The first sign of “precocity,” according to family members, showed in his early facility for magic. From the time he was a small boy, Alfred was fascinated by the art of illusion and would not rest until he could work out the solution and re-create it himself. He became a master of sleight of hand, making quarters appear and disappear behind ears and inside pockets, and could perform thrilling card tricks. He collected the apparatus used by professional magicians and staged elaborate shows for his siblings and cousins. His younger sister, Julia, once recalled, “You never knew if you were on the ceiling or on the floor when Alfred was around.” He never lost his touch. Throughout his life he would demonstrate a talent for the surprising, inexplicable, remarkable result.
“He liked to awe people,” recalled his grandson Alfred Lee (Chip) Loomis III. “Magic fits into that psychological profile. He was a very imperious type. The whole idea of having your own laboratory and inviting people to come there and live like kings and do science—it was a pretty extraordinary arrangement. The whole concept has to do with exercising a sort of subtle power and control.”
LOOMIS’ brand of ingenuity cannot be taught, it is bred in the bone. It was also peculiarly American. By background and temperament, he was well prepared to respond to the momentous changes taking place in the twentieth century and to exert his influence over events in the farthest reaches of the social, financial, and scientific worlds. His lineage was colonial on both sides, but in his forebears’ questing spirit and intellect, he was a child of the future.
From his earliest memories, there was never a time Loomis was not aware that he bore an exalted name, synonymous with a life of great success, service, and honor. It was an indelible part of his identity. His grandfather Alfred Lebbeus Loomis was a tuberculosis specialist who earned worldwide recognition for his advances in the treatment of pulmonary diseases and was one of the most honored doctors of his generation. He was also an educator, reformer, and leading philanthropist who was elected president of virtually every prestigious medical society. Regarded as one of New York’s first citizens, he lived in a big house at 19 West 34th Street and, despite giving away large sums of money, managed to leave an estate worth in excess of $1 million. If Alfred Loomis would later strike some of his peers as princely in his bearing, it was in no small part because of his grandfather’s august achievements and his deeply ingrained belief that the rich should repay their debt to society. Throughout his life, Alfred Loomis would feel that moneymaking alone was not a satisfactory existence.
The Loomises came from a long line of solid, resourceful Yankees. Alfred Lebbeus Loomis was the seventh-generation descendant of Joseph Loomis, a woolen draper from Essex, England, who sailed from London to Boston on the ship Susan and Ellen in 1638 and settled with his wife, Mary White, on a twenty-one-acre plantation in Windsor, Connecticut, the site of the first English colony in the state. He was born in Bennington, Vermont, in 1831. There had been much tuberculosis in his family, and he developed an early interest in medicine because of his own weak lungs. As a child, he was convinced he “would not live to be over thirty.” But after a sojourn in the Adirondacks restored his health, he became persuaded of the curative powers of the mountain air and devoted himself to the study of respiratory problems. He spent at least two months of every year in the Adirondacks and became an enthusiastic champion of preserving the region’s forests as a “natural sanitarium.”
After graduating from the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Alfred Lebbeus Loomis became a practicing physician in New York, treating consumptives in the charity hospitals on Wards and Blackwell’s Islands. He was appointed to the staff at Bellevue and, later, Mount Sinai Hospital. He was active in establishing a home for consumptives in Saranac, New York, while another, in Liberty, New York (later renamed the Loomis Sanitarium), was one of the first to provide poor invalids with a level of care that had previously been available only to the rich. In his later years, he channeled his considerable charisma and passion into fund-raising, becoming a tireless campaigner for medical research. He personally donated $15,000 to the University of the City of New York and persuaded the local grandees to give much more. In 1886, he announced a gift of $100,000 to the medical school from an unnamed wealthy “friend” to build and equip a new laboratory.
After his death in 1895, the university’s chancellor, Reverend Henry MacCracken, noted in his memorial address that “the generous founder insisted on but two conditions: that it should be called the Loomis Laboratory, and that the giver’s name should remain unannounced. . . .
