Welcome
Cornelius Lansing Hays, III and Monica Marie Hays
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Welcome to the Hays Family
It has forever been thus: So long as we write what we think then all of the other freedoms--all of them--may remain intact. And it is then that writing becomes a weapon of truth, an article of faith, an act of courage. Rod Sterling
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My father, third from left, joined the US Navy while attending Columbia Law School in 1941. Walter Potts, second from left, also joined at the same time.
Arriving in Hawaii at the conclusion of the Pacific Cup Regatta, San Francisco to Kaneohe Yacht Club, Oahu, July 1993. We placed 14 out of 60 entries and took 14 days.
At Lake Pleasant four Hayses show off their mustaches.
c. 1983 our kiddiess: from the left, youngest to oldest, Danielle, Erin, MCH, Kelly. Ponytails high and tight
Biography
Youth
Lansing Hays was educated at Riverside Elementary School, Brunswick Academy, a day school in Greenwich, and Williston Academy, a prep school next door to a condom factory in Easthampton. He graduated in 1960 and attended Middlebury College. He majored in American Literature. Summers were spent traveling or working. In 1964, he began graduate work in west Philadelphia at the University of Pennsylvania with MacEdward Leach in Folklore and Anthony Garvin in American Culture. In 1965, he left to marry Sandra Brandt, whose parents were living on an island in the Seine outside of Paris courtesy of IBM World Trade, and to begin work in book publishing. Lansing sold books to professors in colleges and universities in central Pennsylvania for Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. His starting salary was $6,000.
Marriage to Sandra Brandt
Later in that year, Lyndon Johnson changed the draft deferment eliminating the exception for married citizens. Lansing found himself early one morning in a bus headed to Harrisburg with forty farm boys for a draft physical. Interpreting this event as a warning, Lansing signed up for the Navy officer candidate program and was shipped off to Newport, Rhode Island in September, 1965. Sandy left a dispiriting job with a travel agency and signed up for a job with IBM in Cambridge, Massachusetts as a system engineer.
Lansing spent four years in the Navy as a CIC officer and navigator on USS Samuel N. Moore, a destroyer home ported in Long Beach, California. While Sandy continued her work as a systems engineer for IBM in southern California, Lansing was deployed for two tours off Vietnam. On the second of these, his ship returned after nine months in combat zones via Australia, New Zealand, and the South Pacific Islands. The last six months of his tour with the Navy, his ship was transferred to Tacoma, Washington, as a fleet reserve training vessel. They took summer reservists up to Alaska while practicing various Navy drills. Late in 1969, Lansing was discharged. He and Sandy flew to Riverside, Connecticut for Christmas with his family and left shortly thereafter for an around the world flight on Pan Am route one, beginning in Sierra Leone and ending in Japan. They returned to New York in May, 1970, bought an old Cadillac, packed it with old clothes and souvenirs, and headed across country. Lansing had accepted employment representing Holt, Rinehart, and Winston in southern California. The southern California era was remarkable for two events, the purchase of their first house for $14,000 and the birth in 1971 of their first daughter, Christina Spencer Hays. In 1972 Lansing was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes and was dependent on insulin injections for the rest of his life. In 1973 Lansing moved bag, baggage, and daughter to northern California to begin work as an acquisitions editor for Mayfield Publishing, a startup begun with Boyce Nute, the owner and president of National Press. Soon after arriving in northern California, Erin Asher Hays was born at El Camino Hospital in Mountain View. From 1973 to 1986, Lansing signed and published university level textbooks in various subjects while growing and managing Mayfield Publishing Company with Boyce. He loved the responsibilities of editorial qualification and guiding authors. The company grew and prospered. Basic textbooks were signed and developed that eventually earned the company millions of dollars and went through nine or more editions. Over the years as the company grew, Lansing was asked to take on more management responsibilities and to hire and train new editors and editorial staff. Eventually he was managing all the editorial operations. However, he lost interest in personnel problems and wished for a return to editorial responsibilities. Management with the sole owner of a business, even within a rapidly growing and profitable organization, is an experience of uneven pleasure.
Career and Marriage Change
In 1980, Sandy had enough of life with Lansing and left. Instead of becoming lonely and despondent, Lansing was introduced to Monica Johnson, a young widow whose husband had been killed six months earlier in a motorcycle accident. Their first date was a sail around Angel Island on the first Ivory Goose, an eighteen-foot catboat. Monica had two young daughters, MCH and Danielle, who were almost as adorable as their mother. Monica and Lansing were married on Thanksgiving Day, 1982. Lansing happily adopted both MHS and Danielle, forming the Hay-Jo soccer team, which was almost incapable of soccer during the first game but argued with the scrappiest. Despite this flawed opening game, all four daughters played soccer during pre-adolescence. After several happy years in a wonderful sprawl of a house in Los Altos, Lansing moved his family to Palo Alto for the better public schools and more cosmopolitan ambiance.
In 1986, with management with a privately held company owner becoming his dominant work, Lansing grew tempted to revert to hands-on writing and editorial work and took a leave of absence for one year to write The Pirates of Sheepshead Bay . Monica worked as a real estate agent for Carolyn Mansell in Los Altos. At the end of this year, Boyce Nute was forgiving enough to rehire him to start a new venture in the humanities and communication.
Travels
In July and August of 1992, Lansing sailed in the Pacific Cup to Hawaii to experience blue water racing and see if his celestial navigation could get him to Oahu. The trip took two weeks over and three weeks back. Michelle and Monica flew over to greet the survivors and MHS helped crew the boat on its return to San Francisco. During the return trip, Lansing celebrated his 50th birthday. Ever after he was certain that the best birthday possible was standing watches on a sailboat in mid-ocean.
