by Bob Spitz
In late January of 1852, John showed up in Dwight, a tiny farming community near Griggsville, where his younger brother, David, now flirted with success. David owned a mercantile, McWilliams and Judd, which provided equipment for crops and happened to have the only safe in town. Thus, when local farmers got paid and needed a secure place to deposit their cash, David parlayed his little safe into the Bank of Dwight. It became clear soon enough that there was no place in it for John. He stayed just long enough to marry his sweetheart, pretty Mary Dana, then enlisted in an Illinois volunteer infantry regiment and disappeared into the mist.
In due time, John was swept up in the War Between the States, commissioned as a quartermaster for Sherman on his march through Georgia. A modestly published memoir is filled with his exploits. “He was a fearless son-of-a-bitch,” says Alex McWilliams, his great-grandnephew. “The gold rush and the war had toughened him hard as nails.”
When he returned to Dwight, in 1865, the lay of the land only made John harder and tougher. McWilliams family lore maintains that David pretended not to recognize his brother, lest he demand a share of the family business. More determined than ever, John decamped to Odell, a mere eight miles from Dwight, where he homesteaded and opened his own bank, in competition with his brother. Odell was even tinier than Dwight, maybe seven or eight hundred people tops, but it was the largest grain-shipping area in Livingston County, and the Bank of Odell became its anchor, as much the social center of the community as it was a place of business. John McWilliams made loans to local businesses based on personal relationships, money that came out of his own pocket. Meanwhile, he began buying up farmland all around Odell, ground that, to this day, remains in the family portfolio.
“John was a very astute businessman,” says Alex McWilliams, as was his brother, David. “They were serious people; their determination was fierce. They passed the ground on [to their heirs], very rarely selling it.”
In time, the brothers developed “a familiarity with the land,” something innate, so sound, like nature itself. John, especially practical, prized the value of the earth’s minerals, based on his Eureka experiences out West. Land was something you could touch, sift through your fingers, and they banked on it almost exclusively, unlike their counterparts in Chicago who dealt in intangibles: credit and mortgages. In a quiet but persistent manner, John expanded his budding empire, acquiring land in a variety of disparate places: abundant rice fields east of DeWitt, Arkansas, on the White River, where he maintained a family farm; parcels in Arvin, near Bakersfield, on which they eventually found oil; seemingly worthless real estate in what is now Palm Springs; and underground chambers, which the government later contracted for storing fuel. He also played an unobtrusive role in the development of the Mississippi Valley and “is said to have made a fortune [there] during the Reconstruction period.”
Through all these transactions, one constant prevailed: character. It was character that kept their empire from the vicissitudes of ill will. Ambition and savvy never tarnished the family name. The McWilliams brothers were “the epitome of gentlemen—straitlaced, taciturn, pillars of their respective communities,” says a great-grandniece who still resides in Dwight. She recalls hearing an expression shared by the two communities that defined her family’s profile: small-town royalty. The brothers were every inch the county’s power elite, the “leading lights” of the area, its major bankers, major land barons, active in the Methodist church and community service, major contributors to local libraries and hospitals and schools.
The custom of service and character wasn’t lost on John’s son—also named John—who elected, by choice or simply destiny, to follow in his father’s footsteps. John McWilliams II, Julia Child’s father, was bred to be a gentleman, “a carbon-copy of the old man,” to one observer’s eyes, prudent and practical and disciplined to a fault.
John Jr. was born in 1880, and, based on physical characteristics, left no doubt from the get-go that he was “genuine McWilliams.” He cut quite a figure in that flat, barren country. Tall, reed thin, spindly, but with the graceful unself-conscious gait of a natural athlete, decidedly handsome despite a generous chin that Julia would inherit, he had the McWilliams superiority and air of command. But the air of command didn’t come naturally to young John; it was something he cultivated, something he earned, under the tutelage of his father. He spent his youth—and much of his manhood—at the elbow of John Sr., now a cold, hard-shelled man who showed his son little outward affection. The father-son alliance was a clear, calculated enterprise whose chief concern was to mine the family interests. “The obligation they felt was relentless,” a relative recalls. “Don’t let the family down. Maintain the status. There was no room for tenderness.”
