DURING THE MONTH containing the birthdays of the two most revered Americans, it is interesting to read the following observations by a young man named Albert Macomber, who served with the Sanitary Commission in Washington, D. C., during the Civil War. They are taken from letters he wrote home in 1863 and appear here through the courtesy of his niece, Grace Goldsworthy of Alhambra, California:
“Off to the northeast of the new capital and about twenty rods from it, stands [an] old house. It is three stories high, with a sharp roof surmounted by an old-style chimney. The grounds about it—not over half an acre—are overgrown with trees of various kinds, so that it would be difficult to ride about on a horse. The north side of the mansion is made green by a covering of ivy. Back of the building stands an old shed, surrounded by rank grass. The building is yellow, bleached by the weather, the mortar partly crumbled away, giving the edifice a decayed look. It seems to be entirely deserted, the gate tied with a piece of old rope. And of the hundreds of persons who pass on their way to the depot, probably not one ever suspects that dilapidated pile of bricks to have been the residence of George Washington …
“We went to the theater the other night! Now don’t be shocked and I’ll tell you about it. In the afternoon papers I saw the announcement that the President would attend Grover’s in the evening and see Wallack do MacBeth. Accordingly, we did as everyone did and made a rush and found ourselves duly established in front of the President’s box. About the time the play began, he came stalking in with his little boy and a gentleman I don’t know. His outlandish gait would have marked him, if people hadn’t known he was coming. He paid not the slightest attention to the vociferous cheering kept up on his account. During the evening he kept himself in a very unpresidential manner and attracted as much attention as the players. Anon he would make some remark to the boy and set the audience to tittering. When some exciting event occurred, he leaned halfway out of the box, like some codger who had never seen a play, not like a dignified chief magistrate!”
LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN
NOT LONG AGO George Resh, a member of the Pomona, California, School Board, decided it would be nice to honor his colleague C. J. Mendoza, whose term on the board had just expired.
After all, Mendoza had grown up in Pomona, taught in Pomona schools, married a Pomona teacher—so what could be more fitting than to change the name of Hamilton School to Mendoza School?
He proposed it at the next Board of Education meeting:
“Who,” one board member wanted to know, “is Hamilton School named after?”
Resh leaped up from his seat. “I researched that!” he exclaimed. “Hamilton was named after an old American President.”
Someone from the audience whispered to a trustee, Agnes Moreland Jackson, who then turned to her colleagues on the Board of Education and announced:
“Hamilton was never President.”
Laughter.
As things quieted down, Jackson added that not only was Hamilton not a President, he “was in favor of a hereditary monarchy.”
More laughter.
When the trustees regained their composure, they voted 4 to O to rename Hamilton School after Mendoza, though none mentioned who Alexander Hamilton was, or what he was known for.
—Mark Landsbaum
Reported in the Los Angeles Times
THE PRESIDENT AND THE AUTOGYRO
IN THE August/September 1981 issue the article “An Airplane in Every Garage” traced the career of the stubborn American conviction that swarms of private planes would soon be taking the citizenry into the air, just as the automobile had put an earlier generation on the road.
One high point in this stillborn revolution occurred when, in August of 1936, a test pilot landed a strange craft in downtown Washington, emerged to fold back its rotor blades, climbed back into the cockpit, and drove off. The machine was an autogyro, and we gave the pilot’s name as John Ray.
Now Donald Gallager of Fort Washington, Pennsylvania, writes to tell us that the pilot’s name was James—not John—Ray, and that this was not the first time he’d landed an unusual plane in the capital.
James G. Ray, a Texan who learned to fly in World War I, joined up as chief pilot for Harold Pitcairn when the Pennsylvania aviation pioneer formed his own company in 1924. Pitcairn was particularly interested in helicopter design—eventually his firm was awarded no fewer than 270 basic patents for vertical lift and rotary wing aircraft—and on a 1928 trip to England he saw a Cierva C-8 autogyro being built under license by the Avro Company. He promptly ordered one shipped to the States and the next year bought the rights to manufacture it in America.
Convinced that this was where the future of flight lay, he sold Pitcairn Aviation (which managed to struggle along all right with conventional aircraft under its new name of Eastern Airlines) and, with Ray and his other associates, bent all his future efforts to developing the helicopter.
