K a T E ’ S W O R [L] D S

By Kathleen Samsot Hawk

This is her autobiography, written for her children and grandchildren. It includes a family history as well as her reminiscences and selected articles, poems, letters and other writings.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499040739

Kathleen Samsot Hawk

Kate Hawk’s key interests, in addition to her family, have been international (work, volunteer pursuits and travel) and words (writing for employers, friends and volunteer organizations).

Book preview

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K A T E ’ S

W O R [L] D S

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At my Samsot grandmother’s

house: c. 1942

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Kathleen Samsot Hawk

Copyright © 2014 by Kathleen Samsot Hawk.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2014911377

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-4990-4071-5

                Softcover        978-1-4990-4072-2

                eBook            978-1-4990-4073-9

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 06/28/2014

Xlibris LLC

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

545208

Contents

1. Introduction

2. Early Days

3. Parents And Family

4. Ancestors

5. High School

6. College

7. Graduate School

8. Washington

9. Work

10. Men (Pre-Malcolm)

11. Malcolm

12. Children

13. Houston

14. Dallas

15. New Jersey

16. Colorado

17. Belgium

18. Singapore

19. Faith

20. Projects

21. Books

22. Finances

23. Grandchildren

24. Outlook

25. Travel

26. Trips

27. Christmas Letters

28. Poems

29. Letters–Belgium And Singapore

30. Writings

To Malcolm, my cherished husband and best friend

And to our family, with appreciation for the joy and blessing they are

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Genealogical chart of the Samsot/Dohan family

1. Introduction

In 2011, my husband Malcolm completed a 300-page autobiography for our children and grandchildren, and began urging me to write my own. I couldn’t possibly do that, I said, because I just don’t remember things in the kind of detail needed. He had written his life chronologically, using very few notes, and had included enormous detail about dates, people, events and activities throughout his life. That would have been totally impossible for me.

However, I had forgotten (!) how many old papers I had kept through the years: yearly calendars, souvenirs, memorabilia, articles, old school papers and exams, newspaper clippings, articles, letters, invitations, and a host of other items, even down to my elementary school report cards. I’ve never been much of a collector of things (Malcolm is really the shopper and collector in our family), but I have always kept paper. Perhaps that’s because words are so important to me; I’ve always liked the writing parts of my jobs and volunteer activities best, and enjoy the challenge of putting things down cogently and effectively.

As I went through my old files, it was interesting to realize how much of my life has revolved around writing, and what a comprehensive window those writings were into our family activities and my work and volunteer involvements through the years. I had written annual Christmas letters with the major news of our family, dozens of special occasion poems for family and friends, profiles of relatives for a family tree, numerous letters and faxes while we lived overseas, and research papers and articles for various employers, publications and volunteer groups.

In addition to my own files, I discovered that my mother had kept many of the letters I had written to the family during my years in Washington. I would write the family once or twice a week, with a carbon for my brother when he was away at school, giving them all an extensive description of what I was doing each week. After Malcolm and I were married, I expanded the list of carbon copies and began sending the letters to his family too.

My mother had also kept the faxes I had sent to her while we lived in Brussels, and a smaller but still considerable number from our time in Singapore (by that time, we were using mostly e-mails, and they had gone into the ether and were not retrievable). But overall, the amount of background information I found became almost overwhelming!

So after deciding that perhaps I should do a book (I certainly urged my mother to do hers often enough, and have always thought it was a good thing for people to do for their families), I began pulling out the old folders and was soon thoroughly enjoying a look back through my life. That was one motivation.

There was another powerful draw to putting it all down in a compact, easy to manage form: I could then get rid of the bits and pieces of paper. I love organizing, always have. In fact, I’ve sometimes thought that if I ever needed a second career, I would become a professional organizer. And of course it will be a boon to our children if I get rid of most of the papers before they need to do it. I know they won’t have either the space or the interest to keep all of the papers and family records that I have, but I would hate to see them gone completely.

Since Malcolm’s autobiography had covered so thoroughly our lives and our travels and the houses we have lived in together (Three by 33 by Malcolm D. Hawk, published by XLibris in 2011), I’ve given more weight to the years before we met, and to my own work and volunteer involvements through the years. I’ve also tried not to repeat, with rare exceptions, the photos that he included in his book.

