Born and bred a middlewesterner, I will always cherish that brand name, despite 60 years in Boston and my parents’ New England origins. The deeply ingrained sense of regional superiority held by most New Englanders may or may not be justified, but it is well designed to grind down the home-grown pride of people from other, flatter, windier, and colder regions, especially that large flat place between the Rockies and the Appalachians. Bostonians may travel in Europe from earliest childhood, but they can’t seem to get completely straight in their minds the difference between Ohio and Iowa: flat states with short names, mostly vowels. Their children may move to California. But not to Illinois. Most of them will have visited Cairo, Egypt, before they get to Cairo, Illinois. I must confess to some humility, since I too have been to the former twice and the latter only once. Even though a middlewesterner I have now come to feel at home and even a little sentimental about this beautiful northeast corner, where passes are notches and straits are holes.

Our family home was at 1621 Judson Avenue in Evanston, Illinois, about a block west of Lake Michigan. A block or two farther west—a short walk for father—was the C&NW Railroad (the Northwestern), whose tracks running north from Chicago (a mile or so from the lake) defined the line of affluent suburbs called the North Shore.

Mother’s maiden name was Caroline Seymour Daniels. The

Seymour line had its origins in Connecticut, specifically the general region of New Haven and Hartford, and boasted a long line of Seymour ministers. Her mother, Harriet Burnham Seymour, came from Hartford. The Daniels ancestry traced back to Vermont on her father’s side. Her father, my grandfather, Francis Barrett Daniels, after whom I was named, was born in 1848 in Grafton, Vermont, a village about 12 miles west of Bellows Falls. From vacations in such a beautiful little village as Grafton, it was easy to understand the regional pride of New Englanders. It is a storybook place nestled among the hills, with white church spires sticking up through the pine trees. In my childhood those open pastures with dairy herds, cow bells ringing as they grazed, were a joy. Now, the farms abandoned, dense pine and hardwood growth covers all the hills. Bare Hill is no longer bare and is usually mislabeled Bear Hill.

Starting out as a schoolboy from a one-room school in Grafton, Grandfather Daniels had attended Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, then Harvard College (class of 1871) and Columbia Law School. He started his law practice when he moved to Dubuque, Iowa, in 1876. There he married Harriet Seymour, the daughter of the Reverend Seymour of Hartford, who had founded Griswold, an Episcopal College (like his alma mater Trinity at Hartford) in Davenport, Iowa. It was because of this Iowa migration of the Seymours and one Daniels lawyer, and their marriage, that my mother was born in Dubuque. She attended Miss Shipley's School in Philadelphia, then Bryn Mawr College (class of 1901). In 1899, Francis Barrett Daniels, the young lawyer from Dubuque, was made corporation counsel for the Pullman Company. The family moved to Evanston.

My father’s name was Philip Wyatt Moore. The Moore family had its origins in Quincy and Braintree, Massachusetts, and prior to that in the general region of Ellsworth, Maine. That is where two of the Maine Moores, the Wyatt Moores (père et fils), saw militia service in the French and Indian Wars, about 1750. Father’s family later moved to Boston and his parents lived in Brookline. Grandfather Moore commuted to Boston where he was a clerk in one of the banks. He never attended college. His mother was of the Tompson family, a long line of Puritan, later Congregational, ministers in Quincy, Massachusetts. The first Harvard alumnus in the Tompson family graduated in the class of 1652. Father attended

Brookline High School (’97) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (’01). He wrote his senior thesis on the characteristics of an oil-fired internal combustion engine that relied on compression rather than electricity for ignition. He was studying what we now call a diesel, not yet used very much in 1901 or known by that name, though its invention by Herr Diesel is mentioned in the thesis.

Father graduated in 1901 with a degree in metallurgy and went to work with the Bethlehem Steel Company. There he got into an argument with his boss and left. He moved to Chicago, hooked up with an acquaintance, Fred Poor, and the two of them bought out a patent for a device known as a rail anchor, or anticreeper, and started a new company. His former boss, now a close friend, was a major investor. A rail anchor is a device placed on the rail that bears against the tie and keeps the rail from creeping along when the heavy train deforms it slightly and tends to push a ripple of metal ahead of the wheels.

Father and Mother met in Evanston and became members of a congenial set of unmarrieds. They took the big step in 1909. Over the next 4 years they had three children. I was the youngest.

My early years coincided with the years of World War I, known then as The Great War. One of my earliest memories was of running outdoors whenever I heard the sound of an airplane overhead to look up and see a biplane flying low and maybe doing a loop-the-loop. Probably it was a JN4, or “Jenny,” the standard training plane for aviators in WWI. There was an airfield just west of Evanston. I also remember going downtown to my father’s office on the thirteenth floor of the Railway Exchange Building above Michigan Boulevard, where we stood on the balcony, looked down from that dizzying height, and watched the victory parade coming down Michigan Boulevard. This was not long after Armistice Day, November 11, 1918. I was five. I remember General Pershing on his horse and many squads of cavalry before the horse-drawn artillery came along, followed by the doughboys marching in a line eight abreast as far as you could see. Lots of horses but only a few noisy rumbling tanks.

