An American Life: Family Truths

An American Life: Family Truths

• 1. AN AMERICAN LIFE Will Boutelle family myths, truths & half truths

• 2.

• 3. AN AMERICAN LIFE

• 4.

• 5. AN AMERICAN LIFE family myths, truths & half-truths by WILL BOUTELLE ridgetop press

• 6. Copyright © 2024 by Will Boutelle All rights reserved Printed by Bookmobile in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Boutelle, Will An American Life: Family Myths, Truths & Half-Truths/Will Boutelle p. cm. ISBN: 979-8-218-41523-5 Book design by Jane Vandenburgh for The Paradise Library Book production and cover design by Gopa&Ted2, Inc. Ridgetop Press 5718 MacCall Street Oakland CA 94609

• 7. For Christopher Curtis Boutelle (1946-2021) Every family has one member who acts as glue or gatherer. For the Boutelle family that was Chris. Rest In Peace.

• 8.

• 9. “It has all been very interesting,“ Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) on her deathbed

• 10. viii An American Life Table of Contents Preface, 2 Our American Beginnings, 3 Boutelle Ancestors, 4 The Boutelles in the 20th Century, 7 My Great Aunt Mollie, Civil War Widow, 8 My Father, Bill Boutelle, 9 A Legacy of Musicianship, 10 Shipboard Romance,12 Bill Boutelle, Brown Class of 1931, 13 Fraternity Brothers at Brown,14 Bill Finds a Career in Medicine, 15 John M. Holmes’ Farm, 16 The Holmeses, 17 Sara Stratton Holmes, 18 John Horace Holmes, My Grandfather, 19 John Horace Holmes Marries Marie Heloise Adams, 21 The Holmeses of South Dakota, 23 Lady Girl & Baby Girl, 24 Sara Holmes Marries the Left-Handed Surgeon, 25 I Am Born, 26 Men in Uniform, 27 A Stranger Appears, 28 Back to Manhattan, 29 The Farm in Pittstown, 30 Mary Holmes, Artist, 31 Hope Springs Farm, 32 Family Dynamics, Birth Order, The Baby Boom, 34 Choirboy, 35 Touring in the Jim Crow South, 37 High School, 38 My 1938 Buick, 39 First Job in Medicine, Morgue Attendant, 40 Leaving Pittstown for Providence, 41 My First Psychiatric Hospital, 42 Med School, Spaghetti on a Hot Plate, 43 Med School, Continued, 44 Three Months in Europe, 45 My Brother Jonathan, 47 Back to Med School, 48 The French Teacher from Scotland, 49 Annie’s Family, 50 Jean Blair Edwards, Annie’s Mother, 51 Edwards Family History, 52 Blair Family History, 53 Jean Blair’s and Alexander Edwards’ Marriage, 54 Annie’s Education, 55 Romance Blooms, A Letter Is Written, A Telegram Arrives, 56 Annie Writes her Mother, 57 Jaguar Goes, Traded for the Bright Red Truck, 58 Harley in Harvard Square, 59 Getting Married in Scotland — The Subconscious Is a Bitch, 60 Race Riots and Lobotomies, 62 Fifty Years of Psychiatric Practice, 63 Annie Gets a PhD, 64 Echos and Life Choices, 65 Dr. Boutelle, Motorcycle Mechanic, 66 The Berkshires, 67 Country Acres, Call Anytime, 68

• 11. An American Life ix Five Boutelles on Star Island, NH, summer 1992. West Chesterfield, 69 Hog Slaughter at Ridgetop Farm, 70 How I Became an EMT, 72 Soldier’s Heart, 74 Back on the Farm, 75 The Garden, Maple Sugaring, Getting Wood In, 76 The Rhythm of Our Days, 77 Transitions, 78 On Oban Bay, 79 Annie Boutelle, Poet, 80 Sara Holmes Boutelle, Julia Morgan Scholar, 82 Joyous Occasion Torn by Grief, 83 California, 84 Generations, 85 Annie, 88 My Best Pandemic, 90 Lonely Old Man, Boy Next Door, 91 Appendix A, Con Keating, 94 Appendix B, Obadiah Holmes, 96 Appendix C, My Best Pandemic, 98 Timeline of the Boutelle, Holmes, Blair and Edwards Families, 100 Books by Annie Boutelle, 102 Index & Photo Index, 103

• 12.

• 13. AN AMERICAN LIFE

• 14. 2 An American Life I awoke suddenly at five in the morning one summer Sunday with the realization that I had become the sole repository of memories of a long life, well-lived, and with only few regrets. It was on 20 August 2023 that I came to understand that I am now the only one carrying on the details of an American family’s history, stories that date back to the major events of the 1600s. Not only are all those Boutelles and Holmeses represented in this telling but also the history of my wife Ann Edwards Boutelle’s families, both the Edwardses and the Blairs. As the lone survivor, save one, of my generation, I had suddenly became painfully aware that many important family events reside only in my aging brain. Therefore, in an effort to preserve the memory of those people and these events for our own descendants, I’ve resolved to make this account. I have tried to sketch out, as far as is known, the histories of the four families from which my children are descended: my parents, a Boutelle and a Holmes, and my wife Ann’s parents, an Edwards and a Blair. I write too for all those interested the history of an American family and must apologize in advance for its anecdotal, nonlinear, not-strictly-chronological approach, as mine is essentially a stream-ofconsciousness narrative. And please forgive me when I swing from topic to topic too enthusiastically. The impulse comes simply from my wanting to share these stories with you. Will Boutelle — May 2024, Oakland, California Boutelles of Ridgetop Farm, 1989. Preface

• 15. An American Life 3 As noted by W.W. Hayward, the Boutelle family was of Norman-French ancestry and was thought to have arrived in England with the forces of William the Conqueror in the 11th century. Family tradition holds that our name derives from the word bouteille, French for bottle — le bouteiller is the keeper of a wine cellar. More inventive is the story that puts our ancestors living near a river where a narrowing formed the bottleneck the family controlled, their living made by charging tolls on passing boats and barges. No proof exists, of course, of the accuracy of either of these stories. Our American Beginnings My name is William Eugene Boutelle. I was born in New York City on 11 November 1940. My father was William Eugene Boutelle (1908–1972) and, yes, I realize that my father carried exactly the same name as I do, but according to my birth certificate I was not designated a “junior,” and, no, I do not know why. My mother was Sara Stratton Holmes Boutelle (1909-1999). A little genealogy might be useful here, in service of sketching the larger picture. My father, born in 1908 in Providence, RI, is distinguished as the first on the Boutelle side of my family to go to college, graduating from Brown University in 1931. His parents were Eugene George Boutelle (1876–1963)and Margaret Keating Boutelle (1879– 1969) each born in Worcester, MA. Eugene came from a long line of New Englanders, originally based in Hancock, NH. The year of my grandfather’s birth marked the centennial of the founding of our nation: the townsfolk of Hancock thought to commemorate the latter event by commissioning a genealogist to research the histories of the town’s prominent families. The result is the tome entitled The History of Hancock, New Hampshire, written by William Willis Hayward and published thirteen years after my grandfather’s birth. A copy of this book is in my possession and resides in the Boutelle Family Archive — at the time of this writing these papers and artifacts are stored at my house on MacCall Street in Oakland. Two William Eugene Boutelles in New York City in 1940. My father was 32 and I was one day old.

• 16. 4 An American Life “Those who never look back to their ancestors will never look forward to posterity.” — BURKE The Hancock, NH, town cemetery containing many Boutelles is well worth a visit. One of the graves belongs to a certain Deacon William Boutelle — and, yes, the name William does show up repeatedly all down through the centuries of our lineage. The Hancock history written by W.W. Hayward reveals that a certain Thomas Boutelle, born in 1787, the son of Deacon William, was excommunicated — and here we’ll presume this to be the Congregationalist Church — “for attending an abolitionist meeting on the Sabbath.” Thomas was apparently also a subscriber to William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator. As I remember it, there were three or four copies of this publication — now lost or misplaced — in the family archives of my youth. Hayward’s history reveals that the first American Boutelles were two brothers, James and John, who emigrated from England in 1632 and settled in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. John then moved to the New Haven Colony and little is known of his descendants. James, with his wife Alice, remained in Massachusetts and had a large family, the tenth generation of which produced my grandfather Eugene George Boutelle. Throughout the three centuries following James’ arrival, the Boutelles are described in Boutelle Ancestors

• 17. An American Life 5 Hayward’s history as teachers, shoemakers, sea captains, a dentist, a pharmacist, and veterans of both the Revolutionary and Civil wars. A co-lateral descendent, Charles Addison Boutelle (1839–1901) was a notable journalist who served as United States congressman. Hayward mentions the birth of my grandfather, Eugene George Boutelle, on 4 July 1876, noting that he was the only one of their four children to survive infancy, his three brothers each dying before age three. His father, William Eugene Boutelle, married Emma Marcena Curtis of Worcester, MA. A painting of this William Eugene remains in the family, as do photographs of both him and his wife. William Eugene Boutelle (1848–1888) was a pharmacist in Worcester, MA, and his father (my great-great grandfather) was Dr. David Knight Boutelle (1811–1891), a dentist who practiced in Providence, RI. My paternal grandmother, Margaret Keating, was born in 1879 in Worcester, MA. Margaret was of Irish ancestry, her father, Daniel Keating, having come to America from Cahirsiveen (or Cahirciveen), County Kerry, Ireland. The reasons for his immigration are not known but family myth suggests that he might have had to leave Ireland quickly because of his association with the Fenian Rebels. It’s just as likely that he — together with so many others of his time and circumstance — left Ireland due to dire economic conditions, specifically the potato famine. There is good historical evidence, however, that Margaret Keating’s cousin, Con Keating, became a minor Irish hero during the Easter Rising of 1916, when he was detailed by Roger Casement of the Irish Volunteers to take over by force the British wireless station on Valentia Island, off Cahirsiveen. Con Keating, who was martyred and became a hero during the Easter Rising of 1916. I was so taken by the man and the event that I wrote a vivid account of the action that resulted in Keating’s death on Good Friday, two days before the Easter Rising got underway. My detailed account of Con Keating’s life and times can be found in Appendix A, p. 94.

• 18. 6 An American Life My paternal great-great grandfather was Dr. David Knight Boutelle (1811-1891). He was a dentist who practiced in Providence, RI. William married Emma Marcena Curtis, (1845–1906), also of Worcester. William and Emma Boutelle are my paternal great-grandparents. Boutelle Ancestors Dr. David Boutelle’s son was William Eugene Boutelle, (1848 -1888) a pharmacist in Worcester, MA.

• 19. An American Life 7 Eugene and Margaret Boutelle were married in 1906, as were John and Marie Holmes, so both sets of grandparents celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversaries in 1956. Con Keating, the 1916 Irish uprising’s hero and early martyr, pictured on the previous spread, is my Grandmother Margaret Boutelle’s cousin. When the two young people who were to become my paternal grandparents met, Margaret was Irish Catholic and Eugene was, according to her later account, a “backsliding Methodist.” Margaret and the Keatings in this country were what she described as “lace curtain Irish” rather than “shanty Irish” to use the class distinction common in that time. My great-grandfather William died suddenly under circumstances now unclear when his son was only twelve. Despite this early loss, my Grandfather Eugene managed to graduate from high school, playing guitar in the band he’d started. And Eugene came early to the craft of photography, producing both glass-plate and film negatives of life in Massachusetts at the turn of the 20th century. These glass plate negatives were donated to the Worcester Historical Society in the early 2000s, the Archive retaining historic prints of family gatherings and New England scenes contained in four photo albums in storage. Contact prints were sometimes too small so Eugene — always selfmotivated, determined and inventive — constructed his own photographic enlarger at a time when this apparatus was rarely found in the hands of amateurs. Self-taught in several other fields, as well, he became an accountant by passing the test for CPA without benefit of formal instruction — this certificate can be found in the Archive. After certification he then made a good living by circuit-riding around New England textile mills, keeping their accounts. The Boutelles in the 20th Century

• 20. 8 An American Life My Great Aunt Mollie, Civil War Widow The Watertown, MA, home of my grandparents, Margaret and Eugene Boutelle, was also home to Margaret’s sister Mary Morrison, called Mollie. My great aunt was very young when she married C.S. Morrison, a composer of some renown, a man so much older than his bride that she was widowed shortly after they wed. Col. Morrison had been an officer in the Union Army so Aunt Mollie would receive a Civil War widow’s pension — a monthly check for $20 — until her death in 1958 as she lived well into her eighties. Her wistful look in this photograph with her aging husband is understandable.

• 21. An American Life 9 My father was born in Providence but grew up in Watertown, MA, graduating in the Class of 1927 at Watertown High School. Like his own father, Bill was a gifted musician. Margaret evidently realized early on there might be little future for the son of an Irish Catholic girl from Worcester and so had her son baptized at Trinity Episcopal Church in Boston. A staunch Republican, my grandmother went as a delegate to the 1948 convention in Philadelphia where Thomas Dewey was nominated as Republican challenger in a very tight race against Harry Truman. We all remember the famous photo of the reelected President holding the newspaper whose headline reads “Dewey Wins!” In high school my father was active in early ham radio, building his own receiver using the iconic cylindrically shaped Quaker Oats box to wind his tuning coil. Like his father before him, Bill started his own band, one so accomplished they were invited to join the Keith Vaudeville Circuit, the kind of offer musicians and comedians sorely coveted in 1927. Luckily for him — and for all — they turned this offer down. My Father, Bill Boutelle William Eugene Boutelle. born in 1908, Eugene and Margaret Boutelle’s only child. He was to be known universally as Bill.

• 22. 10 An American Life The Merry Music Makers, my father’s high school band with Bill standing in the center. This is the band that was approached by the Keith Circuit. Benjamin Franklin Keith (1846-1914) was an American vaudeville theatre owner who put together a circuit of legitimate theaters for traveling variety artists. In 1928, the Keith Circuit merged with the Orpheum Circuit and shortly afterward became the motionpicture studio Radio-Keith-Orpheum, known as RKO. In looking back we now see how fortunate it was that my father declined Keith’s invitation to join the circuit. In 1927 — the year of my father’s graduation from high school — Al Jolson starred in the first sound picture, the talkie called “The Jazz Singer,” an event of such worldwide importance it would spell the demise of vaudeville as mass entertainment. A Legacy of Musicianship And so it was that my father — president of his senior class, academically gifted and as inventive and ambitious as his own father had been — took it upon himself to go to college. It may have been sentimental reasons that had him choosing Brown, as he had been born in Providence. Brown was then still one of the lesser-known Ivys and in the late 1920s still enjoyed more of a regional reputation. At college, my father joined the Kappa Sigma fraternity, living in the fraternity house. While concentrating his studies on psychology, he played tennis for the Brown team and worked at putting another band together. He became student director of the Brown University Marching Band, playing saxophone. His little orchestra, called The Campus Crooners, played local venues and dances and was good enough to begin to be more widely noticed and sought out.

• 23. An American Life 11 Bill was student director of the Brown University Marching Band, playing saxophone. His little orchestra, called The Campus Crooners, playing local venues and dances, was good enough to be invited to play aboard the French liner, the SS Rochambeau, the voyage that changed both of my parents’ lives. Grandfather Eugene Boutelle’s band. He’s in the front row at the extreme left with the guitar across his knees held like it’s a rifle. This guitar has been repaired and restored and is now in the hands of my eldest son Jonathan. Eugene and Margaret Boutelle always encouraged my father’s musicianship, buying a secondhand piano in 1918, when Bill was ten. He loved to play and practiced continually, taking up many other instruments in turn and with ease, including the clarinet and the saxophone. This photo was taken in 1939.

• 24. 12 An American Life A Shipboard Romance In 1929, my father’s band was hired to perform as the ship’s orchestra aboard the liner SS Rochambeau, a fateful passage. As luck would have it, a young woman named Sara Holmes was a passenger on that ship traveling to Europe in the company of her sister Mary. At one point the passengers put together a skit that requiring Sara to dress in a tux. The only tuxedos on this ship, as it happened, belonged to orchestra members, and so it was that Sara approached the band leader to ask if she might borrow his. Sara was then a student at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, MA. My father’s and mother’s relationship didn’t really take off until each had returned to the US and each was back in school in New England. My father had to first recover from his own European misadventures. The heading for the ship’s manifest reads, We, the undersigned passengers of the SS Rochambeau, French Liner, wish to express our appreciation of the excellent dance music furnished by the Brown University Campus Crooners Orchestra during the crossing from New York to Le Havre, June 20th to 29th, 1929. My mother’s signature, as “Sally Holmes,” appears in the first column, 12th from the bottom.

• 25. An American Life 13 Bill Boutelle, Brown Class of 1931 Bill Boutelle had been badly injured in a violent encounter he’d had when his band was performing a bar gig in Brussels, where he got into an altercation, a dispute rumored to have involved a girl. This man, a local, pulled a knife, cutting my father severely on his face, resulting in the scar he bore for the rest of his life. Newspaper accounts in Boston disclose that his mother Margaret Boutelle travelled to Belgium to be with him during his convalescence. As my father and mother’s love for one another blossomed back home, Bill made many trips from Providence to South Hadley in his Model A Ford. A brilliant student, Sara was elected to both Phi Beta Kappa and as president of her graduating class. As Mount Holyoke’s representative she traveled with her college president, Mary Wooley, on visits to other colleges. President Wooley also had the distinction of being the first woman to attend Brown, entering the university in 1895. Sara and Bill each graduated from their respective colleges in 1931, when the U.S. was already two years into the Great Depression. My father, leaving Brown and well aware that these were inauspicious times, sought advice from his first cousin Mildred Hurley who was an early practitioner in the new field of social work. As he went to consult with Mildred my father was certain of one thing: he was not going out to make his way in the world as an itinerate accountant, as his own father had done.

• 26. 14 An American Life Fraternity Brothers at Brown At college, my father joined the Kappa Sigma fraternity, living in the frat house. While concentrating his studies on psychology, he played tennis for the Brown team and worked at putting another band together. Speaking of determination, my father’s friend Walter Niles (front row on the far right) was not formally accepted at Brown at first but arrived at the university anyway, and — in an audacious display of selfconfidence — began taking courses. Niles did so well that he went to the Dean of Admissions, requesting the place at last be granted, its having been more than adequately earned. In addition to Walter, my father was close friends with David MacMaster (middle row, second from left) and Ed Payne (front row, second from left). Sara turned out to be a consummate matchmaker, fixing up each of her husband’s closest fraternity brothers with such great partners that these marriages lasted half a century or more. The families of those four fraternity brothers, Brown, Class of 1931, maintained their closeness throughout the decades. They held informal reunions every summer throughout the 1950s and ‘60s as their kids were growing up, parties held at the MacMasters’ house in Flemington or our family’s farm in Pittstown, NJ. These get-togethers were great fun for the kids, four MacMasters, two Paynes, two Niles and the three of us Boutelles, parties characterized by the uproarious laughter and prodigious drinking of our parents. Front row: Sarah Niles, Jack Niles. Middle row: Christopher Boutelle, John Payne, Mary MacMaster, Robert Payne, Colin MacMaster, Angus MacMaster. Back row: Will Boutelle, Jonathan Boutelle.

• 27. An American Life 15 Bill Finds a Career in Medicine The Dr. William Eugene Boutelle family in 1943. The consummate matchmaker, Sara Holmes Boutelle managed to equip each of his fraternity brothers with such great partners these marriages lasted entire lifetimes. It’s to be noted too that it was my mother who introduced me to the young woman from Scotland teaching French at the school where Sara was working. Annie and I were married in June of 1967. When he sought counsel from his cousin Mildred, my father had gone to someone expert in the field. As with the rest of Margaret’s family, her niece Mildred had remained Roman Catholic and it was through the guidance of her faith that she’d become a social worker during an era when such jobs were exceedingly rare. Mildred had graduated from Simmons College of Social Work in 1916 and became the founding president of the Psychiatric Social Workers’ Association, essentially creating her own visionary field. In her work, Mildred had become familiar with a number of doctors and suggested that — given Bill’s aptitudes, keen intelligence, dexterity and drive — medicine might be a good career for him. Because he hadn’t taken pre-med courses at Brown, he went home to live with his folks in Watertown while he made up the required undergraduate courses at Harvard. The result was that he was accepted at the medical schools of Harvard, Yale, Columbia, also a fourth school whose name escapes me. My parents were then — this was likely scandalous for their class and era — already committed and living together. The two chose Columbia because they wanted to give The Big Apple a try. Two years after arriving there and halfway through his medical training, they were married in 1934 in a civil ceremony at City Hall, with Walter Niles, my father’s fraternity brother, and his wife Helen Beccard (“Becky”) Niles in attendance. Walter Niles, David MacMaster and Edwin Payne were my father’s closest friends at Brown, friendships that would last their lifetimes.

