We intentionally kept things Spartan on those ski trips. There was no way for our kids not to know they were surrounded by increasing wealth, but we didn’t want them growing up coddled and spoiled. The cleaning and cooking were all done by Olive and me. Fixing food is something I love, going back to the days when I earned a cooking merit badge in the Boy Scouts under my mother’s appreciative eye. I had the whole kitchen organized with labels on all the drawers and cabinets, so that whoever was helping me could put the stuff away correctly. Olive invented a clever way to organize the dormitories. She found out that there were six standard colors of towel available, so she had the six beds in each dormitory painted those same colors. Each bed had its own matching towels hanging at the end, and in the bathrooms there were cabinets color-coded the same way. So there were no arguments about keeping the dormitories neat. Meanwhile I tried to pass along my mother’s sense of thrift. My daughter Jeannette tells the story of how I was constantly badgering people to turn out lights when leaving a room. This campaign failed, and finally one morning I waited until they’d all gone out, unscrewed the light bulbs that they’d left burning, and hid them. When the kids came back at sunset, none of them could turn on their lights.
Building a ski lodge was a pretty ambitious undertaking, but I had even grander ideas when we looked for a summer house. I wanted a place where we could land an airplane and anchor the sailboat I had for ocean racing—and that we could afford while the kids were still young, without waiting for IBM to grow even larger. Olive and I did our prospecting from a small rented airplane. We flew both coasts of Long Island, then Block Island, Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, and Cape Cod. Pretty soon we were halfway up the coast of Maine, near Camden, where Dad had a summer house when I was a boy. Finally we found an interesting place on North Haven Island, several miles out from Camden in Penobscot Bay. The land for sale was called Oak Hill Farm—a beautiful and rugged half-mile-long peninsula with rocky beaches, groves of spruce, bare fields cropped short by generations of sheep, and at the highest point, a few lonely oaks that gave the place its name. The only building was a rambling old farmhouse with falling-down chimneys, but there was a good cove and sufficient level ground for an airstrip.
There is nothing more beautiful than summer on the coast of Maine, when everything blooms during the short intermission from nine months of cold and fog. That magical place became the center of our summers, and visitors came in a constant stream—aviators, yachtsmen, kids’ friends from school. The house had been vacant for twenty years when we bought it; the previous owner had been planning to bulldoze it and build a proper mansion on the highest hilltop of the farm. But Olive and I decided the existing building would suit us fine once the chimneys and roof were fixed. It actually consisted of a barn and two farmhouses that had been put together fifty years before. The houses had plenty of small, snug rooms, and the barn was a large recreation space. One year we invited the entire island for a square dance there, and the dance became a summer tradition.
We cut roads and vistas through the spruce groves; we brought horses and ponies and donkeys to ride. I got the idea that we should turn loose a lot of animals on the land, safe animals that would be fun to have around. So I talked to Dillon Ripley, the head of the Smithsonian, to get the names of harmless species. Llamas were right at the head of the list, so we got a pair of llamas. Then some fallow deer, which are yellowish brown and extremely skittish, and pheasant and woodcocks and wild turkeys. I almost got some buffalo after learning that there were two buffalo farms in Maine. I called the first guy and told him I was interested in getting some as pets and he said, “Pets! These are vicious animals! If you catch them in the wrong mood they’ll attack you.” I thanked him and called the second buffalo farmer, who was more of a salesman. He said they were as gentle as bunnies. “We feed them right out of our kitchen door,” he told me. Both were willing to sell me buffalo but I decided to take the first guy’s advice. Instead I bought a pair of reindeer and some mouflon sheep, which are domesticated but look like Rocky Mountain sheep, with long curved horns.
