Minnie of Hobcaw

By Harry R. Roegner

A lot has been written recently about the Bernard Baruch estate, Hobcaw, located on the coast of South Carolina and a center for the states Gullah culture. A living source for many of the stories written about Hobcaw in the twentieth century has been Minnie Kennedy the daughter of the Baruch family cook Daisy and the familys key duck guide and jack of all trades, William.

But, beyond he contributions to our understanding of Hobcaw, Minnie Kennedy had an amazing life of her own, coming out of a one room school house on the estate to become one of the nations pioneers in the theory and practice of pre-school education. This book is the story of Minnies climb, in the face of racism and doctrinaire attitudes, to become a leading force in headstart and teaching teachers how to teach. He abiding faith in our common humanity guided her through a tumultuous life and to the attainment of her lifelong goal of being a true educator. He life story is a mirror of the evolution of civil rights and concern for children in our society.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 30, 2007
• ISBN: 9781462838813

Harry R. Roegner

With degrees from Princeton University and the University of California at Berkely, New Jersey native Harry R. Roegner has lived in France, Belgium and Germany plus traveled extensively in Asia, Africa and Latin America in his vocation as an international businessman and in his avocation as an avid butterfly enthusiast. Roegner’s ancestors were some of the fist Dutch settles to move into Lenape territory across the Hudson River form Manhattan in the 1680’s. He has amassed one of the major private collections in the country which now resides at the Cleveland Museum of natural History. In 1999, Mr. Roegner started to collect notes made during his 40 plus years of collecting which led to publishing of his first set of butterfly Adventures memoirs – Butterfly Trails. Adventures with Butterflies is his second set of memoirs with at least one more set in the planning stage. In addition to being a leading authority on the international automotive business and the butterfly, Mr. Roegner, who speaks five languages, was an advisor form 1984 to 1992 to the U.S. Commerce Department and the U.S. Trade representative on international trade policy. In 2004, Mr. Roegner published Gerrit the first of a series of biographies on person of historical note. Minnie of Hobcaw, the third book in the series, focuses on the contributions of Minnie Kennedy to our society and the major transitions of many black Americans in the 20th century form South and North and from racial stereotyping to broader acceptance.

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Copyright © 2007 by Harry Roegner.

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Contents

INTRODUCTION

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

INTRODUCTION

On a nice fall day in September of 2005, my wife, myself, and our daughter visited the lovely historical town of Georgetown on the South Carolina coast. I had retired to a lake in Upstate South Carolina ten years earlier to concentrate on writing books, and we had decided to show our daughter visiting from California the sumptuous sights and colors of the South Carolina coastline, from Beaufort up to the North Carolina border. While in Georgetown, we toured the local history museum with the aid of a black lady who lived in the area and volunteered as a docent a few times a week.

From the very first minute, it was clear that our docent was not your ordinary tour guide: she was short but moved quickly with surprisingly long strides; she talked fast with authority in an accent that was neither Southern nor Northern; she was of indefinable age and had sharp eyes that flashed judgmentally as she covered the main elements of Georgetown’s past. She became particularly animated as she discussed the nearby Hobcaw Barony, the former winter hunting estate of famed financier and statesman Bernard Baruch now run by the Belle M. Baruch Foundation as a nature reserve used by the state’s main universities for research purposes.

She next showed us a model she had made of the Hobcaw Barony during the nineteen twenties and pointed out a small house next to Baruch’s Big House where she was born and grew up. If you were born there, I said, what happened to your Gullah accent the black folks around here used at the time?

How would you know, she snapped back, taking obvious note of my Yankee twang. I then explained to her that from age eight to sixteen I had spent summers working on my grand uncles’ farms and orchards in New Jersey with black hired men who came up every year from this part of South Carolina for the growing season. And, as a result, I had a pretty good idea about how folks from the area sounded.

