Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs Read Online Free PDF Page A

drawl. His father’s side of the family, the Butzners of Virginia, had roots in Bavaria. His mother’s side, the Deckers, were Yankees who had moved south from New Jersey in 1839. By 1846, John Decker had warmed enough to southern ways to own a dozen slaves: “All the field hands,” a family history records, “were big women whom he had purchased at the Fredericksburg mart with the definite idea of raising his own negroes.” At war’s end, Mr. Decker owned seven parcels of Spotsylvania County real estate totaling 2,200 acres. In 1877, his daughter Lucy married. The groom was William Joseph Butzner. Their son, born the following year, was our Polyclinic physician, John Decker Butzner, known all his life as Decker.
    All through the Civil War, hundreds of thousands of Union and Confederate troops marched, camped, and fought in the fields and woods of Spotsylvania County, as at bloody Chancellorsville or in Fredericksburg, the little trace of a town just over the county line from most of the Butzner holdings. After the war, nobody had much of anything; the well-off Decker family, it would be said, “never felt the pinching hand of want except in the cruel days toward the end and after the Civil War.” But while Jane would picture them as poor, or at least cash starved, the Butzner side, too, was never much less than middlingly prosperous. During the years young Decker was growing up, his father owned, free and clear, four hundred acres rising up from the Rappahannock River that produced crops of hay, corn, wheat, and, notably, by family lore, Black Galloway cattle.
    Meanwhile, Decker’s prosperous uncle Marshall may already have been helping him and his brothers through school. Decker and his two brothers, Billy and Calvin, had attended a one-room farm school that brought them together with cousins from miles around. The teacher was ordinarily the family’s eldest unmarried female; when she went off to have children, the next young woman in line got the job. Later, Decker put in a year at the Fredericksburg Academy, a recently founded Presbyterian-supported school. He and his younger brothers all did well there, Decker extraordinarily so. In 1894 he was one of only a handful of students to earn a gold medal for his grades, distinguishing himself in English literature, German, Latin, geometry, and physics. From there, with brother Billy, he attended the University of Virginia at Charlottesville, the two whip-smart Butzner boys for a while living next door to one another on campus. In 1901, Decker was awarded bachelor’s andmaster’s degrees, and in 1904 received his medical degree. Then it was off to Philadelphia, his Polyclinic residency—and Bess.
    However their relationship evolved, it seems plain that for several years Dr. Butzner was establishing himself in his Scranton practice while Bessie was back in Philadelphia; as late as December 1908, Bessie wasstill getting mail there. During these years, with Philadelphia aboutthree hours on the through train from Scranton, their relationship may have been something like what today we’d call a long-distance affair. When they finally married, on March 24, 1909, he was thirty, she twenty-nine—about seven years older than the average bride of those days. The ceremony took place at the home of her mother, across the road from the old canal in Espy. Just a few weeks before, her father, Captain Boyd, had died suddenly at age seventy-four. So the wedding, as the local paper noted, was “a quiet one, only members of the family and a few invited family being present.” After a trip south, they returned to Scranton, where they would make their home.
    Soon after they married, with Dr. Butzner still new to his practice, he bought an automobile—to more easily visit his patients, he said. Only trouble is, he never said a word about the big expense to Bess, just did it. The slight rankled. Then, another time early in their marriage, Decker’s mother bestowed on Bess the