It was a great day because it was the first day he would set foot inside the house that Frank Lloyd Wright had designed for Burton and Orpha Westcott, the grandparents who had died before he was born.
It was a great day because it was the day the public would see the results of five year, $6 million quest to restore it to to its original condition.
And, for Mr. Westcott, it all came with a cherry on top: In the parade to celebrate the grand opening, he would have the rare opportunity to drive a 1920 Westcott Motor Car designed not by Frank Lloyd Wright but by Burton Westcott.
Credit: Teesha McClam
Credit: Teesha McClam
During a Zoom interview in which four other family members took part, Jeff Westcott also recalled a strange moment early in the day – that came right after he introduced himself and two family members before asking people involved in the festivities where he was to go to carry out his duties.
In the moment of silence that followed, “It was like they were looking at three ghosts.”
This was particularly strange for Jeff Westcott because the memories both he and his brother took with them from Springfield made both feel very much at home in the world.
The boys came to Springfield in 1956 when Jay was 12, Jeff was 10, because their parents, John and Mary Westcott, thought Springfield was the right place to raise them.
“We wanted to get the boys out of New York City,” their mother told an interviewer. “We really couldn’t send them off to play in Central Park on the bus (and were) anxious for them to … live in a town where they could be freer and could have the experience of a public school.”
Jeff remembers the move from Grammercy Park to a North Limestone Street farm the had inherited from close family friends as being seamless for him and his late brother.
“I don’t think either of us really looked back.”
Just at the right age to be brothers, playmates and competitors, “we would play hardball one-on-one up against the barn,” Jeff said.
When school started, Jay entered the 7th grade at Roosevelt Junior High, where he formed a close relationship with Coach Don Henderson. He then went to Springfield High School his sophomore year and reunited with Henderson when North High School opened the following year.
Jay would then study at Phillips Academy Andover, a prep school, before heading for Yale, where he played squash and distinguished himself as captain of the tennis team.
“(Jay himself) said that all started in Springfield,” Jeff said.
In that era, the city was a youth tennis center. Dr. Howard Dredge had created a strong local program and Jimmy Connors was among those who played at the annual Western Tennis Open in Snyder Park.
Springfield’s reputation – bolstered by some recruiting – brought future tennis coach of the stars Nick Bolletteiri to a job at the Springfield Country Club.
And for the Westcott boys, the experiences were the raw material that would produce family lore, passed down to the next generation.
“I recall him telling us about some pickup basketball games that might have taken place in the barn on the farm,” said Jay’s son Jeffrey, who was named for his uncle.
“I don’t know if Uncle Jeff can corroborate this, (but) he mentioned the floorboards were not so sturdy, and my father knew where the (weak spots) were.”
Because his competitors “were not as familiar with (the court), they may have fallen through the floor.”
Uncle Jeff corroborated the essence of this lesson in ethics of sport saying “the only thing I would add” is that the games involved some first string high high school players.
In the late-50s and early ‘60s Springfield, their grandparents’ now famous house seemed to the boys and community “ancient history,” Jeff Wescott said.
Nor had the home’s fall from architectural grace seemed to bother their father, who had lived in the house.
Some of that may have been due to the difficult times John Westcott associated with it – particularly his including his mother’s and father’s deaths in 1923 and 1926, the latter after the failure of the Westcott Motor Co. and Burton’s reported descent into alcohol.
Better memories would have been evoked by family pictures of John dressed like a cowboy in New Mexico, where his parents sent him to recover from Spanish influenza that sickened him and shut down his prep school in 1918.
John’s bedroom also would also have been a pleasant touchstone, being the place he first experimented with a crystal set that led to a lifelong interest in radio.
Suzy Westcott said her husband, Jay, “talked a lot about his Dad’s HAM radio and stringing these wires through the (farm) field” after the moved back to Springfield. “He actually talked to people … really, all over the world” -- and corresponded with them as well.
And things periodically went haywire.
“The problem was that the train went through the property and would … break the wire ,” Suzy explained. “Then his dad had to go out and re-establish the connection” by reshaping the wire into a parallelogram.”
One can image trying to do that night, in strong wind or winter.
“The other thing his dad was really interested in was the stock market,” Suzy Westcott said. “And he was a great believer that the sunspots affected it.”
He wasn’t, though, a great fan of the federal government after it moved to the gold standard and short-circuited his investment.
Mention of that Jay’s son Jeffrey to mention a related matter of lore that his sister, Valleri launched into immediately.
(In the late 1930s), John “bought up a stock of silk knowing that the war was coming and that the government would need the silk to make parachutes.”
After “he stockpiled this in a very wise maneuver, which he never profited from because “his favorite government” commandeered it for the war effort, leaving him uncompensated.
The boys both attended Yale, then to careers on the East Coast. After law school at Harvard, Jay became a leading Boston lawyer; and after Yale and a dalliance with Navy Jets, Jeff spent 30 years as a broker in New York.
We’ll end by touching on stories their father told his boys about his adventures with the Westcott chauffer and compensated playmate Robert Jackson.
“One was that he and R.J. were trying to drive the experimental electric car” only to have it catch fire in the garage, Jeff said.
That ended, of course, in an awkward explanation to John’s dad and R.J.’s boss that could inspire a Norman Rockwell painting.
But “a lot of” the stories, Jeff said “had to do with Robert Jackson’s fear of going into the cemetery and my dad trying to get him in there.”
Apparently Young John always wanted to see what Robert Jackson’s face would look like if he ever encountered a ghost – or maybe three.
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