Though this blog is not intended primarily to be autobiographical, avoiding the personal is to avoid the essence of Christianity.
Pictured is Shell Island, situated a quarter-mile off the coast of Greenwich, Connecticut, a New York suburb roughly 25 miles northeast of the city. My mother’s grandfather, August Eimer, purchased it in 1910 (it was later sold in 1961).
When I was a kid I once overheard a conversation among a group of salty old sea dogs who’d named themselves, eponymously, “The Byram Boat Club.” As far as I could tell, their meetings consisted mostly of sitting around one of the docks at the marina nearby, drinking cans of Schaeffer beer, and telling (no doubt tall) fishing tales.
That day one of them stated, authoritatively, that the tower on the island was built by “old man Eimer” after his hero son’s tragic death in the war. While it’s true the tower was built to honor the tragic loss of a son (my mother’s uncle, Gus), in actual fact he died of pneumonia on a business trip to Milwaukee!
The sixty-foot tower was erected in 1925 and modeled after a Methodist church in Port Chester, New York (a neighboring town). Its granite stone was taken from the same local Byram quarry that was used to build the Brooklyn Bridge!
The tower featured four floors, each accessed by a winding circular staircase that led up to the top, where evenly-placed windows offered expansive views of the Long Island Sound and the Connecticut shoreline.
Each floor had a theme. One contained letters and memorabilia from my great-grandfather’s time working with Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and others. (He was a chemist and headed a large pharmaceutical company on 3rd Avenue.)
I grew up nearby, on the shore road that dead-ends at the southwestern tip of the state. On one side of the road is the Sound and the other the Byram River which at its southernmost point divides Connecticut and New York.
In 1946, just after WWII, my recently-married parents were unable to find a suitable apartment in New York (their preferred location), but were able to obtain housing in Greenwich, due, apparently, to my mother’s family connections. Housing, you see, was scarce after the war.
My mother, Mary, was born and reared in Manhattan, the daughter of a lawyer/real estate developer and an erstwhile concert pianist from Topeka, Kansas. Neither was religious and only nominal Episcopalians.
For a time they lived in the same apartment building as Babe Ruth. His older daughter and my mother, in fact, were good friends and palled around with each other.
One morning, as she tells it, Mom grilled the Hall of Famer as to why he was eating eggs and bacon instead of Wheaties, which he was endorsing in advertisements at the time. Apparently, from what she said, he failed to appreciate her characteristically dogged impertinence.
Being the adventurous type, Mom one day decided on her own to wander over to a neighborhood church (probably St. Michael’s Episcopal Church on W. 99th St. – though I’m not entirely sure). She was under 10-years of age. In short order she became a paid singer in the choir, this despite the fact that her parents never darkened the doors of the place!
In hindsight, this was a harbinger of things to come. Somehow she was drawn to the church without ever knowing precisely why. She loved its music, yes, but, more than that, she said there was something else, something ineffable, that drew her there.
Later, after a series of tragedies in her family, she resolved that one day she’d marry a minister!