A Close-Up View, Warts and All, Of an Arrogant, Endearing Man

I first met Robert Moses on a hot summer day in 1952. He was a big, talkative man with bronze-hued skin and flashing gray eyes set in a craggy face, hair tousled after swimming, the one recreation that was a lifelong obsession with him.

Usually, Moses swam in the creek behind his house on Thompson Avenue in Babylon Village, but when the water was too murky there he knew -- as always -- how to get things done. He'd phone ahead, throw a bathrobe over his swim trunks, hop into his big black chauffeured limousine with the ``NY 2000'' plate, and be delivered within five minutes to the waterfront home of old friends Rogers and Mary Howell, who lived on the same creek but a half-mile away, where the water was cleaner.

The master planner would swim a half hour, chat a half hour, take a Scotch, then disappear back into the limo.

I had dropped in on the Howells with a friend when we ran into Moses sitting in the screened-in porch that looks out on the canal. I was 23, a summer reporter for Newsday. Moses was 63, at the peak of his legendary career. I don't remember the conversation except that he was pleasant to begin with -- and even more so when he learned that, summer job or not, I was working for a newspaper. Throughout his career, Robert Moses cultivated journalists.

On another Sunday morning when the limo apparently wasn't available, I saw Moses striding briskly along West Main Street in his bathrobe toward the Howells' place. Even now, the image lingers, seeming to catch the human side of this giant of public works with the well-deserved reputation for arrogance, vituperation, even tyranny in pursuit of his goals.

I thought about the man in the bathrobe during a long interview 20 years later. We were in his Randalls Island office beneath one of his great works -- the Triborough Bridge.

To make a point, he pounded a fist on his desk, swiveled his big chair right up to me, stuck his face into mine, waggled an emphatic finger, and said, ``Listen to me, chum. These ecologists are Johnny-come-latelys. In my day we called it `conservation.' At Jones Beach, if we waited for the environment enthusiasts, the whole goddamn place would be covered with small cottages by now.''

At the end of his career, Moses was still crusty.

We were never socially friendly, but during the next 27 years after that meeting at the Howells I would encounter him professionally many times and wonder at his complex and enigmatic personality.

Mary Howell, 80 now, said recently, ``We were great friends because he had known me since childhood. He taught me how to swim when I was 5, but once he exploded at me right in my own living room.'' She had dared to suggest that, when he built the Ocean Parkway through Gilgo Beach in the 1930s, he should have installed a modest bridge so that tidal ocean water could get into Great South Bay to help cleanse it.

``Well, he was furious at that. He shouted at me, `Mary, how could you say that? You don't know what you are saying. We know what we are doing. Where did you get your engineering degree?' Then just as fast, he cooled off and was nice as can be.''

One stop on my rounds as a fulltime reporter for Newsday in the 1950s was Long Island State Park Commission headquarters at Belmont Lake State Park in North Babylon. Once in a while, Sidney Shapiro, a top Moses aide, would usher me into the great man's inner sanctum, the big room where he sat, tie pulled down, sleeves rolled up, snapping orders like an impatient general, pacing up and down, arms flailing, talking almost incessantly, a dynamo whirling around a huge table filled with blueprints and papers.

I was assigned to cover the opening of the Captree Causeway bridge across Great South Bay in June, 1954. After the ribbon-cutting, many of the anointed repaired to the Marine Dining Room at Jones Beach for one of those lavish, taxpayer-footed luncheons for which Moses was renowned -- and that might have been the envy of a Roman emperor.

I sat with Moses for an hour at that event, though he worked the room off and on like a master politician. With the bridge in place, he said, his cherished road down Fire Island was ``absolutely inevitable.'' Anyone who disagreed, he said with a scowl, ``belongs in one of those tall brick places in Central Islip.''

I told him I thought he was going to have fits with rich opponents on Fire Island. He got angry. ``Your head is in the sand. That road will be built.'' It never was. The Fire Island National Seashore was established in 1964 instead.

One summer morning in 1959, I talked to Moses for two hours aboard the park commission cruiser Sea-Ef, moored near his house. This time he was the core of cordiality. He was sprawled out in a large green wicker chair in the cockpit, wearing old khakis, a faded plaid shirt and an oversized fedora hat.

I asked him some personal questions that might normally make him snort fire. He wasn't into golf, tennis or movies (``No time for that crap.''), seldom went to the theater, disliked modern art and ``dimwits'' who couldn't write a simple letter, including some engineers he dealt with. (``We'd be better off if they were taught by crotchety old newspaper rewrite men.'') He said he loved swimming, fishing, boats, beach picnics, baseball, gin rummy and all sorts of reading, from the 18th-Century poets he devoured as a Phi Beta Kappa at Yale to good whodunits.

