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On April 2, 1899, right before his sixtieth birthday, Rockefeller played his first complete game of golf, finishing nine holes in sixty-four strokes. After this, he took up the sport with a vengeance. Not always a powerful player, he was nonetheless eerily accurate, his swing so exacting that time seemed suspended. “It was the slowest back-swing I ever saw,” said one partner. “It seemed to last for minutes.” Once again, Rockefeller dissected his game like a manufacturing method. Noticing that he twisted his right foot at the end of his stroke, he had his caddy nail his foot into the ground with a wire croquet wicket—a hazardous trick that he abandoned once the fault was corrected. Since he lifted his head as he shot, he hired a boy to say “Keep your head down” whenever he teed off. Rockefeller was frustrated at one point when he kept slicing his woods. To identify the source of the problem, he commissioned a Cleveland photographer to do snapshots of his swing, a time-and-motion study that enabled him to root out the troublesome flaw. Later, he had movies made of his game, which he studied intently. As part of this studious approach, he recorded all his golf scores in thick little books, with names, dates, and places included.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Cleveland
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Rockefeller’s passion for golf was linked to his medical problems of the 1890s, which turned him into a fitness buff. “Played in moderation golf is not only a fascinating game but a valuable aid to health,” he advised friends. His physician and frequent golf partner Dr. Hamilton Biggar credited golf with rejuvenating Rockefeller after his near breakdown. “Since he has taken it up with such gusto there has been a marked change in his appearance,” he told a reporter. “His skin, which was formerly pallid and wrinkled, is now firm and ruddy and healthy.” In later years, Rockefeller gave up walking and bicycled from hole to hole to conserve energy for the game. As an old man, he sat upright on the bike and had it pushed along by his caddy to economize further on his strength. Nothing could keep him from his morning game. If it rained or the sun was too strong, a caddy shielded him with a big black umbrella throughout. His retinue came equipped with rubbers for muddy weather, sweaters for chilly weather, and towels to dry the clubs in a drizzle.
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Golf made Rockefeller a more gregarious person, bringing out a bonhomie that had been stifled during the Standard Oil years. For a man who shrank from intimate discussion, golf provided an ideal way to socialize in a highly structured, risk-free environment from ten-fifteen to twelve each morning. As soon as he arrived, he would clown around, setting a tone of genial banter, and people responded in kind. He hummed hymns or popular songs, told humorous anecdotes, or even read short poems of his own composition. One of his favorite gags involved an eminent minister who liked to cheat at golf; an adroit mimic, Rockefeller aped the divine giving the ball a secret little kick behind a tree stump. Golf brought out a native drollery that he had never allowed to flower before. “We should not rejoice in the downfall of others,” he wrote his daughter Bessie, “but I slaughtered four men at golf on Saturday last.… This was very wrong, and of course I will never do it again.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Elizabeth Rockefeller Strong · Standard Oil
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Rockefeller established various taboos on the course, including that no business or charitable bequests should ever be discussed. People who flouted these rules were never invited back, and Rockefeller was extremely uncompromising on the subject. He wanted to keep things on a superficial, slightly unreal level and ward off any serious discussion. In this way, he could be with people yet surrounded by his own ring of silence, an isolated figure amid the crowd, setting the terms of social intercourse.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
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Despite his unmatched place in America’s urban and industrial growth, Rockefeller remained a country boy at heart and now receded further from the city. Perhaps as a legacy of his upstate boyhood, he was drawn to hilltop houses with spacious water views. Seeking an escape from Manhattan, he was especially attracted to the Hudson River, on which William had built his thousand-acre manor. John D. was moved by the river’s beauty and majestic shoreline, flanked by rolling farmland and picturesque villages. When land prices plunged during the 1893 panic, he bought four hundred acres in the Pocantico Hills of North Tarrytown, just south of Rockwood Hall. Though he considered establishing a weekend house or summer hideaway, he had no exact plan. “As I stated to you before coming,” he wrote to Cettie in early September 1893, “I have no scheme whatever in reference to this new property on the Hudson, further than to own it and let the future determine how [we] wish to use it.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Pocantico Hills · Rockwood Hall · Hudson River · United States · Manhattan · North Tarrytown · Hudson · Uncle William
