Charlie Gibson, Lodger

This blog post is part of an occasional series about the Gibson House Museum Archives, a repository of personal documents and photographs from the Gibson family. The archives are accessible by appointment; contact curator@thegibsonhouse.org to make arrangements.

In  1940, Margaret MacDonald came to work as a cook at 137 Beacon Street. Charlie Gibson, Jr. had been living at the house, largely alone, for the previous six years and from a statement Ms. MacDonald signed, it sounds like things were not going all that well.

Ms. Mary MacDonald’s signed statement, April 18, 1940. This was likely written by Charlie and signed by Ms. MacDonald in response to a dispute with a previous employee at 137 Beacon Street.

“I arrived at 137 Beacon Street, on April 9, 1940, to work as cook and house-maid, and found the condition of the kitchen dirty and uncleanly, dishes shelves and utensils not properly cleaned or kept. They showed signs of gross neglect by the cook who had last been in charge of them.”

Tributes to Allied Leaders Part II: Winston Churchill

 

In a previous post (see “Tributes to Allied Leaders, Part I," November 1, 2015) I discussed Charles Gibson Jr.’s poetic tribute to President Franklin D. Roosevelt following Roosevelt’s passing, which Charlie sent to President Truman, Roosevelt’s successor. In this post, I will discuss Charlie’s ode to Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

Writing to the editor of the New York Times in late 1944, Charlie requested that his “To Winston Churchill” be published in both the Times of London and New York. The simultaneous publication, he wrote, could “make a complete international gesture.” As Charlie would later write to MIT Chairman Karl T. Compton, “one of my efforts has been Anglo-American, as well as world[,] fellowship.” Charlie certainly held a lifelong interest in international diplomacy and goodwill (in fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if he were a supporter of the United Nations when it was created after the Second World War). However, nothing came of Charlie’s plans for an “international gesture.” The Times rejected his poem for publication.

But 1949 presented a new opportunity for Charlie’s poem to be read and appreciated, and MIT Chairman Compton would prove vital in this respect. That year MIT held a convocation for members of the scientific community “to appraise the state of the post-war world, [and] to consider the progress of scientific enterprise.” The event’s keynote speaker was Winston Churchill.

Tributes to Allied Leaders Part I: Franklin D. Roosevelt

 

 

Visitors to the Gibson House will be familiar with the framed letters displayed in the dressing room on the third floor. When giving tours of the house, I always point out my two favorites. One is from Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and the other is from President Harry Truman. Both are short but serve to thank Charles Gibson, Jr. for poems he sent to them. Charlie wrote an ode to honor the English prime minister, which was read to him at a science convocation hosted by MIT. And after the passing of President Franklin Roosevelt, Charlie wrote a poem in his memory and sent it to Truman, Roosevelt’s successor.

Whenever I directed tour groups into the dressing room to show them the letters, I always wondered whether there were any existing copies of those poems and whether there were any way to find out why Charlie cared so much about having them read by these men. After all, couldn’t he simply have submitted the poems for publication in some newspaper? Fortunately, I was able to locate copies of these poems and related documents—including Charlie’s response to Churchill’s thank you note and the letter he sent to Truman with the FDR poem—in the museum archives.

In a two-part post, I want to share these poems and provide background information regarding their creation and why Charlie wanted to have them read by Churchill and Truman. This week I am focusing on Charlie’s poem on President Roosevelt, and in our next post, the one on Winston Churchill.

Charles Gibson Remembers Mark Twain

Travelling with members of the Boston Authors Club, including club president and “Battle Hymn of the Republic” author Julia Ward Howe, Charlie Gibson, Jr. attended the dedication ceremony of the Thomas Bailey Aldrich Memorial Museum (author Aldrich’s childhood home) in 1908. Held in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the event featured many distinguished speakers, including Mark Twain, who had been Aldrich’s close friend.

Nearly forty years later, Charlie wrote a short article on Twain’s tribute to Aldrich that day, which was published in late 1945 in the Mark Twain Quarterly, the official publication of the International Mark Twain Society. Entitled, “My Last Impression of Mark Twain,” Charlie wrote that Twain would “always remain the picture indelibly imprinted upon my mind, as he appeared on the stage” at the Aldrich Memorial. For Charlie, Mark Twain’s performance stood out as an example of the author’s great genius and extraordinary abilities.

To the Heroes of the Sea

“The tremendous drama attending the tragedy of Warren’s going, the terrific explosion through the whole metropolitan area of New York, the blowing to atoms of the officers and crew, . . . whirled into the snow storm and melting with the snowflakes into the sea; its repercussions here . . . were calculated to stir the emotions to their depths, and I think they have.”

