In the summer of 1950, Ruth and I both worked on one of my professors farm near Trumansburg in New York about twenty-five miles from our home in Ithaca. For that summer we were staying at the professor’s home and my memory of the first few nights was that the professor’s little dog was making terrible noises, barking and keeping the neighborhood awake. She was so annoying that, late one evening, the neighbor came with a double-barreled shotgun and threatened to shoot the dog if we could not keep her quiet so, not knowing what else to do, I tied her up in the barn but, persistent beast that she was, she chewed a hole in the woodwork of the door and, in the morning, was standing outside on the steps of the house barking – I suppose as a greeting for the new day. My tulip-growing neighbor came out and, in a sign of empathy, let me know that my plight was not without parallels in the neighborhood. As a result we managed to keep our noisy dog relatively happy and quiet with special treats for almost the rest of the summer.
One day in early summer, while I was clearing weeds, I had happy news: a call from the social agency who had placed two little sisters with us for temporary fostering. Apparently, news of this successful foster parenting had apparently reached the adoption agency in the nearby town of Elmira; and they were prepared to accept us as applicants for adoption. Of course we were very excited and I remember stopping work on the farm and sending a brief message to my professor saying that I might not be able to finish the harvesting because my own family wish was becoming real. Ruth and I received a message from the Elmira agency that we should come on a certain Friday to meet and bring home the baby that was to be our child.
When we came to the agency to pick up our new baby we were told that the director, Mrs. X, was waiting to give us our final interview prior to the baby being brought out and placed in our care. In my relations with that agency, there was only one dark spot that almost destroyed our chances - we had joined the director in her office, when an event occurred that has remained in my mind as a near disaster. In this final interview, she mentioned that the baby was of German ancestry - a revelation that made me deeply uneasy. I was about to blurt out something that would have let the social worker know how I felt, when I realized, luckily, that I should not make this revelation to her. Had I expressed how this revelation affected me, a German Jew, it might very easily have led to a disaster – meaning that we might not have become parents at all. Luckily I suppressed my anxieties, and shortly afterwards the social worker came in holding the baby. We had figured that a four-month old would fit into a laundry basket and so had lined one with blankets and put it in the car to bring our new daughter home. Discovering was that she was too large, Ruth held her in her lap all the way from Elmira to our home in Ithaca at 206 North Quarry Street, where our student roomers came out of their rooms to admire her and bring her tiny presents, making our first day at home with our baby quite unforgettable.
Francie’s crib was in a tiny room that overlooked a field of wild flowers and, although the baby would not be able to see them from her crib, the smell of the flowers wafted through the open window with the light summer air. But there was something that the baby could see. Ruth and I had discovered some special wallpaper – a Dutch design repeated with flowers and wagon wheels. The wagon wheel on the wallpaper remains in my memory because, on the second or third evening after the baby was put into her crib, Ruth came to collect me from my study desk to bring me to the baby’s room to look at the baby’s activities. What we had expected was that she would do as many babies do, namely take a blanket and suck on one corner as an aid to falling asleep - that is what we expected from the literature. However, Ruth wanted me to witness that Francie's very different method. She would put her left arm through the crib bars and trace the wheel on the wallpaper before going to sleep. At the time Ruth thought that the baby might have some kind of ingrown drive to draw, which I thought this was ridiculous. If our daughter began drawing with crayons, it would surely say little or nothing about her future as a potential artist. In other words, I was applying the viewpoint of a skeptical observer as I was being taught it as a PhD candidate in child development.
Early that summer we were going to take the train to visit both sets of grandparents in California. Our main concern was, of course, presenting our baby to the potential grandparents. Our preparation for the journey, aside from the usual packaging of clothes, meant creating a secure “cradle”, both for days and nights on the train. As we did not have sleeping accommodations and would have to spend three nights in the same carriage where we sat during the day, how would we manage to accommodate Francie? Looking back, I think I found just the way to do it: Francie would sit up and sleep in a larger version of the basket we had intended to bring her home in when we first got her. The handles at each end provided a means of suspending this basket from the overhead luggage rack when she slept, shielded from the lights in the carriage by a blanket also suspended from the rack. That process, with me standing on the seat, pliers and wire in hand, obviously drew the attention of many other travelers, some of whom came down the aisle to take a better look. That unintentional act on our part led to a wonderful result. Many who came to take a look also offered to help and so Francie had not only women but men offering to walk with her in their arms: in other words she became the mascot that had made a hoard of unrelated, and previously unfocused, travelers into something like a community. It was an event that made the three-and-a-half day trip bearable - through Francie we had become the centre of interest.
That first night on the train in her basket, Francie kept whimpering and neither soothing words nor her bottle helped her go to sleep. We noticed her left arm push against the curved wall and ceiling of the carriage and, suddenly, I saw Ruth get up, take down a small piece of our luggage and, to my surprise and dismay (what would other people think?) take out a roll of ….... yes you've guessed it – the wallpaper. And in view of everyone, including those sitting in the opposite direction, now turned around, Ruth mounted a strip of the wallpaper on the blind. Francie gave out an audible cry, moved her left hand along the wheels on the wallpaper, and soon was fast asleep. In fact, our baby turned out to be exactly what Ruth had anticipated – an artist in the making.
