VII. Rockefeller in Cleveland

Unless you search about carefully, it is almost as if John Davison Rockefeller, the richest man in the world, never had lived in Cleveland.

Millions of footprints have almost obliterated the path that John D. made in his Cleveland lifetime, and the spreading blanket of a modern metropolis has all but covered completely the old landmarks that once marked his presence.

The city’s memory of its most famous son becomes progressively fuzzier with each day, and there is already a noticeable vagueness about the details of his years there, even in the firsthand accounts of people who knew him. Such memory of him as lives on is tinged with a mixture of pride and hurt. There is a lingering vicarious sense of triumph that one of the local boys made it big in the money game, but isn’t it too bad he let success go to his head?

It’s a perfectly normal, perfectly American reaction; the indignation of a hometown scorned. John D., as almost everyone knows, hit it very large in Cleveland, businesswise, that is, but the time in his career finally arrived when he became the victim of his own success. Mahomet at last had to go to the mountain. Rockefeller had created a global business, the Standard Oil Company, and it was not feasible to have its headquarters anywhere else but in the financial capital of the world. In the years from 1877 to 1883, John D., his family, his partners, and his principal executives moved from Cleveland to New York.

It was an exodus that did not go unnoticed or unresented, even though the Rockefellers themselves made it clear that Cleveland was still their real love. Each summer, beginning in 1884, they returned home to Forest Hill, a lovely seven-hundred-acre patch of greenery in the high bills of the East Side with its own lake, with dark, clean-smelling woods, and a vista that took in almost all of the town and the bright blue waters of Lake Erie to the north. Later, it would have Winding paths for bicycling by moonlight and for the leisurely stroll in the fresh morning air smelling of dew and the Lake Erie waters. It even would have its own nine-hole golf course and a network of private roads.

The very perfection of the Forest Hill estate itself was a divisive force in the relationship between John D. Rockefeller and his Cleveland neighbors. With a Shangri-La as his daily environment, John D. had no need nor urge to venture beyond his own acreage. Cleveland therefore saw little of the famous man in his prime years, whether he was in New York or in Forest Hill. If he were in town, though, he could be counted on to emerge with his family on Sunday morning for the trip through the lower East Side to the Euclid Avenue Baptist Church at East 18th Street and Euclid Avenue, the church that he had joined as a fifteen-year-old boy freshly arrived in town and which he gave magnificent moral and financial support throughout his life.

It was in Strongsville, a town on the southern outskirts of Cleveland, that the Rockefeller family first settled in 1853, following a rather abrupt departure from New York State. Among the several explanations for the move, the most intriguing is the story that the head of the family, William Avery Rockefeller, decided to pull up stakes in order to avoid an embarrassing involvement with the law.

Ida Tarbell, an acid-penned biographer of the Rockefellers, once wrote of William Avery Rockefeller that he had “all the vices save one.” He did not drink. Otherwise, he was depicted as something of a rounder who had little use for religion and lived under a shaky set of ethics.

Father William was, at the same time, the most interesting and the most mysterious of all the Rockefellers. All the fragmented descriptions and anecdotes about him bring forth a personality as far removed from John D. Rockefeller as possible. Where John D., the son, was quiet, religious, conservative, restrained, and proper almost to a painful degree, Father William was outgoing, boisterous, restless, and careless of the conventions that bind.

William Avery Rockefeller made what was seemingly a substantial living as a peddler of patent medicines and miraculous medical cures. He was, essentially, one of the enterprising quacks of his day, even calling himself “Dr. Rockefeller.” He sought out his “patients” in the wild western country, spending many months of the year away from home swinging about the frontier with his wagon full of medical goodies and with syrupy assurances of good health for each and every customer. No ailment was beyond his great powers to remedy, judging from one of his handbills, which read:

“Dr. William A. Rockefeller here for one day only. All cases of cancer cured unless they are too far gone and then they can be greatly benefited.”

There are dark suggestions in several of the Rockefeller biographies that Rockefeller pere was not above chasing the girls wherever he could find them, and the evidence hints that this hobby was one of his most enduring weaknesses. In the tradition of playboys everywhere, though, when it came to choosing a wife, William carefully selected a girl of strict upbringing and high moral standards, Eliza Davison, a member in good standing of the Dutch Reformed Church.

In his initial bid for Eliza’s hand, William showed a rare technique, if the story of that first encounter is true. It seems that the shrewd elder Rockefeller (who was at that time, of course, the young Rockefeller) could play the role of a deaf mute to perfection. It had been a useful device in cultivating friendly relations- and business, probably- among the Indians, they having a great superstitious regard for anybody so afflicted. When William presented himself at the door of Eliza Davison’s house, he pretended this inability to speak or to hear with some piteous gestures, and the sight of the tall, handsome, handicapped boy apparently wrenched the heart of this good woman. It is said that she exclaimed: “If he weren’t deaf and dumb, I’d marry him!”

The roguish William held her to her word and they were married.

