Whipped Cream Difficulties

Sir Neville Marriner, noted conductor.

Oscar Brand, folkie. I actually do own one of his albums: Presidential Campaign Songs: 1789 – 1996 is kind of fun, if you have a sense of history.

This is one that I also thought was kind of “amusing” (to the extent an obit can be “amusing”): Carroll Wainwright Jr. He was kind of a sensation in 1934.

Wainwright’s mother divorced his father and remarried (“hours later”, according to the NYT) in 1932. In 1934, the family went to Bermuda for the winter.

“Tousle-headed Carroll Jr. didn’t like Bermuda,” the 1935 newspaper article declared. “He had visions of Christmas in America, of sledding at East Hampton, and of a Christmas tree at his grandmother’s Park Avenue home.”

So, one fine late November day, the young Wainwright stowed away on the S.S. Queen of Bermuda, only to emerge when the ship was out to sea and he got hungry.

What he had not bargained for was the effect his disappearance would have on his mother and stepfather. The terrible fate of the Lindbergh baby, kidnapped and murdered just two years before, was still fresh in the public mind, and the couple, fearing Carroll had been abducted for ransom, called in the Bermuda police.
The police were stymied until someone thought to radio the ship. The captain radioed back that Carroll was aboard, safe and sound.

The ship arrived safely in New York, and Wainwright’s grandmother paid his full (first class) fare. I kind of wonder what her reaction was to a) having an eight-year-old show up unexpectedly at her door, and b) having to come out of pocket for his fare. But reading between the lines, it feels like there may have been more going on than a desire for sledding and Christmas trees: Wainwright’s mother died in 1937 of what the paper describes as “alcohol-related liver disease”.

He did not return to Bermuda. In the coming years he would divide his time between the Malcolm Gordon School, a boarding school in Garrison, N.Y., and the home of an uncle, Loudon Wainwright (grandfather of the singer and songwriter Loudon Wainwright III), in Hewlett, on Long Island.

And this is a nice note to end on:

An enthusiastic outdoorsman, Mr. Wainwright was for decades a keen traveler throughout the United States and far beyond. To the end of his life, he paid his own passage.

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