• 28. 16 An American Life John M. Holmes’ Farm My mother’s grandfather, John M. Holmes, owned a farm in Ohio raising purebred merino sheep. A family story has it that when it came time for him to find a wife, my great grandfather took himself off to a locale where he’d heard there was to be a large gathering of interesting women, this being the Seneca Falls, NY, conference where Susan B. Anthony was holding the first Women’s Rights Convention in 1848. It appears he was successful.

• 29. An American Life 17 The Holmeses My mother Sara Holmes was born in Aberdeen, South Dakota, growing up on the ranch where her parents, John Horace Holmes (1867-1966) and Marie Heloise Adams Holmes (1880-1975) were living. My grandfather John Holmes’ life was unusual in that he was so often on his way somewhere. He was always an adventurer. Sara’s father, John H. Holmes. was born in Ohio two years after the end of the Civil War. The family archive includes a broadside describing a direct ancestor, Obadiah Holmes (1606–1682), a legendary figure, religious renegade and cultural outlaw. Obadiah Holmes was famously exiled to the New World by the Church of England in 1636. In the Colonies he continued to cause so much trouble that he was publicly whipped and came very close to being condemned to death. His troubles stemmed from his absolute adherence to Anabaptist dogma and practice, included the need for public confession and the adherence to the practice of adult baptism by immersion. [See Appendix B, p.96, for the fuller story.] Suffice it to say that this fiery pilgrim was exiled not only from England, but also from both the Massachusetts Bay and Rhode Island colonies, ending up in the wilds of what is now the state of New Jersey. On my mother’s side the line of succession is as follows: Religious renegade and cultural firebrand, Obadiah Holmes (1606-1682), Jonathan Holmes (1633-1713), Obadiah Holmes II (1666–1745), Joseph Holmes (1698-1777), Obadiah Holmes III (1728-1794), Isaac Holmes (1764-1851), John M. Holmes (1817-1883), John H. Holmes (1867-1966), my grandfather. The Holmes family in our lineage is distantly related to Abraham Lincoln, with John M. Holmes, my great-grandfather, being the fifth cousin once removed of the 16th President of the United States.

• 30. 18 An American Life Sara Stratton Holmes My mother, Sara Holmes, was a beautiful girl who became a beautiful woman, always wearing this gift with grace and modesty, reticent always about speaking of the beauty of others. As president of her class she traveled with Mount Holyoke College President Mary Wooley, the first woman to graduate from Brown. On one of these trips Sara met the president of Smith College, William Allen Nielson and his wife Elizabeth. In seeing President Nielson’s wife my mother told her date, my father, that Elisabeth was the most beautiful woman she’d ever seen. Years later, when my wife Annie was hired by the English Department at Smith, it was President Nielson’s grandson, Bill Oram, who made the call offering her the job. Professor Oram subsequently got a great kick out of my mother’s story about his grandmother’s legendary beauty. Sara with her mother Marie Adams Holmes on the day of her graduation from Mount Holyoke College in 1931

• 31. An American Life 19 John Horace Holmes, My Grandfather I now return to my grandfather, whom I had the honor and pleasure of knowing intimately for twenty-five years. In 1883, when John Holmes was sixteen, his father the sheep rancher died and being one for whom adventure always seemed to call, he started westward, accompanying his older brother Wendell. When the Holmes brothers reached Davenport, IA, and stood on the banks of the Mississippi, Wendell allegedly surveyed the scene, turned to John and uttered the words, “Too windy.” Thereupon he turned, retraced his steps and returned to Ohio, while the younger brother stayed on alone in Iowa. The events of the next decade or so are lost to us but by age thirty John Holmes was teaching English and coaching football at the now-defunct Denison Normal College in Denison, IA. My grandfather was a hard-working man and widely traveled, finding employment to suit his interests in various arenas. He once served as the president of the Dakota National Bank in Aberdeen, SD, where it was his signature that validated the worth of a bill as currency. When I was young our family was still in possession of one of these bank-issued $10 bills, becoming legal tender only when signed by John H. Holmes. John Holmes had a lifelong interest in local journalism, once owning a small town’s independent paper, serving as both its editor and publisher. By the time he met my maternal grandmother he was in his mid-thirties and already a widower. After burying his first wife and newborn daughter, he’d sold that paper and was traveling again, engaged as an advance man, buying up tracts of land for the railroads, and so determining where new towns would be established. By 1895, when he was 28, John Holmes was teaching English at Denison College. My grandfather is pictured here in the lower right corner, with other faculty members.

• 32. 20 An American Life John Holmes had the habit of getting off the train at every station to purchase the local paper and at one of these stops he noticed a demure young woman then boarding, who seemed to be traveling alone. As it wasn’t proper for a strange man to approach a woman and boldly introduce himself, he bribed a porter to find out where this solitary young woman was going. As it turns out Marie Adams — who was to become my grandmother — was traveling to take a job. Her desire to work in the world and to live independently from the prominent Adamses continually scandalized her proper Southern family. The Adamses, whose home place was on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, proudly traced their roots back to those Adamses, both the second and sixth Presidents of the United States. Marie’s family was well-off, as was then said, and it was simply expected that each of their three daughters would marry men appropriate to their elite society of gentlemen and ladies. A woman’s role, it was felt, was to become her husband’s auxiliary, aiding his successful life by becoming another consummate society hostess. Marie’s father was the local physician and would frequently take her in his buggy as he made house calls, where she was encouraged to imagine herself as his assistant. On the drive home he’d let her hold the buggy’s reins. Marie Adams was certainly not expected to work for a living, but if she had decided to be employed one of the few proper occupations for a woman was in nursing. It was a surprise to all then that she sought more schooling after high school, another surprise coming when she applied for and was hired as a teacher at a newly inaugurated girl’s academy in Ohio. It was as she sat aboard the train to Tiffin that Marie Adams caught John Holmes’ eye. My grandfather is shown in the photo above, seated in the front row’s lower left with the Denison College football team he was coaching in 1895.

• 33. An American Life 21 John Horace Holmes Marries Marie Heloise Adams Having discovered her home address from the porter, John Holmes arranged to have a single red rose delivered to her residence, accompanied by his card introducing himself. And so their connection was made. As it happened Marie wasn’t fated to teach at Tiffin, as an epidemic closed the school that fall and sent all the students and teachers home. By the time she returned to Maryland, she and my grandfather had already begun an ardent correspondence. Again, her family was scandalized! How inappropriate for a girl who’d scarcely turned twenty to be writing a man like this, someone so much older and a widower! Not only had he been married before, he had fathered a child. And this someone of hers was not only not a doctor, he was a Northerner, not someone likely to ever be welcomed into proper Eastern Shore society. My grandfather’s love, however, proved to be persistent. Insight into the nature of John Holmes is gained by the image of him with the single red rose, a man in love with the romantic gesture. When they married in 1906, he was 39 years of age and his bride Marie was 26. On the day of their wedding feast where oysters Rockefeller were served, John’s new bride was to find the most exquisite pearl in one of hers. My grandfather, John Horace Holmes, married Marie Adams in 1906 at her family’s Eastern Shore home. Coincidentally, the Eugene Boutelles were married that same year in Worcester, MA, so it was that both sets of grandparents celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversaries in 1956.

• 34. 22 An American Life Preface

• 35. An American Life 23 The Holmeses in South Dakota So, the new Mr. and Mrs. John Horace Holmes settled on a ranch in South Dakota where indigenous peoples were part of the great Sioux Nation, whose 10,000-year, or older. culture was being crushed by decades of incursion by European whites. John Holmes made it his business to be respectful and friendly with these peoples and so was asked to be an honorary member of the tribe he’d come to know through trading. When I was young my grandparents still possessed beaded objects and leather wampum gained in trade, intricately made and priceless beyond words, now somehow lost over time. There are photos of him in uniform astride his cavalry horse as a colonel in the South Dakota National Guard showing him to be very handsome. [See photo p. 27.] As luck would have it, Colonel Holmes never engaged in any fighting at all, let alone any battle involving Indians. John Holmes, who’d brought his artistic and sophisticated wife to a wild place on a rough prairie, wanted her to be happy. He contracted a notable San Francisco architect to come out to the ranch to design a magnificent house for them, one formal room displaying wallpaper etched in gold leaf. The closest neighbors of those who lived in this grand house was a family grouping of Native Sioux, some of whom were old enough to have participated in the 1876 interaction with Colonel Custer at the Little Big Horn. So, into this interesting mix of Southern gentility and Northern drive and vision Sara Stratton Holmes arrived, born 227 years after the death of Obadiah Holmes, her great-great-to-the-sixth grandfather. Sara was followed a year later by Mary and both were cared for by parents as well as by Marie’s unmarried sister. Gertrude Adams was said to have been sent by their Eastern Shore family to make certain Marie had not fallen into some Yankee form of domestic misery. Gertrude then lived with my grandparents on and off until her death in the 1950s. The Adams family of Maryland’s Eastern Shore, with Marie Heloise Adams seated on the ground, second from the right, next to her sister Gertrude.

• 36. 24 An American Life Lady Girl & Baby Girl John Holmes called his daughter Sara his “Lady Girl” and Mary his “Baby Girl.” Sara always felt protective of her little sister and later felt guilty for being overbearing in her lordly big sister behavior towards Mary. Indeed, this mothering and protective behavior lasted until her death almost 90 years later in Santa Cruz, CA. There is a story famous in the family in which toddler Mary had done something untoward, maybe tipping over a pitcher of milk. Seeing that Mary was about to be reprimanded, Sara set out to create a distraction. She’d heard from the cook that the two worst things in the world to drink were cold coffee and castor oil and so — out of nowhere — began shouting out about cold coffee and castor oil to distract their parents, whose attention now shifted from toddler Mary to big sister Sara, wondering what had come over her. Sara well remembered those years on the ranch in South Dakota, particularly that one day when a certain ranch hand came back from town wearing a new pair of denim dungarees. Proudly pointing to the copper rivets that were — and still are — a trademark of the Levi’s brand, he shouted “Them’s got rivets in ‘em,” before jumping into the horse trough to wet his new pants, as this is how they got jeans to shrink to exactly fit. The John Holmeses lived in South Dakota until they moved to Chicago when Sara was about seven. Sara recalled her mother Marie pounding the streets in search of a Montessori school for her daughters to attend. Mary, who was extremely nearsighted, later told people that as a tiny girl she’d believed no one could see farther than ten feet away. When finally prescribed glasses in Chicago, Mary was both startled and amazed at the wonders she was now able to witness. Mary Holmes later became renowned as a visual artist, lauded as a painter and teacher of both art and art history, first at the University of Iowa during World War II, then at Ohio State University, then UCLA and finally as a member of the founding faculty of Cowell College at UC Santa Cruz. Mary was briefly married to Gerald O’Malley, whom she divorced when he proved abusive. As my father was an only child, my mother’s sister’s son, Michael O’Malley, born in 1937, is my only first cousin.

• 37. An American Life 25 My Mother Marries the Left-Handed Surgeon We now return to the marriage and life relationship of Sara Holmes and Bill Boutelle, my mother and father. As noted earlier, after each had graduated from their respective colleges, they’d together moved to New York. Sara might well have been inclined to go to graduate school in the fields that consumed her interest, specifically history. Instead, with my father in medical training, she worked to sustain their household. Her work entailed her taking various teaching jobs, including one at the then renowned Tobé-Coburn School for Fashion Careers, in Manhattan. [Miss Tobé Collier Davis was an internationally known fashion authority who’d opened this influential trade school with Julia Colburn, former editor of the Ladies Home Journal. The school closed in 2017.] While Sara was working to support them, Bill’s medical education did seem to go on and on. He graduated from Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1936, going on then to an internship at Bellevue Hospital, followed by surgical training at New York Post Graduate Hospital. As with many of the men in our family, my father was left-handed. Because our scientific and technological world is oriented entirely for those using their dominant right hand, a left-handed surgeon was less than welcome on many hospital staffs. Undeterred, Bill set out to teach himself to cut, suture and tie knots equally well with his non-dominant hand and so become completely ambidextrous in the operating room. Always consumed by his love of music, Bill continued to practice his clarinet. In 1940 he joined the New York Doctors’ Symphony in performing Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A (K.622). Sometime in the late 1930s he and my mother went again to Europe, taking a tramp steamer across the Atlantic in those eerie days right before the outbreak of the Second World War.

• 38. 26 An American Life I Am Born I came along in November of 1940, by which time the shadow of impending conflict was already darkening the globe. My father’s job as a doctor in Bermuda would temporarily exempt him from the draft — my mother stayed in New York to teach and to care for me. In 1942 however, pregnant with my brother Jonathan, she moved with me out to Greeley, IA, where her parents had a farm and John Holmes was then serving as this town’s mayor. Early in 1943 my father, despite his occupational exemption, decided he needed to serve and joined the US Navy. My mother’s trip with me from New York to Iowa includes my earliest tactile memory — this is an actual sensory memory — as opposed to those seeming to originate in the images in photographs. In traveling from the East in a westerly direction through Chicago, you must change not just trains but entire terminals. My earliest memory is grasping handfuls of my mother’s fur coat as she searched for a taxi to get us from Union Station to South Station where we were to connect with our train to Iowa. I was frankly in terror, knowing to a moral certainty that if I ever lost hold of my grip on my mother everything, including me, would be lost forever. And so we’d arrived at my grandparents’ sometime in the late fall of 1942 where, on December 27, my brother Jonathan Holmes Boutelle was born. My mother, now a sophisticated New Yorker, was feeling the cramp of living in such a tiny place as Greeley, a village in her estimation. So the three of us decamped fairly quickly to the more urbane environment of Iowa City, where her sister Mary was teaching art and art history at the university. During the summer of 1943, my mother and her young sons lived on Friendly Avenue in that town, visiting our grandparents in Greeley on weekends. At the other end of Friendly Avenue — the street was one-block long in its entirety — lived Paul and Mary Engle and their family. The two young mothers bonded instantly as their two three-year-old children played. Paul Engle (1908–1991) was a poet and writer of fiction who served as director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop from 1941 until 1965 and was responsible for bringing some of the finest writers of the day to Iowa City, both as teachers and as students. So it was to this intellectually stimulating artistic and worldly university scene that my mother found herself in the middle of the country in the middle of the Second World War. It was perfect but for the fact that her husband was not there. Bill had taken basic Naval training in Virginia Beach, VA, and shipped out to the South Pacific from San Diego assigned to the hospital and supply ship the USS Argonne named for the famous First World War battle in the French forest of that name. There he, as a surgeon, treated wounded Navy and Marine casualties of the island-hopping fight against the Empire of Japan. Wartime letters — and there is a trove of these — between them reveal an intense and passionate relationship. [Marked “Wartime Letters 1943-45” these are stored in the family archive in the house in Oakland.] The letters reflect the intimate nature of their relationship and offer great insight into both the military life and the home-front experiences of an educated and upcoming American middle class family. Reading these letters now one is struck by Sara’s passionate longing for her husband’s physical presence, while Bill’s letters express an equally passionate longing for his wife’s cooking.

• 39. An American Life 27 Men in Uniform John Horace Holmes, my grandfather, in the uniform of the South Dakota National Guard. There are photos of him astride his cavalry horse as colonel in the guard showing him as very handsome. As luck had it, Colonel Holmes never engaged in any fighting at all, let alone any battle involving Native Peoples. LCDR William E. Boutelle aboard the USS Argonne in 1943. My father’s wartime experiences were lived largely without combat stress, aside from when an Imperial Japanese kamikaze fighter hit the fantail of his ship during a suicide mission. Bill, as a medical officer, was classified non-combatant. He was issued a M1 carbine, however, in reaction to rumors that the Japanese would be targeting doctors, as killing noncombatants might serve to destroy American morale. So though he was issued the M1 carbine, as far as I know my father never fired it. He later gave the rifle to my brother Jonathan who stored it in his house in Santa Cruz until his death in 2020, when it came to me. When I acquired it the gun was so encrusted with rust I had it re-barreled and completely restored. At the time of this writing the rifle is functional and is stored at my house as an heirloom.

• 40. 28 An American Life A Stranger Appears At the defeat of Japan in 1945, Bill’s ship was anchored in Tokyo Bay and he used to delight in reading the Morse Code messages from shipto-ship, his literacy in code acquired as an amateur radio devotee back in the Massachusetts of his youth. Before being re-assigned, he returned to Iowa City to visit with and be reunited with his young family. My father had asked for a stateside assignment, arguing that he had done his wartime duties in combat zones. The karmic twist here is that although he was offered a stateside assignment it turned out to be an unlucky one: since the Marines rely on the US Navy for all medical services, off my father went to the Marine Training Base at Parris Island, SC, where he was to perform literally thousands of discharge physicals, helping other service personnel get home. This was particularly vexing for him as his talents as a surgeon were being utterly wasted. When I was five a stranger appeared: my father had come home. I am among that small group of American children born during the war who first became consciously aware of these men late in the year 1945. I vividly remember asking myself who this tall man in the uniform was, and marveling that he seemed to know my mother so well. Mary Engle — my toddler friend — remembers what must have been a cominghome party at their house on Friendly Avenue. I wasn’t there, but she’s described it so vividly we now both seem to remember it. As little children will, she was hiding halfway up the stairs behind the banister watching my parents dancing to “Just My Bill,” a song from the Kern/ Hammerstein musical “Show Boat.” Her parents had spread some shining dance crystals on the floor making it seem like a nightclub. She now says it was just about the most romantic scene she’d ever seen. In the decade before the war Grandfather Boutelle had bought an 8 millimeter movie camera and had given it to my parents. This camera was used to record my Aunt Mary’s son Michael, my one and only first cousin, as he was learning to walk at the Greeley farm in the late 1930s. Upon Bill’s deployment the camera was used to record Jonathan and me so our father — so far away and for such a long time — could witness his young sons’ growing up. This tradition of amateur moviemaking continues in my generation, movies of my family growing up continued to be made until about 1990, when we never quite made the leap to video. Those early silent movies, with a voice-over by me added later were transferred in the early 2000s to DVD — the newest medium at the time, at this writing in 2024, a technology already outmoded. Still we have this motion picture footage and have done our best to preserve it so this will all be available as visual additions to the written record. In any case, our family moved to Beaufort, SC, remaining there until 1946, when my father was finally discharged. In the early 1950s as the conflict in Korea grew in intensity, he threw away all letters from the Navy, stating that if they wanted him for another war, they’d have to come and get him, which they never did.

• 41. An American Life 29 Back to Manhattan By early 1946 my parents’ little family had moved from South Carolina back to New York, as did John Horace and Marie Holmes, who had sold their farm in Iowa and were moving to New York with us. These were “Grandfather and Grandmother from Greeley,” as we kids called them, to distinguish them from “Grandfather and Grandmother from Boston,” the Boutelles. This must have been a novel experience for my grandfather, John Holmes, Westerner, banker, newspaper publisher, farmer along with his Old South genteel Southern wife. Marie Holmes was very loving, but old school, extraordinarily refined in speech. When exasperated, she might utter the phrase “My dear me!” and her most powerful exclamation, rarely used, was “Well, I declare!” When I once used the word “spit,” she corrected me, saying “expectorate” was the more proper term. She had, however, willingly and lovingly followed this rough-and-ready husband of hers to the wilds of South Dakota, the city streets of Chicago, to the virgin farmland of Iowa with no complaints and a steady support through the sixty years of a marriage lasting until his death at age 99. At that time our aunt Mary was still teaching in Iowa but she, with her young son Michael, soon moved east to be with us as well. Our family occupied the third-floor apartment at 111 E. 10th Street in St. Mark’s Bowery, between Second and Third avenues — one of the districts Thomas Edison had first electrified back in the 1880s. As a result, the electricity coming from our wall outlets was 110 volt direct current, DC, rather than alternating current, AC, as all modern systems now are. Edison was a great promoter of DC over the AC being put forward by his rivals, including George Westinghouse and Nicola Tesla, Edison pointing out that it was AC being being used in the new electric chair in Sing Sing prison. Also, in order to further prove his point, Edison once euthanized an elephant using AC current, taking a movie of all this using his new motion picture technology. Therefore, when my father wanted to use a modern AC radio in that apartment, he had to buy the buzzing device called an inverter made to plug into the DC wall socket and convert the current to AC. I well remember him trying to describe to five-year-old me the differences between the two modalities, an attempt that proved initially unsuccessful. Our family remained friendly with the Engles in Iowa City and the then five-year-old Mary, who was called “Munchie” by everyone, came to visit us in New York. She remembers a bedtime tussle revolving around who would occupy the upper and lower bunks, this based on the relative chance of which of us was more likely to wet the bed. A little later, John and Marie Holmes — our grandparents from Greeley — arrived from Iowa to join us and we all moved together down the block to 129 E. 10th Street where we occupied two apartments, one above the other, our grandparents downstairs. The logic was that they were less likely to complain about children loudly jumping on the floor than an unrelated renter in the apartment below. By this time — it was early in 1946 — my father had set up a surgical practice in Manhattan. I remember happily being a six-year-cold boy roller skating up and down the block of East Tenth between Second and Third avenues. I also remember being given three pennies a day by my father to walk down to Eighth Street to buy the New York Sun at the newsstand, and yes, things were simpler back then, and, yes, there was much less hovering, much less anxiety over a child’s safety.