“Dr. Loomis not only got money from the rich for good objects,” said MacCracken, “but he won the hearts and minds of men to something else than merely spending their incomes.”
A tall, well-made man with “a roaring voice and contagious laugh,” the good doctor earned a reputation among his fraternity of physicians as an epicurean. He was much toasted and celebrated after his will revealed a $10,000 gift to the Academy of Medicine to establish “the Loomis Entertainment Fund,” the income to be used for the supper at the monthly meetings. A gleeful posthumous tribute in the New York Herald Tribune recalled that “as master of the feasts,” Alfred Lebbeus Loomis excelled: “He was an authority on canvas-back duck, knew all the best vintages by their first names, and could tell from what region in Cuba a perfecto came from watching the smoke.”
He had two children, Henry Patterson Loomis and Adeline Eliza Loomis, who were born and educated in New York City, schooled in his views on health, science, and good citizenship, and expected to make their contribution to society. After their mother, Sarah Jane (Patterson), died in 1880, he married Anne Prince, a wealthy widow. They all participated in his work at the Loomis Sanitarium, and his son, as expected, followed him into medicine. After graduating from Princeton and New York University Medical College, Henry Loomis went abroad to study for a number of years. In 1887, he returned to New York and took up his father’s work—joining the staff of Bellevue, continuing his research in diseases of the heart and lung, and seeking election to the same medical boards, societies, and clubs. He also took up his father’s convivial ways, only more so.
Henry Loomis was twenty-eight years old and Julia Stimson twenty-six when they married later that same year. He was tall and handsome and regarded as one of the most dapper young doctors in town. She was the proud, striking daughter of a distinguished American family, one of seven children of the Wall Street banker Henry Clark Stimson and Julia Atterbury Stimson. Henry Clark Stimson had been “one of the most respected men in the market,” but he ended up losing most of his fortune and, after the Panic of 1873, retired from business. For the next twenty years, he lived quietly on his small savings and the income from his wife’s trust. Julia Stimson was raised in the shadow of his disappointment in an austere bourgeois household on East 34th Street, just a few minutes’ walk from the Loomis family home. Her marriage to the prosperous young doctor, son of an esteemed healer and philanthropist, must have seemed like a fortuitous match. In what was no doubt interpreted as a good omen, their first son was promptly ushered into the world nine months later.
Alfred Lee Loomis was born on November 4, 1887, and named for his grandfather, although they changed the biblical Lebbeus to Lee on the grounds that it sounded “too old-fashioned.” Two more children followed: a daughter, Julia Atterbury Loomis, four years later, followed by another son, Henry, who was named after both his father and uncle, Henry Stimson. But it was not a happy union, and Alfred’s mother, whom the children called Belle Mere, would endure the humiliation of hearing rumors of her husband’s charming way with female patients. She would return often to the Stimson home just down the street, where she could always count on finding solace and support. As the marriage deteriorated, the couple formally separated, and rumors of their pending divorce scandalized New York’s Victorian drawing rooms. “You could live apart, that was not at all uncommon,” explained Betty Loomis Evans. “But they were actually going to divorce, which was never done. They
were practically ostracized from society.”
In those days, divorce befell a respectable family like a tragedy, and the sense of shame was grimly communicated to the children. Alfred’s sister, Julia, never forgot the social censure they endured. Years later, she would still talk about the way she was snubbed by “good families” because of the cloud of disrepute hanging over their heads. During her debutante season, when she was forced to sit out some of the parties, her older brother made it his business to introduce her to eligible young men. “Her father was quite a ladies’ man,” said her youngest son, Ed Thorne. “He just walked out on the family. My mother never referred to him, but it was always clear that she was very bitter.”
“Julia always said they had a pretty rotten childhood,” added Evans. “I think she suffered much more, or at least more openly, than he did. Alfred and Julia were very, very close growing up, and he always felt his first duty was to make sure his sister was taken care of. He was terribly protective of her. Alfred was determined Julia would never want for anything.”
