Both of my grandfathers arrived in this area in the early
1900’s.
Henry Wilgus, my maternal grandfather
came from Elizabeth, New Jersey.
He married May Van Bramer from High Woods, and after a short time
in urban New Jersey,
they moved to the country. He ran a
country store in High Woods, and he even coined a new motto for High Woods
“High Woods, High and Healthy”. When
prohibition ended, he built an addition to the store featuring a decent sized
dance floor. Pitchers of beer were
available for refreshment and square dancing for fun. Many artists from Woodstock joined in the jolly fun, and the
ceiling over the dance floor was covered with wonderful graffiti signed by
artists. Henry wanted the local kids to
go on to High School, but he was told his ideas were not “…worth a row of pins”
and that he was just a city slicker.
Eventually, his ideas took form, and a school bus was commissioned to
take local kids to the Saugerties
High School. My mother (May Wilgus) and father (Norman
Towar Boggs, Jr.) met at a party at the High Woods Store.
Norman Towar Boggs was at teaching at
Columbia, when…so the family story goes…John Dewey mentioned over lunch
that Ralph Whitehead had an “interesting thing going on in
Woodstock”. Norman
bought land in Woodstock
in an area now known as "Boggs Hill". He built a large home for
himself, a smaller home for his sister, two houses for people who would be
hired to work the dairy he intended to build, two barns for the animals he
intended to have, and a Montessori school for his children and other children
who might wish to attend. The farm never
exactly worked out.
Norman
was a writer and a clergyman. His most
famous work is The Christian Saga a two volume work that gives his version of the
historical path of Christianity was written in Woodstock. He used to walk through the woods to the
little church near the Meads Mountain House and hold services for the summer
guests. Ethel Fitzhugh Boggs, my
grandmother, was a pianist who had studied in Germany. She had an enduring love of the Maverick
Concerts and was a friend of Hervey White.
Percy Keese Fitzhugh, who wrote adventure books for boys, was her
brother. One of his books is set on Overlook Mountain.
I couldn’t do better than Kim Plochman (“Plochman Lane”) in
writing a description of the Boggs family.
August, 2006
Dear Diana:
Here are
some patches of reminiscence of the Boggs family, sketchy at best, since I was
never in school or some other occupation that would enable us to be together
for long, although all five of the family whom I know made and indelible
impression on me, and so there is quite a bit to recall, but the emphasis here
will have to be a little uneven, to my regret, and with my apologies.
The Boggs
family was in Woodstock
in two stretches of time – I’m sure you know all this, but I’ll repeat it, to
give the story a little more perspective.
In the first years, mainly in the twenties, they lived in the big Tudor
style house at the top of Boggs Hill. It
had a level lawn and an elegant view of the valley. Some way above the house was the California
Quarry – why it had that name I do not know.
Quarrying for big slabs that could be used for sidewalks in New York came to an end
when cement took their place.
When we are
all about six or seven years old, Mary had a birthday in the middle of
summer. Zoe Bateman, director of
the Children’s House, a Montessori
School, thought it
would be good if instead of saying Happy Birthday we said Bonne Fete. I arrived at the party a trifle late, and
most of the guests were standing around.
I had a little gift, probably a handkerchief or some candy, and as I
held it out to Mary my French failed me, and I said “Merry Christmas”. It was not many years after that when the
family moved to the environs of Nice, and it was years before I saw them again.
I first had
solid news of their return when I happened to see Ethel in the village. She told me I had been something of a naughty
little boy, but indicated that I was not stupid, and she hoped we’d all see
much more of each other, which we did.
That had an Overland Whippet, a small sedan, short, narrow and
crowded. When the family was on an
outing, elbows and knees stuck out in every direction. In those days I always rode a bicycle, but
for them that would have been hard considering the steepness of their hill,
although this time they lived in what was a caretaker’s house, halfway to the
top, and much smaller. But it seemed a
comfortable house, even so, and I remember it with a very warm feeling. Your family became the friends I most often
saw and enjoyed
Ethel came
to our house fairly often to see my aunt, Elsa Kimball, and I had many
short conversations with her. She was a
strong-minded lady, a person of practicality, ready to face whatever
happened. I admired her greatly, though
I sometimes felt that I had to measure up.
But that was a help, because my parents had both died many years before
and except for Elsa, my relatives shied away for most of the time from helping
me through troublesome years. Ethel came from a good section of Brooklyn. She told
a story about a trip she and her husband took to a side street in Manhattan. He had an errand in one of the buildings, and
while she waited in the front t seat of their touring car with its low doors, a
bum shuffled over, looked her up and down, and then said, “For two cents, I’d
kiss your knee”. She was much pleased
that just then her husband emerged, and the bum vanished. But Ethel told the story with much verve.
