Francis Steegmuller: Growing Up a Writer in Greenwich

By Mary Jacobson, OHP Blog Editor

What are the childhood influences from where one can trace a life’s passion? In the case of Francis Steegmuller, acclaimed recipient of many literary honors, his formative years in the Greenwich schools can be credited for igniting his literary gifts.

Francis Steegmuller
Photo courtesy of Greenwich Library
Oral History Project

Francis Steegmuller, born in 1906, was interviewed in 1977 by Oral History Project volunteer Catherine McNamara at his home in New York City. As he recalled his years growing up in Greenwich, he remembered with nostalgia simple pastimes like sledding down Sound View Drive, “blueberrying” and “blackberrying” in the woods across from his house, and ice skating at Ten Acres (where GHS is now located).

There were also long summer days at Little Captain’s Island beach “the only public bathing beach in Greenwich at that time.” Tod’s Point was then “completely private. Nobody dreamed of going to Tod’s Point to swim.” Bird watching was also a pleasing pastime. “My parents gave me some binoculars, and I used to spend a lot of time watching the birds. I always walked through the woods on my way to Havemeyer School.” Later, they lived in a home on the corner of Stanwich Road where “we kept chickens and pigs. It was really like a miniature farm.” His dad commuted to work in New York City each day “but at home he’d be a farmer in a modest way.”

 

Steegmuller described himself as a quiet, bookish fellow whose family was well-established in Greenwich. His mother had lived in Greenwich since her girlhood. “She knew all the people who had the stores on Greenwich Avenue and people who had the houses around.” Her stepmother, Sarah Held, and her sister, Minnie Held, “ran a hotel called the Held House (later known as Held Cottage). It was down on Indian Harbor.” His grandfather, an immigrant from Ireland, became Judge of Probate in Greenwich. Their family claimed four generations of lawyers in town. Steegmuller’s father hoped his son would become a certified public accountant “despite my bad marks in mathematics, which were really my only bad marks. He thought for a long time that it was too bad that I didn’t go into public accounting. It would have been a disaster, I assure you.”

 

Held Cottage
Photo courtesy of Greenwich Library
Oral History Project

Instead, Steegmuller credited two GHS teachers, in particular, as having had impressionable and long-lasting effects on his future endeavors. One was Catharine Woods “the teacher I knew best. I knew her from the time I was a freshman in high school (1918) until she died (1976).” As Steegmuller describes her, “She was an excellent teacher. We always enjoyed her class… She liked people who had a talent for writing, who loved words, who loved to read and to show that they could write. There was a magazine in school called The Green Witch. Those of us who wrote for that, she always encouraged them.” (Catharine Woods has also been credited by Truman Capote as recognizing and encouraging his writing talents while a student at GHS in the years 1939-1942.)

 

While a student at Columbia University, Steegmuller wrote his first book, O Rare Ben Jonson, published by Alfred Knopf in 1927, under the pseudonym Byron Steel, “a rather romantic name which seems silly to me now.” At the time Steegmuller also considered changing his name to a simpler one like Stuart or Fitzgerald. He gingerly approached his father about it who responded, “Do it if you want to. It’s a clumsy name. I’ve always had trouble with it, and I understand.” Because his dad was so understanding, “I knew I wanted to keep his name. So, I never did change it.” In recognition of the publication of his first book, “Catharine Woods invited me out for tea in New York. She took me to the Plaza Hotel for tea. I was young and, of course, thrilled… We remained friends from then on always.”

 

A second teacher whom Steegmuller cited as influencing his writing was “a very good French teacher, Mademoiselle Hooker… I found that I took quite easily to the study of French.” Upon graduation from GHS, he was awarded “a medal to the person who had the highest marks in French” by the Alliance Francaise in Greenwich. According to Steegmuller, “Both teachers had a considerable influence… It was only later, when I became interested in a particular French subject, Flaubert and his novel Madame Bovary, that I combined the two interests, the writing and the French.”

 

A further fascination with French was engendered by a travel book series his parents had given him entitled Stoddard’s Lectures. “In those days, of course, there wasn’t nearly as much travel, and he opened up fairylands to some of these people who were stay-at-homes… I was so fascinated by two volumes, one on Paris and one on France, that they were almost falling to pieces as a result of my childhood reading.” In addition, Steegmuller recalled one winter when, at the age of four, he and his family lived in Montreal. He conjectured, “So it was a combination of something innate or acquired at a very early age…combined with the good teaching I had from Mademoiselle Hooker, that gave me a basis in French, and so that later somehow I began to write about French things.”

