Drawing Animals With Margaret Mead
Posted December 28, 2024 | Reviewed by Margaret Foley
On Saturday, April 13, 1963, the great baseball player Pete Rose, later disgraced for betting on his own team, hit the first of his record 4,256 hits; the USSR launched its Kosmos satellite from Kapustin Yar near Volgograd; the wreckage of the Dutch ship Vergulde Draeck, sunk in 1656, was discovered; chess champion Garry Kasparov was born; and I was 10 years old, drawing animals on napkins with the most famous public intellectual in America.
My encounter with Margaret Mead wasn’t my first rodeo. By then I had “attended” at least as many academic conferences as many assistant professors. This time it was the annual meetings of the American Society for Group Psychotherapy and Psychodrama (ASGPP), an organization my father, the psychiatrist J.L. Moreno, founded in 1942. That year the conference was held at the Hotel Pennsylvania across from Madison Square Garden. Demolished in 2023, it was one of the biggest hotels in the world, a four-star in today’s ranking of luxury. Among the notable events in its history was the death of the CIA’s anthrax expert Frank Olson, who fell to his death from an 11th-floor window in 1953 after being dosed with LSD.
