Washington Post struggled to succeed — a fascinating and instructive business history as told from the inside (the paper has been run by Graham herself, her father, her husband, and now her son).
It is the story of Phil Graham — Kay’s brilliant, charismatic husband (he clerked for two Supreme Court justices) — whose plunge into manic-depression, betrayal, and eventual suicide is movingly and charitably recounted.
Best of all, it is the story of Kay Graham herself. She was brought up in a family of great wealth, yet she learned and understood nothing about money. She is half-Jewish, yet — incredibly — remained unaware of it for many years.She describes herself as having been naive and awkward, yet intelligent and energetic. She married a man she worshipped, and he fascinated and educated her, and then, in his illness, turned from her and abused her. This destruction of her confidence and happiness is a drama in itself, followed by the even more intense drama of her new life as the head of a great newspaper and a great company, a famous (and even feared) woman in her own right. Hers is a life that came into its own with a vengeance — a success story on every level.
Graham’s book is populated with a cast of fascinating characters, from fifty years of presidents (and their wives), to Steichen, Brancusi, Felix Frankfurter, Warren Buffett (her great advisor and protector), Robert McNamara, George Schultz (her regular tennis partner), and, of course, the great names from the Post: Woodward, Bernstein, and Graham’s editorpartner, Ben Bradlee. She writes of them, and of the most dramatic moments of her stewardship of the Post (including the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, and the pressmen’s strike), with acuity, humor, and good judgment. Her book is about learning by doing, about growing and growing up, about Washington, and about a woman liberated by both circumstance and her own great strengths.
From the Back Cover
Winner of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Biography
An extraordinarily frank, honest, and generous book by one of America’s most famous and admired women, Personal History is, as its title suggests, a book composed of both personal memoir and history.
It is the story of Graham’s parents: the multimillionaire father who left private business and government service to buy and restore the down-and-out Washington Post, and the formidable, self-absorbed mother who was more interested in her political and charity work, and her passionate friendships with men like Thomas Mann and Adlai Stevenson, than in her children.
It is the story of how The Washington Post struggled to succeed — a fascinating and instructive business history as told from the inside (the paper has been run by Graham herself, her father, her husband, and now her son).
It is the story of Phil Graham — Kay’s brilliant, charismatic husband (he clerked for two Supreme Court justices) — whose plunge into manic-depression, betrayal, and eventual suicide is movingly and charitably recounted.
Best of all, it is the story of Kay Graham herself. She was brought up in a family of great wealth, yet she learned and understood nothing about money. She is half-Jewish, yet — incredibly — remained unaware of it for many years.She describes herself as having been naive and awkward, yet intelligent and energetic. She married a man she worshipped, and he fascinated and educated her, and then, in his illness, turned from her and abused her. This destruction of her confidence and happiness is a drama in itself, followed by the even more intense drama of her new life as the head of a great newspaper and a great company, afamous (and even feared) woman in her own right. Hers is a life that came into its own with a vengeance — a success story on every level.
Graham’s book is populated with a cast of fascinating characters, from fifty years of presidents (and their wives), to Steichen, Brancusi, Felix Frankfurter, Warren Buffett (her great advisor and protector), Robert McNamara, George Schultz (her regular tennis partner), and, of course, the great names from the Post: Woodward, Bernstein, and Graham’s editorpartner, Ben Bradlee. She writes of them, and of the most dramatic moments of her stewardship of the Post (including the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, and the pressmen’s strike), with acuity, humor, and good judgment. Her book is about learning by doing, about growing and growing up, about Washington, and about a woman liberated by both circumstance and her own great strengths.
About the Author
Katharine Graham is fondly remembered as the powerful, longtime publisher of the Washington Post. She died in 2001.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
From Chapter One
My parents’ paths first crossed in a museum on 23rd Street in New York. It was Lincoln’s Birthday, 1908. Eugene Meyer, who was thirty-two years old, had been in business for himself for only a few years, but had already made several million dollars. Agnes Ernst, just twenty-one and a recent graduate of Barnard, was strikingly beautiful. She was earning her own living and helping to support her family as well by her free-lance work for a newspaper, the old New York Sun. She was also interested in the art world, which was what brought her to the exhibit of Japanese prints. Both her interests and her work were unusual for a woman in those days.
On his way down to Wall Street, my father, who was driving a Stanley Steamer, one of the earliest automobiles, noticed an acquaintance whom he didn’t especially like. But Edgar Kohler looked frail and dejected and my father felt sorry for him, so he offered him a ride, mentioning that he was going to stop off at a Japanese-print exhibit. Kohler decided to accompany him.
