Lew Shattuck is the divorced father of two boys, Jimmy, 14, and Tommy, 13, who spend most of their time with their mother in Winchester, Mass. Shattuck is president of the Smaller Business Association of New England, and is frequently obliged to travel. On two counts, therefore, Lew Shattuck could find himself very far from his children -- unless, that is, he decided not to be.
One simple thing he does is watch for ways he can include the children in his travel plans. Two years ago, for example, he saw a way to bridge the time between a business conference in Chicago and a convention in San Francisco with an Amtrak train ride to Glacier National Park. As a boy he had taken a similar trip through the Great Northwest, and he wanted his sons to experience one, too.
Shattuck points out that divorced fathers of young children often look forward to their "time with the kids" with something less than enthusiasm. The kids may mirror the sentiment: "This is the weekend we've got to spend with Daddy." It helps, then, if there's something that both parties like to do, and can do, together.
In the Shattucks' case, it is fishing. "Lake fishing is best," Lew Shattuck says. "You're in the same boat, literally, and you've got a common goal. I was brought up in northern Vermont, but there we fished in streams, alone. On ponds and lakes, I've discovered, there's a lot more interplay, with the net and so on, so you are really working together."
"Working together," notice, not vacationing together. A more surprising way of working together was discovered by Gordon Segal, founder and CEO of the 19-store Crate & Barrel retail chain. Segal and his wife, Carole, had heard of a foreign-language program at Dartmouth College directed by a famous teacher named John Rassias. The program calls for total immersion not only in the language but also in the culture, especially the drama, of the country whose language is being taught. The Segals, along with two other Young Presidents Organization couples in the Chicago area, arranged for the YPO to book an eight-day session at Dartmouth in the summer of 1985. In August, filled with some apprehension and accompanied by their two younger children, they went to the Hanover, N.H., campus.
"Most interesting vacation I've ever had," says Segal, laughing. "There were about 19 families, with maybe 50 children. We called it the Club Med for Masochists. After it was over, we went down to Boston to spend the night. I slept for 14 hours straight, I was that exhausted." He also felt it had brought them closer together as a family. "It was strenuous as hell, and takes a lot of courage, too. The children are much better than you. But you really get into your family. You're all struggling with the same task."
Dick Bass, as might be expected from a mantra-chanting mountaineer, came up with a somewhat less sedentary idea for a vacation with his children.Five years ago, inspired by his boyhood reading of Richard Halliburton's The Glorious Adventure, he and his four grown children took off on what he describes as "an adventure vacation odyssey."
It was a bad time for Bass. He had just been divorced, and the bank was making threatening noises about the Snowbird resort. "The trip was designed to get my family together," he says, "but it did even more than that."
They set off, the five of them, to do themselves, as a family, all the great feats the ancients had done, as Halliburton described them, among them swimming the Hellespont and running the same route as Pheidippides along the plains of Marathon.
The trip was a breakthrough experience for Bass personally. "It rebuilt my self-respect and self-confidence," he recalls, "and allowed me to come back and get on the treadmill" of business. But what he holds most dear among the memories of that vacation is swimming the Hellespont.
The Hellespont, or Dardanelles, is a strait of water about three miles across in what is now Turkey. Lord Byron had swum across it in 1818. But none of the Bass family had ever swum more than a mile. "I suddenly found myself locked into the biggest fear of all: I was worried that they'd make it and I wouldn't.
"Then one of my sons said, 'Come on, old man, let's go!' and we leaped into the water. It was so cold it took your breath. After 50 yards, we slowed down. It was early morning, the sun was shining on our backs, shining right down to the bottom. I looked to my right. There was a set of arms and legs, kicking away, with a jillion air bubbles coming from them. I looked to my left. It was the same. What a glorious sight it was. I started crying with joy right there in the water as we were swimming. We made it, all of us, more than two and a half miles, in less than an hour.
"My prayers were answered."
