Imagination-Building: The Memoirs of John Douglas Forbes (1910 - 2018), First Professor of the Darden School of the University of Virginia

By John Douglas Forbes

The Memoirs of John Douglas Forbes encompass watching the streetlamp lighters of San Francisco in 1912, to visiting the Royal Crescent in Bath in 2001, among many other memories. Art curator, educator, First Professor of the Darden School of the University of Virginia; hiker, kite flyer and traveler, who made a second family with the new wife he found through placing a Personal Ad in a magazine after becoming a widower --- John Douglas Forbes followed an unusual path. M.E. Forbes, in An Afterword to the Memoirs, speaks of the 38-year “May-December” journey she shared with Dr. Forbes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Mar 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9781728377636

John Douglas Forbes

John Douglas Forbes, PhD, culminating a distinguished career as an art curator and college professor, became, in 1954, the First Professor of the then newly-founded Colgate Darden Graduate Business School of the University of Virginia. He inspired thousands of students to use their imagination and to communicate clearly in their business endeavors. Dr. Forbes died in 2018 at the age of 107. M.E. Forbes, his widow and General Editor of the Memoirs, is fulfilling his request that his recollections be published.

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© 2023 The Anamcara Trust, Mary Elizabeth

Forbes, Trustee. All rights reserved.

Mary Elizabeth Forbes (M.E. Forbes) is the General

Editor of the Memoirs of John Douglas Forbes.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval

system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the Trustee and General Editor.

Published by AuthorHouse  03/28/2023

ISBN: 978-1-7283-7765-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-7283-7764-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-7283-7763-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023900770

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or

links contained in this book may have changed since publication and

may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those

of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher,

and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

For Michael

Table of Contents

Introduction by John Douglas Forbes

Acknowledgments by John Douglas Forbes

Forward by M.E. Forbes (Mary Elizabeth Forbes), General Editor

Disclaimer

Chapter 1     Mill Valley

Chapter 2     Ross

Chapter 3     University of California, Berkeley

Chapter 4     Stanford University

Chapter 5     Harvard University

Chapter 6     John F. Forbes & Company

Chapter 7     The Golden Gate International Art Exhibition at the World’s Fair

Chapter 8     The University of Kansas City

Chapter 9     World War II and the United States Army

Chapter 10   Bennington College

Chapter 11   Wabash College

Chapter 12   The Colgate Darden Graduate Business School (The Darden School)

Chapter 13   The University of Virginia Division of Continuing Education

Chapter 14   Second Marriage

Chapter 15   Music and Theater

Chapter 16   The books I’ve written

Chapter 17   Travels Abroad: 1923

Chapter 18   Travels Abroad: 1972

Chapter 19   Travels Abroad: 1973

Chapter 20   Travels Abroad: 1974

Chapter 21   Travels Abroad: 1975

Chapter 22   Addenda and Anecdotes

An Afterword: Thirty-Eight Years with Johnny: Our May-December Journey by M.E. Forbes

Invocation

A Word of Explanation Regarding the Appendices

Appendix AThe Literate Executive

Appendix BThe First Twenty Years The Darden School at the University of Virginia

Appendix CThe Word List

Appendix DTea At Remsenberg

Appendix EFlyer for the History of Western Art

Appendix FUVA Retrospective Exhibition on John Douglas Forbes’s Tenure at the Darden School

Appendix GKite Tales Cover Story American Kitefliers Association

Appendix H

THE AD National Review, April, 1980

Appendix IInterlaken and the Reichenbach Falls

Appendix JThe Royal Crescent and the Roman Baths

Appendix KThe Maestro

Appendix LMy Musical Career in Charlottesville

Appendix MOn Dowsing

Appendix NOn At-Home Caregiving: A Radical Proposal

Appendix OJohn Forbes’s Last Visit to the Darden School, April, 2017

Appendix PDanville National Cemetery: Memorial Day, 2020

Envoi

Introduction by John Douglas Forbes

This book of recollections deals primarily with events, places, and things. More important than any of these, are people. I should like, first, to speak of my parents, John Franklin Forbes and Portia Ackerman Forbes. It is sad that we did not understand each other more completely.

I have built, in my father’s memory, a stone bench on Mount Tamalpais, near the place where he and others of the Cross Country Club used to gather at about noon in the years around 1900, to listen to Miss Alice Eastwood, Curator of Botany at the California Academy of Sciences, read aloud the Sherlock Holmes stories, which were being published for the first time in this country in Collier’s Magazine. This bench, situated on a knoll southeast of Rock Spring, commands a magnificent view of the Pacific, the Golden Gate, and San Francisco Bay. I want to thank my mother for introducing me to the arts and for teaching me Greek.

I should next speak of my affection for the two dear women whom I have married: Margaret Funkhouser Forbes and Mary Elizabeth Lewis Forbes. Next, I would speak of my children, in chronological order: Pamela, Peter, and Michael. Next, I would speak of their children, also in chronological order: Alexander, Sophia Forbes McLane, Anne de Marcken, and Allegra Forbes. It would be impossible to list all the beautiful people in my life. I shall list only two names, knowing that this selection will not offend those not mentioned: these two are David Jameson McDaniel, and Byron Kightly Trippett.