I saw Oak Hill as the place where no project was too whimsical to pursue. I loved to drive the kids up and down the hills in an old Model T, like the one I bought on the sly when I was only twelve. The kids named the roads with family phrases, such as “It’s Hard But It’s Fair Way” and “Come On, Daddy Road.” At one point we had a bright red amphibious automobile—the kids would invite their friends to a picnic and then amaze them by having me drive them across the water to a small island about two hundred yards offshore. On some projects I really got carried away. On a hill by the water is a Chinese junk. I bought it on a trip to Hong Kong and had it transported to Maine. But it turned out to be dreadfully hard to sail and the kids didn’t like it, so we hauled it out of the water and put it up on blocks as an ornament. On top of another hill is a fifty-foot totem pole, the handiwork of an itinerant Native American who called himself Chief Kickpou. I ran across him in Canada one year, and although I was never clear what tribe he came from, I thought he was a charming man. He talked me into letting him bring his assistants and carve a totem pole for us. After a while it seemed lonely on its hilltop, so on a trip to Colorado I found life-size bronze statues of Plains Indian squaws grinding maize, and set those up in the tall weeds near the base. I thought of Chief Kickpou’s totem pole as a monument to fast-talking salesmen everywhere.
Olive and I took our kids traveling whenever we could. Travel makes a tremendous impression on children, and I thought it was one of the most important things we could provide. Here I patterned myself after Dad—I remembered his taking us on automobile caravans in the early days, to places like Niagara Falls and Washington. Olive and I never hesitated to pluck a child out of school if it looked as if a trip might do him or her good. Cindy went with me on several business trips, and Jeannette still talks about the time we decided she seemed droopy and took her to Paris for a week.
Every couple of years I’d break away from IBM and take my family on a major journey. I put as much work and thought into those trips as I did into major business moves. For months beforehand the kids would see me making up long checklists, poring over maps on the dining room table, and studying books about the places we were going to see. The first thing I did was introduce the kids to America. I rented an IBM airplane and flew them myself from White Plains to California and back with many stops. I went down low over the grain fields so they could see how flat it was; I took them over the center of the Rockies. When we stopped in Las Vegas for fuel, they all ran into the depot and started playing the slot machines until the owner came out to tell me they were too young to gamble. Olive was the best possible partner on these adventures. She was a good sport about the inconveniences and quite intrepid when things went wrong. There was the afternoon I decided to show the family the Grand Canyon. The plane was bouncing around because of air turbulence and the younger children got sick. Jeannette still remembers the scene of me at the controls, pointing out the beautiful scenes zooming by, and Olive in the back of the plane holding airsickness bags for two children at once. She was a real trouper.
I’d use every tool at hand—imagination, money, Dad’s old connections—to make these trips memorable for the kids. Our first big international journey was in the summer of 1958, when I left IBM for six weeks and took the family across Sweden in a boat, sailing the Goeta Canal and up and down the Baltic. Sailing gives me almost as much pleasure as flying, and our boat was a new fifty-four-foot yawl that I’d commissioned from the famous Bremen yacht makers Abeking & Rasmussen. We picked up the boat at the shipyard, and christened her Palawan, after a beautiful island in the Philippines that I visited during the war. The conventional wisdom in yachting is that you can’t have a comfortable family boat that is also a good racer, but to a degree the Palawan was both. The next year I sailed her to my first major yachting victory in a New York Yacht Club race around Long Island.
Olive and I worked hard to organize everything on th
e boat, down to the food lists and duty schedules. We’d both been to Sweden before, but none of the kids knew what to expect. Palawan quickly turned into a floating picture of life with children, and we’d be seen pulling into ports with kids’ laundry hung out to dry along the railings of our elegant new yacht. The towns we visited were very safe, so Olive and I let the kids take the bicycles we’d brought along and explore by themselves. Even little Susan, who was only four, struck out on her own—Olive would tell her we needed milk and she’d take a small pail and march to the nearest store. One thing that surprised the kids was Sweden’s sensuality. The Swedes love to take off their clothes when the sun shines, and the sight of people swimming nude amazed our four proper daughters, not to mention my son. The joke on the boat was that the two Toms were always racing each other for the binoculars.
