Arkansas: Opportunity Regained

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Why Arkansas? The answer lies partly in the Rockefeller mystique of service, partly in the personality of the most individualistic of John D.'s five grandsons. In Suite 5600 of Rockefeller Center's RCA Building, Manhattan command post for the family's worldwide enterprises, a senior staff member muses: "Win was always the most personally motivated of the boys. He was also the least assured." A younger son of a comparable dynasty in Victorian England who displayed Winthrop's early-blooming symptoms of rebelliousness and high living would have been packed off to colonize Kenya or repel the Pathans. It took more than familial pressures to part Fourth Son Winthrop from the Manhattan fleshpots and the clan's Pocantico Hills domain in suburban Westchester. The incentive came from within.

For one thing, Win was born gregarious. More readily than his brothers and their older sister Abby, now wife of New York Banker Jean Mauze, Win befriended local children in Pocantico Hills, and ever since has shown a natural ease among men and women of disparate backgrounds. When he says, "I've always been interested in people"—and he says it often—he means just that. "Win was basically the nonconformist," says David. "He was rebellious against the stereotype of what we are." He seems always to have been the Rockefellers' odd boy out. Their mother, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, once admonished the older sons in writing: "It seems cruel to me that you big boys should make Winthrop the goat all the time. You know very well that the only way to help him is by being kind to him."

His apartness grew with age. Winny, as the family called him, was the huskiest Rockefeller, at 6 ft. 3 in. and a good 200 lbs., by his early twenties. He was also the only one of the five brothers to drop out of college (Yale during his third year). He never returned. "I went to a doctor," he recalled later, "who examined my eyes and then remarked: 'I don't believe the trouble is in your eyes. Did you ever try opening a book?' " Roustabout to Roughneck. It was an unspoken law that all the Rockefeller boys should try their hands at manual labor while in school and on vacation.

Win went further. After Yale, at a stage when his brothers were selecting wives from the proper families and digging into the New York—based family businesses and philanthropies, he became a roustabout in the Texas oilfields at 75¢ per hour, moved up to roughneck, or assistant driller, at 83¢, and lived in a $4.50-a-week room. When he came home three years later, he worked briefly at junior jobs in such family-dominated enterprises as the Chase National Bank (now Chase Manhattan) and Socony-Vacuum Oil Co. (now Mobil). He began taking on charitable responsibilities and helped organize the Greater New York Fund. He became a leader of the National Urban League—not merely a contributor but a dedicated worker who did much to promote job opportunities for Negroes. Lester Granger, former executive director, calls Rockefeller "as good a board member as the Urban League ever had."