his friend Bill. She found Bill to be tall and lanky, but hardly much more — after all, he was a mere boy of 18, and she was a young lady, four years older than he.
Bill and Lois shared friendly times that summer, usually in a group that included her brother and his sister. In the fall, she returned to Brooklyn with her family. The following spring, in 1914, the Burnhams returned to the lake. That summer, the relationship between Bill and Lois changed. They had what she remembered as “a glorious vacation picnicking, hiking, and taking all-day drives. Long before the end of the season,’’ Lois said, she thought Bill “the most interesting, the most knowledgeable, and the finest man I knew.” She had forgotten all about the difference in their ages.
The timing of their romance was providential, because the summer of 1914 was a bad time for Bill. She listened sympathetically as he told her he was no good, couldn’t face returning to school, couldn’t bear to leave her.
He gave Lois credit for helping him out of his depression. “She lifted me out of this despond, and we fell very deeply in love, and I was cured temporarily, because now I loved and was loved and there was hope again.
“At the unconscious level, I have no doubt she was already becoming my mother, and I haven’t any question that that was a very heavy component in her interest in me.” Whatever the individual needs that sparked their early courtship, Bill and Lois were drawn together. Said Bill, “I think Lois came along and picked me up as tenderly as a mother does a child.’’
Lois was the oldest of six children. She said her childhood had been so happy that she had hated to grow up. “Mother and Dad truly loved one another and openly showed their affection to each other and to us children,” she wrote. “They taught us never to be afraid to tell of our love, never to go to sleep angry with anyone, always to make peace in our hearts before closing our eyes at night, and never to be ashamed to say, ‘I’m sorry. I was wrong.’”
At the time Lois met Bill, she had already completed school at Brooklyn’s Packer Collegiate Institute, and two terms of drawing at the New York School of Fine and Applied Art. Still living at home, she was working in the employment department of the Y.W.C.A.
Meanwhile, Bill’s post-high-school education had followed an uneven path. In the 1913-14 school year, he had gone to live with his mother and sister Dorothy in Arlington, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb. “I was entered in the Arlington High School and barely got through some courses there,’’ Bill said. “The idea of this was to prepare me for the examinations for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Because of my scientific interests, it was supposed that I should be an engineer. I took the examinations and could hardly pass a one of them.’’
Three generations of the Wilson and Griffith families sat for this family portrait.
He had enrolled at Norwich University, which had entrance requirements far easier than M.I.T.’s. Called “The Hill,” Norwich, in Northfield, Vermont, is a military college with discipline as strict as at West Point. In the midsummer of 1914, Europe was on the verge of war, and there was a possibility — albeit slight — that the United States might be drawn into it.
In August, just prior to the start of his first year at Norwich, Bill went to visit his father. It was the first time he had seen Gilman since the divorce eight years previous.
Bill made the long journey to British Columbia on a transcontinental train that he boarded in Montreal. His letters home, written to his Grandmother Wilson, describe the journey west in striking detail:
“I woke up with a ringing in my ears and feeling a peculiar exhilaration. This was my first view of the Rockies. The mountains rise straight up and are clothed about the bases with scrub evergreens excepting when great slides have torn paths down the sides. The mountains are formed of many colored shales lying in strata sometimes tilted, sometimes horizontal. Everything is jagged and angular, showing marks of sudden and violent changes, a great contrast to the smooth, gentle curves of our mountains.
“Great number of streams rush down the sides fed from the perpetual snows above the timber line. Every high valley above the snow line has its glacier. The ice is a beautiful deep blue covered here and there with great white patches of newly fallen snow. The sky is cloudless and almost matches the ice in color. We pass through miles of such scenery as this. On one side of the road the peaks rise up like a wall. So straight and abrupt that it seems that their snows would slide off onto the train. To preclude any possibility of this, miles and miles of snowsheds have been built. On the other side, one looks down into the river gorge sometimes deep enough to be called a canyon. There is always the deep, narrow, swift-flowing river with numerous falls and splendid rapids. Forever tearing at its banks it undermines great rocks and cedars which falling in are swept away like toothpicks on the dark flood.’’
Already showing the powers of observation that would later serve him so well on Wall Street, Bill remarked on the oil field discoveries and natural gas developments in Alberta. He noted that in Medicine Hat, Alberta, the streetlights operated on natural gas that was never turned off, since the gas flowed as strongly as the day it was found 22 years before.
Bill’s letters were written on his father’s office stationery from Marblehead, British Columbia, a small community high in the Canadian Rockies. The letterhead listed G. B. Wilson as manager of the Marblehead Quarries of Canadian Marble Works, Ltd., quarry owners and manufacturers of Kootenay marbles. Its main offices were in Nelson, British Columbia.
For all Bill’s detailed descriptions of his surroundings, there was nothing in his letters about his reunion with his father. Father and son apparently got along well, although Gilman seems to have made little effort to keep in touch with his children.
A month later, Bill was an entering freshman at Norwich, which at that time had a total enrollment of 145. Bill was miserable during his first semester there: “Again, I felt I was nobody. I couldn’t even begin to compete in athletics, in music, or even for popularity with the people around me. I so keenly remember when the rush for the fraternities was on, and I didn’t get a bid to a single one. I tried out for baseball and football and wasn’t good enough for either first team. I remember how there was a fellow who played the violin so much better than I that I could not even get into the dance orchestra. I remember how I produced an old cello that I had and somehow scraped up a part in the glee club with that. But I was very second-rate. Some of my studies, I handled very well; others, I began to fail in.”
However, a letter to his mother written shortly after he arrived paints a very different picture: “There are four fraternities here, have been to all several times to dinner and have had ‘bids’ to join three which is quite an honor for a rook. However, I figure that if one is going to join a frat, it might be good to take a year to size up the bunches who belong.” Some months later, he brought up the fraternity matter again: “Can’t seem to get away from being popular. Have had second invitations to all the frats. But think it policy to stall. Just the minute you join a frat, you join more or less of a clique. In spite of all that’s done to prevent it, the frats can pull strings in the military business and by keeping out of them I think one will stand more on his own merits. As it is now, I am popular with men of the strongest frats here. If I join one, I lose my influence with all the rest. So me for the Commons.”1
During that first semester, Bill received 94 in chemistry, 86 in French, 75 in drawing, 68 in English, 61 in trigonometry, and 53 in algebra. He had an outstanding rating of 98 in military duty and 100 in deportment. His final average of 86 gave him a standing of fifth in his class. If he was not leading the pack, he was certainly holding his own.
From a letter to his mother, written in February: “Am glad to know that you were pleased with at least a part of my marks. The week preceding midyears, I was laid up with a touch of the grippe and thus missed the general review which is held at the time. So my exams were not what they should have been. Algebra was the first exam and I got out of bed to take it. For the rest of them I had a whole day preparation. My exams fortunately coming one every other day, I took a makeup exam Saturday and passed with 65%. Could I have done that in the first place