For most of his life, Moses lived in Manhattan, notably at Gracie Square on the East River, but he owned the large old house in Babylon for almost 50 years. His parents paid for it after he and his first wife, Mary Sims Moses, found it in 1921. A professional building now occupies the site.

He guarded his personal life as much as he could from the scrutiny given his vast public enterprises. He tried to keep Sundays free to spend with Mary, who died in 1966, after spending several years in a wheelchair as a result of arthritis and arteriosclerosis, and their daughters, Barbara and Jane.

But even on Sundays, friends said, he frequently would slip away during the afternoon to a private room with his omnipresent yellow legal pad in hand. He was a severe workaholic, rising at 7 a.m., pushing himself 16 hours or more a day, including Saturdays, and his subordinates almost as hard.

Most of his old friends are defensive of his memory, still angry at what they consider the rough treatment of Moses by Robert A. Caro in his Pulitzer-Prize winning 1974 biography, ``The Power Broker.''

Marian Ritz of Bellmore, who worked 37 years for Moses and became his chief secretary, said, ``It was grossly unfair to a great man who did so much for so many.''

Grace Farrington, 80, a girlhood friend of his daughter Jane, frequented the Moses summer place from age 17 on. ``It was like my second home. I saw him on and off the rest of his life. We never saw the terrible temper. He was just a wonderful guy who loved the beach and the water and his job.''

Moses hated mechanical things, friends said. Though sort of a klutz around the house, he liked to cook big bacon-and-egg breakfasts on Sundays for family and visitors. Once out of the office, he liked to party informally.

But work was an addiction. It energized him. One close Moses friend who asked not to be named, referring to personal problems that both of Moses' daughters developed as adults, said, ``He was not around most of the time they were growing up. I feel he was more interested in his business than his family. Sad, very sad.''

Work so preoccupied him that he was indifferent to clothes: baggy, rumpled suits were a hallmark. He was almost totally unable to handle his personal finances though he thoroughly understood public authority funding schemes and oversaw expenditures of billions of dollars in public funds.

Moses was not wealthy. Much of the public work he did was unsalaried. He was often strapped for personal cash. He lived for years on money doled out by his domineering mother, and once borrowed $20,000 from her to speed up a Jones Beach contract.

Isabel Gallagher of Babylon, who with her late attorney husband, Frank, was socially close to Robert and Mary Moses, remembers Moses as ``one of the most charming and intriguing of men. You knew of his power but he did not flaunt it among friends.''

He had no son and was grief-stricken when Jane's 21-year-old son, handsome, devil-may-care Christopher Collins, whom ``Gramps'' Moses dearly loved, was killed in an out-of-state car wreck one week before Moses' 80th birthday in late 1968.

Moses, at 77, married Mary Grady, secretary to aide George Spargo, within a month of his first wife's death. There were published rumors that Moses and Mary Grady had long had an affair, but Moses loyalists, including Marian Ritz, say it was untrue. Mary Grady Moses died in 1993.

One of the few charitable causes to which Moses lent his name was Good Samaritan Hospital in West Islip. He chaired its first five fund-raising balls from 1963 to 1967, and in the first year arranged to have New York Mayor Robert F. Wagner attend and Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadiens play for 700 guests at the Southward Ho Country Club in Brightwaters, of which Moses was a member.

Retired hospital executive Ted Shiebler recalled, ``Moses could part the waters in all he did.''

During an interview with Moses in 1972, I visited the house he rented on Oak Beach. We could see Robert Moses State Park and Ocean Parkway and the Captree Causeway from the windows. The man who had planned them talked for three hours about everything from politics to poetry, waved off questions about a comeback, showed pictures of his grandchildren, and during a walk on the beach said he thought his work would be remembered for 100 years.

I accompanied him to the Brightwaters estate of Landon Thorne, one of his millionaire friends, where he swam a half-hour in the glass-enclosed pool surrounded by lush tropical vegetation, showing even at 83 the powerful crawl that made him captain of the swimming teams at Yale and Oxford so many years earlier.

We lunched almost three hours at LaGrange Inn in West Islip. He had brandy and soda, oysters, hashed brown potatoes, vegetables, rice pudding and espresso coffee. He talked with as much gusto as he ate, mostly about his joy as a younger man walking and sailing the barrier islands, the start of a public mission that would change the face of Long Island forever.

Moses died July 29, 1981. He was 92. I attended the crowded funeral at St. Peter's Episcopal Church in Brightwaters.

As the hymns swelled, I could not help but think how fitting was the line from Sophocles that Robert Caro had used to introduce his book about this great man: ``One must wait until the evening to see how splendid the day has been.''

Tom Morris, a Newsday reporter and editor for 42 years, retired in 1995.