This third installment of "An Era that has gone" walks us through the support afforded by Nancy Middlebrook's closest relatives and friends at the death of her father.

::::::::

The sudden passing of Frederic under less than gentile circumstances elicited from surviving family members the full range of mixed feelings and conflicting emotions. Left with the task of writing an obituary, Herbert, who for somewhat over a decade had been editor of Brooklyn Life, a weekly publication serving the Brooklyn Heights community, penned only a brief missive, which spoke mountains for what it did not say. In stark contrast with traditional custom, it failed to mention Frederic's familial connections to the Brooklyn Heights patrician class, including his father's graduation from Princeton in the mid-1800s. There was an air of nonchalance in its brevity, as if the death was of only passing consequence. Although no teetotaller himself, Herbert must have known about his brother-in-law's drinking habit, and could not have reacted well to it, as his sister bore the brunt of its consequences.

On the other hand, Esther herself, having been married to the man for some 18 years, could not but have been broken-hearted, and memories of the past, the weight of which urged many a tear to flow, must have accompanied her preparations for Frederic's funeral. Memories of their wedding day, the birth of their first and only child, their outings on Long Island at the beaches, and excursions on the family yacht, must have balanced some of the less auspicious events they endured together.

Even among the close relatives and friends of the deceased, there was, no doubt, a shared sadness. Frederic, for all of his problems, had been a man of some accomplishment. For that life to have ended at a relatively early age and so unexpectedly must have been greeted with at least as much pain as relief.

Surviving her son must have been a source of pain to Emily Congdon Middlebrook. No mother worth the title wants or expects to survive her children. The matriarch of the Middlebrooks, who had already outlived her husband by some 15 years, must have felt the loss deeply. And observing as her somewhat frail and sensitive granddaughter was suddenly exposed to the shock of losing a parent, Emily must have thought of the affection daughter and father shared. Nancy herself must have harbored some affection for Frederic, beyond the resentment she is said to have expressed from time to time when provoked by her father's habitually inebriated state. At least she must have contemplated her father's many lost opportunities to to create more positive and intimate family ties, thoughts that any adolescent, emerging into young adulthood, would be apt to harbor about their parents.

Grieving over, but resigned to, her husband's passing, Esther started to pick up the pieces of her life as soon as the last funeral guests bade their farewells. In spite of the challenges she had met in trying to make a comfortable home for Frederic and the Middlebrook family, she may have at times felt like the odd person out, surrounded as she was by three Middlebrooks -- Emily, Eleanor and Frederic--besides her daughter, who was half a Middlebrook. As with many of life's challenges, the church - in this case Grace Church in lower Manhattan, of which she was proud to claim membership - lent strength to Esther. She was not from stock that was accustomed to surrendering to adverse circumstances. She would be strong, and carry on the family legacy of ambition and endurance.

Esther's first concern was most likely how to pull Nancy through this tragedy. Nancy was a playful, intelligent child who loved her father, in a manner, in spite of his weaknesses and failings. This sudden breach in the armor of her relatively comfortable reality could turn into a major trauma if it were not handled properly. For support in this respect, Esther would lean more heavily on the side of the family that she was closer to--her own blood brothers and sisters. It was the family she had been raised with, and the one with which she continued to have close ties. And except for one sister, Sarah Middagh Henshaw Childs, who, with her husband, Clarence Childs, split their living situation between Florida and Minnesota, Esther's brothers and sisters all lived in the New York metropolitan area, the farthest of them only an hour's trip into the outreaches of suburban New Jersey by commuter rail.

Another of Esther's priorities was to see to it that Nancy could continue her education. In spite of the loss of Frederic's income, the Middlebrooks would remain at their West Side apartment, at least for the time being. Having tucked away a tidy sum from the inheritance she received at the deaths of her parents, Emily would be in a position to bankroll any shortfall in the family's standard of living. Frederic's income had already fallen over the years, but being a woman who was as economical as she was well educated and astute, Emily was not one to throw her money around carelessly. Having received the impulse of a virtuous thriftiness from her businessman father, she would parse and dole out only what was needed.

Fortunately for young Nancy, she had a number of close friends from school who were a source of support for her. With this reassurance, she was able to continue her studies without any major interruption. Close associations among their upper West Side neighbors, including the parents of Nancy's school friends, were a source of comfort for both mother and daughter. In times like these, there was a greater tendancy to generate a supportive fellowship than one might expect in today's society. Neighbors and relatives would hover around the grieving parties and showering them with love and affection in a myriad of ways. In spite of the encroachment of a technological nature that radio, telephone, mass transit and the automobile had brought to American culture, the traditional values accompanying the slow-paced era of horse and buggy just passed, still held sway in many respects.