• 42. 30 An American Life The Farm in Pittstown The 1840 main house of the Hope Springs Farm, photo taken in about 1950. The move to New York City proved temporary for our grandparents from Greeley. By 1946, John Holmes was nearly eighty years old, his wife Marie in her late sixties. One day Grandfather Holmes got a map — these were distributed free in gas stations in those days — took a compass and inscribed a 60-mile circle around Manhattan. He then began to contact realtors within that circle, in southern Connecticut and eastern New Jersey. After viewing several properties, he made an offer on a dilapidated chicken farm in Pittstown (population 150 in the 1950 census), Hunterdon County, NJ. He bought the 30-acre property, which included a huge 1840-era house, three barns and several smaller outbuildings for $12,000. Our grandparents moved to the farm in New Jersey, as did our aunt Mary and her son Michael, who was three years older than I was. My cousin went away to Saint Bernard’s, a boarding school in Gladstone, about 25 miles from Pittstown. Mary took up residence in one of the outbuildings on the land, fashioning a painting studio on the second floor of a barn — by this time her work was beginning a transition to her later Pre-Raphaelite mode from an earlier more realistic one. The Boutelle family of Lower Manhattan visited the farm on weekends and I well remember riding on the back shelf, this being that flat space above the trunk of our car. This was a 1942 Chevrolet, the last new American automobile made as auto plants converted to wartime use. I lay there behind the back seat watching the city lights recede and the hills of Hunterdon County appear. Not only were seat belts barely yet being used — maybe in airplanes? — so too apparently little thought was being given to the safest location within a car for little children to ride. Also great fun was the “portable” radio my parents got me for my seventh birthday. It was about 10-by-12-by-7 inches in size and required large “A” and “C” batteries, but since there was no radio in the Chevrolet, it allowed us all to listen to “Stella Dallas,” “The Lone Ranger” and other radio dramas while flying above Jersey City on the Pulaski Skyway.

• 43. An American Life 31 Mary Holmes, Artist Mary Holmes’ painting of the three of us hangs on the wall of my living room of the Oakland house.I’m holding a musical pipe, Jonathan a chicken and Christopher our dog. If you look closely at that 36” x 44” canvas, you can spy tiny images of two orange kittens, two horses, a cow and calf, an old pickup truck, a brown dog and two sheep, and other items yet to be found. It was also a great experience to accompany Grandfather on his rounds to pick up the dozens of eggs from his many laying hens. These eggs were then packed in 30 dozen crates for weekly delivery to the Flemington Auction market, about nine miles away from our grandparents’ farm. For me, grades one to three were in New York, my first-grade year spent at the Grace Church School on Fourth Avenue and East 10th Street; second and third grade years at the Downtown Community School on East 11th Street and Second Avenue, where my brother Jonathan was also enrolled. My brother Christopher was born on 2 September 1946 in New York City. With his birth came several important changes, primarily my father’s decision to change from surgery to psychiatry. He then began a three-year residency at the VA hospital in Lyons, NJ, the Boutelle family moving to the farm in the summer of 1949. I was then eight years old and entering the fourth grade. At the farm in Pittstown, Mary was soon in her studio and painting. In 1948 she arranged for the three Boutelle boys — then aged eight, six and two — to sit as she painted us. I’m holding a musical pipe, Jonathan a chicken and Christopher has his hand on our dog, Daisy Mae.

• 44. 32 An American Life Hope Springs Farm The move was both exhilarating and troubling. I reveled in the ability to saddle up and ride Mary’s two horses — Mouse was a quarter-horse and Prettyface, a sorrel. Still, I found it hard to get to sleep without the continual backdrop chanting of the Third Avenue El just a couple of hundred yards from my bedroom window. I also missed the regular screams and bleating of the fire engine sirens. Still, the three Boutelle boys eventually settled in, becoming country folk. I really enjoyed helping Grandfather on his egg rounds, as well as boxing up ten-week broilers for sale in Flemington. In addition to chickens, and horses, we had ducks and geese and a Jersey cow, all of which demanded tending by me, an eight-year-old boy. I remember a painful lesson of responsibility when I forgot to water the chickens on a hot day and returned from school to find twenty to thirty of them — this in a room of 500 — dead from thirst. A lesson not forgotten. But I also remember the tender kindness of my Grandfather Holmes, particularly when we were both up early to do chores and he would cook up home fries and maybe a slab of bacon for breakfast. Well-educated, a former college professor and journalist, he still loved his role as a farmer and general repairman, as this was how he’d grown up. After moving to the country, I was enrolled in the fourth grade at the Franklin Township Elementary School in Quakertown, about three miles away from home by school bus. By this time, my grandfather had taught me how to drive on his 1938 Ford pickup, and we would travel together to Flemington to deliver either eggs or chickens. He had never had a New Jersey driver’s license that I know of, didn’t hold with the concept. One day, having satisfied himself that I knew all the controls, he suggested that I make the drive to Flemington on my own and then come back to school in Quakertown. This all went well, even uneventfully, until a teacher looked out the class window to see her nine-year-old fourth-grade student parking a pickup in the school lot. My parents were informed, and that was the end of my teamster career until I got an actual drivers’ license. However, I still helped my grandfather by driving around our 30-acre farm, sticking to the back fields, away from disapproving parental eyes. By this time, Mary Holmes had accepted a teaching job in the art department at Ohio State University, and she, Michael and both John and Marie Holmes departed for Columbus. We Boutelles now had the place to ourselves. My father had decided to change his medical specialty to psychiatry. In 1950, at the end of his psychiatry training, my father had set up a private practice in Somerville, NJ, about 20 miles away. He then named the place Hope Springs Farm, from the line in the poem “An Essay on Man,” by Alexander Pope, “Hope springs eternal in the human breast.” This was the 1950s when the concept of a semi-rural psychiatrist was quite new. My father once told me that when someone was acting strangely on the streets of Somerville and did not appear to be drunk — drunks were left in those days for the police to handle — a city policeman would sometimes bring the person to his office, saying, “Here’s one for you, Doc.” My father commuted daily and Sara continued her teaching job at the Brearley School on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, commuting the sixty miles by train from a station at Flemington Junction on the

• 45. An American Life 33 Lehigh Valle railroad, Sometimes, my father would drive us there to the station to pick up our mother — I remember one especially harrowing winter trip where the car got stuck in a snowdrift and we had to walk to the nearest house. There, I saw my very first television set in a private home The screen was only about seven inches across, with a thick magnifying glass anchored in front to make the image large enough to see. Previously, the only television sets I had seen had been in walking past bars in New York City. By the late 1940s, many bars there had TVs. In the winter, the power would sometimes go out, and my father would wheel the Sears Roebuck garden tractor into the cellar with a hose connected from the exhaust pipe and out the cellar window, belt the tractor’s power take-off pulley to our well pump, and we had all the water we needed. The house was heated with a huge octopus coal furnace in the basement and it was my duty to make certain the fire in that furnace was always well-stoked. On Friday nights I would let the fire go out so that I could shake down the clinkers, or cinders, to spread on the driveway. On Saturdays, I had to get up very early to prep the new fire, using paper, then small-sized kindling, then larger kindling, then wood, and finally coal. This was necessary to insure the pipes would not freeze. With candles and a portable radio, we did just fine during power outages — and the big prize was that there would be a snow day at school, always, disappointingly, needing to be made up at the end of the school year in June. Three cowboys at the Hope Springs Farm, 1949.

• 46. 34 An American Life Family Dynamics, Birth Order, The Baby Boom It may now be appropriate to mention our family dynamics. I felt that I was my father’s favorite, as demonstrated by his never seeming to be satisfied at my performance. Later in this report, I will list the ways in which I have seemingly echoed his choices throughout my life. The youngest, Christopher, was my mother’s favorite as was acknowledged by all, although she tried her best not to show it. Poor Jonathan, in the middle, wasn’t anybody’s favorite — which may have contributed to his suffering from psychological problems decades on. My parents’ was a generation of heavy drinkers but my father’s habituation to alcohol progressed as the years went by, a practice that eventually became destructive to the close bond that had once existed between my parents and to our family life. I continued at the Franklin Township School from the fourth through seventh grades (1949-53), my brother Jonathan two grades below me. Our classes were very small — seven to eight pupils each — so classes were often combined. My fourth grade class shared the room and the same teacher as fifth. By contrast, our brother Chris was born in 1946 just as the war was ending and for him, as with the other Boomers of Hunterdon County, his classes were thirty to thirty-five students in size. We had now become part of a new social cohort calling ourselves the Ex-Urbanites, those living out beyond the suburbs, but still within commuting distance of the city, even if this commute was long. By the mid-fifties my mother decided the commute was too arduous. She stopped teaching for a bit, but was soon at the former Miss Fine’s School in Princeton, NJ — about 30 miles away. For this job, she bought a 1951 Nash Rambler. Then, in 1955, she acquired one of the first VW Beetles in the US. Franklin Township School’s fourth and fifth grades in 1950. I was in love with Barbara Thompson first row, third from left in the plaid dress. I am in the second row, second from the right. Barbara Thompson was a year ahead of me and I was shy so she never knew. Our entire romance consisted of a heart I drew above her head on the photo.

• 47. An American Life 35 Choir Boy Like my father and his father before him, I’d always been naturally musical, learning to play the piano from my father, using the chord method. This was after I’d thoroughly failed to learn to read music and play classical piano from my local music teacher, Mrs. Graff. Although Mrs. Graff was a good teacher, who played the organ at the local church — her methods were unusual. At a very young age, she had been in a terrible house fire and two of her fingers were melted together, with another one bent and unusable, with the result that she had only eight fingers with which to play. She was an excellent teacher who instructed us not to use her unusual fingering pattern. I was an inattentive piano student who failed to practice very much but after she wisely gave up on me, my father took me on. Unlike “Für Elise” and “Minuet in G”, my father taught me “Stardust” and “It Had to Be You,” along with very many popular songs from the 1920s and ‘30s, which he’d played with his band. He was often a bibulous teacher but the tunes excited me tremendously and served to make me popular at parties. He also arduously taught me the walking bass of boogie-woogie, wherein your left hand drums out the bass line seemingly unaware of what your right hand is doing. Hard to master, impossible to forget. I also sang, mostly in the “Inter-Church Choir” which practiced in the town hall basement in Pittstown. The main reason I did this was so I could meet and hang around with girls, much more numerous in choirs than boys. I was pretty good as a boy soprano, singing many solo leads. This came to the attention of a local musical lady, Maud Little Wilson, who became very interested in my young life as a singer and musician. She once arranged for me to audition for the St. Thomas Boys Choir, a residential choir at St.Thomas Episcopal church on 53rd Street. There is a funny story associated with this audition. Our family had kept in touch with the Paul Engles from Iowa City, who often travelled to New York and sometimes summered in Amagansett on the south shore of Long Island. I was visiting there one weekend in summer 1953 and was due to take the train into New York for my try-out at St. Thomas’ when Munchie and I looked out the window, saw a train steaming by in the distance and called out laughing,“There goes Willie’s train” And it was poor Willie’s train and I had missed it. However, Mr. Engle put me in the car and speedily drove me to the next station and I did make it to the audition. I later learned I’d been accepted into the St. Thomas Boys Choir but a series of events intervened that were to change my life in major ways. Mrs. Wilson had contacted the Director of the Apollo Boys Choir, based in Palm Beach, FL. His name was Coleman Cooper. Mr. Cooper was taking a recruitment tour on the East Coast and was due in New Jersey later that summer of 1953. I had learned many solos in the Inter-Church Choir and prepared a particular piece of sacred music, “Let This Mind Be in You,” one of the many sacred songs based on the verse from Philippians 2:5–11. Mrs. Wilson drove me to the audition in her 1938 Buick — this has always seemed symbolically important as an immaculate 1938 Buick

• 48. 36 An American Life belonged to my grandfather and this was destined to be my first car. Once there I sang my song for Mr. Cooper, who seemed unimpressed if not disdainful. He later said I had a decent “choir voice” as opposed to the voice that deserved a solo. I’d noted that Mr. Cooper had certain effete mannerisms but knew little about such things and likely didn’t mention this to my parents. I then learned I’d been accepted as one of the 22 choir members, being offered a chance to go to Florida for an entire year as a professional boy singer. My parents were then invited to meet Mr. Cooper. After this meeting, my father took me aside and explained that it was clear that Mr. Cooper was homosexual — we didn’t yet seem to be using the term gay. It was possible, too, my father said, that he might be interested in young boys. My father didn’t use the word “pedophile” but the idea was somehow adequately conveyed. My parents then told me they thought it might be worth the risk for me to have such an extraordinary experience, as long as I remained on alert and knew how to get help if I needed it. All I must do, they said, was to call and they’d come and get me.Truly, this was such an unusual experience, their giving me the choice, that all this was left up to me! I was twelve years old and being trusted to decide if I wanted to go or not. In looking back at all this, it feels almost inconceivable that my knowledgeable, worldly, anything-but-naïve parents — my father was a psychiatrist! — would have allowed me to go but they did and I did and no harm came to me. So I chose to go to Florida and started gathering up the required clothing items. For concerts — these were divided into a “sacred” half and a “secular” half — we choirboys had to provide a blue blazer, black pants and shiny black nonpointy Oxford-type shoes, while our Eton collars and white surplices were provided by Mr. Cooper for the sacred half. The day I arrived, one of the other boys whispered to me to look out for him because he was a “sexomaniac,” this the term that was then evidently in usage. Sophisticated me saying, Oh I knew all about all that, assuring him — and myself — that I did understand I’d need to keep my guard up. I remain grateful to my parents for allowing me to spend my eighth grade year traveling with Mr. Coleman Cooper’s Apollo Boys Choir.

• 49. An American Life 37 Touring in the Jim Crow South We practiced four and five hours a day, housed in an opulent 1920s mansion on Royal Poinciana Way rumored to have been a gambling house during Prohibition. In the huge ballroom, elegantly decorated and at least 80 feet long and 30 feet wide, there were sliding panels designed to quickly hide the gambling machines during a raid. It was in this huge space that we rehearsed, rehearsed, and rehearsed, ending up sounding very good, and made local trips for concerts all around southern Florida. It was then that I noticed huge differences from my home in New Jersey: that the restrooms, drinking fountains and stores displayed signs, proclaiming “Whites Only.” This was the 1950s in the pre-Civil Rights South. Jim Crow segregation was still in full force, all this blatant and ugly. Each fall and each spring, the choir leased a Greyhound bus and went on a one-month tour around the country, giving concerts in large towns and small — sometimes piling into the bus after an evening concert to drive 200 miles to our next venue. We played to packed smallish houses throughout the South and stayed in hotel rooms that seemed they hadn’t been painted or even cleaned since the Depression. On occasion, we’d be put up by the arts-loving families of a town, which was a great treat because the usually strict rules regarding bedtimes, so forth, were absent. We played New York, where we recorded the soundtrack for a movie version of Humperdinck’s “Hansel and Gretel,” a film using the then brand-new technique called Claymation. We played Chicago and when we played Newark, NJ, my parents came to hear the concert. We toured the Gulf Coast including Biloxi, MS, and New Orleans. We played little towns like Blytheville, AK, and huge venues like the Greenbriar Resort in White Sulphur Springs, WV. This last was important to my father, since his band had once played the Greenbriar, too. We traveled as far west as Keokuk, IA, Our teachers at Palm Beach Public High School would give us the month’s assignments before we left on tour, which we then gleefully cheated on, returning our work at month’s end. There was trouble when we were actually attending that school, when we were sometimes called “queer boys” instead of “choir boys,” but a few fistfights seemed to solve most of that. All in all, this was an experience not to be missed, and I am ever grateful to my parents for having the nerve to let me try it, for trusting me and my good sense to these circumstances. So my eighth grade school year, 1953 and 1954, was spent in this great adventure.

• 50. 38 An American Life High School Home in New Jersey the summer of 1954 found me preparing for high school. I had the advantage of a four-year high school, grades 9-12, drawing from five or six small towns, so everybody was new. My voice had begun to change so Mrs. Wilson arranged a recording session to memorialize my singing soprano before those pure tones were lost to time. She found Mr. Fred Stothoff, the local well-driller, who was musical and who had a primitive 78 rpm recording device. This recorder made direct record tracks on a blank 12-inch disc — the only pressed copies, still in my possession, have now been transferred to CD. Mr. Stothoff played piano and organ accompaniment. He also sang some duet parts with me. So that was the end of me as a boy soprano. Music has remained an important part of my life, however, and I have sung tenor in Boston’s Handel and Haydn Society and Northampton’s Hampshire Choral Society, as well as in several barbershop quartets. Throughout our time at the farm in Pittstown, Munchie Engle would occasionally visit. She’d became a special friend of Christopher’s and the two remained very close until his death in 2021. Chris was the glue that held everyone together, being there to help whenever needed and he is sorely missed not only by his family but by all who knew him. Just entering the ninth grade, I joined the band playing clarinet, bass clarinet and acoustic string bass as well as singing in glee club. High school was largely uneventful except for a couple of things: I had my first, and only, physical fight. The fight occurred because a snotty kid whose father owned the department store in Clinton, NJ, made a snide comment about the girl who was sitting next to me in homeroom. As we were seated alphabetically, I didn’t even really know the girl but my manly values were affronted so I challenged this wiseguy kid to meet me after school. He did that, and we each brought seconds to help us off the field in case of injury. No weapons were involved. However, as I was taking off my sport jacket — why I was wearing a sport coat to school, I have no idea — with my arms pinned, Reid, as this was his name, suckerpunched me, hitting me in the mouth. So now I really had a reason to fight and we went at it. I ended up making a lucky connection with his face and, both having drawn blood, we quit the fight. The next morning in homeroom there I was with a fat lip and he with an enormous black eye. No more was said. I am not proud of being a part of a Latin class which was so disruptive that the teacher, Miss Lochran, left school the following year and became a nun. I have since experienced great pleasure in understanding the derivation of English words using the Latin she taught and the medical Greek I later learned.

• 51. An American Life 39 My 1938 Buick When I turned seventeen and got my first driver’s license, my Grandfather Boutelle, who could no longer drive, gave me the immaculate 1938 Buick he’d bought new. My father and I went up to Watertown, MA, to pick it up. With that car I guessed I was now just about the hottest thing in Hunterdon County. Will and the 1938 Buick in 1958.

• 52. 40 An American Life First Job in Medicine, Morgue Attendant My first medical job was as morgue attendant, or diener, at the local medical center. By this time, I was the terror of the rural New Jersey roads in my ancient Buick sedan and able to drive to the hospital in Flemington after school. My job was to keep the glassware cleaned in the autoclave for the postmortems and to make sure the jugs of formalin were filled to be used during autopsy. Formalin is a solution of 10 percent formaldehyde and 90 percent water. It has a caustic odor and stings the eyes during that mixing but you can get used to it. During an autopsy I assisted the pathologist by opening, cleaning and weighing the internal organs, including the gut. As an experienced chicken farmer, I had no problem with the smell of innards that others find distasteful. Most autopsies were for common ailments, heart attacks, cancers, sometimes a ruptured organ. The pathologist taught me the Rokitansky method of opening the body cavity, a Y-type incision to the bottom of the sternum, followed by straight down to the pelvis. Doing brains was fascinating — I used the Stryker saw to cut around the bony cranium before extracting the brain, this being the saw with a circular blade that vibrates but does not turn, thus making it easy to cut through bone without injuring underlying soft tissue. It’s perhaps an understatement to say that, as a high school student, I was learning quite a lot. On the day that was to become my last was conducted a very unusual autopsy. A patient with a rare case of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever had expired, and the unusual post was going to draw most of the medical staff to observe the pathologist at work. Now, the work of a pathologist is most often a lonely calling, with very little opportunity to display their skills to colleagues so this was the pathologist’s big show and he was overjoyed. Unfortunately, on that day I had forgotten to make the formalin solution and had to do it during the post. As I poured and mixed, one by one the medical staff members — their eyes weeping and stinging — left until finally only the pathologist and I remained. The next day I was relieved of my duties. This remains the only medical job from which I have been summarily fired.

