Beginning with James, of Scotch-Irish stock,

shipped out to America from Enniskillen at sixteen,

following the magnetic call of Manifest Destiny,

pulling up 

                 on the stockyard banks of Cincinnati.

There he learned the soapmaking trade, and soon

fell in with William Procter, candlemaker.

They pooled funds, and in 1837 co-founded

the Procter & Gamble company.

Energetic, shrewd stockpilers of materials,

they grew the business well, filled coffers

in Civil War contracts on the Union side,

shipping bar soap and candles downstream

into the maw of the conflict.

               And when the armies stumbled home

they expanded as the nation, reconstructing,

flexed its wealth westward.

                David, son of James, born

into wealth amidst the bright industrial flush

of household goods, cradled high on the bow

                             of flagship Ivory Soap,

while America scoured itself clean, striving

toward a fresh end to the century.

David served P&G as company Secretary,

retiring in 1893 to sail the world with sons,

overseeing Presbyterian missions charged

with Oriental evangelization.

                                                  Disembarking,

he shuttled between showcase mansions

in Cincinnati and Pasadena, the latter now

a national landmark, the Gamble House.

                Clarence, son of David, unexpected

youngest of three.  Prodigal, self-possessed,

he posted first in his class at Princeton, 1914, then

second through Harvard Medical School.

                                        His generation unburdened

by the reins of soap production, instead he got

a trust fund, his first million at twenty-one.

Clarence caught the bug of Eugenics,

pseudo-science of race and class superiority,

dreaded humanity being dragged down

by bad genes.  He never built a medical practice,

instead became

                           a population-manipulator of one,

urging for more babies amongst the educated,

testing new contraceptives for the poor, funding

rogue clinical trials, advocating sterilization

of the feeble-minded in the rural South,

always striving to constrain human sprawl

in worrisome backward societies

around the globe.

                Walter, son of Clarence, third of five

redheaded siblings, the quiet, studious one.

He lived for scientific questing; like his father

he studied medicine,

                                   and unlike him he kept at it,

specializing in pediatric cardiology, designing

new pacemaking devices in the 1960s to impose

strict rhythms on sick kids’ faltering hearts.

He kept a hand in the family’s Great Cause

of world population control, sitting

on their foundation board,

                                               rattled about

in his research lab with a menagerie

of subject rats and cows, rounded on patients,

and biked in to work in all kinds of weather,

for over thirty years.

                Robbie, son of Walter, first of three boys,

came into unexpected millions at eighteen.

He grew deep discomfort for his wealth,

shifted from Harvard to the Bowery in 1982,

to work among homeless folks,

                and with his first wife Martha

                               gifted away a fortune.

He became a nurse practitioner to better

care for people scraping at the margins, raised

three kids, lost a marriage and a brother,

discovered Anna, an orchard, a shining

reverence for words.