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She managed well. One monument to her imagination is the 2,257-ft.-long Bear Mountain Bridge, across the Hudson River 35 miles above Manhattan. She saw the need of a bridge there, and her younger son, E. Roland Harriman, now a Manhattan financier (and still a Republican), built the bridge (now state-owned) as a private venture. By the time mother Harriman died, in 1932, she was able to leave her two sons and three daughters a multimillion-dollar heritage.
A Prince's Life. Averell Harriman grew up to the pattern of his inheritance. He spent his summers at Arden, near Bear Mountain, where his father built a 100-room French Renaissance-style house on a 20,000-acre estate with a private railroad. The villages of Harriman and Arden were established near by just to supply the Harrimans. Below the main house were imposing stables, a polo field, a track for exercising trotting horses.
At Arden, Averell learned to shoot, swim, row. ride and race trotters (he later switched to polo because of a strange allergy to horses, which affected him when he rode behind them, but not when he rode on them). In winter the family retired to a big town house on 55th Street in Manhattan, where Averell fashionably attended Craigie School and Miss Dodson's dancing class, and became a cadet in the Knickerbocker Greys. He saw the world as a prince might see it, from his father's private railroad car, from the family's yacht and from chartered ships.
At Groton, Averell did not distinguish himself; he was a fairly good scholar, pleasant, modest, quiet, well-mannered, but he won no prizes. At Yale he was again just average as a student. It was at Yale that Averell Harriman's record first showed the intensity of concentration that has never left him. He became a bridge addict. After a bridge session, Averell would return to his room and sit for hours doing postmortems. He learned to memorize the hands and plays, and then would reconstruct them. His daughter Kathleen (Mrs. Stanley G. Mortimer Jr.), recalling his stories of this exercise in memory training, has said: "It's one of the best things he got out of Yale."
Harriman was also noted at Yale for his expertness as an oarsman. When he was a boy back at Arden, his father had hired the great Syracuse University crew coach, Jim Ten Eyck, to spend a month on the Harrimans' private lake teaching Averell and Roland to row. Averell was so good that, when Yale decided to use amateur coaches, he was assigned to coach the freshman crew. He wangled leave from classes, went to England to learn the long Oxford stroke, came home and introduced it successfully at Yale. When he became varsity coach, he appointed as the new freshman coach another keen oar named Dean Acheson. Bob Cook, Yale's grand old man of rowing, once called Averell "easily the most promising crew coach in America."
In his senior year at Yale, Averell was elected a director of the Union Pacific Railroad, startled the austere board by showing up for a meeting with a psychology textbook under his arm. After he graduated from Yale (B.A., '13), he went to work for the Union Pacific in the offices and yards. Within two years he highballed past his fellow trackmen to become a vice president.