Then, there are all the wonderful men and women who have either taught me, or been taught by me. The latter group may amount to almost 10,000 individuals.

Acknowledgments by

John Douglas Forbes

I wish to thank the kind women who have put this book together, among them: Mary Elizabeth Forbes; Donna Packard; Janelle Bash; and Darby Vollmer.

Forward by M.E. Forbes (Mary

Elizabeth Forbes), General Editor

John Douglas Forbes dictated his Memoirs between 2000 and 2006. The tapes were then transcribed into a typescript. John gave this typescript to me and asked me to correct spellings, complete names that he had forgotten or were incomplete, and other such items of general editing. I have performed these tasks to the best of my ability. He also asked me to make sure that his Memoirs were published warts and all, as he would say, with names, dates, places, and events. I have also endeavored to keep his narrative in the book as conversational as possible, as it was in the original dictated tapes.

John’s Memoirs are an encyclopedic account of his life in particular, and of life in general, from the end of the Edwardian Era into the 21st Century. The reader will find his clear recollections that go back to at least the year 1912 and through the early 2000s; of his being present at the meeting in 1954 that established the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, and of his tenure as the First Professor of the school; of his putting a Personal Ad in the April 18, 1980, issue of The National Review magazine, in search of a new wife after his first spouse had passed away (and I, who answered that ad, became that new wife and the mother of his youngest child); among many other things.

John Forbes speaks of his two older children, Pamela and Peter, in his Memoirs. To add a little more to his writings concerning them: Pamela Forbes is a graduate of Radcliffe College. Her career includes editing a magazine on American Indian art, and as media editor for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, in addition to her freelance work. Peter Forbes holds degrees from the University of Michigan, Yale University, and the Wentworth Institute of Technology. He is an educator, architect, and designer. He lives and works in Italy. Michael Forbes, John’s youngest child and our son, is spoken of in Chapters 14 and 15 of the Memoirs and in An Afterword to the book.

The properties in Maine, San Francisco, and Virginia mentioned in the book have been sold.

John was a member of many organizations. He was proud to have achieved fifty years of membership in the Pacific-Union Club in 2016. He was also pleased to be a social member of Farmington Country Club in Charlottesville.

It is my belief that the reader will find in the Memoirs of John Douglas Forbes an account of a modern Renaissance Man: A complex, multi-faceted person who rebuilt decrepit Rolls-Royce sedans so he could drive them; who taught thousands of college students the importance of using their imaginations in business dealings and in life in general; and who fought back against illness and death until his last breath, to be a compelling history of inspiration, determination and achievement.

Disclaimer

These Memoirs are an account of real persons,

places, things, and events in the life of the late John

Douglas Forbes. They reflect his experiences and

opinions, and were not written to intentionally harm

any person, living or dead, or any institution.

Items in this book by M.E. Forbes (Mary Elizabeth

Forbes) are reflections of her experiences and

opinions, and were not written to intentionally harm

any person, living or dead, or any institution.

M.E. Forbes (Mary Elizabeth Forbes), General Editor

Chapter 1

Mill Valley

This is John Douglas Forbes. It’s June 24, the year 2000, and I’m reminiscing about my childhood and youth. This will be rather informal and not precisely organized, and I’ll start out with the general picture.

I was born in San Francisco on April 9, 1910. My father was John Franklin Forbes who was born in 1876 in what is now Los Angeles, and my mother was Portia Ackerman Forbes who was born in 1881 in Eureka, California. I was born in San Francisco at Wakefield Sanatorium and taken at the age of about a week to live in Mill Valley. The house where we lived in Mill Valley was a shingled cottage built by my father before his marriage as a place from which to start his walks on Mount Tamalpais. He was a great hiker. He was an early backpack hiker in the Sierra and practically every weekend went climbing on Mount Tamalpais.

We had a very modest house in Mill Valley in those days. Shingle sides and roof, no basement. There was a lower level at the north end that contained a bedroom for our live-in maid. We always had a maid. That would’ve been 1912. I have a picture in my mind of sitting on one of the swinging seats that was on our veranda. We had a veranda that had a lovely view of the bay. I was sitting there with Aunt Zoë watching the moon come up over the Blithedale Ridge. It was about the biggest moon I ever saw, a full moon.

We lived quite modestly. My father was a pioneer in the field of accounting, and he was an early certified public accountant. He had sold his own private practice to the international firm of Haskins & Sells, and there wasn’t a great deal of loose money around the family because he was busily buying up partnership units in the firm, sort of shares of stock, you might say, and was seeking to accumulate a larger interest in Haskins & Sells, which he certainly succeeded in ultimately doing.

We lived in Mill Valley from 1910 until we were burned out in the great forest fire of July 1929, at which point we moved to Ross, and there begins a sort of brand-new chapter in the family’s history, which I’ll deal with quite separately. I think the best strategy is to give the larger picture first and then get down to details as they come along.

