Winter Nitze, class of , recollections he wrote for that journal in In my father was asked by President Harper to join the faculty of the University of Chicago as head of the Department of Romance Languages and.
I remember it as being a glorious place with high ceilings, sunny rooms, an enormous veranda with rocking chairs. I was three; I had a friend who was four and much more grown up. I admired him immensely. Emily Kimborough, in her book about growing up in Chicago, has an amusing description of us staying at the Del Prado Hotelβthe Nitze family, their charming daughter Pussy, and their spoiled, objectionable brat of a son.
I am sure she reports accurately. Pussy was in second grade in the elementary school while I was being a pest around the hotel. The next year we moved to a house on what was then Blackstone Avenue between 57 th and 58 th Streets.
Wisconsin, to escape the heat of the Chicago summer. We drove up with the Guenzels, friends of my parents, in a glorious red Stanley Steamer. The roads north along Sturgeon Bay were merely two ruts with grass growing between them.
Every ten miles or so the boiler would over-heat and blow the safety valve. Guenzel would have to climb under the car and insert a new one. Father stayed behind in the Blackstone Avenue house with a fellow member of his department, Clarence Parmenter, both of them having opted to teach for the summer quarter. Father could become so intent on what he was talking about that he could be absent-minded. Parmenter wrote Mother a letter describing Father pouring maple syrup on his head while he scratched the breakfast pancakes.
