chapter 3 - the founders
the people:
the timeline:
the story:
Charles & Miriam
After the dinner at the Boyds, Charles and Miriam stayed in touch. When they returned to school that fall, they were a short 30-minute commute from one another – Charles at Harvard Law School, Miriam at Wellesley. The schools had joint social functions, so they saw each other frequently.
When Miriam graduated in 1921 she moved back to Philadelphia and began graduate work in advanced mathematics and chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania. Charles had one more year at Harvard, so they maintained a long-distance relationship through correspondence and family gatherings during the holidays.
Charles graduated in 1922 and went to work for Simpson, Thacher, & Bartlett as a legal associate. The firm was based in New York City, a short commute to Miriam in Philadelphia.
By the spring of 1923, Charles knew he was going to propose. He and Miriam were deeply in love, — a love that had stood the test of time and distance. He went to the Diamond District just south of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in NYC to shop for rings but was quickly overwhelmed with all the options.
Fortunately, he had a good friend from his army days at Fort Monroe, Paul MacPherson, who was in the diamond business. Paul helped him pick out a diamond.
The last hurdle was working up the nerve to ask Mr. Boyd for his approval. Charles knew Mr. Boyd liked him and would probably look upon his proposal favorably, but he was still intimidated. Mr. Boyd was an imposing man.
Charles consulted with his brother George for advice.
“I like Miriam, but nothing on earth would give me the courage to ask Mr. Boyd for her hand!” George said, only half-joking. Good luck,” [1]
Charles went to Philadelphia early that summer to meet with Mr. Boyd in his office at the Curtis Center.
“I love your daughter Miriam and I’d like to marry her with your blessing,” Charles said nervously.
“Well I was wondering what was taking you so long, good boy! Of course, I say yes. The two of you are two peas in a pod,” Mr. Boyd said much to Charles’ relief. “My only question is how do you plan to support her and provide the life she deserves?”
Charles looked at him, unsure how to answer, then launched into a lawyerly explanation about how his net worth was not much but would grow as he ascended the ranks. He earnestly provided examples of Harvard Law graduates older than him and where they were practicing today.
“Charles,” Mr. Boyd said, “I have faith that you’ll work it out.”[2]
In the summer of 1923 Charles and Miriam were officially engaged. Little did they know that their relationship would stand one more big test before they got married.
Charles Parlin
Charles and Miriam.
Miriam Boyd
miriam
The Great Kanto Earthquake
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There was nothing in life that could prepare her for what she was about to see.
In 1923, Miriam was traveling to China to teach chemistry at Yenching Christian University. The invitation had come from the president of the university who was having dinner at her parents’ house in Philadelphia. Miriam was seated next to him at the table. When he learned she had a degree in chemistry he said, “I need you to come to China and teach at the university. My current chemistry teacher is returning to the states.”
She didn’t know how to respond. On the one hand, it appealed to her sense of exploration and desire to help those less fortunate. On the other hand, she had just gotten engaged and this would take her away — very far away — for an entire year. On top of all that, it was very unusual for a 23-year-old woman to travel by herself halfway around the world.
She and Charles discussed it that night. They both had a deep sense of mission and believed that if you were privileged, you should use your talents, education, and resources to help other people, especially the underprivileged. Charles’ career as a tax attorney was just taking off and he knew he would be working 18-hour days anyway. Their relationship had survived time and distance before; they knew it would again.
Besides, this was a once in a lifetime opportunity. They agreed she should take the offer.
In the late summer of 1923, Miriam took the train across the country to California with her sister Isabel, and then went on by herself to Vancouver to board the Empress of Canada, a trans-pacific ocean liner. Boarding the ship by herself, not knowing anyone, Miriam began the two-week voyage across the Pacific Ocean. The first stop was Yokohama, Japan.
Empress of Canada.
On September 2, 1923 she was making her way to breakfast and saw a large crowd gathered at the bulletin board.