It’s been suggested that this is a good time for me to reminisce, beginning with my childhood in Mill Valley, and the logical place to begin I think is with the geography.

You’d start out from San Francisco on a wonderful side-wheeler ferryboat that you’d pick up at the Ferry Building at the foot of Market Street, and after a little more than half an hour, you’d land in Sausalito, and there you would get onto an electric train with black wooden cars, many years later replaced by large orange-colored steel cars, but the others were just as good, and you would ride up to Mill Valley.

Mill Valley was at the head of Richardson’s Bay, which was a sort of western arm of San Francisco Bay, and Mill Valley was built on three spurs of Mount Tamalpais, a mountain in the Pacific Coast Range. If you sliced the spurs vertically with a guillotine, you would find the general contour of a letter w. The hill on the ridge on the left was the Pipeline Ridge, and on the other side of that, west of that, was Muir Woods, and beyond, the Pacific Ocean. The right hand or eastern ridge was Blithedale Ridge, and on the other side of it, you would run in the flatlands at the end of the Ross Valley, Larkspur, and Corte Madera. The valley, the canyon, on the west side was Cascade Canyon, and the canyon on the right side was Blithedale Canyon, and in the middle was the Middle Ridge, and we lived on the Middle Ridge.

The Middle Ridge had two principal roads going on each side of the crest, or the ridge. On the east side, there was Summit Avenue, and on the west side, there was Tamalpais Avenue. Then the next level down on the east side at the foot of Blithedale Canyon there would be Corte Madera Avenue and also at the bottom of the canyon, Cottage Avenue. On the west side, on the next level down, there would be Lovell Avenue, roughly parallel to Tamalpais, and then below that there would Throckmorton Drive. As I say, we lived on the Middle Ridge.

Now when you got off the train, the tracks dead-ended in a very handsome station with a great peaked roof, which was thought to be a reconstruction of a Swiss chalet because Mount Tamalpais was supposed to suggest the Switzerland of America, which, of course, was nonsense.

Well, there were several ways of going up to our opposite little ridge. One was to go straight up from the public square. The public square was the center of what we always referred to as the village with stores and banks, the usual small-town stuff, and if you went straight up almost with the railroad track, you’d go up Bernard Street for a couple of blocks, and then you would come to a very steep hill where there was a flight of steps, several hundred steps, that would take you up to the place where Summit Avenue and Tamalpais Avenue began their joint venture.

We always went up on the right-hand side, that is to say the east side, on Summit Avenue and kept on going. The Middle Ridge had a series of shelves. You could not call them terraces in the sense of terraced hillsides of Italy, for example. These were shelves, sort of flat places on which houses could be built. At the top of the flight of steps that I spoke of, there was a real Swiss chalet copy, the Evans house designed by the architect Mulgardt who was active at the 1915 Exposition. Anyway, the first level space was the Venetta House, and then you’d go winding up some more and you’d come to a place where McGee Avenue came up as a sort of side street that dropped off abruptly to the right, to the east, into Blithedale Canyon, and at the intersection there was a watering trough. We were on foot, but if wanted, you could’ve taken a horse-drawn carriage driven by either Mr. Budar or Mr. Roth. In wet weather, the carriages were wrapped around with oilcloth with isinglass windows.

Mill Valley, in those days, was very primitive. The streets were not paved, which meant that in summertime they were thick yellow dust, dust to a depth of about three or four inches. When a horse-drawn vehicle and one of those rare automobiles went by, it raised a great cloud of dust that went way up in the air. It was extraordinary. And in winter, of course, the streets were hog wallows.

Winters were more rigorous in those days, and for three months—January, February, and March—it was almost solid rain, and during those months, the Forbes family would rent houses on the other side of the bay to get away from the mud.

In 1912 in the winter the family moved to an apartment on Hyde Street in San Francisco, very near where the hill drops down toward the bay at the extreme north end of Hyde Street. We lived on the east, or bay, side in the apartment owned by the Woodhead family. Mr. Woodhead was the editor of the Sunset Magazine. It had a pleasant porch on which I used to play, and the porch had some wicker furniture with parallel lines of wicker wear, which I used as railroad tracks for my toy locomotive, which I pushed by hand. It was cast iron, and so, to my dismay, the wheels didn’t turn around, but you get the picture.

We lived on the ground floor, which was slightly raised above Hyde Street, and I could look out and see people, pedestrians, walking along the way, and in Mill Valley we’d had a family retainer, a dear, dear Japanese man named Tomo Soga, whom we called Togo. At a very tender age when a Japanese person went by, I would say, Togo, Togo. And when a Chinese person went by, my mother would say, Togo. I would say, No, not Togo, not Togo. How I could tell the difference between the Japanese and Chinese at a tender age, I do not know. I don’t think I can do it today.

My mother read aloud to me a great deal. She read Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses, and there was the character of Larry the Lamplighter. The streets in San Francisco in those days were illuminated by gas lamps, and so the man who went around at dusk each day I naturally referred to as Larry.

