Muzzy

From cover: The story of a great lady whose exploits her son recalls with affectionate wonder From inside flap: The author of Guerilla and Diplomat learned the flexibility both those roles require early--from his mother, a Philadelphia Main Line lady with a genius for enjoyment. In this beguiling and often hilarious memoir, Muzzy and her consort, who was quite her match, are recalled by their witty and warmly appreciative son. The result is the vivid portrait of two remarkable people and their wonderfully free-form family, living in a society that was self-contained without coldness, affluent without vulgarity and always vital--a happy cross between the boyhood world of Clarence Day and Helen Howe's Gentle Americans. Mrs. Thayer's family, the Wheelers, settled on the Main Line when it was still a summer resort. When she and her fiance built their own home they ranged on horseback over hills that are now thickly settled suburbs. At Kyneton, she settled down and produced six children without diminishing her other activities. She presided happily over a large and various menage, including a family school, animals of all kinds, a butler too old to keep up with the formalities of the Wheeler household and an aging seamstress who came for two weeks and stayed for life. Athletics were a passion on both sides of the family. Muzzy built her own tennis court and played on it fiercely until age demoted her to referee. Until his death Daddy uncompromising athletic director to the children. (He had inadvertently created American football while trying to learn rugby at Penn.) And when only croquet remained as an arena for competition, Mrs. Thayer's mettle showed high as ever. She was pitiless to all opponents, even the smallest grandchild. And if she couldn't win honestly, she won anyway. The secret, of course, was that Mrs. Thayer enjoyed everything: festivals, gardening, the telephone, National League ball games, and pitting her wits against customs inspectors, other drivers, and the Eighteenth Amendment. Most of all she enjoyed human beings, and foremost among them, children. In these beguiling pages, her still-bemused son makes marvelously clear why life with mother was life at its best--irrecoverable and unforgettable.