Roots

When I was a boy in New Rochelle, father was a volunteer fireman, a member of Neptune Co., Number 4. This was more a social affiliation than a contribution to the town's fire defense but he did occasionally attend fires and march in the departmental parades. Mother took me to the parades, which were after my usual bedtime, and we applauded enthusiastically when father marched by, handsome in his dark blue uniform and formal cap. It seemed too bad that the bright red lining of the uniform was so unnoticeable. At home, mother let me don the heavy coat, which came down to my ankles, the formal cap, and then the big black service hat with the red number 4 in front and the long rim in back rolling down over the neck for protection from water.

My earliest recollection is of awakening one night at the age of about four to the sound of the fire whistle and a considerable commotion in the house as father dressed and left for the fire. The only other conflagration I remember was four or five years later when a poultry farm not far from the railroad station was consumed with most of the chickens early enough in the evening for me and apparently all others in town of my age and older to attend. It was a lengthy and a spectacular affair from which father returned a somewhat bedraggled fire fighter.

My earlier years are matters of hearsay except that my birth on November 28, 1897 is attested by the official records of the Borough of Brooklyn. This took place at 272 Decatur St. where mother and father were still living with his parents, not far from the house in which mother was born only some twenty odd years earlier. I guess most babies were born at hospitals in 1897 but mother adhered to the practice in 1907 when my sister was born and in fact was able to avoid hospitals, which she abhorred, until she was well into her seventies.

272 Decatur St. was and still is one of the narrow, three storied brownstone houses common to many parts of Brooklyn and old New York. I can still remember from periodic visits until my grandparents moved to New Rochelle about 1903 some of the rooms and the old Victorian furniture. Around the corner was Grace Presbyterian Church, in which grandfather was a deacon and a substantial contributor for many years and in which my parents were married on September 23, 1896. Around another corner or two was the elevated railway to New York and farther into Brooklyn. Of this I have an abiding unpleasant memory. It invariably made me carsick and I dreaded my fortunately infrequent trips on it.

The problems of my own life have occupied me to the exclusion of any great interest in my ancestry. The only ancestors I have known personally were kindly people with the usual and some unusual faults, beloved by many and with a certain quality which I choose, to call gentility. The latter is something agreeable to have and difficult to define. To me its essence is kindliness and graciousness, something apart from the material, which can be but not always is inherited.

I have been told that my grandfather was a younger son of a Glasgow grain merchant. A portrait of this great grandfather, exhumed from the attic of my sister, hangs on my wall. It is not a distinguished picture but it does portray the physical hardihood and strong character which my grandfather, who lived to be 88, inherited. Grandfather was about six feet tall, set with a ruddy complexion and kindly expression. His hair was thin and white as long as I knew him. He was seventy years old when I was still a boy.

Janet Watt, whom grandfather married on June 7, 1871 when he was over forty, lived in Kinross. She had sisters, who never left Scotland and whom my parents once visited, and a half nephew known to us as Cousin John (Izat) who came to Brooklyn in 1903, worked for my grandfather for many years, and was always close to my father (he was about the same age), spending most holidays and many weekends and vacations with us. When I took my two younger children to Europe in 1958 we arrived in Glasgow on a rainy Sunday morning, and left immediately without even looking in the telephone book for current Aitkenheads. (My grandfather dropped the "t".) A few days later my Glasgow caddy at Gleneagles assured me there were still many there. On the way to Edinburgh we passed within a few miles of Kinross but could not stop. That is as close as I have come to my Scottish ancestors.

Grandfather came to this country when father was two and went into the shirt and pajama business with Edmund Millen, whom he had known in Scotland, where I believe grandfather had been a salesman or drummer as they were then called of some textile product, possibly shirts. Grandfather handled the sales from a New York office and Mr. Millen the manufacturing:, the principal factory being in Middletown, N.Y. Whether the firm of Millen, Aikenhead Co. was formed immediately or a few years later I do not know but by the time I was born it was a prosperous business, providing my grandfather and his family a comfortable living. Unfortunately all his profits were left in the business by my grandfather and dissipated under the competitive stresses of the first world war. Eventually the business was sold, but too late for the fortunes of the second and third Aikenhead generations. According to father, my grandfather had twice before lost everything once due to a defalcation of an employee) and successfully rebuilt the business. This time he was at the end of his life with no opportunity to recoup.

Father grew up in Brooklyn and attended the Polytechnic Institute there but he did not go on to college, of which grandfather did not approve, although he later financed my school and college education. When father finished school, or enough to satisfy grandfather, he was taken into the business as a salesman, becoming Secretary and Treasurer when the firm was incorporated. He was a good salesman but never an astute businessman. I doubt that college would have made him much different although he always thought it would have- Father had no brothers and only one sister, who died in Brooklyn early in her childhood.

My mother's father was William Boswell and mother never spoke of him. I have been told by people who knew him that he was a promising young lawyer of pleasing personality and appearance who was popular in his social circle in Brooklyn. When mother was a young girl, he moved his family to Greenwich, Conn, where his brother Henry lived and ran a drug store. When mother was only fifteen and a student at Greenwich Academy, he left her and his wife. Before leaving I understand that he had mismanaged his wife's estate to virtual extinction.