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Rockefeller was drawn to the spot by natural beauty, not elegant neighbors. “He chose the site of his house on Pocantico Hills for its glorious view of the Hudson and the Catskills, one of the most magnificent landscapes in America,” reported Gates, who accompanied him on the first trip. The property included a jagged ridge called Kykuit Hill—pronounced kye-cut and derived from the Dutch word for lookout—which enjoyed splendid views of the river and distant Palisades. As at Forest Hill, Rockefeller simply took the furnished house that came with the property, a modest frame structure with wide verandas known as the Parsons-Wentworth House. As was his wont, he kept remodeling the house over the years, enlarging a room here, making one more comfortable there. It was his own Walden, a place where “fine views invest the soul and where we can live simply and quietly.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Frederick T. Gates · Pocantico Hills · Forest Hill · United States · Hudson · Catskill Mountains · Kykuit Hill · Palisades · Parsons-Wentworth House · Walden
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By 1900, Rockefeller had acquired 1,600 acres and eventually the Pocantico Hills estate expanded to 3,000 acres, threaded by dozens of miles of winding roads and bridle paths. Rockefeller could tolerate extravagance as long as the style was understated and did not trumpet his wealth too loudly. He avoided a gaudy residence and had no desire to impress other people. If anything, he craved seclusion. At one point, Rockefeller decided that he had to purchase a small corner property owned by Thomas Birdsall. He offered an excellent purchase price and said he would buy a nearby strip of land to which Birdsall could move his house. When Birdsall refused, Rockefeller ordered his superintendent to surround the offending property with the largest cedar trees he could find, casting the house into perpetual gloom. Birdsall caved in.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Pocantico Hills · Thomas Birdsall
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Almost as soon as he caught the golf fever in 1899, Rockefeller laid out four holes at Pocantico. “Mother and Father crazy over golf,” Junior told a college chum in 1900. “Father plays from four to six hours a day, and Mother several hours.” William Tucker, a golf pro from nearby Ardsley, coached Rockefeller regularly. By 1901, the titan hired a golf architect, William Dunn, to plot a twelve-hole course, and he also had a nine-hole course designed for Forest Hill. Gamely trying to please his father, Junior took lessons for a year, but he was not cut out for competitive games and favored the more solitary pleasure of horseback riding.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · Pocantico Hills · Forest Hill · William Dunn · William Tucker · Ardsley
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At some point, Rockefeller decided that he had to play golf daily at Pocantico. In early December 1904, after four inches of snow had fallen on Westchester County, Elias Johnson was taken aback to receive a call from Rockefeller, inviting him up for a foursome. When Johnson objected that they could not possibly play in the snow, Rockefeller said, “Just come up and see.” Even as they spoke, a team of workmen with horses and snowplows were assiduously clearing snow from five fairways and putting greens; the next morning, Johnson found a shimmering green course, carved from a wintry landscape. “We never had a finer game,” said Johnson. Rockefeller played in all kinds of weather. “Yesterday morning I played with the thermometer at 20 in the shade,” he boasted to a niece in 1904. “It was cold indeed on these Pocantico Hills, but a good thing for my health.” To keep his partners warm, he distributed paper vests, which became a trademark gift.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Pocantico Hills · Westchester County · Elias Johnson · Johnson
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Golf was his greatest indulgence. A full-time crew at Pocantico was charged with keeping the greens clear, and they were often out in the early morning, wiping dew from the grass with special mowers, rollers, and bamboo poles. An account book from early 1906 shows that Rockefeller spent $525,211.47 on personal expenses during the previous year, devoting an astounding $27,537.80—or $450,000 in 1996 dollars—to golf.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Pocantico Hills
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Another rich man might have turned to his estate for rest, but for Rockefeller much of the charm lay in the construction and heavy labor. At first, he had the firm of Frederick Law Olmsted, who had designed Central Park and many other parks, do the landscaping at Pocantico. Then, he took this work in hand himself, relegating outside firms to advisory roles and building a surveying tower to help him lay out the gardens. Rockefeller had a flair for landscape design and delighted in transplanting trees as tall as ninety feet. By the 1920s, he had some of the world’s largest nurseries at Pocantico, where he planted as many as ten thousand young trees at a time, selling some of them at a profit.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Frederick Law Olmsted · Pocantico Hills · Central Park
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Rockefeller belied Thorstein Veblen’s generalization that rich men possessed “an instinctive repugnance for the vulgar forms of labor,” for he always believed in the dignity of manual labor. Along with his son, he laid out sinuous trails and framed striking vistas, leading the work gangs himself. “How many miles of roads I have laid out in my time,” he reflected, “I can hardly compute, but I have often kept at it until I was exhausted. While surveying roads, I have run the lines until darkness made it impossible to see the little stakes and flags.” He became so skillful that he built roads without an engineer. “I am thinking of moving that hillock,” he would say, quickly sizing up the volume of material involved. “Offhand, I would say there are just about 650,000 cubic feet of dirt here.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Thorstein Veblen
