[PW] Re: ? Last-ditch source question: baby food/steak

[Karen Weiss]

I, too, thought of John D. Rockefeller as I had heard that he purchased 
human milk from breastfeeding mothers.  There is a Booknotes interview 
of Ron Chernow at

http://www.booknotes.org/Transcript/?ProgramID=1418

I quote Ron Chernow:

Rockefeller, when he was in his early 50s, after he had created this
global oil monopoly, had a kind of breakdown. It was both a physical
and a nervous breakdown of sorts, and he had terrible digestive
problems.


It's very, very interesting because the source of that breakdown, when
he was in his early 50s was not, as one might imagine, the stress and
strain of creating Standard Oil. It was the strain of his charitable
commitments, particularly--he was creating the University of Chicago
at the time. So he began a diet of bread and crackers in order to
cure these digestive problems. What happened was that there was a
whole very pernicious mythology for the rest of his life that he could
only survive on mother's milk. I mean, this was part of this
vampirish image of Rockefeller that he was such a ghoulish character
that he needed mother's milk in order to survive.


Rockefeller, who had very little concern for public opinion, really
never bothered to disabuse the public or the--the press of the fact
that he ate normally and he ate whatever he wanted. But throughout
his life, he ate very sparingly, which is one reason that people
remember him not as this rather rangy young man who created Standard
Oil, but this spindly, wizened little guy hopping around on the golf
course or mugging in front of the--the newsreel cameras. He finally
weighed around 90 pounds by the time he died.

Karen Weiss

On Oct 11, 2006, at 1:54 PM, Winters, Murl wrote:

> I made a Google.com search using +"john d. Rockefeller" +diet and found
> on p.25 of A Review of Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., by
> Ron Chernow; reviewed by Michael Lee, Journal of Business Leadership -
> 2000-2001 http://www.anbhf.org/pdf/lee.pdf the following:
> "His work with the University of Chicago was so stressful that
> Rockefeller experienced a near nervous breakdown. Over a twenty year
> period he donated more than thirty-five million dollars ending with a
> farewell gift in 1910. He experienced tremendous digestive problems and
> adopted a very stringent diet in his life from this time forward."
>
> Nothing is said here about baby food (only "a very stringent diet) but
> the dates near this part of the text would place this in the first
> decade or so of the 20th century and might focus your searching in
> biographies of him.
>
> Murl Winters
> Assistant Library Director
> Evangel University
> Springfield, MO 65802
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: project-wombat-bounces at lists.project-wombat.org
> [mailto:project-wombat-bounces at lists.project-wombat.org] On Behalf Of
> Hilary Caws-Elwitt
> Sent: Wednesday, October 11, 2006 1:06 PM
> To: list at project-wombat.org
> Subject: [PW] ? Last-ditch source question: baby food/steak
>
> Hello all,
>
> I'm trying this as court of last call for a question that's been
> languishing in
> our new statewide reference service queue for more than a month. If
> wombats
> can't find the answer, I'm going to close it!
>
> Patron asked "Who was the rich man that could only eat baby food but
> wished he
> could have a steak?" On reference interview added "It may have been a
> quote from
> the last days of this person which was really about the moral of being
> or
> wanting to be rich. I think it was a famous person, like the founder of
> Ford or
> K-Mart or someone like that within the last century of so."
>
> The original librarian said "I have tried everything I could think of,
> plus put
> the rest of my department on this, and none of us have been able to 
> come
> up with
> anything. Keywords that we've tried have included millionaire,
> millionaires,
> rich man, robber baron, baby food, pablum and porridge. As well as an
> excursion
> into millionaires with bad and/or poor digestion. I've tried our print
> quotation
> books, quotation databases, and parables."
>
> I'm not holding my breath, but if one of you knows or can find the
> answer, it
> would be pretty exciting!
> -- 
> --
> Hilary Caws-Elwitt, Systems & Public Services Librarian
> Community Information Network Administrator/Programmer
> Susquehanna County Library, 2 Monument Sq, Montrose PA 18801
> Phone 570-278-1881 -- Fax 570-278-9336
> info at susqcolibrary.org -- http://www.susqcolibrary.org
> info at susquehannaCIN.net -- http://www.susquehannaCIN.net
> _______________________________________________
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