The two had always been inseparable, bound together from early childhood by the shocking death of their little brother. It had happened before their eyes, just as the family was preparing to set off on an outing. Alfred and Julia were already seated in the horse-drawn carriage, and their baby brother, Henry, was about to be lifted in when a rabid dog rounded the corner and attacked him. The toddler was badly mauled before the dog could be pulled off him. He was rushed to the doctor, but there was no cure for rabies in those days, and he could not be saved. It was an awful death. Alfred, who was almost ten at the time, never forgot Henry’s terrible screams and convulsions. “Alfred watched his little brother die right there, right in front of him,” said Bart Loomis, who can recall his grandfather’s vivid retelling of the incident. “The suddenness of his death taught him something that day he never forgot, and it formed the bedrock of his determination. He knew what it meant to take care of his family. It was seared into him.”
A regular escape was eastern Long Island, where his Stimson aunts rented houses each summer, taking along with them their many nephews and nieces. Alfred and Julia spent much of their time with their large band of Stimson cousins. As they grew older, summers were divided between their mother’s place in Sterlington, New York, near Tuxedo Park, and Highhold, the rambling, thirty-acre Stimson homestead in Huntington, Long Island, that belonged to her brother, Henry. The family was presided over by their maternal uncle, Lewis Atterbury Stimson, a powerful, commanding personality whose intelligence was supported by a “rugged, militant character.” Lewis Stimson had served with distinction in the Civil War and went on to become an accomplished doctor and one of the first American surgeons to operate using antiseptics. But he never recovered from the tragic death of his wife nine years after their marriage, and he withdrew into the workaholic grind of emergency medicine, abandoning his son, Henry Stimson, and a daughter, Candace, to be raised by his aging parents and an unmarried sister, known as Aunt Minnie. A stoic, somewhat removed figure, he remained the undisputed patriarch of the “fifty uncles, aunts, and cousins” that constituted the extended Stimson clan and were the abiding influence of Alfred Loomis’ life.
It was within this family circle—bonded by unhappiness, orphaned children, absent parents, and interconnected households—that Alfred Loomis and his cousin Henry Stimson, twenty years his senior, formed their extraordinarily close, lifelong allegiance. When Henry Stimson discovered early in his marriage that he had been left sterile by an adult case of mumps, his young cousin became the son he would never have. Alfred Loomis idolized Henry Stimson, and Henry became the surrogate father from whom he inherited his single-minded purpose, as well as a dominant characteristic that was famously known by members of the clan as “the Stimson reserve.”
The men in the Stimson family were encouraged to turn to professions rather than to business—one of Henry’s brothers was a clergyman, another a lawyer—marking a strong intellectual strain that was fairly unusual in well-to-do American families. Most of the important decisions of Loomis’ early life proceeded from the collective wisdom of the Stimson men, who were consulted at every turn and weighed in with their expectations, imperatives, and stern injunctions. Central to the Stimson way of thinking was membership in the elite, which in their view was accomplished by attending the right institutions. So after a stint at St. Matthew’s Military Academy in Tarrytown, it was determined that Loomis should follow the same path as Henry Stimson—first Andover, then Yale, then Harvard Law School.
Alfred was a gifted, if somewhat distracted, student. While at Andover, he reportedly “burnt up” courses in mathematics and science but demonstrated only passing interest and grades in the required language and arts courses. Throughout his schooling, he was more interested in his hobbies and inventions than he was in the drudgery of daily assignments. But Andover provided a welcome refuge from the tensions at home, and he would later remember his time there with affection. He was captain of the chess team and the tennis team and was voted “Brightest” in the class his senior year. Like many young men of his age, he was obsessed with cars and had the pocket money to indulge his hobby. His dormitory room was infamous for its phalanx of wired and radio-controlled cars and trucks, which could mow down an unsuspecting visitor. Writing to Henry Stimson in April 1905, Loomis’ mother conveys a clear understanding of her son’s extracurricular enthusiasms:
I had a letter from Alfred yesterday in good spirits, in which he asked me to “throw on third gear” and write immediately. His mind is evidently occupied with the delights of motoring to come. As for the present every opportunity is given him to concentrate upon study. He writes “it appears to be clear sailing to a diploma.”
