I’m Sarah Crichton.    The Crichtons and the Bartles have been beloved friends, dating back to the years just after World War II when our fathers found each other at Harvard, which was not long before Stuart found Barbara.  To me, as I’m sure it is to you, it’s an unimaginable concept—Stuart before Barbara, or Barbara before Stuart.  They were such an indomitable pair—I can hear their voices crackling in my head.  Stuart! Barbara!  What an extraordinary team.  

I have a letter that Barbara wrote to my parents in 1966 or 67, from Charlottesville.  She writes, “Dear Crichtons, I have been meaning to write you for months—but I have spent my entire time warding off disaster.” Then she stops and corrects herself:  “Me and Stuart, that is.” 

The disasters include Chris in imminent danger of being dismissed from his school for “conduct non-academic”; Andy being unjustly accused by the “redneck” father of one of his friends of doing something awful;  Stuart being the victim of a horrible power play by his boss at the hospital; the dog, Baby, biting a child who has asthma, and being impounded unjustly by the police.  Throughout the letter Barbara is caught up vigorously defending and protecting her family. And when she’s not fighting those battles, she’s on the barricades fighting for others.  Letters from earlier in the 1960s are filled with news about “the other tender area of my mental makeup which is, of course, the Negro Revolt.”   There is the very scary sit-in at the local lunch counter and picketing of Buddy’s restaurant.  This is Virginia, in 1962 and 1963.  This is scary stuff, brave stuff.  Later on, her focus shifts, but her commitment is equally strong.  And realistic.  She ends another letter with a lovely self-deprecating note, “Naturally, we have not succeeded in getting open housing or stopped the war in Vietnam.  Even after all our efforts.”

When I heard that Barbara had died, I instantly could hear that laugh of hers—that distinctive sound, but I needed words to go with it, so I pulled out from my shelf my copy of A Vanished World, the book Barbara wrote about growing up in New York and East Hampton in the 30s and 40s.  It’s a wonderful book, filled with great vivid portraits of people who have been gone a long time, and wonderful observations told with Barbara’s lovely wry humor woven throughout. I remembered a lot of this book, but there was a chapter in it that I hadn’t paid much attention to before.  It’s called Dying in the Right Season. 

It begins:  “When my brother in law died this past summer of July 11th, I couldn’t help but think that if he was going to have to die, it should not have been in the heat of the summer.  Not that he had anything to say about the matter.  Summer isn’t for the dying…. Summer is for picnics, sunshine, swimming, laughter, not for coffins, eulogies, crematoriums and memorial gardens.

“I can remember everyone I knew who died inappropriately in the summer.  Dr. Spiro, for example, who died the summer we lived in Wellfleet on Cape Cod.  The ocean, calm and inviting, was behind us, as we stood in the graveyard off of Route 6 with its irregular, crumbling stones, so old that was impossible to read the names.  Staring at his two bereaved sons—who normally would be out in a sail boat at this time--- I tried to remember the last time we had seen Dr. Spiro.  What were doing here?  We could smell the hamburgers being cooked at PJs, our favorite eatery, close by.  Being here in the graveyard was wrong, all wrong.”

She remembers more:  “So when is the best time to die?  A minister I knew said once that it was possibly November when the first snow had fallen which was like a soft, white blanket over the earth protective of the newly buried.  Not in the time of the year when the sun shines on the ocean and the waves lap gently on the shore.”

To me, Barbara Bartle, was all about summer.  With her huge sunglasses and even bigger hats, in her summer shifts and sandals.  The most magical days of my whole life were the summers the Bartles and the Crichtons spent together.  August on Cape Cod, on the dunes of Corn Hill, and one wild July in the Virgin Islands, where we managed to cram the collective eight kids and at least two or three adults into a VW bug.  The twins were tucked into the little spot where the groceries were supposed to go; Chris and Andy stuck out of the sunroof.

I cannot tell you how joyous those days were.  We’d spend all day on the beach, running bases, riding waves in the freezing sea until our lips turned blue.  Our fathers would take us down to the Pamet to gather mussels to bring back for the cocktail hour. We’d watch the sun set over Cape Cod Bay.  The grown-ups would drink gin and tonics.  My father loved to embed glasses of red wine in the sand in such a way that the retreating sun would cast a red shadow down the dunes.  We sang all the time, classic American and English folksongs.  It wasn’t always perfect.  There were fights over tuna fish-- the Crichtons ate Bumblebee; the Bartles ate Chicken of the Sea.  This caused a lot of tension.  A lot.  The Crichton kids hated the food that Barbara cooked, and the Bartle kids hated Judy’s food.  So the families for the most part learned to separate at mealtime, and come back again afterward.  Some nights, the fathers drank a wee bit too much, and there’d be some eruption.  But the mothers would chase after the fathers, and by morning whatever had happened was usually gone.  More often, we would come together and we would sing. 

