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By Root 347 0

son went on to marry Benjamin Franklin’s aunt, and their son hunted whales from the harbor. As American settlers, they lived by necessity in the ways we would live by choice two centuries later—growing and hunting food, cooking and heating with wood or whale blubber, using an outhouse. Thanks to in-law Benjamin Franklin, as well as Thomas Edison and others, by the 1900s, Americans would have electricity, running water, telephones, and the automobile. Food would be bought at the store, vegetables grown commercially, cooking done on reliable gas or electric stoves. Life was good for Americans—the Roaring Twenties had arrived.

It was in this privileged time that my grandfather Eliot, nicknamed Skipper, undoubtedly for his love of boats, met Dorothea Morrell, a spirited girl from a fun-loving family in Morristown, New Jersey. She was a tomboy debutante with sporty tastes—skiing, fishing, hockey, and tennis. The nickname Skates came from the time she was playing hockey disguised as a boy for the Morristown pickup team and got knocked down, her hat falling off to expose curly, long blond hair. “A girl,” someone on the other team yelled, “and she skates.”

“Skipper was handsome, and a good athlete,” Skates told us, athleticism garnering her highest esteem. His parents had moved from Long Island to the well-to-do suburb of Rumson, New Jersey, known for the oldest lawn tennis club in the country, a beautiful beach club, and easy access to Manhattan by train. When Skates and Skipper married, they set up house in the renovated boathouse of the Coleman estate on a tributary of the Navesink River. Aunt Lyn was born in 1936 and two years later, Eliot Warner Coleman Jr. came into the world at Morristown Memorial Hospital.

“He came out smiling,” Skates claimed. She smiled, too, it was such a joy for her to have a son. We still joke that he was like her own little baby Jesus. There were so many pairs of knitted booties among the baby gifts, the nickname-prone family dubbed him “Boots,” which later became “Bootsie,” much to his chagrin. Boots was sent to private school at Rumson Country Day and then to prep school at St. Paul’s in New Hampshire, where his cousins also went. He was a star cross-country runner and lacrosse player, though a mediocre student. Papa made close ties with friends and teachers, but was by spirit independent, even then preferring V8 to Coke. Though he was teased for it, he stood up for himself, to the point of once getting his nose broken in a fistfight in the dining hall.

“Attaboy, Boots,” Skates likely said about the tiff. She ruled the home, children, and Skipper with a confident belligerence to any view outside her own. Skipper, who was slightly shorter than Skates’s five feet eleven inches, was a quiet and gentlemanly husband, some said henpecked. He served in the navy and after the war commuted to Manhattan, where he worked as a stockbroker, making a decent living at it, though never enough to be rich. Instead they did what they should have known better than to do—spent the capital from his inheritance. Skates’s sister and friends were all well-to-do, driving her to keep up with her tennis partners both on the court and off.

“Those were the years of the Hemingway model of adventure,” Skates explained. She and Skipper passed on their love of sports and the outdoors to their children, teaching Boots and Lyn to fish and ski as soon as they could walk. They had a cruising boat, the Here We R, that they took out on summer weekends, and in winter they escaped to warm locales to fish or up to Uncle George’s lodge in Stowe, Vermont, to ski. Papa began to notice that when his parents were outdoors, they seemed happier and drank less, and he felt his own spirit lift and heart beat more rigorously as he skied or climbed in the clear air of the mountains.

“Hello, Bootsie,” Skates and the Callens chorused when Papa emerged from the farmhouse to greet them. Skates kissed us all with her red-lipsticked bow-shaped mouth, smelling of soap and something brighter than soap that made a shield around her, separating her from