Skip to main content

Generations Back




Third Bob, as he is known, recalls a family story about his father, known to familiars all his life as Bobby, and about his grandfather, known more formally (from childhood) only as Robert. And, of course, about Amma. 

The story begins with this: The second Roosevelt had just been inaugurated when Amma went into labor and grandpa Bob rushed her to the hospital. 

Skip forward three days: she was ready to leave, with her new baby, but President Roosevelt had closed all the banks, had called a 'bank holiday.' This meant that the hospital refused to accept a check - they had no idea how long it would be before the paper would do them any good. They were demanding cash.

It is amazing (one would always say, hearing the story) that people were so well behaved. Wouldn't there be anger in the halls, people demanding their checks be accepted? rushing for the exits if not? Were there a lot of fearsome looking Pinkerton men about?  Not a lot of people had a lot of cash ready to hand in March 1933. 

But no, fathers (accepted as the paying party in these situations) led their wives, the mothers of their new children, back to their rooms -- including Amma and new born Bobby, and the families, including the one remembered fondly by Third Bob, accepted the fact that they were now hostages "until I can drum up the cash." 

Which Grandpa did, getting the cash that his tenants had hidden away given whatever emergency of their own they had been storing it for. There were two tenants on a small shack on his land, and since times were bad he had been accepting of the non-payment of rent. So now, he thought, they were his bank. 

And with a combination of pleading and harassing: they were. 

Amma and Bobby arrived at home, the large house that shared the two-acre plot with that shack, on the fourth day. 

 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
9 comments
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
17 comments
Read more

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...
4 comments
Read more