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My Life in the Twentieth Century
by A. Stanley Thompson
WASHINGTON, DC
Chapter 5
WASHINGTON, DC
As the time approached for our return to the United States, I found myself anticipating
with pleasure the move to the place which I remembered as free of cockroaches, and
where household equipment worked.. For a short time we lived in a downtown hotel.
From our hotel windows we had a view over the concrete parking lot below, where Norway
rats played and scurryied about their normal business of living in a city rich in
unprotected garbage. We bought a town house at 32 Riggs Place, just off 16th Street.
It appealed to us that we were within easy walking distance of picket lines at the
White House. Our house, at the time we bought it, was in the process of being renovated
by John Gerstenfeld, the son of a Rabbi, who was carrying on a large-scale renewal
project in the area. The house, when finished, was quite elegant. It turned out to
be infested with cockroaches. Our new General Electric dishwasher, electric range,
and clothes washer all needed to be rebuilt. We bought a General Electric television
set, which didn't work, nor did its replacement. The third one worked. Rats chewed
their way through the back door to our "English basement." We stopped their
invasion by covering the bottom sections of all outside doors with metal sheeting.
One day I heard a man swearing at fate outside the basement door of the house next
to ours. He was a city employee whose duty was to respond to citizens' reports of
rat infestations. Somehow he had trapped a dozen or so rats in a steel barrel, but
had upset the barrel when he tried to move it, releasing the rats. So much for my
idea that the United States was the country where mechanical things worked and without
cockroaches. In Turkey we had never experienced fear of violence. We soon found that
Washington in 1967 was not like that. When we told some neighbors about a walk we
took from our house the evening before, the comment was, "Are you crazy?"
A few people with the financial means to do otherwise still chose, for various reasons,
to stay in the inner city. But, as in inner cities everywhere in the United States,
Washington was largely abandoned by the people who could afford to move to the suburbs,
leaving the poverty and violence behind them. Poor people generally hadn't the means
for moving to the suburbs, so that the inner city came to contain a disproportionate
fraction of poor people, most of them black.
THE CITY
We arrived in Washington almost coincident with Martin Luther King's "I have
a dream" speach. We thought that application of our industry and good intentions
would help with the problems we heard about. As residents of Washington, DC, from
1967 until 1976, Barbara and I became aware of the conditions of modern inner-city
life in the United States. We started learning more than we were equipped to handle
about life in cities in the United States. Violence, on all levels from verbal to
physical, was practiced by a small fraction of violent people against the majority
of their fellow citizens. We became conscious of the wailing of sirens at all times
of the day and night. Robert Kennedy was killed, and Martin Luther King, and the
riots came to Washington and other US cities. From our house on Riggs place we could
see the smoke and flames from burning buildings on 14th Street two blocks away, between
us and Howard University. During the hours of darkness we were confined to our house
by a curfew. When the riots came, there were even more sirens. Then we became so
accustomed to sirens that we no longer registered them consciously. We joined the
Adams-Morgan Community Council which was formed to work toward reversal of the continuing
deterioration of Washington's inner city. We rode with busloads of people, black
and white, to City Hall to protest plans to build highways through inner city houses
for poor people and to resist abandment of needed city schools. We joined the "Poor
People's March" to The Mall after taking training in non-violent resistance
to learn the proper crouched position in which to accept being struck with "billy
clubs" with a minimum likelihood of brain damage. Fortunately, with the remarkable
control of the march by its leaders, and commendable police restraint, there was
no violence connected with the march. I joined a housing committee which hoped to
gain financial help to renovate as housing for poor people large and elegant, but
abandoned, houses, some of them along 16th Street, not far from the White House.
Savings and loan institutions had been used by families of crooked real estate operators
to finance false transactions on these houses. A family member would buy a house
at one price, then sell it at a greatly inflated price to another family member,
who received from a family operated savings and loan institution a loan based on
the inflated price. Having received from the lending institutions far more money
than the cash they had invested, the family members walked off with their profits,
abandoning ownership of the properties and the lending institutions to the agency
of the United States Government which had guaranteed the loans. The prices of the
houses were so inflated that no one could justify buying them. Every so often another
of the abandoned and vandalized houses fell to the wrecking ball. Although this whole
scam was revealed in a series of articles in the Washington Post, I am not aware
that anyone ever went to jail, or was punished in any way. And the scam widened to
become a national financial scandal. I am continually amazed that public announcement
of scandal seldom becomes an embarrassment to the perpetrators. The housing committee
which I had joined fell apart because no one could find a way to start on the problem.
Our Area Across the alley from the back of our house was an attractive Mexican restaurant,
named La Fonda. From our house when windows were open we could hear rattling dishes.
Also across the alley on the corner of 17th Street was a liquor shop. At the corner
of our small back yard, a group of men congregated, drinking from bottles contained
in paper bags. In the morning we'd find the bottles neatly lined up for us to place
in our trash can. Before we went off on a summer vacation, we removed our car from
our parking space next to the alley, parked it in front of the house, surreptitiously
packed it with our posessions for the trip, and left, hoping that our departure wouldn't
be noticed. When we returned, as I was putting the car back into its parking place,
I was welcomed by one of the liquor store patrons with the hope that we had had a
good time on our trip. Several times, as we sat in our living room reading, we'd
hear screams from the sidewalk in front of our house. I'd dash out to find an elderly
person who had been thrown down on the sidewalk and robbed. Once I recognized a neighbor,
who appeared to be hurt. The ambulance which responded to Barbara's call was driven
by a black man, and the words written on the side indicated that it was connected
with the Howard University Hospital. My neighbor announced that he wasn't about to
go to any nigger hospital. The driver shrugged his shoulders and drove away. One
day I was sitting on the front steps, resting from some work I had been doing. A
black man stopped on the sidewalk, in front of me, and announced, "I'm so mad
I have to talk with someone. Can I talk with you?" Wondering what would happen
next, I moved over on the steps to make room for him. He told me that, just down
the street, he had seen a quarter on the sidewalk, and reached down to pick it up.
