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John M. Templeton Jr. Physician, Philanthropist, Seeker
With a History of the John Templeton Foundation
By John M. Templeton Jr. Templeton Foundation Press
Copyright © 2008 Templeton Foundation Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-59947-113-6
CHAPTER 1
The Early Years
I shall never forget the words spoken to me by a senior assistant resident physician in the late 1960s. I was a young doctor in the midst of a medical internship at the Medical College of Virginia. A young girl had been accidentally shot in the side by a shotgun at close range. When she arrived, she was bleeding profusely and in a state of shock. Her emergency surgery went well, but it was uncertain if she would make it. Before leaving for the night, the senior assistant resident turned to me and said, "Whether or not this girl makes it depends on you." I was both awestruck and challenged. This is what it was all about — to care for others, to offer life and hope wherever possible. It was the reason I chose to spend my professional life in and around hospitals.
The hospital where I was born on February 19, 1940 — the French Hospital on the east side of Manhattan — no longer exists. In the year prior to my birth, both my parents got jobs in New York City. Before that they lived in Dallas, Texas, where my mother had an advertising business and Dad worked as a financial officer for a small Dallas oil exploration company. In New York, Mother worked for the McCann Erikson advertising agency while my father started his full-time career in investment counseling. My mother kept working almost up to the time of my birth. During the pregnancy my parents had looked for a house in Alpine, New Jersey. They finally found one for $100 a month rent, so at the age of two months, I moved with them to New Jersey.
When I was five months old, I was taken to Winchester, Tennessee, where my father grew up, to be with my grandparents, that is, my father's parents. Part of the purpose of the visit was to see if there was someone there who might come and live with my parents and take care of me so that my mother could return to work full-time. My grandmother knew of a black family in Winchester named the Battles. They had several children, including a daughter named Rosezella. Rosezella was very unusual for a black woman in that era. Not only had she graduated from high school but she had taken at least one year of teacher's college training. She could not afford to go beyond that and was interested in the possibility of a job that would take her to the New York City area largely because she wanted to see the 1939–40 World's Fair.
My grandmother arranged for Rosezella to come and take care of me at their house on South High Street in Winchester. My mother ordered that for a certain period of time each day I be taken outside. Apparently she had heard somewhere that being exposed to the sun was good for a child. My grandmother, I think instinctively, felt that it was not wise for a small and skinny baby to be out in the hot Tennessee sun in June or July, but yielding to my mother's wishes she did arrange for Rosezella to take me out in a carriage. It was so hot that Rosezella took an umbrella with her to block the sun. As for me, I was so uncomfortable that I would cry whenever the sun fell on me. Although Rosezella did not know it, my grandmother kept watch out the window. She noticed that Rosezella would allow her own umbrella to slip off of her shoulder and over the baby carriage to shield me from the sun. In later years my grandmother told Rosezella that when she witnessed that, she knew that Rosezella was the right caretaker for me. After all, she allowed common sense to guide her. When I was old enough to speak, I began calling her "Ro Ro." (Not too many two-year-olds can say "Rosezella.") That would become the way all of us who benefited from Ro Ro's presence would refer to her until her death in 2005 at the age of ninety-three.
I stayed with Ro Ro and my grandparents during the summer of 1940. My mother returned to New Jersey where she started a job as an advertising writer for Bamberger's in Newark. To get to work, she used a car that she and Dad had bought for $200. Dad took the bus into New York each day. On October 8, 1940, Ro Ro brought me by train from Tennessee to Newark where we were met by my mother's mother, known to us as "Nana." We then went to live in Alpine, New Jersey.
A year or so after I was born, my mother had a miscarriage. She eventually got a better job as an advertising executive at McCann Erikson in New York City where she worked, except during pregnancies with my sister and brother, until her untimely death in 1951, the details of which I will describe in the next chapter.
When I was two, we moved from Alpine, New Jersey, to Grand Avenue in Englewood, New Jersey. Ro Ro lived with us and cared for both me and my sister, who was born May 9, 1942. Her Christian name was Anne Dudley, but I knew her from the beginning as Candy, the nickname my mother gave her at birth. The new location made for an easy bus trip for Mom and Dad into New York City, where both were still working full-time — Dad in his new investment firm, called Templeton, Dobbrow and Vance, and my mother still with McCann Erikson.