“Wireless advises this morning that Yokohama was destroyed at noon Saturday by earthquake and fire. It is reported that at first shock of the earthquake, buildings collapsed and fires broke out in various places. Any further information will be posted in due course.”
Many of the passengers were desperate for more information as they had relatives in the city. There was a great deal of confusion due to the lack of detail. The city was completely cut off from the outside world.
The rest of that day the ship was at a standstill as the crew tried to get more information and decipher whether or not it was safe to proceed to the harbor. That night the passengers were told that they would continue to the harbor at first light. No passengers would be allowed to disembark. The ship’s only purpose was to take on refugees.
Nobody got much sleep that night. Miriam saw the ship hands setting up cots in the gymnasium and upper deck, presumably to take on the wounded. There was an air of foreboding. The passengers discussed what might be ahead of them, trying not to imagine the worst.
All passengers were up on deck at four in the morning the next day. The ship slowly moved along the coast, making its way to the harbor. As it started to get light, they could see smoke pouring up from the city and the flames started to come into view.
Just then the captain made an announcement: “All passengers are to remain below deck. If you remain on deck it’s for one purpose and one purpose only – to assist those who have been injured.”
The announcement caused a stir as most began moving to their cabins. Miriam started to her cabin and then stopped cold. Years later when she reflected back on it, she couldn’t say if it was her Christian commitment to serve, her lifelong interest in nursing, or just the naivete of a 23-year-old facing danger and jumping towards it.
Whatever it was, she stayed on deck.
As they pulled closer into the Tokyo harbor, she could feel the heat like an open oven. Fire was everywhere. She turned and saw a pillar of flames 60 feet high swirl up like a tornado, setting off explosions as it ripped along the waterfront merchant district.
Metropolitan Police Department burning.
Artists depiction of scene at dock terminal.
They couldn’t dock, but pulled up alongside the Empress of Australia, which had just set sail when the earthquake began. Many people had been on the dock to see the ship off and were thrown into the harbor when the dock split in the middle and sank. Some of them drowned, many of them were burned neck to knee from the flames of burning oil on the surface of the water.
There were still bodies floating lifelessly in the harbor, the smell of burnt flesh in the air. She didn’t think; she just acted.
Miriam started pulling the injured, who had dived off the pier to escape the fire, onboard. Then she ran to the top deck where the injured were laid down and passengers doing all they could to help.
Miram saw a young, terribly burned woman screaming out for her child as she tried to jump over the railing back into the harbor. The woman’s husband was holding her back because he knew the child was gone. She saw a man stumbling across the deck, trying to get to something or someone, his hair burned to the scalp and his eyes seared shut.
Many of the wounded were carried onboard half naked and badly burnt. The Japanese first responders had run out of bandages, so they were covering wounds with tar paper torn from the flooring of the dock. While this had stopped the bleeding, it had also sealed itself to the burns and had to be gently peeled off.
The responders quickly used up all the bandages in the infirmary, so Miriam joined a group of passengers who got all the clothing they could spare and began ripping it into makeshift bandages.
Although there was mayhem around her, Miriam was calm and methodical. While she wasn’t fanatical about her Christianity, that day she felt the Lord inside her.
The ship took in 1,400 victims total. The captain had been ordered to take them to Kobe, Japan where the medical facilities were on standby. The entire eastern coast of Japan was on high alert for aftershocks and tsunamis. The hospitals in Tokyo and the surrounding cities were overwhelmed.
Aftermath of earth quake and fires.
Miriam spent the next 48 hours on deck caring for, feeding, and comforting the injured. She prayed for the souls that didn’t make it. She didn’t sleep. There was too much adrenaline running through her and, besides, there were too many people to care for.
