Father, Son & Co. Read online

  Dad became scared of airplanes during a Sunday outing to a county fair in the early 1920s. We passed a field where there was a Jenny, back from World War I, and a pilot taking people up for five dollars. Since he’d spent so many years in Dayton, it would have been odd if Dad had never been curious enough to go up. He’d even met the Wright brothers. So he bought a ticket and joined the line. But as he stood there waiting, we kids started yapping at him, “You promised to buy us ice cream!” Father said we were right, and asked the flier if he could come back in half an hour for his ride. By the time we came back, the plane had crashed and three people had been killed.

  He took that as an omen that he should never fly. I have to admit that in those days there was every reason for him not to. Before World War II airplanes were crashing all the time. Anyone who was a sportsman had to have an airplane, and often the plane would malfunction or he’d make a mistake, and he’d be killed. But Dad’s superstition never made me hesitate. A year after the Jenny incident, a fellow announced with placards that he was going to land an airplane on a golf course near Short Hills. He would perform and then give rides for one dollar per minute. Father was having a district managers’ meeting at our house, and I badgered those men privately and got a buck from each. Although Father was annoyed when he found out, he said patiently, “I’m not going to let you go up in that airplane. I think they’re still getting them improved. But if you’ll give these gentlemen their money back, we’ll go see it.” He took me over and paid the guy a couple of bucks to let me climb in the cockpit and feel the controls. After that I would sit in Mother’s kitchen doing flight simulations using a broomstick and a board balanced under my feet as a rudder.

  When Father had business to do in Europe, all of us went; and during my boyhood we made five long trips there. CTR accounting machines were sold in most countries by independent agents, but Father, convinced that Europe was going to be a big deal one day, disliked this arrangement. He gradually bought out the middlemen, bringing foreign sales under the company’s direct control.

  Europe had a special meaning in our family. It was the place where all of us could unbutton a little. In London, Mother would take us to the joke store near the Savoy Hotel to buy itching powder. Then she’d try to keep her face straight as we liberally sprinkled the chair of the fat wife of one of IBM’s Scandinavian managers. Dad would make a show of admonishing us not to play hotel slot machines, lecturing about the evils of gambling—and then he’d play them himself.

  It was in Europe that my parents finally let me fly. It had to be the greatest thrill of my entire childhood. In Paris in 1924, when I was ten, Dad took us to Le Bourget field and we walked around an air exhibition with thousands of people. I got more and more excited, listening to the roar of engines running up. They were selling rides in a converted French bomber, a great big hefty biplane called a Breguet. It was the same type of plane that the great French pilot and writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry later used to start the first air mail line, from Toulouse to Dakar. It had only one engine but enough room in back to tuck in four seats. The Hancocks, a young couple traveling with us, wanted to go up, and I pleaded to go along. I’m sure Dad and Mother were worried, but they knew how much I wanted to. We bought three rides, and the Hancocks and I got in with one other passenger. Two sat backwards and two sat forwards. The whole cabin smelled of castor oil, then the best lubricant for difficult jobs. The pilot sat up above and forward, where we couldn’t even see his legs.

  As we taxied out, the engine, which was probably four hundred horsepower, just rumbled and stumbled. Then he opened it up to take off, and we were engulfed with noise. It seemed to take over, until there was no other sensation. We were rolling on grass, so the undercarriage was bumping pretty hard. Then suddenly everything except the noise stopped, and a terrific smoothness took over. I watched the ground fall away. We had big windows on both sides so we could see everything.

  After we went around a few times we headed down. Then the engine noise dropped and was replaced by a singing. Few people today have ever heard that sound—it comes only from old biplanes with many wires between their wings that sing as the wind passes. To keep the engine clear, the pilot opened the throttle every once in a while. As the ground approached, the whistling got quieter and the tail was dropping and dropping. Finally we made a smooth landing and I could feel the wheels thumping on the grass again. I was overwhelmed. I knew airplanes killed people, but the sensation of freedom, the noise, the unseen bumps that pushed the airplane up and down, the ability to choose one’s own angle of bank and make one’s own decision to climb or descend—all these combined to give me a powerful desire to learn to fly.

  I pleaded to go right back up. But I had to wait a few years before my second flight, again in Europe, in the fall of 1927. This time I actually went somewhere. I was wandering around a hotel lobby in Basel and saw an air schedule next to the desk. There was a four o’clock flight to Paris! My family was eating lunch nearby with a friend named Mrs. Mangan. I came racing in with this announcement, and before Father could send a negative signal Mrs. Mangan said, “Oh, how thrilling! I’ll go with you!”

  We bought tickets and flew. Everyone else was to follow by overnight train. Paris was about two hundred fifty miles away, and the flight took almost four hours. We arrived early enough in the evening for me to go to the movies. As it happened, they were showing The Jazz Singer, the first film with sound. In a single, fantastic day, I’d become the first Watson to travel by air and the first to see a talking picture.