As demanding as was his job of touring the West in the interest of a healthier America, William still interrupted his field trips often enough to sire a family. His first child was a girl, Lucy. The second was a boy, John Davison Rockefeller, named after Eliza’s father, John Davison, a stem Scotsman. The date of the first boy child’s birth was July 8, 1839, and the place was Richford. The town later would become famous for the event, and the accent would be shifted to the first syllable of the town name. The family in following years was further augmented by the births of William, Mary Ann, and a set of twins, Franklin and Frances. Of the latter pair, only Franklin survived infancy.

The family moved to Moravia, some forty miles distant, in 1843, and then on to Owego in Tioga County in 1850, finally breaking the home ties with New York State three years later in the move to StrongsviIle, Ohio. There is nothing to indicate that the selection of StrongsviIle as the family’s home community was anything more than a random choice. William Rockefeller was motivated not so much by a desire to live in Ohio, it seems, as he was by the powerful wish to leave New York State.

John D. was fourteen and his brother William was thirteen when the big move interrupted their education at Owego Academy. There was no high school in Strongsville; indeed, there was but one high school in Cleveland, and that was too far from home- twelve miles or so distant. The elder Rockefeller still was determined to provide his sons with a good education, however, and he could afford to do so. It was decided to have the boys board in downtown Cleveland and enroll in Central High School in the heart of the little lake town to the north.

The enrollment at Central was small, high school being something of an educational luxury in the middle of the nineteenth century, but John and William found themselves among some interesting classmates. One was a sixteen-year-old boy named Marcus A. Hanna. Another was a pretty, shy girl named Laura Celestia Spelman. She would marry John D. Rockefeller one day. He, of course, would become the richest man in the world, while Mark Hanna would become a United States senator, a President-maker and, some say, the most powerful politician in the world.

It was most unlikely that two such future notables should be brought together in the tiny classroom of a small school in a sleepy Ohio village, but there they were, in open defiance of the cosmic odds, together for two years at least. Sometime in that period, John’s interest in further educational preparation for the world flagged. He became, in today’s parlance, a high school dropout. It was not such a dreadful offense against society then as it is now, and, as a matter of fact, John D. didn’t completely drop out of the field of education. He switched from the high school to Folsom’s Mercantile College (forerunner of today’s Dyke Business School) where, he said later, the foundation for his future business success was laid.

“My business college training, though lasting only a few months, was very valuable to me,” he wrote. “But to get a job- that was the question. I tramped the streets of Cleveland for days and weeks, asking merchants and storekeepers if they didn’t want a boy. But offers of my services met with little appreciation. No one wanted a boy and very few showed any overwhelming anxiety to talk with me on the subject. At last one man on the Cleveland docks told me I might come back after the noonday meal. I was elated; it seemed that I might get a start.

“I was in a fever of anxiety lest I should lose this one opportunity that I had unearthed. When finally I presented myself to my would-be employer he said he would give me a chance, but not a word passed between us about pay. This was in September, 1855. I joyfully went to work. The name of the firm was Hewitt & Tuttle, wholesale commission house.”

The company’s office was on Merwin Street in the river bottomland area called the Flats.

“When January of 1856 arrived Mr. Tuttle presented me with $50 for my three months’ work- about $4 per week. No doubt it was all I was worth, and it was entirely satisfactory to me. For the next year at $25 a month I kept my position, learning details and clerical work connected with such business. It was a wholesale commission house.

“At the end of my first year’s service I became bookkeeper with a salary of $500. The next year I was offered $700, but thought I was worth $800. We had not settled the matter by April and as a favorable opportunity had presented itself for carrying on the same line of business on my own account I resigned.”

The “favorable opportunity” was the formation of a partnership in 1859 with a man ten years his senior, Maurice B. Clark. The two pooled their money to finance a commission merchant business dealing principally in the handling of vegetables. Clark, a native of England, had two thousand dollars to invest. Rockefeller had only nine hundred dollars saved, but his father had promised him and his brothers a cash gift of one thousand dollars each when they should reach their twenty-first birthdays. John D. was only nineteen, but his father offered to give him his money in advance, provided he agreed to pay interest on the one thousand dollars until his twenty-first birthday arrived. The promise was given and the firm of Clark & Rockefeller was made possible.

Even as the world looked askance at William Avery Rockefeller in later years, John D. indicated his deep affection and respect for his father, writing: “To my father I owe a great debt in that he himself trained me to practical ways. He was engaged in different enterprises; he used to tell me about these things, explaining their significance; and he taught me the principles and methods of business.

“He used to dicker with me and buy things from me. He taught me how to buy and sell.”

William Rockefeller’s revealing postscript to this revelation was his statement that “I cheat my boys every time I get a chance. I want to make them sharp. I trade with the boys and skin them and just beat them every time I can.”

John D., reminiscing at another time, said his father never carried less than one thousand dollars in his pockets. This at a time when a thousand dollars was a large sum even to have in the bank. John D., who won a reputation himself for carrying a supply of dimes in his own pockets, recalled his father’s big money foible with admiration.

