CHAPTER 2
First Light

This is a most peculiar state. Almost invariably, on so-called clear days in July and August out here, an indescribable haze over everything leaves the horizons unaccounted for and the distance a sort of mystery. This, it has always seemed to me, is bound to produce in certain types of mind a kind of unrest. In such light, buzzards hanging high above you or crows flying over the woods are no longer merely the things that they are but become the symbols of a spiritual, if I may use the word, or aesthetic, suggestiveness that is inescapable.…

FRANKLIN BOOTH, quoted in
A Hoosier Holiday,
by THEODORE DREISER

In the early morning hours of July 14, 1904, George Greenleaf settled and opened the Terre Haute Morning Star. Medical matters were on his mind today, and that’s why the story about Carl Kitchner caught his eye. It said that Kitchner, “a patriotic little American lying on a bed of pain” had been diagnosed with lockjaw [tetanus]. The four-year-old was hurt on July 4 when he was injured by wadding from a toy pistol. Unfortunately, tetanus was not one of the diseases treated by Dr. Ward, “The Old Reliable Specialist,” who advertised cures for rheumatism, nervous disability, stammering, and diseases of men. His ad boasted that “he does not treat all diseases but cures all he treats.” Mr. Greenleaf was relieved that his family physician was Dr. Charles F. Gerstmeyer, an able man who was admired in the community both for his medical skills and his untiring efforts in promoting technical education. George’s wife Burchie was already showing signs of labor, so today was likely the day when his good doctor friend would be called to the Greenleaf home.

George Greenleaf was intensely interested in politics and noted the Star’s report that well-known Hoosier author Booth Tarkington had written from Europe saying he’d like to be nominated as a state senator from Indianapolis—as if he could have the nomination just for the asking! There was a story that Terre Haute was eagerly awaiting the visit of labor leader Mother Jones, “The Angel of the Mines,” who was scheduled to speak on Saturday evening.

As if on cue, distant whistles interrupted George’s reading, announcing the beginning of a coal mine’s morning shift. Good! Lord knows coal miners needed all the work they could get. With six mines near the city, and coal running the steam engines that gave primal energy to the factories and locomotives, King Coal’s future in Terre Haute was unlimited.

George took a moment to reflect on the growth of the city of his birth, a model of Midwestern industry. Terre Haute (French for “high ground”), located on the western edge of Indiana and the eastern bank of the Wabash river, sat at the intersection of two of the country’s most important highways: the east-west National Road (now U.S. 40), and the north-south Dixie Bee Highway (U.S. 41). Swift electric streetcars and interurban lines moved people cheaply and efficiently between destinations. Horses pulled carriages and delivery trucks through the raucous streets, but they had to avoid the new horseless carriages, like the one bought that year by Dr. George L. Dickerson, a physician who listed office hours in George’s morning paper as, “every day in the year from 8 to 12, 1 to 5, and 7 to 8 o’clock.” Nine railroad lines radiated from Terre Haute to all parts of the state and country. Seventy-five years of industrial development had attracted a polyglot population with heritages as diverse as German, Irish, African-American, Jewish, Syrian, French, Italian, Hungarian, and other Southern and Eastern European nationalities. It was a city of factories and tradespeople and robust working men—laborers and craftsmen who knew how to use their hands, muscles, and machines to make a living and forge a future. Men of common sense and hot, sweaty work. Men whose hard lives were leavened by the civilizing influence of their women and a few public-minded community stewards. George Greenleaf understood these men. He was one of them, with experience as a grocer and skills gained working as a machinist and steam-engine mechanic.

George returned to reading the Star and noticed a story that made him wonder whether the growing prohibition movement would affect Terre Haute’s largest industries—her distilleries. His city was home to some of the largest whiskey distilleries in the world. The front page story, in its entirety, read:

CARRIE NATION SPOKE
(By Star Special Services)

MADISON, Ind., July 13 - Carrie Nation addressed a large audience here tonight.

During the day she destroyed several liquor signs.

