TREETOPS: A FAMILY MEMOIR - Softcover
The effects of living with a dynasty of talented individuals are explored in a memoir of the American family that gave to the world Thomas Watson, co-inventor of the telephone, Yale Medical School founder Milton Winternitz, and writer John Cheever
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
Susan Cheever is the bestselling author of thirteen previous books, including five novels and the memoirs Note Found in a Bottle and Home Before Dark. Her work has been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the Boston Globe Winship Medal. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, a member of the Corporation of Yaddo, and a member of the Author's Guild Council. She teaches in the Bennington College M.F.A. program. She lives in New York City with her family.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
CHAPTER ONE
TREETOPS was built out of my great-grandfather Tom Watson's dreams. Born grit poor in a Salem, Massachusetts livery stable, Watson got rich and famous in the 1870s, when he and his friend Alexander Graham Bell invented and developed the telephone. Watson was an inspired technician, a clever storyteller, a driven adventurer, and a man who lost a lot of money banking on the innate goodness of human nature. He spent the bulk of his Bell millions building a shipyard which employed most of eastern Massachusetts during the depression of the 1890s -- he joked that it would have been cheaper to pension off every ablebodied man in the state. His unorthodox management methods -- Watson liked to bid on huge navy battleships his Fore River shipyard wasn't equipped to build, figuring that if he won the bid he'd expand -- sent the shipyard's treasurer into a sanatorium with a nervous breakdown, but Watson managed to produce five of the cruisers and battleships in President Theodore Roosevelt's navy, and two of his ships went around the world with the proud Great White Fleet. When the shipyard's creditors finally foreclosed, Watson had saved enough to five on if he supplemented his income with writing and lectures, and to buy the fifty acres on a hillside in New Hampshire which is still the geographical center of his family.
Watson believed that the rich owed the poor. With his friend Edward Bellamy, the American writer and socialist, he founded the Nationalist political party He also panned for gold in Alaska, studied classical music, committed most of Shakespeare's plays to memory, and became a geologist who had a fossil -- Watsonella -- named after him. In his fifties, Watson joined Frank Benson's traveling company of Shakespearean players and toured the small towns of England. Fully costumed in armor or togas, he proclaimed his lines -- "Ave Brutus!" was one -- from the ramshackle stages at Bath, Birmingham, and Liverpool.
In my family, conventional success at formal education has always been taken as a sign of a dull, law-abiding nature. My father was expelled from school at seventeen and wrote his first story about it. My grandfather Milton Charles Winternitz graduated at fifteen. Watson quit school in Salem when he was fourteen. By the time his classmates were getting their degrees, he was chumming around with Queen Victoria and Kaiser Wilhelm and trying to decide how to invest his personal fortune. He believed in reincarnation of the soul after death, the curative powers of daydreaming, and taxing the rich -- and he
loved a good story. At Treetops he enthralled his grandchildren with tailor-made tall tales about a boy named Tom who invented a car that ran on milk-and that made ice cream, a boy named Bill who was taught to swim in the lake by a talking and a girl named Mary who discovered underground tunnels which enabled her to chat with the carrots and potatoes Watson's hose tops were growing in the vegetable garden. Watson's most skillful and enduring story is the one he made up about the first words spoken over the telephone wires, on the evening of March 10, 1876, in the attic rooms Bell rented in Boston.
According to Watson, writing in his 1926 autobiography, Exploring Life, the historic words were Alexander Graham Bell's shout for help after he knocked over a beaker of battery acid. Bell was always clumsy. "Mr. Watson, come here, I want you!" he called in pain, and Watson, standing in the next room, heard the words transmitted through the wire. Since then, this story of the birth of the telephone has been repeated in thousands of biographies, history textbooks, and educational films, and even in a movie, The Story of Alexander Graham Bell, starring Don Ameche.
The fact that it didn't happen this way has not diminished the story's dramatic impact.
There was no accident, there was no spilled battery acid. "The first recorded message was commonplace," Watson complained in a letter soon after the event. "There was little of dramatic interest in the occasion," he wrote to another correspondent. There is no reference to the accident with acid in any log or letter of Bell's or in Watson's log for the day.
It wasn't until Watson sat down to remember this historic moment in his autobiography, fifty years after the fact, that the spilled acid was invented. Watson was an old man, and the past had become dim and malleable. Bell was dead and couldn't contradict him. Watson was living in retirement in a fisherman's cottage on the Florida beach, and his impulse to tell a good story finally became irresistible.
