Q: How would people on the street respond to your father and how did it make
you feel?
BBC: Dad was adulated by the public. Wherever we went people would recognize
him. We couldn't really be a family, a normal family together and just take a
walk down the street or go to a restaurant or a movie, without people crowding
in all over to and wanting to shake his hand and get his autograph. Of course,
I didn't like that a bit. We so seldom saw our Dad anyway, I kept thinking
well leave him alone, let us have our father for a change.
Q: You were saying that he didn't belong to the family, sometimes you felt
like?
BBC: Dad was such a public figure. He belonged really to the world. He
belonged to the public, at least I think that's the way the public felt about
it. I can remember in our camps up in Maine and the public kind of felt that
they owned him and they would come into our camps, even though we were miles
away from the main road and had private signs all along the dirt road, that
we'd find them wandering around and looking into, breaking, some of them even
broke into the house and looked into closets and bureau drawers, like it's
perfectly okay to do this, you know. It's like he belonged to them.
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