With her husband gone, Esther's brothers and sisters took upon themselves a greater role in Esther's and Nancy's life. Herbert and his youngest sister, Cornelia Gracie, neither of whom were married, and both of whom lived in the family brownstone in Brooklyn, were the most influential and helpful among the Henshaw siblings, in spite of their living a borough apart from the Middlebrooks. The then-recently completed improvements in the New York City subway system had made it possible to travel between the Upper West Side of Manhattan and Brooklyn Heights in as little as 30 minutes. This ensured continual exchanges among the syblings and their children.

As the editor of Brooklyn Life, Herbert's time was mostly taken up writing several pages of opinion, along with an extensive column on the week in sports and an occasional theater or book review. Born in 1862, Herbert's earliest childhood memories streched back to the time his father was building rail systems in Denmark in the early 1860s. An elder brother, Levy, had died as a youngster under mysterious, and undoubtedly tragic, circumstances, and this put a strain on Herbert's parents that had to have affected the entire family. His mother, Cornelia, had destroyed practically all the early correspondence between herself and husband George, an action she regreted, but that may have been a response to this tragedy, for which each parent very likely blamed the other as well as themselves. Nor did either appear to consider theirs a match made in heaven, as the saying goes. Their engagement was originally called off by Cornelia's family, who feared that the life of the wife of a civil engineer would be too strenuous for her. But being in the continual presence of one another in back-to-back social engagements that were prevalent in their youth, the affection between the two had grown so intense that it was no longer possible for either of them to contemplate life without the other, or so it seemed at the time. In later years, George intimated that his marriage to Cornelia may not have been the wisest decision in his life. And an examination of Cornelia's correspondence with George from the 1860s expresses some equally tell-tale signs of marital stress.

In the late 1870s, when the family moved to Ste. Anne de Bellvue in Canada where George directed canal construction, Herbert and his younger brother Fred were plunged into a cultural clash with the Canadian French boys, who seemed intent on harrassing them about their strange accents and ways. The Henshaws were Episcopalian, while most of the local boys were Catholics, and shouts of "heretics" were often followed by an escallation to some rough-and-tumble altercations. But the Henshaw brothers learned to defend themselves and their outsider English heritage with fists, thus earning the respect of their peers.

As the family remained in touch with their Brooklyn relatives, travel between Montreal and New York was a frequent occurrence. Herbert himself moved to Brooklyn in the mid-1880s, and by degrees gained a reputation as an accomplished amateur sportsman. The types of activities he would undertake in this connection are instructive, if not amusing. We have an account of one sporting event in which he participated, this one sponsored by the Williamsburg Athletic Club three days after Herbert's 23rd birthday in July of 1885:

The men lay with their backs flat on the ground. At the signal they jumped to their feet and ran fifteen yards backwards. Then they turned about and ran at full speed fifteen yards, ran up an embankment, leaped over a bridge, plunged into a pond of muddy water, swam and floundered to the opposite bank as fast as possible, crawled out, rushed to a flat net suported on high poles, tumbled and rolled over it, dropped to the ground and then ran up a pyramid of boards and down the other side, slid under a horizontal beam only a foot and a half above ground and worked their passage through flour barrels, then gave another jump over the bridge and took another ducking and ran home.

On the professional side, Herbert adopted a career in journalism, and by the late 1880s, played a sometimes controversial role as a notable writer for the magazine "Sport". By then, his talent had come to the attention of two young entrepreneurs--Frederick Munroe, a newspaperman who had been on the staffs of several New York newspapers, and John Angus McKay, a former reporter for the New York Sun. In 1890, these two young upstarts pitched the idea of an upbeat weekly magazine that would chronicle the happenings of Brooklyn society, much as another weekly, New York Life, did for Manhattan. The pair launched Brooklyn Life on a shoe-string budget, and as the new magazine outgrew its meager beginnings, the skeleton crew that put it out was deemed inadequate to the task at hand. Herbert, with his editorial experience and extensive social connections in Brooklyn, was a natural choice for associate editor, joining the team in the mid-1890s.

