On George Peabody
By Ken St. Onge
WASHINGTON, Dec. 7, 2004 – To those who know his family history, it makes sense that Lawrence-born George Peabody would be a leader in a group that on Thursday challenged Congress to affirm a new vision for the National Mall.
“It has become a center stage not just for monuments, celebrations and varied public uses, but for social movements that have shaped our history,” said the report by the National Coalition to Save Our Mall, a Maryland-based citizens group for which Peabody serves as secretary. “It’s a metaphor for our burgeoning democracy.”
In his small role with that group, which aims to preserve open space in the maze of museums, monuments and memorials the Mall has become, Peabody said he is partially fulfilling his family’s tradition of public service.
“He’s our wise soul,” said Cheryl Terio, the coalition’s director.
The middle child in a family where public life is a generations-old custom, it was expected that Peabody would carry on the tradition. Along with his brother and sister, Peabody, more than eight decades ago at the age of two, left Lawrence, where he was born into one of the oldest and most prominent families in the state. His father, a priest at Grace Episcopal Church, left for a new parish in Pennsylvania.
His older sister, Marietta, who went on to serve as a U.S. delegate to the United Nations with Adlai Stevenson, was the eldest of the five children of Malcolm Peabody and Mary Parkman. Their second oldest, Endicott, known as “Chub,” would become governor of Massachusetts from 1963-65 and a candidate for the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts and New Hampshire. George’s younger brother, Sam, went on to a successful real estate career in New York. Malcolm, the youngest, became a teacher and a leader in the charter school movement.
“I think, from my family, I was influenced by two things,” Peabody said in a recent interview, “a certain rebelliousness and a certain confidence at the same time. The kind of confidence that mother had when she went to jail.”
In 1964, his 72-year-old mother joined civil rights protesters in St. Augustine, Fla., where she was promptly arrested for helping African-Americans disobey the state’s Jim Crow laws. It made national headlines: Massachusetts socialite, cousin of Franklin D. Roosevelt, mother of sitting governor of Massachusetts, arrested for protesting. Martin Luther King Jr. called her one of the “heroes of St. Augustine.”
George Peabody has tried to exemplify those qualities throughout his careers, he said. He joined the Coast Guard and served as a gunnery officer on the ship that carried three of the marines who raised the flag on Iwo Jima.
According to Harry Haskell, his best friend since age five and World War II crewmate, after their first year in the Coast Guard, he and Peabody – both nearsighted – tricked their way into officer candidate school, by surreptitiously putting on contact lenses to pass the eye exam.
“It was George’s idea,” Haskell said. “What a wonderful man.”
Later, as an Episcopal priest, Peabody resigned from the church over political differences to spend eight months following community organizer Saul Alinsky.
Since 1980, Peabody has lived in Washington, where he teaches about leadership to clients such as the CIA and the Environmental Protection Agency.
Although he has long since left Lawrence, Peabody recalled returning several years ago to preach a sermon in the same church his father had nearly 80 years earlier.
“I was preaching a sermon about my mother and I mentioned that she had been given this very fine painting by a famous French painter,” he said. “Since it was showing a little bit too much bosom, my mother gave it to the rummage sale where it sold for about 50 cents. I said, ‘Somebody here has to remember the family who bought this important French painting. It’s probably up in your attic.’ Having said that, I expected everyone to leave.”
While in Lawrence he was able to locate the Prospect Street house he was born in.
Despite his many years’ absence, the shape of the house was etched in his memory, he said.
“It just felt right,” he said.
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