Like the characters in British novels, there was no time in our lives, in my early life, when we didn’t have a domestic servant of some sort. At the time, we had a young woman named Eleanor, and she used to take me down to what is now the Marina—this was in 1912—to watch them fill in the area that subsequently became the fairgrounds for the Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915. It was mudflats in my childhood, and it was filled in with dirt, and, of course, it will be remembered that when the earthquake came many years later, in 1989, that whole area was very soft, and the damage of the quake was tremendous. Anyway, barges filled with dirt would come and clamshell scoops would take the dirt out of the barges and dump it onto the mudflats, and little by little, the fairgrounds grew up.

I’m a little vague about 1913. It is possible that that was the winter that we went to Alameda, but I know that in 1914, we started a series of rainy season visits to Berkeley, and we lived on Alvarado Road in a house owned by a family named Peck behind the Claremont Hotel behind where the Berkeley Tennis Club now is. Looking out from it, we could see the enormous mansion - a word I don’t like - of the Hart family, who I think had made a great deal of money in mining, and I don’t think the house is there anymore, but it was as big as a Newport cottage.

There was another vast house in the neighborhood, the Taylor house. It was on the other rise of a hill, and I think it had been designed by Mulgardt who did some very handsome work at the Fair, and who also designed a Swiss chalet for the Evans family in Mill Valley. Anyway, that was 1914.

Then back to Mill Valley again, and in the rainy season of 1915, we rented the Treat house. I think they were the Treats of Shreve, Treat & Eacret, the jewelers. That was on Hillegass Street down on the flat, and at that time, the Berkeley Tennis Club had not moved up to its present site in front of the Claremont Hotel, so the Berkeley Tennis Club courts were just across the street from us. Our house had a croquet court, and I remember the Christmas of that year my Uncle Charles, better known as Mike, Charles Merrill Forbes, my father’s younger brother, had given me a horse-drawn fire engine, a hook-and-ladder, which I pulled around on the pretty much abandoned croquet court. Around the corner lived the Brobecks of the legal firm in San Francisco of Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison, and occasionally I would see Billy Brobeck, the child of the family, who was about my own age.

Then back to Mill Valley again, and in the rainy season of 1916, we rented the Vernon Kellogg house on El Camino Real which was at the end of the Claremont line a few blocks from the Claremont Hotel, and it poked out around a hill in a southerly direction toward the Broadway Cutoff to Oakland. At that time, my parents bought a lot on the hill. It’s the hill between El Camino Real on the west and Tunnel Road on the east, quite the nicest place in Berkeley, I think south of the campus. Their intent was to build there, and they had designs by an architect named Kaiser. It was to be an L-shaped English house, but that whole business was changed by the First World War breaking out, and the U.S. joining the World War the following year.

I have very interesting recollections of the Kellogg house. It was on a hill, and I can remember that you entered on the main floor where the living room, dining room and kitchen were, and then the hill sloped away so the bedrooms were on the lower floor because of the drop-off of the grade.

And one thing I remember very vividly about the Kellogg house was that on the wall above the flight of stairs that led down to the sleeping apartments, there was a hide, I think probably a cow hide, on which there was a long, long inscription in Greek from a Greek classic, and I was too young at the time to know which of the Greek authors was being quoted. It was not in verse, so it was clearly not Homer.

It was at that house that I first met Wilhelmina Jones, then a very, very small child, whose parents lived in Mill Valley but who had been visiting Anna Jones, my honorary Aunt Banty, who was visiting her family, the Krugers, who were lumber people from Truckee, California, but originally who lived in Alameda. Also, I think they were refugees from Mill Valley mud. Anyway, Willie Jones came to visit and to spend an hour with me, and that was my first meeting with her. I knew her all of the rest of her life. She was adopted by the Jones family. They had no children of their own.

And then back to Mill Valley again, and in the rainy season of 1917, we made our last move and this time we went to the Shattuck Hotel, which was down on Shattuck Avenue, on the flat in Berkeley, and it was a very pleasant residential hotel. One family with whom we became very good friends were the Hillmans. Mr. Hillman was the President of Standard Oil of California, and he had practically a whole floor. It was just really just like a private house. You would hardly know you were in a hotel. The Hillmans had a granddaughter named Longacre, and the Longacre girl years later lived in the sorority house next to where I lived in Berkeley when I was an undergraduate at the University of California, and the Longacre’s son, Billy, was a young man of enormous charm.

The Shattuck Hotel was a very pleasant residential hotel. They had dances. Sometimes there were costume dances. They had children’s parties. I remember going to a children’s Valentine party with a great big heart cut out of cardboard on my front, and then one in back like a sandwich man and there was a headdress also cut out of cardboard, a sort of a pointed hat on which my mother had written in crayon, Love Me.

There was one great ball, and I remember my mother wore a superb evening gown which had belonged to her grandmother who at that time was dead, but at the time the dress was made, she had married an Englishman named Gidley. The dress, and I think there’s some photographs around of my mother wearing it, was of a taffeta-like material, white with shocking pink stripes. It was very handsome, and my mother was a very beautiful woman. She was difficult, but she really was very handsome, and remained very good looking all the rest of her life. Really, it was quite remarkable.

