Lawrence R. Kegan was my boss at Crown Zellerbach from approximately the spring of 1963 to the fall of 1964 when he and his family returned to the East Coast, his career as an economist taking him to Washington, D.C.
I found myself thinking about him recently and what an intense influence he was on me and my dance writing in the brief time I worked for him in a northwest corner of Zellerbach’s glass building in that lot where Market, Sutter, Bush, and Battery allowed for its construction. The forerunner of other high-rise buildings in San Francisco’s financial district, Zellerbach Paper Company was, at the time, quite an influential paper industry with several marked innovations to its credit: the paper egg carton, the business envelope with glassine windows
What was equally unusual and lucky for me is that the Company had retained an economist, hiring Lawrence R. Kegan to fill the role, bringing him, his wife the historian Adrienne Koch and their fraternal twins to Berkeley where Koch was a history professor at the University.
I had just been released from a hypertension project at Kaiser Hospital, the offices on the second floor of a semi-converted duplex on Lombard Street. The project was winding down, and Dr. Alan Gowman, the blind sociologist who was my principal supervisor, had been hired by Stanford Research Institute. My performance had become less than stellar, thanks to the emotional adjustment involved in getting divorced and I found myself once again on the job market.
Back to the employment agency went I, run by a handsome woman whose first name was Sally. She said, “I know just the spot. He likes brains,” sending me to interview Lawrence Kegan in what, for me, seemed a most unlikely spot of massive glass and protective curtains.
Lawrence Kegan was perhaps five feet six inches, compact and wiry in build, square faced with a shock of white hair, using glasses when necessary, intense, and, like me, left handed. His writing was almost like printing, his hand curved over the paper in the manner of so many of us southpaws. It looked as terse as his voice answering the telephone, “Kegan.”
His office was situated at the northwest corner of maybe the sixth floor with my desk outside with an open aisle behind and to my left. I could look out to half the floor, my vision to the east end of the building obscured by the elevators, perhaps store rooms and toilets for both sexes. The other secretarial jobs I had held had found me in smaller spaces, and this made me feel very exposed.
I brought with me as ballast to my recent divorce the role of San Francisco correspondent for Dance News. Whether that was included in my resume, I don’t remember, but in comparatively short order “Larry” Kegan learned about my enthusiasm; he informed me that living in New York he decided “to find out what this modern dance was about,” and started to study with Charles Weidman, one of the three alumnae of the Dennis-Shawn Company. One afternoon, he invited me into his office and, with the door closed, proceeded to demonstrate one or two of the exercises he had learned in the classes. What I remember most was the impish delight in doing them, I am sure enhanced by the unlikely location.
I couldn’t believe my luck, and it certainly paved my way to the five-days-a-week commute from the flat on Lombard Street where I had taken on a roommate to help cover the rent.
Adrienne Koch was a very lucky woman. Larry Kegan supervised virtually everything in the household and advised her on steps in her career. He also adored his children. At one point Adrienne Koch participated in a UCSF [University of California, San Francisco] relating to women’s view of men or women and careers, I honestly forget which. Held on a Saturday, the entire Kegan family attended, and the following Monday Kegan commented on the proceedings, grinning, eyes gleaming.
I have forgotten the sequence in which Larry Kegan divulged the salient parts of his personal history, early career and courtship of Adrienne Koch, whom he termed was the member of a very intellectual Jewish family. I don’t remember his telling me where he attended college, but he portrayed himself as a scruffy New York street kid, and he did, indeed, display the kind of on-the-ready energy which one time seemed to typify Manhattan cab drivers.
What I do remember was Kegan’s informing me that he was the chief procurement officer for the Manhattan Project, though he never said he made the trip to Los Alamos. What he did imply was that he had saved quite a bit of his salary which he spent wining, dining and courting Adrienne Koch.
As testimony to his support and guidance of the Adrienne Koch publishing career. He asked me to type a healthy portion of her American Enlightenment, published George Braziller in 1965-6. She graciously acknowledged me for my enthusiasm as the typist, “making it a lark.”
Somewhere along the line, he disclosed that he and Adrienne were friends with W. McNeil Lowry, the Ford Foundation’s vice president for the arts and humanities and responsible for the quantum leap for the arts, and particularly dance. I had applied to the Foundation for its first program for editors, writers and critics in the visual and performing arts, but had not been accepted. When the second and final year the Foundation offered the fellowships, I asked Larry Kegan if I could use his name as a reference. By this time I was writing a once-a-month feature on an East Bay dance personality for The Oakland Tribune, the first dance specialist writing for a then major Bay Area newspaper. I remember his stance and the intensity of his consideration as he decided “yes.”
Whether it was at the same time or soon after, former U.S. Ambassador to Italy Stephen Zellerbach died, and Larry Kegan went into alternate panic and mobilized mode. He either believed or actually knew he was at Crown Zellerbach with the Ambassador’s support; without it his position as economist was shaky. He decided to look for a position in Washington, very aware his absence on the West Coast also was not to his benefit.
About the same time, Adrienne Koch was discussing with Alfred A. Knopf the prospect of collaborating with her sister on a biography of the Grimke sisters, the two Southern women who became strident abolitionists before the Civil War. Larry Kegan was saying, “The Grimke sisters by the Koch sisters.” I think a contract may have been signed, but Adrienne’s sister became ill and the move to Washington was a major distraction. While Adrienne enjoyed a year’s sabbatical, leaving a full professorship and the admiration of her students was a major adjustment of which Kegan was fully aware. Though she subsequently became a full professor of history at the University Maryland, it must have been unmooring on a major scale.
Larry Kegan’s departure from Crown Zellerbach was also major for me, though I was transferred into another department where I shared duties with two young women easily a decade my junior and far sharper when it came to figures than me.
I was lucky, however, because I received a telephone call from The Ford Foundation. It was interested in supporting my fellowship, and, further, supporting air transportation to enable me to enjoy a ten-week internal travel grant from the Indian Council on Foreign Relations exposing myself to the vastness of the sub-continent and a bird’s eye view of its equally vast culture.
When I visited Washington, D.C. en route to New York, Boston and then six weeks in Europe before arriving in New Delhi just before Shastri’s funeral cortege, my first concern was to visit with Larry Kegan to thank him for his support. He told me Lowry had interviewed him at length about me, that Lincoln Kirstein had supported me, but it was Lowry made the ultimate decision. I believe my brief association with The Oakland Tribune was crucial in providing me with what became a ten-month round-the-world exposure to dance and other world cultures.
I never saw Larry Kegan again, out living by three decades Adrienne Koch who died in 1971. I believe the Kegan son became a dentist in the Washington area,and the daughter as the subject of an interview regarding her work as an archivist for the U.S. Government.
As this reminiscence testifies, one’s life trajectory is often influenced and aided by some few or one single individual. Lawrence Kegan stands tall on my personal list.
mywesterneye/woollywesterneye 