Mabel Grosvenor, doctor

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MABEL GROSVENOR, DOCTOR 1905-2006
The last surviving granddaughter of Alexander Graham Bell spent many
childhood summers with the great inventor at the family estate in Cape
Breton, N.S., writes SANDRA MARTIN. As his 'unofficial secretary,' she
witnessed many novel experiments. 'Being brought up on wonders, they
seemed commonplace.'

SANDRA MARTIN

With files from Jocelyn Bethune

Think of it: Mabel Grosvenor welcomed electricity, the telephone, cars,
airplanes, female suffrage, television, a man on the moon -- everything
but the computer, which she resolutely resisted -- in a long life that
stretched the length of the past bloody century and well into this one.
The last surviving granddaughter of inventor Alexander Graham Bell, and
one of the first women to graduate from Johns Hopkins Medical School,
she began working as a pediatrician in Washington in the 1930s, an era
when death was a likely outcome of most childhood illnesses. More than
50 years later, she was asked to name the greatest medical advance
during her career. "Antibiotics," she replied promptly.

Self-effacing, private and forward-looking, she never married and had
no children, but she was cherished by several generations of nieces and
nephews as the embodiment of love and caring. "She was like a second
mother to me," said her great-nephew Joseph Blair. "She was the glue
that held the family together."

His older brother, Grosvenor Blair, echoed those comments. "Love was
the theme of her life," he said. "She was a very quiet, serious person,
she didn't wear her heart on her sleeve, but she was a very loving
person and a mentor to many of us. She loved the community in Baddeck,
she loved Beinn Bhreagh, she loved the family and that was her life,"
he said. "We are going to continue her stewardship [of Beinn Bhreagh,
the estate built by her grandparents], recognizing how important it is
to Canadian heritage."

As the last person who knew the inventor of the telephone intimately,
Dr. Grosvenor was a precious conduit to the past. In her old age, she
became the authority for biographers and journalists seeking to know
more about her grandfather. "He was a very theatrical person. When he
told a story, you were on the edge to hear it," Dr. Grosvenor said in
her deep, gruff voice in a 1994 interview with Baddeck journalist
Jocelyn Bethune. "He was six feet -- which was tall in those days. He
had sparkling hazel eyes and great expressions. His hair stood up --
but it was flat when he was not feeling well."

In 2003, during the early research for Reluctant Genius: The Passionate
Life and Inventive Mind of Alexander Graham Bell, biographer Charlotte
Gray went to visit Dr. Grosvenor in her retirement home in Washington.
By then 98, Dr. Grosvenor was nearly blind, needed hearing aids, "had
terrific mobility problems and she had all her marbles." Happy to talk
about her grandparents, she told Ms. Gray that she was 10 before she
realized that her grandmother was deaf. "We all knew that we had to
look her in the face when we spoke to her, and we could never call to
her from another room, but we thought this was just good manners."

As for her Edinburgh-born grandfather, she described him speaking in an
educated, unaccented English, a key detail because there is no known
recording of Alexander Graham Bell's voice. "His father, Melville, was
a speech teacher, and he would never allow his sons to speak with an
Edinburgh brogue," Dr. Grosvenor said. "The only times I heard him use
a Scottish accent were when he was reciting A man's a man for aye that
by Robbie Burns, or when we visited Edinburgh together in 1920."

Mabel Harlakenden Grosvenor was born in the first decade of the last
century at her grandparents' summer home, Beinn Bhreagh (Gaelic for
Beautiful Mountain) in the rugged highlands of Cape Breton, overlooking
Bras d'Or Lake. The property included not only "The Lodge," the 37-room
mansion built by her grandparents in the 1890s, but several other
houses and buildings dating from the same era. The third of seven
children of Elsie (neé Bell) and Gilbert Grosvenor, the man who
transformed the National Geographic from a dry journal into a glossy,
highly illustrated monthly magazine, she was named after her
grandmother Mabel (neé Hubbard) Bell.

She grew up in Washington, in the family home near Dupont Circle but,
as her parents travelled extensively, Mabel spent extended periods,
including most summers, with her grandparents. "He was the centre of
her life, but she was the centre of ours," she told Ms. Gray. By all
accounts, the Bells doted on their 10 grandchildren. In Alexander
Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude, biographer Robert V. Bruce
described Mr. Bell as having "the majesty of Moses and the benevolence
of Santa Claus." Mabel's older brother Melville told Mr. Bruce that his
earliest memory was "sitting on his grandfather's lap and, on
instructions, tweaking the nose of Alexander Graham Bell to produce a
dog's bark, pulling his hair for a sheep's bleat, and by way of climax,
tugging his Santa Clause beard for the deliciously fierce growl of a
bear."

Mabel was in Baddeck when her grandfather's red silk kite, Cygnet, with
a young man named Tom Selfridge clinging to its infrastructure, soared
50 metres above Bras d'Or Lake, hovered for a breathtaking seven
minutes and then sank gently into the water after the wind dropped. Mr.
Bell later wrote about this experiment: "I almost forgot to mention the
witness who will probably live the longest after this event [and
remember least about it] -- my little granddaughter Miss Mabel
Grosvenor -- two years of age."

He was right about that. She didn't remember the Cygnet's brief flight
in 1907 and she was probably in Washington when the Silver Dart
achieved the first controlled powered flight in Canada on Feb. 23,
1909. Even so, in a 1994 interview with journalist Jocelyn Bethune, she
said: "I swear I remember being there with Grandma -- being very cold,
being frozen, but everyone was excited. I didn't see why everyone
should be so excited -- if Douglas [pilot J.A.D. McCurdy] wanted to
fly, why shouldn't he? Being brought up on wonders, they seemed
commonplace."

