Rachel Harriet Talbot

Through her father, Rachel met TAM professor Harald Malcolm Westergaard; they were married in 1925 at 1113 California Avenue. The nepotism rule that forced Rachel's older sister Mildred to leave Illinois would also have applied to Rachel, but Arthur had agreed to step down as head in 1926. "Grandfather retired in part because of Malcolm, so he could stay on in TAM," Warren Jr. says. "Herbert had left."

For eleven years, Rachel and Malcolm made their home in Urbana, first on South Lincoln Avenue, and then at 410 Delaware Avenue. During that time they had two children, Mary Talbot Westergaard and Peter Talbot Westergaard. In 1936, Malcolm accepted the Gordon McKay Professorship at Harvard, and the Westergaards moved to Belmont, Mass. He was later made dean of the graduate school of engineering at Harvard.

The move to Boston was made in the family's Hupmobile. "There is a story that when we arrived in Cambridge:' Peter says, "and were trying to find Belmont, they got instructions which said, 'Go down the street till you get to the cow barns and take a turn there.' We got totally lost. What actually the person had said was 'the car barns'. That is where the Kennedy Center is today."

All of Talbot's grandchildren remember Rachel as exuberant and unconventional. "She married a European, which was a bit much for some people," says her niece Barbara Fuller. "But, yes, she certainly marched to a different drummer."

"You have to understand that teenagers are always embarrassed by their parents," Rachel's son Peter says. "I was constantly embarrassed with mother. But I can see that now as a virtue. In many respects she could be a real cross but in other respects she really did enjoy life immensely."

"We were very well off," Rachel's daughter Mary acknowledges. "We had a nice house in a nice town with good schools and we had a nice yard with trees and a garden. My mother was a member of the garden club. At one time she was a hostess for a garden tour where various members of different garden clubs around Boston came around and toured the houses. I think that we were really very well brought up.

"By modern standards, she was a strict disciplinarian, but not as much so as my father. My father worried about the long term consequences, like what are you going to do for a living, and my mother was more concerned about whether you would behave yourself for the next three hours while she was going to town. She had an independent turn of mind, however. For instance, when she was young she climbed Pikes Peak. I don't think that mountain climbing was all that common. She liked out of doors things. She was a good swimmer -- she swam a mile, for instance. I never did that until recently and then I did it in a pool. She did it by swimming across a cold northern lake in Minnesota." And she was always tolerant of her children's New England mountain wanderings, Mary adds.

The Westergaards spent many summers at Martha's Vineyard. Rachel bought the children a canoe, "one that couldn't possibly sink and wouldn't overturn easily," Mary remembers. "This canoe was very, very hard to capsize but one day I managed. The only person that was in it was my mother. She was sitting there with the paddle holding the canoe steady and I was swimming. I came up to the side and I was going to climb in. But I didn't use the proper Red Cross procedure. I put one hand on one gunnel and I reached over to the other gunnel and I pulled and the whole thing turned over on top of me. The last thing I saw was my mother holding her nose as she dived in. She never scolded me about it. There was nothing in the canoe that was lost but she had on moccasins and in the process of splashing around she lost them and I had to dive for them, through the weeds. Now that I think about it, she was quite patient about it. She could have had a fit, but she didn't. She expected us to learn how to handle it and she expected a certain amount of adversity."

"I wasn't aware until I got a good deal older, of how distant this was for my mother to be out of Illinois," Peter now sees. "I t wasn't until I got to Denmark that I realized the reason my father loved Martha's Vineyard and the Cape so much. One of the first things we did was to take a drive in our automobile to the Cape across the town and then my father and my sister and I took a boat back to Boston and my mother drove the automobile back. Well, the boat was crossing Massachusetts Bay in a deep fog, was rammed by another steamer, and sank in 18 minutes. I thought this was pretty exciting! And I remember my sister stood staring into the fog on this huge ladder and I was thrown to a lifeboat that looked like it was 50 feet down, but I'm sure it was only 20 feet down, and then I remember my father sort of taking charge.... Not many kids I knew, when I was 6, had gotten shipwrecked. Meanwhile my mother came to the pier and there was no ship and there were rumors, and finally the ship came moving out of the fog and she didn't really see but she heard my voice saying, 'Mother, we went out on a little ship and came back on a big ship!' These events were very large in our lives. We did indeed spend many, many happy summers at Martha's Vineyard."

"[Rachel] was fascinated by the visual arts, by costumes," Peter recalls. "She had a lot of books in her library from early on with the history of costumes, and for a long time in our attic there was a wonderful Ugly Duchess costume that she made for herself to go to a fancy ball with my father." Rachel had studied art and was an indefatigable museum visitor, according to Mary. "She took me along, starting when I was about six."

"Great-aunt Rachel Westergaard took me under her wing and introduced me to the landscape and culinary delights of New England," Susan Talbot Jacox says. "Her energy and enthusiasm were boundless and infectious."

"She and my father both enjoyed parties," Mary adds. "They enjoyed a phenomenon that we completely ignore now -- the cocktail party. Cocktail parties were a very big part of their culture. People were very gay. I can remember hearing them from upstairs when I was studying or reading or listening to the radio. I think that was part of the Great Gatsby culture. And I think that my mother enjoyed it too."

"Yes, Rachel was quite a character," her nephew Warren Jr. claims. "We used to visit her up in Belmont where she lived both before and after Malcolm died. She had a succession of dogs -- great big ones. She named one of them Darius" after the composer Darius Milhaud, whom she never met, who was Peter's music teacher. "[Milhaud] was, about the time I met him, rather portly and confined to a wheelchair because of arthritis," Peter explains. "He had very large jowls and very pronounced eyebrows. A marvelous man. When I told him that we named my mother's boxer after showing her his picture, he got really miffed. I thought he was kind of guy that was ready for anything."

Rachel outlived her husband by more than 30 years. She died in 1982. "One time when we visited," recalls Warren Jr., "she was using two canes, and we went to a Big Ten get-together on one of those paddle- wheel boats in Boston Harbor. They had some dancing going on, and she said, 1 want to dance!' She went up to the dance floor with me, handed her canes to a couple sitting at a table and said, 'Here, hold onto these things for me!' She got out onto the dance floor and had a wonderful time."