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.