Personal History (43 page)

But the perception Phil and I shared was right in a way. This was the best short route to the future. Why take years of struggle if you can do it an easier way? There is no doubt in my mind that the struggle to survive was good for us. In business, you have to know what it is to be poor and stretched and fighting for your life against great odds. Many of the young people on the paper today tend to think that the franchise was bestowed on the
Post
and to take it for granted. We all had a deep fear that, like the
Star
family, we would someday become self-satisfied. That fear permeates our family, down to Don Graham, who was very much aware of all these events as a child.

We paid a price for our extraordinary and unexpectedly great success—we raised advertising rates but not enough to compensate for the large gain in circulation, so the paper lost $238,000 the first year. But that wasn’t important. Twenty-one years after my father had bought the
Post
, five years after Phil had been so disappointed at losing the
Times-Herald
, the
Post
had bought its competitor in what was probably the most successful newspaper merger ever, doubling our circulation overnight and propelling the paper into a much more prosperous future. This purchase is what made us a viable company with a future toward which we could look with some certainty, and a foundation on which we could build. At last, after my father’s struggle—which Phil had shared for more than eight years—we could begin to believe that the
Post
was here to stay.

P
HIL AND
I were entering young middle age. For Phil, work, though consuming and demanding, was going along more easily. Except for his increasing physical problems, everything was looking up. The
Star
still led the newspaper scene in Washington, but at last the
Post
had some stability and a clear-cut future. Phil himself was an undoubted business and personal success.

For me, these were successful years in different ways. I loved my life and was happy in the circle of my family—my parents on the one hand and my children on the other. I had a husband who was the center of that circle, around whom we all revolved. We had two large, comfortable houses—the one on R Street and the farm in Virginia. In short, we were privileged; but we knew it and tried to acknowledge it, contributing to the world as best we could.

Our lives were so busy in these years that Glen Welby became our retreat, our R and R, the place where we went to collapse and regroup. It was where we spent the most time together and where the children were happiest, with the possible exception of Don, who would often go to the Friendlys’ to be with his pal Nicholas. Don’s interests lay in town, and, besides, he had severe allergies.

Our days at Glen Welby were crowded with activities, but they were much slower than those in Washington. Life was easy and extraordinarily low-key. The house was furnished informally and sketchily—partly with furniture bought at auctions, partly with a few things purchased from the previous owner, and only a little acquired with the help of a decorator. The large lawn was mowed by an antiquated machine pulled by horses, all operated by Rob Grant, a charming man who belonged to a large, distinguished family that lived nearby. The farm itself was worked by a farmer from nearby Rectortown, aided by another farmer, Buck Nalls, who lived on the place. When eventually we took over the farm ourselves, Buck stayed on, as did two of his sons, and became a pillar of our lives there.

Reconfiguring Glen Welby for our needs was my job. The house itself required a lot of work. We built a hard-surfaced tennis court on the remains of one we found. We created our own recreational swimming and fishing by digging a pond at the foot of the hill in front of the house, then damming a stream and installing pipes under the dam to feed the pond. Every spring I would have a truckload of sand brought in and dumped on the dam to form a small beach. We built a pier with a diving board, and Phil had the completed pond stocked with bass and bream. This one-acre pond eventually was dubbed Lake Katharine, since several such lakes, built by friends in the neighborhood, were named after wives. A few years later, Phil built a second, much bigger pond below the first, lower down on the stream. This pond was named Lake Philip. In 1957, when Ed Murrow was creating a lake on some land he owned, Phil wrote him to “be sure to name this one for your wife. This will seem generous, but more important you are bound to build a bigger pond soon. That one can then be called Lake Edward.” We made a little island in the middle of Lake Philip and called it Ile Sainte-Lally—a takeoff on Ile Saint-Louis in the middle of the Seine in Paris.

