Farm and Pharmacy
Paul's parents lived in Gary, but his earliest years, from seventeen months to five or six years, were divided equally between living at home and living on a farm with a couple who behaved as foster parents.
In November 1916, he went to live with the Gordons, whom he came to know as Aunt Frieda and Uncle Sam, on their 100-acre farm between Valparaiso and Hobart. They were family friends his parents had met at the funeral of a produce buyer.12 Later in life he spoke of his resentment about being abandoned by his parents in this way for reasons he never understood. However, he could also write that aside from the sadness when his parents left after a visit, the years were happy ones. Sixty years later he wrote that his memories of the farm were “fresh and dear to me,”13 regarding the Gordons as many people regard grandparents. It was Aunty Frieda who allowed him, at the age of four, to cut off the long curls that his mother and relatives loved, but that he hated, giving him for the first time a boy's haircut. Of the couple, Frieda was twenty years younger and the one Paul thought the most intellectual. In the longest of his unpublished autobiographies, he described his time on the farm as his “Hoosier idyll,”14 though in another he talked of it more ambiguously as “exile to Arcadia.”15When people hear of these early years they are somewhat aghast. And when I came as an adult to look back on those days it did occur to me
c. Paul compared Dr. Georgi's appearance with the Italian economist Piero Sraffa, whose photograph is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piero_Sraffa. to marvel that all worked out so well. (Freud and Jung would no doubt sneer at this complacent repression.) At the time it all seemed part of the natural order of things. I could remember no time earlier than when I arrived, nursing bottle in hand, and was immediately weaned by disapproving Aunt Frieda.
I learned later it was all a matter of one dollar a day: and that included board, room, and love.16The Gordons had a working farm with, so Paul remembered, ten dairy cows, four horses, hogs, chickens, and fowl. It was in the days before mechanization, indoor plumbing, running water, or electricity, though Paul argued that life there was not that primitive.17 His own life, given that he had few chores to perform, was that of a “gentleman farmer.”18
We had no indoor heating either. A cast iron kitchen stove, stoked by both kindling wood or soft coal, did radiate some warmth and did heat its storage-tank water used for laundering and cooking. In addition, inside the living room below a second floor heat register, was a stove just like those in sixteenth century paintings. It was freezing cold when I threw off my blankets and spread the clothes I would wear over the register above the downstairs stove. No wonder that we wore heavy, scratchy winter underwear and layers of sweaters and coats.
Our main water supply came from the huge windmill that every midwest farm had.... A supplementary hand pump in the kitchen drew up from a cistern soft rain water used to fill the one weekly tub of bath water. If there were five of us in the house, only the lucky first one got clean-clean water to bathe in.. Nor did we have electricity in those pre-Roosevelt New Deal days. Candles, lanterns, and kerosene lamps provided light—inadequate light—so naturally we went to bed early and read only between dawn and dusk. Seven years later my family brought us a one-tube battery radio. Then on the great Thanksgiving weekend we could hear live the big annual Army vs. Navy football match.
We did have a telephone! In fact two phones: the Bell System phone and a local Buckeye or Keystone phone that hardly ever got used. You had to turn a crank to hear and be heard. Each phone was one of a multi-party line; ours was one of an eight-party group. Eavesdropping was fair game.
Each of us could overhear any conversation so that you came to know your neighbors well—maybe too well. And sometimes when you wanted to call a neighbor, your friendly central operator would inform you that she was shopping in Valparaiso.Gasoline tractors had not yet come to pull our ploughs and other farm equipment. Pete and Tom, our sturdy geldings, serviced the buggy for Aunt Frieda. They pulled our various wagons. Never, never did we plough the snow on our gravel roads; that would have made unmovable the sleigh wagons whose wheels had been removed for all of the winter.
Valparaiso, Indiana was a bare five miles from our Wheeler, Indiana [,] township. It was the Porter County seat and shopping center. To get there, Uncle Sam or a hired hand would have to harness up Pete for Aunt Frieda and me. Then it would take hours—not minutes—to get to the town square with its hitching posts at the central square. (As I witnessed the gradual replacement of horse power by gasoline-fueled machinery, every five years the hitching posts would become less and less. Ultimately they disappeared altogether.)
