An interview with Luther Tucker Jr. with grandson David from 2020
Carll Tucker was born in Albany, New York in 1881 to Cornelia Strong Tucker and Luther Henry Tucker. He went to St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire in 1898, graduating in 1900 following his father (class of 1855) and grandfather, Luther Tucker, to Yale and graduating in 1904. (Luther Henry Tucker’s house has been combined with the house next door to form the Ronald McDonald House at 139 South Lake Avenue in Albany). Luther Tucker had founded and published the first daily newspaper west of New York City and published and edited several journals dedicated to agriculture, horticulture, and rural life. Luther Henry Tucker continued as editor and publisher. Among these periodicals were The Genesee Farmer, and The Country Gentleman
Marcia Myers Brady (Tucker) was born in Pownal Center, Vermont on July 21, 1884 to Marcia Ann Brady and Anthony Nicholas Brady. Her father, Anthony Nicholas Brady (subsequently to be referred to as Brady) had an elementary education in Troy, New York. His parents were natives of Ireland in the 1830’s where his father cultivated flax and produced linen. With competition from cheaper yarns being produced in Ireland and Scotland, and the onset of the potato famine, father Nicholas Brady moved his family to northern France, near Lille. There, he became a carpenter. The Brady in our story (MBT’s father) was born near Lille in 1841, and traveled as a young child with his family to visit his mother’s relatives who had emigrated to Troy, New York. The mother and children remained in the Troy area. At the age of thirteen, Brady ran away from home and began working in the barber shop at Delavan House - a prominent Albany hotel - selling cigars, cigarettes and newspapers. His mother knew where he was and kept track of his progress. He began another job traveling with a horse and wagon and selling products. A stop on his route was the Myers country store in Pownal Center, Vermont, where he was to meet his future bride, Marcia Ann Myers. At age nineteen, with his older brother, James, he started a tea store in Albany. They opened other stores until they nearly controlled the entire tea trade in Albany and Troy. This group of stores has been cited as one of the earliest examples on a small scale of what was to become the chain store plan in American retail. Anthony Brady was a risk taker and a visionary. The remainder of his life he expanded the depth of his investment and the breadth of his involvement in emerging technologies.
In 1867 Brady married Marcia Ann Myers, whom he had met in Pownal Center. They had 6 children, Marcia Myers (Tucker) was the fourth, and her lifelong friend and sister Mabel (later, Mrs. Francis Garvan) the youngest. MBT used to say that she had a very happy childhood. She grew up in a time where horses were important for riding, pulling carriages and carts and sleighs. She talked about how her father always had a barrel of oysters in their house (still there at 411 State Street) in Albany. They were transported by rail from the Chesapeake Bay. I always wondered how that was possible, but with her father’s interest in railroads, it now makes sense. MBT was sent away to a Roman Catholic boarding school for a year. She HATED it! They played tennis in hot habits, and the girls could only bathe once a week. She converted to the Episcopal Church as a result.
A chapter could be written about her father’s business accomplishments, but one story has been handed down. The Bradys had a compound on the shore in West End, New Jersey, where Carll and Marcia Tucker would summer. One of the neighbors was Thomas Alva Edison. The family saga goes that one day Brady was home with friends. Edison came over and was eager to show them something he had just invented – the electric light bulb! Whether or not there is any truth in the story, Brady invested with Edison in The New York Edison Electric company (of which he became president), and continued with Edison in the Consolidated Edison Company. In a nutshell, Brady was on the vanguard of, and invested in, most developing trends of the era and a director of many, many businesses. He had the ability to evaluate a business, acquire it, and consolidate several businesses to make a more efficient model. He died in 1913 at 72 on a business trip to London.
