Chapter One
Tools
The America that Don knew as a boy and as a teenager, in the 1930s and 1940s, was a nation whose structures were beginning to be formed with messianic fervor. Or so his father believed. His father, Donald Barthelme, was born in Galveston, Texas, in 1907, the son of a lumber dealer. He learned, early, to calculate board feet, negotiate timber rights, and distinguish loblolly from other sorts of pine trees. These skills led him to a pragmatic view of building and of problem solving in general, a view his eldest son would inherit.
During the elder Barthelmes childhood, Galveston was dominated by singular personalities who left indelible imprints on the citys finances, institutions, environment, and cultural life. William Lewis Moody, Jr., the son of a cotton magnate, owned controlling interest in the citys national bank; in 1923, he purchased the Galveston News, Texass oldest continuously running newspaper; in 1927, he formed the National Hotel Corporation, and subsequently built two of the citys landmark inns; he organized what became the biggest insurance company in Texas, and bought a printing outfit and several ranches, though he had little interest in raising cattle. He used the land for duck hunting and fishing. A Gulf Coast Citizen Kane, he managed the citys money and information, and shaped much of the public space. In 1974, Don would publish a story called "I Bought a Little City" about a Moody-like man who, otherwise bored with his life, establishes an amiable but unimaginative empire in Galveston, and presides over the citys decline.
The other major figure in town, prior to World War I, was N. J. Clayton, a supremely confident architect with a love of high Victorian style. Even today, the generous loft spaces in many of Galvestons commercial buildings bear his mark. He favored bold massing and articulate composition, and was fond of Gothic detail. That one mans sensibility, if pushed aggressively, could fashion a citys looks was a lesson absorbed, and cherished, by Barthelme senior. It was an example of idealism, optimism, and hard work that he impressed on his children.
Always short for his age, with red hair, fair skin, and fat glasses from the time he was three, the elder Barthelme felt as a boy that if he was going to get anywhere in life, he "wasnt going to be able to just stand there." "I had to walk into a room with a swagger, and talk loud, and tell em I was there," he said. In their memoir, Double Down, his sons Rick and Steve said that, early on, their father adopted the attitude, perhaps modeled on men like Moody, that the "world was a place that needed fixing and he was just the man to fix it."
By the time he reached high school, he was an assured and popular young man, always tweaking authority to win his friends loyalty, practiced at the swagger hed affected, a hell-raiser.
As a college freshman, he enrolled in the Rice Institute, in Houston, but was asked to leave "for some indiscretion in the school newspaper, which he edited," Rick and Steve recounted, "an indiscretion that wasnt his, as it turned out, but some fellow students for whom Father was taking the fall."
The elder Barthelmes father approached school administrators on his behalf but found them unbending. Instead of waiting twelve months to reenroll, when his suspension would expire, Barthelme transferred to the University of Pennsylvania. There, he studied architecture with Paul Philippe Cret, and he met Helen Bechtold, whom he would marry in June 1930. They were introduced on a blind date when he went with a buddy to Helens sorority house. As Helen and a friend approached the boys in the houses foyer, Helen whispered that she hoped she would get the "tall, dark, and handsome one." Instead, her date was the "short, red-headed one."
"He was a fortunate man," Rick and Steve wrote in Double Down. "[Mother was] a prize that took some winning, according to the family lore, for while Mother was smart, talented, stylish, attractive, and sought after, our father was only smart and talented." Away from school, Helen lived in Philadelphia with her mother and sister. Her father had died when she was twelve, leaving his family financially secure, but Helen wanted a teaching career and even made what she once described as an "abortive attempt" at writing. She was interested in acting at the time she met Barthelme.
On April 7, 1931, Don was born (he would later write, "What else happened in 1931? ...Creation of countless surrealist objects").In December of 1932, his sister, Joan, arrived. Helen Bechtold Barthelme abandoned her teaching, writing, and acting dreams; she hunkered down to become the "beloved mother" of a family that would eventually total five children, all of whom, swayed by their mothers love of reading and drama, excelled at writing.
After graduating from Penn, Donald Barthelme, Sr., worked as a draftsman for Cret and for the firm of Zantzinger, Borie, & Medary (where he helped design the U.S. Department of Justice building in Washington, D.C.), but he was unable to find lasting work in Philadelphia. In 1932just before Joan was born the family moved to Galveston, where Barthelme joined his fathers lumber business. The company was best known for building a magnificent roller coaster near the seawall at the beach. Barthelmes father, Fred, a New York transplant, was a prominent and successful member of Galveston society.
Barthelme was restless working for the old man and living in a garage apartment behind his parents house. He worked briefly for the Dallas architect Roscoe DeWitt, then, in 1937, moved his family to Houston, where he joined the firm of John F. Staub. In 1940, he branched out on his own.
At Penn, his course of study had stressed traditional architecture and conventional building techniques. On his own, he studied the Bauhaus movement in Europe and pored over Frank Lloyd Wrights published plans; still, he didnt chafe against Penns established pedagogy. He admitted his perplexity at the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society building, designed by Howe and Lescaze this was one of most prominent modern buildings erected in the United States in the 1930s, and Barthelme didnt get its austerity.
In Philadelphia, he encountered, once more, powerful personalities. In class one day, evaluating one of Barthelmes designs, Cret asked, "Where did you get this idea?" "Oh," Barthelme said, "I got it out of my head, Mr. Cret." "Its good that it is out," his teacher replied. Temporarily, Barthelme worked for Cret in a Philadelphia firm that employed Louis Kahn. At night, Kahn would go around the office and leave critiques on his coworkers designs, including those of his bosses. People "laughed at him," Barthelme said. "But he was teaching himself."
Little by little, Barthelme taught himself modern architecture. He would pass his enthusiasm for learning on to Don. Though Dons chosen pursuit would differ from his fathers, the idea of the modern and the aesthetic principles of modern architecture form the background of Dons writing. A broad familiarity with what was at stak