Behind the Shattuck Hotel there was a vacant lot on which some very friendly carpenters who took down the Shattuck’s barn and stables, built me a playhouse and I used to play there; but then there were some tough boys in the neighborhood who came and made my life miserable. They were postal messengers, and so I was then, what, this was 1917, I was seven years old, so I went around to the post office on the other side, and said to the clerk at the desk, Look, I can’t play in my playhouse because your boys are making my life miserable, which worked beautifully because I never had any trouble again.

In our rooms, there was a plaster modeling-clay model of the L-shaped English cottage that my parents were planning to build on the top of that hill between El Camino Real and Tunnel Road, the house which never was built, and ultimately, they sold the property. The coming of the War made all the difference because then we moved to Mill Valley. In the meantime, they had paved the streets, and my father had to make frequent trips to New York because the mail office of Haskins & Sells was involved in the financial end of the war effort, so that was the end of our winter migrations.

Let me go back to the Mill Valley scene. The Forbes’ house was on the eastern slope of the Middle Ridge of Mill Valley. It was on a spur that poked out from the main ridge, and it was about a third of the way from the crest of the ridge down to Blithedale Creek at the foot of the canyon, so that we were really not part of that settlement that flourished on the terrace. You remember, I indicated that the Middle Ridge was a series of rather rough terraces.

Well, we were well below the terrace, and our house was directly below the intersection of Summit Avenue and Marguerite Avenue. Marguerite Avenue dropped off downhill in a sort of northerly direction and at that point the trail down to our house began. We had a series of what we called precast lumber mill-made steps that you would buy by the yard or by the fifty-foot length, and they went down almost as many steps as are from California Street down to Pine Street in San Francisco. They were precast, and the space between the risers, the treads, were filled in with dirt. Now, ultimately, down below, that sort of petered out into a trail, and then the trail led down to the house. At the lower part of the place, there was a trail that led down to the bottom of Blithedale Canyon.

My father had a very thin slice of property adjoining that of Bill Geiger, which was never built on, which ran roughly north and south, leaving our view to the east, which was a mass of brush, a knoll or a sort of spur, belonging to the Bridge family. Now, I’m not sure whether Mr. Bridge himself had been the governor or the San Francisco Mint or whether it was his father who had been the governor of the San Francisco Mint, but one member of the Bridge family caused the Mint to strike off medals, the Bridge Medal, which was awarded (there were several of them) annually to the best students in the San Francisco Public Schools. My father won a Bridge Medal as a boy, and he also won the Lincoln Medal because he’d gone to Lincoln Grammar School and was a top student there. He then had to abandon school, and go to work to support his mother and younger brother because his father was an alcoholic. You can imagine it was a source of great satisfaction to him in 1964 having only gone through the eighth grade, when he was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws by the University of California at Berkeley.

Anyway, one day I saw Mr. Bridge and some people there on the property and so I went down and said hello; and then I reported this to my father, so he got in touch with Bridge and about that whole property in front of our house, completely rescuing our view, and allowing a road, a private drive, to come up from McGee Avenue, which was the next road down – roughly, it was a parallel to the ridge - and so we ended up with quite a large property. After the fire and after we moved to Ross, my father sold it to a developer, and it is now called Beverly Terrace.

Anyway, buying the property involved a lane, a right-of-way between the Owen property to the south and the A.B. Smith property to the north, and below that the C.M. Cole property. So, instead of it going through the Smiths’ and through the Coles’ as we used to, we had a flight of steps put in, which went directly from McGee Avenue right down to Corte Madera Avenue at the foot of the hill right at the bottom, so we could go on to our place clear down to the foot of the hill. That was the route which my father used to go to the train in the morning before the driveway was built, and before he motored down to Sausalito and caught the ferryboat directly.

Anyway, this long flight of steps led up to the top of the hill to the intersection of Marguerite, where Marguerite left Summit Avenue. Our place was surrounded by brush, chamise and manzanita that grows on Tamalpais on the south and east sides. On the north and west sides there were forests: forests with great redwood trees, lots of tanbark oaks, and a number of bay trees. And it was a dark and fearsome place, and it was a very gloomy place to play in as a child, and I used to enjoy walking it. On the other side to the south of us, and on the same level, was our only neighbor, and that was the Buckland family. They were quite a distance away. All distances were great in Mill Valley.

The Buckland family consisted of Dr. Buckland, the ophthalmologist (he was a Canadian), his wife, originally Daisy Dooley (she changed her name to Carol Sawtel when she became a professional violinist), and his parents, the Buckland, senoirs, who were in their nineties. It was hearing Mrs. Buckland speak of her husband when he was ninety-five as, twenty years ago when Pa was a young man, and as I was learning arithmetic, that made seventy-five or so a young man, and I’ve had that point of view ever since.