That war was brought home to me in a more immediate form in our backyard. A couple of trenches had been excavated by my brother (4 years older than I) and his malevolent squad of buddies. Gas masks were commonplace during that war. We made ours from a brown paper gro-

cery bag with two eyes cut out. I was given a stick as a proxy for a rifle and was told to get down in the trench, representing Kaiser Bill. Philip, my brother, and his warlike pals, then possibly 7 or 8 years old, rifles in hand, would charge toward crouching, huddling me (gas mask in place, rifle at the ready) with the announced object of bayonetting me, thus putting an end to both the hated Kaiser and the war. Psychiatrists might regard this as an early episode of terror, some form of sibling harrassment that left an indelible mark. Quite the reverse; I look back on it all with a good deal of pleasure. It is said that a Labrador dog would rather be beaten than ignored.

As the war ended, we moved a few miles north from Evanston to Hubbard Woods. Hubbard Woods does not refer to some boreal hamlet in the subarctic, but instead to an affluent assortment of dwellings on the shore of Lake Michigan about 25 miles north of Chicago. Here my family had acquired a large home on a wooded lot on the edge of a ravine, and it is here that I greatly enjoyed growing up from ages 5 to 18, when I went away to college.

The name Hubbard Woods still fascinates people strange to the area. Some years later I was inducted into a student honor society at the Harvard Medical School. One of the professors, a balding Bostonian of high-grade provinciality (the type often referred to as a Boston Baked Bean) handed me my diploma, saying, “Well, Moore, you certainly have done well coming from such a remote place.” I did not disillusion him about the average size of the dwellings in that remote hamlet, the average number of cars, the chauffeurs employed by the isolated and primitive inhabitants, their folk dances conducted to the music of drums and horns at clubs where they indulged in a quaint game of whacking little round white balls into holes in the ground, or the uniformity of the political clan to which they belonged.

Our family life was both serene and affluent. I certainly was spoiled. Plenty of help around the house. Summer vacations in New England or Wyoming. At Thanksgiving we went to Boston where we had a big Thanksgiving dinner either with my father’s sister, Aunt Isabelle,

or at 80 Commonwealth Avenue with my father’s Uncle Warren. My Uncle Warren was Dr. Hayward Warren Cushing, a surgeon of Boston, a member of the faculty of Harvard Medical School. He carried out his practice and teaching at the Boston City Hospital, which at that time had a very strong Harvard Surgical Service under David Cheever, David Sears, and my uncle. He was no relation of Harvey Cushing, whom he scorned as an upstart, nor of the surgical Warrens of Boston, of whom more later.

Father never discussed his work with us kids, except to tell us what a rail anchor was. We were asked to visit his office from time to time. I always had the sense there of quiet industry, of people working hard and knowing exactly what they were doing. Father was a hard-working industrial executive. He took the 7:47 to town and came home late in the afternoon or in the early evening. His company, originally Poor and Moore, or the P&M Company, manufactured railroad track equipment and acquired a number of foundries to make these products. The company prospered.

If Father was the achiever, Mother was the intellectual of the family. She was well-read, enjoyed the classics in the original (both Latin and Greek), and was always willing to engage in discussion on intellectual topics, the sort of a discussion my father avoided completely. It is rather surprising that they had such a satisfactory marriage.

While differing in many ways, they were both gregarious with a wide group of close friends, played a great deal of bridge and golf, and frequently entertained at large dinner parties. Growing up with them I developed a severe distaste for bridge and never learned to play golf. Yet I enjoyed doing things with other people and developed my own brand of gregariousness. The combination of these parents produced some hard-working scholarly achievers. Both my brother and sister were brilliant students with fine academic records and high honors at Harvard and Bryn Mawr College.

Maybe one thing about being born a middlewesterner is that you are apt to travel a good deal. It is quite a few miles to get anywhere else. For the son and grandson of men in the railroad business, railroad travel was bound to become an integral part of my young life.

To a small boy brought up in Chicago, who spent his summer vacations on the east coast or in Wyoming, who had a father in the railway supply business and a grandfather as corporation counsel for the Pullman Company, trains were a way of life. Trains were wonderful. They went everywhere, and all that came to Chicago stopped and terminated there. In Chicago there were a great many terminals, or depots, as they were called.

On trains they served pancakes every day. You could have them any day of the week, not just on Sundays. Those dining cars were a joy, rattling along, the water jiggling and the ice tinkling in the glass but rarely spilling, while we watched the landscape go by. The large, black waiters wore spotless white uniforms and moved deftly with perfect control and grace in the lurching car. The whole place had an unforgettable smell of bacon and fresh coffee. Always clean, never sloppy.

Leaving the dining car, you would get a glimpse into the long, narrow kitchen, very hot, filled with busy men working in close quarters, laughing and yelling. How could they make hot mulligatawny soup there and still have the loganberry juice so cold?

