Frank viewed his children as a group requiring one master plan, while Lillian saw them as individuals. Skipping grades was central to Frank’s philosophy, with new bicycles as rewards. Though the children disliked jumping ahead, fear of a younger sibling reaching their grade motivated them. Lillian recognized the drawbacks for social development, but Frank, who was in his 50s, wanted to see the children through college before dying.

When enrolling the youngest children at Nishuane Elementary School in Montclair, Frank brought several of his older children to impress the principal, an elderly, refined woman. He insisted everyone enter through the school entrance labeled “Boys” (54), dismissing gender-segregated entrances as foolish. Frank demanded eight-year-old Bill be placed in fifth grade based on mental age. After demonstrating Bill’s knowledge of geography and census data, he secured the fifth grade placement.

Frank made surprise classroom visits, breaking rules by using wrong doors and wearing his hat inside. Teachers enjoyed his attention and invited him to speak at assemblies. He burst into classes during the Pledge of Allegiance, greeted his son’s teacher, Miss Billsop, and the children warmly, and inquired about their progress. At recess, classmates told the Gilbreth children that their father was fearless.

Lillian handled Sunday school enrollment because Frank detested clergymen, particularly after a sea voyage with ministers who monopolized conversation and made inappropriate sexual advances towards a ship worker: “her behind had been pinched surreptitiously so many times between Hoboken and Liverpool that” she’d had to eat standing up (58). Frank waited outside during services, reading the newspaper. He joked that only the Catholic Church would credit his large family.

Lillian, who served on several town and church committees, recruited a newcomer who initially declined due to her three sons. Learning about Lillian’s 12 children prompted the recruit to immediately agree to participate. Lillian befriended Mrs. Bruce, who had eight children. When birth control advocate Mrs. Alice Mebane sought a chapter leader for the Birth Control League, someone jokingly recommended Mrs. Bruce, who in turn suggested Lillian. Mrs. Mebane arrived proposing Lillian lead the movement. Finding the situation absurd, Lillian fetched Frank. He whistled assembly; as the children poured into the parlor. Mrs. Mebane, horrified to discover they had a dozen, quickly departed.

When the United States entered World War I, Frank telegrammed President Wilson offering his services. Assigned to motion study training at Fort Sill, he received a military haircut. Lillian seized the opportunity to visit her family in Oakland, California, with seven of the children.

Lillian’s birth family, the Mollers, lived in a large house with servants, including a French chauffeur named Henriette. Lillian’s parents, Papa and Grosie, and six unmarried siblings comprised the quiet, conservative household. They remained uncertain about Dear Lillie, who left shy and bookish but became a career woman with many children.

A flashback recounts Frank and Lillian’s courtship. Frank had met Lillian in Boston before a European tour. During a ride in an automobile at a time when cars were still seen as ludicrous modern inventions, hecklers had shouted insults. Although he’d been trying to be on his best behavior, when one had mocked that the car resembled Noah’s Ark, Frank had responded by quipping that since he was collecting animals, the “jackass” better hop in (67). His breezy personality had charmed Lillian. When she’d entertained other gawking children with Alice in Wonderland stories when the car broke down, Frank promised to read the book. Later, he’d telephoned Lillian’s house and introduced himself as the White Rabbit from Boston—a way to demonstrate that he had indeed read it. At tea with Lillian’s family, Frank had observed a bricklayer working on their fireplace and loudly proclaimed the work looked easy. When challenged, he’d expertly laid brick, revealing his professional background. On later visits, he’d lift Lillian onto bookcases. On his first overnight stay, his bed had collapsed under his weight, trapping him in a tasseled canopy while he’d shouted swears that broadened Lillian’s siblings’ vocabularies.

The train journey proved difficult. Fred suffered motion sickness throughout, Lill had a broken foot, and Lillian was in her third trimester of pregnancy. They shared cramped quarters, eating Sterno-cooked meals of cereals and graham crackers. The children roamed the train unsupervised. Lillian’s brother, Uncle Fred, boarded at Sacramento as a surprise, finding chaos but greeting everyone warmly and correctly identifying each child. The family arrived in Oakland to a warm welcome. Lillian’s father, Papa, promised his grandchildren daily toy shopping. When Lillian’s mother, Grosie, asked for their first wish, the children requested a real meal but Lillian suggested baths first instead. When Grosie suggested crackers as a snack, the children immediately lost interest, having subsisted on graham crackers during travel. They opted for baths instead.

