The following Life Report was submitted in response to my column of Oct. 28, in which I asked readers over 70 to write autobiographical essays evaluating their own lives.
A Love Story and Redemption
Sometimes, one has a story inside that just has to be put down on paper. In this case, a very personal story and a love story. One does not embark on such an exercise without considerable trepidations. Life stories and love stories are so personal. Still, I had a friend who always said, “What is most personal is most general,” meaning that the things that each of us thinks is unique in ourselves may, more often than not, be part of the universal experience, or at least the universal awareness.
To get to my love story, I will have to drag my reader through a hundred years of family history and 80 years of my own. I’m sorry to burden the reader with slogging through all this, but I can’t get to where I want to go unless I do.
I am my father’s son; same genes and chromosomes. We have shared the same interests in knowledge, in science, in innovation, and in invention. We have shared the same desire to make the world a little better place because of our work. Oh yes, his career was much more significant and contributing than mine. He had more inventions, better inventions, and had a pivotal role in vital developments, some of which affect our lives very much after more than 100 years. This is a story, not about the similarities of my father’s and my lives, but the differences. This is a story about how my wife Adrienne changed my life so that it would be so very different from my father’s life. This is a story about how my life became, for me at least, much more human, much more satisfying, and much happier than it otherwise would have been. It is a love story.
Prologue:
My father, Dr. Walter O. Snelling, PhD, was born on December 13, 1880, the product of two very distinguished families: the Snelling’s, New England Protestants who arrived in America in 1649 one step ahead of Cromwell, the bastard, because they were royalist and Cromwell had a price on their heads; and the Horner’s, my grandmother’s family, who were Philadelphia Quakers. Indeed, my grandmother, Alice West Horner Snelling Moque, was remarkable for her age. She was a college graduate in the 1870s, studied the law and medicine, and was a leading suffragette, editor of the leading suffragette magazine “La Pot Boullie” (the boiling pot), and an author. She was the first woman who was ever invited to address the American Medical Association, which she did, and her address is recorded in their proceedings, The Journal of the American Medical Association.
My father was a remarkable man. He was well educated. He was a graduate of Colombian University, Yale University and Harvard University, and received his PhD from George Washington University in 1904. Guess what, there were only 167 PhDs granted in the entire country in 1904! A truly educated man was a rarity.
My father went on to be a great scientist. He had 150 patents. A dozen of them were truly valuable. He invented high-pressure, high-temperature oil cracking, the patent of which he sold to John D. Rockefeller for $200,000 in 1910. Multiply that by 50 in today’s dollars. Prior to my father’s invention, the relatively new oil industry took whatever came out of the ground and distilled it. They really only wanted “coal oil” or kerosene in the beginning, and then later gasoline. They didn’t get too much of either. When they finished distilling what they wanted from the crude oil, they dumped the heavy fractions on the ground or in rivers! And they burned off the light fractions as flares. My father discovered that if you took the leftover gunks from the first distillation and put them in a very strong retort and heated them at very high pressure and temperature, the gunks reformed themselves into pretty much what had come out of the ground in the first place, like new crude oil. His reformed material could be re-distilled to get another batch of kerosene and gasoline. This could be done a couple of times. Most of the gasoline in the world was made by my father’s process for a few years. Then along came Houdry with catalytic reforming. He basically took my father’s process and added a catalyst. Of course, that was a much better process than my father’s. After Houdry, you could make almost as much of anything as you wanted, and his process replaced my father’s almost immediately.
In 1912 my father identified propane in the waste gasses, which was burned off as waste in those days, and discovered that he could recover it and it could be put in a pressure bottle, as a liquid, with a regulator and piped into the house as a gas main. Now, in those days 90% of the lighting was gas light. So my father founded the propane industry, giving people beyond the gas mains good lighting for the first time. Of course, no one used propane in those days for gas stoves and furnaces, as they do now. Next year the propane industry will be celebrating, big time, my father’s founding of the propane industry with his patents and the founding of the American Gasol Company, which he sold to Mr. Frank Phillips of Phillips Petroleum Company in 1914 for $50,000. You can also multiply that by 50 if you like. Unfortunately, my father did not believe in inheritance; he knew too many Harvard bums, as he used to say, so he gave all his money away, and I had to start over!
So I was born into a prosperous, educated, intellectual and comfortable family. My father married my mother, Marjorie, in 1918 when he was 38 and she was 18. I was raised in a beautiful mansion next to a park. From all outward appearances, you would think that I had a charmed life, but that was not the case. It looked that way from the outside, of course. We had Packard’s and 16 cylinder-Chryslers. We traveled at least six weeks every year. But things were not what they seemed.
