Father, Son & Co.

by Thomas J. Watson

  When the Depression really began to bite in 1932 and IBM’s stock slumped, the company’s profits stayed quite high. So did Dad’s income, since it was pegged to the profits. Word that he was still solvent got around, and neighbors would come at night to ask if he would lend money. I suppose he gave a hundred thousand dollars to people who were caught short. He never turned anybody away, even those he didn’t know well. I think it bothered him that several people in Short Hills never paid him back after they had money again.

  Like many businessmen, Dad thought the downturn was temporary. He would have applauded if he had been present when President Hoover declared a few weeks after the crash, “Any lack of confidence in the economic future or the strength of business in the United States is foolish.” Dad believed that renewed prosperity was just around the corner, and his answer to the Depression was to expand production. In hard times, he saw opportunity. When there weren’t enough sales to keep the factories occupied, he ordered the warehouses filled with spare parts to be ready when demand picked up. He urged the sales force to sell harder and he hired more salesmen. Years later he loved to tell about visiting an art gallery and running into Jim Rand, the head of Remington Rand, IBM’s chief competitor in the tabulating machine business. This was in the very depths of the Depression, 1933, and Rand must have thought Dad was losing his grip.

  He said to my father, “Well, Tom, are you still hiring salesmen?”

  Dad said, “Yes, I am.”

  “That’s amazing!” Rand said, shaking his head. “Businesses are laying people off all over, and you’re hiring salesmen. That’s something.”

  “Jim, I’m getting along in years,” said my dad. “You know I’m almost sixty now. A lot of things happen to men at that critical age. Some of them get to drinking too much. Some of them are interested in girls. But my weakness is hiring salesmen, and I’m just going to keep doing that.”

  In any other business he might have ended up bankrupt. But as far as IBM was concerned, he was right—and lucky besides. IBM more than doubled in size during the New Deal. When the National Recovery Act passed in early 1933, businesses all of a sudden had to supply the federal government with information in huge and unprecedented amounts. Government agencies needed IBM machines by the hundreds too—it was the only way to manage Roosevelt’s welfare, price control, and public works programs. Social Security, which was enacted in 1935, made Uncle Sam IBM’s biggest customer. One of the few things you could do to keep from getting swamped was call IBM. The vital statistics of the whole country went onto punch cards.

  While my father was achieving phenomenal success at IBM, I barely made it through high school. It took me three schools and six years before I finally graduated at age nineteen. Even before I started, Dad suspected that I was going to have trouble, and decided to keep me close to home. My friends went away to boarding school, but he insisted on enrolling me at Carteret Academy, an old, dingy place only twelve miles from our house. For two years I settled into an odd and lonely existence. I’d commute to Carteret every day, often starting out on the same train as Dad, and take another train back at night, barely speaking to anyone.

  Since I was a failure academically, I longed for some other kind of recognition. I went out for all the sports, but while I was skinny and taller than most other kids, I was no athlete. My eye-hand coordination was terrible, so I hated baseball. I tried out as a goalie in hockey—although it was very exciting to have people shooting pucks at me from every direction, I didn’t make the first team. In football I was also pushed quickly onto the second string. The coach, Balky Boyson, was impressed with me—not because of anything I did on the field but just because I showed up. He knew that I faced a long commute home after practice.

  The difficulties I was having seemed to bring out a warmth and gentleness in my father that were not otherwise obvious. He knew I was drifting, but he never gave up. He was constantly telling me that childhood wasn’t the happiest stage of life and that I had much to look forward to. He said, “No matter what happens, it is a time of great change and nobody coasts through it without lots of problems. There is no need to worry about it.” Sometimes he would bring up my bad grades. He’d say, “I wish you were better in school, and I’m sure you do, but at some point, something will catch hold and you are going to be a great man.” I always thought, “That’s impossible.”