As he bent over he saw a white man, in his basement window, watching him. Then the
white man dashed out on the sidewalk, confronted him, and accused him of leaning
over to snoop into the white man's apartment. Agitated by the confrontation, the
black man had continued up the street until he saw me. In answer to his question,
"why the hell are people like that?," I asked whether he thought the tensions
of living in Washington might bring out the worst in people. Reflecting on that,
he said he guessed perhaps that might have happened to him just now. From there our
conversation turned to many things, including, surprisingly, the vaunted sexual prowess
of black males, which he assured me, based on his own experience, was a myth. Finally,
smiling, he arose, thanked me for talking with him. We shook hands, he left, and
I never saw him again. After about a year, we decided that the Riggs Place house
was inappropriate for us. It was larger than we needed, and too exposed to the roughness
of Washington. It was bought by columnist Nicholas von Hoffman. We bought a cooperative
apartment, three bedrooms and a den, in the Northumberland, a regal old building
with a baronial entry in a then depressed area near New Hampshire Avenue and V Street.
The dean of my department at Howard University commented, "I think you like
to live dangerously." We felt safe behind an entry controlled full time by an
attendant at a desk with an intercom.
HOWARD UNIVERSITY
The campus of Howard University is located in downtown Washington, to the east of
7th Street, and both north and south of U Street, just off an area subject to all
the ills of inner city disintegration, in which the worst riots occurred after Martin
Luther King was assassinated. To get to Howard University, I traversed on foot this
high crime area of the city. Students on campus, along with other residents of the
area, were often the victims of violence, much of which seemed to be violence of
black people against other black people. Barbara and I particularly liked one attractive
new importing store just off the edge of the campus, run by a pleasant black man
who specialized in authentic African art. Twice we visited his store just after it
had been broken into and burglarized. The proprietor was operating partly with money
from the Small Business Administration, a federal government agency. After the second
time, the proprietor informed us that if his store was burglarized again he wouldn't
be able to continue in business, that he was at the end of his financial capability.
Soon after that we found his store closed, and it never reopened.
Faculty When I went to Howard University in 1967, as Professor of Mechanical Engineering,
I joined a small minority of a white Americans on the faculty, but white was not
the only minority. On the engineering faculty was one Afghan and at least one black
man from South America. One faculty member reminded me that it would be difficult
to determine what fraction of the faculty was white American. "Look at me. I'm
as light as you are, but I'm black." Many of the faculty members at Howard University
were outstandingly successful, with recognition for their accomplishments. One engineering
faculty member told me that his father and grandfather also had PhD degrees. He then
told of the time when he had accompanied several other faculty members driving in
an automobile from Howard University to the meeting of an engineering society in
Columbus, Ohio. Because there was at the time no place on the route which provided
accommodations to black people, however educated they might be, they drove non-stop
to Columbus, and back the same way. One of my associates at Howard University was
Al Scipio, who had published outstanding work in a field of study called "Continuum
Mechanics". Before I knew Al, I was familiar with some of his work, which I
admired and found useful. I did not then know he was black. Had I met him elsewhere
I might have thought he was Egyptian. At Howard University Al had the title of "Distinguished
Professor of Engineering Science." While our cabin in Rappahannock County was
still quite rough, Barbara and I invited Al and his wife, Katherine, to visit us
there. On their way they stopped at a small garage and service station in Washington,
Virginia, to buy gasoline. Although they could see people moving about inside the
building, no one came out to serve them, and they had to go elsewhere to fill their
gas tank. Afterward, Al told me that we white people didn't understand black people,
and therefore expected them to be like us. We liked to be way out in the country,
away from other people, whereas black people liked to live in the city, where they
could "sit on the front porch and say ëHello' to the passersby on the sidewalk."
The head of my department was Lou (for Lucius) Walker. Lou was a capable, good humored,
considerate person. Barbara and I enjoyed his company and that of his wife, Dene
(for Oswaldene), who had recently completed dental training and opened her own office.
The Walkers had just bought a house in one of the mostly white suburbs of Washington.
Shortly after they moved in, they awoke in the night to find their car and garage
on fire, the result of arson. Lou told me he thought he might have made a mistake.
He had gone to some lengths to meet and talk with neighbors, and to be friendly.
He wondered whether it might have been better for him and his family to keep to themselves.
They continued to live in the same house, and I heard of no further unfriendly incidents.
Occasionally I ate lunch in the dining room at Howard, in company mostly with my
black faculty associates. I am particularly fond of sweet potato pie which was sometimes
available for dessert. During these lunches I became acquainted with the special
humor which black people practice, some of it at their own expense, some at the the
expense of white people. I remember one which Al Scipio told. Because he had struck
a man, Rastus was hauled before a white judge. The judge said, "Rastus, you
shouldn't have done that." Rastus objected, "He called me a black SOB."
"Still, you shouldn't have hit him." "But Jedge, what would you do
if he called you that?" "Well, I don't think he'd do that; I'm not black,
you see." "But, Jedge, supposin' he called you the kinda SOB you is. Then
what would you do?" For all sorts of occasions, including telling stories, the
black people in association with one-another would slide easily into a characteristic
sub-language developed and used by black people in the United States, referring to
themselves in the derogatory terms by which their white "superiors" had
addressed them, such as "niggah", or "boy." The black children
in the streets spoke regularly in the same sub-language to which my cohorts at Howard
returned among themselves. My beginning students also spoke in this same (to me almost
foreign) language, and sometimes I had difficulty understanding them.
The American Association of University Professors AAUP I had been at Howard for a
year or so when I was asked by some of the faculty members whether I would be willing,
if elected, to be president of the Howard University chapter of the American Association
of University Professors (the AAUP). The AAUP had been helpful to us at Robert College
in resisting the attempt by the US AID program to force us to sign loyalty oaths.
