Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs (6 page)

When Jane was about four, the family drove down to Virginia to visit their Butzner uncles, stopped to visit the White House, saw sheep grazing on the lawn, keeping it neatly cropped.

When she was eleven, she wrote in a cousin’s autograph book, “
Bite off more than you can chew—then chew it,” apparently heedless of its unoriginality.

At least once as a child, she flew in an airplane, perhaps a biplane like Snoopy’s.

But Jane Butzner’s childhood was more and richer than any such litany of the everyday suggests. Daily life—especially, as we’ll see, her life in school—was no match for what she read in books. And no match, either, for what she saw and heard around the dinner table or in the parlor at home. Her father’s mother, Lucy, died when Jane was ten; her mother’s mother, Jennie, when she was thirteen; she never knew her grandfathers. But somehow, the great stories and legends of her family reached into her, her head left full of times long past and larger-than-life characters. Not the Jeffersons and Franklins of her private dialogues, but members of her own family who had ventured to distant places, done wonderful things, held stoutly to their ideals.

She heard, of course, of her mother’s father, Captain Boyd, who’d died years before she was born, and his Civil War exploits, his imprisonment in the South, his populist ideals, his run for Congress on the Greenback-Labor ticket. “
I am pleased to see how many of that party’s planks, ‘outlandish’ at the time, have since become respectable law and
opinion,” she would write, “and I am proud that my grandfather stuck his neck out for them.”

Her father’s younger brother, Uncle Billy, the famous one-eyed criminal defense lawyer, as wide as he was tall, all eloquence and cunning, would take up the cause of anybody—bootleggers, black people, scoundrels, and rogues, it didn’t matter. In one celebrated case, he defended the husband of a Virginia socialite found hacked to death, successfully pushing the blame onto his client’s spurned lover; the jury returned a not-guilty verdict in thirty-six minutes flat. Another time, during Prohibition, his client was prosecuted for two pints of bootleg booze. But when, in court, Uncle Billy opened the bottles and emptied them into a graduated flask borrowed from the town druggist, their contents came to a few drops short of a full quart—the threshold at which a stiff penalty kicked in. His client got off. How did he know they’d come up short? “Well,” he said, “I’ve
dealt with a lot of bootleggers in my time and believe me, they always cheat.”

Jane’s mother’s aunt Hannah was another figure of family renown. At age forty-five, this outwardly proper and conventional woman hauled off to Alaska to teach Aleuts and Eskimos. Over a fourteen-year span, she camped out with Indians, clambered up cliffs in voluminous skirts and petticoats, traveled by kayak in garb made from bear intestines. Aunt Hannah was devoutly religious, and what Jane would term “an implacable,
relentless prohibitionist”—yet in her own way a champion of women’s rights, too. To Jane, growing up, “she had the glamour of a storybook heroine.”

And then there was her mother’s older sister, Martha, who after her own time at Bloomsburg Normal School and her years active in the Presbyterian church, at age forty-eight virtually vanished from civilization. In 1922, making an exploratory trip on behalf of the church to the mountainous backcountry of North Carolina, she had fallen in with the local people at a tiny, hopelessly backwater community called Higgins. Instead of returning after a few months, Aunt Martha stayed, and stayed, over the years bringing to it something of the light and warmth of modern life—books and learning, new buildings, a handicrafts center, a strengthened church. She was there all the years Jane was growing up on Monroe Avenue.

Jane’s family included, of course, the requisite ciphers and nonentities, and plenty of solid if unremarkable mortals, too. You wouldn’t hear much
about her father’s brother Calvin, a gruff figure in overalls who stayed back on the farm, beside his wood stove, with his dogs. Jane’s mother was one of eight, and they didn’t all work miracles in Appalachia like Aunt Martha; around the time Jane started in school, Bessie’s brother Irvin sold cars and her sister Emily was a school librarian, both of them back where they came from in Bloomsburg. Still, there were enough examples of family heroics and theatrics that Jane might reasonably have concluded that she came from quite a family.

