Growing Up in the Thirties and Forties in New York and East Hampton

by Barbara Bartle

Barbara Bartle grew up on New York's Upper East Side and spent summers with her family in East Hampton, Long Island. East Hampton then was a small village by the ocean, with a main street lined with giant elms and very little traffic. This is Bartle's personal account of the 1930s and 1940s--of her glamorous Uncle John who eloped one summer day, of Uncle Ben who was cut off from the family, of a very young Truman Capote telling dirty jokes to Bartle and her sisters and the summer gang of kids. She writes about her two formidable grandmothers, one a New Yorker and and one from the Midwest, about Amelia, the family cook, and other relatives and friends in those sunlit days before the war.

Barbara Bartle graduated from Radcliffe College in 1949 and earned a master's degree in history from the University of Virginia in 1968. She taught history at the Chapin School in New York City and later, in Zimbabwe, where she and her husband, Stuart, lived and worked for two years. On their return to the U.S. they moved to the Berkshires, where she taught history at Berkshire Community College. A number of the pieces from this book have appeared in The East Hampton Star. The Bartles have four children and eleven grandchildren.