Initially subdued by the orderly Moller household, the children behaved perfectly. Lillian reverted to her childhood personality, deferring to her parents’ authority. When Grosie gently scolded Lillian for being too efficient in making social calls, the children witnessed Lillian accept the reprimand without pushback, increasing their awe of Grosie.

The grandparents grew concerned about the children’s unnaturally quiet behavior. On the day of a formal tea honoring Lillian, the children were dressed in new outfits. Bill rebelled against his suit, calling the flapped shorts “sissy” (78) and refusing to look like Little Lord Fauntleroy. Eventually persuaded, he remained sullen. Instructed to wait in the garden until summoned, Martha voiced resentment at being sidelined while the adults socialized, unlike at home. She deliberately walked under a lawn sprinkler, soaking her dress. Frank, Bill, Ernestine, and finally Anne joined her. When called inside, they filed in dripping, ruining Grosie’s Persian rug. Lillian sent them to change, and everyone relaxed as normal behavior resumed.

Lillian’s sisters doted on their great-nieces and -nephews, playing games and organizing outings. When Aunt Gertrude hospitalized herself fearing whooping cough might infect them, the children mourned her absence. Bill befriended Chew Wong, the temperamental Chinese cook who allowed only Bill in the kitchen. Chew Wong iced cakes using a newspaper cone, occasionally squeezing frosting into Bill’s mouth. The memoir here reproduces Chew Wong’s accented English in a way that modern readers will find offensive. Whenever Bill misbehaved, Chew Wong would jokingly threaten to put Bill in the oven. One afternoon while the cook checked on a cake, Bill snuck up and pushed him partway into the hot oven, reversing their usual play-fighting game. Chew Wong’s hands were burned, and Aunt Elinor scolded Bill for ungentlemanly behavior.

The visit concluded with tearful goodbyes. On the return journey, Martha began whooping. By Salt Lake City, all seven children had whooping cough. Frank joined them in Chicago, helping with cleaning and Sterno-heated soup. When the children called him “Frank dear,” adopting the polite address style of the Moller family, he joked about sending them to California annually. Lillian declared next time Frank could take them while she went to war.

Frank believed in ignoring sickness, insisting his children stay healthy through willpower. Grandma Gilbreth distributed camphor bags as cold prevention and threatened discipline with a lilac switch, though her blows mostly missed. When illness struck, Frank and Grandma advocated isolating the sick child, but Lillian doted on which child was ill.

A cousin infected everyone except Martha with measles. Two bedrooms became hospital wards. Dr. Burton examined them and declared that their tonsils must come out, including Frank’s. Once recovered from measles, the children enjoyed the wards with games and stories. Frank, lonely, joined them despite his philosophy. He painted red ink spots on his face to joke about having measles, but Grandma identified the prank immediately. Martha, miserable as a suddenly only child, snuck into the sick rooms, admitting she wanted to be ill to be included.

Frank began applying motion study to surgery, filming operations to reduce procedure time. Needing more subjects but facing patient refusals, he proposed filming Dr. Burton removing the children’s tonsils at home. Feeling guilty, Frank volunteered to also go under the knife—last.

Five children were scheduled: Anne, Ernestine, Frank, Bill, and Lill. Martha, whose tonsils Dr. Burton declared to be healthy, stayed with Frank’s sister, Aunt Anne. She taunted her fasting siblings about the pie and doughnuts she would eat. The next morning, a nervous Frank, dressed in white, sent Anne first. After Anne’s operation, Ernestine was anesthetized. Looking into her throat, Dr. Burton realized that he’d mistaken her for Martha—it was actually Ernestine whose tonsils were healthy and didn’t need to come out. However, since she’d already been put under, the doctor removed Ernestine’s tonsils anyway. During the operation, the cameraman, Mr. Coggin, vomited but continued filming. Frank then summoned Martha for her operation; she arrived full of food, kicking and screaming, and suffered most afterward due to having the procedure on a full stomach.

