Armstrong Family Archives

Armstrong with his younger sister Edith.

He sits smilingly on a tricycle, before a long flight of brownstone steps, surmounted by a heavy door with a gleaming brass bell-pull. He stands, bright and self-possessed in tight knee-britches, beside a prized set of toy, cast-iron trains. He climbs, with middy-collar flying, a high hill in a country landscape. He poses, quizzical and teasing, with his younger sisters, Ethel and Edith. One sunny morning in 1896, he and the youngest, Edith, pause in their Sunday best for a picture that preserves the look and aroma of the era. Edith wears a long, plaid, taffeta dress with tiny leg-o'-mutton sleeves and a large flowery hat. Howard, then going on 6, wears a short, dark sailor outfit, a flat felt boater and an open grin. His face in these early years is round, open and quick with joy, though the underlip is stubborn and the eyes, more often than not, are level and grave.

A child of the Nineties
It was a tranquil, genteel, late-Victorian household into which Edwin Howard Armstrong was born, on December 18, 1890, in a neat brownstone house at 247 West 29th Street in the old Chelsea district of New York City, the first child of Emily and John Armstrong. His father was associated then and for many years thereafter with the Oxford University Press, at that time devoted mainly to the sale of Bibles and standard classical works. John Armstrong himself had been born on 19th Street of an old New York family and had gone to work early at the Oxford Press, eventually rising to become vice president in charge of the American branch. Howard's mother, whose maiden name was Smith, was the strong, gentle, deeply religious daughter of a prominent business family in the neighborhood. The Smiths had their family home only a block away on West 30th Street, and together the Smiths and Armstrongs formed a dense phalanx of grandparents, uncles, aunts and auxiliary relations around all of Howard Armstrong's boyhood.

John Armstrong had met and married Emily Smith in the old North Presbyterian Church at 31st Street and Ninth Avenue, an institution in which the Smiths had been exceedingly numerous and active for nearly half a century. John Armstrong himself was a trustee of the church. He was then a tall man of imposing presence, with a dark, luxuriant moustache in the style of the period, a poetic turn of phrase, a flow of banter and an excellent speaking voice, much in demand for leading prayers at church meetings and for addressing conventions in the book trade. Some of his speeches are still extant, carefully written out in fine Spencerian script. Once a year he journeyed to England to confer with his superiors, bringing back an aura of foreign travel, of the world outside and of communion at the fountainhead of Victorianism.

The most pervasive element in the Smith and Armstrong families was school teaching. Emily Smith was a graduate of Hunter College in New York and taught in the public schools for 10 years before marrying John Armstrong in 1888. John Armstrong had lived on 19th Street with two maiden sisters who were for many years teachers in the public schools. Other school-teaching aunts and uncles, great uncles and aunts were pendent all over the Smith family tree. There was therefore a strict but loving air of pedagogy throughout the two adjoining households that kept a young man on his toes. "Quick, boy!" was the invariable greeting of his great uncle Charles Frederick Hartman, who was principal of New York Public School No. 160. "How much is nine times five, minus three, divided by six, times two, plus nine?"

The Armstrongs did not remain long on 29th Street. New York was then rapidly changing. Old neighborhoods were being inundated by rising trade and immigration, and residential areas were being pushed further and further uptown and out toward the suburbs. The old North Church was forced to seek new quarters uptown and the Smith family followed it. John Armstrong moved his growing family out of the crowding Chelsea area in 1895, first to another substantial brownstone at 26 West 97th Street, then, in 1902, to the big gabled house overlooking the Hudson at 1032 Warburton Avenue, Yonkers, an address always referred to later by friends and associates as simply "1032," as if it were a magic number able to evoke at once the exact place and the events that transpired there. The Smith family moved up to Yonkers with them, into a big house on a wide lawn next door.

Armstrong Family Archives

Armstrong's childhood home in Yonkers.

