Belles on Their Toes (25 page)

On the day of the christening, we assembled at the apartment and walked the two blocks to the church. Besides Mother and the eleven of us, there were our husbands and wives and fifteen of our children, including the three babies who were to be baptized.

Two pews had been reserved for us at the front of the large, Gothic church. We walked down the center aisle as quietly as we could. But there were so many of us, and Mother knew so many people, that our entrance created a good deal of attention. Mother, ramrod straight and immensely dignified, led the delegation. We thought she looked as if she were proud of us and of her grandchildren. We hoped she was.

The service started. The organ music rolled out loudly, and then there was a hush and the opening prayer. Three of our boys and their wives stepped forward with their babies.

The clock turned backward for some of us.

WHEN WE WERE YOUNG
, there was a christening in the family almost every year. And although Dad had much more experience with baptisms than the average man, they always made him nervous and irritable.

It wasn’t just the christenings that he objected to—he objected to going to church for any reason. He kept saying that he was a religious man, and had nothing against churches; that he thought it was fine Mother and all of us went regularly.

But he never went himself unless there was a reason, such as a christening. And even then Mother had to prod him all the way.

Few martyrs ever looked more persecuted as they approached the stake than did Dad when, with a baby under his arm, he left the house for a christening.

“This piecemeal business of christening them one at a time is the height of inefficiency,” he’d storm to Mother. “It’s a byjingoed indignation, by jingo.”

“Maybe so, dear,” Mother soothed him, “but I don’t want to raise a houseful of heathens. One in the family is enough.”

“Me a heathen?” Dad yelped. “You know I’m a religious man. But this is my final piecemeal christening. After this one, we’re going to wait until the last of them is born, and then get it all over with, in one efficient ceremony.”

“We can talk about that when the next one arrives,” Mother smiled.

“That’s what you always say. And I wind up in church with a new baby on my hands!”

Dad never had much confidence about holding babies when they were small. He was afraid he might hurt them, so he didn’t grasp them firmly, and they’d wiggle until their dresses were up around their heads. When this happened, Dad would try to straighten out their clothes and get things so twisted around that Mother would have to come to the rescue.

When he stood with Mother at the front of the church, he always looked as if he wasn’t quite sure whether he was holding the baby right side up. And he seemed worried that he might cause the minister to make an embarrassing blunder.

We older children would be sitting with our various Sunday school classes, in the galleries on each side of the altar, dreading what we knew we were going to do, and yet knowing that we couldn’t help doing it.

We always disgraced ourselves at the christenings of our younger brothers and sisters.

As the baby squirmed in Dad’s arms, while he kept peering down into the dress to make sure the head was still on top, the situation would seem more and more ludicrous to us. We’d think about how Dad had stormed beforehand, and how he was going to storm afterwards at Sunday dinner.

Then it would happen, and we would disgrace ourselves again. Suddenly, one of us would explode in a snorting giggle. You couldn’t hold it back—it was embarrassing, but it was just too funny, and there wasn’t anything you could do about it.

Another one of us, sitting with another class and vowing that this time he could control himself, would hear the snort, and he would explode too. Finally, all of us would be giggling, and people down in the congregation would crane their necks to see what was causing the disturbance.

Since Dad only went to church for the christening of his own children, he comforted himself with the thought that a few jackasses in the balcony always giggled whenever a child was baptized. Although this belief was completely erroneous, we did our best not to dispel it.

“Worst-mannered congregation I ever saw,” he’d complain afterwards. “They seem to think a christening is like a vaudeville show.”

BOB’S BABY
was a wiggler. As Bob and his wife and the two other couples stood in front of the minister, the dress of Bob’s daughter started to slide over her head. With considerable concern, Bob looked down. Just for a moment, it was Dad all over again. Just for a minute, the older ones who were sitting with Mother were little children again, up in the galleries with their Sunday school classes.

Ernestine had a horrible thought. Suppose she should suddenly start to giggle? It was bad enough when a child did that. But suppose an adult, herself the mother of two children, should do it? It was out of the question, of course. Adults could control themselves. They simply didn’t make scenes like that.

Bob’s daughter wiggled some more, and Bob looked down again to find her head.

Ernestine snorted. She put her hand over her mouth, but the giggle came out through her nose. You could hear it all over the church.

Ernestine’s husband and children looked at her with amazement. Mother hunched her shoulders instinctively, and kept her eyes straight ahead, as if Ernestine were someone else’s daughter who had got into our group by mistake.

Ernestine tried biting her lips, but it was no use. She sat there and giggled. So did the rest of us, in a series of moist explosions. So, although she still denies it, did Mother. There are witnesses to prove it.

So did the congregation and so did the minister—he had been at the church for years, and recalled the old days. Fortunately the christening service hadn’t quite started; he stopped everything and laughed until he had to dig under his vestments to get a handkerchief.