Mark Hanna once said his old schoolmate Rockefeller was “mad about money, though sane in everything else.”

The Rockefeller family did not stay long in Strongsville, moving on briefly to Parma, another Cleveland suburb, and finally into Cleveland itself, renting a house in late 1854 on the west side of Perry Street (East 22nd Street), near Prospect Avenue. The landlord was Colonel O. J. Hodge.

Hodge leased the house to the William Avery Rockefeller family for one year at a rent of two hundred dollars per annum, payable quarterly.

“Never was rent paid more promptly,” Colonel Hodge wrote, “and never did I have, in all respects, a better tenant. On the day the lease expired, the keys were brought to me by Mr. Rockefeller’s son, now John D. Rockefeller, the great multi-millionaire. I had become somewhat acquainted with the young man at his father’s house, where, to me, he seemed a quiet, unassuming youth. He showed none of that hilarity often seen in boys of his age. Usually he sat quietly in his chair, listening to what was being said. In 1858, three years after… I was surprised to see his name coupled with that of Mr. Morris [sic] B. Clark in a business enterprise…”

A number of Clevelanders were surprised at the speed with which the teenager moved into a position of business independence. By 1863, the firm of Clark & Rockefeller had made enough money that the partners were searching about for a likely business in which to invest their surplus. That their attention should have been drawn to the possibilities of the oil business is hardly surprising. The first oil well had been struck near Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859, and it is a matter of record that the production of the Pennsylvania fields had reached two hundred thousand barrels in the following year and continued to leap upward with each passing month.

The nation suddenly was caught in a frenzy over oil, but in few places was it as noticeable as it was in Cleveland, which, during the decade of the 1850s, had left the languorous bliss of a small town for the robust pace of a booming city. The Ohio Canal, although a tremendous boon to the community in the previous twenty-five-year period, now seemed to typify what was being left behind-a slow-moving, quiet, calculating way of life. Now there were no fewer than five railroads clanking through the stirring city, and their tracks scarred meadows and yards, took over the riverbanks and even the lakefront in a kind of arrogant show of industry’s pre-eminence.

This was the transition time for the city. The horse-drawn barges still ambled through the canals; the white-sailed schooners still sailed into the harbor; heavily laden wagons and stagecoaches still rumbled and squeaked over the cobblestoned streets, but the picturesque scene was fading. The city was yielding to the vanguard of the Industrial Revolution, and it already was being sullied. Of the mighty flow of petroleum that had been drawn from the Pennsylvania oil fields, thousands of barrels of the viscous wealth had been shipped to Cleveland. Refineries to process the petroleum were springing up allover town, especially in the Cuyahoga Valley area where proximity to the railroads was the strategic advantage.

By late summer of 1863, there were twenty refineries actively at work in Cleveland. The smell of oil was in the air that Rockefeller breathed and it was beginning to discolor the waters of the Cuyahoga River flowing past his office. Little wonder that he and his partner should have considered the advantages of investing in petroleum when they already were swimming in its fumes!

It was John D.’s decision, after a careful study of the situation, that the production end of the oil business was entirely too speculative; too risky to meet his requirements of a sound investment. It was his judgment that he and his partners should skirt this get-rich-quick end of the business and concentrate on the processing and distribution of petroleum and its derivative products, thereby reducing the element of risk in the venture.

Through that wonderfully mysterious element of chance that is almost always a part of every success story, there had arrived in Cleveland at this critical juncture a young Englishman named Samuel Andrews, a candlemaker, no less, by trade. He had developed a new process for refining oil kerosene from crude petroleum, but he needed financial backing to put his idea to work.

The firm of Clark & Rockefeller decided to go into the oil refining business, using the Andrews’ process, and the hope of the partners was that this would be a profitable sideline; a diversification which would relieve them of the fears that everywhere follow men who insist on carrying all their eggs in one basket. The offshoot company was called Andrews, Clark & Co.

The venture turned out rather well-better, even, than the vegetable commission house business. It led within seven years (January 10, 1870) to the formation of a joint stock corporation called the Standard Oil Company, which has prospered to this very day. Along the way, it helped to make John D. Rockefeller a billionaire and the most important business tycoon in the world. It established Cleveland as the world center of oil refining- a blessing not without its drawbacks.

William Ganson Rose, a leading Cleveland historian, described it this way:

“…This was the era of oil. Cleveland had a number of small refineries in operation, and it was estimated that more than one-third of the entire production of the oil region was shipped to local plants.

“The city was flavored and saturated with oil; the river and lake were smeared with it. Oil wagons rumbled through the streets and tanks blocked the railroads.

“Oil fires kept the city firemen eternally vigilant and filled the valley with painful apprehension. Kerosene lamps were instantly popular, replacing feeble, flickering candles and whale-oil lamps.