Going into the gallery, they met two friends coming out, who assessed the exhibition this way: There’s a girl walking around who’s better-looking than anything on the walls. Once inside, Kohler and my father immediately spotted her — a tall young woman with fair hair and blue eyes, clearly strong, dynamic, and self-assured. My mother always remembered what she was wearing that day, because she felt that her costume, as she called it, had played a part in her destiny. She must have been quite a sight m her gray tweed suit and small squirrel cap adorned with an eagle feather. My father, on seeing her, said to Kohler, That’s the girl I’m going to marry.
Are you serious? Kohler asked, to which my father responded, I was never more serious in my whole life. Kohler, supposing that they’d never run into her :again, suggested that my father speak to her. No. That would offend her and spoil everything, my father replied. The two men then agreed that whoever subsequently might meet her first would introduce her to the other.
Just a week later, Kohler called my father and said, Guess what happened? You met the girl, was the ready answer. Damn you, I did, Kohler responded. He had been to a party at the home of one of Agnes’s Barnard classmates, where they were giving an amateur performance of The Merry Wido7v in which my mother was playing Count Danilo. When she appeared after the performance out of costume, Kohler realized that she was the girl from the art show. He introduced himself, told her about the pact with my father, and arranged a lunch for the three of them.
My father’s friend had fulfilled his pledge by introducing Eugene and Agnes to each other. On Lincoln’s Birthday in 1910, two years to the day after Eugene had first seen Agnes in the gallery, they were married. When I look back over my long life, if there is one thing that leaps out at me it is the role of luck and chance in our lives. From this particular string of accidental happenings all the rest followed.
My father came from a distinguished Jewish family with roots going back many generations in Alsace-Lorraine, France. It was a family that numbered many rabbis and civic leaders. Jacob Meyer, my great-greatgrandfather, who was awarded the Legion of Honor, had actually been a member of the Sanhedrin, the college of Jewish notables called by Napoleon I in connection with recognizing the rights of Jews as citizens.
My paternal grandfather, named Marc Eugene Meyer, but always called Eugene, was born in 1842 in Strasbourg, the youngest of four children by his father’s second wife. When his father died, his mother was left penniless, and Eugene could stay in school only until the age of fourteen; then, as his siblings had already done, he went to work to help support the family. He first worked for two Blum brothers who owned one store in Alsace and another — improbably — in Donaldsonville, Mississippi, and when one of young Eugene’s bosses said he was going to America, my grandfather decided to go with him. In Paris, on the way, he was introduced by Blum to Alexandre Lazard of the firm of Lazard Freres, who gave him an introduction to their San Francisco partner. Eugene traveled to New York on the fastest boat going, a side-wheeler, for a third-class fare of $110, leaving Europe in September 1859. From New York he took a steamship to Panama, crossed the Isthmus by rail, and then caught another steamer to San Francisco, at that time a city of fifty thousand or so people. He spent two years there, learning English and saving a little money from his job at an auction house, until in 1861 he moved to Los Angeles, where a cousin of the Lazards’ was said to need a clerk for his store. As described by Eugene himself, the town was made up of only three or four thousand inhabitants, mostly foreigners. There were four brick houses — the rest were adobe with roofs that cracked. There were no paved streets or sewers. The water for both drinking and irrigation came from ditches. My grandfather stayed in Los Angeles for the next twenty-two years.
He started as clerk and bookkeeper, living in the general store’s back room. Sometimes he slept on the counter with his gun, to protect the merchandise. As his reputation for reliability and sobriety spread, some of his new friends began leaving money with him, for there were no banks. Within three years, he became a general partner in the store, which came to be known as The City of Paris. Within ten years, he and his brother Constant had taken it over. He also started lending money, became director of a bank and organizer of the Los Angeles Social Club, and helped maintain law and order as a member of the Vigilance Committee. He was an incorporator of the city water system, involved in real estate and mining investments, and doubled as the French consular agent. In 1867, he married the sixteen-year-old Harriet Newmark, whose father, a rabbi, performed the ceremony, following which a sumptuous dinner was served at the couple’s new home — complete with ice cream, something new to Los Angeles.
My father, named Eugene Isaac Meyer after his father and grandfather, was born in 1875, the first boy in the family after three girls, Rosalie, Elise, and Florence. Four more children followed: two daughters, Ruth and Aline; and two sons, Walter and the youngest child, Edgar. Harriet, not as strong as her husband, became a more or less permanent invalid — whether from having eight children by the age of thirty-two under pioneering medical conditions or because there was some depression involved, or both. As a result, my father’s mother-figure in his youth was his sister Rosalie, six years older than he, who left school to help raise her siblings.