Not long after his disappearance, my grandmother, who was always known to me as Baba, brought mother back to Brooklyn, where she attended Adelphi Academy and met father. My cousin Margaret Boswell Finney told me recently that my grandfather Boswell died in Denver, Colorado in the early part of the century but his life after leaving Greenwich is a mystery to me. Margaret also told me that her grandfather Boswell was a Baptist minister in Trenton in 1830 but from which of the English or Scotch Boswells he descended seems uncertain.

Baba was born Marie Adele Godwin on November 9, 1846. I think this was on the lower East side of New York, which was uptown then in the old brownstone section. In any event, I remember being told that she lived there as a girl. It was probably at a later date that her father Daniel, who was a successful printer in New York, built himself a fine large house in Ridgewood, N.J., presumably on the Godwin Ave. which still existed not too many years ago, when I was last in Ridgewood. Baba gave her name to her only child, who was born in Brooklyn on May 1, 1876. It may have been a coincidence, but mother was always known as May.

Mother was a young mother, pretty and fond on sports and parties. As a result, Baba was an important factor in my early upbringing and I could not have been in better hands. Small in structure, with delicate hands and feet, her beauty was not facial. She was quiet and somewhat reserved, a kind and gracious lady. In her earlier years she had been a pianist of some ability and love of music, I am glad to say, came down to me. She lived with us until her death in 1907, and I have happy memories of trips and vacations in her company and of her gentle presence in the background of my boyhood. Mother was proud of her Godwin ancestry, but whether or not descent from the illustrious English family could be traced I do not know.

Grandmother Aikenhead was of a quite different temperament and personality. She was also small and I am sure was a pretty girl. Vivacious, quick witted and voluble, she had many fond friends. How many of them were aware of her great affliction, a periodic resort to alcohol, I never new. Father told me that this went back to an early illness in Scotland and a misguided prescription of whiskey. She had studied cooking at Dollar Academy in Scotland and kept a table that was a wonder and delight to a growing boy. Food probably tastes better when you are young and healthy., but I will never forget some of her dishes. There were no fancy sauces, to which I have always been indifferent, but the crust on the meat pies was flaky and three or four inches deep, the finnan haddie served on Sunday was submerged in just the right amount of milk and butter, and the Yorkshire pudding with the roast beef was crisp but not too crisp to absorb the blood gravy. Scones, scotch cake and rasin cake accompanying the 4:30 tea which was served everyday except Sunday until grandfather died were just a few more of the delicious edibles that made a lasting impression on my young memory. Grandmother was assisted in the kitchen be a succession of Irish girls, at least three of them sisters, who would promptly get a successor over from the old country when decided to marry the milkman or deliveryman or other acceptable provider. Later in New Rochelle a handyman butler complemented the kitchen help but this did not last, for many years. Grandmother always did a great deal of cooking and direct supervision in the kitchen and with the other details of managing a well ordered house often worked herself up to a fatigue for which alcohol was the remedy for her. Perhaps, also, her great vivacity built up a nervous tension to a pitch that found easement in alcohol. Whatever the cause, the result created many unpleasant incidents and an atmosphere of apprehension for a sensitive boy and also for my mother that still lingers vividly in my memory. I also recall her as the lovable person that she was between periods. After grandfather died, mother and father took a small place around the corner from her and then took her into the New York apartment to which they moved in 1919. A year later, when she was 80 years old, she took me with her to a small apartment in Yonkers. She made some to good friends there and after I left kept herself and a boarder for several years until we all returned to New Rochelle in 1924. Strangely to me, she kept the prohibition law until she got into the hands of some bootlegger in New Rochelle. Father attributed her death in 1925 to bad liquor.

These were my roots and an odd tangle they have seemed to me. The Biblical statement that the sins of the father shall be visited upon the children is another way of saying that we go back two or three generations for many of the qualities that dominate our characters and personalities. As I never knew one grandfather and the other grandfather and one grandmother only as a boy, I am not sure of the source of some of my predominant traits. Conservatism, personal reserve, and a basic integrity marked both grandfather Aikenhead and grandmother Boswell. Father acquired from his mother and passed on to me an excellent memory. Persistence and even willfulness were strong in my mother and she also had imagination, subjectivity and a great understanding, particularly of people, something that was almost totally lacking in father. Mother and I always liked the feel of people around us but from a reserved seat from which we could observe without too deep participation. Father on the other hand was really gregarious. When they traveled, father would know half their fellow passengers in a day or so. Left to herself mother might become acquainted with on or two. Father was a mixer and a joiner – the local Fire Department and Elks, the Masonic Lodge, in which he reached the thirty second degree and Deputy Grand Master, and city and county politics most of his life. When business failed, political posts ever though minor maintained him to the end, if in somewhat precarious financial condition. One political principal he always maintained was never to accept or allow mother to accept the smallest gift that might be faintly tainted with political favor.

Certainly I did not inherit all the food qualities that I might have nor do I blame my ancestors for my many faults and shortcomings. I believe that we all start with physical, mental, moral tendencies inherited from those who have gone before, but individual lives are shaped by those who live them to their ultimate ends.