In the 1930s and 1940s a man of my father’s stature could do no wrong. He was world-famous. He was in Who’s Who in America when only five people in the entire Lehigh Valley were. He was Mein Herr Doctor. He was wealthy. But he was also a perfectionist beyond all imagination. He had nine children. Each of us was expected to be, not good, but perfect. I have previously written about our summer trips.
They consisted of a lecture in the morning from the good Doctor, for us to write an essay in the afternoon and, depending on my father’s evaluation of the essay, dinner or no dinner.
Dinner conversations at home were formal. No talk about the weather, no talk about school, just talks about serious subjects. And each of us was expected to participate without question or exception. In stark truth, my dad was a martinet; abusive and a bully.
My father, I am sure, intended to be a loving and good father. The problem was he simply didn’t have a clue about how to be a loving and good father. His perfectionist instincts overruled everything else. Love was measured, very measured. If you got an A+, I love you. If you got a B; maybe I love you; if you got a C; I certainly don’t love you, nor should I. What should have been fun, work and achievement, were made onerous and hateful chores. No joy in Mudville.
My response to all this was to escape to prep school at Phillips Academy at Andover. Andover is an exceptional place and, besides all the wonderful things that other students also found there, I found a haven. Never did I return to the parental roof.
Now, the upbringing that I had did not make me into a comfortable or normal human being, sorry to say. First of all (and humility has no great place in this essay, as I am trying to be honest), I often knew more than other people did, and I am sure that I was overbearing about it. Secondly, I was a very eccentric student. Because I hated work and responsibility so much as I did, I never, never really studied in the normal sense. If I liked something, I devoured it, became an expert in it and got A’s. If I didn’t like something, I didn’t pay any attention to it, regardless of the consequences.
Parenthetically, nothing drives schoolmasters crazier. If you’re brilliant and always perform well, they love you and admire you. If you are dull and incompetent, they feel sorry for you. But if you are brilliant where you feel like being brilliant and disdainful where you feel like being disdainful, they hate you. You are giving them the finger, and they know it.
At University I was my old self. They wanted me to take prerequisites, which I didn’t feel like taking. They wanted me to concentrate in one curriculum or another, which I didn’t feel like doing. I solved this problem by saying that I would not be a candidate for a degree and that I would take what I wanted when I wanted. And that’s what I did. It really annoys professors and departments when you take courses without the required prerequisites. It really annoys professors and departments when you study mechanics, but you don’t want to bother to learn to build bridges. It really annoys professors and departments when you study physics, but you don’t bother learning how to design chips. And it bothers everybody if you study whatever you damn well please, a lot of science, but also plenty of history, literature and economics.
I did end up getting a degree though because of a wonderful and sympathetic Dean. Actually, to the amusement of some, I have since picked up an honorary doctorate along the way, but, as we all know, they don’t count.
The short synopsis of how I got a degree is that what I was actually doing was taking a survey course in science and the arts. There was no such program at the time at my university. But the Dean knew that in a few years the university was going to give not one but two degrees (a BS and an AB) for the work that I had done. He also knew that I had so annoyed the establishment at the university that they were never going to reward me by letting me get away with breaking the rules. Thanks to Dean Leith, he saw to it that I got a degree. Since I promptly started my own company, no one has ever seen my degree! Amid all questions of my checkered educational history, I have been a trustee of my wife Adrienne’s alma mater, Cedar Crest College, these past 30 years.
Now to the good part, the love story:
When I was a sophomore I went on a double date, to a Cedar Crest College sophomore prom, with a girl whom I had never seen before, and who was, shall we say, not to my liking. At our table was a simply marvelous young lady: ravishingly beautiful, bright, well-groomed, well-spoken, mannerly, disciplined and circumspect. Her name was Adrienne Celeste Angeletti.
What a wonder. She was, unfortunately, on the arm of the Yalie who had come to Cedar Crest College for the dance as her date. That Adrienne was the girl that I wanted, the girl that I needed to bring into my life, and the girl that I had to marry became very clear to me quite soon. So I began an energetic pursuit of this sweet young lady. She was a psych major and she used to say that I was her case study! She was diligent and very suspicious of my undisciplined ways. I pursued her with all the vigor at my command. First I had to get rid of the Yalie, and I did. Adrienne was studious, so I had to pretend to study. She used to go with a blanket and her books into Trexler Park to study. I would bring my blanket, books and notebooks to pester her. ―”You’re not studying,” she would say, to which I would retort: “I’m studying you.” Not a good answer, according to her. Usually we would make a treaty. Adrienne would study that afternoon if I would go away and leave her alone and be profligate, and then we would meet for dinner. Perfect!