And as for the sleeping cars, each was named. I cannot remember ever riding in the same one twice. The green drapes down at night, the ladders to the upper berth. Mother often took the drawing room at the

end of the car that sometimes had an adjoining compartment, if there were lots of us. The little sink and toilet. When you flushed the toilet, you looked down on the tracks and the ties (and rail anchors) whizzing by. You suddenly heard the loud unmuffled clatter of railroad travel. There was a sign on the toilet seat: “Kindly do not flush the toilet while standing in the station.” To a small boy, the English here was confusing. If you were standing in the station, how could you possibly flush the toilet? Why would you want to?

Spotless, clean sheets. Tawny yellow-brown blankets that had a freshly cleaned smell. Little green nets strung along the outer side of the berth to put kits or books in. Leave your shoes on the aisle floor at night, and they would be polished in the morning. To this small boy there were no finer people than Pullman porters. They were cheerful and delighted in telling stories to the kids. At the end of the trip even little boys were offered a brush-up as we closed in on the depot. You went to the noisy cold vestibule between the cars—or even on the station platform as people got out. The porter had an oversized whisk broom with which he brushed you thoroughly, front and back. It felt good. That was when you were supposed to give him his tip. Father gave us a silver dollar to tip the porter, who put a little stool below the lower step of the car to ease a small person’s stepping down to the platform.

The roadway crossing whistle calling in the night seemed far away. As it passed, its pitch suddenly fell as the Doppler effect of approach led to a receding, longer wavelength of sound. The red shift at an Iowa road crossing. Then the distant warning wail of a train that seems way ahead, so rapidly followed by the sudden shocking rush of the passing train going the other way only a foot or two away. The clickety-clack of the rails. Father said that each rail was the same length. So if you counted the clicks and had a stopwatch, you could calculate the speed of the train. An easy bit of algebra but we often forgot to divide by 5,280 or multiply by 60, or something equally basic. He never worked out the problem for us. Just left us with it. Maybe that’s one sign of a good teacher.

Because of Grandfather’s work with the Pullman Company, at the time of his death we were given a private car for the family to accompany him to his burial on a hilltop in Grafton, the Vermont village where he had been born in 1848. All the members of the Daniels family are

buried there. It was a sad time, but an unforgettable journey for a small boy. All that switching of the private car from one train to another. Big chugging steam engines emitting little short signals on the steam whistle to direct the switchmen, the way an ocean liner signals to the swarming tugboats as it comes in to dock.

A train trip to Wyoming—frequent in my life—took two nights and the better part of three days. I enjoyed seeing the flat land and the treeless plains and the sometimes surprising contrasts. There is a strip of northwestern Nebraska that runs on into Wyoming where the thick, dark-green pines of the Black Hills suddenly cease to grow. The CB&Q (Burlington Route) went right along that line for many miles. So, looking out the dining car to the north, you saw a dense pine forest; to the south were endless flat plains without a tree or distinguishing feature all the way to the horizon.

The trip back to Chicago on the cow train after the beef roundup (conducted early in the fall) took five nights and six days. It was slow because of a ruling of the Interstate Commerce Commission that cattle had to be released from their cars and given food and water once every 24 hours while on the way to slaughter (in Chicago).

Uncle Fred was a good deal older than his brother, my father. He, too, had attended MIT. He was keen on the theater and often took us to see plays in Chicago. I can remember going with him to see the Irish Players perform Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars in about 1922. Grandmother Daniels looked after our musical education and took me to many concerts of the Chicago Symphony and an impressive array of soloists. As a little boy I had the privilege of hearing Kreisler play the violin; Paderewski, Rachmaninoff, and Horowitz the piano; and an orchestra under Frederick Stock that was especially strong in the works of Bach, Haydn, Handel, and Beethoven.

On one occasion Uncle Fred took me to visit his foundry in Hoopeston, Illinois, where they made rail anchors. It was a typically middlewestern scene, etched clearly in my mind: a small town of brick dwellings with a town square and white fences. It was early summer. Huge cornfields stretched in every direction as far as you could see. In the town was one set of brick buildings a bit taller than the rest of the town. It had a couple of smokestacks chugging out smoke. This was the foundry. Pig iron was melted down for molding. Huge ladles of molten, white-hot

iron poured their burden delicately into tiny sand molds to make rail anchors. These shapes were then annealed by slow heat treatment to make the iron malleable, so it would bend without breaking. The workers were sweaty, stripped to the waist, smiling at their young visitor. They looked like friends. Hoopeston is on the Vermillion River. This was the Vermillion Malleable Iron Co. at work.

Mother had several medical theories. As children we laughed at them behind her back. As we grew older and realized that she could be tolerant and often laughed at herself, we would kid her about these theories and the things she did. This was an era abounding in theories about various medical and health practices. Many of them were very different from today’s fads. For instance, there was the idea that children should sleep outdoors at night. Many of the houses in Winnetka and along the North Shore had big sleeping porches. Ours had several so we could all sleep outdoors. In the absolute dead of winter with the temperature about 10 below, it was difficult to see what manner of health benefit was obtainable from sticking the tip of your nose out of a pile of blankets. I don’t think it did us any harm. But we would sometimes retreat indoors.