  I never remember, when I was growing up, Father coming right out and saying, “I’d really like to have you follow me in this business.” In fact, looking at me then, he probably found it hard to imagine a less likely successor. But I got it into my head that the old man wanted me to come into IBM, take it over, and run the whole deal. The very idea made me miserable. One day after school, when I was about twelve, I sat on a curb thinking about my father. What precipitated it I don’t know, but by the time I got home I was in tears. My mother asked what was wrong and I said, “I can’t do it. I can’t go to work at IBM.”

  She said, “But nobody asked you to.”

  “Yeah, but I know Dad wants me to. And I just can’t do it.” She said I shouldn’t worry and put her arms around me. When Dad came home Mother told him how I felt. He gently said to me that his own father had wanted him to become a lawyer and that I should do exactly what I wanted. From then on he was always offering me alternatives.

  This happened at a time when everything was out of kilter for me, even more so than for most adolescents. I was tall and gangly and thin, having grown to a man’s height much too fast. My father’s power and success in the world were mushrooming just when I was trying subconsciously to match myself with him man-to-man. I was subject to terrible emotional lows that lasted weeks at a time.

  No matter what he said about alternative careers, Dad’s real hopes for me are obvious in a 1927 photograph of us. He and I are standing together, shoulder to shoulder, almost equal in height. We are dressed exactly alike, with heavy, somber suits, overcoats, and derbies. We were on our way to a sales convention in Atlantic City; I was thirteen, a little young for business clothes.

  My first memory of IBM is from when I was five and Dad took me through the Dayton factory where we made scales. I remember the acrid metallic smell of the assembly line, and the smoke and noise of metal casting. From then on, Dad often brought me to IBM meetings, which were quite small in those days because the whole company was small. Sometimes the chauffeur would pick me up in Short Hills and take me to Dad’s office downtown. This was in the early 1920s, before IBM started filling up buildings in midtown Manhattan. The company occupied a couple of floors near Wall Street, in the same building where Mr. Flint worked. Those rooms at 50 Broad Street seemed gloomy, because the receptionist sat in the center of the building. You’d step out of the elevator, go through a glass door, and there she was. There were no windows to be seen; some ligh
ts, but not very many.

  Normally the receptionist would say, “Oh, hello, Tommy, are you looking for your father?” He had a corner office with an Oriental rug and a big mahogany desk that has belonged to me ever since he died. Around the room were a picture of Dad shaking hands with Nicholas Murray Butler, the head of Columbia University and Dad’s first important friend in New York; a couple of medals Dad got for joining some society; a few mementos of his boyhood; and maybe a stone or two from faraway places for paperweights. The place smelled of cigars.

  Usually I would make a beeline for the machine room, a few floors below. This was where they used punch-card machines to keep records of IBM’s own sales network. In those days the network was pretty thin: in fact, the Los Angeles salesmen had to cover a region that stretched all the way to El Paso. Clerks would be shoving stacks of punch cards into tabulating machines and vertical sorters, and sometimes I’d accidentally knock the cards over and foul up their work. Keypunch machines produce terrific confetti—the tiny little rectangles of cardboard that result when you punch a hole in the card. Those little cutouts would collect at the punches and then would be sold back to paper manufacturers. But if there was a parade on Broadway, many flights below, the clerks would dump some of this stuff out the window. I loved to throw handfuls of it whenever I got the chance.

  All sons at some point have the idea that their father is the most important man in the world. But that impression is hard to outgrow when your old man’s photograph is in every office and everybody around is bowing and scraping and trying to ingratiate themselves with him. Everything he did left me feeling inconsequential by comparison. The worst was when he was doing something that he thought would make me happy. Once, knowing my interest in flying, he decided to introduce me to Charles Lindbergh, whom he didn’t even know. This was soon after Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight in 1927 and Dad bought tickets to a banquet in his honor. Dad led me right up to the dais and introduced himself as head of IBM, and then me. He had such astonishing brass. I think I stammered, “Congratulations.”

  In self-defense, I developed an internal streak of skepticism about my father’s world. The first glimmer of this had come several years earlier, on the winter day in 1924 when IBM got its name. I was only ten at the time, still in knee pants. Father came home from work, gave Mother a hug, and proudly announced that the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company henceforth would be known by the grand name International Business Machines. I stood in the doorway of the living room thinking, “That little outfit?”

  Dad must have had in mind the IBM of the future. The one he actually ran was still full of cigar-chomping guys selling coffee grinders and butcher scales. That didn’t stop him from trying to raise the tone as best he knew how. The top showrooms, like the one at 310 Fifth Avenue, always had Oriental rugs. I guess Dad thought linking Oriental rugs and meat scales was splendid, but I found it embarrassing.

  While Dad was willing to delegate much of my upbringing to other people, he was the one who taught me how to look and act like a gentleman. To him these were among the most important skills in life, and he had worked hard to master them. His favorite method was to take me on trips—to upstate New York, for example, where his family had lived, to see a relative or visit a grave.

  He knew all about railroads—I suppose he’d spent hundreds of nights on trains. On the first such trip, when I was about twelve, Dad showed me how to use the ladder to get to the upper berth, and how to button the curtains for privacy. Then he took me into the men’s room. It was called the smoking room and had a long bench. The men waiting to take their turns at the two or three basins would sit, often just in an undershirt with their suspenders down. Our train was rattling along and Dad waited until all the others were gone. Then he said, “Now Tom, this is a public room. Everyone who uses it has to be careful, because the person coming after you will judge you by how the place is left. Here’s the way you do it.”

