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20th Century Vox
She caught the 20th century when it wasn’t looking.
20th Century Vox
One of “Murrow’s boys,” Mary Marvin Breckinridge Patterson, had eyes and ears for the extraordinary.
BY COLIN W. SARGENT
The first Maine-connected woman to earn a pilot’s license in the U. S. was Mary
Marvin Breckinridge Pat-
terson (1905-2020). But flying an Immelmann or shooting a deadstick landing were the least of her accomplishments.
York residents remember “Marvin” as the lofty owner of River House, the biggest mansion on the York River. Oh, that lady! The one with better family connections than an Auchincloss.
She was pretty good with a camera too. Dismissed as a rich kid, she became a world-class news and art photographer who caught the 20th century with her high-speed shutter–sometimes when it wasn’t looking.
Society’s Child “Traveling to Europe in 1939 on photojournalism assignments, Breckinridge was in Switzerland when the Nazis invaded Poland, starting World War II,” According to the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. “She traveled to London to photograph the evacuation of English children, one of only four American photographers in England for the first months of the war. In November, Edward R. Murrow invited Breckinridge to join him in a CBS radio broadcast about the changes the war had brought to English villages, and then others. At his suggestion she took on a sonorous tone while at the mike, and he hired her as the first female news broadcaster for the CBS World News Roundup to report from Europe.
“She ended up broadcasting 50 reports from seven countries and became part of The Murrow Boys, a group of scholarly correspondents that Murrow assembled before and during the war. Only eleven were in the group, including legendary reporters Charles Collingwood, Richard C. Hottelet, Eric Sevareid, William L. Shirer, and Howard K. Smith, as well as Breckinridge.”
What’s the takeaway?
Marvin, the Maine summer person with social connections to the moon, had an exquisite talent for being in the right place at the right time. Stomping at the Savoy “It was on assignment for Town and Country to cover the Lucerne Music Festival, to be followed by the Nazi rally in Nuremberg for Life, that the Germans marched into Poland and all plans were changed,” she told a 1986 audience filled with fellow members of the Society of Women Geographers.
“The music festival was cancelled. The Nazi rally was cancelled…It was 1939…I traveled to London with an English girl who luckily had an uncle on the board [of directors] of the Savoy Hotel, so we stayed there at the minimum rate.
“It was already blacked out when we arrived late on the eve of the declaration of war. The following night there were enemy planes over England and we feared a damaging raid. The hall porter came along the corridor, knocked on our doors, and said politely, “Excuse me, miss, there’s an air raid on. Will you please come down to the shelter?”
“It was in the basement in the Abraham Lincoln room, neatly protected with piled sand bags. I made a photograph of the hotel guests in their night clothes, which appeared in Life. It was the first picture taken in an air raid shelter [see photo next page].
Nice Work If You Can Get It
“My agent, Black Star, had its original office in Fleet Street and were glad to see me turn up, as their English photographers, all men, had been mobilized and the German and Austrian refugees were considered aliens and therefore not allowed to carry cameras. After I’d done several picture stories, I was dining one night with my friends, Ed and Janet Murrow.
“Ed was interested in stories I had done on ‘An English Village Prepares for War’ and on children from the slums who were
evacuated to the country. He asked if I would come on the air with him Saturday night to talk about them, and I said, yes, thinking that my parents, then in California, would be relieved to hear their daughter’s voice.
“I never thought then that that chance conversation at dinner would lead me into a new career, broadcasting. I have two bracelets, really dog tags, to show: one with Black Star address and one with CBS. I spoke from seven European countries on the World News Roundup program for CBS, a program which is still going on. I believe I’m the only person to have broadcast from all three great capitals, London, Paris and Berlin, during the war.”
World travels as the wife of Foreign Service officer Jefferson Patterson (First Secretary of the United States Embassy in Berlin), whom she met while covering the city, sharpened her focus for irony, disjuncture, design, and detail. This striking art photo with the snake and the riot of shadows is in the collection at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art.
On the other side of the looking glass was her life in Maine. According to documents at Vassar, “Jefferson Patterson retired from the Foreign Service in 1958, and Marvin devoted herself to philanthropy, working for many community organizations and boards, including the Board of Directors of the National Symphony Orchestra, the Women’s Committee on the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Women’s Committee of the Smithsonian Institution Associates and the International Council of the Folger Shakespeare Library. In 1973, the Pattersons donated 23 acres of family land in Maine to Bowdoin College, which became the site of the college’s Breckinridge Public Affairs Center.”
Marvin was one of Maine’s most overprivileged and underrated talents.
It wasn’t fair how much money she had, or how famous the Breckinridges were: vice presidents, senators, generals, Olympic fencers, Confederate generals, and on her mother’s side, the B.F. Goodrich fortune. Gore Vidal winked at the Breckinridge pedigree (and cousin Bunny Breckinridge) with Myra Breckinridge. When you stand at the shore of River House, you see the world as your reflection. Citizen of the World, Citizen of Maine Marvin was born the same year her grandmother had River House built for her on seventy acres of the York River. Guy Lowell was the architect. He’s known for designing the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the New York courthouse familiar to movie lovers as the one with the huge stairway that Charlie Sheen climbs in the final frames of Wall Street.
In a way, Marvin was one and the same as her summer house here. “By the time I arrived it was here to shelter me during my first summer,” she told Bowdoin College professor David Lee Simmons. The puckish Marvin didn’t mind at all that the mansion
was riverside, three miles off the Atlantic shore. “You can play tennis in bright sunshine here while our friends on the ocean are in a damp fog.”
Growing up, “even as a little girl, she traveled extensively with her family, mostly to Europe, and to China and Japan during World War I.” In a world of devastation and beauty, her only constant was Maine.
Then misfortune charred her world. “On October 1, 1925, one day before Marvin’s twentieth birthday, River House was destroyed by fire. Marvin received a telegram with the news at Vassar. ‘I thought it was for my birthday,’ she tells Simmons in Mary Marvin Breckinridge Patterson and River House. “‘I got right up there by the next night. The house was still smoldering at 9 p.m.’”
According to Simmons, River House was rebuilt while the family traveled in Europe. But the experience had unalterably changed Marvin, who adjusted her horizons to international issues, including cofounding the National Student Federation of America, with chapters from London to Budapest. She may have missed staying at River House in the summer of 1926, but she touched down here memorably in 1927 to enjoy some of the Jazz Age upgrades— deluxe bathrooms and a “slightly adjusted roofline.” The first design’s hipped roof sacrificed storage space and had no love for Maine’s deep snow drifts.
Marvin had grown up with her own darkroom, printing her own snapshots. Now that her borderless life was her darkroom, she kept snapping. In 1932, she traveled the African continent, shooting astonishing images in dozens of countries—her portfolio is a permanent part of the Smithsonian’s collection. Closer to home, she traveled through impoverished areas of the U.S. to document rural struggle and courage. Kentucky was the inspiration for her silent film The Forgotten Frontier (1930). n