One summer in the early 1920s there was a severe poliomyelitis epidemic. We were taking the train from Chicago to Bellows Falls, Vermont, for one of our many summer visits. Mother was suspicious of everything as the cause of this terrible disease. Especially filth. As it turned out, she was right. She got hold of some formaldehyde or formalin, possibly an ancestor of Lysol or Clorox or some similar antiseptic solution, and went over the entire sleeping car to get everything nice and clean. Needless to say, this was greeted with severe reprimands, if not angry objections, by the other passengers in the car. There were enough of us to fill up one end of the car and one of the drawing rooms. While there were many cases of polio in Vermont, and my cousin from Providence, Rhode Island, came down with severe paralytic polio (which affected her seriously throughout her life), none of our immediate family contracted the disease. Knowing what we now know about polio—and the fact that it is a filth disease spread in much the same manner as typhoid fever—Mother was certainly correct in trying to clean everything up. But at the time and for years afterward, it was just the source of a big laugh, telling the story about how she drove everyone else out of the Pullman car.

Our widely ranging summer vacations in New England or Wyo-

ming were in part traceable to our parents’ desire for us to see the world as youngsters. Our vacations at first were spent in Grandfather’s farmhouse on the top of the hill at Grafton, Vermont. There we learned horseback riding, watched the farmhands milk the cows, chased the chickens, plucked out the feathers after the chickens were beheaded with an axe on a chopping block, swung on the swing attached to the high roof beams of the barn with the haylofts on each side smelling of wonderful fresh timothy hay. Then, when Father could not summer as a guest of in-laws anymore, we spent a summer on Cape Cod and another one near the Cape in a little place called Marion, Massachusetts, where I went at the age of 13, unaware that it would come to dominate much of our family life 20 years later.

In 1923, when I was 10, we took a long trip to Europe. When Mother took a trip, she took it in a big way. One or two maids or nurses came along to supervise the children. There were trunks and porters. A fair show of a royal progress. We spent about a month in London at a tiny hotel called the Garland House, not too far from Picadilly. There, Mother engaged the daughter of a member of Parliament to show us London and take care of us. She gave us all a marvelous time. Mother was always hospitable to her friends’ children, and we brought along many schoolmates from Hubbard Woods and Winnetka. We spent a couple of weeks in Paris. I detested Paris. It was hot, dry, dirty, dusty, and totally uninteresting. Things improved when we went to see the World War I battlefields. We took a charabanc, an open bus, out to Château Thierry and Belleau Wood near Paris. These battles marked the high-water mark of the German advance in the spring of 1918 that almost overwhelmed the Allies. The American Army, though small in those months, played a role in turning back the advance. As we tramped through Belleau Wood only 5 years after the battle, there were still broken trees, helmets, and belt buckles (Gott Mit Uns) on the ground. We saw occasional bones. Now, that war is as remote in the past as was the Civil War when Laurie and I visited those battlefields of Virginia in 1938.

The fields along the road had little platforms on the side where unexploded shells were carefully placed. The farmers in their plowing often encountered these shells and placed them on those little plank benches. Then the army would come along and take the shells away. There must have been some lethal explosions from those encounters, though I do not remember hearing about them at the time.

We spent some time in a villa in southern France (Father rented it for a month). It was an ancient farm on Lac d’Annecy, a magical region of Haute Savoie. The villa was on the west side of the lake, about halfway down from the ancient castled town of Annecy, near a hamlet called St. Jorioz. We looked across the lake at the French Alps. The little sharp peaks immediately across the lake were Les Dents des Enfants. I was at an age when learning a language is easy, and I became reasonably adept at speaking French. We rented the villa from Dr. André Varay. He was a charming man, the leading surgeon of the area. While we were living at the Villa Varay, someone spilled a pot of tea on my right arm. Dr. Varay dressed this burn with picric acid, a rather painful procedure. He explained that this was the way he had treated les poilus at Verdun. My career in treating burns started out the right way—as a patient.

Many years later a French visitor, a Dr. Varay, came to visit our department of surgery. He was not a surgeon. We invited him to dinner. I did not make the connection at first. But then after a couple of martinis, he announced that he had come to see me not for any profound medical knowledge, but because I had been the 10-year-old boy who had taught him, then 7, how to play le beisbol. He was now a successful French practitioner, quite impressive in his double-breasted vest and spats. His office was on l’Avenue Foch, one of the streets that makes the points of the star of La Place de l’Etoile. Fashionable. Like Harley Street in London. What a reunion so many miles and years from that rustic villa in Haute Savoie!

Mother’s classical scholarship gave her a special interest in the Roman ruins in the south of France. I remember her helping my brother Philip with his first Latin lesson in the Roman amphitheater in Avignon while we were all on a family trip to England and France. I did not yet understand the appropriateness of giving a Latin lesson in a Roman amphitheater.

My parents were a part of a small group who founded a new private day school in Winnetka called the North Shore Country Day School. They obtained the services as headmaster of an educator named Perry Dunlap Smith. It was at that school that I was educated from first through twelfth grade. I graduated from high school there, and then was off to college.

