The Admiral's Son with an Independent Spirit

• Published in: Marriage & family review 2001-01, Vol.31 (3-4), p.155-179
• Main Author: Schumm, Walter R.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Armed forces; Autobiographies; Autobiography; career; Career development; Careers; childhood; Employment; Families; Families & family life; Human relations; Interpersonal communication; military; Personal relationships; Researchers; Social sciences; USA
• ISSN: 0149-4929; 1540-9635
• DOI: 10.1300/J002v31n03_10

KEYWORDS. Autobiography, research, career, military, childhood INTRODUCTION My Father's Family Most of my family's oral tradition was associated with my father's stories that framed much of my childhood and my values. My earliest forebear was orphaned as a child in Germany around the age of ten or so and departed Germany in 1841 to avoid the draft, becoming a cabinetmaker in Switzerland. In 1849 Christian Schumm went to California via Panama to find gold. He didn't find enough, but I still have a piece of a watch chain made from the gold he panned. He moved to Wisconsin to take up farming, which he also failed at, and eventually died in 1881 or so as a saloon keeper in Sauk City, where he and his wife are buried (albeit in different cemeteries). His son Walter, one of several children, earned a degree in architecture from Columbia University, I think, and had a hand in designing the old Grand Central Station in New York City. It is reported that he also designed a building specifically to warehouse/sell china. Once a Catholic bishop offered him all the contracts on Long Island if he would convert and he told him "No way!" At any rate, Walter and his wife Alberta Brooke didn't get along well and they separated about 1911 when my father Brooke Schumm was five or six years old. They tried to persuade my father at that age to choose living in an orphanage rather than living with one of them, but my father refused and ended up living with his mother. My father's family was so poor that as a teenager he cried in thankfulness one Christmas when his mother got him, as his only Christmas present, a bar of soap designed to help reduce acne. He was so happy just to receive anything. One time he thought his mother would be upset with him because he came home from school with bullet holes in his new jacket (gang warfare, he was an innocent bystander) but she was happier he had escaped harm.