On March 3, 1913, the day before Woodrow Wilson's inauguration, Mabel,
then eight years old, rode in an open carriage up Pennsylvania Avenue
to the Capitol building in Washington with her mother, grandmother,
aunt Daisy Fairchild (neé Bell), and two of her own four sisters.

They were part of a suffragist march, at least 5,000 strong,
demonstrating in favour of giving women the vote. The march drew an
estimated half-million onlookers; many of them were violently opposed
to the female franchise and hurled abuse and lit cigar butts at the
marchers, while the police looked away. According to Dr. Grosvenor, her
grandfather was the original suffragist in the family. "He persuaded my
grandmother. I think he felt that women had just as much right [to
vote] as men."

She described her early school days to journalist Jim Morrow in an
interview for the Baddeck Victoria Standard in 2005. "We got out of
school at lunchtime. And then in the afternoon two days a week we had
horseback riding, and one day a week we had dancing class," and all of
this in addition to art classes on Saturday. All the great adventurers
of the day probably passed through the Grosvenor home, but the only one
she could remember was the Canadian Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur
Stefansson because he stayed with them and "he put sugar on
everything."

An intelligent, studious girl, Mabel, age 14, served as an unofficial
secretary to her grandfather, taking dictation from him on a variety of
subjects ranging from genetics to genealogy to the mechanics of
hydrofoil boats. She had had a bad bout of whopping cough that spring
and her parents agreed to let her extend her usual summer sojourn to
"toughen" her up. She was in residence on Sept. 9, 1919, when her
grandfather's hydrofoil boat, the HD-4, set a world marine speed record
of 114 km/h, a mark that stood for a decade. "As I remember, the speed
of the HD-4 was measured on land," she told Mr. Morrow. "There was a
mark on the shore and when the HD-4 reached another mark farther up the
shore, they measured the time it took to get there."

She slept in a sleeping porch off one of the balconies at Beinn
Bhreagh, a habit that persisted until just five years ago. "I slept out
there all winter. We had a child's play broom and we'd brush the snow
to get to the floor. And I had a cold bath every morning to strengthen
me," she told Mr. Morrow. That winter, she took up skiing, ice skating
and snow shoeing, but mostly she was being "tutored" by her grandfather
in his new hobby, genealogy.

The following year, she accompanied her grandmother and grandfather on
a sentimental trip back to Mr. Bell's native Scotland, partly in search
of his roots. "He didn't really get interested in genealogy until his
father died," Dr. Grosvenor remembered decades later. "We went to
parish offices to look through records and visited cemeteries. He found
several cousins he didn't know existed."

While they were in Britain, Mr. Bell, who never flew in any form of
aircraft despite his fascination with manned flight, arranged for his
granddaughter and his wife to fly from London to Paris, but, as she
told journalist Allen Abel in 2003, "at the last moment, he chickened
out and wouldn't let us go. He said it was too dangerous."

Back in the United States, Mabel enrolled in Mount Holyoke College,
South Hadley, Mass., a liberal arts college for women and the eldest
(1837) of the academically elite "Seven Sisters." After graduating Phi
Beta Kappa in 1927, she entered the medical school of Johns Hopkins
University in Baltimore, choosing that institution over Harvard because
of its smaller classes. She was one of only seven female medical
students (one dropped out after contracting tuberculosis) in her
graduating class in 1931. After doing an internship at New York
Hospital in New York, she moved back to Washington, where she worked as
a pediatrician in private practice and in clinics for disadvantaged
children at the Children's Hospital.

Besides caring for her young patients, Dr. Grosvenor, or Dr. Mabel as
she was universally known, played the role of an unwitting matchmaker.
Her younger sister Elsie, who had been sent to the Far East to avoid
the attentions of an unsuitable young man (at least, in the eyes of her
parents), came back from China with dysentery. Dr. Grosvenor
recommended she consult a doctor named Walter K. Myers. After
successfully treating Elsie, and formally discharging her as his
patient, Dr. Myers immediately telephoned her in a private capacity, or
so the story goes, and invited her out on a date. They were married in
1936.

After practising medicine for 35 years, Dr. Grosvenor retired early, in
the mid-1960s, to care for her own parents, who were both frail and in
poor health by then. As well, she took over the stewardship of the
Beinn Bhreagh estate. She loved to sail on the lake in her dinghy, the
Carola, or on the yawl, Elsie. A well-known figure in Baddeck, she
spent her time driving her silver convertible, gardening, presiding as
honorary president over meetings of the Alexander Bell Club (it's the
longest continuing women's club in Canada), and taking care of others.
She was an ongoing source of awe for family and local residents for her
ability to recall names, events and people. As she grew older, she
granted the first conservation easement in Nova Scotia to help ensure
that the property and its gardens would continue as a heritage site.

As she had done almost every year for more than a century, she
travelled from Washington to Baddeck this past June. She stayed on
because her health problems, including congestive heart failure, were
accelerating and she thought she would receive better medical care
there than in Washington, according to her great-nephew Grosvenor
Blair. "That's what she said, but I think she also loved Baddeck and
the people, and she was very much at home here."

Mabel Harlakenden Grosvenor was born at The Lodge, Beinn Bhreagh,
Baddeck, N.S., on July 28, 1905. She died early Monday morning at Beinn
Bhreagh Hall, on the same property. She was 101. She is survived by
nearly 60 nieces and nephews from several generations. A funeral
service will be held today at Greenwood United Church, Baddeck. A
memorial service will be held next week in Washington.