Demanding though he was, John’s father recognized his son’s need for independence. After all, he’d become his own man in California and Georgia. So in 1895, when John Jr. was fifteen—the age when most local boys spent their days at work in the fields—he was sent to the Lake Forest Academy, an all-boys prep school just north of Chicago. This was part of the blueprint his father had mapped out for him. He would attend Lake Forest for two years, then head to Princeton, to study some aspect of the humanities, before returning to the fold.
At Princeton, John McWilliams Jr. displayed the same discipline he’d developed in Odell. He was all business. His studies came first, a fairly general mix of classical history and contemporary politics, with a regimen of sports that included tennis and golf. Though no BMOC, he was elected vice president of his class and considered a campus leader. Still, John took school seriously, seeing it as a chance to round out his character so that he might bring a more informed dimension to his duties back home. One thing was for certain: there was no horsing around. He wasn’t part of the go-go crowd that spent weekends at one of the many sister schools, where Princeton men hitched their wagons to a starlet, or prowled the New York social scene making contacts for future career moves. Unlike other classmates who sought to compete for the best firms, it wasn’t urgent that John distinguish himself in college. His future was already spoken for. John had learned all he needed from his father, the one person who knew all the ropes. As far as the McWilliams family business was concerned, there was one sovereign authority, one way to do business, one way to conduct yourself in every aspect of life.
To say that John McWilliams was a scaled-down version of his father gave him too little credit for his later success, but there was a rigidity about him that was hard to mistake and a chilliness, an aloof side, taken directly from the family playbook. “He wasn’t a warm man by any stretch of the imagination,” his granddaughter, Patti McWilliams, says. “He had no sense of humor, no warmth of any kind.”
Banking and finance suited his personality. It was practical, unsentimental. The process involved with making sound decisions required no emotional investment, just good dollars and cents, which was squarely within John’s comfort zone. Otherwise there was no desperate urgency to making his mark. In 1901, following his graduation from Princeton, John was content to return to Odell and start from the ground up, as the assistant cashier in his father’s bank. It wasn’t a glamorous job, but it gave him visibility in the community, an opportunity to build recognition and trust.
Visibility, he knew, was money in the bank. So were trust and recognition, and by 1907 he had combined all three elements, becoming an alderman of Odell on the Prohibition ticket. He also made his first independent land purchase, buying 4,600 acres in Kern County, California, the southern part of the Central Valley, an area rich in agriculture and where work had already begun drilling wells that would eventually yield oil.
But Odell could compete with the pull of the West for only so long. The Midwest was solid and steady, but as far as growth went it was as flat as the Plains—and they were “flatter than a pancake,” according to local wisdom—that stretched for hundreds of miles in every direction. To speculators like the McWilliamses, its potential was limited. They had taken their busine
ss there as far as it could go. By 1908, John Sr. had already returned to California, this time permanently, where his land investments were making him richer by the day. The old prospector had struck gold again—rich veins of real estate, from Bakersfield to Pasadena. He bought more land, and more, until by the time he settled in Pasadena he owned practically as many acres as the whole of Odell, Illinois. He formed the McWilliams Land Company in 1909, just as Pasadena was enjoying its most rapid growth.
Everyone assumed that John Jr. would follow suit, if not immediately, then as soon as he could get his affairs in order. “He was smitten with California the first time he saw it,” recalls a woman who eventually became his daughter-in-law. Smitten and pulling down his own deals out West. But his father put the brakes on any plans for a hasty exit. The McWilliams family had obligations to the people of Odell, and he had every intention of seeing them through. Meanwhile, John Jr. was promoted to president of the Bank of Odell and given additional commissions that included the rice fields in Arkansas.
