The Last of His Kind: The Life and Adventures of Bradford Washburn, America's Boldest Mountaineer

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The Last of His Kind
The Life and Adventures of Bradford Washburn, America's Boldest Mountaineer

Chapter One

Boy Adventurer

He was born Henry Bradford Washburn Jr. in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on June 7, 1910. There's no getting around the fact that Brad was a Boston Brahmin: he could trace his ancestry back to William Brewster, of the Mayflower and Plymouth Colony. But he was never rich, even when he was the director of the Museum of Science. An uncle who'd made a fortune in the wire goods industry put Brad through prep school. Entering Harvard in the fall of 1929, just as the Great Depression hit, Brad could barely finance his college education. A lifelong habit of penny-pinching was inculcated during those early years.

Brad's father, Henry Bradford Washburn Sr., was a minister who eventually became dean of the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge. His mother, the former Edith Colgate, was the widow of his father's best friend, who had died of typhoid fever in 1902. Brad grew up with a half-sister, Mabel, from his mother's first marriage. Though fifteen years older, Mabel, whom Brad called "Sis," became his close friend and faithful correspondent throughout his teenage years. A year and a half after Brad's arrival, his mother gave birth to another son, Sherwood ("Sherry"), who would go on to become a world-renowned physical anthropologist, one of the first experts to maintain that Piltdown Man was a hoax. (In a brilliant practical joke, several pranksters planted the jawbone of an orangutan and the skull of a modern man in a gravel pit in Sussex, England, in 1912, then claimed to have excavated an early protohuman, the so-calledmissing link. It took more than four decades for the forgery to be exposed.)

Judging by his writings and his achievements, Brad's character seems to have been fully formed at the age of eight. During the First World War, Brad's father moved the family to New York City, where he selected chaplains for military duty abroad. Already fascinated by the outdoors, Brad spent many a solitary hour fishing from the docks off the Hudson and East rivers. Though its publication was no doubt finagled by his father, Brad's first literary effort to see print was a five-paragraph essay that came out in The Churchman on May 12, 1919. It is called "Fishing: What a Boy Thinks."

Despite the idiosyncratic spelling that an editor wisely left intact, Brad already comes across as the self-taught expert confidently lecturing others about the proper way to do things:

Fishing is a very bad habit when out of season. You should not fish to [sic] much because the fish are disterbed and move from place to place; they get scerd and wont bite. I have fished to eat. It is not good to fish for fun and after you have got a great many fish to throw them away or give them to the cat. God never intended them to be throne away, he ecspects them to swim around and chase their tales.Despite his jaunty tone, the lad had a sensitive side: "I have never liked to take the hook out of the fishes mouth, it makes me feel bad and I know the fish don't like it. They make a little grone and are off to the happy hunting ground."

But the young angler quickly reverts to practical instruction:

It is always best to stand at least ten feet from the water. I have always had good luck with a steel rod. The best store to get them is Abarcrombi and Fich, Madison Ave. and 45th St. Most -people think that children living in a city have no chance to fish. That is not true because I have caught a lot of tomy cod off the 79th St. dock, New York.

All his life, Brad would prove to be something of a genius at tinkering with gear in the field. At the age of eight, he knew exactly how to manufacture the ideal tackle:If you want to do this, solder a bell onto the end of a strong peace of wire, on the other end a screw. Fasten this on the dock by means of the screw. Have about a hundred feet of line to the wire and with about three hoocks on the end of the line with a sinker. Tie the loose end of the line to the wire and throe the line into the water. When the fish bite the bell will ring. Give the line a quick gerck and pull the fish off and rebait.

After the war, the family moved back to Cambridge. Many decades later, Brad would credit Miss Florence Leatherbee (it was always "Miss Leatherbee"), his fifth-grade teacher at Buckingham School, with kindling his interest in geography. "She showed us maps of the world," Brad would tell journalist Lew Freedman in 2005. "She had a Hammond Atlas and it showed where gold was found, and copper, and coal. Looking at it, you had the feeling of the world being a live place instead of just a map." At the age of fourteen, Brad drew his own first map, of Squam Lake, the family's summer retreat in New Hampshire.

Throughout his life, not entirely in jest, Brad would maintain that he became a mountain climber because he suffered from hay fever as a boy. In the summer of 1921, at age eleven, he started hiking up the low hills behind Squam Lake, where he discovered to his amazement that the higher he went, the less his hay fever bothered him. On July 21 of that summer, with his cousin, Brad made his first ascent of Mt. Washington, at 6,288 feet the highest peak in New England. Four years later, with his father and Sherry, Brad repeated the ascent in winter. Mt. Washington has a gentle topography, but especially in winter, thanks to its ferocious weather, it can be a dangerous climb. The crown of the Presidential Range has killed more climbers than any other American mountain. (The highest wind speed ever measured anywhere in the world, 231 miles per hour, was recorded at the summit observatory in 1934.)

Brad's parents were loving, involved, and indulgent, and Brad and Sherry shared a happy and adventurous childhood straight out of Tom Swift. The small but elite Buckingham School was situated only a few short blocks from the Deanery, the Washburn family house on Mason Street. (By now, Brad's father had become dean of the Episcopal Theological School.) Brad attended Buckingham through fifth grade, then switched to nearby Browne & Nichols for sixth and seventh grades, because beyond fifth grade, Buckingham tutored only girls. (In 1974, the two schools would merge, becoming Buckingham Browne & Nichols, or simply BB&N.)

In December 1922, three months into seventh grade at B&N, Brad was abruptly offered a "chance-vacancy" at the posh Groton School, in Groton, Massachusetts. He transferred in midterm from B&N, becoming overnight a boarder rather than a day student. Writing from Groton to his parents, Sherry, or Mabel every few days, twelve-year-old Brad was miserably homesick. To his mother on December 14, he put up a brave front: "It is a wonderful school. . . . I am having a fine time." To Sis, at about the same time, he confessed his real feelings:

"I am sorely afraid that I cannot stay here much longer. I have been on detention every day since I have been here. The work is far too hard for me."