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As at Standard Oil, Rockefeller was a paternalistic boss at home. Among his three hundred mostly black and Italian workmen he outlawed profanity and even tried to purchase and shut down Tarrytown’s lone tavern. Though he was exacting and did not pay high salaries, he never yelled at his employees and dealt with them in a patient, considerate manner, occasionally inviting them to sit by the fire for a chat.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Standard Oil · Tarrytown
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Rockefeller’s absorption in his estates might well have stemmed from his fear of the general public and preference for staying in a protected home environment. As one early biographer noted, “Universally execrated, broken physically and nervously, he was forced almost three decades ago to retreat behind stone walls, barbed wire fences, grilled iron gates.” He preferred to socialize on home turf, where guests had to conform to his rules and his timetable. He was also concerned about terrorist acts. In early 1892, George Rogers told Cettie that he had just gotten a letter signed “Justice or Extermination,” which warned that a packaged bomb was on the way. Such threats posed a dilemma for Rockefeller in fashioning his estates, for he wanted to keep his lands open to the public. He finally decided to protect himself by having a secure, private core of four to five hundred acres, including the family houses and golf course, ringed by fences and manned by watchmen. The public was allowed to wander through the rest of the estate, provided that they brought no cars. For decades, Pocantico was a hiker’s and rider’s paradise, making the Rockefeller domain at once exclusive and democratic.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Laura Spelman Rockefeller · George D. Rogers · Pocantico Hills
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In retirement, Rockefeller subordinated many things to the overriding goal of longevity. “I hope you will take good care of your health,” he once told Junior. “This is a religious duty, and you can accomplish so much for the world if you keep well and strong.” His Baptist avoidance of tobacco or alcohol made him a natural advocate of abstemious living, and he was convinced that virtuous habits were medicinal. “I enjoy the best of health,” he said in later years. “What a compensation for the loss of the theaters, the clubs, the dinners, the dissipations which ruined the health of many of my acquaintances long, long years ago.… I was satisfied with cold water and skimmed milk, and enjoyed my sleep. What a pity that more men did not enjoy these simple things!”
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Rockefeller’s boon companion was Dr. Hamilton F. Biggar. They had met in the 1870s in the early days on Euclid Avenue when Rockefeller, playing blindman’s buff with the children, was dashing madly about the parlor and ran smack into a doorway; Dr. Biggar came to stitch the wound and remained in the family bosom. Born in Canada, Biggar moved to Cleveland after the Civil War and became a leading figure in the increasingly popular field of homeopathic medicine. He rose to professor of anatomy and clinical surgery in the local Homeopathic Hospital College and counted William McKinley and Mark Hanna among his patients. Founded by the German physician Samuel Hahnemann (1755–1843) and prevalent in nineteenth-century America, homeopathy cured disease by using minute amounts of substances that in larger doses might cause the disease. At Biggar’s behest, Rockefeller served as a vice president and trustee of the Homeopathic Hospital College, providing money for land, building, and instruction. It was a striking paradox that the philanthropist who would create the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research and did more than anyone else to advance scientific medicine in the twentieth century was emotionally wedded to traditional remedies. Rockefeller sometimes smoked mullein leaves in a clay pipe to heal respiratory problems and never lost a residual suspicion of medical doctors. “The doctor came to see me today,” he once reported to his son. “He wouldn’t give me the medicine I wanted, and I wouldn’t take the medicine he prescribed, but we had a lovely talk.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Mark Hanna · William McKinley · Hamilton F. Biggar · Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research · Cleveland · Euclid Avenue · United States · Samuel Hahnemann · Canada · Homeopathic Hospital College · Civil War
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Portly, tall, and round-faced, given to derby hats and watch chains, Dr. Biggar shared Rockefeller’s love of yarns and dry wisecracks and they took pleasure in good-naturedly ribbing each other. Since Biggar dressed in a more dapper fashion than his rich friend, many people imagined that he was the titan when they traveled together. More than anybody, Dr. Biggar brought out Rockefeller’s amiability, as reflected in his description of Rockefeller: “He has a keen sense of humor, is fond of jokes, sharp in repartee, an entertaining conversationalist and a gracious listener.”