Because this second lake was big enough for boating, Phil gradually acquired or built a small fleet of boats of various odd shapes and kinds—a sailboat he sent for and put together himself, a rowboat, a canoe, and a little canvas cockleshell. He also had a shed built to shelter the collection, which he then christened the Lake Philip Yacht Club, and for which we had a gala opening, complete with matchbooks embossed with “LPYC” and a song Lally composed for the event. As the children grew older, he added a motorboat, small yet powerful enough to pull them on water skis.

Our lives centered on these two lakes, where we swam and boated and enjoyed the ducks and wild Canada geese as they came and went in spring and fall. We went walking, played hours of tennis and softball, and hit golf balls into the fields. Phil and the children, particularly Bill, fished passionately in both lakes; occasionally Phil fished all night. He had an arsenal of guns at the farm, and everyone learned to shoot at an early age. Even I learned to handle a shotgun, although I always ended up with a bruised shoulder, since I didn’t handle the kick very well. Phil used to hunt groundhogs, and in season quail, and we all shot skeet. Bill was an avid marksman, had his own .22 when he was very young, and, I regret to say, sometimes shot pigeons off the barn roof. One day, after dinner, Phil put some pewter candlesticks we had gotten for a wedding gift on the stone wall that separated the house from the farm’s fields, lit the candles, and had the children try to snuff the flames out with .22s. Naturally they missed and hit the candlesticks, which I still have, conspicuously dented.

We kept a World War II-vintage army jeep at the farm, on which each child learned to drive, sometimes circling the fields for hours on end. As
Phil once wrote, it was “Really quite comfortable at speeds up to about nine miles an hour.”

Meals were mostly family-oriented. We often picnicked on the beach, using a grill on which I learned to cook steaks, chicken, and even a leg of lamb and corn on the cob. We always had friends out to Glen Welby, which added to the normal ten people per meal, counting the children, the nurse, and whatever college students I might have helping out. Most days, we ate lunch at a long picnic table under two goldenrain trees. We’d bring the food and iced tea down to the trees in the back of the station wagon, and I’d fill the plates and pass them down the table. One Sunday—with guests present, naturally—when I got to Phil, who was sitting at the opposite end of the long table, he told me just to throw the plate, which I did. Miraculously, he caught it—mashed potatoes and gravy intact. Unfortunately, the second time I tried, it didn’t work so well.

From the very beginning, Lally developed a passion for and a great ability at riding, and entered one horse show after another. She was often the only hatless and coatless member of the party, and one of her ponies resembled a donkey, but she did well and, most important, had a good time. When she learned to hunt, I would get up at 5:00 a.m. and drive her to the meet, where her pony would be delivered by the deep-freeze truck. I would often follow the hunters for a while and watch, but I gave up on the shows, which I disliked. The other children rode also, except for Don, who hated riding, having tried it for about five minutes. I had thought that all the children ought to learn, but one day I looked at him sitting on a horse, vaguely resembling Sancho Panza, and blurted out, “Get down. You’re right. It’s not for you.” He was a superb athlete and loved tennis and everything to do with balls and ball-playing, but riding, swimming, and skiing didn’t interest him.

Phil’s energy spilled over to all of us. At dinner, he would play games with the children, asking them history questions, teaching them about the Civil War, instilling a love of the land. He organized frog-gigging expeditions, taking the children to the lake with flashlights—often just when I had announced that dinner was ready. He told stories and made us laugh. One night at dinner, when he thought the houseguests too stuffy, he started a stand-on-your-hands contest with Stevie in which everyone had to participate, with the college girls there to help out with the children trying to be decorous and keep their skirts between their knees.

O
UR LIFE AT
Glen Welby was only one aspect of this period when all was seemingly right with our world. My parents were still active and involved, although my father was increasingly showing signs of his age. Throughout the 1950s, Mother wrote and lectured extensively and well,
and was caught up in various issues of public welfare and education, being awarded a number of honorary degrees and receiving widespread positive recognition for her work. On her seventieth birthday, Harlow Shapley, the astronomer, named a galaxy after her to mark the occasion—not a common tribute.