  The basin was pretty clean when he stepped up to it. He said, “I take a towel, get some water on it, and first clean the thing all up so there are no whiskers or soap or toothpaste or anything around it. And I clean the front so there are no splashes there. I throw the towel away in this receptacle, and now I start clean.

  “I lather my face, I shave, I brush my teeth.” I wandered off while he went through this fifteen-minute routine. He called me back when he was finished and said, “Now here is the way you leave it.” And he cleaned it up, clean as a whistle. He said, “That’s it. Then the next fellow has the same chance you had.”

  I noticed he always tipped the porter on these trips. On a trip to Chicago he tipped the man ten dollars, a hell of a lot of money in those days. The porters would always say, “Mr. Watson, sir, nice to see you,” and it wasn’t until I noticed those tips that I figured it out.

  I said, “Dad, that’s an awful lot of money to give a Pullman car fellow.”

  “I do that for two reasons, Tom,” he said. “First, that fellow has been up all night in his little cubicle and I feel sorry for him.

  “The second reason is that there is a whole class of people in the world who are in a position to poor-mouth you unless you are sensitive to them. They are the headwaiters, Pullman car conductors, porters, and chauffeurs. They see you in an intimate fashion and can really knock off your reputation.”

  These trips always seemed as if they might be the start of a warm and intimate friendship between Dad and me. But when we got home Dad would always become aloof again. I could never understand why he retreated. Maybe he really was too old to remember what it was like to be a boy, or maybe just too busy.

  When he couldn’t spend time with me himself, my father would farm me out to an employee. Most often this would be his personal secretary, Mr. Phillips. George Phillips, who started life as an accountant, ended up as president and then vice chairman of IBM after World War II, during Father’s declining years. Phillips was the perfect man Friday. He first went to work for Dad in 1918 and had my father’s complete confidence. If Father had a poor aunt he was sending money to, Phillips knew all about that aunt, where to send the money, how much, and so on. Phillips was on his way to making a large fortune in IBM stock, but he never owned a car until 1926. When he decided to get one, he went to Dad and said, “Mr. Watson, I have enough money to buy a car but I would like your permission before I do it.” Dad used to make Phillips take me sightseeing—to the Statue of Liberty, to Fraunces Tavern, to the Brooklyn Bridge. As soon as I was old enough, Phillips taught me how to shoot. Hunting was possibly the only enjoyment Phillips got out of life, and we went shooting together until he died.

  Most of the time my father praised me, telling me what a great fellow I was going to be. But as I look back, I think he must have been awfully worried. Around the time I was thirteen, I began to suffer recurring depressions so deep that no one knew where they were going to lead. The first one started with an attack of asthma. Just as I was beginning to feel a little better, all my willpower seemed to evaporate. I didn’t want to get out of bed. I had to be urged to eat; I had to be urged to take a bath. Such behavior today would probably be seen as a symptom of clinical depression, a serious mood disorder that causes a lot of suicides. But at the time my parents had all sorts of doctors in to see me, and no one knew what the problem was. The best doctor we had said he was sure the trouble was connected to my being an adolescent, but he didn’t know what to prescribe.

  After about thirty days I recovered. But six months later, the same thing happened. For the next six years, until I was nineteen and started college, twice a year I’d be severely depressed. Unless you’ve had such a depression, you can’t imagine what you go through. The fear is totally irrational, your whole thinking process goes awry, and everything you see seems unreal. I would look, for instance, at a knot in a ceiling beam. For some reason I’d tell myself, “That’s a plain board. There are no knots in that beam. I’m going crazy, I see a knot.” Then I’d slip from that stage, of thinking I was going cr
azy, to a stage where I didn’t know what was going on around me. I couldn’t read a book and couldn’t talk to anybody. When the doctor came I would give him one-word answers.

  Mother had the idea that if she got me to exercise I’d come out of it. So she bought me a medicine ball. I remember forcing myself out onto the driveway, having peculiar thoughts and wanting to lie down. Meanwhile the chauffeur would be throwing me this ball, back and forth, back and forth. Nothing helped, and I was afraid I’d never feel right again. These times must have been rough on my family, especially my brother Dick. He looked up to me, and I’m sure it was confusing to see me become suddenly helpless. I got horribly depressed at a camp in Nova Scotia where he and I both went one summer. I was barely functioning, getting up for camp activities but going back to my bunk as often as possible. Dick was only about nine, but I felt so lonely and desperate that I finally took him aside and tried to tell him what I was going through. I said, “Stick around, help me, and if I die be sure to tell Mother and Dad that it’s not their fault.”

  The crash of the stock market when I was fifteen seemed to fit right in with my periodic feelings of gloom. Two Short Hills men committed suicide and the community was pretty shaken. Father’s own fortune was hurt too, of course, but he managed to keep the damage on paper. After the suicides he made a gesture that I still admire today: he took over the school bills for the dead men’s children.