In addition to my own reminiscences, this book includes summaries of my family records going back to the 1800s and beyond, some of it from official sources like newspapers and genealogical records, and some from the stories that all families hand down. It also includes an extensive selection of the letters, faxes, poems and articles that I wrote throughout the years. As a result, it’s more a collection of papers than a regular autobiography. There is a lot of information here, probably more information and in more detail than anyone outside the family will want to read. But it is my best effort to preserve in compact form some of my own and my family’s history for future generations.

2. Early Days

I was born on Monday, February 12, 1940 at 6:45 p.m. at Hotel Dieu Hospital in New Orleans, Louisiana. I weighed 6 pounds 14 ounces and was 20 inches tall.

My very first memory is of travel. I was about two and a half years old, and my mother and I were on a train to Cincinnati to visit her mother’s relatives. As I looked out the window of the sleeper car, I thought I saw a tiny, tiny man by the side of the tracks, holding a light. Even after my mother explained that it was a train signal and not a person, it continued to seem mysterious and exciting, and I still have a vivid mental picture of it.

I have a couple of other vivid visual memories from that early visit to Cincinnati: the cracked sidewalks in front of my uncle’s house, and the tall stairs leading up to a back porch with a cage full of pet finches. Those too were different and exciting.

I’ve felt that way about travel ever since. Some of my most vivid and lasting childhood memories are of our family vacations to Alabama, Arkansas, California, Florida, Virginia and Colorado. Perhaps my interest in travel is also the reason that I eventually chose international politics as my favorite subject in college, and later went to work for the Central Intelligence Agency. And it was my great good fortune to marry Malcolm, who loves travel and planning trips; together we have seen a great deal of the world.

But that was far in the future. About that train trip… perhaps it seems strange that at age two I would have understood what my mother was telling me about the train signal. But I was apparently a very early talker, and have been told that by age three I was correcting my Samsot grandmother’s grammar (which I suspect she did not appreciate). But Mamie McCormack Samsot was Irish, and in New Orleans many of those from the old Irish families still said ain’t for isn’t. I knew that wasn’t correct; my mother, a longtime English scholar and teacher, had told me so; and so I told my grandmother.

Looking back, I realize that these early interests have stayed with me for a lifetime: a fascination with travel and learning, and a love of words.

My little brother Robert (Rob) was born on July 20, 1943 when I was three and a half years old. With a little urging from the doctor, he arrived just before midnight on my father’s birthday. My mother had several miscarriages before and after Rob’s birth, but there were no more surviving children.

Early photos bring back memories of my father in his Navy uniform during World War II, my mother in her graceful 1940s clothing, me in pigtails and smocked dresses, my brother Rob as a baby and as a little boy, our dog Coco, Rob and me dressed up for Mardi Gras as Dutch children, my Samsot grandmother and her sister in front of the Carrollton Avenue house that they and their families shared, Sunday drives to Audubon Park or out to West End on Lake Pontchartrain, trips to the Gulf Coast to enjoy the beach, picnics at a small river across the Lake in Covington, my First Communion, Cincinnati relatives visiting, the swing set in our back yard, and the special photo of Rob and me in our pajamas by the Christmas tree that my mother sent to my father when he was serving in the Navy in the Pacific during World War II (he told us later that it made him incredibly homesick).

The first home I remember from my childhood in New Orleans was at 3317 State Street Drive. It was a raised bungalow, with a full above-ground basement, a substantial back yard and a detached garage. My parents rented for the first few years, then bought it when the owners decided to sell.

The front steps led up to a screened porch that was the perfect place to relax and read on warm evenings. Beyond it on the right side were living room, dining room, kitchen and storage room. On the left were three bedrooms: my parents’ room first, then a center hall and bathroom, then two more bedrooms and a back porch.

The house originally had just one bathroom (hard to believe in this day and time, when multiple bathrooms are a given in most houses), but eventually my parents enclosed the back porch to make another room and added another bath. There was no air conditioning at that time, so the house changed for the seasons: when the weather turned hot and humid, as it always did in New Orleans summers, the sofa and chairs were covered with floral cotton slipcovers, and the Oriental rug was rolled up and replaced with sisal mats. The window fan would run all night, to be turned off at 6:00 a.m. when the drapes were drawn and the house kept closed to retain as much of the coolness as possible.

