An American Dream, Realized by Henry Freeman

Author:Henry Freeman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Robert James Freeman

Chapter 24

Bobby Arrives

Sometime around the last week of August, our famed obstetrician decided that, because he wanted to run off to Bermuda with his nurse, it was time to bring Florence’s pregnancy to a conclusion and ordered her to take a good dose of castor oil, to be followed by some quinine capsules!! Thus, on the Sunday night of August 25th, with those ingredients already ingested and we reading the New York Sunday Times, unrecognized labor pains started up and were blissfully ignored until the water broke all over the Times, on the floor, and Florence rushed to the bathroom, nauseated! Then only after calling the doctor and getting his OK did we start out at one o’clock in the morning for the General Hospital on West Main Street, some five miles away. At the head of Culver Parkway and Culver Road, we actually were naive and dumb enough to wait for the signal light to change, while my wife, already in labor, groaned next to me! Then instead of pulling the car into the emergency entrance at the back of the hospital, I proceeded to park the car way out in front, and a long walk through the grounds to the main entrance. It was then that my fastidious wife pulled a clean pair of panties out of the glove compartment, determined to arrive in pristine condition, only to have the water break once more, onto the sidewalk, and put to rout her idea of what an expectant mother in labor should do. After a long walk to the admitting desk, and only after answering endless questions, was a wheelchair brought and my wife taken to a pre-delivery room!

Here I must interpolate a story that has bearing on what happened years later, when this son, about to be delivered on August 26, 1935, had been Director of the Eastman School for some years, and a librarian came to Bob and asked what he wanted doing with a lot of old School tapes of student recitals and network broadcasts that were taking up precious storage room. “Oh,” he replied, “throw them all out, I guess.” “What about this one?” the librarian queried. “It is a recording of an NBC broadcast of a Schumann quartet played by graduate students, and the first violinist is listed as Florence Knope Freeman!” “Wait a minute,” at once snapped back the director. “What was the date on that?” “It was performed in February of 1935,” he was informed. “Wow!” Bob exploded. “I was there at that performance, too! My mother was three months pregnant, with me as the fetus!” And all this was going on while Florence played all her professional radio dates, kept house, cared for Skippy (and me!), and rehearsed with that Girls’ Quartet. (That tape is now in our library at Stockbridge.)

From then on until our first son was born at 8:01 AM, and until the doctor came and told me that I had a son and that “Everything is all right,”

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