Her life would prove rich in harmonies tuned to those of her family and her forebears. But if so, what—what,
exactly
?—should we make of this? That she came from “good stock,” something rare and precious being passed down through her DNA? Or that whatever came down to her did so through the “culture” of the family? Certainly Jane was blessed with extraordinary intelligence; all she thought and said testifies to it. But we can say with equal assurance that she was blessed with an unusually nurturing family; and that of those social and family forces that crush so many children’s spirits Jane was mercifully free. She couldn’t have known at the time just how rare that was. She knew later, though: “
Being in a family where I wasn’t put down, that’s luck.”

Good luck, too, was that she grew up at the right time to be a woman, or a better time, anyway. A time that, more than the Victorian era preceding it or the post–World War II era of her own children, didn’t discourage her as girl, woman, worker, thinker. Those years, she’d say, amounted to “
an island of hope for women.” A constitutional amendment brought women the vote in 1920, when Jane was four. The idea was alive, she’d say much later, “that women were equal to men and
could do anything.” In the Girl Scouts, she’d remember, “we had all sorts of merit badges, not just child care and being a hostess and those sorts of things, but for astronomy and tree finding and making things. All this was part of a liberating ideology for women. We were lucky.” The world was a big place, where you could do great things. You had agency. You could become something. A
woman
could become something.

All in all, Jane Butzner didn’t have much going against her. She seems never to have been hampered, or held back, or squeezed into something she wasn’t. “I grew up with the idea that I could do anything,” she’d say. “Nothing was going to be barred from me if I wanted.”

   CHAPTER 2   

OUTLAW

I
F THERE WAS A PROBLEM
with this pretty picture it was that it was too special, too rare, and thus certain to butt up against the less forgiving realities of the world outside Monroe Avenue. In Jane’s case, the conflict came early—in school, first at George Washington School in Dunmore, later at Scranton’s Central High.

“
In those days,” Jane would recall, classrooms were “more regimented than they are now. For hours we would sit there doing this or that and we wouldn’t be allowed to talk unless we were asked a question.” Some of her classmates may have found this congenial enough, or at least tolerable. For Jane it was torture, so at odds with her life at home, so deadening, that it exacted its own peculiar price. She developed what she’d call a “
misapprehension,” a fear “that I couldn’t talk anymore, that I didn’t have a voice anymore.” And out of that, in turn, developed “what you might call a little tic. I would make a little noise in my throat, a little voiced noise, just to be sure I could still talk.” One day, finally, her parents asked her why she did that. She wouldn’t answer, or couldn’t, “because I had a feeling that if I did, it would open up the whole subject of how my teachers and I were at outs a good deal.”

Her first two years at George Washington School, located a few blocks from home, at the corner of Green Ridge Street and Madison Avenue, were all right. But then things went downhill. As Jane told it, at numerous times and circumstances during her life, the ordeal of her school years could seem to apply to all of them without distinction—third grade, fifth grade, high school, it didn’t much matter. Later, she’d sound
downright jealous of her father’s schooling in that one-room schoolhouse in
Spotsylvania County, Virginia. She’d tell how as a schoolgirl she “
didn’t listen much in class. I would try to, but I would get bored with it.” She always had some
book hidden beneath her desk, maybe
Bulfinch’s Mythology
, that was more interesting than anything the droning teacher had to say. She’d remember being subjected to “the most awful endless repetition,” and years later could still recite all the countries of South America, in alphabetical order, pointing in the air at their locations on an invisible map. “To tell you the truth,” she’d tell an interviewer once, “I thought that most of my teachers were
rather stupid. They believed a lot of nonsense. I was always trying to educate them, so we would get into conflicts sometimes.”

In third grade she
managed to get herself expelled. And at least in Jane’s adult telling, it was the great gulf between the vibrant, open air of home and the stiflement of school that led to it. A promise, her father told her one evening, was serious business; you never, ever make one unless you’re sure you can keep it. Well, Jane would recall, the very next day at school, a man came in to talk to them about tooth care. In a scene redolent with the wholesome spirit of public health and do-goodery of Sinclair Lewis’s 1920s, students were ushered into a common room to listen to the good gentleman. Of course, he exhorted them to brush their teeth. But he took things one step further, which is where he got into trouble with Jane: “He asked everybody to promise to brush their teeth every night and morning,” for the rest of their lives, and that they raise their hands to affirm their promise.