His earliest political memories date from the farm, where the Gordons posted a picture of Warren Harding on the door during his 1920 campaign, and he remembers being there when news of Harding's death came in the summer of 1923. However, his most vivid memories were inevitably of the animals and events on the farm.
I remember Babe the white collie. Pete (who pulled our horse and buggy), Tom (who was one-eyed and we believed had fought in the war), Mollie a gray mare whom I hoped would have colts (not realizing that the horse was on the way out). We used to hitch up for the ride to Wheeler, either through the back fields or over the Pennsy bridge. A much longer trip for a little boy was a buggy ride all the way to Valpo [Valparaiso], or more rarely, to Hobart.... For a small boy, the walk of a quarter of a mile up and down hill to get the mail was an adventure. I remember reading the Prairie Farmer by lamplight, and how cosy the room seemed as the windows became mirrors on account of the dark outside..
In the morning one shivered while dressing over a register that drew a little heat upstairs from the coal-burning stove in the not much used living room. The warm range in the kitchen provided the real heat, both for cooking and living. I recall bringing in kindling wood; but I suppose coal was the main ingredient. I also recall going to the windmill pump to fetch a pail of water. One of the worst traumas of my infancy was when we once changed the pump from automatic windmill to hand pumping. One had to take out a bolt from two holes that held together two adjoining[19] pieces of the piston. I was told to hold the lower part during the maneuver. But it got away from me, and the top of the handpump sank into the well, probably having to be recovered by a professional. I was very ashamed of myself. In the winter, sometimes I was the only child on the farm. Then I had Aunt Frieda's undivided attention. Bliss! One year I must have had scarlet fever and was in quarantine. Through the windows of the El-shaped downstairs I could see others who weren't allowed to come in to visit me. At night I remember the eerie sound of the Pennsy and Nickel Plate train whistles. On summer afternoons the wind in the silver poplar lulled one to sleep. I remember when we built a new cistern near the willow tree that Lester [Uncle Sam's son] had planted.20
He also remembered some of the people he got to know and even claimed to remember some of the conversations he had with them.
Lester was our handsome hero, blond with a touch of red in his hair. He was away at medical school most of the time. But his picture in tuxedo was on the parlor organ. I remember when the organ used to work. It seems to me that Lester learned to chew tobacco one summer; I was too chicken even to try. Do I recall that Lester went with a girl called Alma for a while, someone who lived across the bridge in the general direction of Valpo?
Miss Ruth and Miss Bradley [his teachers] I of course remember.
With their Model T Ford, which carried them to distant places each summer. Actually, my time was before the consolidated school bus.... I promised I would take Aunt Frieda around the world. I never lived up to that promise. I do remember her funeral and that of Uncle Sam. I remember threshing time. The apple tree I used to climb and sit in toward the road. We used to peek at the girls taking their weekly baths in the wash tubs; what a thrill! Even better than watching the bull service the cow.21In the same letter he wrote that the Gordon schoolhouse, built up the road by Uncle Sam, was the first he ever attended, and that he still had a brick from it (it was one room and had privies). However, Miss (Ethel) Ruth, one of his teachers, replied by saying that his memory was wrong. Paul might have played there, but he had never been a pupil. She remembered him clearly, writing,
You were ahead of the other children and I had to give you extra work to keep you busy and not bored. Your mother told me before you started to school, “Don't let him sit with his elbow on his desk and his head in his hand.” But with 40 pupils and 2 grades I just couldn't give you my undivided attention.22
Moreover, his talents were not merely academic. “Don't you remember,” she wrote, “the whole evening's musical program of ‘The Three Bears,' put on by the Wheeler 1st and 2nd graders? You were The Baby Bear, the star of the show and your family and friends came from Gary and Chicago to show their pride in you. You had a number of solos as well as speaking parts.”23 Paul, however, thought that she had confused him with his younger brother, Robert, born in 1922, who went through the same experience.24 Robert, however, went for shorter periods, possibly only for summer vacations, and never felt the same resentment as Paul was later to feel.25
Paul never could explain why his family chose to send him and his brothers to the Gordons.
