Remembering Priscilla Buckley
Den Mother
Of my thousand memories of my beloved Aunt Pitts, an early one is of visiting the old NR offices at 150 East 35th Street when I was maybe eight, so it would have been 1960 or so. Pup (a.k.a. WFB) pointed out to me with amusement the dumbwaiter in his office. It's possible that he was the only editor-in-chief of a journal of opinion who had a dumbwaiter in his office. (No jokes, please.)
When he finished writing an editorial on his trademark yellow paper, he would place the copy in the dumbwaiter and ring a bell and hoist it aloft―to the office of his older sister, Priscilla, NR's managing editor.
As I think on it, this arrangement is a perfect metaphor for their relationship. She was only five feet tall, Pitts, but Pup looked up to her all his life. He adored her. I don't think it's exaggeration to say that without Pitts, there might not have been an NR. Or if there had been, it certainly wouldn't have been as good, or come out every two weeks. Or have been nearly as much fun for those who worked there. She made the trains run on time, and she made everyone laugh. She became a kind of den mother to the modern conservative movement, cherished by everyone who knew her in that role, from George Will to Garry Wills. Quite a spectrum, that.
Pitts never married or had children of her own. She had 50 nieces and nephews, too many of whom lost their mothers at a too-early age. Pitts became their mother. (She even delivered one of her nieces — Priscilla O'Reilly — when her sister Maureen couldn't make it to the hospital in time.) She was unfailing in love, always there for you. So perhaps Pitts ended up having more children than any of her brothers and sisters. She was to the Buckley family what the rock of Gibraltar is to the Mediterranean.
Bless you, Pitts, and bon voyage on your latest ballooning adventure into the heavens.
Sent from my iPhone
Victor Cuvo, Attorney at Law
770.582.9904
1.888.355.4983 (fax)
No comments:
Post a Comment