Life at the Dakota (27 page)

Once more thanking you, I remain,

Very truly yours,

One would not have supposed that this letter would have called for a reply, but Mr. Knott, not to be outdone in the arena of courtesies, sent off the following day this communication to Mr. North:

I am in receipt of your favor of the 19th inst., and note same and thank you for your very kind expressions. In return let me congratulate you on the method you have always pursued in the conduction of your business, that it is possible for one to deal with the head of the house without being always cast off onto a salesman, who in all probability is working for a commission and whose solicitations cease on the booking of the order, when with him the whistle blew twelve and there is absolutely nothing on his mind except dinner, or another order and any instruction in regard to yours “can go hanged.” This state of things is very disagreeable to the purchaser. I never found it in your concern, so you see you have yourself to thank for the loyalty of your customers.

Yes, I want the same fine grind as you sent and the date selected by you will be eminently satisfactory.

Best wishes.

Yours very truly,

Perhaps, once upon a time, Americans were a gentler breed of folk.

Certainly the Dakota, when it was a building of somewhat older, properly married, for the most part childless people—the kind of people Winnie Bodkin feels made it seem more like a “family” building—was a considerably quieter, less disputatious place. Though it didn't project the kind of glossy glamour that it does today, it projected continuity and calm. The building had its share of well-known tenants, but they were people whose celebrity did not depend on press agents. As a result, some of those older people, distinguished in their day, have not exactly lasted as household names into the late 1970's.

For example, Mr. Frederick Coykendall, the chairman of the board of trustees of Columbia University, died at the Dakota in 1954, a few days short of his eighty-second birthday. It was Mr. Coykendall's board that was responsible for a historic mix-up in 1948, when the university was scouting for a new president. The board had voted to approach “Eisenhower,” intending this to be Dr. Milton S. Eisenhower, the educator. Somewhere down the line, however, there was a misunderstanding, and the Eisenhower approached was Dr. Eisenhower's brother, Dwight D. Eisenhower. The former President promptly
accepted the post. Though it got the wrong Eisenhower, there was not much the university could do under the circumstances, and Frederick Coykendall officiated at President Eisenhower's installation, proffering to him the historic charters and keys. Mr. Coykendall was in charge of the same ceremony again in 1953 when Dr. Grayson Kirk assumed the presidency of Columbia.

Frederick Coykendall was originally from Kingston, New York, where the Coykendall family had been prominent for several generations. He was graduated from Columbia in the class of 1895, and for a time he headed an informal social group which called itself “The Last of the Forty-Niners,” men who had graduated from the old Columbia at Forty-ninth Street and Madison Avenue. In 1926 Mr. Coykendall received the Class of 1889 Gold Medal for Achievement at Columbia, and in 1940 Hamilton College gave him an honorary degree of Doctor of Laws.

The Coykendall family had long been prominent in Hudson River shipping, and, following college, Frederick Coykendall became secretary of the family-owned Cornell Steamboat Company (which operated a fleet of tugboats on the river) and later became the company's president. As a businessman, he was a member of the New York State Chamber of Commerce, the New York Board of Trade, and Commerce and Industry Association, and the Maritime Association of the Port of New York. Still, he was essentially a scholar and a bibliophile. For years his 6,000-volume collection of poetry, early periodicals, and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century romances lined the walls of his Dakota apartment. Eventually, most of this collection went to Columbia.

“Professor” Coykendall, as he was often called, was a gentle-mannered gentleman with a full head of white hair, and was once described by a contemporary as a “quiet man who says but little, but when he does speak has already made up his mind and states it with a force that instantly brings to him the concurrent support of his associates.” When Mr. Coykendall died his Dakota apartment on the courtyard was one of the few that had remained in its original state, its doorways draped with heavy portieres and tassels, its walls all hung with dark-green velvet. Windows and over-doors were of stained glass and, just inside the front door, was a stuffed bear that carried a silver card tray in one paw. After his death the New York
Times
editorialized, “Frederick
Coykendall did not use his excellent taste in letters and the arts as a refuge from the storms and responsibilities of life. Instead, he projected them into many years of able service to Columbia University. Combined with a talent and industry that made him a force in the business life of New York State, they were of great importance to the university.” During his funeral service, Columbia suspended all classes.