• 53. An American Life 41 Leaving Pittstown for Providence Our family continued living the exurbanite life in Pittstown. In those days, I swam competitively, having taken all the Red Cross water safety courses. So, in the summer after leaving high school, before entering Brown University in the fall, I got a job as assistant lifeguard and general pool-boy at the Orange Lawn Tennis Club in South Orange, NJ. The job included a shack at poolside where I lived. There were a number of younger — also a few older — ladies who frequented the pool so this seemed an adolescent boy’s dream job come true. I was also a keen photographer, as had been both my father and paternal grandfather. I took many sports photos for the local newspaper for which I was paid $3 for each published photo. I also supplied photos for the high school yearbook with my 4” x 5” Speed Graphic camera. This huge apparatus used flashbulbs made of tangled magnesium wire, which sometimes exploded when fired. During medical school, I took most of the photos used in our 1967 class yearbook. And so it was off to Providence in the fall of 1958 to go to Brown, where my father had gone to join the Class of 1931. It was from Brown too that all three of my children would subsequently graduate. My brothers Jonathan and Christopher each also attended for shorter or longer periods. Ever drawn to the eclectic, I also joined glee club, and started a small unsuccessful photography business. I majored in psychology, earning grades hardly sufficient for acceptance to medical school. My applications to med school were initially rejected and I became resigned to the possibility of changing my career goals. In those days, I swam competitively, having taken all the Red Cross water safety courses. So, in the summer after leaving high school, before entering Brown University in the I got a job as assistant lifeguard and general pool boy at the Orange Lawn Tennis Club in South Orange, NJ. This was the dream job of an adolescent boy and included a shack at poolside where I lived. This photo of me with my lifeguard’s whistle was taken in 1958.

• 54. 42 An American Life My First Psychiatric Hospital During the summer of 1962, however, I obtained my second job in medicine. The Carrier Clinic was a private psychiatric hospital located in Belle Meade, NJ, only 20 miles from the farm in Pittstown. I was hired as an orderly, partly due to my father’s professional connections with Dr. Russell Carrier, the clinic’s founder. The pay was $1 per hour and my fellow orderlies who depended on their jobs to feed a family usually had to work an additional 40-hour job elsewhere to make ends meet. The older ones vividly remembered the era just a few years before the introduction of tranquilizing or neuroleptic medication such as Thorazine, when violent patients were routinely placed in straitjackets, which were also called camisoles, until they became calm. One of my duties was assisting in electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), also called shock treatments, I learned the particulars of this treatment modality. Another interesting aspect of the job was to monitor the LSD patients for the first 48 hours after their treatment: That’s right: LSD as treatment. This was before acid came to be used by the counterculture as a recreational drug and was still being evaluated for its efficacy as a psychiatric treatment. Several of the psychiatrists were using it as an adjunct to therapy and my job as an orderly was to make certain that none of the patients did anything else that was dangerous while they were sleeping off the effects of the drug such as to suddenly awaken and take it in mind to jump out a window. It wasn’t until August of the summer after college graduation that I was accepted at the New Jersey College of Medicine. Now part of the Rutgers University system, it was then run by Seton Hall, aligned with the Catholic Church. My class seemed to be half Irish boys, half Italian boys, the Irish calling Italians greasers; Italians calling the Irish micks. Of our class numbering 70, only five were women. As one of the few Protestants, I kept my own council, silent on the subject of my Irish heritage and — to my relief — was largely ignored by those engaged in class and ethnicity struggles. WEB as an intern.

• 55. An American Life 43 Med School, Spaghetti on a Hot Plate Driving for Mister Softee I found that all police officers were to be given free ice cream as a matter of course. Why? because rules regulating concessions were so twisted and arcane, the cops could run you out of town virtually any time they felt like it. I’d get my Checker into the cab line at the Jersey Central railroad station, taking the fare wherever they were going. When I dropped the fare in New York after crossing the river, I’d try to pick up another in order to avoid deadheading — driving an empty cab — over the bridge back to New Jersey, a practice which was both risky and illegal. If a legitimate NYC cab driver caught you doing this, you would be lucky to leave with both your cab and your body intact. Thus, during 1962 and 1963 I lived in an attic room in Jersey City for $8 a week, cooked my evening meal, quite often spaghetti cooked on a hot plate eaten while studying, and only occasionally traveling the 50 miles home to Pittstown on weekends. During the summers I had interesting jobs. One summer I drove a Yellow Cab. Another summer I sold Mister Softee ice cream from a truck. I’d arrive each morning at the depot where the trucks had been cleaned overnight, tanks filled with new soft-serve ice cream mix and drive to Hoboken, which was, yes, the hometown of Frank Sinatra. At that time the streets I drove down, going slowly, playing the Mister Softee jingle on loudspeaker, held scenes of most dire poverty, kids of all ages clambering off stoops of tenements crying out for a ten cent cone, through windows of apartments where they owned little aside from a television set.

• 56. 44 An American Life Med School, Continued Another thing I did to make money was to buy and sell used cars, though informally, I never even had an office. I’d buy a car with something minor wrong with it, fix the car and sell it the next week via a newspaper ad. That was how I came to own this 1959 Jaguar XK-150 roadster, which I bought for $750 and put a $15 Earl Scheib paint job on to make it presentable. Though I had intended to sell it once it was beautiful I ended up keeping that car for a while longer. One might think that with that inauspicious beginning, which included an internship at the gritty Newark City Hospital, my medical education might not have been first rate. As I’ve discovered through 55 years of medical practice, this was a great way to be trained. I saw too many young doctors from the more prestigious schools arriving from such privileged backgrounds that they lacked any intimate knowledge of the more difficult aspects of human existence. I benefitted from doing my own labs and taking and reading my own x-rays. As an intern I delivered more than fifty babies, many entirely on my own. Our obstetrical team once delivered a very jaundiced premature baby. The resident had just read a paper noting that jaundiced babies whose bassinets were near a window recovered much faster than those in the interior of the nursery. So we rigged up fluorescent light mimicking sunlight and placed the bassinet under them and the child’s bilirubin came down dramatically. This was an early improvised application of the technique now standard. We also regularly typed and cross-matched ourselves to provide for the needs of patients — we transfused our own blood as a matter of course. Making do inventively, learning what was necessary and how to come up with all this is something in my training for which I have always been grateful. This, coupled with my father’s warning that never, as a psychiatrist, should I forget that I was a physician first, has helped me understand and treat the complex union of physical and emotional elements, each acting on the other that comprise the human condition and must be understood if a person wants to be a good doctor.

• 57. An American Life 45 Three Months in Europe During the summer of 1963, after finishing my first year of medical school, I bought a three-month EurailPass for $500; this pass enabled me to travel first class on any European or British railroad, and on many ferryboats and river boats as well. I signed on as one of a dozen passengers on the Srbija, a Yugoslavian tramp steamer sailing from Hoboken, NJ, to the Moroccan port of Casablanca. What was then called Yugoslavia lay behind “The Iron Curtain,” another of the political entities to all but disappear under communist rule. On our first night at sea, the crew plied all of us — mostly college students — with slivovitz, the national plum brandy, then spirited various female passengers below to the crew’s quarters. The next morning the captain, a stern man and fervent communist, issued an order prohibiting fraternization between passengers and crew. He told all passengers: “You are not in America now. You are on a Soviet Socialist vessel and you will behave appropriately if you want to eat.” It did no good to protest that it was the crew who’d instigated these liaisons, the new rule was enforced until we reached Casablanca. I had a brief shipboard romance with an art student who was going to Salzburg to study with Oskar Kokoschka, the Austrian painter; embarrassingly, her name now escapes me. Taking the train in Spain, I visited Malaga, Madrid, Valencia, and Barcelona. I visited the famous Gaudi buildings at my mother’s insistence — she was a devoted student of architecture — and dutifully climbed all the way to the top of the Basilica de la Sagrada Familia and studied the Casa Mila from the sidewalk. Then it was on to Portugal where I heard fado in my late nights in various bars down dim alleyways. After this, it was off to Paris, Brussels, Venice, where the vaporetto canal boats were also covered by my pass, to Salzburg, Geneva and a number of other cities, using the pass. I had neglected to get a youth hostel card while in the US but I bought one for $3 from a guy who was leaving. I forget his name, but from then on, I was this man as far as youth hostels were concerned. I’d bought a copy of “Europe on $5 a Day” and yes, this could be done with a little ingenuity, especially when transportation had been paid for in advance. In Casablanca I visited the casbah and had my first taste of hashish. Little did I know then that the same guys selling hashish to the American tourists made extra money by informing the port police as to which kids were likely to be caught with drugs. I may have been leading a charmed life in that I did manage to make it across the Mediterranean to Gibraltar without getting arrested and spending time in one of those notoriously awful Moroccan jails.

• 58. 46 An American Life I eventually got to Munich, where I met up with my brother Jonathan. He’d also been at Brown, but had to leave after an incident in which a tree was chopped down in the president’s yard — alcohol may have been involved. Jonathan went to Hoboken, got maritime papers and signed onto a tramp as a wiper, one of the lowest of the low among shipmates, as a wiper follows the oiler, his job being to wipe. Anyway, my brother reveled in his visits to those many ports of call, spending time in Libya, Pakistan and elsewhere. By the time I was in Europe on my EurailPass, he’d found a job working at the BMW factory in Munich on the assembly line, as this was during the post-war German economic miracle when factories there were hiring anybody who showed up. Jonathan had bought a 1951 BMW motorcycle and we agreed that he would quit his job and we would travel around Europe on the bike, alternately using my pass for special trips like a Rhine voyage — where I’d get on the boat while he rode the river road. Then, when I got off, he’d take another Rhine cruiser down the river while I rode the bike alongside. I think we visited every single castle along parts of the Rhine. There were a lot of castles. However, to do this, I needed to learn how to drive a motorcycle, something I’d never done.My instruction consisted of this: Late one afternoon during rush hour in Munich Jonathan told me “There’s the gas, here’s the clutch, there’s the shift, there’s the brake.” I got on and made my way into traffic. I came back white faced and terrified but knowing how to drive a BMW. We left Munich, drove through Germany, staying at youth hostels where each of us had a card. Throughout Germany we noted some hostility from young German bikers — this was less than two decades after the war had ended with our victory and their defeat. As we had German plates and a German motorcycle, and my brother Jonathan spoke the language, we became two German brothers, the one with colloquial German, the other both deaf and mute. We traveled the lowlands of Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg and on up to Copenhagen, Stockholm, and as far north as Bergen, Norway — as my Eurail Pass covered my North Sea passage and we split the fare for the bike. After several weeks Jon delivered me to Rotterdam to take a student ship back across the Atlantic. By unlikely coincidence, our brother Christopher who’d spent a year in Scotland, was on the same boat home. Jon stayed in Germany, but later returned to New Jersey, where he soon had to face the draft board, since the Vietnam War was heating up and he was no longer a student. He told us later that as he sat in the draft board’s waiting room, he heard voices over the transom, one saying, “This guy’s been around the world,” another replying, “Great, let’s send him around again.” And so he went back to Germany as a private and was stationed at Frankfurt am Main. Later, Kim Howell, his longtime love, came over, and they were married. My parents went to Frankfurt for the wedding, as did I. I was accompanied by a girl I’d met while playing piano in a bar in Greenwich Village — I was paid not money but in tips and occasional drinks. She was a doctor’s daughter from Sparta, Tennessee, whose first name was Jenna, so we all called her “Jenna from Tenna.” I’m now embarrassed to say I cannot remember Jenna’s last name.

• 59. An American Life 47 My Brother Jonathan This might be a good time to recount a bit about my brother Jonathan’s life. After leaving the Army, he and Kim moved to Italy, where he began working on a graduate thesis on the Etruscan culture. They lived simply in an Italian village, going to the town oven to bake their bread daily in the community’s wood-fired oven and learning the language. For reasons still unclear, they left Italy before his work Jonathan and Will, The Netherlands, 1963. was completed, and moved to Santa Cruz on the Northern California coast. Jonathan became a carpenter and was very active in the carpenters’ union there. Their three children — Philip, Annie and Tommy — were all born in Santa Cruz. The marriage, however, did not last and the children stayed with Kim. Jonathan had seemingly always suffered from cyclic moods that went untreated. He also drank to excess, all of which made it very hard to live with him. My brother found solace in his work and poured his soul into the union, becoming a true hero after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake destroyed much of the historic downtown area of Santa Cruz. Jonathan organized other unions to join the carpenters in contributing labor and supplies. He arranged for temporary pavilions to be brought from Canada to house affected businesses and became vital in helping the town get back on its feet after near total devastation. Later, he became active in various civic events, including big Labor Day celebrations. We lost my brother Jonathan in 2021 when he died suddenly of undetermined causes. He had suffered from numerous health issues including cancer and Covid 19.

• 60. 48 An American Life Back to Medical School Back in the US, I quickly returned to work studying medicine. By this time, I was living at the YWCA in Jersey City, and, yes, I do mean to say the YWCA rather than the YMCA. As it happened, the Jersey City YWCA had a ten-story building whose rooms they couldn’t fill with women so they had reserved one floor — the third — for “respectable” young men such as the one they took me to be. Most of us were medical students. Each floor had a pay phone and my third-floor friends and I had the numbers of each one. I had a motorcycle myself by then and I would call up the various women’s floors until I’d located someone who wanted to take a ride and so I found myself in another young man’s paradise. I became friendly with a beautiful deaf girl who lived at the Y. She taught me the rudiments of ASL as we drove out on country roads. We’d be traveling along on my bike, her seated behind me and she’d stick her fingers in front of my face to talk. In order to answer I’d have to take one hand off of the handlebars. This fairly carefree life continued until the fall of 1965. My mother had started teaching at a new girls’ school in Pottersville, NJ, about 30 miles from Pittstown. After leaving the Brearley, she’d taught at the former Miss Fine’s School, but left when they decided to go co-ed. Her new school was called Purnell and it was small enough that my mother comprised the entire history department. The departments of French and Modern Languages were, in turn, comprised of a single young Scottish woman named Ann Edwards. She had come to this position in an unusual way. Ann’s minister at home in Scotland, the Reverend Robin Buchanan-Smith, had spent some time at Princeton University and knew some people. When Annie was planning a trip to the US after college at St. Andrews University, this person put her name up on the Princeton bulletin board saying she was looking for a position teaching French. Littleton Gould, a Princeton man, was headmaster of this new girls’ school. He simply could not abide the French for reasons never clear, so when he saw the offering of a Scottish woman to teach French, he jumped at it.

• 61. An American Life 49 The French Teacher from Scotland So it was that Annie ended up teaching French at the Purnell School where she and my mother immediately hit it off and one weekend in October Sara invited Annie and the only other single teacher to the farm to meet me and my fellow medical student friend, Don Burke. Annie was to be Don’s date as I’d been assigned to the other girl. When the time came to pick up Annie and the other girl at the school, Annie’s friend, an equestrienne, had injured herself while riding and couldn’t come. By the end of that first evening, it was clear that Annie was to be my girl, which Don accepted with good grace. Don did later stand as godfather to one of our children, although he still professed atheism. Annie bought a cute little Austin Healey Sprite of the variety called the BugEye and I had my Jag. We had one another and life was good. By the summer of 1966 we were a team. That summer, Annie went back to Scotland for the wedding of her sister Sheena to Robin BuchananSmith, the former minister of the local church. It was Robin, of course, who’d been instrumental in getting Annie the job. Annie in White Plains, NY, in 1970.

• 62. 50 An American Life Annie’s Family It is time in this account to offer some history of my wife and her family. Ann Margaret Edwards was born in Aberfeldy, Scotland on October 8, 1943. Her father, Alexander Wishart Edwards, known as “Sandy,” met Annie’s mother Jean Blair when he was assistant manager of the Kenmore branch of the Bank of Scotland. Jean was manager of the Kenmore Hotel in the small village of Kenmore, on the banks of Loch Tay in Perthshire. Annie’s father’s family — the Edwardses — had a long history in the area around Perth though the name sounds more Welsh than Scots. Two conflicting stories seek to explain this: one is that Welsh farmers, following the flax fields, moved from Wales to Scotland. The other is that Welsh mariners, shipwrecked off Scotland’s coasts, decided to stay, marrying into the resident population. Whatever the actual history, Sandy’s father was a stationmaster in central Scotland. One direct line distant ancestor was George Wishart, a Protestant reformer and the mentor of John Knox, founder of the Presbyterian movement. Wishart was apprehended by the Catholic authorities, tried in a clerical court, found guilty and burned at the stake on March 1st, 1546 in the main square of the town of St. Andrews. Sandy’s sister Ella Edwards, taught school in the town of Alyth in Perthshire for many decades. She never married and was known to be something of a free spirit, family archives containing a photo of her from about 1924 on a motorcycle. A studio photo of the Edwards family with children Sandy, Ella, John and their parents was taken in the early 1930s and appears in this book on page 52. Annie’s mother, Jean Fulton Blair Edwards, was born in Bearsden, a town on the outskirts of Glasgow, just north of the River Clyde. The Blair family name is important in the history of Scottish weaving. Matthew Blair (1837-1908), the son of a weaver, was born in Paisley, a small town west of the city and now part of Greater Glasgow. In 1863 Matthew Blair formed the firm of McLennan, Blair & Co. and began making shawls using the Kashmir teardrop pattern later known, and famously, as paisley, some of their firm’s shawls selling for 20 or 30 pounds when a pound was not only sterling but a large and important piece of money. Matthew Blair was, as was then said, “an outstanding character in an age which bred remarkable men.” He often worked from eight in the morning to nine at night or — at times — on till midnight. His hobbies included botany, geology, and sailing — a loving cup won in a sailing race remains in the family archive. Matthew Blair also wrote at least three books on the weaving industry, copies of which remain in family archives. Matthew married Miss Agnes Lang of Paisley and they had six children, all boys. The eldest of these, Harry Blair married Ann Walker of Glasgow in 1899 and they had three children who survived to reach adulthood, the youngest of whom was Jean Fulton Blair (1905-2004), Annie Boutelle’s mother, making Matthew Blair Annie’s maternal great grandfather.

• 63. An American Life 51 My Mother-in-Law Jean Blair Edwards Annie’s mother. Annie’s grandmother, Ann Walker Blair, was wife to Harry Semple Blair. When Ann Blair died her young daughter, Jean, was essentially made the lady of the house and put in charge of caring for her two older brothers, Bill and Arthur. Jean was a remarkable woman. She was interested in drama — there are several photos of her in various theatrical productions. Theatre, as she realized early, was not a field in which she could hope to make a career and so she began training for the hotel trade, which had jobs becoming open to women. She apprenticed at various hotels, finally becoming manager at a small hotel on the Isle of Skye. From there, she went to Kenmore, where she met Sandy, her future husband. They married as war clouds gathered around Great Britain in 1939. Their honeymoon took them biking around Loch Awe. During that trip, they stayed at the Taycreggan Hotel on Loch Awe where, 28 years later, Annie and I were to spend our wedding night. The young couple set up their household in Aberfeldy in the County of Perth, just as the Second World War began. They opened their home to child refugees from Glasgow, then being bombed mercilessly by the Germans. There are many tales from that admixture of utterly poor children from the blighted Gorbals section of Glasgow with the middleclass folk of Aberfeldy. One such is when little Archie came home one day with a bicycle. Jean Blair Edwards asked him where he had got it. It was “lost” according to Archie, who’d observed it leaning against a wall for half an hour, no one having come to claim it. In the Gorbals, a bicycle left alone for two minutes would be “lost”, but no one in Aberfeldy ever thought to lock up their bike. The bike was returned, and Archie counseled. [Continues on p. 54.] The Blair family in 1906, Annie’s mother Jean second from left, with her brothers Arthur and Bill “Memoirs of the Blair Family,” is the booklet by Matthew Blair privately funded and produced on a mimeograph machine. According to “Memoirs,” the family traces itself back to the year 1620 — before that time the lineage grows cloudy, but we have a few moments of clarity. Sir Bryce Blair was put to death in 1296 by Edward I (“Longshanks”) during the English invasion. An Alexander Blair became the ancestor of the various Earls of Dundonald. A definitively understood lineage begins with James Blair of Ladymuir (born 1620), then Hugh Blair of Ladymuir (1660), John Blair of Corsleyhill (1690), John Blair of Corsleyhill (1721), Matthew Blair of Maxwelltown (1758), Walter Blair of Paisley (1804), Matthew Blair of Paisley (1837), Harry Semple Blair of Bearsden (1867), and Jean Fulton Blair, born in 1905 and

• 64. 52 An American Life Edwards Family History Alexander Wishart Edwards, in 1938. Called Sandy, Annie’s father died of kidney cancer when she was nine years old. She’d later write of him in her poetry: I know my/father with the movie-star good looks and the no-/good luck, scratchy dressing gown leather patch/at elbows, hangs out in the country of dreams. [From Country, 2014] Alexander Edwards’ father was a stationmaster in central Scotland. He was a direct descendent of George Wishart, Protestant reformer and mentor of John Knox, founder of the Presbyterian movement. After Wishart was apprehended by Catholic authorities, he was tried in a clerical court, found guilty and was then burned at the stake on March 1st, 1546, in the town square in St. Andrews. The Edwards family in1930, Alexander on the left.