My bedroom was at the back on the left side, just beyond Rob’s room. My father and a friend built a desk and two bookcases for me and painted them a mellow jade green, and my grandmother made the curtains and bedspread, which were dark green with peach trim. I loved it all.

I remember lying in bed at night in early September – windows open, of course, since there was no air conditioning – and knowing that the new school year was beginning because the smell of swamp gas was drifting in the windows (I don’t know exactly what produced it, but it was a smell distinctive to New Orleans -- a sharp and pungent, not unpleasant, aroma that drifted in from the low-lying watery areas, and I seem to remember it only in the fall). It always made me feel that things were changing and new things were beginning. In some ways, I still think the year begins in September.

The full basement, which was actually above ground and had windows, was my mother’s laundry area and also a great place to play. We kids often used the ping pong table there, as did our parents and their friends and neighbors. In addition to regular ping pong games, we used to try to keep the ball going in the air for as many times as possible; I seem to remember reaching goals of well over a hundred. Rob and his friends kept a set of weights there when they were trying to bulk up to play football. And it was a great place to play with our dog Coco.

My tonsils were taken out when I was three, and I remember trying to avoid the anesthetic by burying my face in Dad’s tie. It was wartime, and I can still see the khaki uniform he was wearing at the time.

My appendix followed at age five, and Joey the Cloverland Dairy milkman came to visit me in the hospital. Joey was a special friend. I would often go down the street to meet his mule-drawn milk cart and ride with him as he made house-to-house deliveries of milk in glass bottles.

I had pigtails for years, and then a chin-length cut I never could seem to manage. As I look back at photos, it’s clear that until I arrived at my current short and easy-to-care-for style, I had not much sense of how to make hair look good.

I was part of a small group of students at Ursuline Academy who completed second and third grades in the same year, an experiment for students who showed academic promise. That made me younger than most of my peers as I progressed through school, and though I never had much difficulty with school work then or later, I am sure that I was behind most of my classmates in maturing socially.

My Ursuline report cards for fourth and fifth grades showed mostly As in academic subjects but pretty consistent Bs in Drawing (I’ve never been particularly artistic) and Penmanship (I remember in second grade trying to do Palmer Penmanship exercises and leaving holes in the paper because I could never master the flowing ovals that were expected). My handwriting is still cramped and poor.

My favorite teacher at Ursuline (and one of my favorite teachers ever) was my fourth grade teacher Mother Teresita (I think the Ursulines later changed the designation to Sister, but when I was there, the nuns were always called Mother). Mother Teresita had a cheerful loving personality and was always very supportive of her students, especially me. She must also have been very talented; she later became superior of Ursuline Academy with its staff of 65 nuns, and was elected by the province to be a delegate to their General Chapter in Rome. She eventually became Mother Provincial of the entire Ursuline order.

My brother Rob and I had parakeets as pets when we were children. The first ones were a Christmas surprise; my father hid them in the basement beforehand, and one escaped the cage so that he had to chase it all over the basement while worrying that its screeching would spoil the surprise. My parakeet was a lovely blue; I named her Cherie, and she was soon allowed the run of the house. She would swoop into the living room and back again into the bedroom to light on the mirror and chirp to her reflection. She would often sit on my shoulder or play with pencils on my desk while I was doing my homework.

We also had our wonderful dog Coco, a reddish Spitz-Chow mix with a plumy tail. He was a gift to Rob on his fifth birthday, and became our constant companion. We often played hide and seek with Coco in the basement; he would wait patiently on the stairs until we whistled for him, and would then race in and find us within seconds. When he found us, we would race him back to the door; he always won. He loved being out of the yard, and tried to escape through the gate whenever possible; one time when he got out, he went immediately to find a dachshund that had frequently taunted him through the fence, and the two had a major fight while neighbors tried to separate them with hoses and rakes. We would sometimes take Coco for walks on the leash, and he would pull us along at a run (we never did train him to heel). I still have a scar on my knee from crashing into a car bumper during one of those wild runs.

Mr. Hardy next door built remarkable wooden toys, and one of the local newspapers did a feature on his work. To add human interest, the photographer recruited some of the neighborhood children, and my photo appeared in the newspaper standing beside one of the large trains he had made. After Mr. Hardy moved away, a South American couple rented the house next door, and they would often come over for ping pong evenings with my parents in our basement.