Dr. Buckland had a daughter, Julia, from a previous marriage, who was my only playmate for a long time. She was four or five years older than I and not at all well. She died in her teens of the same tuberculosis which carried off her mother. She was a very pleasant person to play with as a child, and she had the most wonderful love of words and vocabulary.

A woman moved to town, a new resident, and someone said, Has anyone met Miss Bryant? No. Nobody knew Miss Bryant, but Julia had. Oh, yes, I’ve met Miss Bryant, a sallow woman, but a deep thinker. Julia was a child of nature, and when the call of nature was upon her when we were playing, she relieved herself with complete relaxedness anywhere, and didn’t stop the sentence that she was talking about, and it just didn’t seem to me to be in any way strange. We just carried on in a perfectly normal way.

The Bucklands had a whole enormous family of chipmunks living in their woodpile, and they would buy peanuts by the gunnysack-full, and they would go out on the porch and yell, Chip, chip, chip, chip, chip, and a horde of chipmunks would come out of the woods, and they’d feed them. They could feed them by hand, so when you hear me go Chip, chip, chip, chip, chip, in Charlottesville outside our woodpile, you’ll know exactly where this came from, except that our chipmunks are far less sociable than the Bucklands’ chipmunks.

Dr. Buckland was very gifted with his hands. He built a wonderful swing, a two-seat, face-each-other swing, and a charming doll house in great detail, and he carved all the furniture, and he carved all the plumbing fixtures and the kitchen stove and sink and all that sort of thing. He carved it all out of wood, and really did just a beautiful job. On rainy days, we would play in her house.

There was a walk through the brush, through a very, very rough trail indeed; and about half-way through the brush at one time my parents bought a set, maybe a half-a-dozen, I’m not sure, of blue Windsor chairs. They came in a great wooden crate, and David Harker (with whom I was much more pals than with his younger brother Robert, nearer my age) and I made a playhouse out of this crate in the brush about halfway between the Buckland house and ours. We would play there until one day we found it wrecked. His unrestrained brother Robert wrecked it because he was not part of the show. We hadn’t been trying to freeze him out or anything.

Anyway, at the top of our flight of steps up on the crest of the ridge there was this terrace. I speak very loosely in calling it a terrace. It was a flat space of considerable extent, and there were several houses of our neighbors on it. We had no close neighbors. Social life was very restricted indeed.

The other big house on top of the hill was in the center of the next little rise. It was a single-story house that had been built by Mary Curtis Richardson, who was a leading California neo-Impressionist painter of the pre-World War One period, a superb landscape painter. There were a number of little houses in addition to the main house. There was one which was her studio and remained called the studio forever after, ultimately lived in by Sue Dornin, Alice Rosenquist’s sister, the mother of Admiral Marshall Dornin, and Captain in the Navy, Robert Dornin, one of the most decorated submarine officers of the Second World War.

There was another little house that ultimately was used by the domestic staff. The house was bought by a man named Gale Carter who was a World War One profiteer, not a pleasant term, but he was large and good at games and outgoing. He made a lot of money selling ships to the government during the First World War. He was married to a very quiet little woman whose maiden name was Thomas. Her father was the founder of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. She, I believe, was tone deaf, which was sort of ironic.

Anyway, they had a little house in the woods there, which their Japanese domestics, Hishi and Ishiala, lived in. It was a strange house because it had a porch, but the porch was also the roof, and then the house was below it as the land dropped away. I think Hishi and Ishiala were lost in the Japanese earthquake and fire of 1923. They had gone home to visit their relatives.

The Carters had a very fancy, multi-car garage. They had a couple of Crane-Simplex cars. That was the American equivalent of the Rolls-Royce in those days. Then they had a cottage behind it, for the chauffeur, a house which was later lived in by Della Kruger Dunbar, who was part of the Kruger family from Truckee, California, and a sister of Anna Jones, my honorary Aunt Banty. My Aunt Banty and the Joneses lived on Marguerite Avenue.

The first two houses on Marguerite Avenue were owned by the Fleming family, and then there was the Landsburger family. Miss Landsburger lived there. Miss Landsburger was engaged to be married but the man said to her, Look, I can’t stand your relatives. I think you’re a darling, but I can’t stand your relatives. If you marry me, you will have very little to do with your relatives, and she said, Well, as between my relatives and you, I’m afraid that I’ve chosen to stay with my relatives, which was very sad. She remained a maiden lady all the rest of her life.

The next house down belonged to the Jones family, the Lee Savage Joneses. He was a purchasing agent for various industrial corporations. Directly down the hill from them were the Brockhoffs, and Randall Brockhoff was almost exactly my age. He ultimately became a lieutenant colonel in the Second World War.

On a level with the Brockhoffs and off to the north were Miss Clement and Miss Hodgehead, who were the founders of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Across McGee Avenue from them was the wonderful Victorian house of Lovell White, the head of the Savings Union Bank, the father of our cherished family friend, Ralston White. I think the house is still there, with stained glass around the doors. It was a perfect Victorian establishment.