I went, not
altogether happily to Columbia, which made it
possible to come some weekends to Woodstock,
railroad fare being two cents a mile. I
was invited to supper many time, and I read aloud some of the Ibsen plays.
Towar and Mary listened intently, and we talked afterward. Virginia
was the about twelve, Ghosts or even Rosmersholm and Dolls
House would have been pretty much for her.
Fitzhugh was usually in New
York. But the
conversation was also general as well.
Towar and
Fitzhugh were both a few years older than I was. They were intellectual, though in very different
ways. When the family returned to
Woodstock, I think in 1933 or thereabouts, Towar became a pupil of William
E. Shumacher, a serious painter, much of his work being of women wrapped in
light-hued gossamer veils – or were these spiritual essences, not cloth at
all? Towar showed me a couple of pieces
of his own work, and from a fine course I had had in school that included a
weekly trip to the Metropolitan, I felt able to say that I thought his
depiction of character had promise.
(There were also some traces of the influence of Shumacher.)
Towar also
told me a strange story. When the artist
lay dying in a Kingston hospital, his sister,
who had come to Woodstock
to be with him was standing on a hill after a brief rainstorm. A brilliant double rainbow appeared, and she
began to cry. “I know he’s gone”, she
said, “That rainbow was for him”. Many
of the colors in his work were indeed like those of a rainbow.
Towar had
his mother’s independence.
I think that Fitzhugh’s first job
was with Dr. Joshua Rosett, tall and positive, highly inventive, whose
main project was to build a metal copy of the human brain – this was before
there was even a hint of the electronic devices that made this sort of thing
much easier. It involved, with Rosett, a
process in about five difficult steps, and was, I think never finished. Fitzhugh told me that on one occasion he was
traveling on the New York Subway with a glass bottle containing hydrofluoric
acid. This acid is the only one that
eats glass, and pretty soon Fitzhugh had to run out of the nearest subway
station and get to a drugstore where they bathed his hands in some base that
could counteract the acid.
There are
plenty of chemists, and there are plenty of physicists, but there are not many
physical chemists. I don’t know how
Fitzhugh met Elizabeth Monroe, but they were both tall, forthright, and
physical chemists. Elizabeth
came from Manchester, Vermont, a town that may be characterized by
saying that the sidewalks were of marble slabs.
Their wedding was at her house, and was one of warm dignity. I think they went to Cornell, and worked
there. The morning after the Hiroshima blast, at
Breakfast, Fitzhugh said,” Well, at least I can be glad I had nothing to do
with that thing”, to which his wife replied “Well, I did only I was sworn to
secrecy”.
I heard or
perhaps read in a newspaper, that Fitzhugh was working on some sort of varnish
that would be so slick that it would increase the speed of small boats without
increasing the power to drive them. I don’t
know what come of that. Fitzhugh died,
decades before his time. Elizabeth gave up her
scientific research, and turned to organizing groups that would help mentally
deprived children. She was evidently
quite a success in this, for a friend of mine here said that he knew her work,
and it was highly praised.
One thing
that Virginia
did that impressed me greatly was to give a reading of a part in Shadow and
Substance, a somewhat mystical play that had slightly more talk than solid
thinking. But Virginia had mastered the Irish brogue, and
read through the part with much insight and energy. (We had a group that met fairly often at
various houses in Woodstock,
for the sake of reading classic plays.) Sinclair Lewis had performed the male lead at
professional theater in Woodstock
the year before. I wish I had a line
like the great piece of music criticism “The So-and-So Quartet played Brahms
last night. Brahms lost.” Sinclair Lewis was easily the worst actor
that could be imagined, and not even Virginia’s
performance, which was better than the professional one that did not rescue
him, would have saved him.
In the
early fall of 1942, I was in Washington for a couple of weeks, helping so far
as I could to get the Headquarters of the Northwest Service Command started
before taking it up to Whitehorse. I had
supper with Virginia, but we both had to hurry
off shortly after that, and I don’t believe I saw her for several years; this
was briefly, in Woodstock
village, and she asked my wife and me if we could come and see her husband’s
African artifacts.
In some
ways Mary was a mystery to me. She was
the person of pure feeling, I came to believe that she did not reason her way
out of problems, but intuited their solutions.
Of the Boggs family, she had the least concern for institutions of
learning, or business, or other enterprises – and when I knew her she was a
sociable loner, a highly agreeable one.
I never looked into a face more open, not heard a voice more feminine. She spoke beautiful French: I had this on
good authority.
Kim
No comments:
Post a Comment