George heard the rooster cock-a-doodle in his back yard and looked up to see dawn breaking over Terre Haute, drenching his beloved city with the yellow-white light of progressive optimism that would banish shadows all across this great land. Yes, Terre Haute was booming, and Indiana was humming. Teddy Roosevelt was in the White House, and America was on the move. Mr. Greenleaf believed every person in America could make a difference, so he expected the world to shift imperceptibly when a new Greenleaf appeared on this fine summer day, joining older sister Lavinia June Greenleaf, who had been born four years earlier.

Later on that cloudy Thursday of July 14, 1904, Dr. Gerstmeyer delivered a blue-eyed boy into this seemingly ordinary Terre Haute working family residing at 1810 North 11th Street. Mother and son were both healthy. The child was promptly named Robert Kiefner Greenleaf, Kiefner being his mother’s maiden name. On the day of Bob’s birth, George Washington Greenleaf was thirty-four years old, and Burchie Mae Greenleaf was twenty-seven.

George stepped out of the house into the humid July air, leaving behind the cries of a small life astonished to be part of a new and confusing world. Mr. Greenleaf was a man of high integrity and deep beliefs but not one who gushed emotions. He was, in fact, a person who trusted his interior life, who pondered before he spoke and meant what he said. Still, his emotions were running high today. He had a son! A son to teach and mold. A son who would tag along with him on work and community activities that only a male could enjoy in this enlightened time. A son who would grow up to live nearby, give him grandchildren, and be there for him in his old age. George looked forward to getting to know this new life, this son. Would he have the temperament of his father or of his mother? Time would tell, but George hoped for the best. He did know one thing: a son changes a man’s life in ways that are different than the changes wrought by a daughter.

Back in the house, something was also changing for Burchie Greenleaf. Mrs. Greenleaf was an attractive but volatile woman. Her ways were often mysterious and troublesome to her soft-spoken husband. For four years, she had dutifully stayed home with her daughter June, caring for her adequately. On the day of Bob’s birth, Burchie Greenleaf oddly began to lose interest in June. This disaffection went beyond the usual family dynamic of focusing more attention on the newest arrival; it was simple neglect. No one knew why this dynamic evolved, and young Bob would not realize that it had happened until after his mother’s death. In later years, Bob would find a family picture that told the whole sad story. It was taken when he was about four years old. His reflections on it yielded a surprise:

George Greenleaf’s intuitive genius with machines provided the prospect for his family’s long-term security during this zenith of the Industrial Age, but the family was not yet secure, either physically or emotionally. For one thing, the Greenleafs did not live long enough in any location to feel settled. Soon after Bob’s birth, they moved to an old one-story house on Washington Avenue. Bob’s first faint recollection was of that home.

Mr. Greenleaf was a gentle, soft-spoken man with a steel backbone when it came to matters of principle. Still, he could be angered. For the rest of his life, Bob would remember two times when his father spanked him. The first was when Bob called him “a redhead.” The second occurred when Bob popped a cracker into his father’s mouth while he was taking a nap and snoring. In those days, even mild-mannered fathers expected more than a modicum of respect from their children.

Within several years, the Greenleafs moved to 1021 South 21st Street, which must have seemed like an estate to young Bob and June Greenleaf. The three-room house sat on an acre of ground. An attached shed served as a kitchen, but there was no central heat or plumbing. Water was drawn and hauled from a well. Kerosene lights provided illumination, and the outhouse provided a place for relief of bodily functions. A small barn on the property housed the Greenleaf’s horse and carriage. Nearby was a pigeon cote. George caught pigeons in the old bell tower at Rose Polytechnic Institute and sold them to supplement his income.

When Bob was four years old he had his first ride in an automobile, provided by his Uncle John and Aunt Anna Parkhurst, who drove a Rambler to Terre Haute from their home in Marengo, Illinois. The car looked like a horse-drawn, single-seat carriage. The putt-putt engine under the seat was connected to the rear axle with a beefed-up bicycle chain. Bob liked to squawk the horn by squeezing its bulb. Anna, his father’s sister, had married John in 1888, soon after John had graduated from Rose Polytechnic. Uncle John was Assistant Professor of Astronomy on the first staff of the University of Chicago’s Yerkes Astronomical Observatory at Williams Bay, Wisconsin, which opened in 1897. John Parkhurst would play a critical role in Bob’s life, introducing him to a wider world beyond Terre Haute.

