Erik Hanson’s new book, A Book Of Ages is a compendium of moments from famous lives, including triumphs, failures, odd incidents, crossed paths and other such tantalizing miscellany. Especially revealing, apropos of this special day, is the excerpt about fathers, after the fold.
Organized by year of age:
2: In 1949, Stephen King’s father, a merchant seaman, abandons his family, leaving behind a box of science fiction paperbacks.
3: Ernest Hemingway is taken fishing for the first time by his father at Walloon Lake, Michigan, 1902.
5: Yo-Yo Ma is learning to play Bach’s Suites for Unaccompanied Cello, 1960. His father has him memorize several bars at a time, working for a half hour each day.
7: His father and his teacher believe Thomas Edison is too stupid to be educated in school, so his mother begins teaching him at home, 1854.
7: Agnes Gonxa Bojaxhiu’s father is murdered, leaving the family in poverty, 1917. The child will be educated by Irish missionary nuns. She will later change her name to Mother Teresa.
12: Charles Dickens’ father is imprisoned for debt, 1824.
14: Paul McCartney’s father gives him a trumpet for his birthday, 1956. Paul takes it to a music shop and trades it for a guitar. In the fall, his mother dies of breast cancer, two weeks after being diagnosed. Paul writes his first song, I Lost My Little Girl.
18: Winston Churchill passes the entrance exam to Sandhurst on his third try, qualifying for the cavalry, which has lower intellectual standards, 1893. He receives a letter from his father deploring his “slovenly happy-go-lucky harum-skarum style of work.” The letter goes on:
“I am certain that if you cannot prevent yourself from leading the idle useless unprofitable life you have had during your schooldays & later months, you will become a mere social wastrel…and you will degenerate into a shabby unhappy & futile existence.”
Churchill’s father will die two years later of syphilis.
18: A new father, Gandhi sails from Bombay to England, alone, to study law, 1888.
22: Theodor Seuss Geisel adds the honorific “Dr.” to his pen-name Seuss, hoping his father won’t know he’s dropped out of school, 1926.
37: Charles Dickens begins the monthly serialization of a new novel called David Copperfield, May 1849. In it he describes the young narrator’s despair when his bankrupt father forces him to go to work in a shoe-blacking factory. It is an experience from the author’s own childhood, which he has never told anyone before. His own children believe it is fiction.
42: Abraham Lincoln skips his father’s funeral, 1851. When his mother died, Lincoln’s father left the children alone in their one-room cabin for six months to travel to another state to court a new wife. Lincoln never forgot this abandonment.
43: Charles Ingalls moves the family to a farm on the shores of Silver Lake in the Dakota Territory, 1879. He has settled, farmed, failed and resettled nine times in eleven years. His daughter Laura will write a series of books about the experience.
48: Mick Jagger is a grandfather, 1992.
52: Rolling Stone bass guitarist Bill Wyman marries his 19 year-old girlfriend, Mandy Smith, 1989. The New York Daily News later reports that Wyman’s 28 year-old son is dating Smith’s 40 year-old mother, which means, should they marry, that Wyman’s wife will be her own stepmother-in-law and Wyman will be his son’s stepson-in-law.
55: Richard Nixon accepts the presidential nomination at the 1968 Republican Convention in Miami. The sight of him with Tricia and Julie causes Norman Mailer to reflect that “a man who could produce daughters like that could not be all bad.”
64: Philo T. Farnsworth, the inventor of television, dies bankrupt, 1971. He never allowed his children to watch TV, believing the content was worthless.
66: Johnny Carson tapes his last Tonight Show on May 22, 1992. He can honestly claim that most of the children born in the U.S. in the previous three decades were conceived during his television show.
81: When his daughter writes a memoir, J. D. Salinger says to a Cornish, New Hampshire neighbor: “Never have children.” Catcher In The Rye is still selling about 250,000 copies a year in 2000, a half-century after publication.
84: Saul Bellow has a new daughter, his first, 1999.
95: Senator Strom Thurmond, who secretly fathered an out-of-wedlock child with a black 15-year-old housekeeper 65 years earlier, swears in the Chief Justice presiding over the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton, who is charged with having consensual sex with a 22-year-old intern in the Oval Office and trying to cover it up.
