D AV I D PAT R I C K C O L U M B I A Pennoyer. It is clearly and simply an almost Zen-like story of a man’s life. Pennoyer, who is now in his 92nd year, was born and brought up in New York (Glen Cove in Long Island, to be exact). It was a privileged existence that was and still is associated with great wealth and its place in society. On his mother’s side, he is directly descended from J. Pierpont Morgan and J.P. Morgan, Jr.—his great-grandfather and grandfather, respectively. The Morgan family had been in international banking from the mid-19th century, beginning with Junius Spencer Morgan, great-great-grandfather of Pennoyer. As It Was: A Memoir documents the way of
life for a family of their means and lifestyle in America. Pennoyer, the author, was born on April 9, 1925, along with his twin sister Kay Pennoyer—the middle two of six—in the third-floor nursery of his grandfather Morgan’s house on Madison Avenue and 37th Street, which is now part of the Morgan Library & Museum. They were the second and third children of his parents, Frances Tracy Morgan and Paul Pennoyer. His parents had married in June 1917 in an Episcopal church that his maternal grandfather helped found in Locust Valley. (Pennoyer’s grandfather, J.P. “Jack” Morgan, Jr., was a deacon of the church and also
a stickler for time. The sermon had to be 12 minutes. He always wore his watch. Everybody knew his issue and didn’t want to upset him.) He writes: “Just before my father went off to (the First World) war, Grandpa Morgan commissioned the architectural firm of Goodwin, Bullard, and Woolsey to build ‘Round Bush,’ a picturesque English-style country house of brick, stucco, and slate. The house featured at least twenty-three rooms, in addition to a seven-car garage, six-stall stable, pig sty, chicken pen, tennis court, squash court, and fifty-foot swimming pool. It sat on a hill overlooking more than fifty acres of fields,
woods, and pasture. There were abundant flower gardens and several acres of vegetable gardens. It was named after a hamlet near my grandfather’s estate north of London, Wall Hall, where my mother grew up. It had a perfectly round English boxwood bush at the center of the circular drive near the front entrance.” “Round Bush” was staffed with a cook, an upstairs maid, two kitchen maids; an English butler (a houseman “who did everything from making ice cream to shoveling coal, winding the clocks, an doubling as my father’s valet”); a Scottish grounds superintendent who lived in the gatehouse; two Sicilian gardeners; a French
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