• 65. An American Life 53 History of the Blairs In 1863 Matthew Blair formed the firm of McLennan, Blair & Co. and began making shawls using the Kashmiri teardrop pattern to become known thereafter — and famously — as paisley. Some of these paisley shawls sold then for 20 to 30 pounds sterling, an astonishing sum of money. Jean Blair Edwards, Hotelier, 1938 Sheena and Annie Edwards, 1947. Matthew Blair (1837 -1908), weaver and innovator of the new paisley-style fabric pattern.

• 66. 54 An American Life Jean Blair’s and Alexander Edwards’ Marriage Another story is of the mother who came up from Glasgow to take her child back to the city despite the bombing. When asked why, she stated “That’s a quick death there. Here, it’s a creepy crawly death” — meaning the middle-class standards of behavior and speech. The threat of German invasion was very real and Jean Edwards prepared a cave in the hills with supplies, should that happen. Fortunately for the British Isles, Hitler then turned his attention eastward toward Russia, which is said to be possibly his greatest strategic mistake. Soon a son, Robin, was born to the young Edwards couple. Sadly, Robin suffered from Down syndrome and died at age five. On October 8, 1943, Ann Margaret was born. Because of the genetic nature of this disorder, the family then decided to adopt their third child, and, in 1945, Ann’s sister Sheena came to them as a newborn. By 1949, Alexander W. Edwards had earned a promotion to manager of the Oban Branch of the Bank of Scotland and the couple moved to Oban, in the county of Argyll in the West Highlands. They settled in Duncraggan, a large nineteenth century house in a commanding location at the very top of the bowl of hills surrounding Oban. Unfortunately, Sandy was soon thereafter diagnosed with kidney cancer and died in 1952 when Annie was just nine years old. Putting mourning aside, Jean Edwards, a remarkable woman in every way, set herself to bringing up her two girls on her own. Since her grandfather, Matthew Blair, had sailed for sport and Oban was a seaport, she decided that her girls should learn to sail, a sport she had herself never mastered. So she took sailing lessons, bought a dinghy, practiced daily, and was finally given some money by two uncles, Murray and Frank, to buy the 30-foot cruising boat she christened “Mufra”, the name being a combination of Murray and Frank. Uncle Frank, incidentally, had been generous to her before, taking her on a round-the-world trip in 1933 during which they traveled from San Francisco to New York, stopping in at the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago. Undaunted by widowhood, Jean set out to be father and mother to her girls, teaching them Scottish country dancing, helping them with drama, going hiking with them and cruising the islands on the good ship Mufra. She became such a proficient sailor that she was elected commodore of the Oban Sailing Club, the first female commodore the club had ever had. She could be extravagant but only when it suited her. As an example years later, for one of her annual trips to the US, Jean Edwards took a tramp steamer east over the Atlantic then flew the Concorde supersonic transport back, simply because she was curious about it. Grandfather Matthew would have approved.

• 67. An American Life 55 Annie’s Education Sheena was not particularly interested in school, but Annie excelled, winning the German Prize and earning a first or a second in every class. The student who alternated first place with Annie was Gilleasbuig Macmillan, who became Chief Minister of St. Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh, as well as Chaplain to Queen Elizabeth. Not bad competition. Oban High School was full of amazing teachers. Iain Crichton Smith OBE, a well-known modern Scottish poet was her English teacher. The Rector was John Maclean, brother of modern Scottish poet Sorley Maclean, who was born on the island of Raasay near Skye, and spoke only Scottish Gaelic until coming to high school on the mainland. Maclean used to substitute-teach occasionally and would recite “The Iliad,” translating in his mind from the original Greek to Gaelic and finally to English to the students. Mr. Murray was the history teacher who, importantly, started a climbing club, in which the students climbed all the major hills of Scotland, including Ben More, the highest point in the British Isles. Upon graduation, she spent what’s now called a gap year in Lausanne and Vienna, where her German came in handy. After that, she matriculated at St. Andrews University in the City of that name, where she was also an outstanding student. Graduating in the spring of 1965, Annie decided to come to the US for a year, which is what prompted the posting on the bulletin board at Princeton. She was offered two jobs — one at a Connecticut girls’ school and one at the new Purnell School in New Jersey. Because she chose Purnell, she met my mother Sara. High school in Oban in the late 1950s for Annie was a heady experience, rivaling the education provided by many colleges. She was a top student who took the German Prize. In her spare time, Annie became a Queen’s Guide, the British girls’ equivalent of an Eagle Scout. This photo is of her receiving the award from her mother, Jean Edwards. Some thirty years later, Jean Edwards was with us in West Chesterfield, NJ, to present the Eagle Scout award to her grandson, Jonathan.

• 68. 56 An American Life Romance Blooms, A Letter Is Written, A Telegram Arrives Mrs. Alexander Edwards Duncraggan Oban, Argyll, Scotland October 3, 1966 Dear Mrs. Edwards, I don’t know how to commence the important part of this letter, as I have never before had occasion to write anything like this. Since Annie’s father is not alive and since you are too far away from me to visit, I feel I must write my request in the form of a letter. Mrs. Edwards, it is my hope and intention to marry your daughter, and I am herewith asking your consent and blessing. I love her very much and I believe I will be able to support her in the style to which she is accustomed. I thought it better to delay this request until she had been home for the summer to gain some perspective. When we again met each other last month in California, we found that we had both remained deeply in love and hence this letter. In addition to my personal devotion to Annie, I am sure that she will make an excellent mother for our children. I realize that this request may come as something of a shock at this time. Indeed, international marriages are always somewhat more complicated than local ones, but love has no regard for national boundaries. I shall be awaiting your reply with great eagerness. As Annie and I became more serious about one another we visited back and forth in Pittstown and Newark, where I was living by the fall of 1965. As a third-year student in medical school, there wasn’t much extra time but we went riding in my $750 Jaguar, enjoying weekends at the farm and going on dates in Manhattan. By New Year’s Day, 1966, we were deeply in love and had decided to marry. That summer Annie had to go back to Scotland for the wedding of her sister Sheena to Robin Buchanan-Smith and I had a job writing a research paper on public health in California. At the end of summer Annie flew to meet me in San Jose where I’d been working and we drove back across the country to New Jersey together. In October I wrote a long letter to Jean Edwards asking for Annie’s hand in marriage. Jean quickly sent back a telegram offering her approval.

• 69. An American Life 57 Annie Writes Her Mother October 12, 1966 Dear, dear Mother, This is the first chance — the very first — I’ve had of writing to you since Will asked me to marry him. I’m so happy that I don’t know where to begin. How I wish you were here so that I could give you a great big hug. On Tuesday I had gone into East Orange after my morning classes to cook lunch for Will. I was merrily coping with bubbling pots while he was deep in the paper, when he suddenly looked up and said “Annie, will you marry me?” And all the time, unbeknownst to me, your telegram was lying upside down on the table. I hadn’t known anything about Will’s letter, or your cable, or anything! That lunch became very disorganized, and we still have our heads in the clouds. I’m so really very happy — can’t even begin to describe it. We dashed into New York to tell Sara the tidings. A brilliant autumn day, with the Hudson sparkling as we scooted along the East Side Highway. We picked up Sara and headed straight back to the farm, stopping only to pick up some champagne to share the news with Dr. Boutelle. The girls at school don’t know yet, but they soon will. Will is arranging the announcement and I will be going out to the farm for a photographic session — evidently, it’s customary here to have a photo with the announcement, and Will wants to take it himself. Bubbling over with happiness, Love, love, love,

• 70. 58 An American Life Jaguar Goes, Traded for the Bright Red Chevy Truck So now I was in the final year of medical school and working hard in the clinics. When I finally did sell the Jaguar and buy a 1957 Chevrolet pickup, the girls at Purnell, where Annie was a house mother, helped by sanding the truck down to prep it for its new bright red paint job. I then had a sign painter paint a caduceus on either door and the name “Annie” in script on the truck’s hood. No longer fast, maybe, but now I could haul anything. In my last year in med school, I sold my $750 Jaguar for $1500 and bought the 1957 pickup we would paint bright red.

• 71. An American Life 59 Harley in Harvard Square 1965 Harley Davidson in 2011, forty years later Annie searched Goodwill and the Salvation Army to find clothing similar to what she’d been wearing in the earlier photo. I had the 1971 Cambridge background with the faculty club behind us photo-shopped in. The black leather jacket and boots I was wearing had been kept in one closet or another for those four decades. 1965 Harley Davidson in 1971 One spring day as I was walking from our house on Dana Street in Cambridge over to Harvard Square, I noticed a man with a big 4x5 inch camera on a tripod and a sign saying he’d take your picture and give you a 2x3-foot enlargement for $3. I went up to him, asking him to wait a few minutes while I went home to get my wife and my motorcycle. When I returned, he snapped this photo. And later sold me the 4x5 inch negative for an additional two dollars.

• 72. 60 An American Life Getting Married in Scotland — The Subconscious Is a Bitch I was now in the final year of medical school and working hard in the clinics. I’d sold my Jaguar finally and had bought a 1957 Chevrolet pickup truck. By the spring of 1967 Annie and I were planning our wedding in Oban, Scotland, to take place right after I received my MD degree in June. As plans for this developed, it became apparent that my Grandmother Holmes, whose husband John had recently died at age ninety-nine, was determined to go. She had, however, neither a passport nor — as it turns out — even an actual birth certificate as her father, the doctor, had delivered her at home and had not evidently bothered with the paperwork. All this took some effort to arrange but finally my parents, Grandmother Holmes, my brother Chris, and Mike Honer and his family all set out, Mike was my roommate at Brown and was there to be my best man. The wedding was to be on June 17th and Annie and I were to fly from JFK on the evening of the 7th. Early that day, we began to pack. Annie asked about my passport and I told her it was fine — I had obtained it in 1962 in preparation for the first trip to Europe. Annie insisted that she take a look at it. US Passports at that time were issued for five years and she saw it had expired. So there we were, with all our relatives in the air to Scotland for a wedding that I had somehow seemingly engineered not to happen. We’d heard that there was a passport center in Rockefeller Center, which could re-issue passports on the same day, so I took the Hudson Tube to midtown Manhattan. This was June 7, 1967. The Six-Day War in Israel had just begun so there I joined a blocks-long queue that seemed to contain every able-bodied young Jewish male in New York, all desperate to go to Israel to get into the fight. I got my passport and we took off for Scotland All went well at the wedding with Harry Dobbins, Annie’s high school math teacher, playing Handel’s “Water Music” during the procession. As we made our way into the church we saw, on the nearby embankment, a former boyfriend of Annie’s. Stephen Scobie, together with his new Canadian wife, had heard of the wedding and — though not invited — could not stay away. Stephen Scobie later became wellknown as a poet in Canada and we later visited with him and his wife in Vancouver. Our wedding reception was held at Duncraggan, the house where Annie grew up on the top of the hill. Back in the US, we found a ground floor apartment in East Orange, NJ, for my grueling internship year at Newark City Hospital. Annie had quit her job at the Purnell School and was thinking of pursuing an MA in literature and writing at NYU. Why stop there? I asked, and she began work on her doctorate. View of Oban, opposite page, showing McCaig’s Tower, a local landmark. Duncraggan, the Edwards’ family home where Annie grew up, is the large house seen at the top of the hill.

• 73.

• 74. 62 An American Life Race Riots and Lobotomies My internship was not only hectic, it was dangerous. During the long hot summer of 1967 there were riots in many cities, including Newark. There were rumors that these riots were spreading to outlying towns and I called Annie to warn her and to suggest that she ask to stay with friends on the sixth floor. Hospital staff sometimes had to stay at work for many days. From the top of the 15-story hospital building in Newark, we could see fires all over town, as close as I’d ever felt to being in an actual war zone. During this time Annie and I always ate well, but our entertainment budget allowed for only a single movie. The one we went to see was the original “Planet of the Apes.” Finally, the penury of that internship year ended. Annie continued her studies while I began a psychiatric residency at the New York Hospital, Westchester Division in White Plains. Annie commuted down to NYU on the lower East Side of Manhattan, while I tried to learn psychiatry. Among the many interesting parts of my residency training was getting to know some of the patients who had been lobotomized during the heyday of psychosurgery as a treatment for mental illness, a practice that ended during the early 1950s. These patients were, in fact, quite docile and seemed to have emerged from treatment with their intellectual abilities largely intact. The receding hairlines of the older men sometimes revealed the telltale bilateral indentations made by the burr holes in the cranium through which the lobotomy had been performed. Incidentally, the other major method of performing a lobotomy, the trans-orbital method, was to slide a very flexible spatula known as a leucotome in around and behind the curvature of the eyeball to where the cranial bone is the thinnest and then, using a surgical mallet, smash through the bone into the prefrontal area of the brain. Although this sounds like a medieval torture, this method had the advantage of eliminating the need for burr holes in the skull. Of course, by the time I was in training these procedures were no longer performed, but patients are longlived, so I was there to witness the results. Naturally, there were also a large number of patients for whom the treatment was medication and psychotherapy — far less radical than either ECT or lobotomy. As it happens, in 1968 Munchie and her then-husband Boyce lived not far away in New Rochelle, where he was doing a post-doc at Albert Einstein Medical School. In that year also, her son Christopher Burge, named for my younger brother, was born. Our two families sometimes met up and ate or went hiking together. After two years of residency in a very neurologically oriented program, I had begun to want to know something about psychodynamic theory. So I applied to senior residency programs in Boston and we decided to move there in the spring of 1970. Annie had finished her coursework by then and was completing her doctoral dissertation and got a job teaching at Suffolk University in Boston. We moved into a basement apartment in Cambridge. Boyce and Mary Burge had also returned to Cambridge and we all continued to see each other.

• 75. An American Life 63 Fifty Years of Psychiatric Practice Concerning my half-century of active clinical practice, I am very fortunate in that I have never regretted a single year. For most of those decades, I was lucky enough to be able to practice psychiatry without the financial pressures faced by many doctors. While I worked many jobs during med school, my parents continued to offer support so that I was able to finish my medical training and start practice without the crushing debt experienced by many young doctors. In 1967, I’d graduated from medical school and Annie and I had married. I then became an intern at the Newark City Hospital earning what then seemed the princely sum of $5000 a year. The previous year the interns revolted at being paid $2500 a year, and the intern salary had doubled. Still we struggled: Annie started her work toward a PhD at NYU and the $2000 she earned teaching at Purnell, went to grad school tuition. After a general internship, I began learning psychiatry, first at New York Hospital, then at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston. It was at Beth Israel that I first met the tattooed survivors of the Holocaust, which contributed to my interest in what was later named PTSD, or post traumatic stress disorder. Throughout my years as a psychiatrist, I have been fascinated by the struggles of my patients, also gratified when I have been able to help. My ongoing work has been conducted in various contexts: the ten years I spent in a small private practice in Cambridge while working at the local VA, decades working with veterans, ten years working for a local nonprofit clinic in Massachusetts, and the final six years seeing patients at the Lifelong Over Sixty Clinic in Berkeley, where I was older than most of my patients. It’s been a rare privilege to do something with your life that you love and are good at, that helps people and that you get paid for! But to go back to the beginning: I began residency years III and IV at the Beth Israel Hospital in Brookline, MA, a Harvard-affiliated program. During this training I was fortunate enough to work with some outstanding psychiatric practitioners, among them Dr. John C. Nemiah, who later became the editor of the prestigious American Journal of Psychiatry. I also worked closely with Dr. Carol Nadelson, later to become the first female president of the American Psychiatric Association. My work with her involved utilizing the then-new medium of videotape, our taping couples through a one-way mirror during a therapy session, then playing the tape back so they could watch their interactions more objectively. This work resulted in several publications. I eventually published a dozen papers on various psychiatric topics, with Dr. Nadelson and others. I learned much during my stay at the Beth Israel Hospital. The clinics offered a complex array of psychiatric issues and at this time — only a quarter century after the end of the Second World War — there were many older women and men displaying the numerical tattoos on their forearms from their internment in concentration camps. The Beth Israel Hospital was then a heavily psychodynamic program at the time and its teaching staff assured me that before the end of the residency I’d be selling my motorcycle and starting my psychoanalysis. I scoffed at all this at the time, but both of these predictions eventually came true. American participation in the war in Vietnam had been building since the mid-1960s, and every male medical school graduate was headed for uniform, like it or not. I was fortunate in that I was allowed to complete my full specialty residency training before serving. I had chosen the Navy, and after the end of my fourth year of residency in the summer of 1972 I was called up.

• 76. 64 An American Life Annie Gets Her Ph.D. Annie finished her dissertation, got her PhD and Jonathan Blair Boutelle was born on 8 May 1973. Ann’s pregnancy with Jonathan was complicated, as in March, with the pregnancy still many weeks shy of term, her waters broke and she was required to spend the next two months on bed rest, fearing each day that labor might begin. We were thankful that this was successful, our baby being born at term. One day in 1974, while the two of us were reading the newspaper looking for movie listings — we could finally afford a movie — we accidentally turned to the real estate section where we saw a house on Dana Street in Cambridge for sale. We went to see it, bought it and began moving out of our basement apartment. Annie finished her work on her doctorate and was teaching at Suffolk University while I fulfilled my obligation in the Navy. The Navy, in its wisdom, had ordered me to be stationed at the Boston Naval Hospital, about three miles from our home. I was discharged in July, 1974, when I joined the Veterans Administration Hospital staff at Bedford, MA. I then began an interesting reverse commute. Cambridge was part of the large metropolitan Boston area where many people worked. Bedford, fifteen miles to the west, was among many bedroom communities in the suburbs. Every morning I would get in my car and head westward to Bedford, with the sun at my back, seeing the inbound road lanes choked with cars heading into work in Boston, with the sun in their eyes, while my outbound lane remained empty. In the evening I’d head into the city with the sun at my back and the outbound road lanes choked with cars going back to the suburbs, with the sun in their eyes, while my route was again empty, another stroke of good luck. My work at the VA was very satisfying. I’d started a small private practice while I was still a resident, continuing all the time I was in the Navy. Three days a week I saw patients in the evenings after work at the hospital, my first at 5:00, the last scheduled to finish at 10:00. Annie kept the books and sent out the bills. In those days, very few people had insurance for mental health care and most patients paid by check. Our little family of three continued like this from 1974 until 22 August 1976, when Laura Paisley Holmes Boutelle was born.  Laura’s birth was uneventful compared with that of Jonathan. Both Jonathan and Laura were born in the Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, where I trained. Now the family had four members and life was a bit more complicated. Annie had completed her Ph.D. at NYU. Since I was out in Bedford all day, the kids were cared for by nannies.

