Before 1888
A young doctor’s room
Dr. Clark Burnham boards here. The front room is his bedroom and office, and a pile of medical books holds up one corner of his sofa bed. Later he rents the back room to examine patients.
Lois Remembers, ch. 1
“They taught us never to be afraid to tell of our love, never to go to sleep angry with anyone … and never to be ashamed to say, ‘I’m sorry. I was wrong.’”
182 Clinton Street
Lois W. was born in 1891, the first of six children of Dr. Clark Burnham, a gynecologist and surgeon from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and Matilda Hoyt Spelman, whose parents lived on Willow Street in Brooklyn Heights. Her father had come to Brooklyn as a young doctor and boarded at 182 Clinton Street, a red brick house built in 1848. He made his rounds on horseback. The front room was his bedroom and office, and a pile of medical books held up one corner of his sofa bed. In 1888 he leased the whole house and brought his bride there. Five of their six children were born in it.
Her childhood, she wrote, was an extremely happy one. Her parents loved each other and showed it. Lois grew up in the Swedenborgian church, also called the New Church; her grandfather in Lancaster had been one of its ministers. After Sunday service, guests often came to dinner. The family held hands for the blessing and kissed the hands they held, and the wine came from the stock her father’s grateful patients had given him. Everyone told the children their mother was the loveliest person they knew.
Her father was quick, energetic and generous, and treated many families he never billed. Once, when the buckboard broke an axle at sunset on a lonely Vermont mountain road, he cut down a birch with his penknife and tied it under the axle, and the family limped home after midnight. But he “never could admit to us children that he was wrong.” One evening she told him he could be. They kept it up for hours, in good humor. “I, you see, was just as obstinate as he.”
The family spent nearly half the year in Vermont, first in her grandmother’s old house in Manchester, which her father bought, and later at two bungalows he bought on Dorset Pond, afterward named Emerald Lake. Her mother tutored the children so they could stay from May to November. Among the other summer families were the T.’s of Albany; their youngest, Ebby, was her brother Rogers’s pal. Lois rode a bicycle at five and climbed trees, and was called a tomboy. Once, jumping down from an apple tree, she tore her dress and lost her hair ribbon, and walked past the very proper Equinox House like that to see a friend. Years later she heard that a social worker had seen her that day, and had said the only person in Manchester who seemed to need help was that little girl.
In Brooklyn she went to Friends School and then to Packer Collegiate Institute. She played guard on the basketball team, and a gym test found she had the strongest back in the school. She and her friend Elise Valentine loved to dance at coming-out parties but wanted none of their own; they felt only “social butterflies” came out. Young men called on her in the front parlor, and if one hadn’t left by eleven, her mother called down from the top of the stairs. After Packer she studied charcoal drawing in New York for two terms, then went to work at the YWCA in Brooklyn, in its employment bureau.
Much later she traced something else to her girlhood: daydreams of changing bad people into good ones by the power of her personality. In her memoir she called it “frightening egotism,” and told how she came to see it (4 · Damn your old meetings).
It’s the 1890s, in Brooklyn Heights. Lois is the eldest child of a doctor, in a red brick house on Clinton Street.
Her parents love each other openly. They teach their children never to go to sleep angry, and never to be ashamed to say they were wrong.
Her father can’t say it himself. He is generous, and quick, and always right. One evening she tells him he could be wrong. They argue for hours, in good humor. She is just as obstinate as he is.
In the summers, in Vermont, she rides a bicycle at five and climbs trees. One day she walks right past the grand hotel with her dress torn and her braid flying, and doesn’t mind in the least.
Years later she hears that a visiting social worker saw her that day, and decided she was the only person in Manchester who needed help.