Affection Harvested in Autumn

He was the scion of one of the wealthiest mercantile families in a small industrial city in the Middle West.  She was the daughter of the descendants of the Irish and German immigrants who had populated the city in the 19th century.  Both received their grammar school educations at St. Benedict Catholic School, 13 years apart.  He went East for his high school education in private schools.  She graduated from the local public high school.

He went on to Yale, where he graduated in 1924 with a degree in engineering and where he was elected to the Torch Society, which honored the 10 outstanding juniors for their achievements.  He was also an exceptional athlete, especially excelling in track and field events, while also playing the offensive end position on two undefeated Yale football teams in 1923 and 1924.  In the latter year he was named to the nation’s All-America football team and voted Yale’s best all-around athlete.

She studied at the local state college for one semester, majoring in English, before dropping out during the Great Depression to work in order to help her large family.  She had wanted to be a writer, and in fact had written a novel during grammar school.

He was handsome and gifted and a sportsman.  She was beautiful and multi-talented and a sportswoman.  He was Anton Hulman, Jr.  She was my mother-to-be, Dorothy Cleary.

Crossing Paths

After his college graduation, Tony–virtually everyone called him ‘Tony’–returned to his home town of Terre Haute, Indiana, and joined the family’s wholesale grocery business.  His first assignment was to market Hulman & Company’s Clabber Girl Baking Powder, which he turned into the nation’s leading brand of baking powder.  By 1931, at the age of 30, he had become the company’s president, succeeding his father.

Soon thereafter, having set aside her college ambitions, Dorothy Cleary was hired into the Hulman & Company secretarial pool.

After the Great Depression, the company grew much larger by diversification under Tony’s leadership.  Among other things, it acquired gas and utility companies, a brewery, radio and television stations, newspapers, real estate, and a number of Coca Cola bottling plants.  But by far his most significant acquisition occurred in November 1945, when he purchased the dilapidated Indianapolis Motor Speedway for $750,000 (nearly $12 million in today’s dollars).   It had been left to ruin during World War II, and Tony renovated the facility and turned the annual Indianapolis 500 Mile Race into the world’s most celebrated car race, which it remains today.  For more than two decades he began each year’s race with the most celebrated words in motor sports, “Gentlemen (and later also Ladies), start your engines!”

Meanwhile, with her intelligence,  diligence and uncompromising discretion, young Cleary was also growing in her roles at the company.  By and by she became Tony’s secretary.  At the height of her career, she had much more than routine secretarial duties.  She was made an officer of the company, its Secretary, and she had a secretary of her own.  She wrote Tony’s speeches for him.  She was likely the only woman in the contingent of Hulman executives that attended Tony’s purchase of the Speedway in Indianapolis in 1945.  During the war Tony and she led the nationally-visible and very successful savings bond drive in Vigo County to support the war effort.  Throughout, she shunned any limelight that may have attended her successes and responsibilities.  In a 1946 profile of Tony, the Indianapolis Times newspaper simply described her as “his pretty secretary.”

During their close working relationship, Dorothy and Tony developed great mutual respect, trust and admiration.  In her later accounts of her years at the company, she also said that nothing crossed the line.  Tony was a married man, they were 13 years apart in age, and for her part Dorothy was very conservative in her personal deportment.

Centrifugal Forces

In 1946 Dorothy left Hulman & Company to marry my father, the young architect Ralph O. Yeager, Jr.  Many friends advised her that it was foolish to leave her job.  It was likely the most prestigious–and perhaps the highest compensated–position held by any woman in the city to that point in its history.  Not only had she been able to help her family financially, she had bought a house for herself and her parents, and she had paid her younger brother’s college tuition at Tulane University.  But she was a traditional woman of her times, and she wanted nothing so much as to have a family.  In seven years my parents had four of us.  But she also remained a very active presence in the city, joining many civic organizations and taking leadership positions in several of them.

Nonetheless Tony Hulman remained a presence in our lives.  My mother often had occasion to speak to her family of him and his businesses, all the more so as she had helped her younger brother land a good job at Hulman & Company after the war, and he spent his entire career there.  As a boy I was told how many gifts Hulman & Company had given on the occasion of Dorothy’s wedding, including a number of our home’s appliances.  Annually, at Christmas, we received a set of collector Speedway drinking glasses, from highball glasses to large beer glasses, all printed with the Indianapolis 500 logo and with an updated list of the famous race’s annual winners, and with a card from Tony.

In 1957 Tony invited our family to use his elegant wooded summer lodge, complete with lake and pool.  It was a fine, sunny weekend, which I most prominently remember for my three-year-old brother jumping into the pool’s deep end without his life jacket and sinking below the surface.  There must have been something special in the water.  Before I could get to him, he had bobbed back up with a smile on his face, exulting in his toddler achievement.  Like our Hulman benefactor, he went on to be named to the All-America teams in both high school and college, but as a competitive swimmer.

Those good family days were not to last.  By the mid-1960s, my father’s finances had collapsed when his architectural firm, Yeager Architects, failed, and my parents’ marriage was doing even worse. (I describe some of this here.)  In an apparent move to save both, my father moved the family to the Minneapolis area at the end of 1965.  There my parents separated in 1968 and divorced.  Given ongoing family financial problems, my mother had already gone back to work in 1966 as a regular secretary in a local business, earning a small fraction of what she had earned at Hulman & Company 20 years earlier, and working at about the same fraction of her true abilities, simply typing, filing and taking calls in order to pay the bills.  As she now had to largely support herself, she kept at this work until her retirement in her 70s, including through moves to Oakland, California, and back to Minnesota.  She never complained about the work.  She never remarried.