The family life that went on in Yonkers as in New York was on a scale of warmth and closeness that has passed almost out of existence, if not out of mind. Lacking the mobility and distractions of a later day, the family centered on itself. All occasions were celebrated with great vigor amid large congregations of relatives. Family dinners of 40 or 50 were nothing out of the ordinary. Huge preparations went on in the kitchens in a cheerful clatter of steaming kettles, dishes and female gossip. Sundays were holy terrors. Up early to be carefully brushed and dressed for morning services, then back to church again at two for Sunday school, and again at seven and eight for Christian Endeavor and vesper services. The Smiths practically ran the church. Grandfather Smith, who always regretted not having entered the ministry, was leading elder, choir master and superintendent of the Sunday school. Grandmother Smith supervised the infant class. Uncle Frank presided at the organ, Uncle Will was a deacon, and Aunt Rissie and her sister Emily taught in Sunday school. The children followed in the indefatigable wake of their elders, shoes blacked, cheeks scrubbed, hair neatly wetted down or curled, all ruffles and pressed pants and Sunday decorum.

A child in the age of industry
This was the little world of the Nineties, the long calm before many storms. Later generations were to find it at once indescribably funny and gross, nostalgic and revolting, gay and sad, perhaps because they were to break from it so sharply. The men walked about in narrow trousers and high, black, cast-iron derbies. The women wore high, starched shirtwaists over deeply corseted bosoms and trailed long skirts of heavy-textured stuff. They lived in homes heavy with fretted porches, Turkish rugs, fumed oak and blood-stained mahogany. The leading citizens were all very solid. Nearly everyone was connected with business. William McKinley, the Sound Money and High Tariff man, had come to rule in the White House, and if all was not well with the world, at least the world was kept at a distance, walled out and far away.

Nights were illuminated by the greenish glow of the gas mantle, for the electric lamp was still a luxury and only a few main streets lay harsh and bare under the glare of the arc lights. The Chicago world's fair of 1893 put on a dazzling display of the new electricity, but men of substance were dubious when a leading inventor, Nicola Tesla, predicted that it would soon be as available to everyone as tap water. The first electric trolleys were careening around corners, but the streets were still given over largely to the horse and carriage and dray. The gasoline buggy was a gaping curiosity wherever it appeared. Charles E. Duryea had begun manufacture of the country's first, high-hipped automobile in Ohio in 1891, but as late as 1900 weighty opinion could be obtained in Wall Street that it would never amount to much.

The age was running to complacency after the ponderous building up and concentration of industry following the Civil War. It was full of civic pride, lush sentiments and too much food. Financial panics briefly shivered its self-esteem in 1893 and again in 1897. Dark rumblings of revolt were heard from farmers and laborers. Teddy Roosevelt and the muckrakers were in the wings, ready to thunder and gnash their teeth theatrically at the Trusts. And in the distant Philippines the country's first adventure into imperialism was raveling out dustily and ignominiously in the hills. But in the long calm that ended the great, vulgar, vigorous, seminal, sublime and sanctimonious nineteenth century, nothing seriously came to disturb the middle class in its belief that Progress must move ever forward at the rate proper to its comfort and accumulation of wealth. And, indeed, a vast ferment of ideas and discoveries made the new century dawn with immense promise.

Howard Armstrong was a schoolboy in this period, and its yeasty influences penetrated and shaped much of his life. But of that boy's life before the turn of the century little now survives except traces of memory and a few outward facts. He was brought up with firm rectitude in that stern yet practical Presbyterianism that combines sanctity and hope of heaven with getting ahead in the world. He was sent to public grammar school on West 89th Street, where he was a good though not memorable student. He was enveloped in the life of the family. It was a quiet, gregarious, genteelly cultured but by no means austere household, with many books about, a lively interest in domestic affairs and an occasional visiting dignitary from the great English press. On the scale of the times it was neither wealthy nor poor but comfortably well-to-do. Thus insulated by happy middle-class circumstances, the boy's early life appears all soundless and serene behind the veil of childhood.

A "serious child"
Only one sharp rent appears in the curtain. In his ninth year he suddenly came down with St. Vitus' dance. The family account of the illness closely links it with a blow on the head received while out at play one wintry day, when a companion threw a shovel at him. The blow may be regarded as only incidental, for St. Vitus' dance is now generally believed to be associated with rheumatic fever and other acute but then little recognized childhood infections. The infection in some way short-circuits the motor areas in the brain, producing those twitchings and violent, involuntary motions that give the disease its name. Usually, it runs its course in a few weeks or months, subsiding as mysteriously as it came, leaving behind only a nervous tic or some slight change in personality. Occasionally it may leave deeper, hidden damages that appear only later in life. In Howard Armstrong's case the attack was severe enough to keep him out of school for two years, carefully nursed at home by his mother. His great aunt Rosina, who was no longer teaching school, came over every day throughout this period to tutor him, so that when he again returned to school he was, with almost no effort, soon abreast of his class. This illness was the final impelling force that moved the family out to Yonkers, for there Howard would be able to get out in the sun, the fields, the clean air and regain his strength. He pulled out of it all without apparent harm, but with a tic that he would bear for the rest of his life--a habit of hitching a shoulder forward and wryly twisting his neck and mouth whenever he was excited or under stress.