The only piece of IBM equipment we had on board Palawan was a dictation machine—the typewriter division was making them by then—and we used it to keep a log of our trip. Each family member was responsible for one day of the week. I made a game of it, holding the microphone up to the little ones and asking questions. I also took hundreds of pictures, and when we got back those went into a scrapbook with typed-up excerpts from the dictation tapes as a caption under each one.
The trip was such a success that we later made equally ambitious journeys to Israel, Greece, and Japan. But these travels were also a good example of how my tendency to be dictatorial undermined my effectiveness as a father. I would go to enormous trouble to plan a trip, but then defeat my own purpose by failing to sell the idea to the kids. Instead of asking if they wanted to go, I simply ordered them to do it. In retrospect it seems to me it would have been so easy to build up slowly to an idea, by saying something like, “You know, there is a canal that runs across Sweden.” And then, the next day, “Gee, I wonder what it would be like to be on that canal …” until the kids got excited and clamored to go. But instead I’d announce, “I’ve booked seats on TWA this June and here’s what we’re going to do.”
The one place on earth where I felt free to forget I was head of anything and just have fun was Europe. For two weeks each winter, Olive and I would take time off and go skiing in the Alps without the kids. We’d travel in a group of perhaps ten friends. My favorite resort towns were Kitzbühel and Davos—Kitzbühel especially, because of the beautiful zither music played there, which I love. We’d ski all day, and at night there were parties in the small restaurants in the villages and sometimes on the top of an alp. It cost almost nothing to get the cog railroad to run a single car loaded with friends up the mountain for the evening. The music would play, the sweet Austrian wine would flow, and we’d go back down the mountain afterward filled with romance and with beautiful old alpine dances still ringing in our ears.
Europe was the province of IBM World Trade, of course, my brother’s territory and not mine, but I had occasion once or twice each year to go there on business all the same. Dick and I always found time to break away, and this led to some of the best moments we ever had together. One evening in the late ’50s he and I flew into Berlin with Wiz Miller. We had an appointment the next morning to see Willy Brandt, the prominent Social Democrat who was then mayor of the city and later chancellor of West Germany. Nightclubs, of course, were Berlin’s great attraction, and none of us felt like staying in our hotel studying our notes for the meeting, so we went out on the town. We saw a couple of unusual cabaret shows and ended up in a famous nightclub in which each table had a number prominently displayed, and a telephone. The idea was that if you saw a girl you liked across the room, you could call and introduce yourself. Dick and Wiz and I had a fantastic time watching this scene and we managed to stay out almost until dawn without doing anything scandalous. But the next morning was very confused. None of us remembered to leave a call at the desk, and when I woke up we had less than half an hour before we were supposed to meet with Brandt. I’d never seen three people put on white shirts so fast. We raced across town in a taxi, quarreling about whose fault it was that we’d overslept. The meeting with the mayor came off well, so no harm was done to Watson family honor. But I kept wondering what Dad would have thought.
In the middle of 1959, I heard on the radio that Nikita Khrushchev was coming to visit the United States. I thought of a surefire way to make IBM stand out: we could give him a tour of one of our factories. Before sending an invitation I called the State Department to make sure I wasn’t violating diplomatic protocol. An official who was helping to plan Khrushchev’s stay got on the phone. “We’d like to invite the premier to visit IBM,” I told him. “Does the State Department have any problem with that?”
He said, “No problem, but he won’t come.”
I sent a wire directly to Khrushchev at the Kremlin. It said, “I’d like very much to show you an advanced electronics plant. We have such plants in Poughkeepsie, New York and San Jose, California. We can make your visit as brief as you like, but we recommend that if you want to get a feel for the product and the people who make it, you come in the morning and stay for lunch.”
I heard nothing for several weeks. We pulled some strings but never expected it to work. Then Gav Cullen, the head of the San Jose plant, called me and said, “What are you trying to do to me?”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve got two Soviet lieutenant generals here who want to check out the plant!” That was how I learned Khrushchev had said yes.
