“Then it was that Mother told us that Father had gone for good. To this day, I shiver every time I recall that scene on the grass by the lakefront. It was an agonizing experience for one who apparently had the emotional sensitivity that I did. I hid the wound, however, and never talked about it with anybody, even my sister.”
His parents’ divorce was a shock Bill never forgot. The pain was heightened by the fact that he did not see his father again for nine years. After the separation, Gilman left Vermont. He eventually settled in western Canada, continuing his work as a quarryman in High River, Alberta, and around Marblehead, British Columbia.
Bill’s strong-willed mother lacked the warmth and understanding that might have stood her son in good stead at such a difficult time. “My mother was a disciplinarian, and I can remember the agony of hostility and fear that I went through when she administered her first good tanning with the back of a hairbrush. Somehow, I never could forget that beating. It made an indelible impression on me.’’
Emily settled Bill and Dorothy in with her own parents, Gardner Fayette Griffith and Ella Griffith, in East Dorset. She remained there with them for a time, recovering from an unidentified illness and completing arrangements for the divorce.
“By this time, I was ten or 11, still growing (even more rapidly), still suffering from my physical awkwardness and from my mother’s and father’s separation and divorce,” Bill said. “I remember hearing Mother and Grandfather talking about this divorce and how it could be brought about. I recall Mother’s covert trip to Bennington, Vermont, to see a man called Lawyer Barber. Then I learned that the divorce was complete. This certainly did something to me which left a deep mark.’’
For young Bill, the divorce must have been painful beyond imagining. He was being separated from a father he adored, at a difficult time in the life of a young boy — the beginning of puberty. To compound the injury, divorce in a small New England town at the beginning of the century — 1906 — was virtually unheard-of; it may have aroused feelings of shame and disgrace that the child of divorced parents today would not understand or share.
Bill said he remained depressed for almost a year following his parents’ divorce.
Bill and his younger sister, Dorothy, “felt abandoned” after their parents’ divorce, in spite of loving grandparents.
Of this time in her husband’s childhood, Lois Wilson later wrote: “Although Bill and Dorothy loved their grandparents, who were very good to them, they felt abandoned. Bill was especially devoted to his father and badly missed him after he moved to the West. . . . The separation made him feel set apart and inferior to youngsters who lived with a mother and father.”
And now Emily, too, went away from East Dorset. Leaving Bill and Dorothy in the full-time care of their grandparents, she moved to Boston to go back to school — specifically, osteopathic college. The effect on her family notwithstanding, this was a courageous undertaking for a woman of her age, in her time.
Fayette Griffith, Bill’s grandfather, now became his substitute father. All accounts show that it was a warm and complex relationship. “My grandfather loved me deeply, and I loved him as I have few other people,’’ Bill said.
The Griffiths “were capable of great love for their own, and this [was] certainly a factor in my grandfather’s relation to me, but somehow they were not overpopular people.”
“People didn’t like Fayette particularly,” Lois said, “because he was almost everybody’s landlord. He had ideas of his own; he was a very opinionated gentleman. He owned property; he owned the waterworks. When it was time to be paid, he wanted to be paid.’’
A cousin, Robert Griffith of Brattleboro, had a similar perception: “Uncle Fayette was not a humble man,” he said. “Though I always found him kindly, he was popularly considered a rather smug person.
“Once when he was driving a team of spirited horses, the horses balked and threw him from the seat. He landed on his head just inches from a block of marble used as a step when alighting from a carriage. Somebody said, ‘You were lucky you didn’t break your head on that horse block.’ ‘Humph!’ grunted Uncle Fayette. ‘Jolly well knew where I was going to land!’
“He was known behind his back as ‘Jolly’ Griffith — not because he was jolly, but because he used the word colloquially.”
Fayette had been reared in Danby, about nine miles north of East Dorset, and was a Civil War veteran who had returned to Vermont to farm after serving as an ambulance driver at the Battle of Gettysburg. “He had chipped out a precarious living until he got the notion of lumbering and then, importing many French woodchoppers, had begun to aggregate a comfortable competence,” Bill said.
Fayette had married Ella Brock, a woman as passive and gentle as he was forceful and opinionated. It was said of her that “she took up very little room in anybody’s life.’’
Like many of the other Griffiths, Fayette was a shrewd businessman, and there were probably several reasons why he became interested in lumbering. For one thing, while the marble industry around Dorset was in decline, the mountains had an abundance of choice hardwoods, and it was not too difficult to take them out. Fayette’s cousin Silas Griffith had become Vermont’s first millionaire by lumbering the mountains around Danby, and had helped endow the S. L. Griffith Memorial Library in that town. Bill remembered that Silas had been “a super businessman for those days.’’
As East Dorset’s most prosperous citizen, Fayette provided well for his family. He paid for Emily’s education at the osteopathic college and was generous with Bill and Dorothy. Fayette’s only son, Clarence, had died in Colorado the year before Bill’s birth; having a grandson may have helped to soften Fayette’s grief. Bill was considered a rather privileged boy in the village. “He had a motorcycle at one time and a saddle horse, the equipment necessary to his wireless set, along with his violins and cello. In those days, a kid who owned a fielder’s glove, or a ball and bat, a .22 rifle, and a bicycle was considered well-off,” said Robert Griffith.
Fayette was proud of Bill and had great expectations for him. “Uncle Fayette thought Will was the smartest person that ever was,” an aged cousin recalled. “He was smart. He made that radio!” she added, referring to Bill’s experiments with a wireless set.
Since Fayette read a great deal himself, he probably helped encourage Bill’s early interest in reading. He read travel books to Bill, and that spurred a strong interest in other kinds of reading: “The Heidi books and the Alger books, and all kinds of things that kids used to read in that time,’’ Bill said.
A neighbor, Rose Landon, installed a circulating library in her father’s deserted cobbler shop. “I began to be a voracious reader myself as quickly as I got the ability, reading anything and everything that came into that library. In fact, I used to sleep very little when on these reading sprees. I would seemingly go to bed after being sent there rather sternly by my grandfather, and then I would wait until I felt they wouldn’t notice the light, light up the old kerosene lamp, place it on the floor, and lay a book alongside and hang off the edge of my bed to read, sometimes all night.”
Encouraged by his grandfather, Bill plunged into a succession of activities with single-minded determination — a trait that remained with him throughout his life. One project that stood out in his memory was the boomerang project.
“My grandfather got in the habit of coming to me with what he thought were impossible projects,” Bill recalled. “One day, he said to me, ‘Will’ — for that’s what he called me — ‘Will, I’ve been reading a book on Australia, and it says that the natives down there have something they call boomerangs, which is a weapon that they throw, and if it misses its mark, it turns and returns to the thrower. And Will,’