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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Bill Dedman
Read between
July 31 - August 1, 2025
When W. A. Clark died in 1925, he left an estate estimated at $100 million to $250 million, worth up to $3.4 billion today.
The length of history spanned by father and daughter is hard to comprehend. W. A. Clark was born in 1839, during the administration of the eighth president of the United States, Martin Van Buren. W.A. was twenty-two when the Civil War began. When Huguette was born in 1906, Theodore Roosevelt, the twenty-sixth president, was in the White House. Yet 170 years after W.A.’s birth, his youngest child was still alive at age 103 during the time of the forty-fourth president, Barack Obama.
When Huguette was born, W.A. was a vigorous sixty-seven with four grown children from his first marriage, while Huguette’s mother, Anna LaChapelle Clark, was only twenty-eight.
Reporters who toured the home counted twenty-six bedrooms, thirty-one bathrooms, and five art galleries. Below the basement’s Turkish baths, swimming pool, and storage room for furs, a railroad spur brought in coal for the furnace, which burned seven tons on a typical day, not only for heat but also to power dynamos for the two elevators, the cold-storage plant, the air-filtration plant, and the 4,200 lightbulbs.
None of W. A. Clark’s enterprises profited from trusts or monopolies or stock manipulation, as did Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harriman, Rogers—and Mark Twain.
“True or false, that which is said of men often occupies as important a place in their lives, and above all in their destinies, as that which they do.”
animals.… Sympathy, the great bond between human beings, is largely dependent on imagination—that is, upon the power of realizing the feelings and the circumstances of others so as to enable us to feel with and for them.
Indeed, Huguette was hidden away from hospital inspectors, according to two former employees at Doctors Hospital, a nurse and a social worker. The Joint Commission, which accredits hospitals, made regular visits to Beth Israel to ensure it met standards.
Pour vivre heureux, vivons caché. To live happily, live hidden.
