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a long dress with a fishtail in the fashion of the day, and she tucked that fishtail between her ankles and stood on her head!
    By the time I knew Mrs. Cate she was a tiny, erect lady whose most remarkable feature was her voice, a kind of
basso profundo
bark. My father said she used to have to insist over the phone that she was not
Mr.
Cate.
    Curtis Cate was a scholarly man who believed in Spartan discipline,tempered by a sense of humor. The atmosphere of the school was much less formal and competitive than Groton’s. There was a lot of riding rather than team sports. It was perfect for my father. He was the
only
Duke. According to Uncle Minturn, my father put on twenty pounds in the first six months; he was so happy he stayed there for two and a half years, working summers on a ranch nearby.
    HARRY SEDGWICK  But then, after the Cate School, Uncle Francis went to Harvard. He was back in the competitive furnace. Babbo always said that the two essential things to do at Harvard were to play football and to join the Porcellian Club. He himself had played on one of the earliest football teams, in 1878. My father, Minturn, was always a great athlete—at his birth the family doctor said, This boy doesn’t need a nanny, he needs a trainer.” He made quite a record at Harvard. He had played for a team that never lost a game. In his senior year, after the Princeton-Harvard game, the sports page of the Boston
Globe
read SEDGWICK TURNS TIDE . Babbo was proud of being introduced as “the father of Duke Sedgwick.”
    So Uncle Francis had quite a name to live up to at Harvard. He hated the name Francis, and clung to “Duke” for the rest of his life. In fact, thirty-odd years later at his twenty-fifth Harvard reunion, he and Dad actually quarreled over who was the
real
Duke. Dad told him, “You wI’ll always be little Duke.’”
    In his freshman year Uncle Francis went out for football and crew, and while he made the football team, he got I’ll that spring and was dropped from the crew. He took six courses that first year and got A’s in all of them. In his sophomore year he was awarded the Jacob Wendell Scholarship, and Babbo took him to Europe as a reward. But in all his years at Harvard he never won a single H. He kept trying, forcing himself, building up his body to such a degree that some of his Porcellian Club classmates referred to him as “Physical Francis.”
    It was a tradition in the Sedgwick family to belong to the Porcellian Club. Babbo had been a member, and even Judge Theodore Sedgwick, the one at the center of the family graveyard, had been elected an honorary member just before he died, one of the very few Yale men so chosen. Uncle Francis was invited to join, and he accepted. But although I’ve heard that he later considered the club an important part of his life, another member told me that he rarely went there and that when he did, nobody seemed to notice him. He was sort of a vacant spot in the room.

    Francis with his parents
     

    The Sedgwicks (
left to right
): Halla, Babbo, Francis, May, and Minturn
     
    MINTURN SEDGWICK  Francis was concentrating on Fine Arts at Harvard, but what he really wanted to be was a tycoon. When he won a Clarence Dillon scholarship, Babbo, who was not in the least worldly-wise, told his son, “Now that you’ve won this scholarship, why don’t you go down to New York and call on the great man? I’m sure none of his other scholars wI’ll ever come near him.” So Francis went to see Mr. Dillon and made a great hit with him. Dillon asked him what he was concentrating on. “Fine Arts and Finance,” said Francis. Dillon apparently said, “Splendid. That’s just what I did in college.” Then Dillon asked him what he expected to do when he’d graduated. Francis told him that he planned to study at Trinity College in Cambridge for a year. Then he said, “After that I’d like a year of banking experience in Europe.”
    Clarence Dillon wrote several letters of