Monroe and McKay eventually ceded control of the magazine to Herbert and an associate, Fredrick Timpson, moving on to establish a fistfull of new publications, including Town and Country, The Spur, and perhaps the magazine that among them is best known today, Golf Illustrated. Meanwhile, Herbert, after assuming full editorship of Brooklyn Life in 1909, took on the important task of writing editorials and providing sports coverage.

In 1923, his 13th year as editor of what was then a 32-year-old magazine, Herbert wrote an editorial defending not only his outspokenness but also his penchant for addressing issues of national and international importance to a local audience, some of whom undoubtedly believed that the editor should get off his bully pulpit and stick to neighborhood news. He writes:

As an issue necessarily implies division of opinion and the existence of conflicting factions, it follows that no paper can take a determined stand on any burning issue without making enemies as well as friends, though if it stands for nothing it can expect neither.

Whether it makes more of one, or of the other, depends on how closely its opinions happen to coincide with those of a majority of the class from which it draws its readers; but if an editor is honest and fearless, he cannot afford to consider this.

He must write what he believes to be the truth whenever he believes it essential that the truth should be told, regardless of whom, or how many, it may please, or displease, else he is neither honest with himself nor with his readers.

Herbert was well versed on a broad range of issues, and fully able to articulate his views, often in a humorous or sarcastic vein. Among the issues of his day, he tackled repeatedly the evolution-creation controversy, the federal ban on consumption of alcoholic bevereges known as Prohibition, and the economic tumult of the times, all of which have parallels in our own day.

Having an uncle of such stature must have inspired Nancy, whose intellectual consciousness was just beginning to bud as she entered her mid-teens. But the notoriety of the Henshaws did not end with Herbert. Herbert's brother Frederick Valdemar Henshaw had risen to professional heights within his own field. After earning an engineering degree from Bishop's College, Montreal, Frederick entered the rapidly growing industry of electrification. Electric lighting had by then begun to replace gas light, opening up a new field of commerce. Although he worked as an electrical engineer for many years, and in fact took a keen interest in the burgeoning

field of radio wave transmission in the late 1890s, he eventually joined the investment house of Wood, Struthers & Co., where his professional duties became more closely aligned with banking than with engineering. Frederic would eventually help craft legislation that would enable banks to invest in utilities bonds. At the time of the passing of Nancy's father, F. V. Henshaw was living with his wife in Bellport, Long Island. The couple had no children.

Esther's elder sister, Sarah Middagh Henshaw, was named after their grandmother by adoption, Sarah Middagh Gracie. She was probably the first of her brothers and sisters to marry, and the courtship took place in seemingly far-away Minneapolis. As it turned out, matriarch Cornelia's biological mother, Ann Pettit Birdsall, who had given Cornelia up for adoption but with whom she ultimately re-established ties, moved to Minneapolis in the later 1800s with her other daughter and son-in-law. The Henshaws thus made frequent trips to that part of the world, and it was there that Maddie, as she was familiarly called, made the acquaintance of Clarence Childs, a rising attorney. When the two foresaw a more permanent bond on the horizon, they broke the news to Maddie's father, and a brief correspondence yielded the hoped-for permission to make their romantic affiliation permanent. Having learned their lesson of the effect of cold climate on the human psyche, the couple, after raising a son, George Henshaw Childs, eventually migrated to sunny and balmy Florida, where they spent their retirement years.

Esther's younger sister was Cornelia Gracie Henshaw, or Corrie. Herbert had taken Corrie onto the staff of Brooklyn Life, and as a writer, she found an avenue to express her ideas in a forthright and incautious manner that no doubt found its encouragement in her elder brother. A crisp, dark-haired woman with a strong intellectual character and a

mischievous countenance, Corrie, besides attending to many of the day-to-day details of the publication, penned a column about her beloved pet dog, Willie Winkie, which proved so popular that it was to run for three years until Winkie's untimely death. Corrie wrote the column in Winkie's voice, rather than her own. Thus, Winkie refers to his master, Corrie, as his "two-legged boss," and to Nancy as his "New York boss," as Nancy still living in Manhattan at the time. One can imagine that young Nancy got a kick out of reading her name in her aunt's weekly column, albeit in codified form.