 

In his literary career, at the time of his OHP interview in 1976, Steegmuller had written twenty books, several on the subject of Gustave Flaubert, including a translation of his letters, and was a recipient of the National Book Award. In conclusion, Steegmuller observed, “I had excellent teachers. I don’t think anyone could have had better teachers anywhere.”

 

The interview “School Days Remembered” may be read in its entirety or checked out at the main library. It is also available for purchase by contacting the OHP office. The OHP is sponsored by the Friends of Greenwich Library. Visit the website at glohistory.org. Our narrator’s recollections are personal and have not been subjected to factual scrutiny. Mary Jacobson serves as blog editor.

 Mary Mainiero Margenot - An Enterprising Woman

By Mary Jacobson, OHP Blog Editor

Mary Mainiero Margenot had dreams. She arrived in this country by ship with her mother from Castelfranco in Benevento, Italy, at the age of four in 1900. “When we came to Ellis Island, I remember the water and the bench I slept on. It seemed the water was coming towards me. I remember that; it always comes in like a dream.” Mary was interviewed by Oral History Project volunteer Eileen Harrington in 1984.

 

Mary Margenot at 82.
Photo lent by the Margenot family.

Mary’s father, a shoemaker, was already living on Mulberry Street in Manhattan with his aunt and uncle, awaiting the arrival of his wife and daughter. By the time Mary was ten, her family moved to Greenwich, to “a little place on the corner of Railroad and Davis Avenue, a little place where someone could be a shoemaker…they used to also sell working clothes, working shoes, and things of that sort.” In the decades that followed, the Mainieros (the name later changed to Manero) steadily expanded their business and real estate holdings. Soon they had two stores; the second “was like a meat market and a grocery store, and my uncle was the butcher.” They would cater to the large yachts in the harbor. Her dad subsequently found work at the lumber mill owned by the Maher Brothers on Steamboat Road, cutting, sizing, and stripping lumber.

 

Mary was the oldest child in the family. “My mother and father had seven children besides me. I was the family from ‘the other side.’” As the eldest, although only a young student at Havemeyer School, Mary had the most responsibilities. Her mother could not read or write. “I taught her to write her name, and I taught her the numbers, like one, two, three. … She never learned the English language. She could understand what you said, but she would never talk.” After school, Mary would help her mother with chores and work in the store.

 

One of Mary’s dreams was to become a teacher. Math was her favorite subject. “It came naturally to me… I wanted to be a teacher, so I took…French, Latin, and history…but my people didn’t have the money to send me to school. They had a bunch of kids and no money.” After two years at Greenwich High School, Mary left school. “I was about sixteen, and my mother was still having babies. I could see they needed help, and I could see that I wasn’t doing too well in school… I could hardly hear the teacher.” The reality was that Mary had an untreated perforated eardrum, causing deafness in one ear, contributing to her unsatisfactory performance in school. “I said to myself, ‘If you can’t hear, you certainly can’t teach.’”

 

Mary Mainiero Margenot wedding photo.
Photo lent by Margenot family.

As a young woman, Mary chafed at the strict rules her parents imposed on her. “The Italian families years ago used to raise their children that way… They used to watch me like a hawk. I had no friends. I never had a boyfriend. I never had anybody other than what I could see in the store.” Life changed for Mary when John Margenot started to come to the store with some regularity. “My mother used to say, ‘Why does he hang around here?’ So, I used to say, ‘He’ll come over and talk to me.” In John, Mary saw an older man of twenty-five with a future to share. “He was a man with some vision, and he was a very hard-working man. He was very intelligent… He brought himself up by his own bootstraps.”

 

John Margenot wedding photo.
Photo lent by Margenot family.

At the time, he also had a steady job with Bridgeport Boiler Works. “He didn’t have a home of his own; he was making good money, and he wanted a home of his own.” Mary was eighteen and a half years old when she and John married in 1915. “I told my father I wanted to marry him and my father said no. He said, ‘You have a lot of young children over here. You ought to help us bring them up.’ I said, ‘You had them. I didn’t have them…’ They were never happy with John, but I lived with him for fifty-nine years.”

