I read “A Century of Cable Cars” (April/ May) with interest but was concerned that the writer took no note of our incline up Lookout Mountain, which is advertised as the “Steepest in the World!” It was built in the mid-1880s, and a hotel went up atop the mountain a few hundred yards from the terminus.
Cable roads in the West and Northeast are liberally listed in the story, but there is no reference to any system in a Southern state.
Alice W. Milton Lookout Mountain, Tenn.
The Lookout Mountain incline is a fine operation but, like Angel’s Flight in Los Angeles, it is a funicular, and hence does not strictly qualify as a cable-car line in the classic sense.
We did not include the Southern states in our list of cable roads because they had none. As George Hilton says in The Cable Car in America, his definitive book on the subject, “There never was a [cable] installation in the South, though Atlanta had the population and undulating terrain to justify a line, and New Orleans had a large population together with straight streets.”
Ingersoll Admirer
I have been a charter subscriber to American Heritage, and I particularly want to compliment you on the February/ March 1985 issue. An article that deserves special praise, in my opinion, is “Robert Ingersoll: The Illustrious Infidel” by Lynne Vincent Cheney. The story is superbly written, and the author merits our praise and appreciation. It is interesting to note that, although many people today are unfamiliar with this once famous American, his work has not been forgotten. His birthday is now being celebrated annually in Peoria, Illinois, his writings are again available on the market, and he has been portrayed on the stage by Roger E. Greeley in a fine performance entitled “An Evening with lngersoll.”
William L. Cregar Mt. Vernon, Iowa
Cold Confusion
It is unfortunate that John H. White, Jr., confused two places with similar names in the “Postscripts to History” entitled “More on Matthew” (February/March 1985). The West Point Foundry’s location, “fifty miles up the Hudson,” was not Cold Harbor but Cold Spring. It is also referred to as Cold Spring-on-Hudson to distinguish it from the Long Island whaling community of Cold Spring Harbor.
William G. Tyrrell Albany, N.Y.
Praise over All
Congratulations upon your beautiful April/May issue, with special commendation for the George Inness reproductions and the nostalgic retrospectives on early advertising and cable cars.
Greatly as I enjoyed Mr. Yardley’s speculations on literary influences upon the daily life of Americans, I fear he was born too late to have experienced the bouleversement that shook us in the teens and early twenties, when the staid Victorian era came to its rather abrupt end, a change in which both Sherwood Anderson and H. L. Mencken played a large part. I am sorry that the recollection of that sweeping wind, which altered the American atmosphere, seems to have faded to such a degree.
Delicious, too, was another glimpse of Gluyas Williams with Robert Benchley’s very perceptive piece on times of trouble and the derby-hatted bystander. Too bad that you did not top it off with the famous and deeply moving lines of W. H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” on the same theme:
About suffering they were never wrong
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there must always be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood …
Nathaniel T. Rood Minneapolis, Minn.
If He’d Been There
If Gene Smith could have gone back to the New York City of 1932—as he wanted to do in “I Wish I’d Been There,” December 1984—he might have included in his tour a trip by subway (for a nickel) to the South Bronx. Instead of the burned-out ruins that exist today, he would have found solid lower-middle-class apartments that would have been serviceable for another hundred years or so with proper upkeep. On his subway trip he need not have had any fears for his personal safety, either from fellow passengers or from neglected maintenance of the track and equipment.
I am curious about where Mr. Smith got the idea that the food in most restaurants was awful. As I remember, it was generally pretty good, and we know that it was prepared by a cook or chef in the kitchen—not prepackaged. In addition, I’m sure the service was better then, and that there were likely to be linen tablecloths and napkins and substantial cutlery on the tables.
It is interesting that Mr. Smith was careful to limit his wished-for stay to twenty-four hours, as though in the middle of a great plague. True, there was the Depression, and it was bad. But nevertheless, New York as a city worked better in 1932 than it does today. I think that can be said about most American cities.
In his discussion of the 1932 World Series, Robert L. Beisner wonders whether Babe Ruth really called his shot. For what it may be worth, I was listening to a broadcast of the game, and, after the second strike, the announcer did say that the Babe was pointing toward the center-field stands.
President Roosevelt’s speech of October 31, 1936, was indeed a spectacular event. I remember the broadcast well. I mention the matter to note that William Manchester was indubitably correct when he said that Louis Howe was elsewhere that evening. Mr. Howe had died in April of that year.