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Not everybody was enamored of Dr. Biggar. As Rockefeller’s official doctor, issuing medical bulletins to the press, he struck some as pompous and self-serving. Some physicians even thought him a charlatan with a good bedside manner. One such doubter was Harvard president Charles Eliot, who told Frederick Gates that most Harvard doctors considered Biggar inept. In 1901, according to Eliot, when Biggar had a physical breakdown, Rockefeller paid his expenses for a European trip to recuperate. While he was away, Rockefeller had a renewed attack of hydrocele, an accumulation of serous fluid, which Biggar had pronounced incurable. Rockefeller summoned a doctor from the Harvard Medical School “who not only promptly relieved him of present pain but in a month effected a permanent cure, which Mr. Rockefeller had been led to believe was not possible,” Eliot told Gates nine years later. After that, Rockefeller consulted other doctors, especially an elderly German named Dr. Henry N. Moeller, but Biggar was often at his side and had a continuing influence on his views.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Frederick T. Gates · Hamilton F. Biggar · Charles Eliot · Harvard University · Henry N. Moeller · Eliot · Harvard Medical School
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By the early 1900s, Dr. Biggar frequently prophesied in the press that Rockefeller would live to one hundred (which doubtless endeared him to his patron), and he became such a zealous spokesman for Rockefeller’s health principles that it became hard to tell where Biggar ended and Rockefeller began. In 1907, Biggar stated his foolproof rules for long life: “At fifty the American businessman should cease to worry, eschew liquor and tobacco and make play in ‘God’s out of doors’ his chief aim in life.” As time passed, Biggar added an admonition to rise from the table a little bit hungry, while Rockefeller laid additional stress on nine hours of daily sleep, including a long siesta after lunch.
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There are hints that Rockefeller had a more than ordinary dread of death. Years later, he was playing a golf foursome at Ormond Beach, Florida, when one partner, a Mr. Harvey, thought he had a severe attack of indigestion. Rockefeller took his arm and uttered consoling words before Harvey crumpled to the ground from a heart attack. Doctors were summoned while Harvey was carried inside, where he died thirty minutes later. Rockefeller, so compassionate at first, unceremoniously fled the scene. As one golfing partner recalled, “Mr. Rockefeller turned away and walked rapidly to his car and drove off. I always felt that he did not want to witness death.” Nowhere in his voluminous records does he ever even remotely discuss death.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Ormond Beach · Florida · Harvey
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Rockefeller seemed to believe that he could keep death at bay if he adhered to his fixed rules. Extremely finicky about diet, rest, and exercise, he reduced everything to a routine and repeated the same daily schedule, forcing other people to fall in step with his timetable. In a letter to his son, Rockefeller credited his longevity to his willingness to reject social demands. “I attribute my good condition to my almost reckless independence in determining for myself what to do and the rigid adhering to regulations which give me the maximum of rest and quiet and leisure, and I am being richly paid for it every day.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
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Part of his single-minded program for reaching one hundred was to go through life in a steady, unhurried fashion. He paced himself, husbanded his energy, and took pride in his abnormally low pulse: “That indicates a capacity for enduring and retaining one’s balance.” In his early years, he had struggled to master his temper and clear his mind of petty annoyances; now, he had a medical rationale for purging his system of turbulent emotions, especially anger. “It produces in the blood a lot of toxins that poison the system of the angry person. That tires him out and renders him less efficient, to say nothing of causing him to grow old and wear out before his time.” Worry was also to be avoided. “I am certain that worry causes a greater strain upon the nerves than hard work.” This outlook further encouraged him to avoid spontaneous, potentially confrontational encounters with people.