In 1950, when I was ten, I won a circus ticket in the Dash Dog Food contest for submitting a unique and appropriate name for a dog. My father suggested that I not win any more contests, because he had to buy three more tickets so that all of us could go to the circus.

In the summertime, we often went to our local Nix Library, and I loved the dusty smell of the books, the high windows, and the hush. It was one of my mother’s favorite places too, and in the summer we would be there every two or three days. I would take out at least four books and read them very rapidly, usually sitting sideways in one of the easy chairs in our living room with my legs draped over the arm. As a special treat, I sometimes bought a large peppermint stick for five cents, and would munch away while reading (which probably contributed to my having more than twenty cavities to be filled by our dentist during the summer my braces came off).

Another favorite stop was Woolworth’s five and dime store, where I loved to browse the stationery counter. In those days of generally-accepted segregation, Woolworth had separate white and colored drinking fountains and bathrooms -- and of course, when you grow up with a situation like that, you accept it as normal. While we loved many of the African Americans who were part of our lives – especially my Samsot grandmother’s cook Annie and our once-a-week housekeeper Hattie – the only ones I ever came in contact with at that time were domestic help. It was not until much later, when I was in college and then working in Washington, that I began to meet well-educated African Americans who became colleagues and friends.

Rob and I both have vivid memories of family dinners around the dining table. My mother was an excellent cook, specializing in Creole dishes, so the meals were always good. Mom would have us wait to tell the news of the day until Dad was home, so much of the dinner table conversation revolved around what we and our friends were doing. We also talked current news and politics. When one of my high school friends from a musical family had dinner with us, she was fascinated by the political conversation and said that her family never talked about such subjects. Of course, we seldom talked about music or art!

At home, barbecues in the back yard, ping pong games in the basement and family dinners were a routine part of life. Many afternoons, we would drive over to Tibby’s bakery for fresh French bread for dinner; and after Mass on Sundays, we usually went to MacKenzie’s bakery for doughnuts or apple cake. Special highlights were visits to Planche’s farm in Covington for horseback riding and picnics by the river, and trips across the river to swim in the pool at the Naval Ammunition Depot, where the water looked like root beer because it was stained brown by cypress roots.

We often listened to the radio, to programs like The Lone Ranger and Sky King – there was no television at our house yet. My grandparents had a television, and we would sometimes go there on Sunday evenings to watch shows like Maverick and Ed Sullivan, but my parents did not get a television until after I had gone away to college in North Carolina. One of my major gifts in high school was a small transistor radio in a white case that I could use in my bedroom to listen to music. I did so often, and can still remember the lyrics of some of the songs of the day. Since then, though, I’ve usually preferred silence to sound, and I seldom keep music playing throughout the day. I also have a limited tolerance for the sound of television. Years later, I found it very wearing when Malcolm’s parents would come to visit and would keep the television on all day in the family room beside the kitchen.

Throughout my childhood, we spent a great deal of time with relatives: grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. Most Sundays, we went to dinner at the home of one of my grandparents. At my Samsot grandmother’s, my father’s side of the family, the gatherings were almost invariably lively and noisy, with vigorous political arguments that reflected the Italian, French, Spanish and Irish heritage. The meal usually featured the wonderful fricasseed chicken prepared by Annie Walker, the family’s faithful cook; I often requested the chicken’s heart as a special treat. After dinner, the afternoons were quiet. The men would usually go into the parlor for a nap (I remember the chorus of snores), and the women would chat. Even if my cousins Johnny and Ralph Edwards were there, they were much younger and usually played with Rob while I spent the time reading my father’s boyhood books from the big bookcase in the entrance parlor.

At the Dohan home, my mother’s family, the political arguments around the dinner table may have been just as intense, but the family’s German heritage was dominant and made the style much quieter and more low-key. Those Sundays were more fun for Rob and me, because my Swander cousins were almost always there. We would have a wonderful time playing with Janie, who is my age; her sister Nan, who is Rob’s age; and their younger siblings Steve and Susan. My Warriner cousins would occasionally be there as well: Doug (a few years older) and Anne (my age), visiting from their home in St. Francisville near Baton Rouge.

