Schumacher - 1 - 1
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Interviewee: Gus Schumacher Session #1
Interviewer: Judith Weinraub New York City
Date: June 4, 2009
Q: It’s June 4. This is Judith Weinraub, up here with Gus Schumacher and we’re about to begin our first interview.
Good afternoon. Why don’t we start by your telling me something about, first of all, when and where you were born and what your family life was like and where you grew up, anywhere you want to.
Schumacher: My father met my mother skiing in New Hampshire in 1936 or ’35 when he was farming in Flushing, New York. My mother was the manager of the Harvard Law Review and the secretary for Felix Frankfurter at the Harvard Law School. When they met, there was an agreement that if they were to get married, my father would move from Flushing in Queens to New England and farm in New England, particularly outside of Boston, and then live in the city and reverse commute. So he lived in Brookline, parked his pickup in the city, and then drove out to Lincoln and farmed in Lincoln, Massachusetts.
They got married in 1938 and I was born in 1939. My mother started having a number of children. She married very late. She was thirty-nine when she got married, so she had four kids, the last born in 1946.
Then they decided that reverse commuting with four kids and an apartment near Boston didn’t quite make sense, so they rented a home in Lincoln in 1938, ’39 and ’40 and then bought a farm in Lexington, Mass., in 1940, the old Ballard farm, which was a terrific farm. It was an interesting purchase because my Dad came from a basically three-generation horticultural family, which we can get into in a little while, here in Manhattan and then Queens. He had seven brothers and two sisters, all farmed in Queens. When the people bought farms back in the thirties, the farm was bought with all the crops and all of the livestock in situ. So in April 1940 when he bought the Lexington farm where I grew up, basically, Mr. Ballard and his wife moved to retirement in New Hampshire, but all the crops were planted, all the animals were there, all the pigs, the poultry, the horses. There were no cows, and there were seventeen Polish men living in the back of the house.
Q: Oh, my. You mean farm workers?
Schumacher: Yes. They had come from Poland in the thirties during the Depression and they lived in the back of the home. My mother had two stoves, wooden stoves, coal stoves, and a special woman to help cook.
Q: I should hope so. [laughs]
Schumacher: So my mother cooked for about twenty people three times a day with the help of a cook that came with the farm.
Then the war started and, of course, most of the men were drafted and went on to the war, so there were only two men left that I really remember, maybe a little older, too old to go to the war, and they lived with us in the farm. There was a dormitory in the back of the house, in one of these New England farmhouses. We lived in the front and the men lived in the back. That was fascinating.
Q: What was the community like?
Schumacher: It was a suburban community. It was basically eight miles from Boston, ten miles, Lexington, Mass., where the shot was heard round the world, where the Minutemen came. In fact, where the British soldiers went from Charlestown to Lexington and from Lexington to Concord, they went right through my father’s farm, where the stone wall—so as kids, we’d get our BB guns out and behind the stone walls and play “Let’s shoot Redcoats.”
Q: A little reenactment there.
Schumacher: A little reenactment from the kids. We’d pretend we’d shoot Redcoats.
Q: Had your mother ever lived on a farm before?
Schumacher: No. No, she graduated from Boston University. My other grandfather, her father and mother, were Irish immigrants, first generation, and she wanted to become a lawyer, but women were not allowed into the law schools back in the twenties. It was not a permitted entry to law. So she loved law and she got a job as the personal assistant to Felix Frankfurter, and she worked there for fifteen years. My baby cup, actually, is from Felix Frankfurter, and I visited him when he was still alive in Washington in the early sixties. My mother would take us down there to visit.
So this was kind of a new thing for her from being a prominent administrative assistant manager of his affairs and manager of the Harvard Law Review, where she got to know all of the major people who worked on the New Deal. She never admitted it, but I think she dated Alger Hiss. She knew Phil Graham when he went to law school. She knew Tommy Corcoran. So there were great discussions at the dinner table in the fifties between my father, who’s Republican, my mother, who’s Democrat, was Hiss a communist or not, and Whittaker Chambers versus Alger Hiss. I remember when I was nine, ten, twelve years old, there was vibrant discussion, and my father saying, “He’s a commie,” and my mother saying, “No, I knew him. He’s not a commie. He couldn’t be a commie. He’s a very nice man.” “You may have known him, but he was a commie.” So there was a lot of discussion on the New Deal over the kitchen table.