Another distinguished Dakotan of the past was Dr. Michael Idvorsky Pupin who lived at the Dakota until his death in 1935. His was a Horatio Alger success story—a Serbian shepherd boy, the son of illiterate parents, who came to America, became one of the most famous scientists and inventors of his day, won the Pulitzer Prize and numberless other honors and degrees, and died a millionaire. In his autobiography,
From Immigrant to Inventor,
Dr. Pupin wrote of how, at age fifteen, he persuaded his parents to let him immigrate to “the land of infinite opportunity,” taking with him only a small bundle of food and clothing. When he arrived at Castle Garden in the autumn of 1874, he had only five cents to his name. He immediately spent his fortune on a slice of prune pie that, when he bit into it, seemed to contain mostly prune pits. On his voyage from the old country he had lost his hat, and when he stepped out into the streets of New York he was wearing a fez. This marked him as a foreigner, and he was immediately set upon by a group of young hoodlums. In the end, Pupin won the fight but lost both the fez and the piece of pie. Still, despite this unfriendly welcome, he cheerfully set out to make a name for himself in the New World.

For a while he worked as a mule driver in Delaware City, Maryland. He also worked in a cracker factory, in a grocery store as a shipping clerk, and as a laborer on farms in New Jersey. By 1879 he had saved $311 from these odd jobs, which was sufficient to permit him to enter Columbia. He passed the entrance examinations with high honors, and four years later graduated, again with honors, as president of his class. Michael Pupin then went to Cambridge for a while, where he studied mathematics and physics, and then to the University of Berlin, where he studied thermodynamics. In 1901 he returned to Columbia where, until 1931, he was Professor of Electro-Mechanics.

It was during these years that his genius as an inventor became apparent—with inventions in electrical wave propagation, electrical resonance and multiplex telegraphy. He discovered secondary X-ray
radiation and invented a means for short-exposure X-ray photography by means of a fluorescent screen. This produced a method of photography that shortened the time of exposure from about an hour to a few seconds. During World War I he invented an X-ray device for spotting submarines, which he donated to the United States government. His most celebrated invention, however, was the Pupin Coil, which greatly extended the range of the long-distance telephone. This he sold to the Bell Telephone Company and to other foreign telephone interests. The Pupin Coil made him a rich man.

For the rest of his life Dr. Pupin went on inventing devices in telephone, telegraphy and X-ray technology, collecting, as he went, a long string of medals, awards, honorary degrees and prizes. His book, when he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1924, was cited as “the best American biography teaching patriotic and unselfish services to the people.” When he died, at age seventy-six, the huge Cathedral of St. John the Divine overflowed with mourners, and among those who sent flowers were King Peter II of Yugoslavia, John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan. Bishop Manning eulogized: “Michael Pupin was a noble and illustrious American whose life was an honor to his adopted country.”

Michael Pupin was a plump, cheerful man with a walrus moustache and round, steel-framed spectacles that perched on the tip of his nose. Though his scientific inventions had, for the most part, practical human uses, Dr. Pupin also had a strong faith in God, in a divine plan and in a life of the human soul and intelligence beyond the grave. In an interview with the New York
Times
he once said, “Science gives us plenty of ground for intelligent hope that our physical life is only a stage in the existence of the soul. The law of continuity and the general scientific view of the universe tend to strengthen our belief that the soul goes on existing and developing after death.”

His first intimations of immortality, he said, came to him on nights as a boy in Serbia, where he guarded his father's sheep and cattle from wolves and thieves, when he gazed at the stars and listened to the tolling of distant church bells. “It seemed to me then,” he said, “that light and sound were divine methods of speech, and so two questions: What is light? And what is sound? filled my waking thoughts and penetrated my dreams. The more I have thought of these things as a scientific man, the more do I realize that my boyhood fancy was
correct. When I hear a great musician play Beethoven or Brahms on a violin, I feel he is making the vibrating strings speak a language that is a true message from Heaven.”