Meanwhile, Tony continued to build his businesses and grow the Indianapolis 500 into the “greatest spectacle in racing,” as it became known everywhere.  The racetrack is the largest spectator sporting venue in the world, and the facility has packed in as many as 350,000 spectators on race day.  If you like, you could fit all the courts at Wimbledon, Yankee Stadium, the Kentucky Derby, the Rose Bowl, the Roman Coliseum, and all of Vatican City–all of these at once–in the infield of the 2.5 mile oval track.

He also became Terre Haute’s greatest benefactor, widely known for his kindnesses and his great generosity.  Like his father and grandfather before him, he gave millions to higher education institutions and other civic organizations in the city.  And he donated land to build the city’s airport, a Catholic high school, and a golf course, among other properties.  For all of his wealth and his ambition, he was a humble man who, like my mother, did not crave or particularly welcome attention and praise.

Autumn

Much of the decade of the ’70s was not kind to my mother.  Her self-esteem and financial security had been devastated by my father’s unfaithfulness and the divorce, and his later failures to pay alimony as required.  She was sad much of the time, angry at other times, and routinely anxious at the uncertainties in her life.  She began to dull her pain with drink in the evenings, but she never missed a day of work or failed to carry out her duties.  During those evenings, though, she occasionally made angry calls to her children, to me in particular while I was in graduate school in Wisconsin.  In them, she would attack me so as to discharge her anger at my father by asserting my failures, real or imagined.

One weekend, while I was visiting in the Twin Cities, I returned to her apartment after a very late night out with friends and went to bed.  She had been asleep, but moments later I heard her begin sobbing–first quietly, then more loudly–in her bedroom down the hall.  I lay there for a few minutes, lost as to what to do but not so as to what made her cry.  I knew, because she often told me.  In her worst moments, her life seemed a failure and the loss of what should have been seemed grave.  Still not knowing what to do or say, I finally walked into her darkened bedroom, went to the side of her bed, sat down and simply held her until she stopped crying.  No words passed between us, either then or thereafter regarding those moments.

Then one random morning in the mid-1970s–early, around 6:30, before she went to work–her phone rang.  The voice on the other end was as familiar as it was shocking to hear.  It was Tony Hulman’s.  They had not spoken in years, and my mother must have thought that something was terribly wrong for him to call, and at that hour.

Nothing was wrong.  Tony just wanted to visit, to catch up a bit.  They spoke for awhile, an enjoyable conversation, before Dorothy had to drive to work.

That call began a pattern:  He continued to call her five days a week–every work day–to visit on the phone for 15 or 20 minutes before she went to work.  He would get to his office in the Hulman & Co. building early every morning and dial her number.  These daily conversations went on for a year or more, until his unexpected death in late October of 1977.  They meant very much to my mother.  She could have not cared less for his fame and fortune, and she kept these calls confidential from everyone but a couple of her adult children.  She had simply never lost her affection for her friend, mentor and boss, and this return of his own for her reinvigorated her sense of worth and framed her days with new meaning.

During this period he often sent her gifts and even offered to buy her a car at a point at which she needed one.  She politely declined the automobile and returned all of the gifts, save one that she kept:  a nine-inch color television set so that she could watch the nightly news while working in her galley kitchen. (I recall encouraging her in this as she was such a news junkie.)  Given her high sense of propriety and no little bit of Catholic guilt, she felt taking gifts from him would be improper, as she had explained to me more than once.  It appeared that Tony kept their regular conversations from his wife–given the calls only from his office–and Dorothy always carried a discomfort that rode shotgun with the renewed joy of their friendship.

Epilogue

I will never know, but it seems as if the renewal of their affection so late in their lives helped to change the trajectory of my mother’s.  Her last two decades of life–she died unexpectedly in 1998 in the Twin Cities–were much more positive and joyful years.  The lonely drinking ceased.  She was noticeably more content and eager to embrace joy when the opportunities arose:  her adult children settling firmly into marriages, homes and careers, the arrival of grandchildren, traveling to visit family and friends.  Finally retiring from her secretary’s job.

The two old friends, for all of their manifest differences, were alike in so many of the ways that mattered.  They were both humble, diligent, trustworthy, honest and generous.  If one had built a business and sporting empire upon the family fortune, while the other scrambled to survive both emotionally and materially, they had seen a similar light in each other from the beginning.  While it had dimmed during the intervening decades, it had been rekindled–just in time.

Tony and Dorothy both had their funerals at the church of their respective childhoods, St. Benedict Church in Terre Haute.  His was the largest funeral the city had ever seen.  The funeral Mass was grand, celebrated by seven priests and attended by many leaders in politics, sports and business, and hundreds of local admirers.  Hers was performed before about a dozen or so family and friends, by a priest who did not know her.   Her 10-year-old grandson played his beautiful composition “Triumphant Scales” on the church’s grand piano, and it was both solemn and joyful.  They were both buried at Calvary Cemetery on the east side of the city.  Hulman family wealth had been essential to the building of both the church and the cemetery.

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