She then smiled and acknowledged that she knew Gullah but as a professional teacher had spent a part of her life trying to eradicate it from her own speech as well as the every-day speech of the local folks. I told her that she had done a good job on herself but that I had a good ear for languages and somehow detected a kind of New York City accent in her speech. Oh well, she answered, Let me tell you that I spent from 1942 to 1945 as a welder in the Brooklyn Navy Yard—that will give you some interesting language training.

I did a quick mental calculation that if she was, let’s say, twenty-two to twenty-five in 1942, she was probably born in 1920 or earlier and was now unbelievably approaching the age of ninety. She saw that I was figuring out her age and chipped in Yeah, I’m almost ninety—God has given me all these years for a purpose, and I’m still working to figure out what that purpose is.

The museum tour ended and I went out first to open and cool off the car while my wife and daughter visited the gift/book shop. A few minutes later they came out of the museum accompanied by the white lady who ran the shop and collected entrance fees. The lady smiled and told me Your daughter says that you write books and you’re looking for a subject for your next book. I nodded in the affirmative and listened attentively as she went on. That lady who took you around the museum, she said with an ingratiating smile, her name is Minnie Kennedy and she just bubbles over with stories about Hobcaw and Georgetown back in the twenties and thirties and she can chew your ear off with stories of her days being a fancy teacher in New York City. We are always telling her that she should write a book about it all before it’s too late, but she says she’s too old to write a book and who cares about all that old stuff anyway. Could you help her out?

I went back in the museum, found Minnie, introduced myself, and said that I might be interested in doing her biography and would she mind telling me a little more about herself. A few minutes later the general outline of her odyssey from a one room school house on Hobcaw to a position of national leadership in the formulation of pre-school and elementary school teaching theory began to emerge. I looked at her and she looked at me. Well? she said with a challenging grin.

Your story should be told, I told her, but are you up to dozens of interviews and continuous requests to dig around in your records and memories?

I’m triggered by having someone sit in front of me; she replied, if you can do that, you’ll have a hard time shutting me up. So, we arranged that I would come down to Georgetown armed with a battery of questions for a couple of days every month for the next eight or nine months, and we would have at it.

Interestingly, towards the end of her career, my Aunt, Vivian Fletcher (a quite well known writer and editor in the mid 20th century) had taken on the editorial direction of Catalyst, one of the country’s first environmental magazines, which was funded by the Baruch Foundation. She told me several times about her pleasant trips to Hobcaw—commenting each time on the beauty of the place and colorful nature of the people she met there. This memory gave me some additional comfort and motivation as I undertook the project, utilizing some of the interview techniques she had passed on to me when I was fifty years younger.

By the fall of 2006, Minnie and I had completed nearly seventy-five hours of interviews, and we were both fairly well convinced that I had a pretty good handle on what made her tick. She was great fun to interview, and I tried to capture in my notes not only here words but also her reactions to old memories as they resurfaced. I decided to write the book largely as Minnie’s reflection on herself, in order that not only the sound of her words but also the expressiveness of her reactions could be conveyed to the reader as directly as possible.

I was fortunate that Minnie had thought a lot about herself as she progressed through life. She was continually trying to shape herself to conform to her image of what she should be. It takes a lot of pride, dedication, and discipline to live one’s life in this manner, but Minnie was up to it. Of Minnie’s many positive characteristics, two stick out foremost in my mind—her strict adherence to being a moral person and her sincere conviction that society as a whole was capable of coming to grips with the issues of our common humanity.

One can ask if Minnie’s rise from quite humble surroundings on Hobcaw would have been possible without the influence of the powerful Baruch family who were lords of the manor in her early years. Minnie had a strong internal drive inherited from her mother that was destined to propel her forward, but, I think, it is fair to say that material support from Bernard Baruch Sr. and advice from Belle Baruch certainly helped Minnie get up the first steps of her climb. Even allowing for some extra help in her early years, it was Minnie herself who was the primary enabler of her success in running the tough gamut facing a single, black lady in mid-20th century America.

The reader will find that Minnie Kennedy is a person with very definite views on the people and practices of the various decades through which she has lived. For Minnie, straining controversial issues and situations through the filter of political correctness invariably takes a back seat