In October, 1993, Lansing resigned from Mayfield for the final time to depart on his Freedom 44 cat ketch sailboat, Ivory Goose, for Mexico, and parts beyond. Departing in November, 1993, the Ivory Goose sailed south along the coast with a crew of four. That winter was spent in the Sea of Cortez and the coast of Mexico from Puerta Vallarta to Zihuatanejo. In the middle of the winter season, the Ivory Goose developed a leak in its diesel fuel tank. Running with a jury rig for fuel, the Goose sailed back to San Francisco for the summer months and underwent welding repairs.
During August and September of that summer of 1994 Lansing attended Spanish language school in Antigua, Guatemala continuing a lifelong frustration with Spanish. He lived with a family on the outskirts of town. He walked to school each day to converse with a native speaker. He tried to learn the Spanish words for oar and starboard and shoal reef, but the residents in Antigua, a small, ancient capital high among the volcanoes of Guatemala, did not know what these words were in any language.
In November of that fall, 1994, Lansing and Ivory Goose again set sail for Mexico. From San Diego to Cabo San Lucas, the boat participated in the first Baja Ha Ha, a cruiser's rally organized by the peripatetic Richard Spindler, publisher of Latitude 38. In Cabo, Jed Mortenson joined the crew. He was to land eventually in Venezuela ten months later, a most welcome and valuable addition to the boat, and its longest passagemaker.
The Goose spent the following season 1994-1995 gunkholing up and down the Pacific Coast of Mexico visiting ports as far south as Zihuatenejo. By spring of 1995 Lansing departed for Acapulco and points south, cruising along the southern coast of Mexico and Costa Rica until transiting the Panama Canal in July, 1995. Entering the Caribbean for the first time, the Goose spent three weeks in the San Blas Islands before taking the southern route along the northern coast of South America. The first port of call was the old capital of the Spanish Main, Cartegena.
The fall and winter of 1995-6 were spent in the Leeward Islands, slowly working up and down the islands taking on various visitors from the States as crew. February, 1996, was spent in Trinidad for Carnival before heading for more northern islands. In May, 1996 the Goose eventually sailed from Abaco Sound, Bahamas, into Savannah for the inland waterway trip north with Monica. Their intention was to find a town to live in on the East Coast. After getting as far north as Nantucket, they decided on Annapolis and arrived for good at Arnie Gay's Marina at the end of Shipwright Street on Spa Creek in October, 1996.
Life on the East Coast
In late 1996 with winter coming on, Lansing bought 118 Conduit Street, Annapolis, and began remodeling it, installing two new kitchens, and replacing all the lead paint to rent the house, which was divided into two apartments. Also during this winter while he huddled in the attic feeling like a Russian novelist, he wrote Summer of The Misogynist in the evening and on weekends. In spring of 1997 Monica arrived and they purchased 248 Prince George Street on the other side of the historic district as their permanent residence. That spring Lansing was getting some experience in retail by selling boat stuff at West Marine, a job that paid $8.50 an hour. While exploring Annapolis, he investigated the option of working in the maritime trades but quickly discovered that most workers earned minimum wage and most business owners earned marginal profits. Publishing started to look better. Fortunately, during July, he was offered a position managing Brunner Mazel, a small publisher of psychology and psychiatry professional books recently purchased by Taylor & Francis of London and headquartered in the District of Columbia.
By the middle of summer, 1998, after the company moved to Philadelphia and the two hour commute for two days each week became burdensome, Lansing resigned from Taylor & Francis and, after several months of sweating out the publishing employment scene in Washington, was hired by the American Psychological Association in September, 1999. In July, 2002 Kelly moved to Annapolis with Amparo, her new baby, and Fabian, her new husband. They moved into the third floor at 248 Prince George Street. Shortly afterwards, Erin moved home, also taking up a bedroom on the third floor. Uncle Steve was also frequently in residence on the second floor.
Lansing continued working for APA until November 16, 2006 when he retired. He kept an office on the third floor of his home at 248 Prince George Street. From the window he could see historical guides in colonial dress escorting tourists around the streets and students at St. John's College, "johnnies," walking into town from campus.
Move to Buckingham, Bucks County, Pennsylvania
In the fall of 2007 we moved from Annapolis to Buckingham, a rural area in central Bucks County between Doylestown and New Hope. This location was 45 minutes from two daughters and four grandchildren and about eighty minutes to New York and Philadelphia.
The idea was to experience rural living, an exotic idea for a native of Brooklyn. Marine folklore has the tradition of a sailor, weary of a lonely life on an indifferent sea putting an oar on his shoulder and walking inland in search of peaceful change. He walked until a farmer leaning on his fence asked, "What's that on your shoulder?" The sailor then knew he had walked enough and could settle down. Buckingham was where my oar was questioned.
We found an old stone farmhouse built in 1720 on a hillside overlooking fifty acres of wetlands and cornfields.
"Dying is no big deal. Living is the trick." --Red Smith
It is traditional to end one of these life summaries with an "is survived by" paragraph. Lansing was surrounded by family love and generosity from birth. Dealing equally with family, friends, and finances, Monica and Lansing shared their lives with mutual respect and affection. Our four daughters and their families are our pride and greatest accomplishment. Kelly Calella Hays is his eldest daughter and an independent spirit who lives in Plano, Texas. She has a young daughter, Amparo, who is adorable in two languages and studying at Collins College, and a son, Santiago, just entering high school. Erin Asher Hays, his third daughter, lives in Lansing, NY, with her husband, Eric Lavin, registrar at Cornell College of Law. They have a son, Joseph, and a daughter, Morgan. Danielle Hays, currently living in Lawrenceville, NJ, and has a son, Mario. The family also has a home in Santa Fe, NM that is used during the summer and fall.