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the breakfast table: An e-mail conversation about the news of the day.

Timothy Noah and Marjorie Williams

the breakfast table
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from: Timothy Noah

A Penny Saved is a Penny Earned

Posted Friday, July 17, 1998, at 9:55 AM ET

Dear Marjorie,

The papers were full of Breakfast Table fodder yesterday, and we spent the whole day arguing about Jennifer Lopez's butt. Today the papers are a little dull, so we'll spend the day talking about...what? I suppose if we get desperate we can chew over some of the good stuff that we bypassed yesterday.

The most interesting material of the day is a New York Times op-ed piece by David Frum, the somewhat iconoclastic conservative journalist, about Donald and Mildred Othmer. This is the couple whose unsuspected $800 million fortune, which they left to various relatively obscure (hence unusually grateful) charities and institutions, captured your imagination a few days ago. Turns out the Brooklyn couple used to be David Frum's landlords! Frum and his wife rented the third floor of the Othmers' Brooklyn Heights brownstone, "a magical apartment, with a balcony overlooking New York Harbor, a great old fireplace and a six-foot-long bathtub. The house had been built in 1840, and a century and a half later still boasted its original doors of Honduran mahogany."

Frum writes with affection about the Othmers' graciousness (they would often invite the Frums to join them downstairs for dinner), but as the piece progresses he makes clear it wasn't much fun "being on the receiving end of their frugality." Dr. Othmer wouldn't allow repair work to be done on the house without inspecting the problem first; when he did come by, he invariably criticized the Frums for having a big air-conditioner and a toaster that, he asserted improbably, "uses as much power as a motorboat." Most maddening of all was the tangle of electrical wire wrapped in "antique insulating cloth" on the floor: "[I]f you were not careful as you tried to get the lights back on, sparks would shoot out, landing disconcertingly close to the woodwork and dried paint of the hallway."

My friend and former US News colleague Phil Longman could use this piece as exhibit A in his case that conservatives no longer embrace the once-central conservative virtue of thrift. Phil (who wrote a book called The Return of Thrift) was intrigued that William Bennett's The Book of Virtues contained no section on thrift, and that the general revival of enthusiasm among conservatives for all things Victorian somehow bypassed the Victorians' love of thrift. Frum at least is willing to write about his ambivalence toward thrift in an honest and engaging way.

Thriftily,

Tim

the breakfast table
entries
12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728293031323334353637383940414243444546474849505152535455565758596061626364656667686970717273747576
from: Timothy Noah

A Penny Saved is a Penny Earned

Posted Friday, July 17, 1998, at 9:55 AM ET
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Timothy Noah writes Slate's "Chatterbox" column. Marjorie Williams is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair.
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