The primary functions of the AAUP are to uphold the concept and practice of academic
freedom, and to arbitrate disputes involving breaches of academic freedom. The AAUP
gained much strength during the McCarthy era defending the beleaguered academic freedom
of university and college teachers. Part of the prestige of the AAUP comes from its
recognition as a fair, conservative organization. I questioned whether it wouldn't
be better for a black person to have the office. When it was proposed that my year
of office be used to prepare a black person to take over the following year, I agreed
and was duly elected. At that time, James Nabritt was President of the University.
I had heard of Dr. Nabritt as an outstanding supporter of racial equality for black
people. One of my first acts as president of the AAUP Chapter was to invite President
Nabritt to address an evening meeting of the members, telling them about University
policies which might affect the activities of AAUP. I was pleased that he accepted
my invitation. I volunteered to drive Dr. Nabritt to the meeting, but was informed
by his secretary that he would come in his university limosine. We advertised the
meeting on Campus, announcing that Dr. Nabritt would be the speaker. Quite a few
members arrived to hear him, as I had hoped would happen. To my consternation, Dr.
Nabritt didn't appear, and no explanation was given for his absence. When I called
his office the next morning his secretary told me that Dr. Nabritt didn't like to
travel around the campus in the evening, and would not accept a repeat of our invitation.
Many of the older members of the faculty and administration, who had themselves once
been fighters for the rights of black people, had now become cautious and conservative,
according to the view of students and some younger members of the faculty. At one
meeting in the University auditorium, I heard students from the audience calling
various of the faculty members on the stage, in their academic gowns, by the name,
"Uncle Tom." The meeting was so disrupted that it was adjourned before
its completion. Once when the students had a grievance with the University which
they wished to discuss with Dr. Nabritt, he was reported to have refused to meet
with them. The students published an article in their paper saying that Dr. Nabritt
was afraid of his students. One day I received a call from the Dean's office suggesting
that I not come to the campus. Some students had taken over the Administration Building,
and the situation was considered dangerous. All classes had been cancelled. I stayed
home. Later I learned that the students had come to the Administration Building to
stage a peaceful protest, with no intention of violence. They were surprised to find
themselves in possession of the building after the whole Administration had moved
out. Many faculty members, both black and white, accepted the student invitation
to enter the building to observe that everything was orderly and controlled. The
building was being cared for. The students were disappointed that there were no officials
to whom they could express their dissatisfactions. Finally members of the Board of
Trustees came and talked with the students and the problems were settled. Partly
as a result of student protest, Dr. Nabritt was replaced as President by Dr. James
Cheek, a wiry, thin, dynamic person. Dr. Cheek changed some aspects of the way the
University operated. He listened to the students. Some of the more conservative members
of the faculty and administration were fired from the University. The Dean of Engineering,
Steve Davis, was removed from his administrative office soon after the arrival of
Dr. Cheek, but remained a professor. He was considered by President Cheek to be too
conservative. Generally, according to AAUP practice, a university is considered free
to appoint or remove anyone from an administrative office at will, if no breach of
academic freedom occurs in the process. In talks with Steve Davis, after he lost
his position as Dean, I suggested that, because he was accepting his "demotion"
as inevitable, he would do well to adapt philosophically to his new status. He had
not suffered financially, he was close to retirement, and he had already had two
heart attacks. The demotion, however, had been too much of a blow to his pride, and
he could not accept it with equanimity. Sometime later, after I had left the University,
he died from another heart attack. At most universities such firings would have been
reviewed by the local chapter of the AAUP, and possibly by the national organization
of AAUP. Black professors, who thought they had been wrongfully treated by Howard
University, preferred to go for redress to the regular courts. In several cases the
courts decided against the University, assigning monetary awards to the faculty members
who had brought suit. I found that, at Howard University the AAUP was considered,
with some good logic, a white man's organization. I discovered that the AAUP office
in Washington, D. C., wasn't desirous of becoming involved with Howard University,
so that, as chapter President, I received little help from them. During the course
of my year as chapter president, it became apparent that no black member wanted the
presidency. Among other reasons was the fear on the part of some black people of
reprisals from the University for actions having to do with academic freedom. It
was also apparent that neither the chapter nor the national AAUP was effective at
Howard University. It was at this time that I came to the conclusion that my being
president of the local chapter of AAUP wasn't appropriate, and I decided not to be
available for reelection. Another white professor accepted the office, and the AAUP
at Howard remained what it had been before, largely a social organization in which
one could safely air one's dissatisfaction with things as they were. The main benefits
to me from having been chapter president came from meeting some interesting people
who were concerned with the concept of academic freedom at Howard. One of these was
Patricia Harris, Professor of Law at Howard, then Dean of the Law School. She had
a problem with the University which she considered a breach of her academic freedom,
but she chose not to use the services of AAUP. Later Professor Harris was made Secretary
of the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. I also talked with "Monty"
(Montague) Cobb, Dean of the School of Medicine. Monty had received his first degree
from Amherst College, several years before I graduated there. Monty also had a problem
which he considered a breach of his academic freedom, which he took successfully
to court for settlement. Barbara and I invited Monty and his wife as guests to our
house for dinner. In return they invited us to the Cosmos Club, in Washington, a
posh establishment which had recently been required to accept black people as members,
but which still refused to accept women, of whatever color.
Students The largest fraction of the undergraduate student body was black American,
many of whom had graduated from the high schools of Washington, D. C. It was estimated
that about ten percent of the student body was then white American. A small fraction
of the engineering students was foreign, some from India, some black Africans, and
a scattering of other nationalities, including a few Turks. The fraction of foreign
students increased during the eight years I taught there, many of the new additions
being from Iran. The Administration claimed that Howard University had the highest
fraction of foreign students of any American University. I found that many of the
new black American students with whom I came in contact had difficulty in writing
a paragraph telling why they wanted to be engineers. Many of these students had come
through the public school system in Washington. Over ninety percent of the school
children in the District of Columbia were black. They came into the school system
with their separate language, largely from families in poverty, and were passed from
one grade to the next, often without ever having absorbed the material to which they
had been exposed. Howard University had a policy of open admission, so these poorly
prepared students could start there, but had no assurance of being able to graduate.