George accepted a job at Rose Polytechnic a few years after Bob’s birth. Rose Poly (renamed the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in 1971) opened its doors in March 1883. Its mission was to provide men (and they were all men in those days) a rigorous program of training in science and multiple technologies—thus the prefix poly—needed to design and maintain the muscular machines that were carrying America forward. Terre Haute had need for such men. Railroads and mines needed them. The local distilleries, paper mills, glass factories, and utilities needed them. The companies that manufactured 123 different products in the city by 1925 required trained men who could talk the language of steam, gears, and pulleys. George W. Greenleaf never had the benefit of formal training in these areas; he gained his knowledge through old-fashioned apprenticeships. Yet, he was a man who seemed to not only understand but feel the sweet emotions of well-oiled, perfectly functioning machinery. Over time, he became invaluable at Rose Polytechnic.

George worked 54 hours a week at the Rose Poly job. He was a machinist in the “Practice Shops” where students could help with the construction and repair of machines for commercial accounts. From an early age, young Bob, or “Rob” as his father called him, would tag along and watch his father in action. When George had to work late on an emergency repair, Bob would simply curl up in the corner and sleep.

In addition to his Rose Polytechnic job, George was active in local politics and the Machinist’s Union. He first ran for a seat on the Terre Haute City Council in 1910. Six-year-old Bob helped by binding together pages of campaign literature with string. Mr. Greenleaf won the election and served a four-year term that paid $200 per year. He enjoyed sharing his life with his son, so he took him along to evening City Council meetings. Terre Haute was not a genteel city in those days, and neither was its Council, at least not in Bob’s memory:

To spend so much time with his father, little Bob had to stay on the move. In his role as an officer in the Machinists Union, George Greenleaf became a friend of the pioneer union leader Eugene V. Debs, the Terre Haute native who founded the American Railway Union and the American Socialist Party. Debs was a savvy politician and made an indelible impression on young Bob Greenleaf:

The bald, bow-tied, distinguished Mr. Debs was a major political figure of the day. Under the Social Democratic party (later the Socialist party) banner, he ran for President of the United States five times, beginning in 1900. In 1918, Debs gave an antiwar speech in Canton, Ohio, arguing against American participation in the great European War. The speech was not wildly radical. It was “merely a restatement of what Debs had said for years, with only one vague statement about capitalism declaring wars for profits while the workers fought them and died.” For his efforts, Debs was charged under the wartime Espionage Act, convicted, sentenced to ten years in prison and stripped of all citizenship rights. While Debs was home on bail before surrendering to the District Attorney in Cleveland, a Terre Haute barber commented, “Well, it’s coming along to Easter time, and we’re getting ready for another crucifixion.”

Debs wound up in the Atlanta Federal Prison, where his cell door was never locked. In 1920, the ailing Socialist Party, with a membership of five thousand, again chose him for their presidential candidate. It was the last time he would run for the presidency. Campaigning from his cell, Debs garnered 919,000 votes. He was not released until the Senate ratified the peace treaty. Finally, he was sent home on Christmas day, 1921, but his civil right to vote was never restored. A few days later, seventeen-year-old Bob had his final encounter with Eugene Debs, again in the company of his father. They joined a small group that met Debs at the train station and walked with him to his home. The home is now a national monument, sitting in the middle of the Indiana State University campus. In later life, Greenleaf called it “a touching memorial to one of the nation’s great men.”

Even though most Terre Haute residents may not have agreed with Debs’ socialist leanings, they respected him as a caring reformer and greatly admired the compassion sensed by young Bob Greenleaf. Poet James Whitcomb Riley, an unlikely friend of Debs, wrote:

And there’s Gene Debs—a man ‘at stands
And jes’ holds out in his two hands
As warm a heart as ever beat
Betwixt here and the Jedgment Seat.