Herbert managed to corral another relative into writing an even more ambitious and perhaps equally humorous column -- a spoof on the scientific and academic community. Dr. George Henshaw Childs, the aforementioned son of Clarence Childs and Esther's older sister, Sarah Middagh Henshaw, was born in Minneapolis in 1890, a year after his parents' marriage in Brooklyn's Grace Church. Distance never having been an impediment to the intercourse among the Henshaw syblings, the Childses would make frequent trips to New York, and during one such visit, the family took young George to the American Museum of Natural History.

The boy's exposure to the many interesting exhibitions there sparked his instincts for and curiosity about nature and art. Upon his return to Minnesota, he began sculpting figures, not only of the dinosaurs, but of other animal forms conceived on a much grander scale and fashioned out of his imagination. As the boy grew into manhood, he attended the University of Minnesota, earning a doctorate while teaching, and eventually landing a job as a research artist at the American Museum of Natural History in the same month Nancy's father met his untimely end. During his career at the museum, which he would pursue to his retirement in the 1960s, George Henshaw Childs would contribute to the construction of many of the dioramas and other artistic displays that have made the museum famous.

This, of course, placed Nancy's cousin only a few blocks away from the Middlebrook family's apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and one can surmise that the cousins availed themselves of the opportunity to visit each other from time to time. But to avoid the hustle and bustle, and the rents, of Manhattan, Childs decided to inhabit the basement apartment at the Henshaw home on State Street in Brooklyn. His close contact with Herbert, and the sense of humor that both shared, led to the creation of the weekly spoof on the typical advice column genre then in its hayday. A fictional character, Dr. Padapopper Patagonia, would dole out his weekly wisdom in response to questions from readers, also of imaginary origin. The column was amply illustrated by Childs's fine art work, but the authorship was never openly declared. In one of the columns, oblique references are made to the almost universally hated Prohibition:

Dear Dr. Padapopper, I see that you invariably advise those who seek your counsel and advice to "keep smiling." Does this mean that you advise them to be "scofflaws" or to keep on smiling in defiance of the laws, or do you mean smiling in the sense of grinning?

You know of course that "scofflaw" is the new epithet invented to fill the long-felt want for something that will "stab awake the conscience of the lawless drinker."

For instance, the other day when the boss told me his mother-in-law had died and I could have a day off he looked hard at me and ill humouredly inquired "what in hell are you grinning about?" And when my wife told me her pet dog had died and I kept smiling, she denounced me as a heartless, selfish, unfeeling brute, who thought of nothing but himself and had ceased to love her.

Dr. Padapopper responds:

Allow me to inform you that your manner of responding to my simple little exhortation is far too literal and objective and I cannot easily escape the conclusion that you are somewhat lacking in common sense

Had I said: "Keep grinning" you might indeed be justified in holding me responsible for the unpleasant consequences of your affected cheerfulness, but I fail to understand how one of normal intelligence can conceive of a smile as being nothing more than a facial expression or a lawless libation.

P.S. Keep smiling but do not grin.

One easily sees in the above the very natural affinity the Henshaw family had toward humor as a balance to the seriousness exemplified by many of Herbert's editorials. Childs's creation could be used as a vehicle to satirize some of the important issues of the day without seeming to be outright seditious.

While the column was written anonymously, one can judge from the illustrations, and some oblique references in his aunt Cornelia Gracie's column, that George Childs was the author.

Another of Esther's brothers, the sixth child of George and Cornelia Henshaw and the youngest of the band, had achieved a professional niche of his own. Walter Percival Henshaw was in the education business.

Born in 1876, he graduated with Bachelors of Science and of Arts from Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, and taught at the Ridgefield School and Newton Academy before settling in, in 1921, at the St. Bernard's School in Gladstone, N.J. Soon thereafter, he added to his responsibilities as an English and classics teacher, that of assistant headmaster and business manager of the all-boys Episcopal school. While he was a rather rigid disciplinarian, he also had a sense of humor, particularly when it came to introducing Geoffrey Chaucer to his charges. To commemorate his beloved teacher, a student composed a poem in mock-middle English, which was published in the school's magazine, The Spirit of Clairvaux:

And too ther was a teecher smal and sye

Who taughten laddes all he coulde devyse.

Abouten boc-lore, grammair, aye and he

Would talk also of past philosophye.

Still another student would later write:

In the junior and senior years we studied English literature. This was the equivalent of a college course, only more thorough. To stir up our interest in Chaucer he (Walter) would say, 'You can skip all the lewd parts.' One day he said, 'Fart is a good Anglo-Saxon word.' This was the first time I had heard this word from an adult of such refinement. But sure enough, there it was in Chaucer along with a lot of other earthy language.