In a letter to her parents describing the disaster she told a story about one of the survivors:
“The last boat full was brought to our ship about 10 o’clock. In it was a little Russian woman on a stretcher. It was pouring rain by then, which added to the misery. She was burned very badly, her face cut deeply, and her eyes and face black from being buried. She was so bad in fact that the doctors would not examine her. She was covered with tar paper. They thought her back was broken too. Her brother had dug her out and her husband had carried her 10 miles on his back. There was little hope for her but she was put on the floor on a mattress in the Writing Room. One woman sat with her all night and would not let any of us relieve her. In fact, for three nights she watched her. The poor little thing was taken off at Kobe, very much improved, had been examined and her back not broken. The gratitude of the brother and husband was great. But her face will haunt me every time I think of this. And it was only one of many.”
- Miriam Boyd: Letters From China 1923-4
When the boat finally pulled into Shanghai, Miriam was exhausted and dazed. She helped get the injured off the boat and joined a prayer circle that had gathered below deck. She gathered what remained of her clothing and other possessions and set out to the Shanghai Methodist Episcopal Church where she was to spend the night before continuing to Peking (Beijing).
When she entered the church there were three older women there to greet her. She apologized for her appearance but didn’t explain what had happened. She just couldn’t find the words to describe it, nor did she want to relive it.
The three women became rather condescending towards Miriam. They thought she was much too frail to endure life as a missionary in China. When Miriam picked up on this she got very quiet.
She politely thanked them for meeting with her, got her bag, and headed straight for the Shanghai Train Terminal. From there, she boarded the 17-hour overnight train to Peking.
Miriam learned later that these women even had the audacity to write to her mother saying that they couldn’t understand why the university would send such a frail, unprepared girl to the mission field.
When she arrived in Peking she went straight to her final destination, the Yenching Christian University. She got some sleep on the train so she felt a little better, but the aftershocks of trauma were still with her.
That afternoon she got a tour of the classrooms and church and met her associates. After dinner, she excused herself and turned in. She slept on a cot in the open air and slowly drifted off under a spectacular star-filled sky.
After a year teaching chemistry at the university, Miriam returned home. She only spoke of the event to Charles once. After that she never spoke about it again.
The Great Kanto earthquake, as it is now known, was the 9th worst natural disaster of the 20th century. The entire city of Tokyo burnt to the ground; 143,00 people died. Miriam’s faith in Christ had never been so tested, nor had it served her so well.
While Miriam chose not to talk about it, the memories of what she experienced never left her.
Miriam Boyd Parlin died on October 6, 1972 of a degenerative disease that was never diagnosed, but is presumed to have been Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). The children, now adults, would visit her in Englewood, where she had a full-time nurse providing care and was bedridden.
Her last years of life were a struggle as she lost the capacity to feed herself, walk, and, in the last year of her life, speak. She could only squeeze her visitors’ hands.
One afternoon, almost a year since they had last heard her voice, Blackie and Joan were visiting Miriam.
Charles had set up a TV for her and the four of them were watching the evening news. There had just been a natural disaster and Walter Cronkite was reading down the list of the worst natural disasters of the century.
Out of nowhere Miriam started wailing and screaming in utterances none of them could make out. It was a terrifying sound, like the primal noise of a wounded animal. They tried to comfort her but she just kept wailing. The nurse finally had to sedate her.
“Do you know what triggered that?” Charles asked them.
“I have no idea,” Blackie said, disturbed.
“Do you remember what was on the television? As Walter Cronkite was listing all those disasters, when he got to The Great Kanto earthquake of 1924 and showed the images on the screen, that’s when your mother started screaming.”
“What are you talking about?” Blackie didn’t understand the connection because his mother never spoke of it to any of the children in detail. Charles explained the terror Miriam experienced on that ship.
If it wasn’t for being there when Cronkite mentioned the disaster, Blackie may never have understood how deeply impacted Miriam was by it.
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Religious Faith
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Miriam was a devout Christian, but she wasn’t one to proselytize. To her, religion was deeply personal and private. Her faith was combined with a sharp scientific intellect. The fact that some people, particularly in academia, were beginning to question religion as new scientific evidence began to emerge about life’s origins didn’t bother Miriam. For her, science was simply the language we used to understand God’s intent.