• 77. An American Life 65 Echos & Life Choices At this point, it is interesting to contemplate some of my choices in life, particularly as they relate to my father. Back on page 34 I mentioned that it seemed that I was my father’s favorite of his three boys. Here is a list of choices that I made, which mirror his: Go to Brown University, major in psychology, marry a teacher, have three children, join the Navy — I actually wore his 1943 uniform during my tour, as we wore the same size clothes and that uniform still hangs in my closet. Go to medical school, become a psychiatrist, move to a farm when our oldest child was seven, become elected president of the state District Branch of the American Psychiatric Association. You can see where some of the themes for a psychoanalysis might derive. And during that psychoanalysis, before I started service in the Navy, my father became ill with lung cancer after a lifetime of smoking. The fall of 1971 was spent with both Annie and me traveling to New Jersey on Thursdays — Beth Israel psychiatric leadership was very understanding of these circumstances. We traveled each weekend to help Sara, returning Sunday night to Cambridge. My father died in January of 1972. After that, my mother moved to Santa Cruz to be close to her sister Mary. Both of my brothers were also then living on the West Coast. Up until my father’s death, I had never been able to grapple with the chord structure of the German accordion he had obtained during the war. After his death, playing this instrument suddenly seemed to come to me easily. I often played his accordion, musical chairs, at children’s birthday parties. I had my father’s uniform during my deployment — he and I wore the same size. This is the accordion liberated by him from a German supply ship during his tour in the Pacific. I was unable to master its chord structure until after my father died.

• 78. 66 An American Life Dr. Boutelle, Motorcycle Mechanic During this time — this was the late 1970s — I had become interested in antique motorcycles and had acquired a huge load of Indian brand motorcycle parts from a former dealer. Indian brand cycles had been manufactured in Springfield, MA from 1901 until 1953. They were very well built, and I became very interested in them. However, in those days there were no manufacturers who made replacement parts so I was forced to either find old parts or fashion them myself. When I realized I did not have the proper skills, I enrolled in the Cambridge school system’s night school for a course in machine shop and welding. The old Indian dealer had a nice 1930 South Bend lathe, which he threw in with the Indian parts. I soon acquired a (very old) milling machine and now I was an amateur machinist. These skills would prove invaluable for a person moving to a small farm. In 1974 I had heard of an interesting summer position at Star Island, a conference center run by the Unitarians and Congregationalists on an island ten miles out in the Atlantic off the point where New Hampshire and Maine meet. There, intellectual conferences were held, each one for a week during the eight-week summer season. Since there were up to three hundred people at these conferences, they required the services of a doctor. So I applied and got the job for one of the seven-day conferences. Although it paid a pittance, it was a marvelous family vacation on a fifty-acre island with other families with children. I continued doing that every year for a dozen years, and our kids, soon to be three, grew up experiencing this, and eventually went to work there, taking summer jobs as part of the hotel staff. Late in 1979, we’d both become fixed on the notion that we might want to raise our little family in the beautiful countryside of Western Massachusetts. As a VA employee, I had access to the list of open positions at other VAs, and there was a Chief of Psychiatry position open at the VA in Northampton, MA, 80 miles west in rural Hampshire County. I applied and got the job, set to start in January, My interest in motorcycles had evolved in the direction of antique bikes and I had acquired and restored a 1947 Indian Chief motorcycle, complete with sidecar, which our whole family of four would sometimes use for trips out into the country. Unthinkably dangerous as I look back on it, but we were then, as in so many things, so lucky. When we moved to West Chesterfield, I had the 1947 Indian Chief with sidecar and the 1938 Indian Four, as well as several tons of various cast-iron engine parts. Clearly we were in need of a farm on 17 acres with several barns and other outbuildings.

• 79. An American Life 67 The Berkshires 1980. For the first six months, Annie and the kids stayed in Cambridge, while I worked in Northampton, scouting around for the right place for our family. About that time, Suffolk University, where Annie had been teaching nearly ten years, offered her tenure. She turned it down, and so remains the only academic I’ve ever known to turn down a tenured position. During the winter months of 1980 I’d come back to Cambridge on weekends, bringing Annie out to Hampshire County to look at a house. In June, we found a little farm on seventeen acres in West Chesterfield in the foothills of the Berkshires, midway between Northampton and Pittsfield. The farmhouse and its barns, built in 1867, had not been well-maintained. The house had an interesting history: Before the Civil War, the property was owned by a family named Kinney, sometimes spelled “Kinny” on gravestones in the local cemetery. The Kinneys had initially lived in a simple cabin, the foundations of which remain in the yard behind the larger house. These people were not prosperous, seemingly owning little aside from what was basic and necessary. Then Mr. Kinney was called away for service in the Civil War, reappearing with the large sum of money he’d somehow mysteriously acquired. He then hired a contractor to have the current farmhouse built. This was unusual in that folks usually built their houses themselves with the help of friends and neighbors so we speculated that some grand Southern plantation might be missing its silver. Annie and I both fell in love with Mr. Kinney’s little farm, deciding it would be a fine place to raise our family. Without realizing it, we’d become part of the back-to-the-land movement wherein young Americans left the cities and suburbs to find a more grounded existence. We were also following the pattern set in the post-war 1940s, when my own parents did the same thing. So, in the late summer of 1980, we moved from Cambridge to West Chesterfield, arriving at Ridgetop Farm on the first day of August, newly minted as country folk. We began fixing up the house and barns, becoming farmers as we raised pigs, sheep, chickens, geese, and ducks, in addition to two horses and a couple of goats. The drafty farmhouse did have an oil furnace but Annie and I, in refashioning ourselves as rural pioneers, elected to heat our spaces with wood stoves using the logs we were chopping and splitting ourselves. We decided, too, to eat only meat from animals that we ourselves had raised and had slaughtered. Annie now had a job at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, MA, about forty-five minutes away, while I was working in Northampton, a half an hour’s distance. The kids took the bus to the local school and we all worked very hard in our huge gardens and caring for the animals. This was a lot of hard work, this simple, honest, rural existence of ours. Although incorporated in 1762, the history of Chesterfield goes back to land grants made to two soldiers who fought in the Narragansett War — also known as “King Philip’s War — against the Native American tribes in 1675. At the time, this land was considered wilderness by white settlers. A century later the descendants of these men founded the Town of Chesterfield. The surnames of these two soldiers were Healy and Bisbee. It is no coincidence that Russell Bisbee was church organist for the entirety of the last half of the 20th century and that Healy Wood Products was a local industry for nearly 150 years.

• 80. 68 An American Life Country Acres, Call Anytime When Annie and I moved our family to the farm, Healy Wood Products, established in 1847 on the banks of the Westfield River, was still making saw handles as it had for more than a century, using tools nearly as old. High-line electricity only arrived in West Chesterfield in 1947, two years after the end of the Second World War. Before that time residents there lit their homes with kerosene-run generators or with batteries brought to town each Saturday for recharging.

• 81. An American Life 69 West Chesterfield In the previous century, the town blacksmith Samuel Eddy had earned the Congressional Medal of Honor, our country’s highest miliary honor, during the Battle of Sailors Creek, which was among the last of Civil War battles. This honor’s citation told how, even as a bayonet had run him through, Samuel Eddy managed to pull out the bayonet and kill his assailant. He then saved the life of his adjutant, all this before agreeing to go back to the rear to find medical attention. Until his death, this local hero proudly marched in the Fourth of July parade with his shirt off in order to display the scars from that Confederate bayonet’s entry and exit wounds. When we moved to West Chesterfield the farm still looked pretty much as it had in the 19th century and this felt like an idyllic return to a simpler and more self-reliant way of life. We seemed to leave the past in the morning to go to school and to work in the present time. Jonathan was in the third grade at the Chesterfield School, an excellent public school. It was here, too, that Laura started kindergarten. During the fall, we kept reassuring ourselves and one another that we’d made the right decision, but that first winter was rugged and we spent many cold days and nights longing for the city. The new wood-burning furnace I’d installed in the basement did not yet have the proper ductwork, but we remained determined not to use heating oil. That winter, the temperature regularly fell to 15 F. degrees below zero and the wood stoves on the first floor simply could not keep up with the icy blasts. We were all cold beyond cold but the kids kept taking the bus to school and Annie kept driving to South Hadley and I to Northampton and somehow we survived that first winter. That spring we bought our first young pigs. We got chickens, ducks and geese and we were on our way to becoming farmers. We also acquired three Suffolk ewes and a ram, named Rimbaud (“Rambo”). Late each fall we would strap a bag of red chalk on his underbelly and turn Rambo loose with the ewes. When each of the ewes had red chalk marks on her back, we knew the ram’s job was done and they retired to the barn to gestate and avoid the snow. The sheep were noted to often produce twins, so each spring we’d get five or six lambs, sometimes having to assist in the birth. In the late fall came slaughtering time and the cycle repeated. We also cared for the two horses we rode regularly. Jonathan and Laura and their dad with one year’s piglets. Though we didn’t breed pigs ourselves, each spring we’d purchase two or three piglets and raise them through the summer for slaughter in late fall. And down the road a couple miles was the town of Cummington with its fair, an agricultural extravaganza offering ox pulls, prize animals and vegetables and a midway that had been held every August since 1869.

• 82. 70 An American Life Hog Slaughter at Ridgetop Farm I get up early and dress in my oldest work clothes on this late autumn day. Walter Stein is due at eight. We eat a breakfast, go out to the barn and feed the hogs their last meal — they’re grunting happily, the sad dramatic irony being that we know what is coming and they do not. He arrives in his ancient truck with his bathtub, his crane and his gun, the .22 rifle he’s told me his father gave him sixty years earlier. Walter is a kindly grizzled looking guy, with a slight sing-song cadence to his speech. He enters the pen and coos to the hogs, who gather around to nuzzle this two-legged fellow creature. As always, the toilet-place of the pen is rigidly demarcated from the rest of the area by the pigs themselves, the rest of the pen covered with spotless and pristine straw. He tells me few people realize how clean pigs are, the cleanest of the animals he slaughters: these being sheep, cattle, pigs, and goats. Walter refuses to kill chickens or turkeys, considering them to be of a lesser order. Now he walks softly to the first pig he’s selected, speaks to it gently and positions the muzzle just behind the ear. He pulls the trigger and the hog falls immediately, dead before it hits the ground. It’s now up to us to drag the carcass out of the pen without spooking the others — Walter accomplishes this with gentle, thoughtful movements. He’s already filled his bathtub with water heated on the propane stove — we haul the market-sized pig carcass weighing about 230 pounds to the tub and lift it with his crane. Walter with his bathtub and truck-mounted hoist.

• 83. An American Life 71 By this time, the older two kids are down and take the wheelbarrow filled with offal down the hill in back to dump out as a feast for the coyotes and crows. After cutting off a section for tonight’s dinner, Walter and I, using block and tackle, raise the pig-halves to hang on the 12-foot high beam over the barnyard gate. The autumn air is chilly, flies not too interested. Pork must be hung, resting the meat to age before butchering. As Walter readies to take his leave, he’s repacking his gear, and is paid $10 per pig — he charges only $5 a lamb. On parting, he tells me, “Y’know, some people say I’m a cruel man, doin’ what I do. I don’t think so myself as I never let an animal suffer,” and off he goes, driving away in his rattling truck. Later, it is time to haul down the pig-halves and load them into the pickup for the trip to the Polish smokehouse in Chicopee for butchering and smoking. Smoked parts will be picked up several weeks later, while the fresh parts are packaged, labelled, and placed in one of the three huge freezers in the basement of the farmhouse. This is also where the lambs, the chickens, the ducks and the geese all go too, in their time. We keep no cow on the farm as milking animals need to be milked twice a day and suffer if they aren’t, something we cannot manage with our busy schedules. At dinnertime Annie serves the freshest pork possible, roasted while still slightly warm from life. Walter then gets out what he calls pig shaving cream. This is alum, and he spreads it liberally all over the entire body, massaging it well into the hide. He then pulls out a straight razor and shaves the pig’s bristles as expertly as any barber, never nicking the skin. After shaving the pig, Walter spreads its hind quarters, attaching each leg to one end of a two-foot timber with a steel eye in the center, then hauls the pink body aloft and upside down, using his crane. As he slits open the belly, a torrent of guts tumbles out falling into a wheelbarrow positioned below. He carefully separates the organs, looking for the lungs that I’ve promised to a friend, a medical doctor from the Philippines so she can prepare a special Filipino dish . Walter next extracts the kidneys as expertly as a surgeon, then finds the heart and liver, placing these to the side. He then removes the head with a long sharp knife, putting it aside for now. He’ll later open the cranium with his saw and remove the brain, which is not to be wasted. Annie has a recipe for an egg dish, Portuguese, Omolete deMioleira made with pig brains. Walter takes his electric Sawzall with extra-long blade and splits the hog stem to stern, going through the center of each vertebra. It is a delicate and precise surgical procedure, and Walter nods his satisfaction after completing the work. He nicks his finger slightly on the blade, but does not swear. Walter, a devoted churchgoer, never swears.

• 84. 72 An American Life How I Became an EMT During those years on the farm I was busy. In addition to chopping wood, running a subsistence-type farm, helping Annie raise three children, being a scoutmaster as well as a full-time physician, in the early 1980s I became an emergency medical technician. The EMTs are the people who ride ambulances and try to save the lives of folks involved in road accidents, fires, medical emergencies, and so forth. Here’s how all that happened. One winter’s day I was on my way downhill from our place — called Ridgetop Farm for very good reason — to the hospital in Northampton. In these icy conditions I happened to notice the back end of a car many feet off the road and down a bank, apparently having hit a telephone pole. There was no one else on the road and snow had begun to cover the damaged vehicle. I stopped and made my way down the embankment to have a look. I found a woman barely alive inside, crumpled down onto the pedals in the area beneath the dash. She was unresponsive but I did my best to get her up onto the seat of the car to begin CPR — all VA employees were required to certify in basic life support every two years. I worked on her for several minutes until another car came along. I asked the driver to get to the nearest telephone and call an ambulance, no cell phones in those days, of course. Twenty minutes later, the local volunteer ambulance arrived and her care was transferred to EMTs. I went on to work, learning only later that the woman had not survived. What struck me at the time was that while I was a trained and Board-certified physician, I had no idea whatsoever of how to prolong life in a traumatic situation. I called the volunteer fire chief in Goshen, one town over from Chesterfield where the ambulance was based and asked him how I could learn more. Goshen Fire Chief Francis Dresser suggested I take the EMT licensing course — he also said I should not tell them I was a physician, intimating that the instructors would probably fail me outright if they knew I was a doctor. So, I took the course, studied hard, kept silent about my profession, and passed the licensing exam, a hands-on affair with volunteers bloodied up to resemble victims of horrible accidents. I remained a working member of the Goshen volunteer ambulance corps for almost a decade until I was finally convinced by a lawyer friend that, in the event of legal action, I would no doubt be sued as a doctor rather than an EMT. The worst case I had to deal with was also the loneliest, this near the end of my work as an EMT. Annie and I were out mixing cement for a foundation, using the hoe-and-trough method we preferred, when two cars raced by speeding down the arrow-straight road in front of our farm, the first with men in it, a second car following carrying the women.

• 85. An American Life 73 about 20 minutes later. After opening that car up like a tin can, the final outcome was the same as if I had not been there at all: one fatality, one badly injured man and one very frightened guy. There were many other ambulance experiences, but that stands out as the worst. I later learned that Chief Dresser, a World War II veteran, suffered from severe post-traumatic-stress disorder, or PTSD. Occasionally at night he would semi-awaken in a dreamlike state, then begin arranging the bedroom furniture into a defensive position and crouch down awaiting Japanese attack. His wife was very understanding and waited for him to to snap out of it, to come around, which he always did. This man was a pillar of our hill-town community, having started up the ambulance service on his own many years before. It is people like this who make a community resilient and strong. In my work at the VA I saw many men with symptoms like Chief Dresser’s, as my patients were primarily veterans of the Vietnam War. It was these experiences that caused me to open what became one of the country’s first inpatient units devoted to the treatment of PTSD. Annie and I mentioned to one another that they’d be wise to slow down, then went on with our work. A few minutes later my emergency radio went off and I learned that the first car had failed to negotiate the sharp turn at the end of our road and had crashed into a tree. The second car, holding the wives of the young men, was not involved. So, there I was, about to be a sole first responder, the Goshen ambulance with its crew and equipment being 15 miles away. I dropped my hoe, scrambled into my orange jumpsuit, grabbed my emergency bag, got into my car, and tore off down the road. About a mile away I arrived on the scene and saw the effects of a car coming to an abrupt stop from 70 miles per hour. I have never felt more helpless. In front of me was a human leg, still bleeding, the rest of the body of the leg’s owner was crumpled up with the steering wheel pinning his chest. In the passenger seat was another man, with multiple fractures and in the back seat, a third man with no apparent injuries locked in the compressed metal of what had previously been a vehicle. This was not a job for a single first responder with an emergency bag. I did my best to comfort those still living until the ambulance arrived with the Jaws of Life and other equipment

• 86. 74 An American Life Soldier’s Heart In early 1982 I became very interested in the condition of combatrelated post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This interest had first been stimulated by my experiences working with concentration camp survivors at the Beth Israel Hospital. The similarity of the combat veteran and the concentration camp survivor was that, in both cases, the individual found him/herself in a world in which the entire object was to kill the person (gas chambers/enemy troops). This seemed to me, and still does, as a different sort of syndrome than other types of PTSD, such as surviving a rape or airplane crash., in which the trauma was equally terrible but not part of an organized system of killing. Although the name PTSD was new — accepted by the American Psychiatric Association only in 1980 — the condition has affected soldiers since the beginnings of warfare. In the First World War it was known as shell shock, in the Second it was called combat fatigue; and in the American Civil War this same malady was known as soldier’s heart. No doubt one of the reasons that retiree Roman Legionnaires were given tracts of land in far-off Gaul was to keep them and their PTSD symptoms far away from Rome. I started one of the first inpatient PTSD units in the country, a unit that has been successfully treating combat veterans now for almost forty years, helping thousands regain their civilian composure. Getting permission to start this program was not easy, as the VA at that time was used to dealing with World War II vets, who were now in late middle age and far more docile than the angry young men from Vietnam. Work at the VA was satisfying, and I considered it an honor to help psychologically disabled veterans back into society.This work was challenging and could also be dangerous. Veterans, by their life’s experience, are familiar with weapons, and sometimes may be tempted to use them if feeling provoked. One such vet, who was disappointed in a decision made by the Board of Compensation, actively threatened me, saying he knew where I lived and where my children went to school. I alerted the authorities but then carried a personal firearm for a while as a result. A curious anomaly occurred in 1996 when I was appointed Chief of Staff while still holding the position of Chief of Psychiatry. Chief of Staff is the direct supervisor of Chief of Psychiatry in the VA system. Sometimes, as the hospital’s Chief of Staff, I was forced to make decisions that I did not agree with in my role as head of psychiatry. When the family moved from Cambridge to West Chesterfield in 1980, I became Chief of Psychiatry at the VA Medical Center in Northampton, a position I held until 1996 when I was appointed Chief of Staff of the entire Medical Center. I remained in that position until 2005 when I retired from the VA medical care system. I did not, however, retire from the practice of psychiatry and continued to see patients in Massachusetts. I moved my psychiatric practice to Northern California in 2015 and didn’t retire until 2022 at the age of 81. As the Chief of Psychiatry at the VA Medical Center in Northampton, I was tasked with developing a modern psychiatric department at an older hospital, one built in 1924. I hired qualified. Board-certified psychiatrists, set high standards and successfully designed modern programs that significantly changed and improved the treatment of veterans. On May 21, 1982, Alexander came along. Our third child was a huge breech baby whose birth required a C section at the Cooley

• 87. An American Life 75 Back on the Farm Dickinson Hospital in Northampton. While he was an infant Xander would accompany Annie, still teaching at Mount Holyoke, on her commute to South Hadley and stay with a family there during the day, the two returning to us at night. We had devised a lifestyle close to the land — strenuous but rewarding. As one could well imagine, the schedule was demanding and was hard on all of us. We’d become owner-operators of a small subsistence farming operation, even as Annie and I continued to work full time as professor and doctor and continued as parents of three small children. Everybody, as able, was needed to help out with the chores. The winters were hard, with large snowdrifts filling the roads. I had a large truck and eight-foot plow to clear the snow, but we soon learned the truth of the old adage, that a four-wheel drive truck will allow you to get stuck in places that you could never get stuck in with a two-wheeler. When that happened I’d call up our neighbor Fred Chick and borrow his small bulldozer to free my truck. And every winter, we would buy a 50-pound bag of onions and one of potatoes in case we were snowed in for days and days, but that never happened, although Chesterfield’s own snowplow often got stuck and needed a giant bulldozer to free it. We joined the Chesterfield Congregational Church, where Annie quickly was voted onto the Board of Trustees, and I worked as a deacon. On those occasions when the regular organist, Russell Bisbee, was absent, I played that old organ for the services. The organ was built in 1867 by the Johnson & Son Organ Co., of Westfield, MA. This is the same year my Grandfather Holmes was born, the same year too that the house on Mr.Kinney’s farm was built. The Johnson & Son Jon on the tractor pulling our stuck truck out. organ was huge — sixteen feet high, many feet deep — so large that when the church bought it second-hand for about $250 in 1924 and had it carted up from Huntington in a horse-drawn wagon, an addition to the church building was necessary in order for there to be room for it. It was one of the tracker types — smaller than the organs Bach played but similar in function — with a powerful, deeply beautiful set of pipes. Already considered obsolete at the time it was built, this organ’s only concession to modernity was that now its bellows were operated by an electric motor instead of by the huge pump handle in the back. One Sunday when the electricity failed, I was called into service as the pump-boy and the service continued with only a slight delay.