Her writing and appearances always brought strong reactions, the positive ones of which she was only too happy to share with us—like a clip she sent us from the
Richmond News Leader
, a staunch conservative Southern paper that had reprinted a speech of hers, along with an editorial saying, “Today the Supreme Court instead of following the flag, follows the Washington Post.” A Richmond citizen wrote her that her speech was one of the “noblest utterances he had ever read, in the tradition of Jefferson and Lincoln.” With her normal breathtaking assurance, she told us: “You ought to read it some day. It is actually one of the loftiest things I have ever written. Strong Emersonian influence.”

Tensions between Phil and my mother escalated temporarily in the mid-1950s because of a disagreement over the location of a proposed auditorium and cultural center for Washington. She was chairman of the Auditorium Commission and wanted the center located along the Potomac riverfront in the Foggy Bottom area of Washington, where the Watergate apartments were later built; he thought it should be part of the redevelopment of Southwest Washington, with which he was heavily involved. Conceding that the Foggy Bottom area provided a beautiful Potomac River site, Phil nevertheless believed strongly that placing the auditorium in Southwest Washington was an important step toward discouraging white flight to the suburbs and upgrading a community of 40,000 people in the Southwest.

From Mother’s point of view—and that of her commission—the river site was perfect, and putting the auditorium in Southwest would have ended the whole project, since she felt she couldn’t raise money to build in a slum. She railed at Phil and at those in Congress who were opposed to her point of view, accusing them of having been reached by real-estate interests, and vowed that if the Southwest area of the city were chosen as the site, she and her whole commission would resign. In a P.S. to one letter to him about the issue, she added, “I would like to write an analysis of the factors involved in Foggy Bottom vs S.W. for next Sunday’s
Post
. If you don’t want it, I hope you don’t mind if I offer it to the
Star”
—incredible, even in retrospect.

Yet Phil could honestly say that after sixteen years he approved of my mother, despite an occasional impulse to “matri [in-law] cide.” The two of them had a curious, conflicted, but very deep bond, despite the endless dueling over her relationship to the paper.

During this period my father was more and more removed from the
day-to-day operations of the paper and the company, but no less interested than ever. When they were not in the same city, Phil sent him letters and memos recounting meetings, speeches, Port-related activities, and so on. Dad was clearly aging, but his mind was sharp and his judgment and perspective were still sought by Phil and others. He turned eighty the year after the purchase of the
Times-Herald
, and he clearly was thinking about the implications of aging. In April of 1955, he sent a memo to Russ Wiggins noting the significance of the deaths of two newspaper legends that week: “Joe Pulitzer died on Wednesday; Bertie McCormick died on Thursday; and I have just left to see my doctor.”

For a while Dad had been contemplating the idea of leaving some stock to
Post
employees. Phil suggested to him that it would be nicer to give it to them while he was still alive and have the satisfaction of observing their pleasure. Dad agreed, eventually telling the recipients:

What he did was to work out the details for giving a half-million dollars of nonvoting stock to 711 of the paper’s employees and independent circulation dealers—in essence, everyone with five or more years of continuous service in the company. The gifts ranged from four to twenty shares. The fair market value of each share was worked out by Price Waterhouse to be $59.44. My father wrote to all the recipients explaining the gift and adding that he and my mother hoped they would retain their shares at least as long as they were associated with the
Post:
“We believe the stock is a good investment. With the enthusiastic help and cooperation of everyone in the
Post
organization, it should increase in value over the years.” Several people understood the stock’s value from the beginning and bought all they could from those who didn’t. Many sold to each other, but those who simply hung on or bought five, ten, or fifteen shares were richly rewarded as the company grew and went public. One share became sixty shares when we went public, and since we went public at $26 and split the stock twice, these initial gifts eventually became worth a great deal. The stock-distribution gift was announced in a memorable lunch at the Statler Hotel in June of 1955, an event that also served to commemorate the twenty-second anniversary of my father’s purchase of the paper. Eddie Folliard, the
Post
’s White House correspondent, spoke
for the employees at the luncheon, beginning his remarks with “Fellow stockholders,” and continuing—after the laughter subsided—“Well, you never know. You start out for work as a wage-earner and you come home a capitalist.”