These early circumstances help me understand my father’s personality. His father was very strict and not particularly loving, as far as I can tell, and the only real mother-figure was a near-contemporary, sweet and sensitive but overwhelmed by being thrust into a position of authority well before she was ready for it. There couldn’t have been much parental love for all those children, with the father ambitious and driven and no real mother. My father himself was never very good at personal relations of the intimate kind; the feelings were there, but they went unexpressed.
Early in 1884, my father moved with his family back to San Francisco, a city by then of 225,000 with much better educational and medical facilities than Los Angeles could offer the large Meyer family. It was also safer. I remember my father saying of his early days in Los Angeles that everyone carried a Derringer and almost every night someone was shot. But though my grandfather may have been pleased with the move, my father, a young boy of eight, immediately became embattled. He was a loner and a fighter, forced by his family to wear clothes — including a white starched Eton collar — that made him look different. Older boys at school would put the younger ones in a circle, pitting them against each other. The fights would stop only when someone had a nosebleed, and this was usually my poor father. Nonetheless, he was forced to learn to fight to defend himself, all the while receiving severe reprimands from his father for his rough behavior. These encounters toughened him to the point where, when the family moved to Alameda, to improve his mother’s health by removing her from San Francisco’s fog, young Eugene outfought the local bully, who had previously ruled the playground. This victory had the dubious effect of making him the top troublemaker, both at school and at home. He led the younger
children in rebellion against the housekeeper, generally made mischief, and teased the girls, especially harassing poor Rosalie.
Alameda had done my grandmother no good, and it proved too remote to be practical for my grandfather, so after a short time the family moved back to San Francisco. It was the third change of school for my father. After getting hit in the eye by a baseball, he was forbidden to play, on the grounds that it would worry his mother. Football and sailing on a nearby lake had also been forbidden. He was, however, allowed to take fencing lessons, and boxing lessons from Gentleman Jim Corbett, later heavyweight champion of the world, but these too were stopped when a picture appeared in the paper of the lesson with Corbett, who was seeking publicity. He went on having a difficult time in school, and endured being called a sheeny, along with others who were called wops, micks, and chinks.
The family belonged to a Reformed Jewish congregation, and Eugene was instructed in Jewish history, Hebrew, and the meaning of religion, but when it came time for his bar mitzvah, he declined. Asked to declare perfect faith, he said, I believe some of these things, but I don’t believe them all with perfect faith. He was never overtly religious, yet was later involved in Jewish charities, causes, and international issues. He was not a Zionist, however, believing strongly that he was an American citizen first and foremost.
School didn’t interest him, but he read a lot. When he came out third in his grammar-school class, his father reproached him with not being first, largely because he knew the boy wasn’t working, but eventually Eugene developed a true passion for learning, enhanced when his father included him more and more in his business meetings and discussions of politics and high finance.
Like my father, Rosalie became a strong and dominating person. She married Sigmund Stern, and her next-younger sister, Elise, married Sigmund’s brother, Abraham. The Sterns were nephews of Levi Strauss, who had gone to San Francisco at the height of the Gold Rush with heavy denim material for tents to sell to the miners. Either it didn’t sell as tent material or it made better pants, sealed with rivets, but Levi Strauss made his fortune through those pants, and Levi’s eventually became known throughout the world. Because Strauss was a bachelor, the Sterns, who managed his business, inherited the company, which was handed down through Sigmund and Aunt Ro to their daughter, Elise, and her husband, Walter Haas, and eventually to their children and grandchildren.
My grandfather was offered a partnership in Lazard Freres, and although the family hated leaving San Francisco — which was now the home of the oldest two daughters, who after marrying had built two large houses next door to each other — he saw the offer as a fine opportunity. They made the move to New York in 1893. At that time my father was seventeen and had completed his first year of college at the University of California at Berkeley. For the first time he saw the vastness of this country and the awesome size of New York, then a city of three and a half million, with its great luxuries and contrasting slums.
He went to work as a messenger at Lazard with the full expectation that someday he would succeed to his father’s position there. With just three weeks’ notice and only an average recommendation from Berkeley, he crammed for the Yale entrance examination and was accepted, settling down to an excessively grueling schedule. He knew very few people — he was a lonely Jewish boy from the West — so he studied all the time and took extra credits, with an occasional break for a workout in the gym, no doubt both to compensate for the lack of social life and because he was driven to excel. He emerged as a Phi Beta Kappa, and, with his extra credits, skipped his junior year and graduated in two years — nineteenth in a class of 250. He was not yet twenty.