Miriam’s enlightened views of religion made her somewhat cautious about pushing it on the kids. One day when 13-year-old Blackie came home from Sunday School, he was very upset.
“We had the stupidest lesson today, you won't believe it,” he said in disgust. “We took an imaginary trip to visit Wong Foo in China on a magic carpet. And we learned that Wong Foo is just like us. They treat us like we’re in pre-school!”
Miriam didn’t say anything about the lesson, but she was deeply disturbed by it. And it wasn’t the only time that Blackie came home contemptuous about Sunday School.
“You don’t have to go anymore,” she told Blackie the next day.
It was her own spirituality, combined with intellectualism, that led her to this decision. She simply could not tolerate the thought of her children being introduced to religion through a lens they rejected. For her, faith was personal, and one had to find their own relationship with God. While she had a strong connection to the church, she didn’t view it as a prerequisite to living a holy life.
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Full of Surprises
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Because of her introverted and shy personality, Miriam was constantly being underestimated.
It was a family tradition to spend Labor Day at the Rutland State Fair in Vermont as it was only an hour away from Silver Bay and marked the end of the summer. Everyone in the household would go.
One year Miriam was walking with the family through the fair when she came upon the duck shooting booth. She approached the booth and was looking at the setup when the rather uppity teenager attending the booth said to her, “This is really more of a man’s thing, lady. Just down the way are some games more suited for women.”
Miriam didn’t say anything. She just stared at him blankly then looked down at the dozen rifles chained to the counter at the front of the booth.
She laid down her money and began to take off her white satin gloves. She pulled each finger on one gloved hand and laid it on the counter, then the other. Slowly she reached up and took the hat pin out of her hat and set it in the soft fur lining. Then she set her hat on the counter without an ounce of emotion.
She began to lift each rifle, carefully inspecting them to find the one with the right heft and lines. She took her time. The family stood back and watched incredulously without saying a word. The attendant had a smug, supercilious sneer on his face.
Finally, she chose one of the rifles and lifted it to her shoulder. Carefully and deliberately she took aim, and BAM!, down went a duck. Never letting the rifle off her shoulder, BAM!, down went a swan.
Ten shots! Ten birds down!!
She glanced at the attendant and placed the rifle down on the counter. She picked up her hat and carefully set the pin. She picked up her gloves, and pulled them on, one after the other. Then she turned and took Charles’s arm, and they walked on down the midway.
Neither of them said a word until they were out of sight, and then they both broke into laughter. The dumbfounded look on the booth attendants face was priceless.
The kids were thrilled. “Our Mom, the markswoman!” they shouted. None of them had ever seen their mother with a gun before, and never saw her with one again. How she learned to shoot, they had no idea.
Remembrance
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The “older cousins” of my generation (I was the youngest of my generation) have many fond memories growing up with Miriam. Rob Parlin left a wonderful remembrance in his contribution to the Parlin Family Volume 4:
“I am now 43 years old (August, 1995), soon to be 44 on September 25. There isn’t a day I don’t think about Gramma, and I have a picture of the two of us taken in September 1962 sitting on my desk at work.
I miss you, Gramma. It’s not time for me, yet – hopefully not for a long, long time, but someday I’ll cross the river to the other side and be with you, Grampa, Nancy, Nana and all the gang I knew during my Big House years. I wish that all the other grandchildren could see you as I did – strong, full of life, and happy that I was a child and your best friend.
I love you – Robbie”
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- Rob Parlin, 1995.
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Read More Stories from the family history books:
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Charles
“I know I’m asking a lot of you Charles, but you are going to be more or less in charge of the family,” his father said.
Charles was only thirteen. The thought of being the man of the house all summer was intimidating but he could tell by his father’s seriousness that it was important.
