Dr. Thomas Hepburn, the father of the blue-blooded Katharine Hepburn, lived across the street from Dr. Dunne, but neither wealth nor their common profession could overcome centuries of prejudice, and the two families never spoke. Those early years of being snubbed, or “high-hatted,” as Dad used to say, laid the groundwork for a social insecurity that never placed him in the right club, but just across the street from the swells who “belonged.” Horatio Alger tales embarrassed him, and he preferred to describe Poppa Burns as “a wealthy banker” rather than a grocer who fought his way out of an
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