After a brief stint back at Lazard, he went abroad for a year and a half to be apprenticed in banks in Germany, England, and France. He arrived first in Paris, where he worked without pay but was rewarded with a beautiful pearl stickpin, which he wore always, at least in my early childhood memories. He also started investing in the market with $600 his father had given him for not smoking until he was twenty-one. (Years later, my father offered all of us children the same deal, but I believe no one took him up on it, or possibly none of us made it to twenty-one without experimenting with smoking. No doubt the $1,000 he offered us meant a great deal less to us than the $600 did to him.)
My father’s first exercise in adult independence occurred on his return from Europe. His father had groomed him, and certainly expected him, to enter the firm of Lazard. What he found when he returned there was that nothing had changed: his year and a half of learning banking counted for nothing. He was started at $12 a week and increased only incrementally. In addition, he was working for his brother-in-law George Blumenthal — a difficult man, with a big ego and a quick temper, whom he never really liked. Already an extraordinary foreign-exchange banker, Blumenthal later became even more successful as head of Lazard in the United States. He had married my father’s much-loved sister Florence, or Florie, as the family called her.
When I first became aware of the Blumenthals, they lived winters in New York and summers in France or on yachts in the
Mediterranean. Their enormous and elaborate house in New York occupied half a city block and had an indoor tiled swimming pool. Florie brought home immense quantities of French clothes every year, so many that once, when her trunks were brought down from the attic for packing to leave for Paris, one was discovered full of clothes that had never been unpacked from the previous trip. My father once jokingly moaned to George about my mother’s extravagant taste in clothes, exaggeratedly claiming she hardly ever wore the same dress twice. George turned to him and said in all sincerity, Eugene, you don’t expect your wife to wear the same dress twice, do you?
Florie had a perfect figure — one Christmas, instead of cards, they sent out plaster casts of her very delicate foot and ankle. She had only one child, whom George didn’t allow her to nurse lest it spoil her beautiful figure, and she never got over this son’s early death.
In any event, whether it was because of my father’s feelings about George Blumenthal or because of his instinct to go it alone, he began to veer from the path his father had laid out for him. After a variety of adventures and false starts in other fields — he had tried learning law at night, but it bored him — he came upon a book, The Map of Life, by William Edward Hartpole Lecky, that suggested that a man’s life should be planned as a single whole in which each stage would be a prologue to the stage that followed, and he outlined such a plan for himself. The first twenty years were over — they were generally called school. Twenty to forty would be given to growth and experimentation, during which he would earn a competence, marry, and start a family. Forty to sixty would be a time for implementing all that he had learned and done prior to this, which, if feasible, my father wrote, should be devoted to public service. He would retire at sixty to grow old gracefully and help young people.
As he looked around at Lazard and even at his father, he was more than ever convinced of the rightness of his plan for life. The Lazard bureaucracy was hopeless, with older men making all the decisions and little opportunity for a bright young man to make a significant contribution.
The Paris partners controlled the company. He was taking out many young ladies, and there was one in whom he was really interested, Irene Untermeyer, the daughter of the lawyer Samuel Untermeyer. I think this was his only genuine romance before he met my mother. At Lazard, however, he was even now making only $200 a month, and realized — as did Irene’s parents, I’m sure — that he couldn’t support a wife on that.
By this time, the cigarette money had been well invested, and he had $5,000 saved. He parlayed this into $50,000 by investing in railroad stocks and then faced his father with his determination to leave Lazard and start out for himself. It was an emotional moment. His father viewed this decision as the rejection of his lifetime of toil in his son’s behalf. When the younger man went further and told his father that he was going to buy a seat on the stock exchange, his father said he wouldn’t help him, but my father announced that he had accumulated the $50,000 then necessary and could do it without any help. My grandfather said, Eugene, you’ve been gambling, which is how he viewed playing the market.
My father’s first move on his own, quite soon after leaving Lazard, turned out to be trouble: he unknowingly affiliated with a bucket shop — a kind of fraudulent brokerage house. When he discovered the nature of his associates, he left immediately. It was a blow, but now his father stood behind him, stating that he wanted his son to invest his own funds and expected others in the family to do the same. Even Blumenthal did.