I proposed that I teach a class for entering students who had inadequate preparation
for the work at Howard, in which I would try to teach whatever was necessary to make
up some of the deficiencies. In this class I met students on a basis where I heard
about problems which were outside my experience. One young man, to whom I felt drawn,
had no regular home, but stayed with various relatives for periods of time until
he was thrown out for reasons which seemed to have nothing to do with his behavior.
It seemed more that the people who so kindly supported him while they could, in each
case, fell victim to their own lack of financial resources. He came to class only
sporadically. Trouble seemed to follow him. In one of his classes he was assigned
the task of interviewing doctors at the University hospital to learn why black people
were more susceptible to sickle cell anemia than white people. These mutant sickle
cells supposedly give the person who has them an immunity to malaria, but clog blood
vessels. In the hospital one day, the student found himself suddenly surrounded by
police who frisked him and accused him of being a "peeping Tom" in the
vicinity of the nurses' quarters. When I called the hospital to protest, the hospital
staff admitted that the student had bad treatment, but claimed they didn't have time
to spend on him. I went to the hospital where I found someone able and willing to
clear him of blame. Finally the student disappeared from my class, and I never saw
him again. Occasionally I think of him, and realize that my fate could have been
like his, had I started out in his circumstances and had I not received the help
I needed at various stages. All engineering students graduating from Howard were
practically assured of obtaining jobs, partly because of fair employment practices
enforced on government contractors. Many of the students did succeed in graduating
from the University. A few of them did spectacularly well. I remember one who had
in his first couple of years achieved only minimal performance. Sometime in his junior
year he became motivated toward a goal of achievement. In his senior year, in answer
to an announcement on the bulletin board, he went to an interview for a fellowship.
I did not know ahead of time about his interview. When he returned he told me that
he had been interviewed by someone named "Dr. Keller." He said he hadn't
done well. Later I learned that his interview had been with Edward Teller, and as
a result of the interview he had a substantial stipend for graduate work at Stanford
University.
RELATIVES IN WASHINGTON
An opportunity came while we lived in Washington to learn more about my Scottish
ancestry and to locate living relatives whose grandparents had been part of the Scottish
diaspora. My father had mentioned that William Pirie, his mother's brother, lived
in Washington, DC, and that William had a son, Raymond Pirie, also in Washington.
In 1968, while Barbara and I lived in Washington, I called up Raymond Pirie, who
referred me to his daughter, Alice Kiesel, whose husband, Charlie, had worked with
a construction company, requiring travel all over the world. Now retired, they lived
in Exmore, Virginia, not far from Washington. Alice was working on a genealogy of
the Piries, for which she and Charlie had traveled to Scotland tracing family connections.
Most of my information concerning the genealogy of Pirie relatives came from Alice
Kiesel.
MORE ABOUT Pirie Ancestors
Alice most generously shared with me all she had learned about the family of my grandmother,
Elsie Pirie. Because Alice was working on the Pirie family tree she was pleased to
have my information concerning Elsie's children, grandchildren, great grandchildren,
and great great grandchildren in the United States. I told Alice about George Brodie,
in London, from whom she was able to find Pirie relatives in Canada, the United States,
England, Australia, and New Zealand, with whom she has since been corresponding.
In 1979 Alice invited Barbara and me to her home to meet her visitor from New Zealand,
our newly-discovered second cousin Lex Thomson, a retired school administrator who
lives in Plimmerton. In 1984 and again in 1987 Lex visited us in Eugene. In 1989,
I visited Lex in Plimmerton and her brother, Keith Thomson, an architect, and his
wife, Trudy at their home in Havelock North, New Zealand. Lex Thomson's grandmother,
Isabella Pirie, was Elsie Pirie's sister, eight years younger than Elsie. Isabella
had married a James Thomson in Scotland. Lex told us that, when Isabella moved her
family to New Zealand, her grandfather, James, stayed behind in Scotland. I had wondered
whether this James Thomson could be the same person as the younger brother of my
grandfather (Alexander), also named James Thomson, in which case Lex and I would
have been double second cousins. However, they were two separate James Thomsons,
born two years apart. My grandfather's maternal grandfather, Alexander Willox, listed
as a general labourer, was married to Catharine Robertson. Their daughter, Mary,
was born in 1823. My grandfather's paternal grandfather, William Thomson, listed
as a crofter, was married to Mary Ironside on June 8, 1822. Their son, George Thomson,
was born in 1828 and was fifteen years old when he married Mary Willox on December
18, 1843, eighteen days after the birth of their first son, George, my grandfather's
oldest brother. George was listed as a servant in Balmacassie, an estate in Ellon,
in 1850, as an agricultural laborer in Balmacassie in 1861, as a storekeeper at Harbour
in 1882, and as a harbour laborer in Aberdeen at the time of his death in 1898. Mary
died in 1882. My grandmother's great-great-grandparents are recorded as William Pirie
and Janet Cock Their son, William, was born in 1731 and married Elspet Davidson..
Their son, Alexander Pirie, a laborer, was born in 1764 in Windywalls. On June 25,
1808 Alexander married Isabella Wilson. Their son, my grandmother's father, William
Pirie, was born in 1820 in Old Deer. My grandmother's mother, Isabella Duncan, the
daughter of James Duncan and Elspet Black, was born in 1825 in Petercoulter. William
and Isabella were married on January 17, 1846 in time for my grandmother to be born
on April 3,of the same year. William died at Woodburn, Kinellar on April 24, 1869,
and Isabella on December 18 of the same year. Among my ancestors there appear to
have been no college graduates, no doctors, no lawyers, no politicians, and no lairds.