Back in the 1920s, I encountered people in the Mountain West who considered a private school to be a retreat for retarded children. The idea of sending children to a school where parents paid large tuitions seemed outrageous. Removing children from a comfortable bed and home-cooked food in exchange for a hard bed and bad food at great expense seemed a ridiculous waste of money.

Today private schools are found in every part of this country, but they are still a larger slice of the educational pie in the East and the Northeast than they are elsewhere. Some private boarding schools in New England have multi-million-dollar endowments and vast brick-colonial campuses, the envy of any freshwater college.

By those standards, the North Shore Country Day School was simplicity itself. It was dedicated to the proposition that most of its students should easily achieve admission to the colleges of the eastern seaboard with—in addition—a broad education based on a rich mixture of scholarship, athletics, music, and art.

Our school was situated in a community inhabited by people of affluence who were given to liberal views of education, such as those endorsed by Dewey in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, but who at the same time were prone to conservatism in politics, social intercourse, and business, and harbored their own full share of ethnic prejudice.

The school was rather small, graduating about 30 students a year.

It was coeducational, which was lucky for me, since the student body included Laura Bartlett. The school encouraged intellectual inquiry on any and all topics and was more liberal in its view of politics than was the surrounding community.

North Shore Country Day School nourished my interest in music. The headmaster played the bass fiddle in the school orchestra where I played clarinet. As a member of the orchestra, our authority figure was completely subject to the baton of the conductor. The headmaster had also been a famous athlete in his college days and an officer in World War I. He inspired not only by his philosophy, avoiding the zealotry of overenthusiasm, but also by his joy in achievement and by his quest for excellence. In addition, he could be found having a good time at school dances or enthusiastically singing with the students.

Despite my egregious shortcomings in athletics, I found it possible to struggle through with studies and exams and to enjoy proms, dances, Gilbert and Sullivan operas, and the other obsessive-compulsive disorders of private teenage education. My life certainly could not be described as hardscrabble. While I can remember walking those 2 miles to school and taking the trolley on many occasions, our children later insisted that I was regularly driven to school by a uniformed chauffeur. This disaster happened, but only rarely. When it did happen, I got out of the car a block or two from the school to avoid a pretentious arrival. The understanding chauffeur (friend and confidant) always laughed over this.

Courses in algebra, history, Latin, English, and psychology were my favorites. I made music with several members of the music department, with whom I performed two-piano recitals. One, Arthur Landers, later became music director at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. I played Rhapsody in Blue at a graduation celebration, using Gershwin’s own two-piano arrangement about 6 years after Gershwin first performed it. My partner on the other piano on that occasion was Eleanor Cheney, a classmate and far better pianist than I.

Our class did pretty well in fulfilling the college-entrance mission of North Shore Country Day School. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Williams welcomed a good many of the boys, while the girls were admitted to Vassar, Smith, Radcliffe, Bryn Mawr, and Wellesley. Our class picture shows the 28 boys and girls, standing awkwardly on the auditorium steps in the June sunlight. The year was 1931.

Freshly sprung from 12 years at North Shore Country Day School, three of my classmates and I came to Harvard together. We were Fisher Howe, member of the State Department for many years, still one of my closest friends; Thomas Lynde Dammann, later to become a wide-ranging reporter for The New York Times; Charles Friedman Haas, later a film writer and director in Hollywood; and I.

We arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in mid-September 1931. I came by train, straight from a glorious Wyoming summer pitching hay, punching cows, and concocting mint juleps for my father’s houseguests. The four of us had pored over catalogues and selected our courses and rooms. Three of us were to room in Harvard Yard in the same room in Lionel Hall that my brother had occupied while finishing college the previous June. We were the first freshmen to live in the Yard, formerly occupied only by seniors.

Although I considered myself to have been privileged by family upbringing and private schooling, I was not prepared for the excitement, challenge, and mix of experiences that awaited me at college. I was far from home. Most members of our Harvard freshman class seemed to have dozens of close friends from prep school, whereas I knew only my three high school buddies. The locals (of whom there were a great many in those days) went home frequently for weekends. I had to make new

friends and learn new social customs. Early on I learned that, when I responded “Hubbard Woods” to the question, “Where are you from?” the riposte would be, “Where’s that?” Answering “Winnetka” helped, but not much. “Chicago” was the simplest reply to those many students (most of our class) whose families lived east of the Appalachians, the majority in New England and New York.

In spite of the advantages of having an achiever father, an intellectual mother, and a wonderful high school education, my academic career in college was somewhat less than spectacular. I concentrated in anthropology because I was interested primarily in human evolution: physical anthropology. The curriculum for anthropology included several pre-medical courses in its concentration list, so, when I decided to go to medical school in sophomore year, I found I could meet two requirements with one sign-up: concentration in anthropology, and the pre-med curriculum.