They were well off, so it was not for financial reasons. His only explanation was that his mother was a career woman who chafed at domestic chores. However, his recollections also contain suggestions that his father's health might not have been perfect. In Frank's youth, whereas his brothers had been accomplished horsemen, he had been sedentary, due possibly to rheumatic fever. However, for all his resentments, Paul could write that “It was all part of a wonderful world” that was “not really gone, because it is so vividly remembered.”The other part of Paul's early childhood was the Gary pharmacy that his family owned until they gave it up in 1923, the year after his younger brother Robert was born. They spent the summer of 1923 in “the Shack” on the Gordons' farm before moving to Chicago. In 1925—26 they lived in Miami Beach, in Florida, losing money when a large hurricane caused the real estate bubble to burst.26 The 1930 Census found them still living in Chicago, along with another relative, Herman Samuelson.27 There, his mother ran a restaurant called Plantation Chicken Barbecue, which Paul found surprising as he did not consider his mother to be a good cook.28 At some point his father fell ill and became virtually an invalid. This peripatetic childhood resulted in Paul's having a pre-uni- versity education involving eight schools. He recalled later that he did not find this a problem—to the contrary, he appreciated the variety it provided.
Education, however, took place at home as well as at school, notably in his father's drugstore. In one of the very few places in which Paul discussed his father, he wrote:
It was exciting for me to own a drug store. You could get free Hershey bars and cherry cokes. I saw the soda fountain come into the American pharmacy and, later, I saw it go out. I was all admiration to see how neatly my father could wrap a bottle of castor oil or a prescription for codeine. (I knew I could never excel in a calling that called for precision folding.) It was fascinating to type on the old Oliver typewriter that was used for prescriptions. Mortar and pestle were in constant use back in those early times when druggists prepared their prescriptions from scratch. Long before the time when the subject of algebra was to come up in Freshman high-school math class, Dad taught me cute tricks for solving simultaneous equations. (8 ounces of alcohol at 700F added to 12 ounces of water at 730F would give a liquid at 720F; and even trickier methods were everyday fare for the practising professionals.) I also can remember the long hours of boredom, during which Norman would read the French novels of Anatole France or pore over a few days, old issue of Le Monde?29^
Thus while it may have been Ethel Ruth, his first-grade teacher in Wheeler, who taught him “to read, write and figure,” a significant element of his mathematics education came at home.30 However, despite his parents' language skills—his father spoke Polish and Russian and could make himself understood in “Croatian, Serbian, Slovenian, Slavonian, Rutterian, Czech, Slovakian, and Lithuanian,” a collection that they lumped together under the label “Slavish,” and his mother had learned Latin and French, as well as Russian, Polish, and Yiddish—Paul resisted learning other languages.31,e Being bookish, he frequented the Carnegie Library in Gary, a magnificent stone building complete with pillars in the classical style, opened in 1912, where he read “old, end-of-the-19th-century popular books.” This education including getting frightened by Alice's changes in height.32 He attributes his failure to notice the impending arrival of his younger brother to being immersed in the world of books. However, though his father did possess a copy of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, Paul never ventured up to that shelf.
Paul would have been conscious of his family's Jewish identity from an early age. Many of those who frequented his father's pharmacy would have been Jews, and the list of names of his contemporaries in high school suggests that many of his school friends were Jewish. Very unusual for their generation, his parents did not practice their family's religion. Jewish ceremonies
d. While his father's pharmacy may not have acquired one earlier, many pharmacies had soda fountains in the nineteenth century.
e. It is not clear what Rutterian refers to.
were not, therefore, part of his upbringing. Until much later in life, when he addressed the topic of anti-Semitism at Harvard and its absence at Chicago, he was virtually silent on the subject. He deduced from the bookshelves that his father was an atheist.