• 88. 76 An American Life The Garden, Maple Sugaring, Getting Wood In That first year our garden was about one acre in size but each year after that it grew smaller and smaller, as we became more realistic. We ate off that garden and our pigs ate off it too. Annie put up jars of canned vegetables and we made our own maple syrup, getting about ten gallons of syrup from our trees, all of which we used ourselves or gave to friends. The gathering and boiling of the sap in the springtime was a big farm ritual, as was the chopping, splitting, stacking of the more than eight cords of wood we’d need to heat our house. For the syrup, we had a wood stove in the woodshed where we boiled down the more than 40 gallons of sap required to make a single gallon of syrup. After our first disastrous attempt, when we boiled in the house, leaving walls and ceiling coated by the sticky maple steam, we came to understood why New England farms all have a sugar house lying separate and well away from rooms where you might want to live. Getting the wood in required all of us, four at first, then quickly five, I handled the chain saw and the hydraulic splitter, while Annie, Jonathan and the smaller ones took each new stick to the woodshed. Later, as our kids grew older we had five legitimate hands and the work went smoothly. By now we well understood the old New England adage about wood, that each log will heat you three or four times, first the cutting, then the splitting, then in stacking, and only then in the comfort of burning. Thistle and Rose, Annie’s study of the modern Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid, was published and in 1984, she was offered a teaching position at Smith College, in Northampton. South Hadley being twice as far away, she accepted. Our now two-year old Xander would be cared for during the day by a Chesterfield family. The West Chesterfield Boutelles and their three Suffolk ewes.

• 89. An American Life 77 The Rhythm of Our Days grandmother Jean Edwards, who had assisted Annie in becoming a Queen’s Guide 30 years before, [See photo on page 55.] Thankfully, when someone else agreed to act as scoutmaster, I was off the hook. Both Laura and Xander were in scouting but neither chose to pursue it. We also required each of the children to take two years of piano lessons, at the end of which they could decide whether to continue or not. None did. Each day we all would journey down from the ridge top entering the 20th century, Annie and I going to work and the kids to school. We’d then retreat to the 19th at the end of the day. We did, of course, have electricity and a telephone and in the year 1984 we finally did break down and buy a television set. The days and weeks at Chesterfield had a particular rhythm, as did the year. We would go out to Star Island for the week that I was a doctor there, we would often go to Scotland to visit Annie’s mother, and we would go to Santa Cruz on the coast of Northern California, where my mother had settled after my father’s death in 1972. At these times when we were away, the animals were cared for by a neighbor. Each Memorial Day I, along with the other town veterans, would gather at town center to be given a rifle loaded with blanks from the American Legion. We would then march the 300 yards to the town cemetery. There, we would form a line and on command give a ragged three-shot salute to fallen veterans, the entire town attending and stirring speeches were made. Meanwhile, Jonathan had become a Boy Scout and was rising fast in hierarchy of rank, heading for Eagle Scout. Halfway through this training, however, the scoutmaster abruptly moved to Arizona and no one else wanted to step up into the role. I became the Scoutmaster, organizing camping trips every month — including January — and running each weekly meeting in the Town Hall. The troop took an overnight canoe trip from lower Vermont down to Turners Fall, MA, designed dogsleds—these to be pulled by the scouts themselves — for the winter inter-troop contests, and one summer made a 50-mile hike/paddle/ portage in Maine. When Jonathan earned his Eagle Scout rank the badge was pinned on by his Jonathan as an Eagle Scout with Troop 705. In this black-and-white photo, the color of Jon’s neckerchief doesn’t show as blue. All the other scouts are wearing red.

• 90. 78 An American Life Transitions The annual Fourth of July parade was a Chesterfield tradition and still is. In it I marched my scout troop down the two-block street, the sheriff and his men upon their horses, the fire engine and police car blew their sirens and the kids all marched in costume. Annie’s mother Jean continued to visit from Scotland for a month each year, often timed to be there for this parade. Idyllic though this childhood seemed to us — and Jonathan, Laura and Xander may strenuously disagree — Annie and I realized that we should be offering a more broadening experience for our children. And so, both Jonathan and Laura spent a high school semester in Switzerland, at a public school in Geneva where nothing but French was spoken. We had come to know the principal of that school, whose daughter had stayed with us some summers at the farm. As preparation for these visits and to supplement the French learned at high school, we rented French movies — by this time we had acquired a VCR — and were now taping over the English subtitles at the bottom of the screen. Not wanting to mimic his older siblings and wanting to speak his own second language, Xander elected to spend time in Spain. This all continued until our farm’s labor force left, one by one, for college. Annie and I then realized that we could not continue the rigorous farm work on our own and, in 2001, we sold Ridgetop Farm and moved to a Victorian house in Florence, just two miles one way to my work at the VA and two miles the other way to Smith College for Annie. In town we marveled — astonished — at streetlights and that gas was piped directly into our home from pipes under the streets, as we were gradually becoming accustomed to life in the 21st century.

• 91. An American Life 79 On Oban Bay These photos are taken from the highest point on Kerrera, a tiny island in Oban Bay. One year Jonathan brought a sleeping bag and spent the night up there.

• 92. 80 An American Life Annie Boutelle, Poet I continued working at the VA, where I had risen to become the hospital’s Chief of Staff as well as its Chief of Psychiatry, and Annie continued her teaching at Smith College as well as her oversight of the college poetry center she founded in 1997, which has since been renamed the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center in her honor. Annie was an inspired teacher, famously so, her classes always overbooked. The general feeling among students of all disciplines was that your Smith education was not complete until you took one of Professor Boutelle’s courses. She was also writing poetry, which resulted in four volumes published between 2005 and 2014. Annie Boutelle’s How They Fell, published in 2014 by CavanKerry Press, was met by extravagant and well-earned praise: “These are beautiful, fearless poems, their language equal to the most fearsome occasions,” one reviewer said. This is “…a book to savor, to celebrate to come back to over and over,” said another.

• 93. An American Life 81 This Caravaggio, printed and published by Hedgerow Books of Levellers Press, Amherst, MA, 2012. The poems are told in this brilliant painter’s dark voice. Last Words for Lena He said he was leaving Rome. But he kept painting me. No matter where he drifted. I’d be like a spirit, hiding in his shoe. When he needed it, he’d take me out. No way he could lose me. From This Caravaggio by Annie Boutelle, 2012 Country Born in one country, I’ll die in another. And if I dream, I’m where I was before I was: and if I’m awake, I’m where I’ll be after I am, and hard at times to tell which space. But I know my father with the movie-star good looks and the nogood luck, scratchy dressing gown leather patch at elbows, hangs out in the country of dreams, and my tiny mother shrinks so small she curls in his pocket mouselike, against the dark, and always in the space between two countries, sound of rushing water, rain pitpattering relentless on a pitched slate roof, or waves breaking on pebble beach that swallows its salt, or the river telling its tired stories to rocks and trees, and the journeying hard in the place between, where two pale moons struggle to see which wins a slot in the sky, and flowers are Baudelaire’s, beautiful, malign, seductive, song birds banished, fauna unrecognizable, and all who enter hurry through, ignoring the flowers who gasp and plead for audience. From How They Fell by Annie Boutelle, 2014

• 94. 82 An American Life Sara Holmes Boutelle, Julia Morgan Scholar Shortly after moving to California and as she was taking the visitor’s tour at the Hearst Castle at San Simeon on the central coast, Sara Boutelle discovered that the architect of the entire huge compound was a woman. Julia Morgan had gone to University of California, Berkeley, taking a degree in engineering and studying with the famed architect Bernard Maybeck. She was the first woman to graduate from Cal in architectural design, after which she moved to Paris to continue her training at the renowned Academy des Beaux-Art. My mother’s next decade was devoted to research into the life and work of this extraordinary, highly original individual. Julia Morgan was not only gifted, she was also amazingly prolific, designing more than eight hundred buildings. This was a woman — as my mother soon discovered — remarkably intent on guarding her privacy. The design and construction of San Simeon took place over a period of nearly thirty years. All during this time she’d board a train from Berkeley traveling to San Simeon on a Friday, work on the project all weekend, and then return to her architectural practice on Monday. Indeed, when she retired, she offered clients the original blueprints of the buildings she had designed for them, and then burned all those that remained unclaimed. My mother, who’d always been drawn toward the academy and might well have become a scholar after her graduation from Mount Holyoke, resolved to find out all she could about this publicity-averse and reclusive woman. Sara was then in her seventies. She researched old records in San Luis Obispo County, tracked down and interviewed carpenters and stonemasons, some of whom were then in their 90s. Fourteen years later in 1988, Sara published Julia Morgan, Architect, the seminal work on this giant of American architecture. At that time and due in part to her distain for public notice, Julia Morgan was still little-known and Sara’s book sparked international interest in her work, from both an architectural and a feminist viewpoint. For years after publication, my mother traveled to lecture on Julia Morgan at schools of architecture, at Yale and Columbia, at Mount Holyoke and Williams colleges, and at the Pompidou Center in Paris, to name a few.

• 95. An American Life 83 Joyous Occasion Torn by Grief One Way to Varanasi 19 January 1999 As they wouldn’t believe him dead, we stripped the blanket off and let the body in the bunk cool down. The jeans and white t-shirt marked him as one of us, but under the clack and shudder of the wheels, earth was calling back its blood and the back of his ears and neck turned grape-purple-blue. He was going nowhere now.Along the straight track Varanasi’s platform hurtled toward us. Each time the train’s brake squealed, fog gripped the windows, thick as muslin layers that, five hours later, would wrap the body into a tidy packet, neat as any Pharaoh’s, ready to load on a bicycle cart and sealed with crimson wax. From Nest of Thistles, Annie Boutelle 2004 In 1999 our family had a huge change. Jonathan was married to Rashmi Sinha in Allahabad, India. Jonathan had met Rashmi when they were together at Brown University, and — although she was a doctoral student, and our son was still an undergraduate — the two fell in love. For the wedding, the whole family travelled to India — Laura, Xander, my brother Christopher and Glenn Patterson, Chris’ partner of twenty years. Andy Edwards, a cousin of Annie’s who lives in London also came along. For this event I’d prepared a small speech in phonetic Hindi and we all set out. This joyous event was marred by the tragic death of Glenn who suffered cardiac arrest while on the train to Varanasi. We were then forced to learn first-hand about Indian rituals of cremation and the rules regarding transport of ashes back to the US. The wedding did, however, proceed and was beautiful, seemingly even more joyous and touching as it was shadowed by this loss. Jon and Rashmi settled in Mountain View, CA, and designed the start-up tech company SlideShare that they eventually sold to LinkedIn. On 2 January 2012, our twin grandsons Rohan and Vikram were born in San Francisco.

• 96. 84 An American Life California Laura with Iona Morgan Boutelle, born in Berkeley in 2018. Rashmi and Jon, with Rohan and Vikram, born in San Francisco in 2012. Upon graduation from Brown, Laura moved to California and trained as an architect at the University of California, Berkeley, then opened her own firm. On December 14, 2018, she gave birth to Iona Boutelle. Our granddaughter is now five years old. When Xander finished at Brown he also came west to settle, returning to Massachusetts for an MBA at MIT. He now lives in Oakland and works as a project manager at various firms. When I retired from the VA in 2005, I began work as a psychiatrist at two western Massachusetts clinics — ServiceNet and New England Geriatrics — until our move to California in 2015. I got established and went to work at Lifelong Medical Care in Berkeley, continuing until 2022, when I finally retired from the practice of medicine at age 81.

• 97. An American Life 85 Generations Boutelle brothers in 1995. The three Boutelle brothers in 1980, inspired by Mary Holmes’ 1948 painting [see p. 31] — Will with fife, Jonathan with chicken, and Chris with our dog. The Dr. William Eugene Boutelle family in 1957.

• 98. 86 An American Life Generations Will and Annie, Cambridge, MA, 1973. Jonathan in Cambridge. Jon and Laura. Xander

• 99. An American Life 87 Generations Three generations — Laura, Jean and Annie — at Ridgetop Farm. Help! We’re from the city. Ridgetop Farm, fall 1980. Five Boutelles in a tree, 1991.

• 100. 88 An American Life Annie I have so far avoided speaking of the central tragedy of our family life, which is that our beautiful, brilliant wife and mother Annie Boutelle was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease in 2012, at age 68. Her diagnosis coincided with her retirement after 42 years of teaching. There were few symptoms in the beginning, but the disease is progressive and soon I needed to employ caregivers to be with her during my hours away seeing patients at my office. A tragic experience, our watching the keen intellect of this woman we all loved so dearly deteriorate before our eyes. By early 2015 we made the collective decision that she and I should move to California, since all three of our children were living there at that time. I cared for Annie at home but as her condition continued to worsen, she began to wander and in November of 2019 we needed to place her in residential care, where she is safe and secure and remains to this day Which would normally be the end of this story, except — luckily enough — it isn’t.

• 101. Annie on Mufra on Oban Bay.

• 102. 90 An American Life My Best Pandemic A funny thing happened to me on the way to becoming a lonely old man. In November of 2020, for my eightieth birthday, my daughter Laura had the idea of putting together a tribute video made up of brief appearances of people from my past. She got clips from old colleagues, bosses, neighbors, relatives, our wide circle of friends. Laura consulted my brother Christopher, who suggested the name Mary Burge, the same Munchie I’d met as the boy next door to the Engles in Iowa City in 1943, the same Munchie who was there when her father Paul stood as my godfather. Our families were so close Mary had named her first child Christopher after my brother and her daughter Sara after my mother. We’d known one another as youngsters, then again as teenagers vacationing on Long Island but as the years elapsed we’d moved on, fallen in love and married other people. In the 1970s in Cambridge, our families knew one another again as friends. Mary was then teaching at Harvard but as her marriage ended felt the need to change careers and had decided to go back to school. In 1977, she gathered her children — Sara, then five, and Christopher nine, and moved to California. They lived in Palo Alto where, given that this was a wealthy community, Mary knew there would be good schools. She was herself attending UC Berkeley in training as a social worker. After graduation she found work at Stanford where she eventually became the chief social worker for the university’s heart transplant program, a position she then held for forty years. In this capacity she worked closely with such trailblazing heart surgeons as Dr. Norman Shumway, the first American surgeon to successfully transplant a human heart. Over the years Mary’s great friend was my younger brother — we were both heartbroken when Christopher died suddenly in an auto mobile accident in November of 2021. With this loss, I was left as the last of the Boutelle brothers. Before he died, however, he had become aware of how much Munchie and I once again had come to mean to one another — he was elated for all of us. In order to better understand the ongoing development of this relationship the interested reader is encouraged to consult the piece I wrote in 2021. “My Best Pandemic,” can be found in Appendix C on page 98. During Covid lockdown, Mary and I began the intense email correspondence that rekindled our old deep friendship and — eventually — love. Our ardent exchanges developed into the close romantic relationship that’s felt lifesaving, not only for the two of us, but as a matter of joy and gratitude for each of our five children. As part of my campaign to win Munchie’s heart, I began playing piano again, something I’d neglected for forty years. This resulted in my learning or relearning a huge number of popular songs from the early and mid-twentieth century. I’ve now recorded a four CDs compilation entitled “Will Plays the Oldies.”

• 103. An American Life 91 Lonely Old Man, Boy Next Door Mary Engle at fifteen Sonnet 58 The boy next door owned toys she never found. And best of all a marvelous blue boat With wheels that rolled it over grass and ground, Yet in a pool of water it would float. All other toys moved in one element, Truck on land, kite on a length of string, But the blue boat was doubly different, Less like a plaything than a living thing. One evening she left it on the walk And it was smashed, her first enormous crime. He wept accusingly, unreconciled, Until she touched him without any talk, With one warm hand, and was for the first time In act a woman, though in hand a child. From American Child by Paul Engle, 1945 Will and Mary in 2024

• 104.

• 105. Appendices

• 106. 94 An American Life Appendix A— Con Keating I write this on the eve of the 100th anniversary of Good Friday 1916, a day on which occurred the very first casualties in what is generally known as the Easter Sunday Rising in Ireland. I first heard this story in 1972 from my cousin Bride Keating (now deceased), who was either the niece or the sister of Con Keating (I cannot remember which) and who was a lifelong schoolteacher in Caherciveen, County Kerry. My wife Ann and I were visiting to renew family connections which came from my paternal grandmother, Margaret Keating Boutelle, whose father had journeyed from Caherciveen to Worcester, Massachusetts in the later 19th Century. When we visited again in 1977 I heard the story again and asked Cousin Bride if any of the other people from that time were still alive. She knew several, all very elderly, and invited them to tea. After the story was again told, Cousin Bride presented us with a copy of The Capuchin Annual 1966 published in Dublin, which gave an account of the events of that night. Since that time, I have seen an article in the Archives of the journal The Kingdom from April 13, 2006 (archives.tcm.ie/thekingdom/2006/04/13/story20146.asp) and a publication from North Antrim (northantrim.com/ rogercasement.htm), both of which describe these events. Each has, however, since been removed from the internet, but are still available on archiving sites. Given these varied sources, I will present the events as I heard them from my cousin and her friends, using the written sources for fact-checking backup. Before the Easter Rising, Padraig Pearse, Roger Casement and many others recognized the necessity of obtaining arms and other materiel for the fight. Germany, which was engaged in fighting the British in World War I, was only too willing to help. A quantity of arms — including 20,000 rifles, some machine guns and about one million rounds of ammunition — was loaded aboard The Libau a ship originally named The Castro and owned by a Hull company before being captured in the early days of the war by a German torpedo boat. The ship was then outfitted as a Norwegian freighter, renamed again as Aud Norge and crewed by German sailors disguised as Norwegian seamen. Under cover of darkness, the new name painted on her hull, with “Bergen” given as her home port, the ship sailed from Hamburg to Leubeck, where she was loaded with arms carefully disguised. Captain Karl Spindler was in charge of The Aud and he met with Roger Casement in Berlin before the mission. The plan was for The Aud to sail to a point off County Kerry and there meet with Casement for the delivery. However, Casement became concerned about traveling by surface ship and agreed to be delivered to Ireland by German submarine. The sub which took him, U19, was commanded by Captain Weissbach who, a year earlier, had been the torpedo officer on U20 when it sank the “Lusitania”. Indeed, it was Captain Weissbach himself who released the torpedo. Meanwhile, it had been proposed by the Volunteer headquarters to dismantle the British wireless station on Valentia Island just off Caherciveen and set up a transmitter in Tralee to make contact with The Aud. On the morning of Good Friday a party of five men left Dublin to carry out this task. They were Denis Daly, Con Keating, Donal Sheehan, Charles Monaghan and Colm O’Lochlainn, with Daly in charge of the party. Keating was chosen because he was the one man among them who was expert on wireless installation; he also knew Morse code. The five rode the train from Dublin to Killarney, where two cars from Limerick would be waiting to take them first to Caherciveen to capture the radio and then to Tralee to set up the transmitter to guide The Aud in for unloading. One of the Limerick cars, a new Briscoe American 20 horsepower open tourer, belonged to John J. Quilty, the son of a man involved in the 1867 rising. The other, an older Maxwell, belonged to Tommy MacInerney, a garage owner. They met the Dublin party in Killarney and set off, the car containing Daly in the lead because Daly knew the

• 107. An American Life 95 way, with the MacInerney car following. The weather, which had been fair, began to darken with mist. Daly’s car got through to the outskirts of Caherciveen and waited there for the other car. MacInerney, meanwhile, had had engine trouble and lost sight of the lead car. He also encountered a policeman outside Killorglin who became so inquisitive that Keating was finally forced to draw his revolver and order him off. Now, with the mist swirling and as each was becoming increasingly anxious about the police, the men headed off without seeing Daly’s car. MacInerney was not sure of the way after Killorglin and stopped to ask directions from a young girl, who told them “first turn to the right”. Macinerney was still in some doubt after the turn and asked Keating (who was from Caherciveen) if they were on the right road. Keating replied that he was certain they were on the road to Caherciveen and MaciInerney put on speed. The road actually ended on Ballykissane Pier and seconds later the car shot over the pierhead and into the water. MacInerney, the only survivor, heard Keating utter the words “Jesus, Mary and Joseph”, after which he sank out of sight. Donal Sheehan, Con Keating and Charles Monaghan were therefore the very first casualties of the Easter Rising, having drowned before midnight on Good Friday. Con Keating is buried in Caherciveen and a city park was named in his honor. There is a heavy irony to this tragic story: Although Con Keating, as radio expert, was there to contact The Aud after the British radio station had been overwhelmed, no one had thought to check whether the ship carried a radio and — in fact — it did not. Therefore, even had the mission been a success, it would have been a failure. The Aud, with cargo aboard, was later scuttled by Captain Spindler in Queenstown harbor, after having been captured by the British As Annie and I sat in Bride Keating’s sitting room in 1977 listening to the older ladies retell their remembrances of that night 61 years earlier, we noticed that several of them indicated that the men had stopped by for a cup of cheer, as they said, in beginning their journey on that dark and misty night. It’s surely possible that these statements were only delivered to make the tellers part of that story, but if true, then there might have been another reason for that car to have gone shooting off the end of that pier.

