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I approach the task of outlining my parents’ lives with trepidation. I am a product of my parents biologically and socially. We share temperament and intellect. However, my life is largely my own choosing with my own errors and missteps that have nothing to do with my parents. Let us call these memories of my parents, then, not biographies. Memories that might be of interest to my children and grandchildren. I will deal with them chronologically together as parents and as individuals.

My mother was called Mimi by all the family. She kept our house, raised us kids, and volunteered with the Junior League and FISH, a Christian based charity helping families in need (she founded the Greenwich FISH chapter). She was also a steady volunteer at Greenwich Hospital. My father was a lawyer with a small firm in downtown Manhattan. He practiced corporation law, although I remember once in the fifties his photograph on page one of the Daily News. Apparently a wealthy socialite on Long Island was attending a party at a north shore Long Island manse when she snuck upstairs and stole a handful of jewelry. She was caught and chose my father as her lawyer. The News photographer caught my father coming down the courthouse stairs during his client’s “perp walk.”

I also recall his leaving once to go south of Philadelphia to a Tidewater Oil refinery there; as he told the story he rode in a truck cab at the head of a line of scab strike breakers as part of his representation of Getty Oil. Throughout his life he had Getty Oil as a client, serving on its board and executive committee, and became J. Paul Getty’s personal lawyer. At his death in 1980 he was co trustee with Gordon Getty of the Sarah C. Getty Trust. After his family, his work was his most compelling activity.

Any description of my father would have to mention his cigarette smoking. He was a two pack plus a day smoker throughout his life, only giving up the habit within the last few years of his life. He died at 67; cigarettes and stress were responsible for his shorter life. 

He attended Williams College and Columbia Law School. He met Nancy Spencer at a dance at the Heights Casino in Brooklyn. My mother thought he was awfully cocky when he cut into her during a dance. She was a graduate of the Baldwin School and Sarah Lawrence College. They were married in 1941 at St Bartholomew Church in mid-Manhattan with the reception at the Regis Hotel.

WAR YEARS 1941-1945  

My 

On the left: Barney, Dad, Lans preparing fishing lures. Barney was always inventing new devices to fail catching fish. One was two beer bottles towed with a string of spinners between them to look like a school of minnows. The main lure trolled behind. Once deployed it became so tangled, the fishermen turned to golf.

My first pet was a dachshund named Bumps who gleefully chewed the crotch from all my underwear. I had a hamster also until it ate all its young while I watched just on the other side of its glass enclosure.

Mom had a black Labrador named Brutus, who was a strong, capable dog with an independent streak; if he came into the house covered in swamp mud from the reeds along the sound, he would get a thrashing.

My mother had certain principles that she stuck with throughout our childhood. Once old enough, we had to work. If an opportunity came we should grab it. If a saying became known she would add it to her considerable collection. We should always wash before meals. When we were older she convinced my father to let me hitchhike across the country with a friend, Derek Scoble, from England. She insisted I find a job the first Christmas I came home from Williston. I was hired by the local post office because I was tall enough to reach the blinds; I delivered Christmas mail. The next vacation I worked as an orderly at Greenwich Hospital partially because I was interested in medicine, but mostly because Mom insisted I get out of the house. She also strongly supported my 1962 summer at the Grenfell Mission in St Anthony, Newfoundland where I worked as a ward orderly.

We all had to spell her cooking chores once a week, generally Sunday night. I’m afraid most Sundays we would make peanut butter sandwiches to eat with milk in front of the Ed Sullivan and Jack Benny shows on TV. Dad did not cook much; Steve recalls his specialty was Welsh Rarebit. Every Friday night when they were home they would close themselves off in the den with drinks and discuss their week. We stayed out.

Over the years we each left home to pursue our educations and marriage partners. Spencer graduated from Williams and Columbia Law School. Sutton attended Rosemary Hall and Stonleigh School and Syracuse University before graduating from the Portland Museum School of Art in Portland, Oregon. Steve went to Lake Forest and then got an MBA from Boston College.

I remember having dinner one evening with my father on the west coat while I was in the Navy. We both told stories about our experiences with the baby and war. Mine were all comic tales of my mistakes and miscalculations; his were all all war stories of heroism, discomfort, and boredom. At the restaurant a diner behind his seat bumped the back of his chair while sitting down. I watched as my father’s face grew red as he silently stewed. Then, he reached down to grasp the seat of his chair, lifted it, and slammed it back into the other diner. My father had a temper and, if he felt justified, would unleash it violently. 

Later in life my father decided to take up oil painting. He discovered he could paint Point O’ Woods dunes by assuming the canvas looked like sand and could be simply outlined with dune grass. He painted a lot of sand dunes. Famously he once painted a nude woman staring across the ocean by painting her face, body, knees, and then connecting the various parts. Our entire family enjoyed commenting on this  

Family is Everything 

On June 27,1981 Priscilla Barton Hays (Sutton) married Dr. Albie Forwood on the lawn in front of their house on Leeward Lane with Long Island Sound providing the backdrop.

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Mom died in 2005 at The Manor in Carmel Vally, a retirement home she was eager to move to after living in a small home in Carmel not far from Clint Eastwood’s house. She did not want to be a burden on her children by living with one of us. In the last months of her life each of us stayed a week or two through the summer until she died with Sutton. Her celebration of life was held at the chapel in Point O’Woods late in August. Her ashes were interred alongside Dad’s at St Pauls in Riverside, Connecticut.  

Writing about living family is difficult. Each of us develop our own understanding of our relations with parents and siblings. These insights are true for ourselves but may not be true of others. I have omitted conflicts between my father and me for several reasons. I loved my father. He was distant, irascible, baffling, and ultimately cowardly in his relations with me.

He was capable of astonishing cruelty to my mother, who never seemed to lose her temper in our presence. He had a quick wit and a teasing temperament that was amusing when not critical. He was capable of stubborn argument and tricky rhetoric, which I always attributed to his legal training, but was probably his nature.

Once when I was young and expressing bafflement with Latin he sat me down to teach me verb conjugation. Throughout my life I could hear his screaming “amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant” at me in a red hot fury. Much later, in a reflective mood, he said that he always thought of himself as an effective teacher and wondered sometimes if he had missed his calling.

At his funeral my brother, Spencer, gave a long list of adjectives to describe my father’s endless contradictions in his eulogy. To this day that list, while lacking rhetorical flourish, is the most accurate portrait of our father.

My mother lived for twenty five years after Dad’s death. She lived to love again and to happily reestablish loving relations with each of her children and her many grandchildren. She died of a wasting blood cancer that failed to extinguish her love of those around her. She died at peace that only those close to death themselves can know to be truly profound.