not adjusted, and left a permanent scar.”
In the 1949 biography Frank and Lillian Gilbreth: Partners for Life, Edna Yost wrote of Frank’s grieving, saying it “was not the normal reaction of a man to death, for this death was his first forced admission of failure in a project to which he had given his utmost.” A theme in Cheaper by the Dozen is that illness was considered a weakness. Thus, Frank headed illness off at the pass, and he had all the children’s tonsils removed at one time, even if all did not have tonsil plights.
Lillian wrote of her husband’s response to Mary’s passing: “Frank insisted on trying his techniques, but it was no use.… For the first time in his life [he] faced a situation which he could not master.”
The death of his daughter and his attempt to engineer his grief may have been Frank’s greatest perceived failure in finding “the one best way.”
FRANK HAD A HEART CONDITION and carried “stimulants” with him at all times in case he had an “attack.” Both he and Lillian were to attend conferences in Europe the summer of 1924, where Frank would speak: the Power Conference in London and the First International Management Congress in Prague. Three days before he was to sail to Europe, Frank walked to catch a commuter’s train for New York to update their passports. Before he left, Lillian brushed specks of dust from his coat, and Frank said in his usual chipper style, “The pat of finality!”
A short time later, Frank telephoned from the station. He had forgotten their passports. Lillian put down the phone to look for the documents. Frank said, “All right. I’ll wait.” When Lillian returned, the line was silent. She jiggled the receiver but heard nothing. Frank Gilbreth had collapsed in the phone booth and died.
Two days after Frank’s death, shell-shocked Lillian called a meeting of the “family council.” She told the children, who ranged in age from two to nineteen, that they did not have much money. Most of it had been invested in the couple’s business. The family could move to California to live with Lillian’s mother, or there was an alternative. If the children could pull together, sacrifice, and take care of themselves and each other, Lillian could go ahead with their “father’s work.” The vote was unanimously in favor of Lillian carrying forth the couple’s shared professional passion in the research of motion study.
In June of 1924, Lillian, age forty-six, sailed for Europe with a group of eminent American engineers and their wives. Lillian would give Frank’s scheduled speeches at the overseas conferences. Unlike the other women on board wearing their long white summer dresses, Lillian wore black. Her life had changed in a phone booth.
Lillian’s future floated on the waves before her. For the next fifty years, she would carry on the Gilbreth scientific mission of motion study, which dovetailed with family life.
In Cheaper by the Dozen, Frank Jr. and Ernestine wrote:
There was a change in Mother after Dad died. A change in looks and a change in manner. Before her marriage, all Mother’s decisions had been made by her parents. After the marriage, the decisions were made by Dad. It was Dad who suggested having a dozen children and that both of them become efficiency experts. If his interests had been in basket weaving or phrenology, she would have followed him just as readily.
While Dad lived, Mother was afraid of fast driving, of airplanes, of walking alone at night. When there was lightning, she went in a dark closet and held her ears. When things went wrong at dinner, she sometimes burst into tears and had to leave the table. She made public speeches, but she dreaded them.
Now suddenly, she wasn’t afraid anymore, because there was nothing to be afraid of. Now nothing could upset her because the thing that mattered most had been upset. None of us ever saw her weep again.
DURING HIS CAREER, Frank had been an occasional lecturer at Purdue University, invited to campus by A. A. Potter, dean of the schools of engineering. In the early 1900s while he was a student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Potter began a friendship with Frank and Lillian that lasted a lifetime. Frank had built an MIT building in an unbelievably short time. Potter attended a lecture Frank gave on “the one best way” to lay bricks. In the following years, Frank would be a lecturer at Kansas State when Potter was on faculty there, and then at Purdue after Potter was hired as dean in 1920. Potter had joined the Gilbreths as guests at the White House. The three became personal friends of President Herbert Hoover and his wife, Lou.
Lillian filled in for Frank as a visiting lecturer at Purdue after his death, and in 1935, she took the first salaried job of her life there. She became a full professor of management in Purdue’s School of Mechanical Engineering, the first woman in the United States to hold such a title. Perhaps because of the time commitment and her children, Lillian may have first said no to the position. Decades later Dorothy Stratton wrote to Ernestine and told of the day that she invited, yet again, another famous friend over for waffles—the woman she called “Dr. G.”
Your mother came to the Purdue faculty shortly after I became Dean of Women at Purdue. It was understood by me, although never mentioned by Dr. G., that Dr. Elliott had offered her the position and that she had refused it. I knew that Dr. Elliott would be decisively influenced in his opinion of me by what Dr. G. thought. I was new to the university circles as a staff member, new to Indiana, and to being a D. of W. I was also relatively young—34. And of course, I was overawed by your mother’s reputation.
In due course, I invited your mother to a luncheon. There were just four of us—my mother and father and Dr. G. and I. We were having waffles and bacon. Period. The waffles stuck (in the waffle iron). Cooking has never been my strong suit. I didn’t know what I was going to do. There was nothing else to eat. In desperation, I took the (waffle) iron to the kitchen, explained to it what the dilemma was, asked for its cooperation, brushed out the crumbs, uttered a brief prayer and took it back to the table. It worked. Throughout your mother chatted along as though unaware of any crisis. I still wonder what I would have done if the [waffle] iron had not cooperated.
Lillian also admitted she couldn’t cook. She spent little time in the kitchen unless it was to analyze therbligs to decrease the user’s motions and improve the layout of the galley. Lillian referred to Dorothy as one of “her girls.” Dorothy was special to Lillian, and she would give Purdue’s young dean of women much sage advice in years to come. The two women’s lives would intertwine in weighty endeavors until their deaths.
Lillian talked to her children about moving to West Lafayette, but they did not want to leave Montclair and their friends, so she went without them. It was Potter who suggested that Lillian become a staff member, and it was Elliott who arranged her salary and accommodations in the Women’s Residence Hall. Her son Bill was a student at Purdue during this time. When Lillian was told she would be working on the same campus as Amelia Earhart, Lillian said, “I’m so glad, because I’m one of her ardent admirers.”
Long before she, herself, became famous, Amelia was a fan of the Gilbreths. She had pasted a photograph of the couple in her 1924 scrapbook.
For two years, Lillian spent three weeks of every month during the academic year at Purdue. Lillian’s daughter Martha, age twenty-nine, ran the family on a day-to-day basis back home. Lillian supervised from afar. She once wrote a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt on Purdue notepaper asking if her daughter’s middle school class could visit the White House during a field trip to Washington. Eleanor instructed her secretary to invite the class to tea. While at Purdue, Lillian also acted as a consultant at Duncan Electric Company in Lafayette. This was the company founded by Thomas Duncan, who gave the funds to build Duncan Hall, which had been the vision of Dean of Women Carolyn Shoemaker.
Dorothy said that Lillian’s hands were never still. “She was always knitting, crocheting, or tatting something for someone’s birthday or anniversary.” She kept an extensive birthday book and sent notes to an astonishing number of people. According to Dorothy, Lillian had a great capacity for caring. Perhaps the loss