They appear to have been farmers or laborers managing to survive indentured to the
economic and social system which encompassed them. What they did best was to have
children, not always blessed beforehand with matrimony. My grandmother's father,
William Pirie, and mother, Isabella Duncan, seem from the record that is available
to have been prospering relative to the conditions described above. Through various
censuses, William Pirie is listed in 1846 as a farm servant, in 1851 as an agricultural
labourer, and in 1861 as a farm overseer of Inchgarth Farm Steading in Banchory,
southwest of Aberdeen. I have copies of pictures which Alice and Charlie Kiesel took
of the Pirie house, called Blackburn Cottage, in Kinellar. The family house appears
large, built of granite and with a slate roof, sitting in an area of well-tended
farm fields. I understood from Alice that the house had been divided into four apartments.
If they were relatively comfortable, why didn't the family stay? Why in just one
generation did so many of my Thomson and Pirie ancestors leave Scotland for other
distant parts of the world? What did they achieve by moving, for themselves and their
progeny? I don't know from any family source why my grandmother and grandfather migrated
to the United States, but I think I can make some reasonable conjectures. It would
be pleasing to believe they had moved abroad in a spirit of high adventure, pridefully
taking their clan tartans with them. But if they had been that comfortable, I believe
they would have stayed and enjoyed their status. It seems more likely that, whatever
their current standing in the Scottish economy, there was great danger, with any
change of family status, of falling through an almost non-existent security net into
abject, miserable, and hopeless poverty. For my grandmother I believe the safety
net broke when both her parents died in the same year, and that she and her brothers
and sisters escaped to the United States and elsewhere searching for the means to
live. When Elsie Pirie's parents died in 1869of unknown causes, Elsie was the oldest
child, almost 23 years old, in a family of eight surviving children. The youngest
was nine. Their situation as a family must have been calamitous. It is unlikely that
they would have been welcomed to continue in the house in which they were living
as the children of a deceased estate overseer. I believe they had no alternative
but to scatter to whatever places seemed to promise a chance of survival. I do not
know the date of my grandmother's move to the United States, nor of my grandfather's.
Neither do I know the date of their marriage in the United States. Their oldest son,
my Uncle Alex, was born in 1875, in Vinalhaven, Maine. My grandfather, Alexander
Thompson, and my grandmother's brother, William Pirie, were indentured to the Alexander
MacDonald Field Company, in Aberdeen, Scotland, apparently in their teens, to learn
the business of cutting and shaping granite for buildings and monuments. My grandfather
came as an expert stonecutter, first to Vinalhaven, Maine, and later to Westerly,
Rhode Island. As seems to have been the case with many Scottish immigrants to the
United States, my grandparents apparently were invited and welcomed by friends and
relatives who had come before, and who could inform them of the contrast between
their prospects in coming to America or staying in Scotland. My grandfather's oldest
brother, George, apparently preceeded my grandfather in coming to the United States.
Cousin Ruth Dunning told me that George and his wife, Ellen, are burried in Jordan
Cemetary, in Waterford, Connecticut.
SCOTLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
My grandparents left Scotland about 1870. My historical reading indicates that, as
George Brodie said, many people had been treated badly in Scotland for a long time,
including most of the nineteenth century. I can only conjecture concerning the detailed
involvement of my ancestors with the various difficulties which operated on a national
scale. I do know that some personal events in my grandmother's family must have had
a direct bearing on the decisions of all the members of her family to emigrate to
more favorable circumstances. I have the impression that ordinary people in Scotland
could not own the land on which they lived, vast tracts of which were held by landed
proprietors, called "Lairds," the Scottish version of the English word,
"Lord." Much of the small scale agriculture was carried out on small pieces
of land, called "crofts." The crofters who occupied these enclosures were
tolerated by the landed owners in return for services performed, often of a military
sort, and the payment to the Laird of a fraction of the crops they raised. With the
advance of the industrial revolution and the development of mass produced textiles,
sheep became more valuable to the landowners than people. During the latter half
of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth, the "clearances"
were carried out. The crofters were forced off the land and left to shift for themselves
in whatever way they could. Many moved into the terrible slums of cities. For large
numbers of people the clearances meant emigration from Scotland. A few of the lucky
ones became employees on one of the large estates. Apparently my grandmother's father
was fortunate to become the supervisor of one of the estates. The potato was imported
into Europe in the sixteenth century from South America and eventually became an
essential part of the Irish and Scottish diet. The potato famine in Ireland began
in 1845 when blight (Phytophthora infertans) caused the failure of the potato crop.
This was soon followed by typhus along with the famine. Vast numbers of people died.
Emigration from Ireland was the main escape from death. The population of Ireland
fell in six years from 8,500,000 to 6,550,000. Large numbers of Irish moved to Scotland,
among other destinations, to work for a pittance in the potato crop and in whatever
other work could be found. In many areas of Scotland one fourth of the population
was immigrant Irish. Great increases in population occurred in Aberdeen as in all
other metropolitan areas, while populations in many agricultural areas passed a peak
and then declined. The whole labor market in Scotland was depressed. To become unemployed
in Scotland could not have been a desirable fate. My father had many prejudices,
one of those being toward the Irish. I wonder whether that prejudice might have come
about as an effect of the potato famine on economic conditions in Scotland. Any attempt
to ameliorate Scotland's economic problems was made additionally difficult because
Scotland was managed like a colony from London, so that the Scots had very little
local autonomy. Another of my father's prejudices was toward the English, a prejudice
apparently shared with many other people of Scottish descent, many of them still
living in Scotland. Added to the other woes of working people was the maldistribution
of wealth caused by the industrial revolution, which started in the middle of the
eighteenth century. Scotland developed much heavy industry, which created wealth
for the managerial class, but crowded most of the working people into the filth and
degradation of city slums and mining villages. In the first half of the nineteenth
century particularly, typhus and cholera killed many people in the slums of Scottish
cities. Housing conditions of poor people in Scotland in the first part of the nineteenth
century were unbelievably bad and for many people persisted into the last half of
the century. In the countryside people shared their houses with their animals. A
visitor to one of these houses described a cow urinating in the same room where he
was eating as a guest. The smells were described by visitors as "noisome."