  Dad became more and more tolerant of the scrapes I’d get into. Not long after I started at Carteret I teamed up with another boy and secretly bought a Model T from a schoolmate. Neither of us was old enough to drive and I don’t know how we got the license plate. We were driving around Short Hills one day when Father came home from work unexpectedly and caught us with the car. We saw him coming and tried to sneak away by cutting across a neighbor’s field. But Dad saw us and flagged us down.

  “Very interesting car,” he said, walking all around it. “I used to have trouble with these cars. But very interesting. Do you own this car?”

  My friend started to say, “Well, not exactly, Mr. Watson,” but we finally admitted we did. He asked where we kept it and we said in the backyard of Carteret. “Well, if I were you,” he said, “I’d take it back there and sell it or get rid of it. That car will get you in trouble.” He could have made a big to-do, but he didn’t, and we sold the car a few days later.

  It was a big event when Dad let me transfer to boarding school. I spent a year at a place called Morristown, and then moved on to the Hun School in Princeton. I wanted to be a Princeton man, and by going to Hun, which had close ties to the university, I figured I was as good as in.

  Hun was filled with playboys. I’d see them with the hip flask, the raccoon coat, the babe on their arm, driving the Stutz Bearcat roadster like hell down the street. It was a style of life for which I felt to some degree qualified. It meant that studies were not particularly important, that you had a little more money than the average fellow, that you were always out with the girls, and that you owned a car. Mine was a really hot-looking black and red Chrysler that I got on my seventeenth birthday.

  Prohibition was still on. Speakeasies didn’t monitor the age of their customers much, and I used to take girls dancing at the Blue Hills Plantation outside of Short Hills. My luck with girls was at best uneven. Part of my trouble might have been that I didn’t drink, which was another sign of Dad’s influence. I did try marijuana once, however. In those days nobody knew much about drugs, although people did say that the black bands played wonderful jazz because they smoked a kind of cigarette called reefers. These supposedly stretched out time so much that the musicians could play eighth notes instead of quarter notes. A racy guy at Hun by the name of Moore came around with a couple of reefers for sale. I bought them with another guy named Tom. Today he’s a pretty staid fellow around New York, and I never greet him without saying, “Remember the time we smoked marijuana cigarettes?” It really irritates him.

  We locked ourselves in Tom’s room and each smoked a whole reefer. At the end I honestly felt no different from when I started. Neither did Tom. I looked at him and said, “I don’t feel any different at all, do you?” And he said, “Not at all.” Then he began to laugh. I began laughing too—it was uncontrollable laughter—and we both realized this was abnormal as hell. We thought we’d walk it off so we went out in the hall. I remember feeling so tall that it was hard to keep my balance, and I ran into a wall. We were so afraid we’d get caught in this condition that we decided it would be prudent to sleep the drugs off, and that’s what we did.

  My performance at Hun was no more impressive than at my first two high schools: academically I was still a zero. But I had one great success, the first of my entire life. The day I arrived at Hun a fellow told me, “We’ve got a crew here, they use the Princeton boathouse.” Rowing out of the Princeton boathouse seemed exciting to me. As soon as I got down there and made the first crew, things started to pick up.

  Rowing in a crew is a pretty simple motion. I wasn’t good at throwing or hit
ting, but this involved pushing hard with the legs—I’ve got strong legs—and pulling hard with the arms. It got you out on the water and I love water. I was mad for that sport and all the next year worked hard at it. The crew during my final year was good enough to qualify for the international regatta in Henley, England. We got our parents to put up a couple of thousand dollars—a round-trip steerage ticket in those days cost only one hundred dollars—and the whole crew went over.

  While I was engrossed in crew, Dad and his friends were trying hard to get me accepted to Princeton. I had taken the college admission tests a year before and got very uneven scores. I was at or below the passing level in most subjects, but had the highest mark in New Jersey in physics. I loved the subject; my teacher gave vivid demonstrations on such things as how pulleys make lifting easy. When the results came in this teacher said to me, “You’re a funny guy. Most of your marks are lousy, so how did you score so well in this?” I couldn’t explain it. I just have a sense of why mechanical things do what they do.

