Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [21]
CHAPTER 3
The Last of Spring
In the desperate, hardscrabble years of the Great Depression, 1932 was, as the historian William Manchester described it, “the cruelest year” of them all.1
Even resilient, industrial Chicago had not been spared the Depression’s ravages. On the edge of the Loop, the city’s downtown business district, thousands of those left unemployed and homeless constructed a Hooverville of scrap metal shanties and cardboard tents, named as such to disparage the president who was blamed for the economic woes. Alleys and streets were given new names like Prosperity Road and Hard Times Avenue.2
On July 9, 1932, the Chicago Tribune noted grimly that the Dow Jones Industrial Average had closed the day before at 41. 22—the lowest point recorded during the Great Depression. This was the day I was born—on what may well have been the bleakest day of the cruelest year of the worst economic catastrophe in American history. Born in St. Luke’s Hospital in downtown Chicago, I was the second child of George and Jeannette Rumsfeld. As I later recorded in my first and only other attempt at an autobiography (at age thirteen) I came home from the hospital to find I had a two-year-old sister, Joan.3 Since my family moved a great deal during our early years, Joan tended to be a frequent playmate and one of my closest friends.
Our mother, Jeannette, was a small woman, but her stature belied a feisty intensity. A teacher by training, she was a stickler for proper grammar. While she was kindhearted, she was also a formidable taskmaster. One vivid memory of my mother occurred when we lived briefly in North Carolina. In the South teachers taught by rote, as opposed to the progressive education I was used to in Illinois, in which students were encouraged to learn at their own pace. As a result I was far behind my Southern classmates. When told that I was in danger of being held back a grade, Mom bridled. She told my teacher that I would attend summer school and that she would tutor me personally to get me up to speed. Every day, Mom and I went through drills to make sure I learned my division tables. It wasn’t my favorite summer, but I learned enough to make it to the next grade.
My father, George Rumsfeld, was the kind of man any young boy would look to as a role model. I certainly did. He was the most honest and ethical person I knew, and I often sought his advice. One of the reasons he might have worked so hard to be a good father is that he knew what it was like not to have one. John von Johann Heinrich Rumsfeld left the family and divorced my father’s mother soon after his birth. From an early age, it was up to my father and his older brother, Henry, to help support the family. Dad started as an office boy at the age of twelve and worked hard for most of his life, always with an upbeat manner, often whistling, and without complaint. He seemed to have a sense of urgency about things and was never one to waste time. Sometimes he’d take me to the public golf course near twilight for his version of speed golf—playing nine holes in what I remember to be less than forty-five minutes, never stopping to take a practice swing.
My earliest years were spent in the city of Chicago, which by then had become known as a settling place for large numbers of European immigrants, industrious frontiersmen seeking a second chance at fortune, and for sizable numbers of African Americans, who emigrated from the South. Yet amid the city’s diversity, Chicagoans shared a common trait: a decidedly unfriendly attitude to the pretensions of aristocratic Europe. Many in Chicago were Irish at the time, and local politicians gloried in mocking the English, and the British seemed to reciprocate.