Free Personal History by Katharine Graham Page B

much too fast. It’s odd how long childhood habits stay with us.
    When I was in high school, one friend, Mary Gentry, came home with me for the weekend and remembers coming down to breakfast alone. She was seated in the huge dining room when the butler approached and asked what she would like. She was so terrified that all she could think of was Grapenuts. The Grapenuts were brought and set before her by the butler, who stationed himself behind her chair. Mary remembers her horror as the sound of each bite echoed from every corner. She says she just stopped coming down to breakfast, even though she spent several weekends with me when her father and mother were away.
    Wherever we were living, in Washington or at the farm, we were invariably busy. We always existed on a strict regimen of lessons and a multiplicity of planned activities after school and during the summer, too. We spent a lot of time riding, especially on the miles of trails surrounding the farm, or in Rock Creek Park in Washington. When I was nine, the
Washington Evening Star
carried a photo of me on Pete, my small horse, giving me credit for being an “accomplished equestrienne.” I actually wasn’t very good at riding and didn’t like it much, either. Nonetheless, riding was part of our routine, and I had to do it.
    There were music lessons, carrying on the traditions of Mrs. Coleman. There were even posture lessons, for I was thought to stoop too much—and still do, despite the lessons. We also all received instruction in the Dalcroze method, a kind of dance that gave you a sense of rhythm. One thing I remember is using my arms to a one-two-three beat as my feet were marching to a one-two beat. It wasn’t easy.
    There were also French lessons, with a woman who lived with us for years at a time to teach us. She was not a relative, but her last name was the same as ours, Mademoiselle Gabrielle Meyer. On weekends we would be called on to give recitations in French. To this day, nearly seventy years later, I can still recite bits of La Fontaine’s
Fables
and certain speeches from
Cyrano de Bergerac
, which I adored. For some reason, Mademoiselle Meyer departed for France when I was nine. Even though I went on with French through high school and my French today is fairly fluent, it remains nine-year-old French.
    Sports were a major part of our program. In summers, there were tutors for my brother, one of whom organized the making and flying of kites. Bill even had a wrestling teacher, and my sister Bis occasionally inserted herself into his lessons. As we grew older, there was tennis all the time. For a few years in the very early 1930s, a tennis professional lived with us in the summer and worked as a coach, mostly for Bis. I had one short lesson a day.
    My mother was more actively involved with us on the every-other-summer camping trips we took, although at least one of the governesses usually came along. My father never took to camping the way my mother did; he didn’t like the cold and was uncomfortable in it. He would ride for about ten minutes into the wilderness, then turn to the guide and demand, “Is there a phone anywhere around here?” (Of course, now there would be.) One night, on a later trip, the full moon lit up the sky so brilliantly I heard him call out, “Someone turn out the moon.”
    My mother’s diary about Bill’s first camping trip contains some of the few negative notes she ever wrote about the children. This time, they—I was still too young to go—were described as quarrelsome and “need much careful handling. I had not realized that they have been getting rather selfishand spoiled.” She was distressed at the difficulties of three as opposed to two children, comparing them to a basket of eels.
    Mother saw these trips as bringing us closer to the realities of life and making us more independent. She once said that this was a way to show us life outside large houses. I suppose it did, but the lesson had its limits. There