Ian Frazier on George W. S. Trow's "Eclectic, Reminiscent, Amused, Fickle, Perverse"

George William Swift Trow, Jr.,'s G name fit his quickness of wit and spirit, and his grace.

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May 29, 1978

His friends, of whom I was one, called him George, pronounced in a descending tone as if in reference to his firmly grounded authority on subjects important to the rest of us, or not. The Trows had been in New York City for generations. When I came from Ohio, in 1974, I knew nothing about the city and had no connection to it except as a destination for ambition. In the nineteenth century, an ancestor of George's had published what was known as "Trow's Guide," an early directory of the city's residents and their addresses. Another ancestor had been on the Hudson River, in 1804, when Alexander Hamilton was being rowed back to Manhattan after his duel with Aaron Burr. George's ancestor looked at the boat through a telescope and said, "My God, they've shot Alex Hamilton!" It's not an exaggeration to say that all my visceral knowledge of old New York derives from that sentence, and from the way George said it (spoken, it doesn't have a comma), and from other things George told me. I wasn't a New Yorker, and George made me one.