To cut a long story short, I wooed and won this wonderful lady. We were married on March 21, 1951, the first day of our spring break, and rushed off to Bermuda for a quick honeymoon. Of course, sophomores did not get married in those days. Cedar Crest College was a United Church of Christ College with a PhD minister as President. He wasn’t amused, but it wasn’t against the rules either. Ten months later (that’s right, not seven months, not eight months, not nine months, but 10 months later) our first child was born, Adrienne C. Snelling II (Penny). We bought a little tract house in Alton Park, halfway between Cedar Crest College and Lehigh University. We arranged our classes so that one of us would always be there to take care of Penny. Adrienne took one year off to be a mother, and then finished her senior year and graduated from college, although she was by then well pregnant with our second child, Jonathan C. Snelling, when she marched in the academic procession to get her degree. The President was apoplectic that a pregnant lady would be marching, though there were no rules against it, fearing that some of the parents there might fear the worst for their little darlings.
Now seems the right time to tell you a little about Adrienne’s family. Her family was quite different than mine, but no less remarkable. Her father, Adrian William Angeletti, always called “Will,” was an Italian immigrant who arrived in the United States at Ellis Island when he was 12 years old in 1913. He spoke no English when he arrived. Here is how it came to pass that he came to America. Will’s father, born in Rome, was a skilled marble craftsman. In the late 19th century he was employed by the famous German pencil family, Eberhard Faber, to help build a great castle outside Nuremburg Germany. Will’s father spent a few years in Germany and decided that he wanted to go to America to make a new life for himself and his family So, he did go to America in 1909 and worked at his trade, without his family, until he had the money to bring his family over to America.
Will Angeletti practiced the marble trade, starting off in the Bronx, New York City, with his father and then went on his own, starting his own business, the Angeletti Marble Company. Such was Will’s skill, industry and ability, that in no time, Depression and World War II notwithstanding, Will became one of the principal interior marble contractors in New York City. Will did the interior marble work at such exciting buildings as the UN building, CBS building, the World Trade Towers and many other great New York City projects. Indeed, every time you see a world statesman at the podium in the UN General Assembly great hall, you will notice the really beautiful green marble behind the podium. Will’s work. Indeed, he did such a good job that he got to know Secretary General Trygve Lie. The Secretary General, himself, took a beautiful photo of Will at the podium as though Will were addressing the General assembly, and gave it to Will. It hangs, to this day, in the living room of our guest house.
During World War II, Will managed to keep his business healthy by building mausoleums for the Catholic Church in the New York area. Such were Will’s skills that he prospered in his new country and through the most difficult of times. In 1940 Will moved his family to Westchester County New York in a lovely suburban setting near the Village of Hartsdale. Adrienne’s mother was half-Irish and half-Scots and her family had arrived in this country in the last half of the 19th century. Her name was Marjorie Somerville. Adrienne’s mother died of breast cancer when Adrienne was only 12 years old, so I never met her mother. Adrienne was promptly enrolled in Good Council Academy, in White Plains New York, a Catholic convent boarding school. Then, Adrienne went to Cedar Crest College, in Allentown Pennsylvania, where I was lucky enough to meet her. We were married in the Hitchcock Memorial Church in Scarsdale, New York.
Although I never knew Adrienne’s mother, I did get to know an uncle and a few cousins. The uncle, Dr. John Somerville, was a professor of philosophy at Hunter College in New York City. He was famously left-wing! He was an avowed socialist and pacifist, to put it generously, who spent several years living in the Soviet Union under Stalin. He wrote several books, the most interesting of which was “The Philosophy of Peace”. Dr. John Somerville essentially recommended that the appropriate solution to the Cold War was capitulation on our part! While we were civil to one another, his and my views on the world could not have been further apart. Most of our discussions and correspondence were political. Neither one of us was able to convince the other, no surprise.
When I met Adrienne she was as well spoken as anyone I ever met, with a wonderful vocabulary, beautiful unaccented diction and perfect grammar. When I found out that her father was a recent immigrant I could hardly believe the perfection of her assimilation.
I worried about how my family would react to my choice of a bride. No doubt about it, my family had a distinctly north Europe preference. In all the family’s European travels they always involved only England, Scotland, Denmark, Holland Germany and Switzerland. Never did we set foot in a “Latin” country. I need not have worried. Everybody in the family took to Adrienne with warmth and enthusiasm. Indeed, just before were married, my mother told her “don’t worry, Adrienne, if there’s ever any trouble, we will take your side!” I believed it. But there never was any trouble.