• 108. 96 An American Life Appendix B — Obadiah Holmes Upon his emigration to America, Obadiah Holmes established the first glass factory in what was to become the United States of American. As a dissenter from the Established Church of England he founded what has become the Baptist denomination. The son of Robert and Katherine Holmes, Obadiah Holmes was born in England in 1606 into a family of means engaged in industry. Though he matriculated in Oxforcl University he didn’t graduate and broke with the Church of England when he had satisfied himself that the only form of baptism acceptable was adult immersion together with public confession, beliefs found heretical and for which he was expelled. He was married to Katherine Hyde in 1630 in the Manchester Cathedral and the couple resided in Manchester until 1636 when Obadiah was banished from England because of his heretical religious beliefs and nonconformity. He landed in Boston but settled in Salem where he joined the church and was granted land for the purpose of building his glass factory, becoming the first to successfully manufacture glass in the colonies. He continued his nonconformist practices and was excommunicated from the Salem church. Thereupon he went to Rehoboth in the Massachusetts Bay Colony to organize the first church to openly practice adult immersion, for which he was banished from the colony. He made his way to the Roger Williams’ Providence Plantations but found people there so divided and quarrelsome he and Dr. John Clarke withdrew to Newport Island. There the two set about organizing a church practicing baptism by immersion and other covenants similar to those practiced by the Baptist denomination of today. In July 1651, Obadiah Holmes set out — along with Dr. Clarke and John Crandall — for Swampscott, MA, to visit William Witter who had also been excommunicated because of his Anabaptist sympathies and practices and on account of suspicion that he was implicated in a political scheme to join the Colony of Rhode Island to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The trio felt they might better escape observation in visiting a place as remote as Swampscott in their mission to minister to someone they saw as one of Christ’s imprisoned and needy disciples. But on Sunday, the day after their arrival, they held a private church service at which they were promptly arrested and charged with having administered baptism and communion. Compelled to attend the Established Church service during which they read, they stubbornly refused to remove their hats until the constable did that for them. When Obadiah Holmes had been tried at Plymouth after his expulsion from Rehoboth, the Boston authorities felt he’d been dealt with too leniently. Now that he was their prisoner again and as the most prominent of the three, he was sentenced to pay 30 pounds or be flogged. The other two men were issued lesser fines, which friends then paid. Obadiah, though, steadfastly refused to allow his fine to be paid and went to the whipping post. When Obadiah tried to start a theological discussion during his trial, the pastor of the Established Church put a curse on him and Governor Endicott of the Massachusetts Bay Colony declared that Obadiah Holmes deserved to die. In a letter written to friends in England he said, “the Lord came to my aid and the punishment was as nothing.” The historian King has written, “Obadiah Holmes, the martyr of heavenly spirit and triumphant faith, was Dr. Clarke’s successor in the pastoral offices of the Newport Baptist Church for thirty years.” After the flogging he hid in the home of a friend for weeks as he recovered, then fled in the night when he heard the authorities were again coming to arrest him. Evidently, word was out that all the while he was in the Massachusetts Bay Colony he’d been offering communion and conducting adult baptisms.

• 109. An American Life 97 He then fled to Newport where he continued his ministry. By way of material possessions, Obadiah Holmes had acquired a plantation of 500 acres which he improved and profitably managed for a wealthy man until this man died, when it came to him. And in addition to his preaching and his farming, Obadiah and eleven others were granted the equivalent of two entire counties in what is now the State of New Jersey, this grant conditioned on their establishing a town on this land and settling 200 families in this new community. Both his son and son-inlaw settled here and each of whom lived to raise families of nine children, so New Jersey had literally thousands of descendants of Obadiah Holmes, connections reaching to include Abraham Lincoln in Kentucky. This new town was named Middletown: Obadiah organized its first Baptist church, still the leading church in this town and the oldest Baptist church in New Jersey.

• 110. 98 An American Life Appendix C — My Best Pandemic November, 2020: The world was reeling from the effects of Covid-19. No vaccines were available and the daily reported new cases were over 140,000, with more than 3000 deaths during the month. Everyone in the world was either hunkering down or in denial of these statistics, depending on locale. As a practicing physician, I had been seeing my patients by video for much of the year, and had limited my outdoor activities to one weekly trip to the supermarket at 7:00 in the morning. It would be another month before the first vaccines for this disease would be approved by the FDA and life looked pretty grim. Then my daughter had an idea for how to celebrate my 80th birthday, which would happen during the second week of November. She called people who were important in my life and asked them to record brief congratulatory messages, to be compiled in a “Tribute” video. She contacted old friends, employers, colleagues, pastors, relatives (including two Greek guys I had met on a trip in 1969, when we discovered that all three had the same 1940 birthday), and compiled the video. When she asked my younger brother — Chris was 75 at the time, now is sadly deceased — about others to include, he mentioned Mary, a woman I had known since we were both three years old. Although our families were close in the 1940s — her father was my godfather and she subsequently named one of her children for my brother and the other for my mother — we had drifted apart, and now Christopher was much closer to Mary than I was. A bit of history here: Mary and I had coincidentally lived near each other not only in Iowa, but also in Westchester County, NY, in Cambridge, MA, and now in Northern California. She was a frequent visitor in my family’s home when we were in our teens and also later on, when we both had children. Indeed, we had a brief affair when we were in our early 20s, but then went on to marry other people. Mary was — and is — very intellectual, a strong person, and when her marriage dissolved, she decided to leave Harvard where she was teaching and set out on a new course in life, training as a social worker. In 1977 she travelled with her two children, then five and nine years old, across the country to Palo Alto because, as she says, it was a wealthy community providing good schools for her children, even though she herself was not wealthy. After satisfying residence requirements in California, she enrolled in the UC Berkeley School of Social Work — commuting the 50 miles between her home and Berkeley, often with her children in tow. At the end of training, she requested the most difficult assignment available. There were two such: a chronic psychiatry unit and the Stanford Heart Transplant Program, then under the leadership of Dr. Norman Shumway: this world-famous surgeon had performed the first successful US heart transplant only ten years earlier. Mary chose the heart transplant program and there she remained for the next forty years, becoming a central figure in this pioneering treatment. Meanwhile, I’d stayed in Cambridge finishing my residency and serving in the Navy during the 1970s. In 1980, my wife Annie and I decided to move to the country and we bought the farm in western Massachusetts to raise our three children. Annie, an accomplished poet and PhD in English, published five books and taught at Smith College, while I worked as a doctor at the local VA medical center. We had an idyllic life in the Berkshire foothills, raising all our vegetables and eating only meat from animals we’d raised. Sadly, in 2012, Annie developed Alzheimer’s disease which became slowly progressive. After three years we decided to move to California, since by that time all of our children had moved there. We made the move, first to Berkeley and then to Oakland and I worked as a doctor at a local non-profit clinic, where I still see patients. Annie’s illness progressed from just needing a caregiver to dangerous wandering through the streets of Oakland — sometimes only being found by using the GPS on the Apple watch she wore on her wrist. By November, 2019 we all had come to understand Annie needed residential care. Fortunately, found an excellent facility nearby in Oakland, where I was able to visit her daily.

• 111. An American Life 99 Then Covid came and no visitation was permitted for many months. By the time I was again able to visit, Annie’s illness had progressed to the point that she could no longer recognize either me or the children. Sadly, this is the natural course of this terrible disease. Back to November, 2020: Mary and I had not seen one another in more than five years, had not touched in more than sixty. My brother Chris gave her name to my daughter, who contacted her. Mary was unable to record a video but sent a lengthy email. I answered by email, and thus began a five-month interchange, sometimes three or four messages a day in which we spoke of our lives and experiences, both happy and sad, all these reminiscences of half a century’s separation. Neither of us was vaccinated and couldn’t meet and chose email as our preferred medium. Gradually, over the months, the messages became more intimate—indeed somewhat steamy. We likened the interchange to those 19th Century epistolary affairs, such as those of Emily Dickinson, whose letters are now available because the poet in many cases didn’t send them. We spoke of our children, our lives, current events, our hopes, our fears. We fell in love. By February 2021, we were able to express these feelings to each other and became extremely eager to meet. However, Covid got in the way. As a practicing health care worker, and geriatric human, I’d been able to get vaccinated in late January, but Mary couldn’t be vaccinated until March. We set a date of two weeks after her second shot to meet for the first time. I drove down to Palo Alto to pick Mary up for our first weekend on April 16th, 2021. We were both very nervous: How could this be happening? Neither of us had planned any such thing before our re-introduction. Who knew what might now occur? However, we seemed to get over these fears very quickly. We had found that our lives had such congruence that we could often finish each others’ sentences. Both having similar backgrounds and being in related medical fields have had us wondering and laughing together many times a day. Since then, we have traded weekends at each other’s homes, and we recently returned from a two-week trip to Massachusetts, visiting old haunts. Our total five children are all on board with this octogenarian romance and we are a bit like teenagers—often referring to our “last rodeo”. And it gets better each time we meet. Written in December, 2021 by Will Boutelle

• 112. 100 An American Life Timeline of the Boutelle, Holmes, Blair, and Edwards Families BOUTELLE LINE [1632: two brothers, James & John Boutelle leave England and settle in Massachusettes Bay Colony. John emigrates to the New Haven Colony; James continues line] HOLMES LINE BLAIR LINE EDWARDS LINE James Boutelle1 Alice Rebecca Kendall Deacon James4 1699-1752 James5 Elizabeth Smith 1606-1682 Katherine Hyde George Wishart (Burned at the stake) Sir Bryce Blair (Executed by Edward I) James3 Elizabeth Frothingham James2 Rachel Wood William6 1755-1835 Jonathan 1633-1713 Sarah Borden 1644-1713 Mary Alice Ashton 1671-1716 1608-?? Mary Blackwood 1755-1831 1725-1778 1730?? Margaret Rodger 1660-1737 1513-1546 James Marjory Fergusson 1296- ? James Hugh Joseph 1698-1777 Elizabeth Ashton 1700-1750 Judith Poole Obadiah Holmes Obadiah II 1666-1745 Thomas7 1787-1869 Abigail Knight 1787-1872 Mary Clumm 1732-1812 Rev. Obadiah III 1728-1794 Janet Laird James 1656-?? 1759-1839 1777-?? Matthew C. Elizabeth Crawford John 1701-?? 1690-??

• 113. An American Life 101 BOUTELLE LINE, cont. HOLMES LINE, cont. BLAIR LINE, cont. EDWARDS LINE, cont. Elizabeth Bancroft Isaac Elizabeth McNabb 1772-1857 (George) (Frank) Emma M. Curtis 1845-1906 Eugene George 1876-1963 Margaret T. Keating 1879-1969 1872-1872 1873-1877 1881-1882 Walter 1806-?? Dr. David Knight (William C.) (Arthur W.) (Alfred B.) John Horace 1867-1966 Marie H. Adams 1880-1975 1811-1891 1815-1864 William Eugene 1848-1887 1764-1851 (Laura) 1852 (Wendell 1857 (Carrie) 1862 1804-1849 Agnes Greig Mary Sword 1835-1915 1832-1909 John Agnes Lang 1839-1927 1837-1908 Matthew 1908-1972 1909-1999 William Eugene Sara Stratton Holmes Gerald O’Malley Ann Walker Margaret C. S. Wishart Robert Harry S. 1867- ?? 1870-1937 1876-1968 (William) (Arthur ) 1903-1993 1900-1984 Alexander Wishart Jean Fulton Blair 1905-2004 1907-1952 (Isabella) (John Wallace) Iona Morgan 2018 Ann Margaret Edwards 1945-2021 1943 (Sheena) (Buchanan-Smith) Eliza O’Malley 1969 Sara O’Malley 1962 Christopher Krohn 1957 Richard Hylton 1963 Nora Hylton 2002 Sophia O’Malley-Krohn 1995 Isabel O’Malley-Krohn 2000 Michael O’Malley 1937 Elisabeth Peters 1940 Laura Paisley Holmes 1976 Jonathan Blair 1973 Rashmi Sinha 1968 Vikram Sinha 2012 Rohan Sinha 2012 Desmond Tucker Caspers 2008 Adrienne Nan Caspers 2015 Elliette Anne Jonathan Holmes 1942-2020 William Eugene 1940 Kim Howell (Tyler) 1943 Megan E. Caspers Anne Wallis Philip Christopher 1975 Alexander Wishart 1982 Thomas Benjamin Seiji Christopher Curtis 1946-2021 1973 2012 1978 1973 Emily Stratton 1825-1902 John M. Holmes 1817-1883 Mary Adams Holmes 1910-2002 Rachel O’Malley 1964

• 114. 102 An American Life Books by Annie Boutelle Thistle and Rose: A Study of Hugh MacDiarmid’s Poetry (1980) Becoming Bone: Poems on the Life of Celia Thaxter, 1835 -1894 (2005) Nest of Thistles (2005) Relic-Works: A Collaboration, with Images by S. Heideman (2007) This Caravaggio (2012) How They Fell: Poems (2014) Annie Boutelle, poet and distinguished Smith College professor.

• 115. An American Life 103 Index and Photo Index Apollo Boys Choir, 35–37 Beth Israel Hospital, Boston, 64, 65, 74 Blair, Matthew (1937–1908) , 50, 53 Boutelle, Alexander Wishart (1982– ), ix, 2, 76, 79, 86, 87 Boutelle, Ann Edwards (1943– ), ix, 2, 49, 53, 55, 57, 58, 59, 88, 89, 102 Boutelle, Charles Addison (1839–1901), 5 Boutelle, Christopher Curtis (1946–2021), v, 14, 31, 33, 76, 79, 85 Boutelle-Day Poetry Center, Smith College, 80 Boutelle, Dr. David Knight (1811–1895) , 4, 5 Boutelle, Emma M. Curtis (1845–1906) , 4, 5 Boutelle, Eugene George (1876–1958) 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10 Boutelle, Iona Morgan (2018–) , 84 Boutelle, James (arrives Massachusetts Bay Colony,1632), 4 Boutelle, Jonathan Blair (1973– ), vii, 2, 66, 69, 75, 76, 77, 79, 83, 86 Boutelle, Jonathan Holmes (1942–2020),14,15, 31, 33, 46, 47, 85, 84, 85, 87 Boutelle, Laura Paisley Holmes (1976– ), ix, 2, 66, 69, 76, 79, 84, 86, 87 Boutelle, Margaret Keating (1879–1966), 3, 5 Boutelle, Rohan Sinha (2012– ), 84 Boutelle, Sara Stratton Holmes (1909–1999) 3, 12, 15,18, 24, 25, 34, 82 Boutelle, Thomas (1787–n.d.), 4 Boutelle, Vikram Sinha (2012– ), 84 Boutelle, William Eugene (1848–1887), 5 Boutelle, William Eugene (1908–1972), 3, 9,10, 14,15, 27, 29, 65 Boutelle, William Eugene (1940– ), ix, 2, 3,14, 15, 31, 33, 34, 39, 41, 42, 43,47, 58, 59, 65, 69, 75, 76, 79, 77, 85, 86, 90 Brown University, 3, 10, 13, 14, 41, 84 Burge, Mary (“Munchie”) Engle (1940– ) 28, 29, 35, 38, 62, 91, 98, 99 Buchanan-Smith, Robin, 48, 56 Buchanan-Smith, Sheena Edwards (1945–2023), 53, 56 Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, 15, 25 Cooper, Coleman, 35–37 Cahirsiveen, County Kerry, Ireland, 5, 7, 94–95 Denison College, Denison IA, 19, 20 Dresser, Francis, 72, 73 Easter Rising, 5, 94–95 Edwards, Alexander Wishart (1907–1952), 51, 52 Edwards, Jean Fulton Blair (1905–2004), 51, 53, 54–57, 87 Engle, Paul (1908–1991), 26, 28, 91 Garrison, William Lloyd, 4 The History of Hancock, 3–5 Hayward, William Willis, 3–5 Holmes, John Horace (1867–1966), 17, 19, 20, 21, 23, 27, 29, 30 Holmes, John McNabb (1817–1883), 16 Holmes, Marie H. Adams (1880–1975), 18, 20, 21, 22, 24, 29, 30, 31, 32, Holmes, Mary Adams (1910–2002), 24, 29, 30, 31, 32 Holmes, Obadiah (1606–1682), 17, 23, 96–97 Hurley, Mildred (1895–1980). 13, 15 Julia Morgan Architect, 82 Keating, Cornelius “Con” (1894–1916), 5, 7, 94–95 Keating, Daniel (1842–1909), 5 The Liberator, 4 Lifelong Medical Care, Berkeley, 63, 64, 84 MacMaster, David, 14, 15 C.S. Morrison, 8 Morrison, Mary Keating (1876 -1958), 8 Mount Holyoke College, 12,18 ,67, 73, 82 Nadelson, Dr. Carol, 63 Newark City Hospital, 44, 63 New Jersey College of Medicine, 42 New York University, 63, 64 Niles, Walter, 14, 15 Oban Bay, Scotland, 60, 61, 79, 89 O’Malley, Michael (1937- ), 24, 28, 30 Patterson, Glenn, 83 Payne, Edwin, 14, 15 The RKO, 9, 10 St. Andrews University, 48 Sinha, Rashmi, 83, 84 Smith College, 80 South Dakota National Guard, 24 Star Island, NH, ix, 66 Stein, Walter, 70 -71 VA Medical Center, Northampton, MA, 66, 74 Watertown, MA, 9 West Chesterfield, 67, 68 Wilson, Maud Little, 35 Wishart, George (1513-1546), 50 Worcester Historical Society, 7 Note: Page numbers in italic indicate a photographic reproduction or image.

• 116. The body of this book is set in Galliard, an old-style French type based on a face fashioned by Robert Granjon in the 16th century and named after a lively dance of that period. Designed by Matthew Carter and brought out by Mergenthaler in 1978, Galliard was the first of its genre to be made expressly for phototypesetting. The display faces all belong to the Avenir family made by Swiss designer Adrian Frutiger and debuted in 1987. The word avenir — French for future — references the geometric style of the sans-serif faces developed in the 1920s to convey a sense of modernity and post-war optimism.

• 117. An American Life I awoke suddenly at five in the morning one summer Sunday with the realization that I had become the sole repository of memories of a long life, well-lived, and with only few regrets. It was on 20 August 2023 that I came to understand that I am now the only one carrying on the details of an American family’s history, stories that date back to the major events of the 1600s. Not only are all those Boutelles and Holmeses represented in this telling but also the history of my wife Ann Edwards Boutelle’s families, both the Edwardses and the Blairs. As the lone survivor, save one, of my generation, I had suddenly become painfully aware that many important family events reside only in my aging brain. Therefore, in an effort to preserve the memory of those people and these events for our own descendants, I’ve resolved to make this account. So begins Will Boutelle’s story of an American family whose beginnings in the Massachusetts Bay Colony of 1632 coincide with the first dramatic moments of this country’s coming into being as a nation. An American Life, full of rich historical detail, offers colorful stories of his visionary precursors, women and men both curious and gifted, creating with their own hard work lives then lived as exemplars of our national character. Dr. Boutelle’s book is also a personal story of the discipline required in growing up farming in a rural place. This tale of a family intimately entwined tells of how love can work to redeem any tragic loss whether we find one another in youth or in old age. Publication of Will Boutelle’s An American Life, his gift to generations to come, is cause for honest celebration. ridgetop press