We were required to spread our course selections widely. Particularly prominent for me were philosophy and music. The most stimulating philosophy course I took was Philosophy 4b, taught by Professor Perry entitled “American Ideals and Standards with Special Reference to Puritanism and Democracy.” Professor Perry enlightened us on the interaction of three cultural traits that make American society at least reasonably successful: a puritanical point of view (essential to stay the overweening greed of capitalism); capitalism (generally competent to organize commercial activity); and democracy, “one man, one vote” (providing the public with a means to restrain the excesses of the other two).

By far the best course I took in college was organic chemistry taught by Louis Fieser. Our textbook was written by James Bryant Conant, Professor of Organic Chemistry, who was appointed President of Harvard during 1933, our sophomore year. The course was beautifully organized and taught without frills or distractions. Professor Fieser gave all the lectures himself. It may be hard to believe that a course in chemistry can be a thing of beauty. It was.

Although I finally graduated cum laude in general studies, any academic achievement beyond that was impeded by several diversions. First among these was the fact that Laura Bartlett was attending Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. Obviously, it was necessary

to journey to Bronxville as often as possible. I did so with such frequency that I was accused of seeking my degree at Sarah Lawrence. This commuting was accomplished mostly by bumming rides (I did not have a car), taking the train, or occasionally taking the old N.Y. steamer, via the Cape Cod Canal. This packet was by far the cheapest way to get from Boston to New York (about $1.75 one way). Boarding at a broken-down old wooden wharf on the Boston waterfront at about 5:00 PM, we would transit the canal a few hours later and wake up (if possible) early enough to see the New York skyline and Statue of Liberty emerge from the morning mist. This skyline soon changed drastically because the Empire State Building was completed in 1933 and the Chrysler Building soon thereafter. Please recall that for some years the Woolworth Building was the highest building in New York (and the entire world), and the Wrigley Building, a monument to the invention of chewing gum, the tallest in Chicago.

In addition to New York trips to see Laurie, other diversions were traceable to various extracurricular activities. I enjoyed writing prose and poetry (supposedly humorous) and became a staffer of that famous magazine (also supposedly humorous), the Harvard Lampoon. At this time we stole the Sacred Codfish, a wooden icon that hung in the State House in Boston, and—a year later—the Yale bulldog. Much as I would like to claim credit for these brilliant literary coups as president of that magazine in my junior year, it was my buddies to whom all the credit was due. Fortunately, no one went to jail or was expelled from college. The bulldog (valuable according to the Elis) and the codfish (sacred according to the state senate) were returned in the same state of health and carving they had been in when purloined.

I took some music courses at college. One was on composition, at which I fancied myself adept. I wrote a chorus for orchestra and male voices, set to Shelley’s Ozymandias:

Open fifths. High strings. Octave voices. Terrific. When our turn arrived, my roommate, Warren Sturgis, and I performed this epic on two pianos for the professor and the assembled class. The professor remained curiously, remarkably, and unexpectedly unmoved. When our performance was over, the class offered us some polite applause, which quickly died down when the professor stalked up to my piano, pointed to one measure of the composition and said, “Francis, don’t you realize, that F natural should be an F sharp? Next!”

The one bright spot in the music department was our visiting professor, Gustav Holst, the great English composer. He exemplified the eclectic view of music that has always appealed to me. If Duke Ellington was in town, Holst always went to that night club to hear him. The Holst Dirge for Two Veterans was part of our glee club repertoire at the time that I accompanied and later sang second bass. It is a tremendously moving piece for men’s voices, on the burial of two veterans of the Civil War. Much more interesting than anything our stuffy old music professor had written.

Early in our sophomore year I was asked to join the Hasty Pudding Club, a college club dating back to 1770, whose main claim to fame rested on its theatricals. I wrote some music for the shows, the first was a jazzy tune called “Hot Stuff” for the Hasty Pudding show in the spring of 1933. It owed a debt to Gershwin and Tin Pan Alley, then at a peak of popularity. With a name like that how could you lose? I was then elected president of the Hasty Pudding Theatricals and wrote the show for 1934, which imagined the unthinkable: Harvard College as a coeducational institution (shades of North Shore Country Day). It was entitled “Hades! The Ladies!” This sitcom turned out to be prophetic. By the time of our 20th reunion the Harvard campus was full of students of the gentler gender. They were certainly more appealing aesthetically than all those acne-pocked teen-age males. This particular Hasty Pudding show enjoyed the collaboration of many of my classmates, including my high school buddy, Charles Haas. Our theatrical mentor was a young English student named Alistair Cooke. He was in the United States on a Commonwealth Fund International Fellowship studying the American language. He spent most of his fellowship year in Baltimore studying with H.L. Mencken. We had a great time with this noble adventure, and

Alistair later rose to eminence in the world of TV here and in Great Britain with his series “America” and Masterpiece Theatre.

We took “Hades! The Ladies!” on a road trip that included Washington, D.C., where dwelt many Harvard alumni, not a few of whom were brain-trusters in the first Roosevelt term. You could always count on Harvard alumni to purchase tickets to a Hasty Pudding show. This venue was particularly appropriate because our cast included Teddy Roosevelt III (grandson of the former president) and Mike Garfield (also grandson of a former president). Robert Hepburn (brother of Katherine Hepburn, then at her first of many peaks in popularity) was the third member of what we called the “publicity trio.” We could count on the press to give us all sorts of advance publicity with lots of pictures. We did very well, at least in the newspapers.

