Crossing the Bridge

Bethlehem was of course not “the country”, but a reasonably civilized place on its own merits. Oncle Jacques Haight taught history at Lehigh University across the river, where Catherine Drinker Bowen’s father had once been president. I walked down the “alley” of Milton Street, then west two blocks on Wall Street to Moravian Prep, which had been founded by the Moravians in 1742. Tuesdays and Wednesdays, after school, I walked over the Hill-to-Hill Bridge, past plaques commemorating Count Zinzendorf, the first performance of Mendelssohn in this country, the poet H.D., to Nativity Cathedral to sing in the boy’s choir.


About 90 years ago, the little band of Moravians, scarcely 600 in number, began their missionary work. Of all the multitudes then professing the name of Christ, they only, seem to have felt the force of his parting injunction, "Go—preach the Gospel to every creature " In this grand work, for 70 years, they continued to take the lead of all the Christian world. Within the last 20 years, the church at large has been waking from her slumbers. Instead of 150 missionary laborers, she has now in the field a number not less than 400.—Sixteen years ago, scarcely a single Bible Society of any extensive influence, existed. Now, the number publicly known is little short of 1000. Before the establishment of these Societies, little was done towards translating and printing the Word of Life for the barbarous nations. Since then, nearly 50 of these nations have to read, in their "own language, the wonderful works of God." -The Panoplist

What we read

The New York Times arrived on the front step every morning, the Bethlehem Globe Times by four in the afternoon. Life magazine came in the mail every week with images of Russia and Arabia and Kentucky and Texas, and then Alabama and Mississippi and Vietnam. The New Yorker had cartoons by Chas Addams and Peter Arno and some which I didn’t understand, the Talk of the Town, stories by Cheever and Updike, profiles of important people, including my Uncle Max, and long articles on weighty issues like DDT and the atomic bomb. The National Geographic came monthly with its yellow cover and sometimes with naked breasts revealed within its pages and a new wall map tucked inside.

We didn’t watch TV unless my father was away on business, but when he was off in Buffalo or Chicago or North Dakota defending the legal interests of Bethlehem Steel, we brought our dinners to the second floor and watched Bonanza, Perry Como, The Wonderful World of Disney, Laugh In, the Smothers Brothers Show.

It was an environment that fostered the acquisition of knowledge one needs to succeed on Jeopardy, with its wide categories of literature, art, music, science, and an environment that cultivated veneration of the people who created these objects. My parents had moved out to the “country” of Bethlehem from Manhattan in 1955, when my father left the New York law offices of Cravath, Swain and Moore for a position with Bethlehem Steel, but were not far removed from their New York acquaintances. When my father joined my Grandfather as a member of the Century Club, he brought back stories of dinners in New York with Ved Mehta and concerts by Benny Goodman.

Bethlehem, PA

I was brought up in a home which loved books. There was a “bijou” illustrated life of Christ measuring under one inch square, the compact Oxford English Dictionary complete with magnifying glass to read the reduced type, sets of Kipling, Saki, O. Henry, Bret Harte, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Robert Louis Stevenson, the Federalist Papers, Bellonii’s De Aquatilibus (engravings of fish from 1553), Stormonth’s Dictionary, Johnson’s Dictionary in four volumes, Antique Views of Boston, The Life and Times of Archy and Mehitabel, The Flowering of New England; Biographies of Washington, Thomas a Becket, Hamilton; Roughing It and Life on the Mississippi, several biographies of Burr. A book with a heavily gilded face, which, when one bowed the book block, revealed a watercolor scene painted on the edge of the pages. There were Bibles – the ancestral family Bible kept in a box under the bookcase, recorded with family births and deaths dating to the 17th century, to which my father added each of our names when we came into this world. Matthew Carey’s Bible printed in Philadelphia in 1806. There was a book printed by Benjamin Franklin, and books which once belonged to John Jay, my great-great-great-great-grandfather. There was the new hymnal (1980), and the old hymnal (1940), the new prayerbook (1953), the old prayer book (1928), and the old-old prayerbook (1896?). There were books of poetry by Rupert Brooke, Robert Frost, and Alan Seeger. Winston Churchill’s History of the English Speaking People, biographies of Henry the Eighth and Richard the Lionhearted, 1066 and All That, St. Paul’s School in the Second World War.

There were prints and paintings too- Currier and Ive’s Fearnaught Stallions, portraits of my ancestors: William Weymann , A Calder Print- Mobiles – My father’s wire sculpture of a dinosaur featuring his extracted molar as the mouth – his wood sculpted Steotopygia – Algernon, the half-naked life-sized Moor with ivory teeth who collected keys and cards by the front door– samplers in Italian from 1823, engravings of Matthew and David Clarkson – Stuart’s portrait of James - a letter from John Marshall- a piece of the flag of the Kearsage – A small Dutch painting of an angry child near the dinner table, Ackerman prints of the Star Chamber and the fire of London, an abstract Carnival in Rio- a profile of William M Evarts.