Frank insisted on local anesthetic for his operation to demonstrate toughness. He emerged mid-procedure grinning with one tonsil in forceps, but soon collapsed in pain. A taxi brought him home, the driver assuming he was intoxicated. Frank spent two weeks bedridden. He then received a note from Mr. Coggin confessing that none of the footage was developed because the camera man had forgotten to remove the lens cap. Frank got his voice back for the first time in two weeks, getting out of bed, vowing revenge, and declaring Mr. Coggin fired.

The family summered at The Shoe, a cottage flanked by two repurposed lighthouses in Nantucket, an island off the coast of Massachusetts. After their first summer there, artist neighbors, the Whitneys, moved their house a mile away. En route, the family stayed at a New London hotel where Frank and the manager exchanged friendly insults, recalling how Ernestine had injured her finger in the hotel’s cigar cutter on a prior visit.

The biggest travel challenge was Martha’s two canaries, which Frank nicknamed Shut Up and You Heard Me. Handyman Tom Grieves called them Peter Soil and Maggie Mess, but Lillian deemed these nicknames “Eskimo”—her (casually racist) term for “anything that was off-color, revolting, or evil-minded” (101). During one trip, the birds escaped. Frank wanted to depart, but the children sobbed. The captain, unable to bear crying, ordered four crew members with nets to pursue the birds. The chase failed, and Frank convinced Martha to discard the empty cage. The next day, the captain returned the birds in a ventilated box, and Frank bought Martha a new cage.

The cottage lacked hot water, so Frank enforced daily ocean swimming for cleanliness regardless of weather. Lillian, a non-swimmer who hated cold water, would wade to her knees and briefly squat in the water before going back on shore and taking a cold sponge bath. Frank attempted swimming lessons for Lillian annually. When trying the dead man’s float, Lillian sank like a stone, baffling Frank, who concluded that Archimedes’s principle of water buoyancy did not apply to her.

Frank promised the children no formal studying over the summer, but taught them informally anyway. He painted Morse code alphabets with mnemonic keywords on walls and ceilings, then added secret pun-filled messages requiring translation. The children learned quickly to earn rewards hidden throughout the house. Frank constructed a telescope to spark astronomy interest, then painted planetary diagrams and hung photographs of the solar system from Dr. Harlow Shapley. He added a sheet of graph paper showing exactly one million squares, metric conversion charts, and 17 Therblig symbols, or units of motion or thought named after Gilbreth spelled backward.

The cottage became a tourist stop. Tom Grieves gave unauthorized tours for tips, including through the bedrooms, while the family swam. When Frank discovered tourists’ signatures in the family’s guest book, he considered splitting tips with Tom, but Lillian forbade future admissions. Frank laughed, acknowledging her incredible forbearing, since most women would not have wanted to live in lighthouses or have Morse code covering their walls.

Frank purchased the Rena, a 20-foot catboat, as a swimming reward. Before allowing the children aboard, he delivered extensive lectures on seamanship and navigation. He conducted practice drills on the front porch, commanding them as a crew from a chair while the children manned imaginary rails and ropes. He stressed that skilled sailors make the mooring on the first attempt.

Aboard the Rena, Frank transformed into a strict captain, treating his children as “a crew of landlubberly scum shanghaied from the taverns and fleshpots of many exotic ports” (115). They imagined the catboat as a four-master sailing for treasure. He demanded to be addressed as Captain, requiring their responses to end in “Sir.” Anne served as first mate, with younger children filling junior officer and seaman positions. Frank barked orders in nautical jargon and threatened punishment with the merrie rope’s end, an actual flogging rope, that he sometimes delivered. The mates adopted his harsh tone with subordinates. He sometimes bellowed sea shanties.

Missing the mooring rope toss was Frank’s supreme humiliation. When crew errors caused failure, he advanced with the punishment merrie rope in hand, sometimes forcing offenders overboard. Once, facing mass punishment, the entire crew abandoned ship. Frank successfully made the mooring alone, proving he needed no assistance.

During one foggy evening, after missing the first attempt, a squall hit as they lowered the sail. The boom struck Frank’s head, hurling him overboard stomach-first. He stayed underwater nearly a minute. The frightened crew prepared to dive when his feet emerged and wiggled reassuringly. He surfaced grinning, nose bleeding, spitting water through his teeth. After his head cleared, he resumed his captain persona, bellowing for a line and threatening punishment for whoever lowered the boom.