Smitten as he was by the West, it was nothing compared to an enchantment back home. In 1903, while visiting his Princeton classmate, Alex Smith, in Chicago, John Jr. was introduced to two sisters, Julia and Dorothy Weston, both Smith College alumnae, both “free spirits” with a legacy of their own. Julia Carolyn Weston—called Caro—in particular, had caught his eye. A fair pink-faced redhead, with unruly hair often pulled back into a bun and braided like a challah, she was tall and striking, not in a loud, vulgar manner, but statuesque, drawing attention with elegance. She was more vigorous than her sister, livelier, captivating: a Cupid’s-bow mouth just this side of voluptuous, eyes a startling pale blue, slightly crescent-shaped and tinged with sadness that belied an earthy wit. Neither sister was shy, but Caro was downright outgoing. She could engage and hold an audience in any crowded room. “Vivacious” was a word used often to describe her nature. So were “saucy” and “independent,” the latter of which proved a nuisance to John McWilliams.
Caro and her sister, Dorothy, were constantly in motion. Since graduating from college, they had hopscotched across the country, ingratiating themselves in any number of settings that offered easy and open companionship. In New York, in Chicago, in El Paso and Denver and Santa Barbara, they joined the stratified social circles of their upbringing, given entrée on the strength of their names. Being a Weston opened doors wherever they went. Not with the small-town royalty distinction that pegged the McWilliamses, but an aristocratic birthright of national prominence.
The Westons were thoroughbreds, old money, with ties stretching back to the Mayflower—and beyond. Caro’s mother, Julia Clark Mitchell, was a direct descendant of Priscilla Alden and Experience Mitchell, who settled the Plymouth Colony in 1623, and pruned an ancestral tree rife with notable branches: William Bradford, governor of the Plymouth Colony; poet William Cullen Bryant; Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. No one had more blue blood running through her veins, though Caro’s father, Byron Curtis Weston, brought his own respectable credentials.
Byron’s roots also descended deep into the Plymouth Colony, which his great-uncle Edmund helped found. A nephew of Zenas Crane, who practically invented fine papermaking, Byron started a rival company right in the Cranes’ backyard—Dalton, Massachusetts, on the Housatonic River—where he manufactured high-grade cotton-fiber books, ledgers, and tablets that gained worldwide renown. The Crane Paper Company and Byron Weston Paper competed for every major account, including printing dollar bills for the U.S. government, which the Cranes managed to snag. (The Westons made some Chinese money.) Descendants of both families say “the Cranes and Westons hated each other,” but in truth they shared an uneasy détente. They struck up friendships and intermarried on occasion, but about as easily as the Capulets and Montagues. They even socialized on occasion, though each family lived on their own side of town—the Westons in the eastern section, known as the Center; the Cranes in the western or “Flat” neighborhood, called “Craneville.” Their churches were separate; they buried their dead in different plots of the cemetery. “You couldn’t attend a Crane function and be welcomed at the Westons’,” says John Kittredge, himself a mixed-blood relative of the two rival clans. Both families possessed an unshakable belief in their own moral superiority. This was especially true among the elders, whose infighting affected all phases of local life. Byron Weston, especially, was spiteful. If one of his merchants defected to the Crane fief, he’d move an outsider into the vacant post to let the scoundrel know there was no chance of return.
Despite the petty rancor, Byron Weston was popular enough to be elected lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, and not just once but for three terms (the Cranes were quick to note they fielded governors), during which his wife gave birth to ten children, in rapid succession. Caro, the seventh, resembled her mother most. She had a stubborn streak, was smart as a whip, treasured her independence, displayed a wicked sense of humor, and courted adventure in a way that seemed, at times, extreme, if not reckless. She was the first woman in Berkshire County to get a driver’s license, and she tooled around those dirt roads like they couldn’t contain her. She was an outspoken feminist, or whatever term stood for individualism and self-reliance in her day. She was also quite the athlete, a formidable tennis player and scratch golfer, which appealed to John McWilliams; indeed, they’d both played basketball for their respective schools. John liked everything about this gutsy New England gal, everything except that she wasn’t available.