Julian S. Herz Tinton Falls, N. J.
Coupon Lure
I found “The Golden Age of Advertising” (April/May) fascinating, but you omitted what to me was the most fascinating part of the advertisements—the coupon.
I have the year pinpointed: 1929. My parents had moved from Somerville, Massachusetts, to Frostproof, Florida, in 1925, just in time to lose almost everything when the land boom collapsed. We lived in five different houses during the next four years, finally settling in a frame house across from the school where Mother taught. The house had a two-room apartment and a front bedroom that could be rented out.
I don’t believe magazines, other than church magazines, were staples in our house, though the daily paper was. But relatives had them. When my parents went visiting, I could look at Ladies Home Journal and Literary Digest. (Later, I found a treasure trove of old National Geographies in the attic.) Soon I was clipping the coupons and using every available cent to buy penny postcards, gluing on the coupon, and signing Robert S. Cody instead of Bobby Cody in hopes of fooling the companies into thinking I was old enough to use Williams Shaving Cream or Aqua Velva—which appear in an advertisement you reproduced in the article.
Within a few months I must have had a hundred samples to treasure. I hoarded them like a miser, examining the printing and reading the labels. In fact, when I started shaving some years later, I actually used Aqua Velva, so maybe the manufacturers got some benefit.
Whether I invented the idea myself, or knew another child who did it, or someone suggested it on a rainy afternoon, I do not remember. But collecting those faithfully reproduced miniature bottles, tubes, and cartons became my first real hobby and deserves mention.
Roberts. Cody Kissimmee, Fla.
Book Notes
In our town, the oldest pioneer settlement on the West Coast, the article “Ten Books That Shaped the American Character” by Jonathan Yardley (April/May issue) was enjoyed by many more people than just local subscribers to American Heritage. To celebrate National Library Week in April, we used the article as a theme for a display in the main reading room and pulled the books chosen by Yardley. Among the forty-two works cited, we had all but Mason Locke Weems’s The Life and Memorable Actions of George Washington. For a library in the Far West, our collection is quite old; it has been expanding since the library was founded in 1892. Many patrons browsed through and borrowed from the display, and some took the time to read Yardley’s article. Many thanks for a good idea.
Juanita Price Astoria Public Library Astoria, Ore.
Book Notes
When Horatio Alger had one of his characters say, “I was lucky enough to invent a machine, which has brought me in a great deal of money” (“Ten Books That Shaped the American Character”), he certainly struck a responsive chord in many a youngster at the turn of the century.
New inventions were indeed creating fortunes, and it was the ambition of all of us to “get a patent” and make ourselves rich, rich, rich. It mattered little what the patent was for, and nobody had any idea that it was not the product but the process that was patented, nor did we have the slightest idea how anything was manufactured or distributed. All that mattered was to invent something and get that almighty patent. Even “Patent Applied For,” which appeared on many articles, would have been acceptable.
Whenever two or three of us got together to make our own telegraph set from a spool of wire wound around a nail and activated by a bent key cut from a tin can, we would discuss how, someday, we would make a machine that could transmit without wires. Or send pictures, or “somp’n like that, you know.”
We were aided and abetted in all these dreams by the articles and stories in The American Boy and Youth’s Companion. Clarence Budington Kelland’s creations, such as Mark Tidd, the fat kid who did all sorts of things to gain fame and fortune, and others of his ilk, were our heroes. Then there were the Rover Boys and Tom Swift, who actually went out and invented all sorts of highly remunerative things.
I wonder what the kids who break sophisticated codes with their little home computers would think of those unsophisticated magazines and books. But, of course, our new kids really are doing just what we dreamed of accomplishing.
Owen J. Remington Lancaster, Va.
No Booz Log Cabins
I was surprised that you printed a letter in the correspondence column in the February/March 1985 issue with the story about Booz bottles dating from the “log cabin” campaign of 1840.1 thought that the McKearins [Helen and George S., American Glass, 1941] had laid that story to rest many years ago.
There were log-cabin flasks made for that campaign with the slogans “North Bend” and “Tippecanoe” on them, but the Booz bottles, which are in the shape of a small house but not a log cabin, date from the 1860s.
Jane Shadel Spillman Corning Museum of Glass Corning, N.Y.
