Virgil Damon would drive to our house in the Long Island suburbs and bring me prototypes of toys. He must have been connected in the toy world. There were large Civil War sets with cannons and blue and gray soldiers, and Flintstones villages--all Marx Toys, a company now defunct. Dr. Damon's dog was named Duke (or maybe it was named "Chief" and "Duke" was Dr. Damon's nickname). He was my mother's obstetrician.
Duke (or Chief) was a German shepherd and would sit by Dr. Damon's in the living room. My father would sit next to Dr. Damon, suppressing complaint about the dog he was allergic too. There was a special reverence for Dr. Damon. It could have been Zeus or Abraham Lincoln or Einstein sitting in the wing chair in the living room. The adults would sit leg crossed in the elegant style. On the arms of the wing chairs perched big drink glasses that were thermos-like in size. My mother would be especially exuberant these visits.
Who was this man, anyway? A friend of my mother? Of my father? The latter didn't sound likely--he was not the type I might expect my father to really seek out. When older, I learned he had helped my mother after a number of miscarriages, and delivered her last child. Also, years later, I discovered in a drawer a photograph of my mother and father and Dr. Damon and another woman chummily drinking cocktails in a New York bar at a table with a white tablecloth. Albeit in a very polite way, they seemed to be having a great time, my father in particular.
Dr. Damon's chauffeur would sit outside, the car a long dark silhouette on the street. The motor was kept running. The exhaust would chug out for hours. Wasn't that wasteful or dangerous, I worried? Would the car explode? And what was he doing out there? Eerily I once out there and saw him looking back in the rearview mirror at me. I the mistake of greeting him at the door once by the name Duke, the dog's name (or Dr. Damon's nickname). His actual name-I was not sure, but somehow the term Rex comes to mind--although that is also a dog's name--all these alphas!
When he visited, Dr. Damon greeted the children formally. A person might expect that Dr. Damon would make an obligatory fuss over me, since after all I had been named after him. My recollection, though, was that he dispensed with my company quickly, and might have found the whole matter awkward as I did. He had a troop of children named after him, which is odd by today's standards. Generally I left the living room when it was feasible.
Dr. Damon had the store Abercrombie and Fitch opened just for us one night so we could look at the toy section. It was dark in the store, like a cave, and then the toys seemed to expand in rows in front of us. Some doubt this story. I assume it happened and is not a confabulation on my part, since I do remember it.
Dr. Damon gave us one of the pups from Duke's litter. Duchess (all the names associated with Dr. Damon had a regal sound) chewed a wooden door about an inch in. The door still remains, decades later in the family manse, though painted over. Duchess was a nippy dog, and I kept my distance. I think she was eventually destroyed--I was not entirely privy to the sad details.
I later learned Dr. Damon had endowed a chair to Columbia University obstetrics department, so was a big wig and must have seemed a starry visitor to our smaller town suburban cosmos. A couple of years ago, I called the current professor holding the chair at Columbia, The faculty member who currently held the chair wasn't available, but a staff person was quite interested and listened--"graciously' I guess is the right word to my recollections of the person whose money was helping her boss.
Dr. Damon was not very real to me as a child. At that age, one adult is pretty much the same as the next. Nor was he very real to other people who benefited from his largesse. So goes fame and fortune and legacy. To me or the professor or most others, he is now a spectral image--except of course to his actual family and friends to whom I assume he was kind and dedicated and still revered.
http://www.nytimes.com/1972/07/11/archives/dr-virgil-g-damon-gynecologist-dead.html