The above excerpt comes from a letter Charlie Gibson, Jr. wrote to his nephew Henry Allen after the death of Lt. Warren Winslow, another nephew, aboard the USS Turner, which exploded and sank off the coast off New York in January 1944 (see “The USS Turner Disaster,” August 7, 2015). Lt. Winslow, like most officers aboard, went down with the ship.

While there is little documentation to provide us with greater insight into just how deeply this bereavement affected Charlie, he did write a poem that could be read as an expression of grief. Entitled “Antinous,” it is an elegy “to the heroes of the sea who have given their lives during the war.” Select stanzas of the poem, which is quite long, appear below.

A few details concerning the poem’s classical references and central theme are necessary to make its meaning clearer. Although Charlie describes the poem as an elegy to American sailors killed in the war, like his nephew, he does not speak directly to them or Lt. Winslow. Rather, his poem is an elegy to Antinous, the lover of the Roman emperor Hadrian (76–138 CE). Antinous was universally admired for his youth and beauty. He met a similar and equally tragic an end as Lt. Winslow when he drowned in the Nile.

Charlie holds Antinous up as the “symbol of youth,” and this relates to the central theme of the poem, therefore explaining why it is Antinous and not Lt. Winslow whom Charlie addresses. As the “symbol of youth,” Antinous represents, for Charlie, all the young sailors killed in the war, and in a more general sense the poem expresses the sorrow over so many young lives cut short by war. Charlie does not write of war-time death in romantic or glorifying terms as Lord Tennyson did in “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” Rather, his lines speak only of pain and grief and the profound absence felt in Charlie’s family and so many others as a result of the Second World War.

The USS Turner Disaster

 

Recently during my summer internship with the Gibson House, archiving a collection of family manuscripts, I was surprised to discover evidence of yet another Gibson family member death at sea, that of Lieutenant Warren Winslow, the twenty-five-year-old son of Rosamond Gibson Winslow (“Little” Ros). (An earlier GHM blog post covered the death of John Gardiner Gibson, Jr. aboard the Lyonnais; see “History Repeats Itself,” January 1, 2015.) Lt. Winslow, a Harvard graduate called to service when he was attending Harvard Law School, was one of the 139 sailors lost when the USS Turner, a naval destroyer, sank to the ocean floor just a few miles northeast of Sandy Hook, New Jersey, on January 3, 1944.

A series of explosions aboard ship that morning completely wrecked the vessel and started fires that could not be effectively controlled. While the navy later could not determine the exact cause of the first explosion, an investigation turned up no evidence of enemy action or sabotage. The official report could only suggest that stored ammunition on board had something to do with the incident, as the first explosion occurred in an area containing ammunition meant for transfer later that day.

After a sixteen-day voyage on the Atlantic, the USS Turner had anchored a few miles off of Sandy Hook early on the morning of the third and had begun preparations to sail for Gravesend Bay, New York, to transfer its cargo of ammunition to Fort Lafayette in Brooklyn. The sky was overcast and snow was falling in the area. Nearby were other naval vessels, including the USS Stevenson and USS Thorn, which maintained a continuous underwater sound search. These sonar sweeps detected no enemy craft in the area.

So it came as a complete shock when, at about 6:17 a.m., a violent explosion rocked the USS Turner. 

The Forty Steps

The Gibson House Museum's founder, Charlie Gibson, continued to spend time at his family's summer home in Nahant throughout his life. The home was called Forty Steps, because there were forty steps separating the home from the water. A few months after D-Day during World War II, Charlie wrote this poem, partly based on the fact that there had been guns placed near this place that had been a sanctuary for the Gibson family for generations.

                                                                                       

  The Forty Steps

             

I.

Once Forty Steps; now thirty nine – 

   And they in doubtful state,

Like ravished riches in decline,

                                        The blasting of the great.                                          

II.

Yet God has blessed the sacred spot,

   Now touched by time and war,

While echoing the cannon’s shot

   Beyond the ocean’s roar.

       III.

Once peopled by a stately throng,

   That bathed upon the shore,

Now to the poet still belong

   Their annals and their lore.

      IV.

O footprints of an age outworn

   By fickle time and tide,

Your hallowed dust lies all but gone,

   Its grandeur and its pride.

      V.

Today a soldier’s martial tread

   Guards what is now no more,

The gaiety from laughter bred,

   The peace – that led to war.

Although my tourees might note that I'm often fairly harsh when I talk about Charlie's poetry, I think this poem really captures a part of his personality. Here we find him remembering the Nahant of his childhood, and comparing it to what seems to be a desolate and laughless place during the war. Charlie had a hard time accepting that we live in an ever changing world- and for someone who lived through two world wars, can we really blame him?

by: Katie Schinabeck, Former Museum Guide