 

For a while, Mary and John lived in Bridgeport and then in Jersey City, where John worked at a shipyard. They bought a small house there but “it was very low land. I got malaria from it.” Within a few years, they returned to Greenwich permanently, purchasing “a little old house right where the 537 Steamboat Road building is now” (opposite the present location of the Delamar Greenwich Harbor hotel). “We had no money, but we had four thousand dollars in Liberty Bonds… We borrowed the four thousand dollars on the Liberty Bonds, and that way we bought the house.” Eventually, they renovated the house into a three-family dwelling so they could have a steady income from renters.

 

House on Steamboat Road.
Photo lent by the Margenot family.

With their innate business sense and readiness to expand their holdings, Mary and John eventually bought the adjoining lot with $1000 of borrowed money. They bargained with an excavator to remove the dirt and stone for no cost and sell it to the town to help create Grass Island. In time, with more borrowed money and hard labor, “We built Connecticut Iron Works on that property… My husband was very handy with trucks and cars—blacksmith work of any kind, sharpening tools.” Maher Brothers Corporation, which supplied much of the material used in the development of Greenwich, was located across the street, and gave them quite a bit of business. To make extra money, “We used to store trucks in the empty shop at night. In the morning they would drive out and we’d use it as a shop.”

 

Original Connecticut Ironworks in the early 1940s.
Photo lent by Margenot family.

 At the end of WWII, John got into the house-building business. “He used to build on his own, buy a piece of land and build on it, about a house a year.” Mary and John forged a business partnership. Mary enrolled in a business course in Stamford so she could help with their business. She remained its bookkeeper for the next fifty-six years. “Last month (at age 87), I handled ninety thousand dollars’ worth of billing… I still love it. To me, it’s a hobby; it’s not work.” Together they raised four children—Carl, Albert, John, and Vera. Their son John served on the Greenwich Board of Selectmen for fourteen years, including a decade as first selectman from 1985 to 1995.

 

Mary and John Margenot at 50th wedding anniversary.
Photo lent by the Margenot family.

Looking back on her life, Mary observed, “I don’t feel as if a person should be suppressed. What you want to do, what you feel that you can do, do it, whether you’re old, young, or whatever you are, man or woman… That’s always been me. Do it.”

 

John and Mary in their Studebaker.
Photo lent from Margenot family.

The interview “An Enterprising Woman” may be read in its entirety at the main library. It is also available for purchase by contacting the OHP office. The OHP is sponsored by the Friends of Greenwich Library. Visit the website at glohistory.org. Our narrator’s recollections are personal and have not been subjected to factual scrutiny. Mary Jacobson serves as blog editor.

John Gleason - Policing in Greenwich 1930 to 1956

By Mary Jacobson, OHP Blog Editor

John Gleason, born in 1907 and raised in Greenwich from the age of eight, was the descendent of six generations of blacksmiths in Ireland. However, as he said, “I’m not a blacksmith, but I have another forge I hammer at.” John Gleason’s “forge” was the Greenwich Police Department where he labored from 1930-1956 from a rookie to Chief of Police. In 1975, Oral History Project volunteer Penny Bott interviewed Gleason as he described his career in the Greenwich Police Department.

John Gleason, 1975.
Photo by Karl Gleeson.

In 1929, three years after Gleason graduated from Greenwich High School, the stock market crashed. “It became evident that things were going to go very badly with everybody. No one used the word ‘Depression;’ it later came into use. I thought at the time that, no matter what happens to the country, they’re going to need police. So, I applied and was appointed in January 1930” at the age of twenty-three.

Gleason police photo, 1929.
Courtesy of the Oral History Project.

Training and educational requirements for police officers in the 1930s were far different from today. “The training at that particular time amounted to being called into the chief’s office; handed a small booklet of motor vehicle laws; putting on some other policeman’s secondhand uniform; getting the badge; being sworn in by the selectmen; and being put on a post – all within a couple of hours.”

As far as educational requirements were concerned at that time, “You didn’t even have to have a grammar-school education to be appointed… They were a fine group of police officers of what we term ‘the old school.’ They had come up the hard way.” The expected work week consisted of one day off a month with a sixteen-hour shift every third Sunday. “You were glad to have a job. You did what you were told, and there was no association or union or anything of that type. You were more or less completely on your own.”

As far as equipment and transportation were concerned, “…there was only one car at that time, driven by the chief. Radio was unheard of.” The police force of approximately thirty-five officers were quartered in two rooms in the basement of Town Hall.” Gleason’s first responsibility was as a relief patrolman. With no regular patrol cars, police moved from location to location in town by trolley. “When you went out on your post, you got on the trolley at Greenwich Avenue and you went over to Cos Cob.”