About the time Caro began her sophomore year at Smith, growing restless and casting about for her own identity, her father, who suffered from high blood pressure, died suddenly of a stroke. Three years later, her mother, Julia, died of Bright’s disease, or kidney failure, bequeathing to Caro the responsibility for raising her three younger siblings, Donald, Dorothy, and Philip. “We are all orphans,” she noted with gravity in her diary, signifying the upheaval in their lives. In any case, this twist of fate handcuffed Caro to the family, waylaying any plans for an independent future, let alone something as superficial as romance. Her world, once boundless, was now confined to Dalton, Massachusetts, which she accepted with the grace of someone destined for nothing more. Still, her role as surrogate mother provided its own experiences and rewards. “She was a strong-willed woman who met challenges with a sense that she could walk through walls,” recalls an admiring relative. But the family—Caro’s kryptonite—stunted her ostensible superpowers.
In the summer of 1903, her sister Dorothy, who suffered from fatigue and a persistent cough, was diagnosed with galloping consumption, or what we now know as tuberculosis. Thus began Caro’s eight-year-long search for a remedy to the disease, traveling from one spa to another in an attempt to revitalize Dorothy’s lungs. Dry, clear air was essential to their quest, but it gave the sisters’ lives a fractured itinerant quality. Seasonal changes meant packing up and moving on. This gypsy life might have had a disillusioning effect on anyone with less pluck, anyone less determined to battle illness or bet against the odds. Living out of trunks and steamers, however, never seemed to discomfit Caro. She may also have felt that she deserved more from life than what Dalton, Massachusetts, had to offer. Dalton was a company town, with a company mentality. Whether you were a Weston or a Crane, making paper—and more paper—was the focus of everyone’s lives. While at college, Caro had learned something of the world beyond, and knew there was more to it than Dalton’s myopia. “She was sick and tired of that scene,” recalls her granddaughter, Phila, “and Dorothy’s illness, sad to say, may have been her ticket out.” Whatever its drawbacks, the travel proved favorable in advancing the Weston sisters’ social status and, with their native New England beauty and cultivated charm, they became welcome fixtures on the Ivy League country-club circuit. In Santa Barbara and Colorado Springs—two places where the Weston sisters put down provisional roots—Caro infiltrated the close-knit social circles without breaking a sweat. She and Dorothy were in great demand at the various society balls and cotillions,
to say nothing of the tennis and golf tournaments that always seemed to attract a certain crowd.
John McWilliams Jr. joined their exploits whenever possible, but it was exhausting keeping up—and personally frustrating. For seven long years he shadowed the Weston sisters, from Chicago and out through the west to Colorado, and then further south and west, spending his free time wherever they turned up next. Caro made it clear that Dorothy’s health was her priority, and that nothing—neither romance nor marriage—would hinder her goal. She didn’t discourage John, per se, so long as he knew where everything stood. Otherwise, they enjoyed a mutually exclusive, if rather arm’s-length, relationship.
To John McWilliams Jr., this ritual of courtship seemed more like a war of attrition. Caro seemed disinclined to settle down anytime soon—or perhaps she was uninterested. Was Dorothy’s health a raison d’être—or an excuse? He couldn’t be sure. Either way, John’s prospects offered him little in the way of comfort. As he approached his thirtieth birthday in 1910, he became increasingly restless. He was at an age when most of his friends were already married, starting families, but Caro Weston gave him nothing more than vague gestures of faith. And his desire to branch out on his own, ditching the small-town routine in Odell for a larger platform out West, was discouraged by his father.
A year later, an unforeseen event threw John’s mounting despair a welcome lifeline. That summer, Caro’s sister Dorothy became engaged to Wilber Hemming, a Yalie from a Texas banking family who was working in Colorado Springs. Despite an accelerating illness, she planned to marry him the next June. Practically on the spot, Caro, now thirty-three, decided the time was right for her to marry as well. John McWilliams Jr. was a primo catch and, like him, she wanted to live in “the Golden West,” as far away from Dalton as one could get without a boat. They intended to “grow up with the country,” as John quipped in the handbook of his tenth class reunion at Princeton.