In the cities housing was provided in great multistory structures with granite walls
four feet thick, still a special problem for slum clearance projects. Inside such
a building would be a stairway, used by the occupants as a toilet, leading to perhaps
fifty rooms on the several floors, and generally without windows. No water was piped
into these houses, and no effluent ran out. The smells were of people, not animals.
Children in schools were reported as using the playgrounds as a substitute for non-existent
sanitary facilities. People in Scotland were preyed upon in various ways. It is reported
in A History of Scotland, by Rosalind Mitchison, Methuen & Co. LTD, 1970, that
murder was resorted to to provide cadavers for practice by students at the Edinburgh
College of Surgeons.
MODERN Scotland
On subsequent trips to Great Britain, I learned that one condition I've discussed
hasn't changed. The royal families still own a lot of land. On a 1966 visit, a physicist
friend, Carl Malmstrom, was currently Science Attache to the American Embassy in
London. He and his wife, Kay, invited us to share their apartment at One Eaton Place
(Cousin George commented, "that's a posh address"). We were invited to
dinner with their landlord, who gave us a lecture on the evils of the British land
system. He owned the Eaton Place house, but the land was owned by one of the royal
families to which he paid rent on a long term lease, just as the family in the film,
"Upstairs, Downstairs," was required to do on their Eaton Place house.
As our host waxed eloquent in his attack on the owners of the land, his wife interrupted
with a smile to comment, "You're just jealous, Dear, that you're not on the
other end of the arrangement." Our hosts were obviously not poor. We were told
of their difficulties maintaining a second car in France for their visits there.
They took all of us to their pub, very posh compared with Cousin George's. We visited,
with them, their ancient but elegantly renovated thatched roof cottage in the English
countryside. Our friend Carl, who is quite tall, bumped his head on a low beam. In
an aside to me, he commented, "I'd take a bulldozer to it." Barbara and
I visited Scotland in 1967 on our way back to the United States from Turkey, driving
the new Rover car we had picked up at the factory in Solihull, England. We loved
the bed-and-breakfast arrangement for travel, particularly being invited downstairs
at nine o'clock in the evening for tea. We'd meet the other guests, mostly English,
and talk politics, theirs and ours. Our country was having racial difficulties. They
were more sympathetic than I had expected, apparently because they could see the
same problems developing in England. As we drove across the Scottish border we were
struck with the evidence of border rapine, back and forth between the Scots and English,
over the ages. The picture comes to mind of a cathedral, I don't remember its name,
from which the lead roof had been stolen in one such raid. The roof had never been
replaced, so that the cathedral had long ago become a ruin. Aberdeen is an impressive
city with its predominance of granite buildings. We looked at the abandoned granite
quarry where my grandfather must have worked, a tremendous hole in the ground in
the middle of the city, now partly filled far down with water and closed in for safety
by a protective wire fence. We visited a beautiful, glistening, white beach on the
North Sea, which to me seemed cold and forbidding. Barbara took a small bag of the
sand as a memento for my unappreciative father. A graveyard we explored had lots
of Thompsons and Thomsons and Piries, but we had no information which would have
indicated whether any of them would have been relatives. The beautiful green hills
around Aberdeen looked overgrazed and barren of trees. On our way to Inverness we
went past Balmoral Castle, to me one more symbol of the royal oppression which I
suspect my forebears were desirous of escaping. At Loch Ness we saw a bed- and-breakfast
sign, and stopped to investigate. It seemed to us a delightful place, but some other
people came at about the same time we did. The landlady explained that she was giving
it to us because we had a Rover car. In return I was to discuss with her husband,
as a fellow owner, the merits of Rover cars, as long as he wished. Our host was a
retired English engineer. We did inspect thoroughly both cars, including his explanations
to me of some features I hadn't yet figured out on ours. We toured their elegant
house, facing on Loch Ness. Its coal-fired cast-iron cooking range in the kitchen
was kept going all year to dispel the perpetual chill. We walked along paths through
attractive shrubbery to view the Loch. We saw no monster, though we looked for it.
After dinner and conversation over evening tea, we went to bed, on an electrically
heated mattress cover. Altogether we had a delightful stay on Loch Ness.
MORE RECENT VISITS TO SCOTLAND
In 1988, after Barbara died, I visited briefly in northeastern Scotland with my son,
Steve, and daughter-in-law, Mary, and grandchildren, Lynn, Daniel, and Christopher.
They had invited me to accompany them on their move from Alaska for a sabbatical
at the University of Copenhagen. On the way we had gone to Aberdeen and Ellon to
search for grave markers for the parents of my grandmother and grandfather. Grandson
Jon had decided to stay behind in Edinburgh. Using my memory of Alice Kiesel's instructions,
we found in the cemetary at Blackburn, near Edinburgh, the monument to my grandmother's
parents, William Pirie and Isobel Duncan. Then in Ellon, we found a monument to my
grandfather's grandfather, William Thomson, and my grandfather's mother, Mary Willox.
I would like to go back with more time and more information to look for markers for
more of my grandfather's relatives. Ellon is a delightful town, about 15 miles north
of Aberdeen, with a river flowing through it and past the cemetary. Being just over
the boundary of the legislated greenbelt around Aberdeen, it has now a rapidly growing
population. More recently, in 1995, Bruce called from Milwaukee to say that he and
Kathy and Laura, were going to England and Scotland and invited us to come along.
Millie and I accepted the invitation and spent almost the whole month of August with
them touring England, Scotland and Wales in a rented car. Bruce drove, a heroic task.