“Rockefeller and his associates envisioned Cleveland as a great refining center; and, buying up their small rivals, they launched the gigantic Standard Oil empire…”

Rockefeller was not the ostentatious type. He and his bride, Laura Spelman, lived well but not extravagantly. He was already on his way to high financial success when they were married on September 8, 1864, being involved in the commission house business and the oil business both at the time. If that doesn’t seem much of a start, remember that he was only twenty-five years old and still groping for direction.

In all the years that John D. and his family lived in Cleveland, they occupied only three houses. As honeymooners, they lived briefly with his parents. The first home of the honeymooning couple was on East 19th Street, close to today’s Carnegie Avenue. Four short years later, they moved to swank Euclid Avenue and a mansion in Millionaire’s Row at the corner of Case Avenue, now East 40th Street. It was a large, ungainly brick house with mansard roof and the usual gingerbread trim, but it met the needs of the young, growing family, and the address was the correct one for a young, rising businessman as the price, estimated at more than forty thousand dollars, would suggest.

Finally, there was Forest Hill, the name given to seventy-nine acres of scenic, wooded land six miles to the east of the city’s center. It was high, sloping land topped by a plateau with a magnificent view of the green countryside and the shimmering lake to the north. Rockefeller loved the beauties of nature. He admired the site and he bought the land- not with the thought of extracting personal pleasure from it, but as an investment. Two years after he purchased the acreage, a group of three men became interested in it as the site for a hydropathic sanitarium. Rockefeller joined with them in the project, incorporating as the Euclid Avenue- Forest Hill Association, capitalized at $250,000. The association bought the land from Rockefeller and proceeded to construct a large frame building to house the sanitarium. Before it was finished, however, financial difficulties discouraged the sponsors of the project and it was never carried through. John D. repurchased the land and then entered on what was undeniably one of the strangest episodes of his career. He took a flyer as an innkeeper, turning the building into a private club-hotel.

It was a very large building that the sanitarium association had started out to build, of course, and its adaptability to use as a hotel immediately occurred to John D. His experience in the short-lived venture in that summer of 1877 discouraged him.

“I found that the guests expected Mother to entertain them and act as hostess,” he wryly commented later.

The hotel idea was abandoned at the end of that summer and the building, thenceforth, became the Rockefeller summer home. It quickly found high favor with everybody in the family and the big, gloomy mansion on Euclid Avenue in time became nothing more than an occasional stopping place, used mainly on Sundays, when the Rockefellers would ride in from Forest Hill to attend services at the Euclid Avenue Baptist Church. The family would retire to the big house after church and spend a quiet afternoon in the cool, high-roofed parlors, returning in the evening to Forest Hill, the fun spot.

John D. kept adding acreage to his original investment in Forest Hill until it comprised some seven hundred acres of choice land. Even when business compelled him to move the family to New York and to take up legal residence there in 1882, Forest Hill continued to draw the Rockefellers back every summer, and there never was any doubt that this was the real family home. It remained the favorite refuge of John D. until it burned to the ground in 1918.

One of the features of Forest Hill late in the century was a nine-hole golf course which was laid out, not for John D:s pleasure, but for his wife, Laura, who took up the strange, foreign game three years before he did. It was, of course, Laura’s pursuit of par which caught John’s interest and led him to take up the game. Her teacher was one of America’s pioneer professionals, Joe Mitchell, a native of Scotland who came to Cleveland to be pro at Lake Shore Country Club. Sometimes, during the lessons, John D. would stand apart, listening intently and watching every move. When his wife was playing the course, he often would saunter to the links and study her progress.

One day he called Mitchell aside and gravely asked the question that millions of golfers since have repeated.

“Do you think that I can learn to play that game?” he asked Mitchell.

“Of course,” said Mitchell.

“Very well,” said the billionaire. “I will send for you at eight in the morning, but you must tell nobody. It must be a secret.”

Mitchell agreed and the lessons began. Every morning he would be picked up by the Rockefeller carriage at the Lake Shore Club to be driven to Forest Hill to meet with Rockefeller. Mitchell charged live dollars an hour, portal to portal.

After months of instruction, Rockefeller decided that he was ready to make his competitive debut on the links, hoping thereby to astonish everybody in sight, most of all his wife.

Mrs. Rockefeller and her sister, Lucy, were on the home course early the next morning, ready to tee off, when John D. suddenly showed up. They greeted him and he, with eyes a-twinkle, suggested perhaps it would be helpful to them if he showed them how to hit the ball.

There were the shrieks of womanly laughter and hoots of derision that were to be expected under the circumstances, but Rockefeller insisted this game of golf was simple enough that even he could handle the clubs. His wife and his sister-in-law reacted as he had hoped, challenging him to step up to the tee and take a swing. As he was making ready for his first shot, they repressed their giggles as best they could. They quieted down, though, when John D. flexed the club once or twice and then clouted the ball straight down the fairway.

It was a highly competent performance that stilled all ridicule. There was, in fact, an involuntary cry of admiration from the surprised Mrs. Rockefeller.

“Wonderful! Wonderful!” she exclaimed, clapping her hands.