Let me tell a quick funny story on Nordic versus Latin. I first took Adrienne to Europe in 1955. When I was planning that trip she asked me where we were going. I told her, of course, “well, North Europe.” “Why not Italy,” she asked? “Oh, I answered, we never go to Latin countries.” “We are going to Italy,” she responded! And so we did, along with the North. Thus began a lifelong love affair with Florence, Venice, Milan and Lake Como.
Adrienne was never rude or abrasive but often firm and determined. The first year we were married, as summer was approaching, I asked Adrienne “where shall we travel this summer?” “What on earth are you talking about,” she answered. “Don’t you travel in the summer,” I asked. Her response: “you are a married man now; get a job you lazy bum.” Which I wasn’t, but still, I got a job.
The love affair was only beginning. Adrienne was teaching me something about which I never had even a clue. She was teaching me about unconditional love! I could hardly imagine such a thing. The lady loved me, good or bad. She did not measure her love for me by performance. She discouraged me from being bad, and encouraged me to be good, but she loved me just as much, good or bad. Who could imagine such a thing?
We had a child every two years with a total of 10 years and five children. Adrienne, when she wasn’t taking care of me, was nobly taking care of our five children. And she was teaching me to be a parent. I was deeply inculcated in the Walter O. Snelling school of parenting. It’s all I knew. But Adrienne would look at me in horror when I would think of being a Walter O. Snelling parent and say, “You are not going to do that to my children!!” It wasn’t easy, but over the years she made some progress with me. And she was always an adoring, loving, generous and giving mother. Thank goodness. It should have been no surprise, because she was always an adoring, loving, generous and giving wife.
So we lived a charmed life together. Really charmed! Now, I do not wish for our accomplishments to be presented in a way that comes off boastful. Truly, that is not my intention. I just really want to present our charmed life together as it really seemed to me. I became an entrepreneur and a pretty successful one. Not perfect, mind you, but pretty good. Ups and downs, but more ups than downs.
My first venture was in the field of artificial insemination of dairy cattle, using semen carefully frozen to -320 degrees F by a process I developed and patented. We sold our products all over the world, and within 10 years the average dairy cow, bred to the best bulls, gave twice as much milk as before. This process was a great boon to the world. In due time I sold this company (Frozen Semen Products Company) to Union Carbide Corporation. Cryo-Therm, Inc. (in the applied thermodynamics business) was the next company. Innovations followed. Patented products developed at Cryo-Therm were sold to 3M (energy storage electric heat baseboard); to Armstrong Cork Co. (continuously molded urethane pipe insulation); to the Melpar Division of Westinghouse Airbrake (our military division, and several patents); and to New Brunswick Scientific (our Fermentation Design Corp.).
Busy, busy, but still we had time for a great life together. Indeed, we are right now nearing the end of our 61st year of marriage. Not bad. Adrienne was always modest and conservative. One day she told me, you can have any two houses you want, but not four. I’m a nomad, and I don’t know which way to head for the bathroom at night half the time. So, gone were Aspen and St Croix.
I was collecting antique wooden boats when I got out one of the old Packard’s that I had saved from my courting days and had stored in a barn. It was a 1937 12-cylinder Packard convertible coupe, spare wheels on the side, with a rumble seat and golf bag doors and a luggage rack on the back. What are you going to do with that Packard, my sweetie asked. “Why, I’m going to restore it,” I answered. Well, said Adrienne, “you can have antique boats and a wife, or you can have antique cars and a wife, or you can have antique cars and antique boats, but what you can’t have is antique cars and antique boats and a wife!” The Packard went away.
Still, we had a great life. Adrienne has traveled on every continent and we have enjoyed and treasured so many wonderful places in the world that we love. We had real freedom and mobility. We flew together, in our twin, more than a million miles without a Band-Aid or a scratch.
When woman’s lib came along with a vengeance, Adrienne’s friends began casting gentle aspersions at the fact that she was a stay-at-home housewife, and with help at home. Get out and do something, they urged. So Adrienne became a wonderful, prize-winning fine arts photographer. She took the pictures for and did the art editing for two books. In due time Governor Tom Ridge appointed her to membership on the Pennsylvania Council for the Arts. She served on many a board, as she was supposed to.
But most important to our charmed life was our five children. They are good and happy children. One lawyer, one businessman, one banker, one artist and one doctor, all good and happy people. We have 11 grandchildren. Such a joy! Watching them prosper, go to prep school, graduate from college and university, and take up their professions is all so glorious.