I have scores of cherished memories about being in that house. When my cousins were there, we would go outside to run around, jump the hedges, and balance on the narrow iron railing of the front porch. Then we would come back in to dress up in my grandmother’s clothes and shoes (she was remarkably forbearing about that), or play with the buzzer under the dining room table that in olden days was used to summon help from the kitchen, or tell ghost stories in the pantry with the door closed so that it was pitch dark and wonderfully shivery. On one occasion, one of the cousins brought a horror comic book about vampires and werewolves that I found absolutely terrifying, and I’ve never liked scary books or movies since. We younger cousins still remember how offended we were when Doug was promoted to sit at the adult table in the dining room while the rest of us remained at the breakfast room table for lack of space. But I suspect we were having more fun!

One very early memory for Janie and me was of making mud pies with the hot peppers from the bird’s eye pepper bush in our garden. When the pies were done, we decided to taste them. Of course the peppers burned our tongues, so we cried; then we rubbed our eyes with the hands that had mashed up the peppers, leading to wild shrieks of pain from us and great alarm for our parents.

When we were eleven or twelve, Janie and I took cooking lessons downtown. I would ride the bus and transfer to the St. Charles Avenue streetcar (a uniquely New Orleans name; they are called trolleys in other cities). When the streetcar arrived at Janie’s corner, I would wave out the window to let her know which car to board. I remember being very proud of our first cooking achievements, French toast and pancakes.

I had to begin wearing eyeglasses at age 10, when I was in fifth grade; my problem was discovered when I missed an entire section of writing on the blackboard at school. When I put on my first pair of glasses, I remember being astonished that it was actually possible to see individual leaves on trees. Later, my glasses were accidentally knocked off when I was on a Mardi Gras parade truck with my eight grade class, and I was horrified that I would have to ask my parents to spend the money to purchase a new pair – but a quick-thinking person in the crowd on the street caught my glasses, looked at the name on our truck, and managed to return them to me.

After completing fifth grade at Ursuline Academy, I transferred to the local parochial school, St. Rita, for sixth through eighth grades. My grades continued to be good. Our report cards for seventh and eighth grades were done with numbers rather than letters, and most of my grades were between 97 and 100, with a very few 94s and 95s mixed in. But as a new student I was painfully shy, especially now that there were boys in my class.

One of my great childhood traumas dates back to this period, and probably led to my lifetime fear of public speaking. When I was in sixth grade, we had to memorize the poem that begins In Flanders Field the poppies blow, and take turns reciting a verse in class. I happened to get the verse that begins We are the dead. To make it seem more dramatic, I began it in a sepulchral voice – and everyone laughed. I was mortified, and it was years before I began to feel even reasonably comfortable speaking in front of groups.

Another experience at about age 10 has stayed with me all these years. My father worked in Naval Intelligence, and was asked to host a Japanese naval officer who was visiting the United States. At short notice, he brought Captain Mikami home to have dinner with the family (much to the dismay of my mother, who was planning hamburgers and thought they would not be elegant enough for a guest. But Captain Mikami loved them, and joked about going home to open a hamburger stand in Tokyo.) After dinner, my parents were sitting in the living room chatting with him. My father, who had served in the Pacific during World War II, asked Captain Mikami where he had been during the war. There was a long pause, after which Captain Mikami said softly, I was on the destroyer screen that attacked Pearl Harbor. Even at my young age, I knew enough of the recent war to find it incredible that men who had been battling each other so recently could be sitting in our living room calmly discussing their respective roles in that war.

After Captain Mikami’s visit, he suggested that I be a pen pal to his daughters Hiroko and Noriko, whose English was excellent, and who were interested in studying languages and eventually visiting the United States. We wrote back and forth for a number of years. They sent interesting details about their home life and their hopes of studying at university, and I sent them some information about exchange programs; but we lost touch after a while and I don’t know if they ever came to the United States.

For my 11th birthday, my parents planned a small surprise party. Afterward, they asked if I had really been surprised, and I replied I’m never surprised or unsurprised – a response they found vastly amusing and quoted for years.

My mother taught me to type when I was about twelve, and I recall typing out the words to The Man from Snowy River, one of my favorite poems. Being able to type fairly fast has been an extremely useful talent, especially now that computers have become so important.

In 1953, at age 13, I spent eight weeks at Camp Sequoya in Bristol, Virginia near the border with Tennessee. I was quite homesick at first, but grew to love it, especially the horseback riding. My favorite horse was a big palomino named Roman, and I often volunteered to help bring the horses from the stable over to the camp riding ring. Our riding instructor was also my cabin counselor and a fine artist who drew beautiful horses’ heads, and I thought she was wonderful. There were six of us in the cabin.