It may have been one of the happiest moments of the billionaire’s life, and Mitchell’s description of Rockefeller suggests this was so.

“I’ll never forget how the old gentleman looked at me, with those little eyes sparkling, and winked,” recalled the professional. “The lessons were to be a secret for all time, and I never gave him away.”

Possibly John D. thought his wife’s confidence in him needed bolstering every now and then. Laura Rockefeller once, in explaining why she had brought up her children to be modest in their tastes for wordly luxuries, told a friend that, “I have to save my money. John may lose his some day.”

There isn’t any question but that golf, now such a well-established sport, owes a large debt to John D. Rockefeller. When Rockefeller began to play golf, it was regarded as a strange, senseless British eccentricity; a game to be viewed as a curiosity, but not to be taken seriously. Pictures of Rockefeller at play on the links were a fixed part of American journalism for nearly four decades, and in his pursuit of par he was the American Pied Piper, leading millions of his fellow Americans, rich and poor, into the same feverish chase; one from which there is no escape.

Rockefeller was like any other duffer on the links in the way he went at the game, but there were some subtle differences. For one thing, he had better control of his emotions and his reactive speech than most people.

“When he’d miss a putt,” Mitchell revealed, “he’d say: ‘Shame! Shame! Shame!’ That was his strongest language. But then, no matter who he was playing with, he’d stop and practice that same putt over and over until he dropped it.”

Rockefeller was way out in front of the crowd in golf as in business, and he anticipated the modern cart-riding golfing set by his use of the bicycle. He always had a boy and a bike standing nearby as he played. When he made his shot, the boy would wheel the bike to him, and off he’d go across the fairway, a glistening sight in his white straw hat, white shirt, white trousers, and white shoes. He played every day he was home in the summer, except when it rained. The hottest weather would not stay his desire for the game, and no intrusion from the outside world, however calamitous, could interfere with his intense preoccupation in golf.

One day as he was playing along at Forest Hill with Mitchell, a messenger brought word to him that Federal Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis had fined the Standard Oil Company $29,240,000. John D. listened with interest, nodded his head, and resumed his play with nothing more of a comment than, “Shall we go on, gentlemen?”

Another time his game at Forest Hill was interrupted by one of his staff aides, a Canadian-born youth named Cyrus Eaton; the same Cyrus Eaton who himself became one of the richest men in Cleveland-for that matter, one of the world’s richest men.

“I’ll never forget that day,” recalls Eaton. “Mr. Rockefeller and a group of his assistants and business associates were supposed to leave the following morning for Buffalo to attend the Pan American Exposition there. I was at the main house at Forest Hill when a telegram arrived, announcing that President McKinley bad been assassinated.

“In those days, anarchism was in full flower and there was a lot of hate propaganda leveled especially at wealthy men. John D. Rockefeller, being the wealthiest man in the world, was, of course, the prime target and symbol of capitalism. It was an anarchist who shot McKinley and the terrible deed had a double import and significance to Mr. Rockefeller, especially as he was planning to travel to the exposition the next day.

“I rushed up to him on the golf course and breathlessly showed him the telegram. Mr. Rockefeller read it gravely, shook his head and then, without any sign of agitation, he went back to his game.”

At one point, John D. developed a bad slice, a dread affliction whose terrible implications can be appreciated only by another golfer. Millions of players have succumbed to the slice, surrendering silently sometimes, or simply whimpering in despair as they slid down to defeat. But John D. did something about his slice. First, he hired a photographer for a Cleveland newspaper to take a series of pictures as he addressed the ball- a sound enough idea, to be followed in later years by coaches in all sports. The idea worked gratifyingly well for John D., but this photographic device failed him in his effort to correct his distressing habit of lifting his head every time he brought his club around. Like golfers everywhere, rich and poor, he wanted to see where the ball was going before it even had left the tee. Again John D. fought back at his own human tendency to err by hiring a young boy to follow him around the course. Each time that the great man started his swing, it was the lad’s job to cry out shrilly: “Hold your head down! Hold your head down!” There is no record, unfortunately, to reveal the outcome of this experiment. Most golfers, assailed by such a strident cry in midswing, would be likely to go berserk. In view of John D.’s self-control, however, it may have worked for him.

Golf, as played by John D., was something of a mob scene, what with photographers loping alongside, a boy crying out for him to hold his head down, the caddy, a boy to hold his bike in readiness, and still another boy to hold an umbrella over his head as a shield against the hot sun.

John D. did not regard golf in a completely frivolous light. It was, first of all, physical exercise, which he knew he needed if he were to extend his life-span. It was also ’i personal challenge and therefore to be greeted warmly by a man who had met and overcome all the other challenges life had thrown at him. It was a sport that called for the kind of emotional control he had and approved of, and it was a test of personal honesty.

“One of the best places to test a minister is on the golf links,” he told his Euclid Avenue Baptist Church Sunday School class, after announcing he was to play a game the next day with the pastor.

