I soon recognized that these Mellons were omnipresent.
My childish deductive reasoning skills led me to assume that this family must be like some PBS high-brow version of Mr. To kid-me, a family name such as "Mellon" seemed pretty funny: it conjured up images of posh, well-dressed fleshy fruit. Growing up surrounded by the Mellon name in Pittsburgh And I wondered about what kinds of lives those were - not simply in terms of material possessions, but about how the world must seem to such people. What I did know, even at age 5, was that a different kind of life was lived by the sorts of folks who had the money and hubris to reproduce their houses in miniature. The normal condition of man is hard work, self-denial, acquisition and accumulation as soon as his descendants are freed from the necessity of such exertion they begin to degenerate sooner or later in both body and mind. I surely couldn't have known that Sarah's grandfather, Judge Thomas Mellon, had cautioned against precisely this kind of privileged existence when he wrote in his 1885 memoirs: I didn't know that his sister Cordelia's well-intentioned environmental concerns likewise masked support of ardent nativist organizations over the decades - but then again, that wouldn't become public knowledge for years. This country's most generous and influential donors to conservativeĬauses. Nor could I predict that (once sober) he would eventually become one of I couldn't know that Sarah's son Richard Mellon Scaife was even then carrying on the legacy of alcoholism and would ratchet the family's reputation to moral depths with monied bullying behavior. He did, after all, arrange for the Pittsburgh wedding of the century when Sarah married Alan Magee Scaife in 1927.Īt age 5, I knew nothing of the dissipated, privileged, alcoholic life Sarah is said to have led. He likely nurtured his daughter's sense of grandeur from the cradle. Mellon had always been the showiest of the famous Mellon brothers. And of course I couldn't know that Sarah's father Richard B.
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