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From his pulpit Father used to deplore "the duckwaddle or bandmaster's style of carrying the processional cross." And when Isaac Wrubel, who owned a clothing store, asked him to take his five sons into the choir and teach them a little religion —any religion—on the side, Father said he'd teach them Isaac's Jewish religion. "The Old Testament is good enough for me," he said.
Life on a fashionable Middletown street was happy and uncomplicated. About the only rule was that a boy mustn't hang on to the back of ice wagons. "So we hung on to the back of ice wagons," says the Secretary of State, who enjoys recalling the "golden age of childhood." But Acheson could not help but bear some of the stamp of Father. No one who ever came in contact with the Rev. Edward Campion Acheson, later Bishop of Connecticut, came away without his imprint.
On the street corners of Middletown he talked politics, professing his Republicanism but plumping for such radical measures as workmen's compensation. Long and vehemently Father argued: "You know that 40 people in the drop-forge plant are going to lose their hands or smash their fingers before the end of the year. I say that it's just nonsense to say that workmen's negligence has anything to do with it."
"From an early age," says the Secretary of State, "this made me impatient with people who said this step is leading to socialism and the next step will be Communism and the next step will be antiChrist. To my mind the point is, how do you deal with this problem? They say if you do this or that you will end up in socialism. Nuts!"
The Good Oar. The scion of a modest Gooderham inheritance was sent to a primary boarding school in Pomfret, Conn., then to Groton, which left another mark: he learned that he was of the elite, chosen and trained to serve, and to solve problems. With the notion of getting closer to the world, young Dean undertook a romantic, singlehanded journey into the Canadian north woods as cook and handyman with a surveying gang.
At a train stop named Porcupine the gang piled off for a drink of "redeye" at a makeshift trackside bar. Not to be shamed, Dean ordered a slug, gulped it down. Up it came. With his companions, the rector's son ran shakily for the train, missed the handrail, fell and knocked himself out. Someone on the platform pulled him clear of the wheels. The train rolled off with the gang and his baggage. It took him several days to catch up, but a determined Dean arrived at the north woods camp at last, to spend a summer learning to smoke a pipe, talk like a roughneck, and cope with life in the raw.
That fall he went to Yale, where he rowed No. 7 on the frosh crew. Says Acheson, archly: "Those who row No. 7 say it is the most important place." He never put on enough weight to row on the varsity, but another old Groton boy and Yale oarsman, Averell Harriman, admiringly remembers the Dean of those days. Says Harriman, with the air of a man making a lasting character judgment: "He was a good oar."