I would have dreaded driving in crazy British traffic, on the wrong side of the road.
We loved being with Bruce and Kathy, and becoming acquainted with Laura. One of Kathy's
photos shows Millie and eight-year-old Laura, both asleep, snuggled against one another
in the back seat of the rented car. We were impressed with attempts to reforest Scottish
hills which had been deforested and grazed bare for thousands of years. A similar
deforestation and denudation of our mountains seems to be the intent of the United
States, as rapidly as possible. I had thought the "Glencoe Massacre" was
simply a clan war between the Campbells and the MacDonalds. When I mentioned the
massacre to a Scottish bed-and-breakfast hostess, she loaned me a book describing
the treachery going to the highest levels of the London government by which over
forty MacDonalds, as hosts for twelve days, had been murdered on orders from London
by their billeted guests, the Campbells. The bartender in a restaurant, passing our
table, heard me refer to the incident as occurring in about 1700. He corrected me,
saying "1692," then returned with a brochure for each of us outlining continuing
Scottish dissatisfactions with their lack of autonomy under the British Parliament.
We saw many ruined castles, to the joy of Laura, as she climbed every available tower,
wall, or battlement. The historic and present importance of castles to British royalty
was emphasized by our final visit to Windsor Castle. For me, three characteristics
predominate. God's sponsorship of British royalty requires deceased members of a
dissolute royal family to be presented in cenotaphs in an elaborate chapel, with
hands folded together in a false declaration of piety. The military exploits of the
royal family are shown in guardrooms filled with knightly armor. Many pompous staterooms
attest to self agrandizing wealth for the former German royal Hanovers, now become
British Windsors. Titles of royalty have been acquired in great profusion. Edward
VIII was baptised as Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David. As a youth
he had access to Osborne House, a residence of the Queen on the Isle of Wight. He
was given extensive properties of land and the titles, Prince of Wales, Duke of Windsor,
Earl of Chester, Knight of the Garter, Duke of Cornwall, all by divine inheritance.
He held the highest rank in the army, navy, and air force. When he was torn between
his position as the reigning monark of the British Empire and marying his love, the
twice married commoner, Wallis Warfield Simpson, he described himself in a letter
to a friend as an "insignificant little shit." He may at the time have
been the most honest member of British Royalty. I have had a wonderful time on my
visits to Scotland, and I have enjoyed seeing where some of my ancestors lived. My
impression of Scotland is as a place to which I could, if I wished, return in economic
and social comfort as a self supporting immigrant from the United States. If my ancestors
had stayed there, and still somehow had managed to have me, I think I might want
to emigrate from there to some new royalty-free land of opportunity.
SIERRA CLUB BASE CAMPS The Sawtooth Mountains During summer vacations while we were
in Washington we took part in three Sierra Club base camps. In the first of these,
in the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho, our son, Steven, was assistant leader and Mary
was assistant cook. Every day it rained or snowed. We awoke in the night feeling
crushed, to find our tent pressed down upon us by the snow which had accumulated.
The second was in Virginia Canyon, in the Sierra Mountains of California, with California
weather. Fourth Recess Canyon In the summer of 1970, Barbara and I attended a base
camp wilderness outing in Fourth Recess Canyon, a part of the Sierra National Forest,
on the western side of the crest of the Sierra Mountains, in California, near Bishop.
At Fourth Recess camp, Steven was leader and Mary, now our daughter-in-law, was cook.
I was invited by the Sierra Club to be assistant leader and Barbara was invited to
be leader of the entertainment program. Tents, sleeping bags, and other larger belongings
of the participants were transported on horseback by commercial outfitters from their
roadhead in the foothills on the eastern slope of the Sierra Mountains to the campsite.
Food and other group supplies were brought in, and replenished during the two-week
stay, by the same means. The fifty five campers and fourteen crew members hiked about
eight miles in from from the roadhead on the eastern side of the Sierra, carrying
backpacks, over a ten thousand foot pass, to the campsite. The campsite was located
on Fourth Recess Creek, just below Fourth Recess Lake, at about nine thousand feet
altitude. The plan to camp on the lake was frustrated by the presence of a large
number of boy scouts who had preempted the site. The camp consisted of a central,
tarp covered, kitchen area, surrounded by individually chosen tent sites, some close
to the kitchen, others at a distance, according to the individual preferences of
the occupants. Toilet pits were dug at a discreet distance from the kitchen, their
privacy maintained by tarps strung from poles. Aside from the cook, there was an
assistant cook and a staff of kitchen helpers. Each of the guests was expected to
serve as a dish washer for one day during the two week period. Aside from the kitchen
staff, there was Robert Ziegler, a doctor from Redwood City, California, whose function
was to keep us all healthy. A perennial staff member at Sierra Club camps was Norman
Clide, a mountain guide, then in his eighties, who had spent a good part of his life
in the Sierra Mountains. His job in the camps included preeminently making campfires,
around which he told his yarns about life in the mountains. I remember one such story
about his being lost during an attempt to reach a particular destination. He started
out walking along a road which turned into a trail, which turned into an animal track,
then went up a tree and ended in a squirrel hole. Norman consistently arrived carrying
a battered backpack containing eighty pounds of his belongings. When he was not in
the mountains, Norman occupied a homestead in which he was allowed to reside as long
as he lived, on property which had been acquired by the Los Angeles water company
in their "rape of the Owens Valley." We took him home after the camp. He
shared his small tumble-down house with a spotted skunk which he intimidated by staring
it down while stamping his feet, and drove out when he wanted to work in his kitchen.
