Some years ago I was visiting my parents on Long Island over Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend. A PBS special remembering MLK aired on Sunday night and my mother and I sat down to watch it. About 15 minutes into the program, my mom offhandedly mentioned: “You know, I made breakfast for Martin Luther King when I worked for the Knapps.”
Like generations before her, my mother, then Kathleen Rooney and just 18 years old, left Ireland in hopes of a better life in America. She emigrated in 1957. Her aunt in Hightstown, Mary Flatley, had found for her a plum of a job in Princeton working as a housekeeper and caregiver for the family of Professor J. Merrill Knapp, an eminent Handel scholar soon to become university dean.
John Merrill Knapp had graduated from Yale, class of 1936. After serving in the Navy during World War II, he was hired by Princeton University in 1946 as a music instructor and glee club director. Thus began a 36-year career, though, as my mother fondly recalls, his devotion to his alma mater transcended his Princeton affiliation; even when he became dean in 1961, Merrill would sport his Yale Blue togs to root on his Bulldogs whenever they played football against the Tigers at Palmer Stadium.
A distinguished musicologist, he was an authority on the life and works of George Frideric Handel, but the deanship meant a whole new slate of duties—luncheons, dinners, and other events with visiting scholars and dignitaries. In those days, the dean often hosted guests of such stature at his home. And it would be Kathleen who met and served these luminaries.
Within a few months, the shy Irish girl from County Cavan was shaking hands with the President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Ike had been an honorary uncle of the dean’s wife, Elizabeth-Ann (whom Ike called “Libby-Ann”), since she was a little girl through his many years of close work in the military with her father, Thomas D. Campbell, a titan of American agriculture.
Kathleen had indeed landed a wonderful job. The Knapps lived at the secluded end of Rosedale Lane in a modernist, single-floor house designed by Mrs. Knapp, who had graduated from the Cambridge School of Architecture in 1941 (she would also go on to design the Princeton YMCA.) The Knapps had two daughters, Joan and Phoebe, who were slightly younger than Kathleen and affectionately regarded her as an older sister. For their part, Mr. and Mrs. Knapp treated Kathleen as if she was their third daughter.
Along with Eisenhower, Kathleen met President Kennedy, J. Robert Oppenheimer (a frequent visitor as his daughter attended Miss Fine’s School along with Joan and Phoebe), and Thurgood Marshall (whom President Kennedy had recently nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.) At Joan Knapp’s debutante party, Kathleen danced with Princeton sophomore Bill Bradley, already a national phenom of college basketball.
And she made breakfast for a young Baptist minister and rising civil rights activist named Martin Luther King Jr. Born and raised in rural Ireland, Kathleen had never traveled beyond her small town of Cavan nor seen anyone whose skin color differed from hers before arriving at New York’s bustling Idlewild Airport. As my mother recounted, King was the first Black person with whom she had a conversation.
It was a remarkable story. I knew my mom had met many famous people, but she never mentioned MLK. He was very gracious and pleasant, she recalled. After finishing his meal he invited her to sit down to chat, asking her how she was finding things in America. When she cleared the table, he’d left her a note wishing her luck in her new life and a $2 tip.
Alas, that note from Martin Luther King Jr. has long since vanished. What has remained all these years is my mother’s abiding affection for the Knapps and the four years she spent living in their home more as a member of the family than an employee. Time has only burnished what she knew at the outset to be a charmed Princeton life.
Patrick Walsh, a Princeton resident since 1993, is a senior writer at scene4 magazine, an online arts monthly, and an occasional contributor to U.S. 1.