Well, let’s go back to the top of the hill. Just after you pass the Harker’s house, Summit Avenue divided and going up a slight rise to the right toward the north, was Ralston Avenue, named after Ralston White. The first house you’d run into on the right-hand side was the house that was built by the Fernalds. Mrs. Fernald had been Josephine Harker, a sister of the late George. Fernald was an Englishman. They lived in London. He was a playwright, and became internationally famous for a play called The Cat and the Fiddle. They had two sons. The elder one was VanDyke and the younger one was Jack. VanDyke was killed in the First World War on the Austrian front in the Italian Alps, ironically, in the same village where the family used to go to spend their summer vacations in the Tyrol in Austria, and he is buried there. Jack became ultimately the managing director of the Academy of Dramatic Arts in London, and I don’t know whether he is alive today or not. Probably not.

As for people to play with, I spoke about the Fernalds. Mrs. Fernald was Josephine Harker. Their house during my tour of duty in Mill Valley was lived in by Walter and Anna Stein, and their daughter Helen. At this speaking, Helen and I are the only survivors of the entire population that I have spoken of. Helen was slightly younger than I. Wilhelmina Jones may have started in the Mill Valley Grammar School, but ultimately went to the Catherine Branson School in Ross. Well, Mrs. Stein and her mother Mrs. Daly, who was very Irish indeed, upper middle-class Irish, and whose husband had been a member of the constabulary in Ireland, were staunch Catholics, and so Helen Stein went to the Dominican Convent, and I think the Dominican College as well. There were those two girls, and then Randall Brockhoff. His friends were in another part of town.

They had the best collection of classical phonograph records in the days when phonographs were very new. Mrs. Stein was always the person that you would like to have on your side, if you could get her, in charades, because she had a positive genius for determining what the other side was driving at, or what word they were acting out. She was just a genius at that. My goodness, she was good. No matter how obscure, Mrs. Stein always got it.

Like I said, the Steins were Catholics. Their daughter, Helen, went first to the German school. A German, woman, Fraulein Anna Hartmann, came to live in a cottage on our hill, and she had started a kindergarten. It was all in German. I attended it, the Harker boys attended, and Helen Stein attended, and then Fraulein Hartmann moved down to Lovell Avenue right across the road from the yellow building which subsequently became the Summit Avenue Grammar School (the old grammar school), where she had a very small private coaching school with a half-a-dozen students in addition to her regular school. I used to go there when I needed coaching in arithmetic, in which I was lousy. She did very well by me. A fellow coaching student was Sally Jenkins, who became a friend of mine all the rest of her life, and whom I visited in Connecticut, within relatively recent times, and with whose daughter, Marty Lytle, I correspond with and talk with on the telephone.

Anyway, the children on my hilltop did not go to the public school. The Harker boys went to the Cora B. Williams Institute for Creative Education in Berkeley. They lived in Berkeley throughout the week and just came over to Mill Valley to their house on weekends, and during the summer vacations. Willie Jones ultimately went to the Katherine Branson School in Ross. Helen Stein went to the Dominican Convent in San Rafael. Those were about all the children in the neighborhood, so that I had a not-very-sociable childhood, as you see.

Well, anyway, at this point, there was a fork in the road, and off to the right is where Summit Avenue goes off to the left, or to the west, and is flat. Then up a hill to the right you would go up on Ralston Avenue, and you would pass the Fernald house and then you would come to the house of Miss Katherine Harker who was a sister of Josephine Harker Fernald and a sister-in-law of Dr. Harriet Butler Harker whose late husband was George.

Katherine Harker was a maiden lady, and she and her sister-in-law, Dr. Harriet Harker, were not on speaking terms because Dr. Harker had married Harriet, and he had died, and we didn’t know the circumstances. He disappeared, and all that’s known is that his bicycle was found on a pier in San Francisco. And so, she waited seven years and then married his brother, George, and therefore got double the inheritance from the Harker family. The Harkers must’ve inherited or come into a small inheritance, because they had no visible means of support. I know that Dr. Harriet Harker had an interest in a building in Portland, Oregon, and that enterprise collapsed when she was quite well stricken in years because her tenant was murdered.

Katherine VanDyke Harker was known to all of us as Kan Tan. Kan Tan was a child’s corruption of Tante Katrina. Kan Tan was an enormous influence in my childhood. I used to wander as a small child, and drop in on people’s houses unannounced, which everybody did. She was a painter with a rather Impressionist technique, and every year she went to Italy, and she brought back pictures. She really introduced me to the Italian Renaissance. It was she who introduced me to The Blue Danube, for which I shall be forever grateful, and to Italian folksongs and that sort of thing. She had a horse named Sally, and I would earn a modest sum cleaning out the stable yard for Kan Tan.