In Norman's kitchen every available space was occupied by long unused, unwashed pots
and dishes. Barbara and I washed enough dishes for us all to use. After we ate, Norman
slept outside the house, on the ground wrapped in his bedroll. We were glad to take
his advice, and likewise slept out. Barbara's job at the camp was to arrange programs
at the campfires for the entertainment or education of the guests. One such guest
was William Hewlett, of Hewlett-Packard. Bill volunteered to give a talk at one of
the firesides, and Barbara, with some feelings of doubt, accepted his offer. At that
time the United States was involved in the Vietnam war. Bill Hewlett's partner, David
Packard, was then the United States Secretary of Defense. Hewlett-Packard was deeply
involved in defense contracts with the United States Government, including the design
and manufacture of control apparatus for atomic bombs. Hewlett's talk at the campfire
was largely a defense of the military-industrial complex, and of the posture of the
United States relative to the rest of the World. A young friend of Steven's, named
Bill Peppin, also a staff person at the camp, strongly questioned the premises on
which Hewlett's talk was based. Hewlett became angry, stated that he had long supported
the Sierra Club, but would no longer do so, and announced that he would leave the
camp the next morning. Then, accompanied by his wife, still angry beyond self control,
he disappeared into his tent. Later, as assistant leader of the camp, I went with
Steven to the Hewlett's tent to try to persuade him to change his mind about leaving.
By this time he had settled down from the height of his anger, but felt he could
not reverse his stated decision to leave. He and his wife departed early the next
morning for their trek back over the crest of the Sierra, and then home. The valley
in which the camp was located was surrounded by high mountains. With the lake and
the stream it was beautiful. The one jarring note was a wrecked small military plane
strewn over the mountainside at the upper end of the lake. We were told that the
plane had crashed while being used by the Civil Air Patrol to search for another
private plane which had crashed in the mountains. When we first saw the plane, its
engine had been removed and carried out of the mountains by its military owners.
There was apparently no plan to remove the rest of the debris. I took upon myself
the task of cutting up the battered fusilage into pieces of a size which could be
carried. Some of the guests made a raft with logs, loaded the pieces of the plane
on the raft, and swam in the cold water, pushing the raft ahead of them, to the lower
end of the lake. After several trips the wreckage was a neat pile beside the trail,
ready for removal from the wilderness. A letter was written for the Sierra Club to
the Forest Service volunteering to pay part of the expense of transporting the wreckage
of the plane on horseback out of the wilderness. The Forest service replied, thanking
the Sierra Club for moving the debris to trailside, and stating that they were asking
the Civil Air patrol to remove it. Several months later an interagency dispute still
persisted over the responsibility for the removal.
STEVEN AND MARY
When we went to Turkey, Steve had started as a freshman at the University of California,
in Berkeley, I believe primarily because some of his rock-climbing friends were there.
While we were in Turkey, someone sent us from the United States a clipping from a
Berkeley paper describing a "Tarzan Traverse" made by Steven and some of
his rock climbing friends across the eaves of the girls dormitory six stories above
the pavement. The University had taken punitive action. I wrote to Steve telling
him that his behavior was not acceptable while he was operating on our money. He
in turn said he didn't want our money, and proceeded to make his living from whatever
jobs he was able to get. In a letter, Steve had told us, "I have a girl."
Steve introduced Mary to Barbara and me on a Berkeley street in 1970. She was barefooted,
and to me seemed shy. I took an immediate liking to her and invited her to lunch,
but she refused. I believe both Mary and Steve feared the role parents would play
if allowed to come too close. Barbara and I rode with Mike to Yosemite National Park
for Steve's and Mary's wedding on November 4, 1968. Mary's parents, Howard and Wanda
Graham, also were there. The other guests, Steve's and Mary's rock-climbing friends
from the San Francisco area, had been climbing Half Dome when we arrived, and were
stranded high on the rock face by a sudden snow storm. The wedding was delayed while
helicopters took these members of the wedding party off their ledge. A picture of
the wedding shows me looking pleased at my part in the affair. We found that Steve
and Mary, because they had no money, were going to spend the night, despite the weather,
on their inflatable mattress. We persuaded them to let us pay for a room. We had
told Steve when he dropped out of the University at Berkeley that we would be pleased
to support him in completing his education if he decided to return to school. When
he asked us if the offer was still good, we said yes. Steve and Mary in the meantime
had made their living in a variety of jobs, had published two books on edible wild
plants of the Sierra and of the Pacific Northwest, and had developed ideas for more
humane ways of acquiring statistical data on bears than shooting them with darts.
Both Steve and Mary finished their undergraduate degrees, and Steve now has a PhD
from Oregon State University. Mary is an accomplished artist. I have enjoyed immensely
visiting them in the various parts of the world in which they have lived: Oregon,
both Kodiak and Fairbanks in Alaska, Denmark, New Zealand, and now State College,
Pennsylvania. I hope both have forgiven me for misguided parental actions. The parental
training program available to me was inadequate, but I didn't know a better one.
Now, having practiced friendship with many people, I believe friendship with my children
may be a more appropriate goal than parenthood.
TO CABINHILL TREE FARM
After some years in Washington, we felt we needed a connection with some sort of
country living as a contrast to living in the city, and began looking for some sort
of country place. In 1970, after some time spent in searching we bought, in Rappahannock
County, Virginia, an abandoned mountain farm of about 170 acres, much larger than
we had thought we wanted. Our weekends and vacations were often spent there. Toward
the end of my stay at Howard I found myself under more pressure to do research and
to obtain research contracts for the students who were by then being admitted to
new graduate programs. I would have done less teaching, but my feeling was that the
only reason I was at Howard was because I wanted to teach. Also, the only students
in the PhD program at Howard were then Iranian. Mediocre Iranian students who had
money could be admitted to Howard more easily than elsewhere. Black American students
capable of doing competent graduate work went somewhere other than Howard because
they could obtain more financial support. I had come to Howard primarily to teach
black Americans. If I wanted to do research work, I could do it better elsewhere.
I left Howard University after eight years there, and for a while prior to retirement,
did consulting work for friends involved with various research projects. In 1976,
at the age of sixty two, I retired from Howard University. We sold our apartment
and moved full time to the tree farm in Rappahannock County, Virginia.
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