“Even the best of them often lose their tempers. I am sorry to say that I have met ministers who did not hesitate to cheat a little on the links.”

Rockefeller began to teach Sunday School classes at the Baptist church as a teenager and continued this Christian duty through the tumultuous, formative years of his business struggle toward world leadership. He had a way of compartmenting his life- so much time for business, so much time for religion, so much time for play- as he divided his money, with religion always one of the main beneficiaries of his philanthropy. He is believed to have contributed about a million dollars in his lifetime to the Euclid Avenue Baptist Church. Over a long period of years, he matched the contributions of all the other members of the church, dollar for dollar.

Rockefeller in 1872 surely was as sorely pressed for time as he was at any period in his career. This was the critical era, as Standard Oil struggled for a permanent footing. But 1872 also was the year when Rockefeller took on additional duties at the Euclid Avenue Baptist Church, accepting the post of superintendent of the Sunday School- a position which he held until 1905.

Throughout his later career as a Sunday School teacher and superintendent, Rockefeller played host at the annual church picnic that was the social highlight of each year. The picnic was held on the spacious grounds of his Euclid Avenue mansion for several years, and then it became an annual fixture at Forest Hill.

It is to be guessed that many of Rockefeller’s golf foes found it expedient to let the old man win, and with his keen, analytical mind, he probably knew it. One who did not practice such deception or tact, however you may view it, was a Cleveland physician, Dr. E. B. Rhodes. It is probably no accident that Dr. Rhodes was one of Rockefeller’s favorite golfing companions.

“The first time I played golf with him,” said Dr. Rhodes, “I was warned that the old man loved to win, but I said I would ‘throw’ no matches and I never did. In fact, in fifteen years I played with him almost daily I lost only once, and on that occasion Mr. Rockefeller ran into the house and called to his wife: ’Mamma, mamma! I beat Dr. R. today!’

“When we lost a ball, we would call all the caddies and make them look. If they couldn’t find it, he would call his partners, and if they, too, failed, he would summon all the gardeners and hired hands and keep them looking until the ball was found.”

His refusal to abandon even a possession of such small value as a golf ball was part of Rockefeller’s heightened sense of property. He simply regarded the squandering of money or property as wrong.

There are innumerable stories illustrating his careful respect for money and for the principle of full value to be received in exchange for money. One of the favorites of his biographers is his famous barrel bung blast contained in a letter to one of his refinery officials:

“Last month,” he wrote, “you reported on hand 1,119 bungs. Ten thousand were sent you at the beginning of this month. You have used 9,527 this month. You report 1,012 on hand. What has happened to the other 580?”

When Rockefeller worked late in his downtown Cleveland office and the weather was bad, he was wont to take a room at the Colonial Hotel on Prospect Avenue- a hostelry, incidentally, which still is in full operation. One such night, when a terrible blizzard was raging, John D. walked into the Colonial and asked for a room.

The room clerk nodded, and as he handed Rockefeller a pen to register, he mentioned that the room would cost two dollars, but would include breakfast. The combined rate, he explained, was a new rule of the house.

“I don’t want to eat breakfast here and I won’t pay for it,” said the great business tycoon, stomping toward the door. There he turned and added: “I pay my coachman anyway.” With that parting reminder, he wrenched open the door and disappeared into the driving snow.

Not that John D. did not have his own extravagant little habits; he did. One was his habit of nibbling at little smoked herrings. He always liked to carry a package of the herrings in his pocket in case the appetite for the tidbit should assail him.

He confided one day to his best friend and personal physician, Dr. H. F. Biggar, his suspicion that the member of his household staff in charge of purchases was cheating him.

“The other day,” he said, “I saw some herrings in a store window. The price mark was on them. Then I went home and looked up my grocery bills that I had paid. I had been charged eight cents more for a package of these things than they cost at that store, according to the sign that I saw with my own eyes. Now, if they do that with my herrings, they do it with other things. But I have kept quiet about it- only told you. I have given the cook two weeks vacation and now I shall watch how much the second cook charges for these herrings. I know that I have been cheated.”

Richest man in the world or not,. John D. did not like anybody to play him for a patsy.

Another sport, besides golf, that Rockefeller enjoyed was swimming, and he frequently swam in the large lake on his Forest Hill estate. He was no different from any other swimmer in town, except, possibly, that he was given to wearing his hat while swimming.

One of the favorite games at Forest Hill was bicycling through the twisting woodland roads by moonlight, and many a guest of the Rockefellers who was drawn into the game congratulated himself on getting through the experience alive. It was a “follow-the-leader” game in which each participant was called on to follow the lead cyclist, but no lights were allowed- only such light as the moon and stars gave. Many a guest ended in a clump of forsythia bushes with his bicycle sprockets draped over each ear, but Rocky, Sr., thought it was great fun.

The thirty-five years, especially the many summers that the Rockefellers used Forest Hill, were the wonderful green years for John D., his wife, and their children. Theirs was the utopian summer retreat, and in the lavish outlay of money to make it as perfect as possible, Rockefeller gave the lie to the popular canard about his stinginess. There was nothing stingy about John D., but he did have peculiar notions about getting value for his money.

