When the stock market crashed in October 1929, my grandmother Jane Kidston Bunker was on a plane in Europe.
She was flying from Paris, where she was taking her junior year of study at Smith College, to London to visit friends on a school break. People didn’t fly much back then, even people in my grandmother’s social class. So her mother didn’t tell her father she was making the trip.
But he found out when he got a terse cable from his daughter designed to let the family know that she had arrived safely. The cable was delivered to my great-grandfather’s office at the Board of Trade in Chicago, where he was in the midst of what my grandmother called “a near riot.”
This was just a tiny part of the fantastic life my grandmother led.
It’s strange to remember that Didi, as we called her, was born just seven years after the very first airplane flight ever. And she ended up being a passenger on the Concorde, the first supersonic consumer aircraft.
She was 10 years old before women in the U.S. had the right to vote. She lived through two world wars, the Great Depression, Prohibition, and the Cold War. From radio to the internet, biplanes to the moon landing. (She had…complex feelings about FDR, saying that while he undoubtedly had a lot of charisma, whether he had been a good or bad President was “still being debated.”)
In addition to the times she lived in, she was also set apart by her wealth and social class, although I’m sure she didn’t look at it that way. It was just the air she breathed. But she grew up and raised her children in a world of chauffeurs, live-in help, summer homes and first-class world travel by air and sea.
The ivy-covered house she and my grandfather built when my mother was a toddler was grand in some ways: it had a large pool and pool house, a butler’s pantry, a sweeping staircase in the foyer, and a formal living room that led through floor-to-ceiling metal and glass sliding doors onto an elegant tiled porch.
But in stark contrast to so many gaudy McMansions of the modern era, it was also a comfortable family house, a real home rather than a cold triple-height-ceiling showpiece designed to impress. I loved that house so much.
Although her family was not affected by the Depression in the same way so many were, she still had long-lasting effects from that period, as did most of her peers. Calling information to get a phone number was forbade in her house, because it cost a dime. She famously kept every tin foil pan that every frozen dinner had come in, as if Roosevelt was going to call her up one day and say, “Jane, I need one more bomber. What’ya got?”
She was also incredibly generous, with both her time and her money. She put all of her grandchildren through college, a commitment that changed many lives as it cascaded through the generations. (My brothers went to Brown and Cornell. I was the black sheep of the family — I went to Northwestern.)
Didi spent many years doing braille transcription for a foundation for the blind in Chicago. She was so good at it that she was tasked with transcribing technical and math textbooks and books in other languages, work that others couldn’t do. One of my most vivid memories of childhood was walking into the library of my grandparents’ house and seeing the card table set up with the fascinating braille typewriter sitting on it, ready to go at a moment’s notice.
Other than in my grandmother’s library, my only real experience with braille was watching the tragic Mary Ingalls lose her sight on “Little House on the Prairie.” (I’m a child of the 70s. What can I tell you.) I once asked my grandmother if sighted people could read braille by touch. She said she could proofread it by sight, but not by touch. I was enthralled by this other world that she could access.
My grandparents were gregarious people. Their basement had a bar and was set up specifically for parties; the whole house, really, was designed for entertaining. And they spent their entire adult lives traveling around the world, accumulating experiences and friends.
One of her friends was the actress Celeste Holm, probably best known as Bette Davis’ best friend in “All About Eve.” (Watch out, Kevin Bacon.) They met because of a summer theater program in Hinsdale back in the day. There was no place for the actors to stay, so local residents put them up over the season. Sort of Airbnb for the classic Hollywood era. How cool is that?
Didi didn’t just meet people; she kept in touch with them too, writing letters faithfully. Which led to Christmas — her favorite holiday — and the display of hundreds of holiday cards covering every surface of the entryway of their home. I doubt I have even met as many people in my entire life as the number who sent my grandmother a card at Christmas.
She also started writing a daily diary in her teens, which she kept up pretty continuously until her death. This was not so much about her thoughts and feelings, but a more workmanlike accounting of the day: “Leg of lamb for dinner tonight,” that sort of thing. The most interesting thing about the diaries, I think, is that several years of them were written in shorthand, since she had attended business school after college. Years later, even she couldn’t read the shorthand entries.
The fleeting nature of history.
I loved her language, which sometimes to me held such an echo of a bygone era. She would say things like “They’re as different as chalk from cheese!” and “Natch, shnooks!” The latter was usually reserved for rousing matches of Triple Yahtzee, her favorite game.
She loved to tell stories; maybe that’s where I get it. One of my greatest regrets about growing up, especially as I write these family histories, is that I didn’t sit and listen to more of her “famous stories.” What I could have heard, if I was just listening.
She could be incredibly prickly and stubborn. Which led to endless conflict with my father, who was definitely her equal in those areas. I’m pretty sure that Didi didn’t consider my father a worthy match for her daughter; but I got the sense that under all the battling, deep down they respected and loved each other. They both loved my mother, after all.
She had raven-black hair into her 80s, which she maintained that she never dyed, contributing to her regal air. One of my mother’s good friends visiting Hinsdale told Didi that she reminded her of the Duchess of Windsor, Wallis Simpson.
“Well I saw her once in an elevator,” my grandmother replied, “and she looked like a charwoman!”
Remember how I said she could be prickly?
But she was also funny and intelligent and knew that good manners weren’t about making you feel superior to other people. They were about moving through the world with as much grace and class as possible. She embodied that, too.
With all the grand sweep of her life that I’ve only touched on here, now that she’s gone, it’s the little personal moments that I will remember most.
One Christmas — we spent pretty much all the major holidays at Didi’s house growing up — my brother Matt and I were driving down to Hinsdale together, just the two of us. We started talking about how when you would enter the house and go into the library to greet Didi, she would be sitting in the high-backed chair in the corner. You would give her a kiss on the cheek, and ask her how she was.
And without fail, in that wonderful gravelly voice shaped by years of smoking unfiltered Pall Malls, she would always respond, “Lousy.”
So my brother bet me $5 that when we walked into the house and greeted her, she would say “Lousy.” I agreed, much against my better judgement, to take the case that she would say literally anything else. Obviously the hope was that she would say something like “I’m good! Thanks!” But I braced for a loss, because she always said “Lousy.”
We walked into the library. I leaned in to give my grandmother a kiss, and said brightly, “How are you, Didi?”
“Terrible,” she said.
Best $5 I ever won.
I miss you, Didi.