In addition to horseback riding, my schedule included archery, canoeing, tennis, riding, dancing, charm (!) and riflery. There were also daily rest hours, vespers and evening programs, and milk and graham crackers just before bed (we always tried to sneak back into line to get a second helping, but were often caught).

Awards called SUS or sit up straight ribbons were given every week to students with the best posture. Since my name came up only in the very last week when all the stragglers were included, I began to realize how poor my posture must be. Despite good intentions in the years since, I’ve never really managed to change that.

One of our excursions from camp was to the famous Barter Theater to see Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians. At one point, when a murder had just been committed in the play, all the lights in the theater went out at once – terrifying all of us.

At the end of the eight weeks of camp, my parents and Rob came to pick me up and were there for closing ceremonies. While they were there, I participated in the end-of-camp horse show in the Intermediate Class – but my horse and I were both rather skittish because he had been ridden in the hunter class shortly before that and had fallen. We made it through our class without mishap, although I did not win a ribbon.

At my request, my parents had brought a box of heavenly hash, one of my favorite New Orleans candies (chocolate, almonds and marshmallow) for me to share with my cabin. No sweets were allowed at camp, so I had to sneak it into the cabin. We all enjoyed it thoroughly, but as I recall, the sudden onslaught of sugar made all of us feel a bit queasy afterward.

My parents told me later that they were horrified by camp’s effect on my accent. Being with girls from the mountains in Tennessee and Virginia had apparently given me a touch of their accents, and my parents recalled my saying that we were planning to climb Sunsit Heel instead of Sunset Hill. Fortunately, the new accent did not last once I left camp.

The following summer I went on my first airplane trip, to Nashville, to visit one of my cabin-mates. I remember dressing up in my Sunday best, and even carried gloves, something that we always did before air travel became the casual phenomenon it is today.

We took family trips almost every summer. Some, like the ones to Monterey, California and Norfolk, Virginia were in connection with my father’s Naval Reserve training courses. Others were just for fun, like our early trips to Cheaha State Park in Alabama and Petit Jean State Park in Arkansas. All these trips were by car in the days before superhighways, with Dad driving all the way, usually managing some 400 miles a day while resisting our pleas for stops at alligator farms and other sites along the way. Our usual routine was to start the drive before dawn, then stop for breakfast. We would often marvel at our magnetic personalities when restaurants would fill up shortly after we arrived; somehow the more prosaic explanation, that we had just stopped earlier than most people, never occurred to us children.

I graduated from the eighth grade at Saint Rita School on June 1, 1952 at age twelve, and received a proper diploma complete with seal and ribbons and signed by our principal and our pastor. For having the highest average for the year in eighth grade, I was awarded the St. Rita Mothers’ Club scholarship of $100 to be used in my first year of high school.

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May 1941

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c. 1943

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With my cousins Anne and Janie: Christmas 1943

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My brother Robert: 1947

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At Audubon Park in New Orleans: c. 1944

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My father with Rob and me in our

Mardi Gras costumes: c. 1947

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My first communion at

St. Rita Church: 1947

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Our house on State Street Drive in New Orleans: c. 1950

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Our dog Coco: c. 1952

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After my 8th grade graduation from

St. Rita School: June 1952

3. Parents And Family

My father’s two great loves were his family and the U.S. Navy, and he was intensely loyal to both. Robert Desposito Samsot was born on July 20, 1905 in New Orleans, Louisiana. He grew into a lean, handsome man five feet eight inches tall, with jet black hair, warm brown eyes, a long face and jaw, a prominent nose, and a Latin look. He had a quick Irish wit like his mother’s, a gift for making people feel comfortable, and a fine singing voice. He was also an excellent tennis player.

Robert D. (also known as Bob) lived a comfortable childhood in an unusual situation: he and his parents and his sister Rosemary, eight years younger, shared a large home with his aunt and uncle, Rose and Octave Aubert, and their sons Edward and Robert. The family lived first on Tulane Avenue and then moved to 2023 Carrollton Avenue. The Carrollton Avenue house is the one I remember as a child.