A Cleveland journalist, John E. Bryan, who is today- of all things!- financial editor of the Plain Dealer, recalls a revealing boyhood encounter with Rockefeller. He was standing by while his father, Charles Bryan, chatted with the great John D., when the oil king suddenly broke off the conversation to pat the boy on the head and hand him one of his famous shiny dimes. Young Bryan, showing a financial instinct even at that early age, examined the dime carefully, looked up at the wizened old man, and informed him gravely and candidly that a neighborhood philanthropist always gave him a quarter.

“Ha!” said John D., nodding in understanding. “Now tell me, son, what have you done to earn even a dime?”

As remote a personality as John D. was, even to Clevelanders who knew him, he was a familiar figure compared with his brother William. Two years younger than John, William operated in his brother’s shadow and yet he was adjudged by those who knew him as a shrewd, imaginative businessman. Beyond this likeness, he apparently was very much dissimilar to John D., as was the youngest brother, Frank.

Neither of the younger Rockefellers showed the religions, conservative streak that characterized John, and both of them were likened to their father, William Avery, in their physical appearance and in their interest in the material pleasures of life.

William, Jr., left Cleveland in the Standard Oil exodus to New York, severing his ties with Cleveland almost entirely. So far as is known, he returned to the city only a few times after that. He attended Frank’s funeral in Cleveland in 1917, and is known to have visited John at Forest Hill at least once, but beyond those occasions, William’s separation from Cleveland was total.

The relationship among the three brothers was anything but one of complete harmony. William and John were close mends through the years, but Franklin was more the loner. Some people said he was more like his father, the senior William, than either of the other sons. Frank was a vice president of Standard Oil- so far as the title and the paycheck were concerned, anyway- until 1912, but something had happened around the turn of the century to alienate him from his brother, John. Family biographers are vague on the point. One widely accepted supposition is that there was a quarrel between the men over the questionable behavior of the father, William, Sr. Another strong possibility is that Frank, who had been in partnership with James Corrigan of Cleveland in the Franklin Iron Mining Co. in Wisconsin, was angered by his brother John’s treatment of his friend Corrigan.

The mining company had gotten into financial troubles and Corrigan put up twenty-five hundred shares of Standard Oil stock as security for loans from Rockefeller. John D. eventually took over the stock at $168 a share, and when the same shares jumped to five hundred dollars each within two years, Corrigan sued him, claiming the oil king had deceived him about the value of the stock. The legal ruling was unfavorable to Corrigan and the verdict was upheld by the Ohio Supreme Court, but Frank Rockefeller was angered by the transaction.

So bitter was Franklin’s feeling toward John that he refused to speak to him in the last fifteen years of his life. He became, in fact, one of John’s most outspoken critics. Frank severed his business connections with Standard Oil and his brother in 1899, but was kept on the company payroll for some years thereafter- presumably by decision of John.

He remained a resident of Cleveland, but he also had a twelve-thousand-acre ranch in Belvidere, Kansas, as well as an interest in ranches in Texas and Arizona. He spent five months of each year in Cleveland, but never was known to communicate with John- even though John often was in town at the same time.

“I am Frank Rockefeller, stock farmer- not Frank Rockefeller, brother of John D.,” he has been quoted as declaring.

Franklin became gravely ill in February 1917. He was operated on for intestinal trouble in a Cleveland hospital and a fatal paralysis developed. But even as he lay close to death, the bitterness of his feelings toward John were such that he fretted over the possibility that John might try to visit him in the hospital. He dictated a statement to reporters which clearly indicated the extent of the breach with his brother.

“Frank Rockefeller,” he stated, “has not sent for his brother John and will not send for him nor will he advise his brother of his illness.”

Franklin had made many statements that must have hurt his brother, but this one, dictated on his deathbed, must have carried the most piercing hurt of all; more, even, than Frank’s action at an earlier time in removing the bodies of his two children from the family burial plot so they would not be near the famous billionaire.

When Frank died, all his grieving older brother could do was shake his head and say: “Poor Frank. I held him in my arms when he was a baby.”

William Avery Rockefeller, father of the clan, never figured importantly in the civic or social life of Cleveland- probably because excursions out West to sell his patent medicines took him away from the city so often. His trips became longer and more frequent with the passing years. From 1860 on, he was rarely seen in the city.

John D. Rockefeller, Jr., once wrote of his grandfather:

“My Grandfather Rockefeller was a most lovable person. My Uncle Frank, father’s youngest brother, had a ranch in Kansas and my grandfather was often there. He would come to visit us at Forest Hill but he never sent word in advance. He telephoned from the end of the trolley line and we would send a carriage to meet him. He gave me a .22-calibre rifle, and the two of us used to shoot marks and targets. Grandfather was a great storyteller. He played the violin too, holding it down at his waist instead of tucking it under his chin. All the family loved him. He was a very entertaining man, coming and going when he felt like it. He lived a detached kind of life and I didn’t know much about it.”

