My father loved the woods, lived for them. As a D-plus student at Dartmouth, he was best known for being the head of all the outdoor clubs. Canoeing, climbing, he was your guy. Studying, not as much. After he came home from World War II, his father told him he had to take over the family’s struggling Custom-Made Paper Bag Company, which was staying afloat mainly thanks to the contract it had to make the paper covering for the Good Humor Creamsicle. When I visited the factory floor as a little kid, I couldn’t believe there was no ice cream involved.
During the war, he had commanded a thousand men on three islands in the Pacific, watching many of them die. He came home a quiet, intense man of few words. Every day, he commuted from his home in Bronxville to an old factory building in Long Island City, where he sat at a desk behind a wall of glass separating him and his secretary from the machinery, trying to drum up paper-bag clients even as the plastic bag began taking over the market.
The commute—one train and two subways each way—was part of why my father disliked the job. Another was that Bronxville was far removed from nature, where he felt most at home. His father, a legendarily grim man, sensed that not only did his son need a reward for having taken over the struggling shop, he needed a place to relax. So in 1948, he loaned my dad $10,000 to buy his piece of heaven on earth: a small, sagging, 19th-century farmhouse that lacked plumbing or electricity, smack in the middle of 1,000 acres of pines, maples, and birches in western Massachusetts. The land included a lake with an island in the middle that was nothing but pine trees.