A photograph of Dad at about age six shows a handsome young boy in the standard short pants of the time, with an impish grin and sparkling eyes. His favorite pet at the time was a goat named Buck that he used to harness to a cart. He also loved pretending to be the witchlike old woman on the Dutch Cleanser can and chasing the screaming younger children around the house.

He graduated from Jesuit High School in New Orleans in June 1922. It was then called the College of the Immaculate Conception, and was located near the downtown Jesuit church in New Orleans. After graduation, he won an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. He was thrilled – but the distance from home and his mathematics classes got the better of him, and a year later he had to leave the Academy to return to New Orleans. That was one of the greatest disappointments of his life.

The Navy remained a great love, though, as well as a professional focus. He served in the Navy during World War II, remained in the Naval Reserve until his retirement, and spent his professional career after the war as senior civilian intelligence officer in the Eighth Naval District in New Orleans.

Before all that, however, he attended Loyola University in New Orleans, where he joined the Sigma Nu Phi legal fraternity and received his LL.B. on June 8, 1927. As a newly minted lawyer, he began working for Bernard Titche’s law firm, and then moved on to do legal work for a marine insurance company.

He also met my mother. He dated her older sister Anna Jane first, but on a fateful weekend, 18-year-old Mary Helen went with the two of them to chaperone a country weekend. She went horse-back riding, the horse ran away with her, she was thrown, and Dad rushed to help her. He was captivated, and soon had eyes exclusively for her.

He courted her intensively for six years, and she later said that his persistence may have been a major reason that he won out over a major rival whom she dated during several summers in Cincinnati. In 1938, when my mother was 24 and Dad was 32, they were married. Their first home was an apartment in a four-plex on State Street Drive. They then moved in succession to 2432 Broadway, to a South Miro duplex, and finally in 1942 to a raised bungalow at 3317 State Street Drive. Some years later, when the owners decided to sell, they bought the house. They remained there until 1959, when my maternal grandmother died and they bought her home at 321 Audubon Boulevard from Mom’s sisters and co-heirs, Anna Jane and Louise.

The law was not really to Dad’s liking, and he was not sorry to leave it when World War II began. He went into the U.S. Navy in 1939 as a Lieutenant in Naval Intelligence, and attended the FBI School in Washington, D.C. in 1941 and the Naval War College in Rhode Island in 1942. In 1943, shortly after my brother Robert’s birth, he was sent to the Pacific for the duration of the war. His service there, as a naval intelligence officer attached to the Fifth Fighter Command of the U.S. Army Air Force in the Pacific, shaped his career for the rest of his life.

During the war, his task was to map the positions of U.S. Navy ships when the American Air Force attacked the Japanese so that none of the American ships would be hit by friendly fire. He was very proud of the fact that no U.S. ships in his area of responsibility were ever hit by U.S. planes.

Wartime for him and his compatriots in the Pacific was incredibly difficult, although it was marked by intense camaraderie among the men. Dad came home with many funny stories, such as the time one man received a tin of maple syrup from home and they carted it around for months, wondering why anyone would be silly enough to send them syrup when they had no pancakes. Finally a letter arrived asking how they had enjoyed the Scotch whiskey in the tin; it was soon emptied.

He traveled into the back country of New Guinea, where the natives’ teeth were filed into points and stained purple from betel nut juice. The natives had never seen white men before and gathered around to finger their clothing and touch their skin, while the women would try to spy on the visitors while they were in the latrine to see if they looked like their own men. Dad said that he was never sure if the people were cannibals or not, but he and his crew escaped unscathed.

Toward the end of the war, Dad had moved on to Manila in the Philippines. There he met a well known artist named Vicente Alvarez Dizon who drew a wonderful pen and ink portrait of my father (see photo). Dizon had studied at Yale in 1936, and returned to the Philippines to paint and to teach. He won first prize in a contemporary art contest sponsored by IBM during the San Francisco Golden Gate Exhibition in 1939, in which seventy-nine countries participated. Dizon’s painting was the unanimous first choice, topping the entry of Spain’s Salvador Dali, who placed second. Dizon refused to work for the Japanese during the war, pretending to be ill. But shortly after the American liberation of the Philippines, he was hired by the U.S. Army, Fifth Air Force Command at Clark Field as a cultural and historical consultant, which is presumably where my father met him.

