Zest for Life

Years ago, a brash young man, visiting in the Beacon Street home of Godfrey Lowell Cabot, asked his host how it felt to be both a Lowell and a Cabot. The question was greeted with thunderous silence. The guest tried manfully to excuse his faux pas. "I'm afraid," he murmured, "that's a pretty silly question, Mr. Cabot." Replied Cabot: "Young man. it's the damnedest silliest question I've been asked in 80 years!"

It was indeed, for being a Cabot and a Lowell in Boston was not a feeling, but a state of being. Yet Godfrey Lowell Cabot was remarkable even for a member of Boston's two most famed families. He was not content to peer down from Beacon Hill and mourn, like the late George Apley, the passing of Victorian glory. He moved into the outside world and modern times with astonishing vigor and effectiveness, and he left behind him his own highly personal mark.

Carbon & Kitty Hawk. He was born in 1861 and, of course, was given the best sort of education. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at 16, switched to Harvard, graduated magna cum laude in 1882 (the year Franklin Delano Roosevelt, perish the name, was born), went on to Zurich for further studies. Later, he journeyed into Pennsylvania looking for likely investments in oil and gas. Cabot concluded that there was money to be made in byproducts from the refining process. As usual, his judgment turned out to be correct. In 1887 he began manufacturing carbon black as a coloring agent in inks and paints. The business grew, and new uses were found for the chemical in fertilizers, batteries, tires, and finally, plastics. From this Cabot built a vast manufacturing empire, branched out into oil and gas production, pipelines and research facilities.

"If you haven't a zest for living." Cabot said, ''you weren't brought up right." He had enough zest for a dozen men, inherited from his father, Samuel Cabot, a physician (Harvard 1836). "About 79 years ago," said Godfrey Cabot one day in 1950, "my father told me that man is going to fly, and when he flies he will fly farther and faster than the birds. My father was a very farseeing man." Godfrey Cabot was bitten by the flying bug shortly after the Wright brothers lifted off a hill at Kitty Hawk. After the outbreak of World War I, Cabot pestered Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels into letting him try for the Naval Air service. "I wanted to swat the Germans," he explained. Cabot was 54, but he passed his test and flew antisubmarine patrols around Boston Harbor in a seaplane hunting eagerly for Germans he could swat. Still bedazzled by the promise of the air age, he experimented with a variety of inventions, patented a system by which planes could pick up air mail and other bundles from sea sleds while still in flight, and established pioneering research into the principles and mechanics of the ticklish art of mid-air refueling--which is today a commonplace technique used by pilots of the U.S. Strategic Air Command.

Cold Baths & Indian Clubs. Cabot was an indelibly Proper Bostonian--but of a special sort. For most of his adult life, he kept to a stern schedule: up at 7 a.m., a cold bath, breakfast at 7:15 (all Beacon Hill breakfasts included oatmeal; Cabot took his with bananas). He never really accepted the advent of the automobile, always walked the four or five miles downtown to his office and back, striding determinedly across the traffic-clogged streets, looking neither to right nor left. Six days a week, year after year, decade after decade, his employees could set their watches by his arrival at and departure from his office.

As an ascetic, Cabot was a terror. He neither drank nor smoked. But at 72 he could beat opponents half his age at tennis. He played a savage game of chess until he was 85, when he gave it up because he found it was too exciting. At 86, after recovering from a brief bout with pneumonia, the first thing he did was call for his Indian clubs. When he was 90, he got on a Boston subway, rode to Cambridge, picked up an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Harvard, tucked it under his arm, got back on the subway and went home again.

Peanuts & Bawdyhouses. He was, by every instinct, a Beacon Hill Republican. He spent years writing unsolicited letters of advice to U.S. Presidents--no matter who they were. Woodrow Wilson, he said, "could not run a peanut stand." As for F.D.R.--well, friends dared not mention the name in Cabot's presence.

It was a fundamental principle of Cabot life that one never shirked one's duty. He was largely responsible for closing down most of Boston's bawdyhouses, spent his own money to get evidence that led to the disbarment of a few corrupt lawyers and the ouster of a district attorney. He was a leading member of the blue-nosed Watch and Ward Society. As self-appointed judge and jury of the city's morals, the society pounced on the tiniest infractions of "good taste." Playwright Ben Hecht, who used the words "bitch" and "bastard" in one of his plays, was forced to change them to "dame" and "buzzard." Lindsay-Crouse's famed Life With Father rang repeatedly with the exclamation. "Oh, God!" In Boston it had to be changed to "Oh, Gad!"

Cabot's philanthropic gifts ran to millions--they included amounts for scientific research on bad-weather flying and the uses of solar energy. But Cabot was not a man to toss money about thoughtlessly. "Godfrey," said a friend, "would give his shirt if he thought you needed it and you hadn't asked for it. But ask him for something and, well, he sort of got his back up."

Godfrey Cabot had a daughter and four sons (including U.S. Ambassador to Poland John Moors Cabot), 14 grandchildren and 32 great-grandchildren. His pride of family was such that he could laugh at it. He delighted in the old quatrain:

And this is good old Boston,

The home of the bean and the cod,

Where the Lowells talk to the Cabots,

And the Cabots talk only to God.

Indeed, he collected variations of the doggerel, some of them slightly ribald. Among the most proper:

Here's to good old Boston,

The home of the road and the pike,

Where Goldfine speaks only to Adams,

And Adams speaks only to Ike.

Cabot lived long enough to see the day when a Massachusetts Irishman could become President of the U.S. Yet he maintained the customs and manners of a Cabot patriarch to the end. When he died in his sleep last week at 101, his chroniclers could say that, in fulfilling the last line of the original doggerel, Godfrey Lowell Cabot waited for God to speak first.

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