  The man to whom Dad turned for leverage was Benjamin Wood, a professor of educational research at Columbia University. Wood was a strange genius, a self-educated Texan who was the pioneer of standardized college entry tests. He and Dad discovered each other in the 1920s, when Wood was desperately looking for a machine that could help score and process hundreds of thousands of tests. As soon as Dad heard what Wood had to say, he supplied Columbia with free equipment by the truckload. Wood believed that anything of value could be quantified and that numbers were going to play an increasingly important role in civilization—music to the ears of a tabulating machine maker.

  It is ironic that the great advocate of quantitative testing should be called upon to write a recommendation for somebody with grades and test scores like mine. I barely knew Wood but I think I would have liked him. His letter to Dean Radcliffe Heermance, the Princeton director of admissions, was very dignified and at the same time warm and generous. Here is how he tackled the question of my grades:

  In mind and character I do not hesitate to place him in the highest ten per cent of secondary school graduates. I am not acquainted with his high school record, but my inference would be that his strictly academic record would not adequately indicate his real mental capacity and intellectual originality and persistence. His is the type of mind that, in my experience, would not be adequately or justly measured by the ordinary tests and examinations used for college entrance, regardless of how high or low his marks may be.

  The letter didn’t work, but it must have gratified my father, because a copy of it was still among his papers when he died.

  Dad went personally to plead my case with Dean Heermance during my final spring at Hun. When he came back, all he said was that it wasn’t likely that I’d get in. Not until years later did he tell me what happened at that meeting. The dean laid my records from Morristown and Hun on the desk and said to Father, “Mr. Watson, I am looking at your son’s record and he is a predetermined failure.”

  Not knowing this, I was everlastingly hopeful. I told my father that my final grades from Hun would show great improvement. When I got back from Henley, I joined Dad and the rest of our family at the big summerhouse he owned by then in Camden, Maine. My marks were waiting for me—I still have them somewhere. A couple of them were good, and three were bad. Finally I had to admit that my chances for college that fall seemed pretty slim.

  Two mornings later Dad had his big Packard touring car in front of the house. I said, “What’s the car for?”

  “You and I are taking a trip. We’re going to look at colleges. There must be some college we can find that will accept you with your marks.” This was just like Dad. I can see it now from his point of view. When something had to be done he’d do it.

  I was deeply in love with a girl there in Maine and didn’t want to be away from Camden very long. So I immediately thought of an acquaintance who went to Brown University in Rhode Island. I said, “Why don’t we go to Brown?”

  We drove to Providence, checked into the Biltmore Hotel, Dad called the admissions office, and up we went the next morning. He said to the admissions officer, “I’m Thomas Watson, I run the IBM company, and my son would like to consider coming to Brown. By the way, who is the president of Brown?”

  The admissions guy said, “Clarence Barbour.”

  “That’s very interesting,” said Dad. “He was my pastor when I lived in Rochester, New York.” In those days Brown’s charter required that the university president be a minister.

  We went to Clarence Barbour’s office, said hello, and Barbour got somebody to show us around the campus. When we returned, the admissions officer was looking at my record. He said, “He’s not very good but we’ll take him.”

  The girl I wanted to get back to in Maine was Isabel Henry. I wanted to marry her, even though I was only nineteen and had yet to start college. Loving this girl was the only deep attachment I had until five years later, when I met the woman who would be my wife. Isabel was socially prominent, two years older than I, and already going out with a wealthy guy who had just graduated from Harvard, the very handsome John Ames. I met her with the help of an impetuous blond-headed fellow named Conway Pendleton, a friend from the Hun School whom I’d invited to Camden that summer.

