THIRD GENERATION


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:

child i. Katherine Carson Gordon was born in May 1917 in New York City.
child2 ii. Richard Haden Gordon.
child iii. Ralph Carson Gordon was born in Jun 1921 in New York City. He died in 1990 in Martinique, French West Indies.
child iv. Eleanora Cunningham Gordon Gordon was born on Apr 24 1924 in New York City.

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