Barbara wrote,   “We missed you dreadfully after we left the Cape.  Our choruses of the Golden Vanity were very faint but you will be glad to hear that the twins still sing a fairly strong chorus of Chicken Soup with Rice in their high pitched little voices.”

When I was in my 40s and 50s, I started renting a house in Truro again in the summer.  Stuart and Barbara would often do the same.  So my sister and brother started renting houses.  And we brought our mother, who didn’t have many years left.  But she spent them on the Cape with her whole family, and with Stuart and Barbara.  And we’d go back down to the ocean and the ponds, and we’d swim.  And at night we would gather, and there was so much to talk about, so many stories to tell.  And every once in a while, songs to sing.  There still are.

I miss them so much. 

For those left behind, there is no best time to die, is there?  Still, Barbara didn’t want to die in summer.  As she put it, “That would be wrong, all wrong.”   I am glad she got her wish.  And I’m glad that this summer she will get to spend with Stuart, because that’s as it should be. 

Nick Packs - Reflections/Teachings in Zimbabwe, March 5, 2016 

Harry, I just want to say that I am pretty sure it was just me who had to weed the driveway! When I was 5 I was sent out to the camp [Eden Hill] and I hated it. Harry was probably the most popular kid at the camp and Emily and I were separated because she’s a girl and one year older. So one day I decided to put my foot down and refused to go. Grandmere did not make me go but instead had me weed the driveway all day. She was a tough but loving grandmother!

Grandmere was a teacher in NY, Lee, and for two years in Zimbabwe.

The Grandmere I knew was always teaching us too… in a video clip form a trip to Jamaica when I was 4, she is leading all the grandchildren around, teaching us about the flowers and plants

This is an excerpt from an article she wrote about teaching in Zimbabwe…

“One day on a cold, snowy evening in February, my husband, Stuart, had come home to our brownstone in Manhattan and asked me, without any preliminaries, how would l like to go to Zimbabwe  to live (and, we hoped, work) for two years. Knowing little about the country except that it was in southern Africa and the former British colony of Rhodesia, I said yes without a moment’s hesitation.

My husband and I had always yearned to live and work overseas, but like many of the World War II generation, we had been denied the opportunity. Unexpectedly, this longed for opportunity appeared now, almost forty years later and almost by chance.”

She taught European History to the sixth form at Roosevelt School…

“These young women were immensely dignified as they filed silently into my classroom for the first time that day in March. I couldn’t believe my good fortune. I was instantly impressed with their willingness to work hard and to struggle with names, places and terms in European history that were completely alien to them as none of them had ever been outside Zimbabwe.

From the very first, I found the class reluctant to speak during the class. Consequently the Socratic method went out the window the first week. Class participation was discarded the second week. The third week the lecture method also went down the drain. I ended up teaching the way that had been suggested all along but which I had disdained as poor educational practice; by dictating. So, I dictated my way through the whole of the nineteenth century,

Though the sixth form remained shy and reserved with me the first two terms, by the third term we had become friends. They borrowed my American textbooks, wrote extra essays and stayed behind after class to chat.

The farewell party the sixth form gave for me took place at the swimming pool. I brought the fried chicken and drinks; they brought cookies and cakes. At the end, they sang “for she’s a jolly good fellow, which no one can deny,” followed by three, “Hip, hip, hurrah’s. Then they presented me with three traditional baskets and a card signed by all. “How can you leave us?” they asked.  It was very hard.

I knew then that I would never again feel so needed as I had that winter at Roosevelt. Back in the snow and cold of another winter, but this time in New England, I dreamed of my students in Zimbabwe still going to class to the beat of a drum under the clear blue sky and hot sun, singing the national anthem in assembly and laughing, always laughing, because of their enormous enjoyment of the present and refusal to worry about the future.”

I want to end with this quote.

“I miss their openness, their friendliness and their astonishment mingled with gratitude that I would come all the way to Africa to teach them.”

In her high school yearbook from 1945, Grandmere describes herself in a few stilted sentences.

Editor and chief of The Sparklet

Favorite pastime: daydreaming

Favorite expression: “oh no”

Quote: “An exquisite image of life and a love of it”

Flip the page and there is an essay titled “My Name is Barbara.” Here she moves beyond the language of high school yearbooks with their flatening superlatives, in fact, the essay doesn’t even sound like it was written by a high schooler. It is playful, self-diminishing and above all thoughtful.

My sister and I fell in love with the following passage (credit to char for zeroing in on the word roller-skates).

