Childhood
Isabel D. Roberts was born in Mexico, Missouri, the younger of two surviving daughters of James H. and Mary Harris Roberts. James was a mechanic and inventor born in Utica, New York; Mary, a homemaker and a native of Prince Edward Island. They had been married in 1867 in New York state. They lived for a time in Missouri, where Roberts and her sister Charlotte were both born. Leaving Missouri, the Roberts family moved several more times, including to Providence, Rhode Island. They eventually settled in South Bend, Indiana, where James H. Roberts became Deputy Director of Inspections for the State of Indiana. They were active members of the First Presbyterian Church of South Bend and social and civic groups through which they became friends of Laura Caskey Bowsher (later, DeRhodes). This friendship eventually led to Roberts' introducing Laura to Frank Lloyd Wright and Laura's commissioning from Wright's studio the K. C. DeRhodes House.
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Famous quotes containing the word childhood:
“Oh! mystery of man, from what a depth
Proceed thy honours. I am lost, but see
In simple childhood something of the base
On which thy greatness stands; but this I feel,
That from thyself it comes, that thou must give,
Else never canst receive. The days gone by
Return upon me almost from the dawn
Of life: the hiding-places of man’s power
Open; I would approach them, but they close.”
—William Wordsworth (1770–1850)
“When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss. It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“Children became an obsessive theme in Victorian culture at the same time that they were being exploited as never before. As the horrors of life multiplied for some children, the image of childhood was increasingly exalted. Children became the last symbols of purity in a world which was seen as increasingly ugly.”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)