Dad wrote many letters home during the war, and was sometimes able to send gifts. I treasured for years a little stuffed koala that I less-than-imaginatively named Koala Bear Samsot – and later, in search of a grander title, re-named Koala Bear Australia Samsot -- as well as some seashells from the Pacific. I missed Dad a great deal while he was gone, but had also forgotten that he was a strict disciplinarian; after he returned home, he punished me for some misdeed or other, and I told my mother that I wished Daddy would go back to his ship.

While in the Pacific, Dad went through Japanese bombing attacks and other dangers, but one of the worst hazards was the terrible food. The Navy ate fairly well, but the Air Force did not. His was one of the few units in which the mess sergeant was sent home with malnutrition. The food was so poor that Dad weighed just 110 pounds by the time he returned home, and he would devour huge bowls of lettuce and drink quantities of milk to make up for all that he had missed during the war.

In July 1945 he was relieved of duty and arrived back in San Diego in August. His service decorations included the American Defense Service Medal, the Navy Commendation Ribbon with pendant, and campaign ribbons for the Asiatic Pacific Theater – four stars – Western New Guinea Operations, Bismarck Archipelago, Luzon Operation, Southern Philippines, and Philippine Liberation Ribbon – one star. His unit also received the Philippine Republic Presidential Unit Citation.

At his departure from the Fifth Fighter Command, he received an official commendation from Brigadier General Frederick H. Smith and a personal commendation from General Paul B. Wurtsmith, for whom he had served as Naval Liaison officer.

When he arrived home in September 1945, he worked briefly in marine insurance again and then returned to the Navy, this time as senior civilian in the Eighth Naval District, which comprised the states of Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico. He served for the rest of his career as the senior intelligence operations specialist and the senior civilian professional assistant and advisor to the District Intelligence Officer in all areas of intelligence operations except military. He retired in 1968 at the GS-14 level. One of his proudest achievements was reaching the rank of Captain in the U.S. Naval Reserve.

He loved his job, found it fascinating, and met people from many parts of the country and even the world. And he attended a number of special training courses including the U.S. Naval War College in Monterey, California in 1952 and an operational intelligence course at the U.S. Naval Amphibious Training Base in Little Creek, Virginia in 1956.

The family went along for those training trips when possible. We made the long drive to California in the summer of 1952, staying at small motels in towns along the way, and stopping briefly to see the Grand Canyon and Carslbad Caverns. It seemed to take forever to get across Texas, a feeling summed up by a postcard we saw: a small car traveling across a map of Texas, beneath the words The Sun has riz, the sun has set, and here we is… in Texas yet!

In Tucumcari, New Mexico Dad bought a petrified wood bracelet for Mom and a carved belt for me that I still have. We stayed in Pacific Grove on the Monterey Peninsula at Seventeen Mile Cottage Court, which was advertised as a motor hotel with complete family vacation facilities, in the pines near all beaches. The rates were $5 to $10 per day for four persons. We met several other families with children (the name of one of those girls has stuck in my mind ever since: Willadene Oglesby). One of our memorable day trips was a drive down to Carmel, which we all thought

Reviews for K a T E ’ S W O R [L] D S

[eltomaso · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a hard slog but rewarding to the serious thinker.

[dhoe-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A true revelation for me. I've never read anything from Aristotle before, and I spent quite a lot of time reading papers and websites about the book to better understand it. I guess in a way I always thought about virtues as something boring conservatives talk about, so Aristotles perspective was really new and exciting for me. Also interesting to read in the context of gender (what Aristotle thinks a real man (tm) should be like).

[albertgoldfain · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Comprehensive and well reasoned. Except in those few spots where it strains to use the "golden mean" approach to virtue ethics or suffers from outdated views, this important work has largely stood the test of time.

[pepperwings · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The metaphors and language of this were difficult and if I hadn't been assigned this, I probably would not have slogged through it, but I'm glad I did. After parsing through and re-reading this, it's really quite brilliant, and simple. Of course I can't blame Aristotle too harshly, this is a transcription of student lecture notes, and then probably several translations later, it's what we read in English class, so the message does get through, it just takes a labyrinthine path to get there.

[audacity88_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

One of the most accessible works of Aristotle or ancient philosophy in general, but also one of the most practical, because its subject is ethics, or how to live one's life.

[prudent-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Shows almost all types of human character.

[layabout_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Bourgeois before the bourgeoisie.