After this rocky start, my father withdrew to Palm Beach to think things over, and there he drew up a Plan for Developing a Business. This memo outlined a very simple but high-minded strategy of associating with the best people, acquiring known securities, staying with them, and being constructive, not destructive. Such thinking led him to start his own firm, Eugene Meyer and Company, which opened in 1904, and gradually, he began to make his mark on Wall Street and to do well for himself and his associates. By 1906, he had made several million dollars. At the time he started the firm, it must have been very difficult competing with the larger and better-known houses. In time, however, he came to know the heads of these firms. I always heard him say he had the greatest admiration for E. H. Harriman, father of Averell, and a very dominant figure. I think he felt very small and insecure next to Harriman, Morgan, and the other then-reigning titans, and he was gratified when they started to notice what he was doing. He quoted one of them as saying, Watch that fellow Meyer. He’ll have all the money.
His philosophy of investment involved careful research into companies — the first in-depth economic analysis of its kind. This was typical of his lifelong impulse to get at the facts before making judgments. Eugene Meyer and Company, in fact, had the first research department of any Wall Street house. As time passed, my father became more and more adept at analyzing economic trends. He foresaw panics and violent swings in the market and got out when he reasoned that things were going to go to pieces. Although he made a large fortune, he was also willing to take great risks, and twice he was wiped out, at least by Wall Street standards.
He was very devoted to his family, then and always, and his great wealth allowed him to improve the situation of his parents. The entire Meyer family remained a close but combative one. My father stayed especially close to his sister Ro. In 1906, when the terrible earthquake and fire hit San Francisco, cutting the city off from telephone communication with the outside world, he decided to go out there immediately to see what he could do to help. He boarded a train in New York with a money belt containing $30,000, a small suitcase, and a pistol
Rosalie, Elise, and their families were safe. They and their combined households, numbering twenty-eight, had taken shelter at Ro’s for two days. As the fire approached, they had moved first to the Presidio, then to Golden Gate Park, then to a summer cottage at Fair Oaks that one of them had rented. There my father found them. Ro looked up as he approached and said, Eugene, I knew you’d come.
Quite early on, my father became a collector, with a particular interest in Durer and Whistler etchings, first editions of American manuscripts, and Lincoln letters. He met the sculptor Gutzon Borglum, who was working on a head of Lincoln, and volunteered to buy it and give it to the nation. President Theodore Roosevelt agreed to Borglum’s request to show the bust at the White House before it was placed in the Capitol. My father thus went to Washington for the first time in his life, and met Roosevelt. With great foresight, he wrote to his sister Rosalie that Roosevelt should have worked out a monetary mechanism that can prevent the kind of panics we have lately experienced. I should like myself to come to grips with these problems. But I have no doubt that they will still be with us by the time I am in a position to leave business behind me and follow through on my long-standing plan for some sort of direct participation in the mangement of government affairs.
This was the man who entered the art gallery on that February day in 1908 — a successful businessman, a person interested in the art world, a collector of manuscripts, and a man who was already thinking about pubic economic issues. Although he was wealthy, he was aware of the probems of poverty. He had high values and aspirations, but he was something f a loner, driven, a workaholic. He was very family-oriented, despite complicated relationships with his father and his brother-in-law George Blumenthal He also was fundamentally shy, but at the same time he had a fierce temper. No doubt he must have been bruised by discrimination in college, on Wall Street, and socially, but withal he was strong, brilliant, able, witty, and self-confident.
The young woman Eugene Meyer had seen walking through the gallery had a thirst for the avant-garde of the art world and thought of herself as somewhat bohemian. She, too, was full of determination and self-confidence, but she was, in addition, completely self-absorbed. Born in 1887, in New York City, my mother had roots that were in some ways quite similar to my father’s and in others quite opposite. Their differences made for a complicated relationship.
On her father’s side, my mother came from a long line of Lutheran ministers in Hanover, in North Germany, whose number included, at least in more recent times, not a few black sheep. The Ernst family was handsome, gifted, driven, and, unfortunately, riddled with a tendency toward alcohol addiction. My great-grandfather Karl Ernst was clergyman to the last king of Hanover, but when Hanover was conquered by the Prussians in 1866, he sent his seven sons out of Germany to keep them out of the army. All but one came to America, which is how my maternal grandfather got to New York, where he became a lawyer, and later persuaded Lucy Schmidt, my grandmother, here on a visit, to stay and marry him. She, too, hailed from North Germany, her family, mostly seafaring men and merchants, having lived in a small village near Bremen for more than three centuries.
My mother grew up in a then-small country community, Pelham Heights, just outside New York City, where the young family moved when she was three. Describing the atmosphere in which she was reared as puritanical, auster