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1 | A Downwardly Mobile WASP
- University Press of New England
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1 —————————— A DOWNWARDLY MOBILE WASP My dear Mrs. Gordon” wrote Dorothy Adams. “Enclosed is my check for seven hundred dollars. This, I understand, is half the yearly tuition. Sammy is very enthusiastic about going to you.” In the same letter Dorothy also wanted to arrange for her son’s trip to his new boarding school. Dorothy’s wish was to have her Sammy make the journey alone: “Mrs. Van Rensselaer told me that [her son] Philip will go by train to Garrison — I should like to make the same arrangement.” Students and their trunks arriving at Garrison, New York, were driven the short distance from the station to the Malcolm Gordon School. “I hope that things work out well,” Dorothy’s letter concluded, “and that Sammy won’t be too homesick at first. After all, he is very young.” At the time the letter was written, September 10, 1940, Sam Adams was seven years old. Sam was small compared with the other boys that first year away at school, and he was miserable. School was frightening. At night he would cry himself asleep. Terrified, the little boy felt he had nothing in the world and that nobody cared about him. By the looks of the old photographs Sam was the youngest student. “When he came here,” the school noted later, “he apparently had very little interest in anything outside of his particular toys.” He was bullied. The bigger boys would smack him with broomsticks, but he never told any of this to his mother. “Sammy’s letters home have been very happy, which pleases me no end,” Dorothy later informed the school. Sam Adams’s parents divorced when he was an infant but his father, Pierpont “Pete” Adams, lived not far away and worked on Wall Street. Pete appears to have visited his son at school once, and this during Sam’s second year and only after the headmaster, old Malcolm Gordon himself, had written Pete enticingly, “I am very anxious to see you and to have you see 6 Hiam_A MONUMENT TO DECEIT_text_Layout 1 1/28/14 9:43 AM Page 6 the school. . . . Trains between Garrison and New York run frequently.” The following year, 1943, found Pete stationed at a naval air base in Kansas, and he wrote Malcolm that except for this impediment, “I can think of nothing I would rather do than spend the day with you all at Garrison.” It seems likely, however, that Pete’s sentiments were less than sincere. When Sam was sent to the Malcolm Gordon School his parents had both newly remarried. Custody of Sam was supposed to be shared equally, although the chore of raising the child was eventually pushed upon Dorothy alone, with Pete seeing him on weekends and vacations. Dorothy was not maternal toward her son and, as an avowed Anglophile, she kept him in long curly hair befitting a little lord until age four. Sam was raised by the nanny; when he was barely of age his mother shipped him off to camp for the summer. He would forever harbor a fury at his mother about being treated this way, but during his first year in Garrison he pined for her. Busy with her social life in Manhattan, Dorothy rarely, if ever, visited her son at school. Homesick, the young Sam Adams found himself at the small school along the Hudson River. He is remembered by schoolmates as a straightforward fellow who stuck to the basics; an even-headed, cheerful, easygoing, and pleasant person to be around. He was open, amenable to everybody, and not a teaser or nagger or clique former. Sam’s nickname was “Sparky” but he is also recalled as being phlegmatic. School photographs reveal a handsome, nicely proportioned little boy with lots of dark hair, high cheekbones, and slightly buck teeth. In the black-and-white prints Sam looks shy. The home of the Malcolm Gordon School was a big brick manor house designed in the gothic tradition by Richard Upjohn, architect of Trinity Church in Lower Manhattan. In the manor lived old Malcolm Gordon, the school’s founder and headmaster, and his wife, the very formidable Mrs. Amy Gordon. Also in residence were two young masters just out of college to assist in the teaching and discipline. Rooms for the thirty or so students were located both in the manor and an annex. The living was not luxurious, but the showers were hot and the food plentiful. Helping out was a grounds...