It was June of 1911. His father had just accepted a position with the Curtis Publishing Company and the family was going to move from Wausau, Wisconsin to Boston. However, since Charles’s sister Grace was only three weeks old, and his mother was still recovering from childbirth, the plan was to have his father go to Boston and the rest of the family would follow at the end of the summer.
“I need you to make every effort to see that things go smoothly this summer,” his father went on, “Your mother will need your help. She should have no trouble from you, George, or Ruth and, as the oldest, this will largely depend on how you behave.”
“Lastly, and most important, your mother needs rest and sleep to recover, so you will need to assume much of the responsibility caring for baby Grace.”
It was one of those moments when a child has to become an adult. “Yes, I can do this,” Charles said determinedly, “I want mom to rest and get back her strength. I’ll keep after George and Ruth and make sure Grace is cared for.”
Charles didn’t really know what this entailed, but he found out soon enough. He learned to feed Grace from a bottle, change her diapers, and rock her to sleep.
In that era, it was common practice to have babies sleep in the same bed as the parents. Many nights, Charles slept with Grace in his bed. He loved it. She would snuggle up next to him and wake him for feeding by pawing at his face. She was an uncommonly good baby, never giving him trouble. It’s almost like she knew she had to be good, he thought.
The summer passed without any mishaps, much to Charles’ relief. His mother was doing much better but still not ready to do everything needed to move the whole family, so Charles went to Boston himself to live with his Father.
He entered the Newtonville Technical High School, which his father had picked because, at the time, Charles expected to go into engineering. Charles and his father shared a room at the Newtonville YMCA.
With the demands of his new job, Charles’ father was spending much of his time on the road and Charles was on his own frequently. This quite shocked the fellow boarders, who considered a boy of thirteen much too young to be left on his own. But, his father had a great deal of faith in him and Charles enjoyed being independent.
Later that fall Charles’ father was scheduled to deliver the president’s address at the Wisconsin State Teachers Association. This was his last obligation to his previous job. After the address he would go back to Wausau and help Daisy pack everything and everyone up and bring the rest of the family east. He’d be gone for three weeks.
The Sunday after his father left for Wisconsin Charles attended church by himself. A friend of his fathers saw him alone and invited him for dinner. After dinner the man said, “I will wait while you telephone the people you are staying with for a ride home.”
“Oh no, I’m on my own,” Charles said much to the man’s dismay. Soon enough the Parlins became known in their church as the parents who left a thirteen-year old boy alone in the big city for three weeks.
Charles wasn’t fazed by any of this. With each new challenge his father put before him, Charles showed the traits that he would carry into adulthood: leadership, confidence, and optimism.
In fact, when the family arrived in Boston, Charles had already found a house for rent and made all the move-in arrangements.
The experience of being the “man of house” at such a young age left Charles with a deep sense of paternalism for the rest of his life. Even as they grew into adulthood, Charles felt responsible for the well-being of his siblings and their families.
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Discover More Stories about Charles:
Charles Parlin Trip to Berlin During WWII (Audio on YouTube. Narrated by Charles Parlin.)
College and the War (By Charles)
Charles later in life as Head of Firm at Shearman and Sterling law firm.
Charles and Miriam.
Footnotes:
[1] One example of Mr. Boyd’s imposing nature is that he would offer his sons-in-law stock options as a means to know their net worth. As soon as the young man could afford no more, Mr. Boyd would know their worth. But Charles, being quite clever and quick to spot opportunity, went to the head of his law firm and told him about his father-in-law's scheme. The head agreed to lend Charles as much money as he wanted. Eventually Mr. Boyd stopped offering Charles stock options.
[2] Charles did indeed “work it out.” He went on to have a successful career at Shearman and Sterling, one of New York’s most prestigious law firms. He became a partner in 1945 and ascended to head of the firm in 1956. His career is chronicled in the book ‘Shearman and Sterling 1873-1973.’