"I was astonished to hear Bell's voice coming from [the receiving telephone] distinctly saying, 'Mr. Watson, come here, I want you!"' Watson wrote in Exploring Life. "He had no receiving telephone at his end of the wire so I couldn't answer him, but as the tone of his voice indicated that he needed help, I rushed down the hall to his room and found he had upset the acid of a battery over his clothes. He forgot the accident in his joy over the success of the new transmitter when I told him how plainly I had heard his words, and his joy was increased when he went to the other end of the wire and heard how distinctly my voice came through."
Like all inspired storytellers, Watson altered the facts just slightly, drawing what should have happened out of what did happen. In remembering my father's stories about his lifedecades after Watson`s -- I often noticed that this was exactly what he did. If a moment in his career was triumphant, like the moment when an editor bought his first novel, my father would fashion a triumphant moment out of the mundane available facts. A rowboat would become a yacht, a chance meeting at a cocktail party would become a Stanley-meets-Livingstone. encounter on a beach after a thrilling approach down the reach of Nantucket Harbor. Of course none of us expected accuracy from my father. He made his living by making up stories. So it was thrilling to discover that the so-called scientific side of my family had been doing the same thing all along, starting with Great-grandfather Watson.
Perhaps, as he wrote about the invention of the telephone, Watson remembered a previous incident with acid and spliced the two together. Maybe he had heard about someone else having an accident with spilled acid. Using the techniques of storytelling as skillfully as a novelist, he wrote such a compelling account of that evening in 1876 that the spilled battery acid has become part of American history.
By the time the Wit and Wisdom of Great Men is passed on, they are usually bearded, somber-looking stiffs. Their pale faces stare out at us lesser mortals from postage stamps, portraits, and official histories. Watson and Bell are no exception; even in the pictures of them as young men, they are unsmiling and sober-sided, clearly mindful of the important fate which destiny holds in store for them. But in 1874 when Watson, a stable boy turned electrical engineer, met Bell, a Scot who made a living tutoring deaf children with a system called Visible Speech, at Charles Williams' grimy machine shop on Court Street in Boston, they were not elder statesmen. They were a couple of kids with a few inspired ideas embarking on a mission impossible-the invention of a method for carrying a sound-shaped current through electrical wires Which would carry the human voice.
Williams' was one of a few crude machine shops in the country which manufactured electrical equipment-telegraph parts, fire alarms, electric call bells and other gadgets. In the gas-light age, electricity was a commodity reserved for the very rich or the very modem. The shop was on the third floor and attic of a dusty old building on Court Street. Belts and pulleys whirred overhead as the men worked with their hammers, chisels and lathes, stepping over piles of castings and steel rods to get to their benches against the greasy walls. Williams' shop was an informal center for local inventors, those kinky visionaries who needed to see their ideas transformed into wire, metal and cable -- often overnight. Thomas Edison had worked at Williams' shop, and Moses Farmer had invented the electric fire alarm there. But most of the drawings being worked on in the shop were for contraptions like corn-husk-fueled engines and exploding submarine mines.
Watson was twenty-one and Bell was twenty-seven when they met at Williams. Watson worked all day at the shop on their ideas and then the two of them stayed up most of the night tinkering and talking. When something went well they burst into a howling, stomping war dance that almost got them evicted from their cheap, boardinghouse rooms. "Watson! I believe we are on the verge of a great discovery!" Bell would intone before each experiment. They were always broke, and Bell's financial backers, Thomas Sanders and Gardiner Hubbard, urged him to give up the idea of the telephone and work on something more practical.
It was, the electricity generated by their friendship that kept Bell and Watson working against the odds. Watson was an elegant natural technician from a crude background. Bell was a thinker and a gentleman who could never make the machinery keep up with his ideas. Watson showed Bell how to make wire, metal, and wood into something that worked. Bell introduced Watson to classical music and gentlemanly manners; he taught him to stop swearing and to eat with a fork.
The late nineteenth century in Boston was a fertile time for dreams. The city had named itself the 'Athens of America." Longfellow was teaching at Harvard, and Oliver Wendell Holmes held forth at the law school. Electric trolleys and trains provided fast, clean transportation. The clear water of the harbor was crowded with yachts, packets, and the great schooners and sailing ships which carried on a rich trade with the Orient, taking raw cotton, tobacco, lumber, and wool, and returning with their holds packed with Huk-wa tea, coffee, and silks, jammed in with blue and white Canton china for ballast.
