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CORRESPONDENCE
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OPENING GUNS
In the article entitled “Shadows of the Storm” in the June/July 1981 issue of your excellent and distinguished magazine, several inaccuracies appear.
The most obvious is the statement on page 46 that one of the eight-inch Columbiads in the Iron Battery fired the first shot against Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861. This is incorrect. While the Iron Battery did participate in the bombardment of the fort, it is well established that the first shot was fired by the east, or beach, mortar battery in Fort Johnson on James Island, though doubts still exist as to who actually pulled the lanyard. It was probably Lieutenant Henry S. Farley in direct command of the battery, acting on the order of Captain George S. James in overall charge of Fort Johnson.
The caption to the triptych on pages 46–47 states that it was made April 13, 1861, just hours after the Federal garrison surrendered. This is virtually impossible, since the surrender was not agreed on until about 7:00 P.M. that day and the evacuation did not take place until the following day. In all likelihood the photographs were taken April 14.
As the proud possessor of every issue of AMERICAN HERITAGE since its inception, I hate, as I’m sure you do, to see even minor errors creep in.
R. Lockwood Tower
San Francisco, Calif.
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MEMORIES OF MAYBECK
As the only person still living in a home Bernard Maybeck planned for her, and who worked a year with him in the planning, I especially enjoyed your superb article on our California hero [August/September 1981]. I learned much from its distant view which I had failed to learn from my near view. But the near view at least showed me Maybeck’s wide-ranging sense of beauty, which included even the beauty of death.
I still recall his delight, when I was driving him through the ruins left by our Berkeley fire, that so much bad architecture had been destroyed. “It has the quiet beauty of a graveyard,” he said and then got out of my car to examine and enjoy the colors of ash and burned timbers.
Maybeck was eighty when I saw him last. It was at Lake Tahoe, six in the morning, temperature thirty-five degrees. In swimming trunks, his short plump body pink with health and his white beard flying, he went jogging through our pine trees for a plunge into the icy lake.
Your magazine comes to me in Talking Books, and I marvel at how you always find something new to say about the old. Thank you for it.
Dorothy Rieber Joralemon
Berkeley, Calif.
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MEMORIES OF MAYBECK
I have just read your beautiful article on Bernard Maybeck. However, Mr. Reinhardt’s description of Mr. Maybeck is very funny! He really did not have an “odd, gnomelike little figure.” He was five feet five inches tall. He did not wear bib overalls. He had one knitted tam-o’-shanter among the French berets he wore since Paris days. I did not think the “Mickey Mouse” description of the Berkeley hills was valid and it certainly was not dignified—or true.
When Maybeck worked, he wore work clothes. When he was in the city he wore custom-tailored suits—expensive ones from Brooks Brothers! He always gave an impression of dignity—no one ever thought him cute or a gnome or leprechaun. The Bohemian and Commonwealth clubs did not give membership to leprechauns.
Where are the “gunny-sack cloisters,” I wonder, and what makes University of California professors and students “weird”? I was there as a student and became Maybeck’s daughter-in-law in 1927 and I live in that “great redwood timbered house”—not so big, just nice. He would have liked the eighteen-cent stamp of the Palace issued Sept. 29.
Jacomena Maybeck
Berkeley, Calif.
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THE SCENT OF HISTORY
Some time ago, I was given a bottle of after-shave lotion that was in production during the American Revolution and was sold to the officers of both sides. I failed to note the manufacturer’s name, and now I have no idea where to go. Can you help?
—John Wiley
San Francisco, Calif.
Mr. Wiley is doubtless referring to Number Six cologne, which has been sold for more than two hundred years by Caswell-Massey, the oldest chemists and perfumers in America. Made from bergamot, musk, orange blossom, lemon, and a score of other ingredients, Number Six was a favorite of George Washington himself, who is said to have sent some to his friend the Marquis de Lafayette. As in the eighteenth century, the cologne is aged for two years in oaken casks before bottling; however, it is now somewhat stronger than it was in Washington’s day, when, says Caswell-Massey’s owner, Ralph Taylor, “people bathed rather infrequently, and it was used as a mild-scented bottled water for sponge bathing.”