I’d been to Moscow myself only a month before. There was a brief thaw in the cold war that year, and Eisenhower and Khrushchev were trying to promote understanding between our two peoples. The United States put on a big exhibition of consumer products and technology at Sokolniki Park in Moscow. IBM had a RAMAC machine on display, performing feats of electronic memory, and in the course of six weeks, two and a half million Russians crowded in to see it and other evidence of American prosperity. One of the exhibits was a model home featuring all the latest appliances, where Khrushchev and Vice President Richard Nixon had their famous Kitchen Debate. The issue was whether the U.S. was trying to fool Russians by displaying gadgets that no ordinary American could afford.
In spite of all the tension between our two countries I found it an amazing experience to walk the streets of Moscow, which I hadn’t seen since the war, and to stay once again in the National Hotel overlooking Red Square. It had been pretty much off limits to Westerners for years, but by some miracle the Russians assigned me the Lenin suite—where Lenin himself had lived after returning from exile in 1917. It was like a national shrine, but to me it was very familiar—it had been our crew quarters on the Bradley mission, and many a night in 1942 I’d played poker there.
IBM spent weeks getting ready for Khrushchev. He had visits planned to a Hollywood studio, a college, and a farm, but it turned out the John Deere Corporation and IBM were the only major companies that hosted him. The business community held back partly on ideological grounds, but also out of fear. So many people had been criticized for trying to improve relations with the Russians that business leaders were afraid to extend themselves. The only other businessman Khrushchev was scheduled to visit was Roswell Garst, an Iowa entrepreneur who was selling the Russians seed corn.
The first thing I did was to go down to the United Nations and hire an interpreter. Several days before Khrushchev arrived, I went out to San Jose and set up shop in a hotel. I foresaw all sorts of potential problems and incidents I wanted to avoid. For example, IBM had led American industry in hiring refugees after Khrushchev crushed the Hungarian Revolution. I realized that some of our employees must hate him, and I wanted to make sure there was no provocation from our side. So I posted a notice on the factory bulletin boards that said, “My invitation to Premier Khrushchev is not an endorsement of his regime. I think the interests of the United States will be advanced by his visit. Anybody who objects to his presence can have two days off with pay.” I figured offering only one day wasn’t enough to get potential troublemakers to leave. About twen
ty employees took me up on the offer.
The computer demonstration we planned for Khrushchev was pretty dramatic. We had the RAMAC programmed to work like an electronic history book. You could ask it in any of ten languages for the major events of any year from 4 B.C. to the present. Of course, some years were not as eventful as others, but we had something for each year. If you said A.D. 30, for example, the machine would type out “Salome asked for and received the head of John the Baptist.” And, more to the point, if you said 1917 it would reply “The Russian Revolution.” This demonstration was dear to my heart because I’d thought it up myself. The fellow we picked to put the RAMAC through its paces was a tough Polish immigrant from our Los Angeles office who spoke fluent Russian. He called himself Eddie Corwin, but I knew him from sales school in 1937, when he was still Eddie Sochaczewski. When Hitler invaded Poland, Eddie fought in the Polish cavalry, got captured in the first week of fighting, and made it through six years in a Nazi POW camp. A couple of days before Khrushchev came I was in the plant going over the schedule and I asked Eddie, “How long will your demonstration take?”
“About fifteen minutes, including questions.”
“But we have twenty minutes allotted to this. What about the other five?”
He looked me right in the eye and said, “I’m going to talk about the plight of Polish exiles in the Soviet Union.”
I said, “Eddie, you know you can’t do that.”
“It’s very important to me.”
“Khrushchev is going to be our guest. Unless I have your word of honor you won’t do it, I can’t let you give the demonstration.”
He looked aside, scowled, and finally agreed, so I kept him in the program.
Father, Son & Co. Page 37