I was absolutely devoted to Kan Tan. She was rather aloof, but she was very nice to me when I was a child and had a great deal to do with my bringing up because I used to go visiting. During the school year, I had no children to play with, and so I used to go and call on adults, and they were very polite and apparently glad to see me. Well, from Kan Tan, I learned so many things. She, on her limited fixed income, used to go to Italy every summer, and bring back Italian things like dishes made by Deruta and by Cantigalli, which means chanticleer (rooster). From her, I learned about the Italian civilization. I learned about the Renaissance. She had a photograph of the Villa d’Este, which her great-niece, Charlotte Harker Allison, gave to me many years later, but it was such a damaged state from having been in a wet cellar that it didn’t last.

Kan Tan had one of the first two phonographs on the hill. The first phonograph, I think, belonged to Mrs. Stein. Kan Tan’s phonograph was the Sonora brand of phonograph, and she always named things, and so the phonograph was named Nora. She had a very handsome lamp that was green metal, which she called Hephzibah. The name for her house was something like Rosmer Home. There was a sort of little crest that was a conventionalized drawing of a squirrel that appeared on her note paper. She was quite whimsical. From her, I first heard The Blue Danube. I shall be eternally grateful. She had The Blue Danube on the phonograph and some Neapolitan folk songs. She was an education. She really was very helpful to me. She’d been to Vassar, the class of 1890 or so, but she still kept up her Greek, and so, when I was studying Greek between high school and college at Drew School in San Francisco, she knew exactly where I was, and we could discuss the niceties of Greek syntax.

Her house was designed by Bruce Porter. Bruce Porter was the brother of the dentist who rescued me at Glenbrook when I was very young. Bruce Porter was an enigmatic figure. I have described him as an aesthete around town. He designed the Stevenson Memorial in Portsmouth Square in San Francisco. He was active in the design of the stained glass for the Swedenborgian Church, which, incidentally, was a monument to my great-grandfather Alexander John Forbes because he was a manufacturer of wood products, and he had a salon. He was a crotchety old man with a beard, and he had a salon, which included a remarkable assortment of people who were art-oriented. It included Bruce Porter. It included William Keith, the celebrated California landscape painter, and also Willis Polk, one of the best architects that San Francisco ever turned out, a man who did the rebuilding of the Pacific-Union Club when it was converted from being the Flood Mansion to being the Club after the gutting of the original building by fire following the earthquake of 1906, but I digress slightly.

Bruce Porter also designed the Robert Louis Stevenson memorial in Portsmouth Square. I don’t think he’d ever had formal architectural training. Bruce Porter’s design for Kantan’s house was very, very interesting. It was mainly one great big room that went clear up to the roof. It was a two-story room, and you could see the slope of the roof, and about halfway up on the south side, there was a great big window that had an arch at the top, and on the other side, there was a balcony.

There was a balustrade that went across the balcony, and that was the sleeping arrangement. In other words, the bedroom was not walled off from the living room. It was on the next floor up, but there was a flow of air from one to the other. You could get out of bed and look over the balcony. Kan Tan’s charming neo-Impressionist landscapes have recently received wide recognition, thanks to the efforts of her great-niece, Charlotte Harker Allison.

The house that interested me most was the Harker house, which had a magnificent view. Dr. George Harker, who was dead by this time (he died when I was about three years old) and his wife, Harriet Harker, who was also a doctor, a very forceful and formidable woman, had built this house with their own hands, and did all the carpentry work. It was a rambling, single-story affair of considerable charm. It had an attic bedroom with a dormer window. The house went on and on and on, and the dining area was up a flight of steps, three steps or so, from the living room, and formed a stage, and we frequently had dramatic performances on that stage.

Now, on the other side, the non-view side, in the middle of a sort of meadow, the Harkers planted an Italian stone pond, an umbrella pond, and that was there throughout, for years and years and years. and they had built a semi-circular concrete bench facing the Bay. By this time, we’ve got up to the point where you had a magnificent view of the Bay. Our house also had a wonderful view of the Bay. The principal feature of our house was a covered veranda on the east or view side, from which we could look down Blithedale Canyon and look out on the Bay and over and see the slope of Nob Hill in San Francisco, and the only identifiable item on the skyline at that time was the Fairmont Hotel, which was a sort of rectangular blur.

The concrete bench may still be there. It had cast concrete swans at each end as the balustrades. They had a barn. In the middle of their yard, they had quite a flat place where as children we built a nine-hole golf course. In the middle of it was an Italian stone pond with an Italian umbrella pine. It was very sad years later when it was cut down by later owners after surviving the fire in 1929. There were wonderful oak trees, and we used to do a great deal of tree climbing.

Well, the Harker boys were among my oldest friends. I remember the first time I ever saw the Harker boys. Their mother always dressed them in denim shorts and middy blouses. This was practically a uniform, sort of sailor middies. The first time I saw them, they were down on all fours on their drive, which had the usual three inches of yellow Mill Valley dust in the summertime, and they had a cast iron toy ferryboat, which they were pushing through the dust because the dust was serving as water. They were filthy dirty, and I’m afraid I was a bit on the prissy side, so I did not join in the game, because I had no desire to be all covered with dust. That was my very first time of seeing them.

Robert was about two years older than I and David about three or four years older than I, but they were around only on weekends because they lived in Berkeley, and went to advanced private schools. They went to Cora Williams