Names:
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Rockefeller was partial to massage and other forms of bodily manipulation. In the early 1900s, he became a passionate devotee of osteopathy, which tries to restore the body’s structural integrity by manipulating the skeleton and muscles, and he talked Cettie and Lute into going for treatments. In one rapturous outburst in 1905, he told his son that he had profited from osteopathy while at Forest Hill and was “more grateful than I can tell you for the good health which I have and which enables me to do two or three times as much work, Mrs. Tuttle [his telegrapher] says, as I used to do when she was here before. Osteopathy! Osteopathy! Osteopathy!” When exponents of more advanced medicine—spurred on, ironically, by Rockefeller philanthropy—tried to enact legislation to bar osteopaths, Rockefeller rushed to the osteopaths’ defense. “I believe in osteopathy,” he instructed his secretary, “and if any of our people at 26 Broadway can say or do anything to aid the osteopaths at this time of their struggle, I should appreciate it.” A visit to an osteopath occasioned one of Rockefeller’s most celebrated witticisms. As the osteopath cracked his vertebrae, Rockefeller said wryly, “Listen to that, doctor. They say I control all the oil in the country and I haven’t enough even to oil my own joints.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Laura Spelman Rockefeller · Lucy Spelman · Henry B. Tuttle · Forest Hill · 26 Broadway
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In the early 1900s, the press still circulated preposterous stories of how Rockefeller could digest only milk and crackers and had a standing offer of one million dollars to anyone who could fix his stomach. The most ghoulish myth claimed that he needed mother’s milk to survive and that his caddy smuggled it to him daily in a thermos on the golf course. Thousands of letters flooded into 26 Broadway, offering remedies for stomach troubles. Rockefeller was perplexed by these weird rumors. When approaching eighty, he said wearily, “There are multitudes of people in the country today who, from these false reports, believe that I am in such a sad condition that I would give all I possess on earth to be a well man. And I know of no man in better health than I am—and so it goes.” Biggar had, in fact, prescribed bread and milk for Rockefeller’s digestive troubles in the 1890s, and he continued to drink milk and cream regularly in the early 1900s, believing that “fresh milk is an excellent food for the nerves.” Yet as his health returned in the late 1890s, he resumed a varied menu, which he consumed slowly and in tiny portions. He had a plain but healthy diet: green peas and string beans from his garden, rice, barley water, lettuce, fish, brown bread, and baked potatoes twice a day.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Hamilton F. Biggar · 26 Broadway
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In the early 1900s, portly tycoons such as Morgan incarnated the robust prosperity of the era, while Rockefeller weighed in at a lean 165 pounds. Still the ascetic Protestant, he decried overeating, warning that it caused more sickness than did any other cause. He never ate hot food, waited for dishes to cool, and encouraged guests to start without him. Food was fuel for Rockefeller, not a source of sensual pleasure. “He could not understand why anyone would eat a piece of candy, if that piece of candy were not good for him, just because that person liked candy,” Junior explained. Once, in an uncharacteristic moment, he had a craving for ice cream and humbly asked Dr. Moeller for a waiver from his prohibition against eating it. “If I had a license from you to eat a very little ice cream occasionally it would be a special dispensation which I would much appreciate, but, you are the Doctor,” he said meekly.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · John D. Rockefeller, Jr. · J. P. Morgan · Moeller
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Rockefeller’s most distinctive piece of medical advice—and the eternal bane of his dinner guests—was that people should chew each bite ten times before swallowing. So conscientiously did he adhere to this practice that he even advised people to chew liquids, which he would swirl around in his mouth. He would still be eating a half hour after other guests had finished. To promote digestion, he also thought it important to linger at the table for an hour or so after dinner. To pass the time, he played a parlor game with guests called Numerica, a form of competitive solitaire. Since, as a Baptist, he could not play cards, he had square counters made to replace the poker decks that were ordinarily used. Any number of guests could play, and Rockefeller distributed a dime to the winner, nickels to the losers. The game required a certain agility with figures, and Rockefeller grew so proficient from incessant practice that he tended to award himself the dime.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Numerica
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For Americans of a later day, John D. Rockefeller was etched in their minds as a bald, wizened man, a desiccated fossil. Yet before his health troubles of the early 1890s, the few reporters who penetrated his inner sanctum were struck by his youthful demeanor. His correspondence does show that his problem with hair loss began earlier than previously imagined; in 1886, at age forty-seven, he was already ordering bottles of hair restorative. In 1893, Rockefeller’s hair loss, or alopecia, suddenly worsened as he struggled with digestive problems and fretted over the University of Chicago finances.