Q: So where did they meet, actually?
Schumacher: They met skiing in a ski resort up in New Hampshire, because back in the twenties and thirties, farming in New York City, you were profitable. My grandfather, my great-grandfather and my uncles were, frankly, prosperous, and they did very, very well. When you grew vegetables year-round in Manhattan and Flushing in the late nineteenth century and up until about 1955, you were prosperous. You made more than a good living growing leeks and parsnips. We can come back to that in a minute.
Q: Do you have any visual knowledge of or photographs of the Manhattan farm?
Schumacher: Yes. The original Manhattan farm, my mother’s side was Irish immigrant, and my father’s side, my great-grandfather came from Germany. His name was John Schumacher. He was on the wrong side of the 1848 social revolution in Germany, so he thought he’d get out of there before he got nixed. So he came to New York in 1848, ’49, and heard about something called the Gold Rush. So somehow he got to California, did some mining and found a little bit of gold, not much but a little, managed to get it back to Manhattan, where he rented a farm at 72nd and Broadway in Manhattan in 1855, and then farmed there, I guess from what we can figure, from 1860 to 1886, when 72nd Street was cut through.
Remember, back in the nineteenth century, New York was really Wall Street, the Seaport area. That’s why Central Park, they didn’t take any houses down; that was all farms. So when the Dakota was built in the 1880s, 1890s, of course, they called it the Dakota because it was like in North Dakota; not many lived there. I mean, no one was living uptown. It was very unusual for an apartment building to be built at 72nd or 73rd Street in the West Side, because nobody lived there except farmers. So then they cut 72nd Street through in 1888.
Q: Cut it through to the river?
Schumacher: To the river from Broadway or whatever, and right through my grandfather’s house.
Q: So do you have pictures of that house?
Schumacher: Oh yes.
Q: What did it look like?
Schumacher: Not a fancy house, basically wooden boards and a roof, very, very simple. It wasn’t a shack. It wasn’t a cottage. It was sort of kind of like when you build something in Montana in 1890. I have pictures of my grandfather, my great-grandfather and grandmother, sitting in front of the farm, plus some of the pictures of the farm. In fact, it was written up in the New York Times when they talked about my grandfather in 1934. They talked about farming on 72nd and Broadway, and the interviewed my grandfather on what it was like. He said it was great fun because he could sit on the side of Broadway and watch all the great events, including the funeral for Grant. He sat and watched Grant’s funeral as a boy when he then was entombed at Grant’s tomb.
Q: As it went up Broadway.
Schumacher: As it went up Broadway, he sat out front on this curb and watched the cortège go by for Grant going to Grant’s tomb. He put in his diaries, “Watched Brooklyn Bridge being built.” We’ll come back to why the Brooklyn Bridge was very important for farming in a minute.
Q: Primarily they were farming root vegetables?
Schumacher: Basically Northern European crops, so, root vegetables, parsnips, carrots, turnips, cabbage, leeks, and what we’ll come back to is soup greens. They did not farm what we call Italian crops. Those are neighbors who grew peppers and tomatoes and the warm season crops. But they were traditional cool season crops, year-round, but more of a northern German, Polish-type crops than Italian or southern French crops.
Q: And the leeks you mentioned?
Schumacher: Lots of leeks, lots of parsnips, onions, cabbage, potatoes, tiny bit of sweet corn. As we said earlier, he kept a diary from about 1890 to the day he died in 1955, daily, on farming in New York, where he recorded the weather, the crops he planted, the crops he harvested, who he sold them to, which farmers’ market he went to, and then who visited or who he visited and who dropped by, and then any illnesses and deaths in the family were recorded. We have all the diaries, so a complete record of Manhattan and Queens farming for nearly sixty years.
Q: When did he move to Queens?
Schumacher: 1888, 1890. When the 72nd Street was cut through, they originally moved from 72nd and Broadway to Flushing, near LaGuardia Airport on Hempstead Pike, and bought a sixty-acre farm in Queens and farmed there from about 1890 to about 1935.
