4. Richard Haden Gordon
(3)(4)
was born on Dec 30 1881 in Nashville, Tennessee. He died on Aug 4 1978
in North Salem, New York. Richard Haden Gordon left Nashville at the age of
sixteen and came to New York. He got a job as a runner on Wall Street, working
for the firm of DeCoppet and Doremus. During his early days in New York he roomed
with another Wall Street runner, Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., who later became one
of the first Hollywood superstars. In my possession are two letters from Fairbanks
asking his former roommate for an extension on a ten dollar loan.
While working for DeCoppet and Doremus, Richard Gordon also attended New York
University Law School. He was the class valedictorian in 1906, the only time
in the history of the school that the valedictorian attended the night sessions.
He was admitted to the bar that year and remained a member until his death, but
never practiced law.
He bought a seat on the New York Stock Exchange in 1911 and became a partner
of DeCoppet in 1913. He would remain active on the Street until only a few years
before his death in 1978 at the age of ninety-six.
By the late 1920's he was senior partner of DeCoppet, a post he would hold until
1940. During the 1930's, his friend Margaret Rudkin asked him to lend her $5000
to allow her to go into the bread business. He had the greatest doubts regarding
the prospects of the business and did not want a friend to be in the position
of owing him a large sum of money that she could not repay. So he offered instead
to invest the $5000 in return for ten percent of the stock. She readily accepted.
Twenty years later the firm, Pepperidge Farm, was sold to Campbell Soup for $27,000,000.
In 1940 he withdrew from active management of DeCoppet and in 1944 became a limited
partner of Merrill Lynch. He would remain associated with the firm the rest of
his life.
Although he always regretted his lack of formal education, he was widely and
deeply read in both history and literature. He and his wife travelled all over
the world. An honest and honorable man, he is remembered by all who had the privilege
to know him with the greatest respect and affection. He was married to Rebecca
Wilson Carson on Jul 1 1916 in Spartenburg, South Carolina.
5. Rebecca Wilson Carson was born on
Apr 8 1890 in Spartenburg, South Carolina. She died on Jun 17 1979 in North
Salem, New York. Had Rebecca Wilson Carson been born in 1940, instead of 1890,
she might very well have been the CEO of some Fortune 500 company, making life
heaven for the stockholders--whose interests she would have pursued zealously--and
hell for the employees--whose best efforts she would have expected without question.
Her executive abilities were vast but because of the time and place in which
she was born they were exercised only in running--with matchless efficiency--a
large and complicated household. By doing so, she provided her husband with an
island of domestic calm that greatly aided him in his career.
My own turbulent childhood was greatly improved by that island as well. In my
grandmother's house I invariably found the calm, civilized, predictable setting
I so lacked at home and which I have always needed since. The world of maids,
sitdown dinners, bridge games, and no raised voices is over and gone, and most
would not wish it back, but Granny Gordon provided that world to me and I am
grateful for it. As I grew older, my grandmother and I, with many traits and
interests in common, became close friends as well as close relatives. Frankly,
I adored her.
Rebecca Carson was highly intelligent and witty. There was little that escaped
her notice and little that she was unwilling to say, often with a sting in the
tail. This gave her, of course, a well-deserved reputation for being tactless
(as am I), but it was also refreshing. With her, what you saw was what you got,
she simply didn't have a devious bone in her body or the slightest inclination
to say other than what she thought was the truth.
Indeed, perhaps what was most impressive about this remarkable woman was her
honesty and her intellectual courage. She was not an intellectual--in the sense
that she had no interest in abstractions, living entirely in the real world--but
she believed what she believed and that was that. Often called by my grandfather,
with great affection, "a marvel of inaccuracy," she was much more concerned
with the essential truth in a story than details--which is the very essence of
good story telling--and she had a keen sense of irony.
Being unromantic and rational by nature, she never believed in religion. Indeed,
she was never confirmed in her family's Episcopal faith (her grandfather, whom
she never knew, had been an Episcopal priest). Today that would not be remarkable
at all. But in the turn-of-the-century deep South that was an astonishing act
of intellectual independence, especially for a girl. It is made all the more
remarkable by her father's support for her position. She was her father's favorite
child and it is very easy to see why, for they were much alike.
Her daughter Eleanora told me that the only time in her mother's life that she
went to church entirely of her own free will, was at a service held in the late
summer of 1945, when the Second World War had ended, and she knew her two sons'
lives would be spared. This is a telling point about her, for while Granny Gordon
was unromantic, she was anything but devoid of emotion. Her loyalties and loves
ran very deep.
Although she was bossy by nature, and more than a little inclined to run the
lives of anyone who would let her (including, unfortunately for them, her sons),
she needed only to be pushed back to stop pushing. In fact, one of her more endearing
traits was that she admired people who were not afraid of her. It was the secret
of being treated as an equal by her.
She met my grandfather in New York, where she had come to study art after attending
Converse College in South Carolina, and she had a life-long love of art in the
broader sense of the word. Deeply knowledgeable about furniture and decoration,
she acquired an enviable collection of antique furniture, much inherited, but
much as well acquired over a lifetime of collecting.
Before her marriage, she was employed by Charles Schwab, then President of Bethlehem
Steel, to take his illegitimate daughter to museums and to introduce her to the
world of art. At her marriage, Charles Schwab gave her her wedding dress as a
present. Her wedding took place on July 1st, 1916. Coincidentally, that very
same day, Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower were also married. And, unknown to the
guests assembled in the staggering heat of Spartenburg (which was suffering a
heat wave, even by South Carolina standards, at the time), that day was also
the first day of the mindless blood bath known as the Battle of the Somme, and
thus one of the darkest days in the history of western civilization.
There is a story of Granny Gordon's childhood that she told, as far as anyone
knows, for the first time at her sixtieth wedding anniversary. It deserves to
be remembered.
It seems there was a man in Spartenburg named Mr. Bates who drove the ice wagon
around town. A bitter, quarrelsome man, he was unpleasant to everyone, especially
the children of the town who liked to hitch rides on the back of the wagon. He
was thoroughly detested by Granny and her friends, who were somewhere around
eight or ten years old at the time..
Then one Saturday night, Mr. Bates got into a bar-room fight and killed a man.
He was quickly sentenced to be hanged and on the appointed day, Granny's father
mentioned at the dinner table that poor Mr. Bates had, indeed, met his end at
the prison.
"Yes!" said Granny, who was, as it happened, a friend of the prison
warden's daughter, "and I have the rope!" producing the noose from
beneath the table.
The effect of this revelation on the family--not to mention the servants--could
only have been titanic. Children were:
i.
Katherine Carson Gordon was born in May 1917 in New York City.
2 ii.
Richard Haden Gordon.
iii.
Ralph Carson Gordon was born in Jun 1921 in New York City. He died in 1990
in Martinique, French West Indies.
iv.
Eleanora Cunningham Gordon Gordon was born on Apr 24 1924 in New York City.