The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [42]
too big and too unprotected from the furious winds to be good skating ground, rough ice, dull skates, wretched skaters scuffling about, mostly arms waving like windmills in a gale—and when any sane man would have voted to go home, as the afternoon’s sport was clearly a flop, Roosevelt was exclaiming, “Isn’t this bully!”—and the harder it blew, and the more we skated, the more often I had to hear, “Isn’t this bully!” There was no trace of shelter where we could rub our ears, restore our fingers to some resemblance of feeling, or prevent our toes from becoming perhaps seriously frostbitten. Never in college was my own grit so put to the test, and yet I would not be the first to suggest “home.”
Nearly three hours passed before Roosevelt finally said: “It’s too dark to skate any more,” (as though, if there had been a moon, we could have gone on to midnight) … I recall my numbed fingers grasping the key to my room and unable to make a turn in the lock. That afternoon of so-called sport made me realize Roosevelt’s amazing vitality.12
Theodore Senior, admitting to an “almost sinful” interest in his son’s progress, worried sometimes about the physical phenomenon he had helped create. “His energy seems so superabundant that I fear it may get the better of him in one way or another.”13
Clearly, the young man was going to have to do something about his temper. Arguments at his eating club provoked him to furious volleys of food-throwing, and on one occasion he slammed a whole pumpkin down on the head of an adversary. He reacted to personal abuse with instant fisticuffs, even punching friends who tried to restrain him.14
At first the social butterflies of Harvard did not know what to make of this hornet in their midst. His name was too foreign, his manner too “bumptious” to win instant acceptance. However, it did not take the Minots and Saltonstalls and Chapins long to discover that he was the brother of Bamie Roosevelt, the charming Knickerbocker who had summered in Bar Harbor, Maine, the last few years, and that his bumptiousness was a side-effect of his uncontrolled enthusiasms. They found it hard to dislike someone so supremely unconscious of his own peculiarity. “Teddy” happened to be a fascinating, if spluttery, talker: he could analyze lightweight boxing techniques, discuss the aerodynamics of birds and the protective coloration of animals, quote at will from the Nibelungenlied and the speeches of Abraham Lincoln, and explain what it was like trying to remain submerged in the Dead Sea. He was “queer,” he was “crazy,” he was “a bundle of eccentricities,” but he was wholly interesting.15
It was the custom in those days for members of Harvard’s more exclusive clubs to wander through the streets after election meetings, and serenade each new addition to their rolls. At least a dozen times, during the years 1876–80, the name that floated up through the night air was that of Theodore Roosevelt, Jr.16
FEARING THE DAMPNESS OF ground-floor dormitories, to which freshmen were traditionally assigned, Theodore took a room on the second floor of Mrs. Richardson’s boardinghouse at 16 Winthrop Street, about halfway between the Yard and the Charles River. Furnished and decorated by Bamie, it was already “just as cosy and comfortable as it could look” when he moved in on 27 September 1876. Four big windows, facing north and east, supplied all the light an amateur taxidermist could wish for. The walls were tastefully papered, the carpet deep and warm. Cushions and a heavy fur rug awaited him on the chaise longue. There were his birds under domes of glass, and his bowie knives crossed over the mantel. A massively carved table stood in the center of the room, under the gas jet, along with the hard, bare chair which New Englanders considered appropriate for study. Theodore gazed about him in delight. “When I get my pictures and books,” he assured Bamie, “I do not think there will be a room in College more handsome.”17
As he settled in, and felt for the first