From the beginning, Howard had been what his aunts and female relatives called "a serious child." After his illness he was even more thoughtful and withdrawn. The effort to control his muscular movements sharpened a physical courage that was to delight in pitting itself against high places and in all tests of endurance, as if by daring and indomitable will his whole life was to be proved. The long illness threw him back upon himself, suddenly differentiated him from other beings and implanted the idea of differentness. Because of his slowly mending physical tic, he was painfully shy. He played much alone. He was early interested in mechanical things, especially in discovering how they worked. His first and never discarded passion was for railway trains. When, a little later on, his first toy train, a side-winder, was replaced by an electrical model, running off a battery, his delight and explorations knew no bounds. He spent hours in a maze of tracks and wires.

All four of Armstrong's major discoveries occured within a 21-year period. Learn more about when these were made and how they influenced the development of radio.

The illness receded, as such things will, into an episode, and life went placidly on. From his earliest years the family was in the habit of spending the summers away from sultry New York. Summers were spent upstate on a big farm near Richfield Springs, known as Derthick Farm, owned and operated by the John Derthick family, for many years close friends of the Smiths. These interludes formed a memorable part of childhood. There were animals and birds and hills and haymows and luncheons under the trees and other assorted enchantments into which the children sank like yearlings into a fragrant meadow. John Armstrong came up for vacations and occasional long weekends to add to the endless fun and family chaffing. An ardent tennis player, he built a court and put the children on it almost as soon as they could lift a racket, holding that tennis supplied nearly everything needed to develop a quick mind and sound body. Howard took to tennis as to mechanics, with a driving will and, as he waxed stronger, a cannon-ball service. Altogether, some 10 summers were passed thus, until, to be nearer and more accessible to Yonkers, the family shifted its summer operations eastward to the shores of Lake George. But nothing later matched the memories of the Derthick Farm, so redolent of the long, happy retrograde of leafy, childhood summers that ever afterwards the children spoke its name as if pronouncing a spell.

A typical American boyhood
By then the new century was well begun, the family was moved to Yonkers, and Howard was beginning to sprout into gangling adolescence. Many parts of his character were already firmly set. His first 12 years had been spent in New York and he was to retain ever after the accents and loyalties to the New Yorker born and bred. The new house on the heights in Yonkers had its attractions--grass, trees, spaciousness and a majestic view across the Hudson to the Palisades, gleaming in russet and copper on the further shore--but these were enhanced by fast train service directly below at the river's edge from Graystone Station to New York. He was still interested in trains. He was also interested, as a biographical note by himself later revealed, in running, skate sailing and climbing to high places, a sport for which the precipitous Hudson River Valley was ideal. By then, too, he was reading widely, mainly tales of adventure and discovery and the more heroic passages of American history. And always there was tennis, in which he came to hold as firm a belief as his father, and that steady passion for exploring mechanical contraptions, for which there were no precedents on either side of the family.

There was hardly anything unusual in all this. Indeed, up to this point, his life might have been counted a typical American boyhood, typical of his class and station, in an age when the machine and mechanical aptitudes were developing on all sides. Except for a certain gentle freshness, directness and boldness in him, which might have been no more than the brief bloom of youth, he was in no way distinguishable from the offspring of other comfortable families in that tranquil time and neighborhood. Yonkers was then a growing satellite of New York, a forerunner of those endless suburbs that, with the ascendancy of the automobile, would stretch out and out on various levels of economics and fashionableness, all alike neat, sterile and monotonous. It was an atmosphere productive of many able, commonplace men, broken to conformity and the utilitarian professions, but barren, if not inimical, to the imagination and the creative faculty. It was unlikely ground, those shady lawns and suburban porches, for the lightning stroke of genius.