No
, whispered Jane to her schoolmates, they couldn’t make a promise like that?
Don’t do it.
And pretty soon, “they were putting up their hands and pulling them down,” not at all as they were supposed to do.

Back in class, their teacher was mortified. What did they think they were
doing
? Someone pointed the finger at Jane and soon the teacher wormed the story out of her, going on to demand that she and the other miscreants now take the teeth-brushing-forever oath. Jane refused, urging her classmates not to do so, either; when she reenacted the scene years later, you could see her springy youthful energy restored, as she mimed begging her classmates not to comply: They couldn’t
possibly
keep a promise like that. It was
wrong
to say they would. “Well,” the teacher said, turning to Jane, trying to defuse the revolt. “I’ll deal with you next.”

The two met privately. “All she got from me was an argument. So, at her wits’ end, she expelled me.”

Expelled?!
“I’d known of people suspended, but never knew anyone
expelled.” This was different. This was serious. “This was awful. It was like the end of everything.” Her parents would be called in. “It came to me good and strong and fast that I was an outlaw”—a sense that would reach across the years into her old age, never entirely dissipating.

Her misbehavior seemed to feed on itself, and may not have been as discouraged at home as fully as school authorities might have wished. One time, Jane went off popping paper bags in the lunch room and was sent straight to the principal. The principal called her father. Dr. Butzner, according to family lore, replied, “
I’m a busy man. You’re a busy educator. I’ll take care of my problems. You take care of yours.”

“When we were kids,” wrote a Scranton newspaperman who’d known Jane back then, “she was a free spirit, clever, hilariously funny and fearless.” She’d spit on the stairway rail and slide down, which made for grand entertainment for the kindergarten children below. She’d run up the down escalator at Scranton Dry Goods, a major department store on Lackawanna Avenue. It was as if she sought trouble for the sheer delight of it.

In fourth or fifth grade, as one of Jane’s children recounts the story, her teacher dispensed the wisdom that wearing
rubber boots would make your eyes sore. Nonsense, Jane was sure. Nonsense, Dr. Butzner affirmed. Soon she was wearing rubber boots into school every day, parading them around.
See my eyes?
she’d taunt the teacher and anyone else who’d listen.
Look at ’em—they’re just fine.

Another time, a teacher kept her after school; she was to copy out two pages of the history book. “
Which two pages?” Jane asked. Didn’t matter, said the teacher. Jane selected the frontispiece, which had only an illustration caption: “Columbus Landing at San Salvador.” No, said the teacher, that won’t do, and gave her two more pages. Jane refused; she’d done precisely as asked. “So there I sat after school and there the teacher sat at her desk doing something, and we sat and sat.” Finally, Jane just got up, gathered her coat, and left.

It was bad. The saga of Jane and her teachers mocks the more familiar script—of youthful bristling at classroom constraints, minor behavior problems, parents called into school, corrective action taken, surrender to adult authority, schoolhouse harmony restored. And certainly the story doesn’t end with Jane emerging from her school years grateful for a routinized order she’s finally learned to accept; she never accepted
that.
Rather, it was mistrust and rancor ranging across the years, a war interrupted
by only temporary truces. “
She was always afraid of teachers and teachers were always afraid of her,” was the truth one of her children extracted from a lifetime of his mother’s stories of school.

Years later, in the middle of a two-day university conference in 1987 devoted not to the childhood of Jane Jacobs but to her ideas, Jane would offer her own theory of those troubled years. In grade school, “
the little girls who do best are the ones who take the teacher as a model,” imagining themselves as teachers someday; in school, they’re little apprentices, sopping up the tenets and values of their teachers. That, of course, wasn’t her, not one bit. But other little girls “couldn’t care less about being teachers,” and didn’t get “as meaningful an education either—[because] they’re resisting it.”
That
, she said was her. “I was
that
kind of little girl.”