“It was impossible for me to conquer Anne intellectually, but there was something I did do far better than she. This was roller-skating. It was necessary for both of us to skate fairly well to be socially acceptable in the park. Anne insisted that I learn. I surpassed my teacher much to her dismay and my pleasure. As a matter of fact, I could skate rings around Anne and did so whenever the occasion presented itself. However, she saw to it that it seldom happened. As we grew older we skated less and less. Anne decided that trading cards was much more cultured, and it also was a battle of wits. My wits improved too, but I never surpassed my sister.”

“An exquisite image of life and a love of it”

She ends the piece: “I cannot say exactly when our childhood ended, for it stopped at no particular point. It disappeared gradually. We began to look at family dinners and school in a different light. Playing monopoly and going on excursions were no longer the same. It wasn’t that New York had changed. We had changed; we had grown up.”

Barbara Bartle and History

March 5, 2016

My mother was a historian. That’s a fact. She earned the title – she got her master’s degree at UVa with four kids in the house under the age of 16 and virtually no help from anyone, including her husband. She conscientiously did all the reading and wrote the papers, including her thesis (on the then-living, now mercifully forgotten, almost-liberal turned-segregationist Richmond editor Virginius Dabney) somehow amid the chaos.

And she loved it - she loved the work, her professors and fellow students. Especially after a few years of us kids, she loved talking to adults about serious things. She loved being a student again, even if she was more than a little a fish out of water in those very conformist times – older student, woman -  a “housewife” even – at the University, where the undergraduates were all male, all white, wore coats and ties pretty much everywhere.

And she loved the courtliness of Virginia academics in those days. It was a bold, difficult undertaking for the mid 60’s – we later learned she read Betty Friedan and took what she said literally! Added to that, instead of Thomas Jefferson, she studied Reconstruction, which, inevitably and uncomfortably, led to confronting the South’s foundational issue, for you C. Vann Woodward fans - the “Burden of Southern History.” She never doubted what the right answers were.  I’ll just quickly read what she wrote for the liberal Catholic journal – imagine that! - “Jubilee” in 1961, a couple of years after moving to Charlottesville:

“Most of the Virginians I met seemed to feel that in Virginia history has already been made; when the past has been so glorious there is not need to mess around and get all worked up over the future. At this rate historic Virginia is going to stay historic.”

And that attitude led to other adventures.

My mother grew up in a family that tried very hard not to take her seriously. That’s also a fact. The family wanted a boy, so the three Bishop girls, Anne, Barbara & Mary, didn’t really count for all that much – the best case for their parents – and them! - was that they could be married off young, which they all were, actually. Their father, a distracted Park Avenue cardiologist, was an only child, as was their mother, an undereducated and occasionally mean Lilliputian from Kansas. Rather selfish. As we later found out, they didn’t pay for Barbara’s college education – that came from her grandmother – not necessarily worth educating girls, was it? “Bad parents” as sister Anne told me yesterday. An example of how: The family had a way of saying “Barbara” that seemed lighthearted and companionly, ok, yet somehow was said as if she were far way – to me it sounded as if they were saying hello and goodbye simultaneously. “Bahrb-raa” with an accent on the first syllable, but then with a contrary rising inflection. As Steve White might say – seemed to be saying “Come again when you can’t stay so long.”

Famously – it’s in the bible, as I will explain - her father didn’t recognize her on 53rd Street as a teenaged girl. That’s not a mistake that the boys her age made. And famously, each weeknight the 3 sisters followed their father going from room to room at the Racquet Club from their apartment across the street at 375 Park. Dr. Bishop preferred pool – ok billiards, he would say - racquets, squash and backgammon – apparently anything rather than going home to his kids and his wife. And those were the nights when he wasn’t at the theatre or other clubs and societies – he belonged to 31 one of them according to a 1970’s era Social Register - including lots of them where one’s ancestry mattered. I know, I have read his book – “Myself When Young.” You can’t make this up.

Like the caricature of a puffed up man in a tuxedo with sash – which is in fact what he wore often enough - Dr. Bishop loved only one kind of history – history that related to him. Bahr-braa’s insight was that kind of history was a dead end for her, if she wanted to be taken seriously. So she spent the rest of her life learning and teaching history that mattered. And, by the way, she also spent the rest of her life looking for balloons to pop. 

My mother had a number of saving graces – having been brought up in that family, she needed them. One was a pretty stern sense of what was real and realistic. Another was the steadfast, quiet, but very determined sense that she had something to say. And another was a very sneaky sense of humor.

Indeed, the family history her father felt was so important was an opportunity for one of her favorite practical jokes: she liked to lay eggs, that is, long fuse, late blooming jokes. The idea is to say something that is not only not true, but a little absurd, have it believed, and then wait for it to be repeated to an audience that knows better. She also liked rubber peanuts.