This was in April 1934. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had been a member of the Hasty Pudding Club during his Harvard years (class of ’04) and had been in the cast of the Pudding show in 1903. Franklin and Eleanor invited the cast to the White House for tea in the East Room. I played the piano while the cast sang our songs. We had looked up the show in which FDR was a chorus girl. So we sang some of his songs: a pleasant surprise for our hosts.

Our college years coincided with the Great Depression, known by that term even then. The Great Crash of ’29 had occurred when we were sophomores in high school. During this period of economic anguish, the world also moved from post-war to pre-war. There was an ominous prescience based on strong clues: the sudden emergence of Hitler and Mussolini as “dictators” (then a new term), the inflation in post-Versailles Germany, and lingering hatreds and polarization resulting from a war that had not really ended 15 years before with the signing of the Armistice in 1918. I had studied Sidney Fay’s Origins of the World War. It took no genius to realize that we were heading in that direction again. It was a time of dark forebodings: the Spanish Civil War, the occupation of the Saar.

Harvard tuition was $400 per year, $100 a course. I took five courses each year ($500). My father was very generous to stake me to this

additional tuition. But many people couldn’t afford such a large outlay. To put it in some perspective, $400 dollars was the cost of our first automobile—a Ford sedan—when Laura and I married. Nowadays a two-door Ford costs somewhere around $12,000, and tuition at a private college starts somewhere around $20,000.

From our earliest days at school we had been exposed to the concept that privilege imposes obligation, noblesse oblige. Many of our college classmates were active in helping the poor. The Phillips Brooks House at Harvard was devoted to social work. In recent decades earning a salary doing summertime jobs starting at about the age of 16 has become almost universal among American youth. All our children and grandchildren have undertaken such jobs. Many of them have worked during college in social welfare activities with sick, crippled, or underprivileged people. But in the 1930s altruism was not so common. In the summer of 1934 I studied German and went to Germany hoping among other things to perfect my spoken German. It was Hitler’s first year in power, and Germany was already permeated with racist terror. Another summer, I worked in Chicago on a dialysis project for the treatment of kidney failure—prophetic of things to come. But mostly I just had a good time in the summertime with my friends, especially Laura, in Winnetka or Wyoming.

In the fall of our senior year quite a few members of our class were admitted to medical schools (mostly on the east coast). In January Laurie and I informed our families that we would like to be married. No one was very surprised.

My final term at Harvard College, the spring of 1935, was enjoyable and exciting beyond all belief, largely because we were engaged to be married. I returned from Cambridge to Winnetka in June 1935, a few days after graduation, to begin what was the greatest privilege of my life, that of being married to Laura, who became the steadfast guide of my life.

After graduation, as we clutched our diplomas and started to look for scarce jobs or apply to graduate school, we tried to forget about the Depression and the ominous pre-war tensions of Europe. We tried not to consider such matters as part of our own personal future. Laura and I set out on our honeymoon with excitement, love, joyousness, and nothing but the challenge of a medical career ahead and possibly, if we were lucky, a family.

Laura Benton Bartlett and I had met when we were students at school. Meeting her certainly formed a great divide in my life, a little bit upstream of the age of 15.

Falling in love is not subject to close analysis. You can list all its aspects, ranging from the crudest sort of lustful eroticism to the most refined sense of joy in cherry pie, in conversation about Restoration drama, or the way she sits a horse. All treasure is surrounded by dragons. There was plenty of competition. Some of her boyfriends were actually friends of mine, and one was the brother of one of my closest friends. So maybe I shouldn’t call them dragons. But anyway, there they were. Challengers. Competitors.

Laurie was an only child. Her father was a native of Peoria, Illinois, descended from a long line of New Hampshire Bartletts. He was a bond broker and securities underwriter in Chicago, a graduate of St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire, and college at Yale. Her mother’s origins were in Toledo and Granville, Ohio, and Sewickley, Pennsylvania. Like my parents, the Bartlett ancestors had moved west to find business opportunities in the decades prior to World War I. Mr.

Bartlett had been a machine-gun officer and instructor in the service. He went into the securities business right after the war.

The senior Bartletts were good friends of the Moores. They lived only about a mile away. On high school evenings I was often allowed to borrow the car to drive to the Bartlett home. After a couple of years of this, my father claimed that the car would go there automatically without anybody at the wheel.

When I was at Harvard, Laurie often came to Cambridge from Sarah Lawrence, and we attended various functions at Eliot House or at the Hasty Pudding Club. Everyone who saw her fell in love with her. I was worried that I might be exposing her to a variety of men more able, more attractive, taller, and better looking than I. Fortunately, she never wavered.

But there was an additional twist to this. In the course of the Boston debutante cotillions and other affairs of that stripe, held with big-name dance orchestras (Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Guy Lombardo) in major hotels, such as the Somerset, the Copley, the Ritz, or at The Country Club, I had met an interesting group of young Bostonian women. They were cordial but cautious when they first met Franny’s girl from Winnetka. They quickly took a shine to her, and several of them became Laurie’s closest friends for the next 50 years. What better dividend from four college years in Boston?