Then the subways went through, and Flushing became quite urban or peri-urban, and they were pressured by all the housing developments, so he sold the farm for house lots and moved to New Hyde Park, which was about eight miles further east, and bought the old Vanderbilt place. Vanderbilt had an estate which had a farm that went with it, and so he bought that farm, and his sons bought farms nearby in New Hyde Park. So there were three or four farms of about eight or ten acres in that region where New Yorkers, many of my Jewish friends, were born in Long Island Jewish Hospital, and he donated the land for that hospital to be built on his farm in about 1955. So you drive through the road, Schumacher Road, to get to Long Island Jewish Hospital. So some of my younger friends, when I was working in Washington, were actually born there, and their mothers drove over my grandfather’s farm to get to the hospital to be born. Kind of fun.
Q: So your parents married in—
Schumacher: ’38.
Q: —’38, and you were born in ’39, but you were born up there.
Schumacher: Yes.
Q: So had they been living in Massachusetts for—well, they must—no, they moved.
Schumacher: They moved.
Q: They moved immediately to—
Schumacher: When they got married, my mother said, “You want to marry me, you come to Boston. You farm anywhere you want outside of Boston, but I’m not moving to New York. Your choice. We get married, move to Boston, we live in the Brookline, you reverse commute,” and then eventually when all the kids came, they had to move out to Lincoln and Lexington, where basically I was raised.
Q: You have siblings.
Schumacher: Yes, a brother and two sisters.
Q: Where did you fit in?
Schumacher: I was the oldest.
Q: How relevant was farm life to your life?
Schumacher: Oh, it was pretty crucial. We grew up, as I said earlier, with Polish men living in the back of the house, and then when they went to the war, we had two Polish men left, and then he would pick up Italian women workers in Waltham, who were also immigrants. So then we had eventually Puerto Ricans coming up from Puerto Rico, so it was kind of a very integrated community, sort of a micro community of our family, all the neighbors and friends. There were farms up and down our street, maybe six farms. So we were farming a micro area of Lexington, plus the workers. My dad was the biggest operator in the area, so he must have had twenty, twenty-five workers every day, and during the war, we had German prisoners who were from Rommel’s North African army, were captured in ’43, brought to Fort Devens, so at that point we had forty or fifty.
Q: Where is Fort Devens?
Schumacher: About twenty miles west of Lexington in Ayer, Mass., and they were imprisoned there. But the regular army workers had to work. The officers didn’t have to work. During the war, we had to ramp up production so we had a lot of workers on the farm.
Q: You had some of the prisoners working on the farm?
Schumacher: Thirty prisoners every day, plus about eight Italians and about four Polish and then eventually Puerto Ricans, so it was sort of a U.N. of—
Q: Not a bad way to spend the war, actually.
Schumacher: I remember when I was about five or six years old, my mother was not the greatest cook. The Irish cared more about what they said, not what they ate, and so cooking was not her specialty. But then the Italians would bring in these new and interesting foods for lunch, so my brother and I would always skip out lunch and go out and have lunch with the Italian women and have things like hoagies, and special really salami and provolone and just delicious sandwiches, whereas back home I got egg and beans. So the heck with that. We’d go to go to the barn and have a decent lunch with the Italian women workers.
Q: That’s funny. How did your schooling fit into all of this?
Schumacher: Just public school right to Lexington High School, but they were excellent schools. But I remember in 1950 there were Italian men started coming in to work, a few. I don’t remember them that well, but about two months ago [Sept. 2009] someone looked me up on the internet from California and said, “I think my father worked for your father,” and I said, “How do you know?” “Because he signed your father’s name, signed his Social Security application,” which we have a copy of, and he scanned the Social Security application and sent the application to us, and I identified it was my father’s original signature. Then he sent the picture of his father, and I found a picture of his father working on the farm. So he had a picture of his father and his grandfather, his father and mother, and the man, who was now my age, sixty, and his son and grandson. So I was able to identify his father from pictures we had taken on our farm, and I sent them, too. Kind of a déjà vu from the fifties. Again, this richness of the ethnic immigrants, but they weren’t housed in camps like they are in California. They lived right with the families, and we cooked and ate together over that period of time. Fascinating.