But anyway, an example - her father’s name was Louis Faugères Bishop. Where did the “Faugères” come from, we asked? Were we French? How cool! Of course, not, we were told. It was a pretentious, made up name, inserted solely to give the family some class, we were told. Ok! we snickered. Another example – Tell us about Shotwell Bishop, named by Dr. Bishop as a relative who fought bravely in the American revolution! Answer: How could you believe a name like that? Has to be made up so your grandfather could join another club. Well, only this year I got a call from a lovely woman in Nevada related to an Episcopal bishop, named Ellis Bishop - I said you can't make this stuff up. She wanted to know if I was related to Louis Faugéres Bishop. I said yes, of course and then trotted out the “fact” that Faugéres was a made up name. Long pause – “Not really,” she said. Turns out there was a French doctor present at Washington’s inauguration named Louis Faugéres, and, yes, he is indeed responsible for that name in the family tree. Ok, well there certainly was no Shotwell Bishop – how silly. Again a pause – “Well, yes there was.” Shotwell Bishop was real enough – in fact, he was Mom’s great, great, great grandfather (if I have that right), the son of a Quaker who converted to Anglicanism so he could fight. Who cares? I can her her say.

And, it was definitely funnier when these were made up names.

To be fair, she did dwell on Harry Sinclair, perhaps, if you forget about cardiology, the only genuine major historical figure in our family. He went to jail. Mom loved that. And then he converted to Catholicism and tried to buy his way into heaven. Mom loved that even more – she knew it didn’t work.

For Mom, history that was serious and worthy of study was history about people who were ignored, forgotten - not valued – a little like girls in the Bishop family. So, in that regard she struck gold when she arrived in Charlottesville in 1959, at the very beginning of the civil rights era. (Parenthetically, I have to say - she and Dr. Bartle were perfectly matched, each holding a not very flattering mirror to their parents’ values, they spent their lives teaching and caring for and about other people, without thinking much about money. Both second children with inattentive and selfish parents, their sympathies were always with the underdogs.)

But, in Charlottesville, Mom saw clearly what was right and wrong – and it’s where Mom did something I will always hold very dear – she saw that history was being made, and she had the courage to act – and before that to make openly and publicly clear where her sympathies lay – thereby guaranteeing that Charlottesville society would never accept her, despite her “blue” blood – and go sit in at Buddy’s Restaurant, the segregated restaurant that everyone knew was the hangout of people who did not draw a big distinction between “Northerners” and “Negroes.” I know there was risk – even in quaint Charlottesville – because from public school we knew some of the kids of the people who might be doing some of the riding around at night. The rather well-appointed, fancy and well-connected country club blackballed us; she was as proud of that as she was of anything. [“Take that, Dr. Bishop!’]

And she kept demonstrating throughout her time there –even in graduate school. But like my father and World War II, it was very difficult to get her to talk about her role in it – she wanted to talk about the courage of people like Bayard Rustin, or the local black people, many of whom we knew, and who were emerging from the long night of Jim Crow with no economic power and no education.

As we know, she remained dedicated to teaching the rest of her life. And her favorite subject was always the 1960’s.

As most of you know, very late in life she published stories of her youth in East Hampton and New York.  Her relationship with family history came full circle, in a way. The book shows incontestably that she was a natural historian as well as a natural writer – there is prodigious memory, remarkable powers of observation and a very clear eye on a very particular time and place. It’s also very funny and self deprecating - but full of forgiveness and tenderness for all – the good, the eccentric and the egotistical alike - people now almost all gone and to whom she owed only the truth.

The book tells us very clearly that the purpose of all history is to learn something to make us more caring people. In fact, the last story, about her grandmother, ends with “Now that I am almost Grandma’s age, I wish I had told her I loved and what the two years I spent with her meant to me, but then I didn’t know.”  She learned a lot from her grandmother – for instance, like her grandmother, she gave clear instructions for this service. I learned a lot from Mom. And I must say, I wish I had said more clearly how much the years I spent with her meant to me. I tried, but I couldn’t say it all, really.

I did want to say that I saw the last of the Bishop sisters yesterday – Mary died in January. Anne said she couldn’t bear to come, but she wanted us to know how much it meant to her we were gathering for Barbara. And then she said she has been reading the “bible” every night. Something about the way she said “bible” made me ask, “bible?” She said – “Your mother’s wonderful book.”

Finally, when were were young, my mother read to us and occasionally sang to us at night. She loved music, but could not carry a tune – or even close. Aside from Fred Astaire, she loved spirituals. So in closing, here are the twins – Angeleah & Arabella – singing 2 verses of a spiritual: “Daniel” 

[singing] 

Thanks for coming and we hope to see you at the reception at the Gateways Inn.