The Boston Common was transformed from a mucky cow pasture ...
TREETOPS was built out of my great-grandfather Tom Watson's dreams. Born grit poor in a Salem, Massachusetts livery stable, Watson got rich and famous in the 1870s, when he and his friend Alexander Graham Bell invented and developed the telephone. Watson was an inspired technician, a clever storyteller, a driven adventurer, and a man who lost a lot of money banking on the innate goodness of human nature. He spent the bulk of his Bell millions building a shipyard which employed most of eastern Massachusetts during the depression of the 1890s -- he joked that it would have been cheaper to pension off every ablebodied man in the state. His unorthodox management methods -- Watson liked to bid on huge navy battleships his Fore River shipyard wasn't equipped to build, figuring that if he won the bid he'd expand -- sent the shipyard's treasurer into a sanatorium with a nervous breakdown, but Watson managed to produce five of the cruisers and battleships in President Theodore Roosevelt's navy, and two of his ships went around the world with the proud Great White Fleet. When the shipyard's creditors finally foreclosed, Watson had saved enough to five on if he supplemented his income with writing and lectures, and to buy the fifty acres on a hillside in New Hampshire which is still the geographical center of his family.
Watson believed that the rich owed the poor. With his friend Edward Bellamy, the American writer and socialist, he founded the Nationalist political party He also panned for gold in Alaska, studied classical music, committed most of Shakespeare's plays to memory, and became a geologist who had a fossil -- Watsonella -- named after him. In his fifties, Watson joined Frank Benson's traveling company of Shakespearean players and toured the small towns of England. Fully costumed in armor or togas, he proclaimed his lines -- "Ave Brutus!" was one -- from the ramshackle stages at Bath, Birmingham, and Liverpool.
In my family, conventional success at formal education has always been taken as a sign of a dull, law-abiding nature. My father was expelled from school at seventeen and wrote his first story about it. My grandfather Milton Charles Winternitz graduated at fifteen. Watson quit school in Salem when he was fourteen. By the time his classmates were getting their degrees, he was chumming around with Queen Victoria and Kaiser Wilhelm and trying to decide how to invest his personal fortune. He believed in reincarnation of the soul after death, the curative powers of daydreaming, and taxing the rich -- and he
loved a good story. At Treetops he enthralled his grandchildren with tailor-made tall tales about a boy named Tom who invented a car that ran on milk-and that made ice cream, a boy named Bill who was taught to swim in the lake by a talking and a girl named Mary who discovered underground tunnels which enabled her to chat with the carrots and potatoes Watson's hose tops were growing in the vegetable garden. Watson's most skillful and enduring story is the one he made up about the first words spoken over the telephone wires, on the evening of March 10, 1876, in the attic rooms Bell rented in Boston.
According to Watson, writing in his 1926 autobiography, Exploring Life, the historic words were Alexander Graham Bell's shout for help after he knocked over a beaker of battery acid. Bell was always clumsy. "Mr. Watson, come here, I want you!" he called in pain, and Watson, standing in the next room, heard the words transmitted through the wire. Since then, this story of the birth of the telephone has been repeated in thousands of biographies, history textbooks, and educational films, and even in a movie, The Story of Alexander Graham Bell, starring Don Ameche.
The fact that it didn't happen this way has not diminished the story's dramatic impact.
There was no accident, there was no spilled battery acid. "The first recorded message was commonplace," Watson complained in a letter soon after the event. "There was little of dramatic interest in the occasion," he wrote to another correspondent. There is no reference to the accident with acid in any log or letter of Bell's or in Watson's log for the day.
It wasn't until Watson sat down to remember this historic moment in his autobiography, fifty years after the fact, that the spilled acid was invented. Watson was an old man, and the past had become dim and malleable. Bell was dead and couldn't contradict him. Watson was living in retirement in a fisherman's cottage on the Florida beach, and his impulse to tell a good story finally became irresistible.
"I was astonished to hear Bell's voice coming from [the receiving telephone] distinctly saying, 'Mr. Watson, come here, I want you!"' Watson wrote in Exploring Life. "He had no receiving telephone at his end of the wire so I couldn't answer him, but as the tone of his voice indicated that he needed help, I rushed down the hall to his room and found he had upset the acid of a battery over his clothes. He forgot the accident in his joy over the success of the new transmitter when I told him how plainly I had heard his words, and his joy was increased when he went to the other end of the wire and heard how distinctly my voice came through."