With no ambulance service in the 1930s, it was difficult to get patients to the hospital. Gleason vividly remembered responding to a victim who had been hit by a vehicle on Post Road. He had to flag down a random car “to get the driver to help me lift the man off the road before somebody hit him… Then I ran to the Cos Cob firehouse.” Gleason and the firefighter “lifted the man up to the top of the hose (of the open fire truck) and brought him to the hospital…right out in the cold, but there was nothing else to do. We had no ambulances; we had no first aid; we had nothing.” A few years later, the police department operated the first public ambulance in town. “It was an old Model A Ford, called the Black Maria, stationed at police headquarters.”

Gleason’s progressed to that of a plain clothes officer, “checking the back doors of all the stores on Greenwich Avenue and Putnam Avenue . . . from ten at night to six in the morning… If I would find a door open, the orders were to get to a call box.” If help was needed, “There used to be an old White Stripe Taxi Service on Greenwich Avenue…and they would come in a taxi and pick up a policeman and go off on a call.” Gleason reminisced, “If someone told me at that time that one day a Greenwich policeman (in 1975) would have a little radio around his shoulder, and would be able to talk to headquarters two-way, I’d think they were ready for the nut house!”

At that time in Greenwich, “The only east-west artery was the Post Road. So everybody had to go through this corridor… There was no Merritt Parkway. There was no throughway… Our accident rate and traffic load were far in excess of any community of our population.” Gleason cited the lack of traffic lights and the poor condition of the road. “There was only one light at the head of Greenwich Avenue and that was turned off at midnight… If you were going through Greenwich, you started at Byram and there was nothing to stop you.”

 

Gleason police photo, 1941.
Courtesy of the Oral History Project.

The Post Road was also the natural artery for the transportation of alcohol during the Prohibition era. Prohibition, in effect from 1920 until 1933, made the manufacture, transportation, and sale of alcohol illegal. Gleason recalled a particular case, where, working with the federal Alcohol Tax Unit, they followed a truck “with heavily loaded rear springs” up the Post Road carrying ten tons of sugar, only to uncover an alcohol-making operation, over a story high, within a home. “They had taken out the floor of the home and put in a great big copper boiler.” In addition, there were the “local outfits” - a “business that did a little bootlegging on the side, or a butcher shop that kept it in the refrigerator… The complainants in those instances were almost always the wives of the purchasers… They didn’t want their husbands going in and buying liquor, so they’d tell you about it.”

Dinner for Police Chief, 1941.
Courtesy of the Oral History Project.

The year 1937 can be described as a watershed year for the Greenwich Police Department. According to Gleason, the Board of Selectman and the Chief of Police commissioned a study by the International Association of Chiefs of Police. The outcome of the study resulted in numerous organizational recommendations. These included the establishment of separate traffic, patrol, safety, and detective divisions, among others. By 1941, Gleason advanced from Deputy Chief to Chief of the Police, the first time such a position was based on the results of a formal examination. “The police commissioner said, ‘You’re the man it’s going to be and it is done on merit’… I was only thirty-four years old.” Gleason remained in this position until 1956.

Gleason Police Boat.
Courtesy of the Oral History Project.

As Chief of Police, Gleason oversaw the implementation of many other recommendations, including Red Cross training, a standard of record-keeping, improved work conditions, training, relocation from the basement of Town Hall, traffic ticket procedures, to name a few. Gleason was proud that the department, with outside help, undertook the task of producing a “Manual of Procedures” which included police department rules of conduct. As he said, “Your conduct on and off the job is of prime importance… You are an officer at all times.”

Gleason Police Seaplane.
Courtesy of the Oral History Project.

John Gleason proudly led the Greenwich Police Department for fifteen transformative years. On his commissioning as Chief of Police in 1941, a local reporter, William Ryan, wrote an ode with a nod to Walt Whitman for the Port Chester Item:

“O Captain! My Captain!
The fearful test is done!
Your mind has weathered every wrack,
The prize you sought is won.
The first is near,
The yells I hear,
The people all are screaming.
The other guys reached for the prize
But they were only dreaming.”

 

The interview “A Lifetime of Public Service” may be read in its entirety in the main library location. It is also available to purchase by contacting the OHP office. The OHP is sponsored by the Friends of Greenwich Library. Visit the website at glohistory.org. Our narrator’s recollections are personal and have not been subjected to factual scrutiny.