He was asked to explain his concept of Heaven. “It is what scientists call the real world and of which this world is only a picture. All scientific work and investigation are directed toward further revelation of the world beyond. All of this world—the present world—that we know anything about is perceived through the senses. We see a sunset, a rainbow, the new green of spring. We hear the songs of the birds, we smell the perfume of the rose, we taste, we feel, but it all leads to glimpses of another world. Wherever science has explored the universe, it has found it to be a manifestation of a coordinating principle, a definite, guiding principle which leads from chaos to cosmos. I choose to believe in this coordinating principle as a divine intelligence. There is dependability, continuity everywhere present in the universe.”

Finally, Dr. Pupin was asked what sort of state the soul would occupy when it progressed to what he called the real world, and he answered this question with another question. “The soul of man is the highest product of God's creative handiwork. Now, after God has spent untold time in creating man and endowing him with a soul, which is the reflection of his image, is it reasonable to suppose that man lives here on earth for a brief span and then is extinguished by death? That the soul perishes with the physical body? That it existed in vain?”

Of course, not all the early Dakotans were philosophers, humanitarians, scientists and educators. Those more serene, less harried days also saw people who almost made it a point to do very little with their lives. There was Mr. James King Hand, for example. Though he served as a lieutenant in the Navy during World War I, stationed comfortably in Washington, Mr. Hand's only other real occupation was as “perpetual president” of the James King Hand Walking Club. The James King Hand Walking Club was started in 1894, when Mr. Hand was thirty-seven and was in the habit of going to Sunday worship at the old Holy Trinity Church, which was then at 122nd Street and Lexington Avenue. One of Mr. Hand's contemporaries in the congregation was Mr. J. Oakley Hobby, Jr., who
later became treasurer of the American Locomotive Company. Another friend was Theodore Bridgeman whose father, the Reverend C. DeWitt Bridgeman, was pastor of the church.

The Sunday before Christmas of that year, young Bridgeman advised Messrs. Hand and Hobby that a visiting clergyman, whose sermons were considered less than stimulating, would be in the pulpit that day. Bridgeman suggested that the trio might find something more amusing to do than sitting in a pew. Mr. Hand suggested a walk in Westchester County. Hand had grown up in Ossining, knew the countryside well, and that Sunday the three young men hiked from Ossining to Yorktown, about twenty-five miles. The three had such a wonderful time on their walk that they decided then and there to make it an annual pre-Christmas Sunday tradition.

Theodore Bridgeman eventually dropped out of the Walking Club, but Hand and Hobby continued to observe the yearly ritual, and some twenty new members were taken in. The club became very exclusive, and it was not long before it had closed itself to new members. As the years went by, this had the effect of gradually thinning the numbers of hikers. By the late 1920's only a handful remained, and the distance of the yearly walk had been cut down to three and three-quarters miles, from Chappaqua to the Campfire Club in White Plains. By the early 1930's some of the members had become so enfeebled that they actually covered this distance by automobile, and met the others at the club for dinner. In 1932 Mr. Hand was too ill to join his group at all. Still, as he had done for forty years, Mr. Hobby went out the day before the hike and blazed the trail, stashing in advance a supply of snacks and spirits here and there so that the hikers could pause and refresh themselves during the course of their ordeal.

The little group had become very touchy about publicity, and members were irked by the fact that for some time the local press had been having a bit of sport with the annual activities of the James King Hand Walking Club. For several years, newspaper photographers had taken to concealing themselves in the shrubbery along the trail in order to get pictures of the elderly members observing their rite. This grew so irksome to the group that in 1933 the perpetual president announced that that year's hike was being cancelled, due to the advanced age of the members. Of course it was only a ruse to throw the newspapers off
the scent. The group met clandestinely, and carried out the rite in secret.