Like all inspired storytellers, Watson altered the facts just slightly, drawing what should have happened out of what did happen. In remembering my father's stories about his lifedecades after Watson`s -- I often noticed that this was exactly what he did. If a moment in his career was triumphant, like the moment when an editor bought his first novel, my father would fashion a triumphant moment out of the mundane available facts. A rowboat would become a yacht, a chance meeting at a cocktail party would become a Stanley-meets-Livingstone. encounter on a beach after a thrilling approach down the reach of Nantucket Harbor. Of course none of us expected accuracy from my father. He made his living by making up stories. So it was thrilling to discover that the so-called scientific side of my family had been doing the same thing all along, starting with Great-grandfather Watson.
Perhaps, as he wrote about the invention of the telephone, Watson remembered a previous incident with acid and spliced the two together. Maybe he had heard about someone else having an accident with spilled acid. Using the techniques of storytelling as skillfully as a novelist, he wrote such a compelling account of that evening in 1876 that the spilled battery acid has become part of American history.
By the time the Wit and Wisdom of Great Men is passed on, they are usually bearded, somber-looking stiffs. Their pale faces stare out at us lesser mortals from postage stamps, portraits, and official histories. Watson and Bell are no exception; even in the pictures of them as young men, they are unsmiling and sober-sided, clearly mindful of the important fate which destiny holds in store for them. But in 1874 when Watson, a stable boy turned electrical engineer, met Bell, a Scot who made a living tutoring deaf children with a system called Visible Speech, at Charles Williams' grimy machine shop on Court Street in Boston, they were not elder statesmen. They were a couple of kids with a few inspired ideas embarking on a mission impossible-the invention of a method for carrying a sound-shaped current through electrical wires Which would carry the human voice.
Williams' was one of a few crude machine shops in the country which manufactured electrical equipment-telegraph parts, fire alarms, electric call bells and other gadgets. In the gas-light age, electricity was a commodity reserved for the very rich or the very modem. The shop was on the third floor and attic of a dusty old building on Court Street. Belts and pulleys whirred overhead as the men worked with their hammers, chisels and lathes, stepping over piles of castings and steel rods to get to their benches against the greasy walls. Williams' shop was an informal center for local inventors, those kinky visionaries who needed to see their ideas transformed into wire, metal and cable -- often overnight. Thomas Edison had worked at Williams' shop, and Moses Farmer had invented the electric fire alarm there. But most of the drawings being worked on in the shop were for contraptions like corn-husk-fueled engines and exploding submarine mines.
Watson was twenty-one and Bell was twenty-seven when they met at Williams. Watson worked all day at the shop on their ideas and then the two of them stayed up most of the night tinkering and talking. When something went well they burst into a howling, stomping war dance that almost got them evicted from their cheap, boardinghouse rooms. "Watson! I believe we are on the verge of a great discovery!" Bell would intone before each experiment. They were always broke, and Bell's financial backers, Thomas Sanders and Gardiner Hubbard, urged him to give up the idea of the telephone and work on something more practical.
It was, the electricity generated by their friendship that kept Bell and Watson working against the odds. Watson was an elegant natural technician from a crude background. Bell was a thinker and a gentleman who could never make the machinery keep up with his ideas. Watson showed Bell how to make wire, metal, and wood into something that worked. Bell introduced Watson to classical music and gentlemanly manners; he taught him to stop swearing and to eat with a fork.
The late nineteenth century in Boston was a fertile time for dreams. The city had named itself the 'Athens of America." Longfellow was teaching at Harvard, and Oliver Wendell Holmes held forth at the law school. Electric trolleys and trains provided fast, clean transportation. The clear water of the harbor was crowded with yachts, packets, and the great schooners and sailing ships which carried on a rich trade with the Orient, taking raw cotton, tobacco, lumber, and wool, and returning with their holds packed with Huk-wa tea, coffee, and silks, jammed in with blue and white Canton china for ballast.
The Boston Common was transformed from a mucky cow pasture ...
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- PublisherBantam
- Publication date1992
- ISBN 10 055335132X
- ISBN 13 9780553351323
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages224
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Book Description Paperback. Condition: Good. The powerful companion to Cheever's acclaimed memoir Home Before Dark, now in trade paperback. Fascination with the Cheever family has been sparked by the recent publication of The Journals of John Cheever. Treetops is a stor y about the myths that families build around themselves--and the myth of ge nius, eccentricity and closeness which the Cheever family created. 16 pages of photographs. Seller Inventory # RWARE0000060085
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