When the older Mrs. Rockefeller died in March 1889 at the age of seventy-six, her husband failed to appear in Cleveland for the funeral. He was the only member of the immediate family who was missing.

There have been published reports that William lived in New York City under the assumed name of “Dr. William Levingston” until he died in 1906 at the age of ninety-six. According to a New York World story published in 1908, he married a twenty-year-old girl in 1855, and allegedly lived with her in bigamous bliss until his death five decades later.

Now all the Rockefellers are gone from Cleveland, and Forest Hill has been swallowed by the city. Part of it is public park land and still retains some of its old natural splendor; part of it is an expensive home development called “Forest Hills.” People always have had the overpowering habit of adding an “s” to the name of the Rockefeller estate.

The wonderful summer retreat was especially loved by Mrs. John D. Rockefeller. She eagerly looked forward to the approach of warm weather because it meant that she soon would be returning home to Cleveland with all its familiar sights, its old friends, and all the pleasures of the family estate. When Mrs. Rockefeller’s health began to fail in 1913, preventing her from making her usual pilgrimage to the Cleveland retreat the following year, the end of Forest Hill was in sight. She never saw the Cleveland home again, dying at the Pocantico Hills estate in New York in March 1915.

The family burial plot was in Lake View Cemetery in Cleveland, but Mrs. Rockefeller, ironically, was not able to return home immediately, even in death. The bar to her return was a remarkable show of avarice by a special Ohio state tax commission made up of John D. Fackler and William Agnew. They had ruled that since Rockefeller had been in residence approximately half of the previous year of 1913 at Forest Hill (due to the illness of his wife), he was, ipso facto, a legal resident of East Cleveland and therefore subject to the state personal property tax.

The tax authorities sent Rockefeller notification of their decision and called upon him to provide a list of all his property for the purpose of determining his tax liability. The aged billionaire promptly refused to comply with the request, answering simply that he was a legal resident of New York State and not subject to the Ohio taxation. The Ohio commission held to its position and sent Rockefeller a tax bill based on his estimated personal property holdings of $311,000,000.

Back home in East Cleveland, meanwhile, the tax rate dropped from $1.41 per one hundred dollars of valuation in 1913 to a mere thirty-seven cents per hundred dollars in 1914 in gleeful anticipation, apparently, of the Rockefeller windfall… a windfall that never fell. Rockefeller Simply refused to surrender to the Ohio tax decision, holding tenaciously to his claim of New York residency.

The death of Mrs. Rockefeller added a macabre note to the controversy, because her husband was unable to take her body to Cleveland for burial. If he had appeared in Cuyahoga County, he would have been confronted by process servers. While his attorneys sought to settle the case, Mrs. Rockefeller’s body was placed in a mausoleum owned by John Archbold, Rockefeller’s second in power at Standard Oil. After six long months, arrangements were made which permitted the grieving oil king to take his beloved Laura home for the last time; not to Forest Hill, but to Lake View Cemetery, only a short distance away from her favorite home.

Twenty-two years later, on May 23, 1937, John D. Rockefeller died in Ormond Beach, Florida. In less than two months he would have reamed his ninety-eighth birthday. His body was returned to Cleveland for the final services and he was interred alongside his wife at the foot of the tall granite shaft that is the tallest monument in the cemetery; to one side of him is his wife and to the other is his mother. Spread out then in a semicircle, fan-like, are the graves of other members of the immediate family- not including either of his brothers, or his father, however.

The erosion of the years has been severe, but it is still possible to find the signs that Rockefeller left along his Cleveland path. There is still the Rockefeller Building, a seventeen-story building that was one of the city’s first skyscrapers and continues to be one of the city’s most attractive buildings. It sits on Superior Avenue, between Public Square and the Cuyahoga River, overlooking The mats and Merwin Street and River Street, where John D.’s career was planted and took root. The building was constructed in 1905 and when it was completed, John D. turned it over to his son, John D., Jr., as a gift.

In 1920, the junior Rockefeller sold the classic building to a Cleveland entrepreneur named Josiah Kirby, who later would fall into the clutches of the law for mismanaging the funds of his Cleveland Discount Company. The new owner of the building promptly dropped the name of Rockefeller and renamed it the Kirby Building.

When John D. Rockefeller, the senior member of the family, heard of the transaction and the loss of his name from the tall Cleveland building, he was upset enough to repurchase the building at a reported price of $2,972,000, representing a tidy profit, estimated to be several hundred thousand dollars, for Kirby. His first act was to restore the name, “Rockefeller Building.” The building later passed out of the hands of the Rockefeller family again, but there was a provision in the terms of sale that the name of the building must remain Rockefeller. It is somehow appropriate that in this city where the great business dynasty was born, and where the founder of the greatest fortune in American history first made his way and lies buried, that the name of Rockefeller should live on, even in such a small way.