One evening while we were living on Grand Avenue, Dad came home and announced that his company had finally done well enough for him to pay himself a salary. No longer did he have to rely only on my mother's income and the last bonus from his work with the Texas oil company. Up until this time he had used whatever extra money there was to pay salaries to the few people who worked with him in the investment counsel firm. My parents' financial philosophy was reflected in their decision, made early in their marriage, to set aside 50 percent of all they earned for savings. They shared the aspiration of working together as a team with careful budgeting of their resources for long-term investment and financial benefit. When my father came home and told my mother that he was now able to pay himself a salary, they went out to dinner to celebrate, a rarity for them in those days when money was so tight.
The house on Grand Avenue was a small- to medium-size clapboard structure. It had a medium-sized living room with a fireplace that I remember mainly because of the Christmases we spent there. Since my parents worked most of the time, I spent much of my time with Ro Ro in the kitchen as she prepared meals.
It was in this house where, at the age of five, I received a rather rude introduction to the power of electricity. I discovered that one of the floor-level electrical outlets was an open socket. I had some understanding that electrical outlets were the source of power for lights, and I knew that there was some danger to electricity. But curiosity's pull outweighed any good sense. When I stuck my finger into the open socket, my reward was a sudden jolting shock that traveled up my arm and into my torso. Fortunately the shock caused me to lurch backward, thus breaking the connection. I learned my lesson and have respected the power of electricity ever since.
In retrospect, I can see that some of what I experienced while living on Grand Avenue — and how I processed those experiences — forecast my future career in medicine and surgery. On one occasion I developed an earache in the middle of the night. A doctor came and lanced my ear, bringing great relief. (In the early 1940s antibiotics were generally not available, and if the area of infection was not drained, the potential for hazardous complications was very real.) I remember going into my parents' bedroom the next morning and finding in my mother's closet a paper bag with cotton gauze soaked with blood. My mother had hidden it there, afraid I might be repelled by the sight of blood. Actually I was intrigued by it.
I also recall at about age five being given a glass piggybank into which I faithfully deposited coins to save money. At one point, wanting some of the proceeds, I tried to get some coins out by slipping a knife inside the coin entry slot. A portion of the glass bank broke and I cut my finger. It was not all that serious, but it was my first laceration, and it certainly was impressive to me at the time.
Through the years, Christmas has always been a special time for the Templeton family. My earliest memories of Christmas can be traced to the house on Grand Avenue. We were allowed to take the stockings brought by Santa Claus up to our rooms the morning of Christmas before my parents got up, but we were not allowed to open any of the presents under the tree until Mom and Dad were up and we had Christmas morning breakfast. Because of the generosity of my grandparents, most of my presents came from out of town.
Our house was near a corner drugstore. At about the age of five, I was allowed to walk there on my own. To be granted this privilege said a lot about my parents' upbringing in the fairly safe atmosphere of their childhood years in Tennessee where neighbors looked out for young children. Grand Avenue was one of the busiest roads in the town and it contained some hazards. But hazards were not much on people's minds in those days.
At this time, you could get a nickel ice-cream cone and you had the luxury of choosing from three or four flavors! Once without telling anybody, I walked eight or ten blocks down Grand Avenue and into the center of town to the main intersection of Palisade Avenue, a very busy intersection, in search of a new ice-cream sensation. It never occurred to me that my absence would lead to a lot of searching in the neighborhood. Finally somebody went all the way down to Palisade Avenue and found me standing there. Nothing actually came of that episode, except that I had discovered an exciting ice-cream place across Palisade Avenue called Baumberger's. From that time on, it was my first choice when my parents suggested we go out for ice cream.
I started attending nursery school and then kindergarten in a little country day school called Elizabeth Morrow School. My parents felt school would be good for me, as there were not many children around where we lived and school would give me the chance to socialize with other children. When I entered nursery school, and then kindergarten, I was by far the youngest kid in the class. The school had perhaps fifteen to twenty students in a classroom and there seemed to be lots of teacher support. I especially enjoyed the morning assemblies. We started them with the Pledge of Allegiance and some Bible reading or moral lesson. During the play times I learned to stand on my head and do cartwheels, which was something the other kids could not do. I enjoyed gaining recognition for a skill others did not have. I also enjoyed participating in the Thanksgiving, Christmas, and other pageants at the school. Elizabeth Morrow was not overtly Christian, but in the suburbs of New Jersey Christianity was certainly the prevailing religious grouping, so much so that I do not recall whether at that time there were others of different religious backgrounds.
