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Penny for a Weed. An obligation to serve society was instilled in the Rockefeller brothers by their father, and has taken in varying degrees. John D. Jr. taught his boys that the Rockefeller money belonged to God and that the Rockefellers themselves were merely its stewards. "Father never allowed us to feel that we would ever have unlimited sums of money," David recalls. At seven, David spent eight hours raking leaves on the spacious grounds of the family's Pocantico Hills, N.Y., estate to earn $2. Other times he pulled weeds out of the terrace of the Seal Harbor, Me., summer home at a penny a weed. He also received 25¢ a week allowance, which he was obliged to keep track of in an account book that John D. Jr. checked over weekly. (Inaccuracy brought a nickel fine, exceptional accuracy or neatness a nickel reward.) "Father's strict rule," says David, "was that we should save 10% of our money and give away 10%."
David was also taught that excess of any kind was intolerable in a Rockefeller. Soon after his tenth birthday, he wanted a toy sailboat and took it upon himself to order one from a carpenter. When his father found out about it, he deducted the $4 cost from David's allowance over a period of months. A devout Baptist, John D. Jr. neither smoked nor drank and did everything in his power to impress upon his sons the evils of both practices. (David enjoys a martini or two before dinner, but has never taken up smoking.)
Beetle-Bearing Bankers. Education began for David at New York's Lincoln School, an experiment set up by Columbia University Teachers College to try out the progressive techniques of Philosopher John Dewey. Lincoln's students were consciously drawn from every level of society, from the richest to the poorest. "The progressive education," Rockefeller says today, "was an exhilarating experience.
The idea was to fire our imaginations, and I think it worked." But he adds ruefully, "It failed to teach me to read fast or to spell correctly, and I've never been very good at either." For all of John D. Jr.'s efforts to bring his sons up as normal children, the brothers could never escape the fact that they were Rockefellers. When David, at five, insisted on roller-skating to school like the other children, he was allowed to do so—but to his chagrin a nurse tagged along and a chauffeured limousine cruised near by in case he got tired. And from childhood on, wherever he went, David was continually coming up against institutions that his family's money helped to keep open. It was at one of these, the New York Museum of Natural History, where David worked for three schoolboy summers, that he acquired his passion for collecting beetles. Today he has 40,000 specimens carefully mounted on pins in cabinets in the basement of his Pocantico home. The beetles offer an easy answer for people who want to give a present to a Rockefeller; foreign bankers often arrive at the Chase New York offices bearing packages of beetles for David. "The rule is to cut the string and stand back," says David's long-suffering secretary, Mrs. Edna Bruderle.