Walter was very much respected and loved, so much so that St. Bernard's built a home on the campus for him and his wife, which is known to this day as Henshaw House. Another former student was to write later of the four-foot-eight punctilious teacher-adminstrator that he

...always wore a black pin-striped suit with vest across which dangled a large watch chain with a Phi Beta Kappa key hanging from it.

His house was as English as his heritage and as sparsely furnished. Those of us assigned to his cottage for work never had to do anything because in my four years, we never found a speck of dust. The only good part of the assignment was that Mrs. Henshaw was a great cake and cookie maker and always gave us some, although the small portions were maddeningly small!

Attracted by its pastoral setting and the working farm that each student was required to pitch in his services to support, Corrie Henshaw, by then in her late 40s, used the Henshaw House in New Jersey as a weekend gettaway. She often convinced young Nancy and sometimes even her sister Esther, to join in an excursion to the Jersey hinterlands, and the twosome or threesome would embark upon adventures exploring and experiencing the countryside together.

Such was the state of the Henshaw family just after the death of Esther's husband. Emily Middlebrook was the last surviving representative of the oldest generation. Frederic's two syblings, Eleanor and Charles, Jr., and the six brothers and sisters of the Henshaw clan represented the the second generation, and George Childs and Nancy Middlebrook, the two cousins, the third. This cluster of culturally astute and tightly knit family members would provide the stimulation and care Nancy needed to keep an even keel in the face of her father's recent passing.

***

Esther was anxious to find activities for her daughter that would lift her out of any depression or lethargy she might fall into as a result of her father's death. One of these was as simple as a visit to a church flea market in Brooklyn Heights only a month after Frederic's passing. Corrie and Esther took Nancy by the hand, and they visited each of the many kiosks set up by members of the New Church on Clark and Monroe Streets. The church building no longer stands, it having been demolished and replaced by a hodge podge of concrete apartment houses built in the 1960s.

On that day, however, the tables were filled with vendors, one selling aprons, another, dish towels and mops, while still another sold groceries and shredded wheat. Cakes, pies, any manner of baked goods were also to be had. Each table was sponsored by a different church member, the proceeds of the day to be applied to the support of the church's activities. Even Christmas cards were to be had at a table with books and greeting cards.

As evening descended, the pleasantries did not cease. A delicious dinner of turkey or chicken pie was served after sunset, followed by music and dancing. Among those in attendance was Lois Burnham Wilson, the future co-founder of Alanon, and wife of the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill Wilson. At that time, neither Lois nor her husband Bill could imagine that they would play a central role in establishing the organizations that would save many from the scourge of alcoholism. Dr. Clark Burnham, a gynecologist and Lois's father, was one of the New Church's elders, and the rest of the family, including Lois's sister, Katherine, also pitched in at the flea market. There are those who believe that some of AA's impetus springs from the New Church's own origins, the teachings of the 18th Century Swedish scientist and mystic, Immanuel Swedenborg. The church was less dogmatic than most, and often hosted cultural events that were open to the general public.

Whether she was interested in the church philosophy or not--and at her age it is highly likely that she was not--Nancy could not but have been stimulated by the variety of items for sale at the fair and the delicious food that was served afterwards. The program continued well into the night with a dance, and shy as Nancy was, there is little doubt that she would have joined in if she could have found a partner.

Still another diversion was designed to maintain Nancy's positive focus. The family had just encountered an intriguingly animated portrait painter, recently arrived from far-away Poland, who was in the process of establishing a career in the United States. Above and beyond his halting English and thick eastern-European accent, the man seemed friendly enough, and having him paint her portrait might be just the kind of encounter needed to engage Nancy in a positive direction, or so must her mother have thought.

Authors Bio:

Born in New York, March 14, 1949. Staff writer for the New York City Tribune, Economic Growth Report, Register-Star. Presently publish on OpEd News. Mr. Duveen heads up a project known as "The Museum of Brooklyn Art and Culture,' which explores cultural subjects of Brooklyn's past and hosts periodic exhibitions and lectures. He is co-proprietor, with his wife, Junalyn, of "The Siberian Coffee Pipeline Company," which aspires to supply the world with freshly brewed coffee generated from major brewing installations in Siberia. He has also created a planning system known as the Millennial Flexi-Planner, which accommodates short-term and long-term (1,000 years or more) scheduling in a single compatible framework.