It was while attending Elizabeth Morrow that I fell in love for the first time. One of my schoolmates was Mary Pat King, who lived in Tenafly. I recall visiting her house in Tenafly and, on one occasion at school during recess, taking her out behind the bushes and being emboldened enough to kiss her. No one seemed to object in that day and age. There was no protest, no outcry of political incorrectness. In fact, I think she enjoyed the kiss as much as I did. Later on, at the age of eight or nine, I took her out on dates. One set of parents or the other would drive us into the center of Englewood to a soda shop, and I would buy a single ice-cream soda with two straws. I'd seen it in a movie and thought it was the romantic thing to do. We then went on to the movies and got picked up afterwards and driven home.
January of 1946, just before my sixth birthday, brought about a major move. My parents had found a bigger house in a more residential area of Englewood: 126 Chestnut Street, away from busy Grand Avenue. It was "on the hill," as they called it in Englewood, where the properties were bigger and the houses nicer.
As part of their financial philosophy, Dad and Mom never paid for anything except by cash. They never wanted to be in debt for anything, and felt that if you were going to buy a car or house, you should save up your money and simply buy what you needed with the money you had. They had paid $5,000 for the Grand Avenue house and in 1946 sold it for $17,000. Dad then paid $22,000 for the Chestnut Street house and property of about one and a half acres of land.
It was a large wood-shingled house with a front- and side-enclosed porch. The first room to the left upon entering the house we called the library because it had shelving for books. But we tended to use the library more as a living room when my parents were home. It had two couches, and when my mother would come home from a full day's work in New York City, I would help to prepare a highball for her. When my father came home, usually later, he would lie down on the couch. This was one of the few times my sister and I could spend time with both parents together.
As was the case with our previous residences, the kitchen was more the center of our home than any other room. It was where we children ate when our parents were not at home and where we spent a lot of our time talking with Ro Ro, giving and receiving the day's news. By the time we had become settled in the house on 126 Chestnut Street, my parents had acquired the services of another lady from Tennessee — Mattie Whitworth — who helped with the general cleaning so that Ro Ro could concentrate on taking care of us. Ro Ro and Mattie shared the cooking duties.
Adjacent to the kitchen was a pantry where we kept an old two-door refrigerator that contained the iced Royal Crown Colas Dad liked to drink. Also in the pantry was one of the two telephones in the house (the other was in my parents' bedroom). Early on, to make a call you lifted up the receiver and gave the four-digit number you wanted to the operator. Later, we got a rotary dial phone, which was very advanced at the time.
The house included a large furnace room, where we used to show cartoons at birthday parties on an early 8-mm projector, and a medium-size back room, which had a large table for my Lionel train layout. (This room would many years later serve as the location for mice cages in which my brother, Christopher, and my step-brother, Malcolm, bred and raised about forty mice.)
The yard had a nice space down one side where in years to come I would play baseball-like games. I would also throw tennis balls up against the house to practice fielding grounders and catching flies. The property then expanded into a larger backyard that had a wonderful sandbox where I would build sand houses and then stick firecrackers under them to blow them up. The backyard also featured a swing attached to a large tree. This became the center of many of our childhood games and activities.
But the real adventure was elsewhere on the property. There was a house in the back that had once been a barn, with stables where a carriage once was kept. The garage area (as we called it), which used to be the stables, featured about forty years' worth of license plates that had been nailed up on the wall. It was clear that as the license plate expired each year, the previous owner of the house had removed his plate and hammered it up on the wall, to keep some kind of record, I imagine, of his earlier years as a driver.
The first floor of that barn/garage went back to where the tack and supplies had been stored and the horses stabled. The second floor looked as though someone had lived there — probably a caretaker. There was a living room, and adjoining it was what must have been a small kitchen because it had sinks and pipes. Off the side of the kitchen was what might have been a bedroom. From there you could climb into a loft above and all the way up into what might be described as a bell tower, although there was no bell in it.
I describe this in some detail because that house became our great adventure world. When friends came over to play, we would climb all through the house — not, I'm afraid, always respectful of the property. We loved to scamper all the way up into the bell tower, then out the bell tower and down the back roof, as we played our various games of hide-and-seek and chase. No doubt the demise of that building came about in part because we found that it was easier to climb up to the roof of the building if we pulled out some of the shingles so that we could walk up the braces between the shingles.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from John M. Templeton Jr. Physician, Philanthropist, Seeker by John M. Templeton Jr.. Copyright © 2008 Templeton Foundation Press. Excerpted by permission of Templeton Foundation Press.
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