Intergenerational Rootedness

Jacob Weisberg's written a book:

When he was still in his early twenties, Bert Walker set up G. H. Walker and Company, one of the first investment banking firms in the Midwest. He flourished as a speculator, losing several fortunes, but winning several more, and helping to finance the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904. Bert was rowdy, profane, and generally obnoxious. Even an approved family history describes him as “coarse.” At a friend’s boisterous birthday party, he grabbed a bass drum from the orchestra and led a drunken parade through the St. Louis Club. Rather than apologize to the board, he resigned to form the Racquet Club, whose motto was “Youth Will Be Served.” Bert liked to plaster his name around — on his companies, his houses, and his children. As president of the U.S. Golfing Association, he founded an Anglo-American tournament known, of course, as the Walker Cup....

In the family, Bert Walker is described as a bully and a boor, or worse — a violent tyrant who pummeled his sons in a boxing ring set up in his house in hopes of toughening them into professional athletes...

Bert Walker’s success on Wall Street also supported a small army of Negro servants at the ten-thousand-acre hunting lodge he bought in South Carolina and named Duncannon. The current owners have preserved the bullet holes left in the dining room ceiling when Bert fired at a wasp that stung him....

The Walker kids were raised to believe they were crap in any case, and would have a chair waiting for them at the G. H. Walker & Co. office in St. Louis.

Who is Bert Walker?

Well, he has the distinction of being the great grandfather of "the most disastrous president in history."