  Conway and I were at a dance at the golf club one night when Isabel and Ames turned up. Everybody stopped and looked at them when they came in. She was the loveliest girl I’d ever seen. She had blond hair, dark eyebrows, a square face, and wonderful carriage—she walked with her shoulders back. Ames looked pretty impressive in a black dinner coat, a white shirt, a black tie, and white flannel pants. To me they were high society, way up out of reach. But my friend Pendleton cut right in on them. I couldn’t wait to get him off the dance floor and debrief him. “What was she like, Conway? What was she like?” I said.

  “Oh hell, Tom, she’s just another girl! She’s great, a lot of fun.”

  Isabel’s family was a power unto itself in that summer community. They were from Philadelphia and lived in a different way from what I had ever seen. Isabel’s grandfather had bought a small peninsula jutting out into Penobscot Bay and had turned it into a private compound for all the cousins. Isabel’s mother was a Biddle. Their house was modest looking outside but very cosmopolitan inside. I noticed lots of foreign magazines around. They played backgammon, which I’d never heard of before.

  I got Conway to introduce me to Isabel and waited impatiently until John Ames left town. Then I began to court her. We saw each other on and off for four or five weeks, and finally I put my arms around her, kissed her, and said, “Isabel, I love you.”

  She said, “I love you too, Tommy. God knows I’ve tried not to, but I do.”

  I should have started worrying right then. Instead I went home with my heart singing and couldn’t get to sleep. I began to see her all the time. Isabel’s father was a nice guy, very intelligent, but subdued. Mrs. Henry ran the roost. They’d invite me out overnight on their yacht or to dinner at their house. At the table, Mrs. Henry would start cutting me down. She’d be describing some garden party and say, “The Lionel Smiths were there …” and then, turning to me, “Of course you wouldn’t know them.” I’d leave those dinners with my tail between my legs.

  Father was delighted with Isabel: he thought she was a queenly woman and that the Biddies were a great family. But if Isabel and I had gotten married, it would have been a disaster. Mrs. Henry would never have let up on me. In fact, I don’t think Isabel saw much ability in me either. We were out riding one day when she said, “I have money and you do too. I don’t think you ought to work. We ought to just pool our funds and travel.”

  For two years we were very close. She lived with her parents and we dated while I went to Brown. The crisis finally came when I was twenty-one, in the summer of 1935. I picked up Isabel in Boston, intending to drive to Maine. When we got as far as Rockport, we came over a hill and there was a fork in the road. She said, “Tommy, let’s n
ot stop at Camden. Let’s drive right to Montreal and get married.” It was very tempting. But then I thought about who I’d be alienating—her family and my family. I said, “I don’t think we should do that. Your family would be forever annoyed. My mother would be upset.”

  So we drove on into Camden. A few weeks later, Isabel told me it was all over. I was terribly hurt. I went back to Brown and stayed away from eligible girls for more than a year. Mrs. Henry succeeded in getting her daughters married to appropriate men and lived to be about ninety-five. She was always wealthy and spent a month each fall at the Ritz in Paris, buying her gowns. Many years later I ran into her there. I walked down the hall and said, “Mrs. Henry, how are you?”

  She said, “Tommy Watson, you’ve become terribly important. You must come to Philadelphia. I’ll give you a dinner.”

  If you’d visited Brown University in 1933, the effects of the Depression would have been obvious. The campus looked rundown and a good number of students seemed undernourished. Many of them commuted by bus from places like Pawtucket, because they couldn’t afford to live at school.

  However, I fell in with the minority of students who had the money to behave as if the 1920s had never stopped roaring. I belonged to the Psi Upsilon fraternity, which was known for its fun-loving ways. Every night of the week our crowd would head downtown to drink and dance at the Biltmore Hotel. We had apartments, cars, and a pretty fast life. On weekends we drove off to ski resorts in Vermont or to Smith or Vassar for girls.

  Living this way, I was even more at odds with myself than most aimless undergraduates. I was behaving like a playboy, but I could see that the country was in an economic mess. I felt anxious to make something of myself, yet unable to lift a finger to try. I was a rich kid among other rich kids, but my friends’ fathers were Republicans while mine was an outspoken New Dealer.