One evening in 1910, Bob, June, and their parents went outside to watch Halley’s Comet make its brightest appearance of the century. The wonder of the spectacle remained with him, and he later considered a career in astronomy like his Uncle John’s.

The occasional awe at 1021 South 21st Street was mixed with anxiety, however. Young Bob suffered several childhood injuries there. His first memory of Christmas was punctuated by a painful burn from the stove. Another day, his high chair fell over backwards. He hit his head on the baseboard, resulting in a bump at the base of his skull that lasted until his death.

He never forgot another incident that one could see as a metaphor for his increasingly out-of-control mother. Bob was in the buggy with Burchie when the horse bolted and became a dangerous runaway. No one was injured, but young Bob was frightened. His worst memory of that place, however, was of a fight between his parents. Kitchen pots flew. A kerosene lamp was overturned.

Marital relations did not improve, but living conditions did when the family moved to South 18th Street soon after the comet appeared. The Greenleafs rented a house for a year and then bought a new five-room bungalow next door. This home had electricity and gas but no running water, although a handy pump on the kitchen sink drew water from a rain water cistern. A small coal shed at the rear of the lot also housed the privy, a modern two-holer. They lived there through Bob’s elementary school years at Montrose grade school and his first year of high school. Bob’s health was good through those years, interrupted only by a case of German measles.

Meanwhile, George and Burchie continued their fights. After one tumultuous confrontation, Mr. Greenleaf took his children to spend the night at the home of his sister, Olive Couche. George told his children that he might have to get a divorce.

There were several villains in this family drama. Alcohol was one, and Burchie Greenleaf was the alcoholic. Alcoholism was a shameful thing in those days. It was seen as a moral failure, not a disease. There was no twelve-step program, no Alcoholics Anonymous for sufferers or Al-Anon support network for families. Instead, there were the condemnations of evangelists like Billy Sunday, the militant acts of prohibitionists like Carrie Nation who demonized all alcohol, and the personal shame of painful family secrets.

A second bad actor was Burchie’s emotional temperament. She had what might have then been called a “nervous condition.” Volatile, unpredictable, by turns attentive and distant, Burchie must have been unfathomable to her children.

After Bob left home, Burchie’s elderly, indigent father moved in with the Greenleafs. He required constant attention, but Burchie quickly ran out of patience. One day she impulsively packed him up and dumped him with her older sister in Anderson, Indiana. George was not amused:

In later years, Robert Greenleaf wrote extensively about the effect his father had on his development but seldom mentioned the influence of his mother:

By Bob’s high school years, the worst of the family fights had subsided. Burchie let June and Bob go their own way, although Bob still saw his mother as “an uncertain quantity,” and with good reason. After ten years in the South 18th Street house, Mrs. Greenleaf again entered into what Bob called “her restless period.” Through the remainder of his high school and college years, the family moved every year or two, finally buying several adjacent homes in the suburb of East Glen, which they owned until the end of their lives. George and Burchie lived in two different houses, and June lived in the third until her death in 1989.

June Greenleaf was a companion during Bob’s growing-up years. She was attractive and smart, the scholar of the family. She and Bob went to concerts and plays and sang together in the church choir during his high school years, but he never considered their relationship to be close.

After graduation from Wiley High School, June attended the Indiana State Normal School in Terre Haute and then Teachers College of Columbia University, where she received a masters degree. She returned to her Terre Haute high school to teach Latin and French until she was fifty, when an illness forced early retirement. June never married.

Robert Greenleaf was not one to dwell on how the negative aspects of his early family may have affected his life, even if they did introduce a certain melancholy to his already introspective nature. In one set of autobiographical notes, he wrote, “I would not say that I had either a happy or an unhappy childhood. I was loved by both parents. Mother was tempestuous and erratic but she loved me and cared for me.” What Bob focused on was the positive way his father handled the situation:

When Burchie Greenleaf died in 1946, Bob went home to be with his father. George told his son that he simply wanted to be rid of all the furniture and other items his wife had collected through the years. Bob could have sold them to an antique dealer and given the money to his father, but he did something that was more symbolic and emotionally valuable: “I made a big fire out behind his house and burned the whole lot.”