My career has been somewhat unusual because so much of it has been spent in public service. My father always said that you should spend the first 25 years of your life getting ready, the second 25 years of your life doing well for yourself, and the third 25 years of your life putting back into the pot. In my case, by the time I was 40 I had sold my businesses and was on to public service and entrepreneurship. A group of five of us started an enterprise venture capital fund. It was fabulously successful. Meanwhile I was doing other things which weren’t so successful, like building a new town, a financial disaster; then, much better, running a great orchard as well as a series of stores and a chain of restaurants – lots of fun and interesting. Finally, back again to real estate development.
My public service career began when I was 21 and was elected a Republican ward committeeman. In 1969 I was elected to the Allentown City Council and elected by that Council four times as its president. In the mid-70s I became finance chairman of the Republican Party in Pennsylvania. I am proud to have helped to raise money to elect several great governors, senators, congressmen and presidents. Along the way I have received four presidential appointments, some of them significant. In my 70th year, I was appointed by the President to the Board of Directors of The Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority (which manages Reagan and Dulles Airports, plus the Dulles toll road). And in due time, I was elected by that board to be their chairman, a post I still hold. At 80 I was still working 24/7. A nice way, if I do say so myself, to bow out.
So, if this has been a charmed life, and I think it has, why is there need for redemption, an important part of my title? Now, it is not easy to sit in judgment of one’s own life. Adrienne and I have made our marriage work, and work well. As she always says, good marriages are not made in heaven; they’re made by hard work. And work hard at her marriage is something at which Adrienne has always excelled. She has, for these some 60 years, been steadfastly loving, sweet, kind, generous and forgiving.
There’s no doubt in my mind that I was not an easy husband. I was impatient, demanding, headstrong, willful and cantankerous. Parenthetically, I have several books in my library given to me by smiling children, all of which have the description curmudgeon in their titles. My mantelpieces and library shelves have three or four lovely ceramic and plaster gargoyles. (You know, that mystical demon always portrayed munching on a human thighbone? Were my children telling me something?!)
Redemption:
Six years ago tragedy struck our household. My dear, sweet Adrienne was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. This relentless wasting disease destroys the mind. I have now seen many people with Alzheimer’s, and it is a terrible disease. Many, besides losing their memories and their cognitive abilities, also get downright ugly and hostile. Not my sweetie. Although she is a very, very sick puppy, she remains to this day a sweet, happy, loving and generous person. How lucky for both of us. To have such an affliction in the household is a very learning experience. Some people quite promptly disappear from your life. But others, indeed most, rally around in caring and support. It’s quite touching.
So, here comes the redemption. It never occurred to me for a moment that it would not be my duty and my pleasure to take care of my sweetie. After all, she took care of me in every possible way she could for 55 years. The last six years have been my turn, and certainly I have had the best of the bargain. So I have dug in with the will. Adrienne likes to be with me so, everywhere I go Adrienne goes as well. We have wonderful helpers here in Allentown, at Estrellita, and in Washington. Certainly they have helped me enormously, but real care for a loved one with Alzheimer’s cannot be delegated. I did not need to be told that; I felt it in my bones.
Truly, I’ve been simply amazed at the support I have received, indeed, more than support, downright approval and approbation from onlookers. How often people have said to me, sweetly and lovingly, “ten years ago we never would have believed in our wildest imagination that you would care for Adrienne the way you do.” That half makes me feel good, and it half makes me feel terrible. I’m glad that they think I’m doing the right thing, but I’m very sorry that they didn’t think that I would.
It’s not noble, it’s not sacrificial, and it’s not painful. It’s just right in the scheme of things. After all, this lady rescued me from a fate worse than death, and for a long, long time. What I am doing for her pales beside all that she has done for me for more than half a century. We continue to make a life together, living together in the full sense of the word; going about our life, hand in hand, with everyone lending a hand, as though nothing was wrong at all.
Andover was not only a refuge and intellectual haven for me; it was a place where values, human and personal values, were first and foremost. My Andover experience came at just the right time in my life, and the values I was exposed to there have been with me all of my life.
Nearly 250 years ago, Paul Revere designed and engraved, at Phillips Academy, Andover’s Great Seal. It shows a beehive with a swarm of busy bees. On the sun is written “Non Sibi,” in Latin “Not for self alone.” The motto, also in Latin, is “Finis Origine Pendet,” “The Beginning Foretells the End.”
So it is. Sixty-one years ago, a partner to our marriage who knew how to nurture, nurtured a partner who needed nurturing. Now, sixty-one years later, a partner who is learning how to nurture is nurturing a partner who needs nurturing.
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