When he entered Yale that fall, Loomis had not yet settled on any one course of study and chose not to enroll in the Sheffield Scientific School. In his freshman year, he made something of a name for himself when one of his devices went slightly awry. Loomis had boldly announced that he had a contraption that would enable him to “hypnotize anybody” in a matter of minutes. He had with him a small black velvet box containing a crystal, and when a small crank on the side was turned, it flashed a light on the sparkling stone, presumably producing a hypnotic effect. One student volunteered to be his next subject and was led away by Loomis to a dormitory room for the experiment. In just two turns of the crank, he passed out. Unfortunately, Loomis’ triumph was short-lived when the student could not be revived, and a doctor had to be hastily summoned. It turned out that the boy was in an “epileptic coma” and the hypnotism was purely coincidental, rendering inconclusive the results of his most famous experiment to date.
The correspondence between Loomis and Henry Stimson reveals that as a college student he continued to consult his increasingly eminent cousin on all matters large and small, whether it was requesting permission to keep his automobile in New Haven so he could “take it all apart and overhaul it” or asking for help on a paper about the power of the president. Stimson, who served as President Theodore Roosevelt’s U.S. attorney for the southern district of the state of New York from 1906 to 1909, always answered promptly and respectfully, establishing a lifelong exchange of information, advice, and ideas. Forwarding Loomis a document he had written the previous year on the president’s authority in regard to the army, Stimson wrote: “It was a brief in defense of his discharge of the members of the Twenty-Fifth Colored Infantry after the riot in Brownsville, Texas. You may find something in it which may interest you. I should be glad if you send it back when you are through.”
At Yale, Loomis majored in mathematics and quickly distinguished himself as a brilliant, if highly original, thinker. During his junior year, he took a postgraduate course in advanced calculus taught by Ernest William Brown and attended by a select few, including a Chinese student and a lady mathematics teacher. It soon emerged that Loomis and the professor were the only two people who had any idea what was going on in the class: “The textbooks were i
n German and French, and a typical day’s assignment was ten problems,” according to E. Farrar Bateson, a corporate lawyer and lifelong friend. “There was a regular ritual each day. Brown would enter the classroom and say, ‘Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, did anybody get any answers?’ The only one who invariably had all the answers was Alfred, and his answers invariably disagreed with those of the professor. Brown would look them over and say, ‘Those are very good answers. The only trouble with them is that they are incorrect.’ ”
His interest in physics first revealed itself in his study of boomerangs. At one point, Loomis and Brown were observed all around campus throwing boomerangs, “mysteriously writing figures on their cuffs.” It turned out they were trying to get the contraptions to conform to a theoretical formula for boomerang flight that Loomis had worked out. At the time, Alfred was intrigued by the aeronautical advances being made by the Wright brothers, and he carried out his own experiments with kites and gliders. He designed a model airplane based on a theory he had evolved. The plane resembled a “venetian blind,” and according to his theory, the layered wings would fan out in flight and yield a greater combined lifting action than the standard model. However, when he hooked up his model to a car with a kite line and took off, it “promptly plummeted to earth.” A glider he constructed and tested on the beach near the Stimson home in Long Island fared better, staying aloft several minutes. He served as class secretary his senior year but reportedly devoted the bulk of his time and attention to his technical pursuits. He was known to have an unrivaled ability to bone up on a new interest in almost no time at all, and one of these self-taught areas of specialization—a fascination with artillery weapons and a huge store of arcane data on their country of origin, design, and capabilities—would later prove most useful.
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