Finally there was quiet again, and the three babies were baptized. The minister climbed back into the pulpit, and looked down at us. We weren’t too happy about the way we had behaved.

“I don’t know as I’d want to go through it all over again and have the eleven of you up in the balcony every Sunday,” he began. “I’m not as young as I used to be. But it’s good to have you here on a visit. It’s good to see you together again. Mighty good!”

We glanced at Mother to see how she was taking it, and for the first time we knew for certain why she lived alone. We knew that, glad as she was to have us home, she lived alone because she liked it.

For Mother was nodding agreement. She didn’t want to go through with it all over again, either. One generation was enough.

Mother looked as if the minister had taken the words right out of her mouth.

Mother still lives in the same apartment. She retired from Purdue when she reached seventy, but she is busier than ever today.

Not long ago, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and the American Management Association awarded to her, and to Dad posthumously, the Gantt medal for “pioneer work in management and the development of the principles and techniques of motion study.” And the American Women’s Association named her Woman of the Year.

Even those of us on the West Coast see her four or five times a year, because she has a good many lectures there. Those who live in or near Montclair drop by the apartment fairly often after dinner when she’s home, and to sort and forward her mail when she’s away.

Before she leaves town on business trips, Mother makes out an itinerary listing the hotels and the person’s houses where she will be stopping. At the bottom of the itinerary, it says:

“I know you’ll call me, if you need me.”

Authors’ Note

M
OTHER IS LILLIAN MOLLER
Gilbreth, and Dad was Frank Bunker Gilbreth. Their consulting firm of Gilbreth, Inc., specialized in time saving and in making workers’ jobs easier to do. They were the originators of motion study, and among the first in the scientific management field.

Dad died in 1924, leaving Mother with eleven children, the oldest of whom was eighteen. He also left a good many wonderful memories and an “efficiency” system of family life under which the children helped Mother run the house. Without the system, without the esprit de corps which he had instilled, Mother’s job might have been too much for her.

But it was Mother who made the system work. Mother became the family breadwinner, filled the place of two parents, guided her children individually through the growing pains of adolescence, kept the family together. In her spare time, so to speak, she became one of the foremost management engineers in the world.

This is a book about the Gilbreth family after Dad died. It is primarily the story of Mother.

A Biography of Frank B. Gilbreth Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey

Frank B. Gilbreth Jr. (1911–2001) and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey (1908–2006) were two of the twelve Gilbreth children, born to efficiency experts Frank B. Gilbreth Sr. and Lillian Moller Gilbreth. Both Frank and Ernestine were accomplished writers, and they collaborated on two classic memoirs of growing up in a very full house:
Cheaper by the Dozen
, which was adapted into two memorable motion pictures, and its classic sequel,
Belles on Their Toes
, which was also turned into a film. The coauthors received the French International Humor Award in 1950.

Frank B. Gilbreth Jr. was the eldest of the Gilbreth sons, though he had four older sisters. After launching his career as a journalist with the
New York Herald Tribune
, the Associated Press, and the
Buenos Aires Herald
, he served in the US Navy in World War II. Rising to the rank of lieutenant commander, Gilbreth participated in three invasions of the Admiralty Islands and the Philippines, and earned the Bronze Star and Air Medal.

Returning from the war, he worked as a columnist and reporter for the
Post and Courier
of Charleston, South Carolina, eventually moving there permanently. From 1947 to 1993, he penned the column “Doing the Charleston” under the pseudonym Ashley Cooper. The tireless Gilbreth also authored or coauthored the books
Held’s Angels
,
I’m a Lucky Guy
,
Innside Nantucket
,
Of Whales and Women
,
How to Be a Father
,
He’s My Boy
, and
Time Out for Happiness
.

Gilbreth was married twice, first to Elizabeth Cauthen until her death in 1954, and later to Mary Pringle Manigault. He died at the age of eighty-nine, survived by his second wife, two daughters, one son, three sisters, four brothers, six grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren.

Ernestine Gilbreth Carey, the third of the Gilbreth dozen, graduated from Smith College with an English degree and worked for fourteen years as a department store buyer and manager. In 1930, she married Charles Everett Carey Sr., known as “Chick,” with whom she had two children, Charles Carey Jr. and Lillian “Jill” Carey.

The supremely accomplished “Ern” rounded out her professional success by authoring and coauthoring several acclaimed books in addition to her collaborations with her brother, including
Jumping Jupiter
,
Rings Around Us
, and
Giddy Moment
.

Ernestine Gilbreth Carey died of natural causes at the age of ninety-eight in Fresno, California. She was survived by two children, two brothers, six grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren.

Frank B. Gilbreth Sr. and Lillian M. Gilbreth, father and mother of the dozen, in 1920.

The Gilbreth family as seen in the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
, in 1923.

Ernestine Gilbreth at her Smith College graduation in 1929.