“connections” and schools and clubs were fantastically important. Like everyone else they knew, they were class conscious, though my mother—perhaps because she was more secure—never showed it. My father would often refer to people as being or not being “out of the top drawer.” But in California, even though most of their friends had come from the East, it was a more varied and vivid group. I remember an old lady whom we called Mrs. Fithy, who always came wearing a floppy hat and carryinga wicker market basket full of presents; Kate and Curtis Cate of the Cate School; the Baring-Goulds, who were Scottish; Jane Wyatt, the actress, and her husband, Eddie Ward; Chris and Maddie Rand; Alex Tonetti—gloriously beautiful—with her husband, B. C. White, who taught tennis at the Montecito Club; lots of Hoyts, Rogers, and MacVeaghs, especially Jack MacVeagh, who came every week to play tennis; Lockwood de Forest, my mother’s cousin, who was responsible for all the planting at Goleta; and Mary Joyce, who had red hair and blue eyes and a very droll lisp. I can stI’ll hear her squeaking with laughter at some outrageous remark of my father’s: “Franthith, you are a detethtable man.”
From very early on, one of the family’s closest friends was Dr. Horace Gray, a Jungian analyst, who came every Sunday for lunch. My mother and father used to boast that he had tested them and found them to be the most extreme examples of introvert and extrovert of his experience. I think my parents liked to define themselves this way: my mother was the feeler, my father was the thinker. Horace Gray didn’t play tennis, he didn’t come up to the pool, I doubt if he came to parties—he was the wise man, the seer, Merlin.
In a way, my parents were really Renaissance people, but they were more cultivated than intellectual. They read aloud every evening—Dickens, Macaulay, Turgenev. And my mother always knew a lot about music. Even after my father made her stop playing the piano because he said she should devote more time to the children, she stI’ll found time every day to listen systematically to records and read and learn. The tragedy was that along with their happiness and their incredible appetite for life, the forces of darkness were always there, although you would never have known it: the surface looked so good. So it was a life of extremes—paradise and paradise lost.
6
The Twentieth Reunion Book, Harvard University, 1946:
FRANCIS MINTURN SEDGWICK
Occupation
: Rancher
Married
: Alice de Forest, May 8, 1929, New York, N.Y.
Children
: Alice; Robert Minturn, 2d; Pamela; Francis Minturn, Jr.; Jonathan Minturn; Katherine; Edith; Susanna.
My endeavors to enlist in the armed forces having been thwarted by asthma, I settled on my ranch and devoted myself to raising a few cattle and quite a lot of children.
Ranching has the undoubted advantage of providing beef and pork, chickens and rabbits, and milk and eggs as well as vegetables; and also the doubtful advantage of spare time for indifferent sculpture, worse painting, and a novel, “The Rim,” worst of all, the latter published in April, 1945, since four hours a day in the saddle sufficed for the cattle work.
In these peaceful pursuits I have been bucked off three times, thrown twice, had a horse fall on me three times, and, for real excitement, bid in the Grand Champion and Reserve Champion Pens of Bulls at the Great Western Livestock Show at prices below average for the show—very dangerous for blood pressure. Strange uses for a Harvard degree!
I am a trustee of the Cate-Vosting School.
SAUCIE SEDGWICK During the war my parents bought another place in California, a ranch called Corral de Quad. We children heard about it first from the cook, Nancy Kennedy. Later I remember hearing my father tell some people, “I’ve decided to raise cattle for the war effort. That’s the one thing I can do, since I can’t get into the service.”
Corral de Quati was a real
From very early on, one of the family’s closest friends was Dr. Horace Gray, a Jungian analyst, who came every Sunday for lunch. My mother and father used to boast that he had tested them and found them to be the most extreme examples of introvert and extrovert of his experience. I think my parents liked to define themselves this way: my mother was the feeler, my father was the thinker. Horace Gray didn’t play tennis, he didn’t come up to the pool, I doubt if he came to parties—he was the wise man, the seer, Merlin.
In a way, my parents were really Renaissance people, but they were more cultivated than intellectual. They read aloud every evening—Dickens, Macaulay, Turgenev. And my mother always knew a lot about music. Even after my father made her stop playing the piano because he said she should devote more time to the children, she stI’ll found time every day to listen systematically to records and read and learn. The tragedy was that along with their happiness and their incredible appetite for life, the forces of darkness were always there, although you would never have known it: the surface looked so good. So it was a life of extremes—paradise and paradise lost.
6
The Twentieth Reunion Book, Harvard University, 1946:
FRANCIS MINTURN SEDGWICK
Occupation
: Rancher
Married
: Alice de Forest, May 8, 1929, New York, N.Y.
Children
: Alice; Robert Minturn, 2d; Pamela; Francis Minturn, Jr.; Jonathan Minturn; Katherine; Edith; Susanna.
My endeavors to enlist in the armed forces having been thwarted by asthma, I settled on my ranch and devoted myself to raising a few cattle and quite a lot of children.
Ranching has the undoubted advantage of providing beef and pork, chickens and rabbits, and milk and eggs as well as vegetables; and also the doubtful advantage of spare time for indifferent sculpture, worse painting, and a novel, “The Rim,” worst of all, the latter published in April, 1945, since four hours a day in the saddle sufficed for the cattle work.
In these peaceful pursuits I have been bucked off three times, thrown twice, had a horse fall on me three times, and, for real excitement, bid in the Grand Champion and Reserve Champion Pens of Bulls at the Great Western Livestock Show at prices below average for the show—very dangerous for blood pressure. Strange uses for a Harvard degree!
I am a trustee of the Cate-Vosting School.
SAUCIE SEDGWICK During the war my parents bought another place in California, a ranch called Corral de Quad. We children heard about it first from the cook, Nancy Kennedy. Later I remember hearing my father tell some people, “I’ve decided to raise cattle for the war effort. That’s the one thing I can do, since I can’t get into the service.”
Corral de Quati was a real
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