He liked to draw and to explore the surrounding countryside, pastimes which were not welcomed by his maternal grandfather and school authorities who felt he should attend school with greater regularity. His dislike for supervision or control by higher authority caused Bemelmans to be sent to a boarding school. His stay there ended with failure, and he was sent to live with an uncle who owned a string of hotels, in the hope that the lad would learn a respectable trade. His difficulties followed him, and he was placed in one family hotel after another with little appreciable change in deportment. Finally things came to a regrettable conclusion: young Bemelmans was struck by one of the hotel managers. Bemelmans allegedly retaliated by shooting the manager. The family was given a choice by the civil authorities of either sending him to a reform school or arranging for his immigration to America. So, in 1914, the sixteen-year-old Bemelmans left his homeland for the United States.
He arrived in New York with letters of introduction to hotel managers in the city and a brace of pistols to fend off hostile Indians. It seems his perceptions of what New York was like were based on his readings of James Fenimore Cooper.
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