The Bentons: How an American Father and Son Changed the Printing Industry

15 The Later Plainfield Years

257 chapter 15 The Later Plainfield Years About the time that Morris Benton’s great Century Schoolbook type was making its debut, he endured a personal tragedy that must have contributed to his reticence. On St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, 1920, with his two daughters in college and his parents still thriving, Morris’s wife, Ethel, died suddenly of an infection after an operation. She was only 42 years old, and her death was a shock to the family. “I was rather amazed how my father kept producing,” Caroline said, “despite the fact that he had [a] crisis at home. He kept going at the plant, and produced a lot. For a little while, he was terrifically lonely and terrifically unhappy.”1 Later Morris shared his thoughts with Caroline. She remembered him saying that “life divided itself up into compartments, and they didn’t necessarily follow through, they cut off … He just felt that one [had] ended, and he was very, I wouldn’t say that he was philosophical, but he did accept that the facts were the facts. He had to make a new life.”2 Morris began looking for a summer cottage, which he previously had felt that he couldn’t afford, and bought one in Beaver Lake, New Jersey. About three years later, on February 28, 1923, Morris married Katrina Ten Eyck Wheeler, his second cousin on his father’s side of the family and the daughter of Stoughton Rawley Wheeler, a surgeon of East Bloomfield, New York.3 She was 31 at the time, 20 years younger than Morris. Katrina was intelligent and dedicated to Morris, and significantly taller, with a big voice. They moved out of the big white house in Plainfield to an apartment about half a block away and remained there for seven years. 258 the bentons Linn Boyd Benton’s Last Ten Years During the 1920s, Morris’s health suffered again with the onset of serious stomach ulcers. His father was getting older and the added pressures at ATF also took their toll. Linn Boyd Benton “would come into the factory and all hell would break loose— everything had to be just so,” Caroline explained. “That’s the trouble when you work ’til you’re 88, you know, somebody has to help you. And you know who did it.”4 But, Caroline stressed, Morris remained “very patient with his father, and very sweet.” To other observers, Boyd’s advancing age only made him more affable. In 1922, when he was 78 years old, Henry Lewis Bullen wrote, Mr. Benton outdoes his youthful years in humor and geniality. An observant man, he has accumulated a great fund of genial anecdotes. With a clean life, based upon absolute probity, he commands the admiration and respect of all his associates. He has as ardent an interest now in every detail of typefounding Katrina Ten Eyck Wheeler Benton Morris and Katrina at Beaver Lake, circa 1930 Morris Fuller Benton, 1922 Linn Boyd Benton, 1923 259 the later plainfield years as ever he had when confronting its most difficult problems in earlier years. He permits nothing to interfere with a most punctual attention to his duties, though these are largely self-imposed. His vocation knows no avocation.5 An anonymous author in the American Printer described Linn Boyd Benton in 1923 as “one of those men, quietly doing their day’s work, who have a tremendous influence on the American printing industry.”6 He was characterized elsewhere as an extremely modest man, which was perhaps why he was “so little known among those men whose pleasure and livelihood are dependent upon the graphic arts.”7 He was respected by his peers, modest, reserved, and yet, according to Bullen, “much loved by those he admits to an intimacy.” His character was beyond reproach, and “in his thought and the expression of his thought he [was] as accurate and precise as his own machines.”8 Linn Boyd Benton’s friends were at ATF and his social life revolved around the company. He did not have the same interest in hobbies, sports, and the outdoors that his son had, so he put off thoughts of retirement even though his eyesight continued to deteriorate. He knew all the conductors, brakemen, and regular passengers on the train he took to work every day, and loved to read or tell jokes to pass the time. “When he couldn’t read...