October 23, 2019
I didn’t know the man myself, but as a child I often heard his name mentioned by the sturdy but lumpy woman who looked after his daughters, Barbara and Jane, every summer for several years.
Robert Moses was, for half a century, arguably the most powerful man in the city of New York, the planner and so-called “master builder” responsible for its development in the early and mid-20th Century, and for huge projects on Long Island, and in Rockland and Westchester Counties as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moses
Before and during World War II, in order to escape the swelter that was New York City, every summer, Moses and his family moved to their place at “The Lake”, where they hired a local woman, Gwen Larlham, to look after their children.
Gwen was the second-oldest of the five girls and four boys of a woman widowed in 1923, when a drunk driver killed her contractor husband as he stepped off a trolly near a hotel lobby renovation job in neighboring New Jersey.
After his death, Della had supported her brood by turning their large home, built with his own hands by their husband and father, into a boarding house. Like the others of her siblings in their turn, Gwennie had gone to work early in order to add her salary to the income from the boarders, and help support her mother and the younger children.
Unlike her eight brothers and sisters who were all extremely bright, Gwen was slower to understand some things than the average person, moved with an awkward, plodding gait, lacked animation, and wore glasses as thick as the bottom of a Coke bottle. Peering through her glasses her magnified eyes always made her seem like she didn’t quite comprehend what was going on, which wasn’t strictly true. Her plain face rarely held a smile. It was as if everyone else had gotten the joke and she didn’t. That was true. She never got a joke until it was explained. It was as if she was a few beats behind, trying to catch up with whatever was going on. Still, no one in the family teased her or treated her unkindly. She in turn, was a friendly and loving person towards others, if seeming a little out of touch and and tentative.
The other eight did very well in high school. The boys went off to be iron workers and craftsmen in the building trades, one girl became a beautician with her own shop, another an executive secretary. One ran off to Toronto with a handsome Canadian, and another married a tall, shy fellow who could fix anything, was a talented photographer, and made his living as a postman carrying the mail in Hackensack. Gwen, however, remained at home with her mother and worked as a domestic — which is presumably how she happened to be hired the first time to look after the Moses girls.
After which her inclination to treat children as her equal, which in some ways they were, must have helped her form a bond with them that their parents found they could trust and rely upon.
At home, Gwen often talked about Mister-Moses-this and Mister-Moses-that. With a bit more enthusiasm than one might expect to hear from an employee. But again, it was as if her simplicity had resulted in a trusting loyalty towards Robert Moses and his family. She often said that he was a very important man. On the other hand her tone carried no implication of celebrity worship — and in any case, he was not that kind of celebrity. Most local people had no idea what power he wielded. Even later, most people didn’t know that it was because he wouldn’t build them a new stadium that the Dodgers left Brooklyn.
Towards the end of the war Gwen met and married George Schafer, a corpulent laborer of normal intelligence, who had a florid complexion, and who loved her and treated her well. Rather than Gwen leaving her mother’s home, he moved in with them. Which turned out to be fortuitous, because a couple of years later George, who was epileptic, had a seizure while digging a ditch on a road project. He was alone when he fell face down, and drowned in three inches of water in the bottom of the ditch before others found him.
Gwen remained with her mother until Della died in her nineties, then moved in with a niece and lived to a similar age, helping with household chores and with the niece’s children.
This story is told from the perspective of the ten-year-old that I was when I formed these impressions and I may have mis-imagined some of the facts. Now, with 75 years of hindsight and a medical degree, I’d guess Gwennie was on the mild end of the autism spectrum and would now be diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. Gwen Larlham was my mother’s older sister and my Aunt Gwen when these events transpired, in Greenwood Lake, New York in the early 1940s.
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