Our wedding was on June 24th in 1935, at the Congregational Church in Winnetka. The reception was at the Bartlett home. Lots of our friends of both generations were there. We took off in a Model A Ford sedan Mother had given us, with tin cans attached to the back, and headed for Milwaukee for our wedding night. On the way there, something happened that in retrospect, 53 years later, turned out to have been foreboding and ominous, though at the time we did not appreciate anything except physical danger.

We were overtaken by one of those sudden, overpowering, frightening middlewestern electric storms (squalls and thunderstorms). Storms of such ferocity are rarely seen in the east except far out at sea, and then it

is wind and rain and not so much electricity. We were about halfway to Milwaukee. There were some high-tension towers near us. The sky suddenly became very dark, like late evening. There were tremendous strokes of lightning all around us. Shattering crashes of thunder. We sort of tingled, not for love alone. Sparks flew from the electric power lines in the distance. The downpour was torrential. We pulled to the side of the road and watched this magnificent outpouring of nature’s energy onto the flat, hot plains. I knew that in a car you were in the safest possible place because with tires as the only ground contact there was no electrical grounding. It was all over in minutes, to be followed by one of those spectacular and beautiful middlewestern sunsets. Fifty-three years later, in just such a storm, Laurie’s and my life together would end.

One October evening, 4 months after our wedding, was the kind of Saturday night we enjoyed relaxing a little bit. Neither of us consumed very much alcohol. I offered Laurie a rum old-fashioned. I don’t know what ever possessed me to offer my beautiful bride such a dreadful drink. But she downed it with gusto, as I did mine. A few hours later she began to have severe abdominal pain. I called Bill Marlowe, the only internist I knew at that time in Boston. He diagnosed appendicitis and asked if I knew any surgeons. I didn’t know many people because as a newly married couple we had just moved to Boston. The only surgeon I knew of was David Cheever, who presented the first-year clinics in anatomy. At that time I did not appreciate his eminence. He removed Laurie’s appendix, and there began a friendly relation with the Cheever family over many years. Laurie never touched rum again.

About 3 months after this, Laurie became pregnant, and in October 1936, Nancy was born. First we named her Laura. But then we realized that if I was resting comfortably in my favorite chair, lounging robe in place (like Archie Bunker), and called “Laura,” two people would respond. Unlikely. But that was the operative theory. So we changed her name from Laura Bartlett to Nancy Holmes, after her great-grandmother.

Over the next few years we moved to several small houses in the

general vicinity of Boston and Brookline, and soon other children came along to keep Nancy company. Peter Bartlett Moore (1939) was given his grandfather Edmund’s nickname, Peter. Sarah Sewall Moore, named after her great-great-great-grandmother, was born a couple of years later (1941), and then in 1944 came Caroline Daniels Moore, named after my mother. There was a gap of fully 6 years before FDM, Jr., was born. All are achievers, successful in what they do. Our five children are now the parents of our 17 grandchildren.

Nancy, like her mother, married a medical student (Lucius Hill) when she was only 19. They have four children. She is a consultant in learning disabilities in the schools of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Luke is a senior surgeon of Exeter. Peter went to Yale and is now professor of chemistry there, and has taken his turn as head of the Department of Chemistry. Like his grandfather, he married a girl from Iowa, Margaret Murphy. They have two children. Sarah (Sally) is an artist and teacher in Grafton, Vermont. She married Richard Warren, the son of a surgeon, our close friend. They have three children. She has started a school for teachers in Vermont. Caroline is dean of admissions at The Day School in New York. To be original, she married a lawyer, James Tripp, also the son of friends in Brookline. Jim is now senior counsel for the Environmental Defense Fund. They have two children. Our youngest, FDM, Jr., “Chip,” is an academic surgeon carrying out clinical surgery, research, and teaching (much as his father did) at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, where he is an associate professor. After divorce, Chip remarried. He and Carla Dateo Moore together have six children.

There is no predicting a happy marriage. The premarital state seems to have nothing to do with it. In our day, virginity was the rule; marriage was a prerequisite to marital togetherness, to sexual union. One evening my children, in a gale of argument, asked me, “Why did you marry Mother?” I answered, “Lust.” Despite their supposed sophistication and age (they already had several children) they were surprised if not shocked. Children have a hard time realizing that their parents can be passionate lovers. They do not consider that anything as dignified as their parents’ marriage could be contaminated by any such earthy sensations.

What are some of the components of a happy marriage? To

Laurie and me, analyzing ours and the marriages of children and friends, it seemed clear that, after the basics, conflict resolution is one of the most important. The basics certainly include the continued expression of mutual physical and intellectual attraction, congeniality of interests, and fidelity.

Many young couples break up over their first serious argument. We were married for 53 years. Five children. Is there any way of calculating how many serious arguments we had? It was clear to us, among other things, that a double bed is a good means of conflict resolution. You can’t go to bed together if you’re still mad.