The Coral Gables Times

The Spocks in their living room, where he often works after dinner, late into the night.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY MARTIN LINSEY —RAPHO-GUILLUMETTE Left: Another view of the much-used, much-enjoyed living room, showing the pair of tall gold screens they made themselves 30 years ago. Above: Dr. Spock retires to a small, snug library if he has to work at night when they have guests. Right: The sloop "Turtle," and her proud owner. Son John Spock was the artist.

suburban neighbors, in the joys of home and weekends out of doors

tion, over cool yellow walls and side chairs of geranium velvet, and the tall screens the Spocks made when they were first married to hide radiators and closet doors, as they are doing to this day. There are nine big lamps in their 28-by-16-foot living room, and they keep them all on while they are reading or working or seeing their friends in the evening. "Cleveland is gray as pewter day after day all winter," Mrs. Spock says, "and I turn the lamps on at two in the afternoon if I am going to be out after dark. It's nice to come home into light and warmth." As Professor of Child Development at Western Reserve, Ben Spock keeps a schedule he would never recommend to a patient. He is out of the house before eight after a quick breakfast of hot cereal. (It's always hot cereal, and Mrs. Spock has discovered seven different kinds—a change for every day.) Clinics and lectures keep him at medical school until after six in the evening, and when they have had dinner he is very apt to go to his writing table for more work. In the past seven years, in addition to a full-time professorship, he has lectured, appeared on TV, and written about a hundred articles, all aimed at helping parents to understand and enjoy their children more. His wife says he would probably work until two every morning if she allowed it—but she doesn't. He has been described at work as hurrying to a clinic session with his long white coat billowing behind him like a sail about to be sheeted in, six-foot-four of energy and enthusiasm. As so often happens with the busiest people, the energy and enthusiasm carry over into the free time, too, what there is of it. He is a skillful carpenter, and back in his intern days he built the parlor desk as well as the screens they still use. In his upstairs workshop—it used to be a sun porch—he and his son John built a Sailfish and lowered the completed craft out through the window. She was launched, a great success, in nearby Pymatuning Lake where they sail on free weekends. TWICE A WEEK, during the winter, he leaves his office for the lunch hour and goes over to a nearby rink where he puts on figure skates for an hour of fun and practice and the limbering up that comes with a turn on the quiet ice. Sunday mornings are for skating, too. He spends his summer vacation, by choice, sailing off Cape Cod and down to Maine in a 23-foot sloop, "The Turtle," with his family for crew. "She's the cheapest boat three people could squeeze into and cruise," he says. (And he carries a picture of her in his wallet, along with Danny's.) Apropos of "Turtle's" cost, many people have wondered if the spectacular success of "Baby and Child Care" has made Dr. Spock a very rich man. To this he gives one of his characteristic plain-language answers: "A lot of people seem to think that just because the book sold in the millions, I'm a millionaire and that I'm a tightwad because we live relatively simply. The book, including all foreign rights, averaged about $17,000 in royalties over the past 12 years." On their family cruises, they have had three masts break over them, and in the Bahamas "Turtle" took 30-foot waves, all in the day's work to Dr. Spock. "He is completely without fear," says his wife, with a trace of regret in her voice. When he retires, he dreams of retiring to a boat—not "Turtle," something a little roomier—and cruising the Caribbean in the wintertime and his old Maine-Cape Cod beat in the summer. For the present the palm-fringed islands are a mirage on a far horizon, and Dr. Spock continues to fill his 14-hour working days helping professionals and parents with the endless problems—endless even to him—of "raising them right." Suburbia Today, February 1962 9