The entrance of my cousin Will into this race has forced me, and will eventually force everyone, to consider the meaning of a Wadsworth heritage. I’m sure there will be quite a bit of buzz over Will’s quote in the newspaper that he and I are not really in the same family.
That reads as kind of harsh and ungracious, but I know Will is not an ungracious person, so I think I know what he was trying to say. There is a world of difference between being a Wadsworth descendant, with a different last name, and growing up with a big “W” tattooed on your forehead, especially if you live in Geneseo.
I don’t suppose anyone can truly appreciate the pressure of being a Geneseo Wadsworth, unless they’ve lived it. Not only was I blessed with a different last name, but I spent the first 25 years of my life living in a different state. I came to the Genesee Valley and embraced the Wadsworth tradition by choice, but I could just as easily rejected it, and that is a crucial psychological difference.
My younger brother, James Wadsworth Strong, is a person that took the latter course. Very few people in Geneseo know him, or even know that he exists, and that is just fine with him. Of course, he visited here many times when our parents were alive, but I think he was always extremely ambivalent about that middle name. It just carried too much baggage.
The fact that I am here at all has a lot to do with another family member’s ambivalence about the heritage. My mother’s first cousin, Harry Wadsworth, although he now lives in Groveland, went through his own flight from the family.
His father Reverdy had inherited the Hartford House in 1952 when the Senator died. When Reverdy died unexpectedly in 1968, Harry was happily living the anonymous life in Denver. Seven years later, when his mother, Eleanor, could no longer manage the Big House on her own, Harry showed no interest in returning to the Valley to take up the burden of such a White Elephant.
The word came down through the family that Hartford House was going to be sold out of the family, with the suggestion that it would make a beautiful golf course. It was then, at age 25, that I made the fateful decision to head north. I had seen enough of Geneseo to know that I just could not let that happen.
Luckily my parents were in a financial position to purchase the house and 300 acre grounds. My mother, in the best tradition of our perennially “land-poor”family, had shown the foresight to marry a rich man. Because of that I know the burden of growing up in a Big House with the perception that you have a silver spoon in your mouth, but I know that is just a fraction of what Will has had to deal with.
My grandfather, James Jeremiah (”Jerry”) Wadsworth even wrote the book on it. He titled his autobiography “The Silver Spoon,” and noted that all his life people had assumed that he was living on Easy Street, when it wasn’t true at all financially.
After graduating from Yale, Jerry went into the family business by starting a dairy farm on Reservoir Road (the current McClellan place). He lasted a few years before the Depression wiped him out and he had to suffer the ignomy of moving back in with his parents in the Big House, with his wife and young child (my mother).
In his book, Jerry noted wryly that his particular silver spoon, if closely examined, would show evidence of a great number of grit marks. I know the feeling, and I’m sure Will shares it, but at least I’ve had the luxury of struggling a little more anonymously.
In fact, it wasn’t until just 6 years ago that I began to take a full position in the Geneseo community by actually living here. For my first 25 years in the Valley, I was happy to view Wadsworthia from the somewhat safer distance of Avon and Caledonia.
Living nearby, under a different last name, gave me the freedom to experiment with many things and to fail at some without the pressure of the Geneseo fishbowl. There is no doubt this has made me into the person I am today, although I always knew that my heart and my future was in Geneseo.
Throughout my political life, and this is my fifth race, I have always struggled with the Wadsworth connection. Many advisers over the years have urged me to trade on it, but I’ve always been reluctant to do so. Although I have devoted a web page to it on corrinstrong.com and a chapter on it in my book, “Writing for myself,” you will not find it mentioned in my printed campaign literature.
My general feeling is that it has very little to do with my qualifications for office. As Billie Holiday sang “Mama may have and Papa may have, but God bless the child who’s got his own.”