In 1908 Carll Tucker and Marcia Myers Brady married in Albany. In his Will, Brady had established a Trust for MBT which provided income for the Tuckers to live with abundance. In 1915 they purchased a handsome Georgian brick house on the corner of 71st and Park - 733 Park Avenue (now replaced with an apartment building) in Manhattan. The house was designed by Thomas Hastings of Carrere and Hasting who also was the architect for Henry Clay Frick’s mansion (now the Frick Museum) and the New York Public Library. They had 5 children: Luther, born in Manhattan June 20, 1909, Nicholas Brady, born July 11, 1910 in West End, New Jersey, Marcia Ann Myers, born in Manhattan May 30, 1914, Ruth Burnett, born March 25, 2017 in Manhattan, and Carll, Jr., born August 26, 1921 in West End, New Jersey. Ruth died in New York January 11, 1919 during the flu epidemic. Nicholas died of a ruptured appendix in Luther’s presence when they were both at St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire. Marcia died June 6, 1955 in Westchester County, New York, Carll Jr. died in the U.S. Virgin Islands February 6, 1968. Luther died in Essex, Connecticut July 21, 2000.
When the U.S. entered World War I (The war to MBT), she volunteered with the Red Cross to make bandages. In the 1920’s she started going on bird walks in Central Park with Frank Chapman, noted ornithologist. He coaxed her into funding research into birds, and she became a director of the National Audubon Society. She pooh poohed her expertise, insisting she was an amateur, but acquired quite a knowledge of birds on this continent and many others while on targeted voyages and trips. Recently (2020), I was called by Scott Morris, a film maker, who was making a documentary on Piece Meadow, a wildlife refuge in New Jersey which MBT was instrumental in securing through her gifts. I emailed him a photo of MBT to include in his film. Many prominent figures in ornithology in the U.S. cite winning an MBT scholarship to attend Audubon’s annual meeting as an important step in their careers. She acquired and assembled a first class bird library, including one of the copies of John James Audubon’s elephant folios of The Birds of America, which were accessible in the library at the Big House at Penwood on specially designed drawers which slid out so that you could open a volume while it remained in the sliding drawer.
Her favorite philanthropy was probably the Presbyterian Babies Hospital. A neighbor of Betsy and Ronnie Sanders in Washington grew up in a townhouse close to the Tuckers. When the neighbor’s mother was visiting, Ronnie asked her if she knew the Tuckers. She said “No, but I have a connection with Mrs. Tucker as I was head of the Thrift Shop at Babies Hospital and she used to give us all her thrift!”
Their first sailboat, designed and built by Nathanael Herreshoff in Bristol, Rhode Island, was the 2-masted racing schooner, Ohonkara. According to my father, Luther, “Ohonkara” meant “A welcome to a festive occasion” in a native American language. Apparently, she heeled too much for MBT, and they graduated to the larger and more comfortable George Lawley designed Migrant, a 3-masted schooner, so named because of MBT’s interest in birds and birding. The insignia on all the linens was the arctic tern, based on a drawing by Roger Tory Peterson, and chosen because it migrates yearly from the Arctic to the Antarctic and back, over 18,600 miles. After the Navy requisitioned the Migrant before World War II to patrol the coast for German U-boats, the Tuckers built a house on the beach in the newly created resort community of Hobe Sound, Florida.
Grandmother and Pops had always given generously to their communities and interests throughout their marriage. In 1941 Pops started the foundation in his wife’s name - Marcia Brady Tucker - as a vehicle to continue their charitable giving.
Footnote
Brady also started supplying gas to some of the major cities on the East Coast – New York and Philadelphia and Providence, and lighting cities first with natural gas and then with electricity.
He was intrigued by the building movement in New York and began accumulating building materials by gaining control of large granite quarries in New York and elsewhere. Brady obtained municipal contracts and began building sewers and miles of pavement with materials from his own quarries. From this his attention shifted to public utilities. He founded the Albany Gas Light Company, a first step which later led to the lighting of cities. Calculating that the bulk of initial profit in public utilities would be in construction of trolley and railroad tracks (the traction industry), he took over the trolleys in Philadelphia, Providence and New York. He was also involved in the transportation system of Paris. In the 1880’s he concentrated more on New York City transportation and was one of the organizers of the Metropolitan Traction Company. In 1887 he became a director and worked on the reorganization of the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company. A year before his death he was instrumental in Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company’s purchase of the Coney Island and Brooklyn Lines. In his later years he continued his interest in street railways with ownership of the street railways in Washington and Philadelphia. He influenced plans for subway development in New York and was chairman of the board of directors of Brooklyn Rapid Transit when he died.