Other notable Caswell-Massey customers include Dolley Madison, who liked “White Rose” scent, and George Armstrong Custer: one of the firm’s bone-handled toothbrushes was found among his effects on the Little Big Horn battlefield. The company’s catalogue is available for $1.00 from Caswell-Massey Co. Ltd., Ill Eighth Ave., Room 723, New York, NY 10011.
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FLA(C)K
In the August/September 1981 issue of the magazine there is, I think, an error in the caption accompanying the story “The Tennis Racket” on page 65.
The copy states that “Richard Sears, U.S. national champion from 1881 to 1887, indulged in a little sedate flakking for Wright and Ditson during the eighties and nineties.”
My eyebrows rose at the spelling of the word “flakking.” The word “flak” originally referred to high-powered, accurate German antiaircraft fire during World War II. Pilots in my fighter squadron back from a tough mission would often say, “That flak was so damned thick you could walk on it!”
What author Peter Andrews has in mind is a “flack”—one who deals in public relations, often in an obsequious or subservient way.
For Mr. Andrews, this letter is not intended as flak at his article. It was well-written from start to finish and I enjoyed it immensely; I hope he takes up his pen again soon. AMERICAN HERITAGE seems blessed with a vast stable of highly talented writers, and he is certainly one of them.
Richard D. Groo
Newark, Del.
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CITIZEN YORK
I have enjoyed very much the story in your issue for August/September 1981 on Sergeant York by Nat Brandt.
I remember Sergeant York from a single meeting when he visited Providence, Rhode Island, in the early 1920’s and spoke at a public meeting in promotion of his campaign for improved education for the people of Appalachia.
Sergeant York impressed me mightily, as a genuinely sincere and forthright person. I remember little of what he said, except for one story that generated great applause and that still remains vividly in my memory. It was a sort of fable, I suppose, and it beautifully symbolized the man and his purpose.
He said that there was once a bus (or maybe a little train that couldn’t), which was stuck on a steep hill. The conductor came through, saying: “All first-class passengers keep your seats. All second-class passengers get out and walk. All third-class passengers get out and push.” The sergeant had little need to draw his moral, which was that he hoped that “everyone here is a third-class passenger.” It might have been corny, but it wasn’t.
I was saddened to read that Sergeant York had fallen on hard times at the end—even afoul of the 1RS. I guess he was a third-class passenger, too.
Watson Smith
Tucson, Ariz.
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HARDSCRABBLE SCHOOLING
I read an article in the October/ November 1981 issue of AMERICAN HERITAGE about one-room schools of the West. The pictures you show are palaces in comparison with the facts as I knew them.
I started in a one-room log building in Lakeview, Idaho, a small mining town, in 1900. Now there are a few summer homes there. My first school ran three months in the summer. The teacher got thirty-five dollars a month and boarded around. That is one week at one home and the next at another. No charge. The cabin is in a sad state now. About five or six children.
We moved in 1906 to a small farming area along Penderielle Lake in Idaho. It was a larger log cabin—thirty to forty children. Summer term started in May.
The teacher in her first term was usually about eighteen or nineteen years old. I was in third grade alone, so I took third and fourth at the same time. For discipline the teacher had a long whip, which she used often. The older children taught the younger ones. We all used slates, too. We had reading, writing, spelling, arithmetic, geography, history, and physiology.
One of the girls wrote a jingle which we all learned—“Oh Lord of love look down from above upon us poor little scholars/Who hired a fool to teach our School and paid her $35.00.”
Those teachers had a hard job, and I felt sorry for them.
When school started May 1 of 1910,1 was ready for the eighth grade. The teacher asked me if I wanted to finish in June with the city schools. I said yes. I was the only one in that grade (age seventeen). I took the state examination in June and passed with a good grade.
This has been just a quick sketch of a pioneer schooling. And I hope it helps some.
I am eighty-nine years old now.
Leo A. Payne
Spokane, Wash.
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With the launching of this new column we more than ever welcome the opinions of our readers. Just write to The Editor, AMERICAN HERITAGE Magazine, 10 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, NY 70020.
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