On Saturday, April 13, 1963, the great baseball player Pete Rose, later disgraced for betting on his own team, hit the first of his record 4,256 hits; the USSR launched its Kosmos satellite from Kapustin Yar near Volgograd; the wreckage of the Dutch ship Vergulde Draeck, sunk in 1656, was discovered; chess champion Garry Kasparov was born; and I was 10 years old, drawing animals on napkins with the most famous public intellectual in America.
As memory serves, they were horses.
My encounter with Margaret Mead wasn’t my first rodeo. By then I had “attended” at least as many academic conferences as many assistant professors. This time it was the annual meetings of the American Society for Group Psychotherapy and Psychodrama (ASGPP), an organization my father, the psychiatrist J.L. Moreno, founded in 1942. That year the conference was held at the Hotel Pennsylvania across from Madison Square Garden. Demolished in 2023, it was one of the biggest hotels in the world, a four-star in today’s ranking of luxury. Among the notable events in its history was the death of the CIA’s anthrax expert Frank Olson, who fell to his death from an 11th-floor window in 1953 after being dosed with LSD.
This weekend in 1963, the hotel was given over to various demonstrations and lectures about psychodrama and group psychotherapy. Among the hundreds in attendance, there was a mixture of psychiatrists, psychologists, social scientists, social workers, and others either trained in or seeking more exposure to my father’s innovative methods. Already well established as the first of the group therapies, many of his ideas became central to the human potential movement that emerged a few years later at “growth centers” like Esalen in Big Sur, California. But in the early 1960s, his followers were working mainly in small, freestanding therapy practices or as staff members of large mental hospitals that had yet to be deinstitutionalized.
That memorable Saturday night was the occasion for the annual banquet in one of the ballrooms. These rather formal dinners were common features of professional meetings in those days, the climax of the weekend’s work when attendees gathered around a couple of dozen round tables in white tablecloths. The male diners would mostly have been dressed in dark suits, white shirts, and ties, the women in equivalent apparel, routine professional dress before the culture shifted to informality. At some time in the evening, a photographer would perch on a high ladder in one corner of the room to memorialize the event (as was also the case for weddings and bar mitzvahs), with everyone instructed to twist around in the seats to smile for the camera. Except, that is, for the head table where the organization’s officers and other dignitaries dined on a riser before the assembled multitude.
There was no dancing as there would have been 10 years later. The highlight of that more staid occasion was a keynote speaker, and there was never a more distinguished keynoter at the ASGPP meetings than the great anthropologist. Though Mead’s methods and conclusions were criticized years after her death, her 1928 study of the lives of women and girls in Samoa as sexually liberated fascinated and titillated mid-century America and became a model of fieldwork for many younger social scientists. A public television documentary in 1970 and her congressional testimony about adolescence in the modern world contributed to her iconic status.
In 1963 Mead was at the peak of her influence, coming off a term as president of the American Anthropological Association. As the former president of the World Federation for Mental Health and a frequent guest at the famous Menninger Clinic, she was comfortable around mental health professionals. Her third husband, Gregory Bateson, was especially interested in family therapy.
Which of us initiated that drawing session? Seated at the head table, my mother to my left, Mead to my right, I was quite obviously the only kid in the room. Mead was comfortable with children. In her fieldwork on the islands, she routinely asked the local kids to draw animals. It was, she thought, a way to learn how children first understand themselves as part of a culture.
Perhaps I was already doodling on a paper napkin and she joined in, or maybe she noticed I was somewhat bored and made the suggestion. I wouldn’t have carried a pen, so she must have offered one. In any case, it was different enough from my interactions with other adult conference-goers that it made a lasting impression. Her personal charisma might have had something to do with it, enough to make an impression on a 10-year-old. At the time I experienced her as an exceptionally kind old lady, but an old lady (she was 52) just the same.
A few minutes later, it was time for Mead to deliver her address. I can still see her standing at the lectern to my left.
There is no record of Mead’s remarks that evening. Perhaps she noted the continual need for adolescent mental health services amid the stressors of modern industrial life, which she believed compared badly to the easy transition from childhood to adulthood that she claimed to have observed in Samoa. This was a longstanding theme in Mead’s writings and social activism.
As for me, perhaps I was thinking about dessert. I should have been thinking about whatever homework assignment I had due for Mrs. Christopher’s fifth-grade class that Monday, but my education at South Avenue School was never remotely as compelling as my experience on the road with my unique parents and their often eccentric and sometimes brainy associates.
Six months later, President Kennedy was assassinated, and 12 months after that the Beatles came to America. The ’60s had truly begun. Mead’s preoccupation with the stresses of growing up was never more relevant. I wish I’d saved those napkins.