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Generalized alopecia, or total loss of body hair, has been attributed to many causes, ranging from genetic factors to severe stress, but remarkably little is known for certain. For Rockefeller, the onset of the disease coincided with his breakdown of the early 1890s. In 1901, the symptoms worsened markedly, with Cettie recording in a memo book that in March of that year “John’s moustache began to fall out, and all the hair on his body had followed by August.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Laura Spelman Rockefeller · John
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The change in his appearance was startling: He suddenly looked old, puffy, stooped—all but unrecognizable. He seemed to age a generation. Without hair, his facial imperfections grew more pronounced: The skin appeared parchment dry, his lips too thin, his head large and bumpy. Soon after losing his hair, Rockefeller went to a dinner thrown by J. P. Morgan (one of the few public dinners he ever attended) and sat down next to a mystified Charles Schwab, the new president of U.S. Steel. “I see you don’t know me, Charley,” said Rockefeller. “I am Mr. Rockefeller.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · J. P. Morgan · U.S. Steel · Charles Schwab · Charley
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Coming on the eve of the muckraking era, Rockefeller’s alopecia had a devastating effect on his image: It made him look like a hairless ogre, stripped of all youth, warmth, and attractiveness, and this played powerfully on people’s imaginations. For a time, he wore a black skullcap, giving him the impressively gaunt physiognomy of a Renaissance prelate. One French writer wrote that “under his silk skull-cap he seems like an old monk of the inquisition such as one sees in the Spanish picture galleries.”
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Renaissance
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The alopecia dealt a blow to Rockefeller’s morale—the psychological effect is crushing for most people—and he dabbled restlessly in remedies. Biggar started him on a hair-restoration regimen in which he took phosphorus six days a week and sulfur on the seventh. When such remedies failed, Rockefeller decided to buy a wig. Self-conscious at first and reluctant to wear it, he tested it one Sunday at the Euclid Avenue Baptist Church. Before the service, he stood in the pastor’s office, nervously adjusting it and telling a listener what an ordeal it would be to wear it in the church. When the wig met with a good reception, he was almost boyishly elated. Soon, he grew to love this wig, telling daughter Edith, “I sleep in it and play golf, and I am surprised that I went so long without it, and think I made a great mistake in doing so.” He became so fond of wigs that he started to wear rotating wigs of different lengths to give the impression of his hair growing then being cut. He even had wigs styled for different occasions: golf, church, short walks, and so on. For all his wealth, however, Rockefeller could never find the ideal wig. Starting out with a fashionable wig maker on the rue Castiglione in Paris, he grew disillusioned when springs in the framework pushed up through the hair. He then switched to a Cleveland wig maker whose product had another maddening defect: The foundation fabric would shrink, making the wig suddenly slide across his bald pate. What God had taken away, it seems, could never be perfectly restored.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Edith Rockefeller McCormick · Hamilton F. Biggar · Euclid Avenue Baptist Church · Cleveland · Paris · rue Castiglione
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Before Rockefeller’s hair fell out, people noted the contrast between him and his often sickly wife. Then, overnight, the alopecia seemed to equalize their ages. John and Cettie had enjoyed a happy marriage, if one constrained by formality. Whether playing with the children or golfing with cronies, John was capable of a certain hilarity—he could kick up his heels and have fun. Cettie—gentle, sweet, charming—remained immured in her cloistered world of religion and clung to her belief in John as a superman. One observer described Cettie as “a dignified, simple-minded, elderly lady, pleasant faced, soft spoken, entirely without ostentation” for whom John “was still her hero after all the years.” As reformers branded her hero a corporate malefactor, she found a necessary sanctuary in Christianity, her mind soaring to serene religious heights far above the din of political strife.
Names: John D. Rockefeller, Sr. · Laura Spelman Rockefeller · John
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