In 1930 their work gained them the National Aeronautical Association’s prestigious Collier Trophy. And so, in 1931, James Ray buzzed down out of the Washington skies to come to light on the White House lawn, where President Hoover himself stood in the shadow of the curious aircraft and handed over the prize.
THE MAN WHO TOLD MRS. STOWE ABOUT ELIZA
UNCLE TOM’S CABIN first appeared in 1851 as a serial in the abolitionist newspaper The National Era; when it came out in book form the next year, it quickly sold three hundred thousand copies. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s immensely powerful tract (without it, Charles Sumner claimed, Lincoln would never have been elected President) long outlived the war it helped bring about and has left in our national consciousness at least one indelible image: the slave Eliza, child in arms, fleeing across the ice to freedom.
In 1892 an ex-slave named Lewis George Clark wrote of the people he knew whom Mrs. Stowe had incorporated into her story and of his own role in it. His account, never before published, appears here through the courtesy of a New York autograph collector:
”… You must not think that you are reading a letter from a school-taught man for I never went to any school in my life. My teachers was two little nieces of Mrs. H. B. Stowe in Cambridgeport Mass, in the years of ’44 and ’45 at odd times. Their names was Francis Louisa and Mary Lina Safford at that time. Mr. Saffords was my home while I was traveling over the country trying to expose the slave system.
“I ran away from the auction in August in the year of 18 and 41 in Lancaster, Garrod Co., Ky. and was not able to read a good book at that time, any more than our horses or mules, and was sold for the same selfish purposes.
“As to the truth of Uncle Tom’s Cabin it is fixed up and some connections made that is fictitious. But as to the characters that it is based on, they are true and you must not mind the places that things took place nor the names of persons. They are almost all fictitious while facts are clearly true. Eliza did cross the ice and I did tell Mrs. Stowe of it, and she had her little boy with her, and in writing she called me George Harris while my name is Lewis G. Clark.
”… It was not uncommon for men to cross the Ohio River on the ice though not when it was in that fix. Although there was a young girl a little while before the war that crossed on the ice while it was floated and she got on it above Cincinnati and floated and jumped from flake to flake until she got away below Cincinnati. At last she got off and went in a barn and the owner in the morning found her and took her to the house and dried and fed her. Then [he] took her to the care of Nathan Haliday and he put her on the cars and sent her to Chicago to the old tried and true Mr. Carpenter and she told them that Mrs. Henry Harug [?] in Windsor, Canada was her aunt. And so they sent her there and there she stayed until she married and went to Chicago and I suppose she is now in that city though Mrs. Harug told me that she had lost track of her of late. If you doubt it write to Mrs. Henry Harug in Windsor, Ontario. They are as respectible people as is in that city.… I told Mrs. Stowe of several tragedies of like character …
“As to Emeline, the handsome white, she was my one sister and was sold to the New Orleans market …
“As to the Lagrees and the St. Clairs, they was to be found wherever the slave system existed. And so it was in relation to Eva and Topsy and Aunt Chloe …
“I will soon be, if I am correctly informed, 77 years of age and I … always have tried to not to get to be vain or an egotist though perhaps I have had as none [as] singular [a] position as any poor slave the sun ever shined [on]. And I have only taken one straightforward course through life. It fell to my lot to live with the very hated Clements while a child up from about 6 years old from my mother, sold three times to the highest bidder, at last lived with a man that was kind and I got the chance to ride off and pass for a white man in ’41, came back in ’42 and took of[f] my brother. Then I was the first one to make a public speech against that system. I was the first one that met a master in debate in the free states on that subject before 5000 people in Boston in Mass. … I was the first one to give a narrative to a capable writer that was able to bring the whole system before the whole world. My life is a mystery to myself when compared with any other on Earth …
“As to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it has done more good where good was needed than all others that has been published in the world. For the slave system grew in number and power from a few to millions and had nearly ruined the whole country and the world. Now it is gone and educated and paid labor is in place of ignorant white labor. A legal protected family is established instead of chaos. I must close. Yours, for the right.—Lewis George Clark”
