A new museum houses a master’s photographs of how the technology that built America ended —Christine M. Gibson
Between 1955 and 1960, O. Winston link made 21 self-financed trips to Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, and North Carolina to photograph the Norfolk & Western Railway before it became the last major railroad in America to convert from steam to diesel. The 2,500 pictures he took captured more than the remnants of a dying technology; they also memorialized its place in the routine of rural life and the sentiments toward it, ranging from tolerance to awe, that were exhibited in the people it passed. Although Link’s photographs were known among railroad enthusiasts, none were exhibited until the 1980s, and even after that, only one gallery owned more than a couple of his most famous shots.
But in January of this year his work was finally given a permanent home, the O. Winston Link Museum, at the renovated Norfolk & Western passenger station in Roanoke, Virginia. Train aficionados will be pleased by the museum’s collection of railroad paraphernalia, and visitors can also stand in the station’s sleek Raymond Loewy-designed grand lobby—with its schedule board still on the wall, arranged exactly as it was when Link photographed himself with it—and look through the picture windows at the Norfolk Southern freight trains pounding by.
The museum was very nearly doomed a decade before planning began. In the early 1990s Link’s second wife stole notebooks and equipment from the frail and elderly photographer and forced him to make prints, which she stole and later sold illegally for her own profit. His wife was found guilty of abuse and theft in civil and criminal courts, but she retained hundreds of the stolen prints and artifacts and did not produce them until this March, in a plea bargain to settle further criminal charges against her. If Link had not had the foresight to secure his negatives in a safe-deposit box, there likely would have been nothing to fill the museum.
Before he died in 2001, the Brooklyn-born Link chose Roanoke as the site for his museum because the locals’ respect and appreciation for his task had turned him into a folk legend in the area. “I would have lived there the rest of my life—it was gorgeous,” he said. And, in a way, he does. As Ken Citarella, the district attorney who prosecuted the first case against Link’s wife, explained, “If he had no museum, Winston would live in 20 different galleries all over the country. Now he has a place his spirit can live in."—
Screenings
And starring Pancho Villa as himself —Allen Barra
One of the most remarkable historically based films in recent years, HBO’s And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself, first aired last September and attracted a large viewership despite a puzzling lack of coverage from the mainstream press. Recently released on videotape and DVD, the film should gain even wider acceptance through word of mouth.
And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself is based on a true story so improbable that it doesn’t seem possible Hollywood could have ignored it for so long. In 1914 the former Doroteo Arango, a mestizo of Spanish and Indian blood by then known as Pancho Villa, was contacted by the Mutual Film Company and D. W. Griffith with an unusual offer. Villa wanted money to finance his Division del Morte army in its revolution against the despotic Mexican government of President Victoriano Huerta. Mutual would get exclusive rights to live battle footage and to close-ups of General Villa himself in action; in return Villa would get 20 percent of the revenues from all films using the footage that Mutual produced.
Griffith and Mutual jumped at the opportunity, dispatching a camera crew and an aspiring young filmmaker named Raoul Walsh to northern Mexico with a bag full of gold (Villa was rumored to have shot at someone who approached him with paper money). Shortly thereafter, the Mexicans received a shipment of 5,000 facsimile Confederate Army uniforms. Griffith wanted his Mexican extras to look presentable for American audiences.
Possibly for the first time in history, a motion-picture camera was used to film men dying in battle. The Mutual Film Company was as oblivious of this as it seemed to be of the fact that by financing the revolution, it was indirectly responsible for the deaths it was recording. At first the company planned to run the footage in newsreels, but Villa gave it such good material that it decided to splice fact and fiction into a feature titled The Life of General Villa, with Raoul Walsh stepping in for Villa in close-ups. The result was, apparently, melodramatic in the extreme. The film was hugely popular and garnered much sympathy for the Mexican revolutionaries until, in 1916, Villa attacked the town of Columbus, New Mexico. Villa went from hero to scoundrel in the American press, and Gen. John Pershing led a futile punitive expedition into Mexico in pursuit of him. He was assassinated in 1923. No one knows what became of The Life of General Villa.
And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself is full of the color, sweep, and historical resonance that were once a staple of Hollywood feature films but are now to be found mostly on cable television, where big productions like John Milius’s The Rough Riders can, through repeated showings, find audiences for themselves. Directed by the Australian veteran Bruce Beresford (whose films include Breaker Morant, Tender Mercies, Driving Miss Daisy, and Black Robe) and written by Larry Gelbart (who developed “M*A*S*H” for television), And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself shows surprising fidelity to the known historical record, much of it taken from Friedrich Katz’s massive 1998 biography of Villa and Raoul Walsh’s 1974 autobiography, Each Man in His Own Time.
The superb cast includes Alan Arkin as Sam Drebben, a machine-gun expert known in real life as “The Fighting Jew,” Colm Feore as D. W. Griffith, Matt Day as the journalist John Reed, Jim Broadbent as the film producer Harry Aitken, Pedro Armendáriz, Jr., as the fabulously wealthy landowner Don Luis Terrazas, and Eion Bailey as the film’s narrator, Frank Thayer, a real-life American businessman rewritten as a movie-company executive.
The film, though, is sustained by the fire and force of Antonio Banderas. He plays Villa as a peasant visionary, a shrewd, charismatic monster molded by poverty and hardship and toughened by oppression and bigotry. He’s illiterate but savvier than Hollywood when it comes to comprehending the power of cinema. He rides into battle with one eye on the enemy and the other on the camera; between battles he rages alternately at the fear the film will depict him as a mindless brute and the fear that it will depict him sentimentally.
Banderas’s is the first full-blooded film portrait of Mexico’s most famous rebel since Villa’s own.
Our Cars, Ourselves
A new Smithsonian permanent exhibit looks at the history of a nation on the move
Last November the National Museum of American history (a part of the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, D.C.) opened its biggest-ever exhibit, America on the Move, in the General Motors Hall of Transportation. This ambitious project includes everything from locomotives and antique cars to radiator emblems and a stretch of the original pavement from Route 66. The installations combine animated life-size figures with sound and lighting to create realistic vignettes, including (according to the museum) “a conversation between a Buick salesman and a young family buying a car” and, for those who crave such things, “a ‘commute’ into downtown Chicago on a December morning.” Elsewhere, displays examine issues like migration, gender, and globalization. The museum can be reached at 202-357-2700, or see www.americanhistory.si.edu/onthemove.
Leadership Lessons From Warren Harding
... And other unlikely presidential sources —F.S.
Portfolio, a division of Penguin Books, has published a series of leadership tutorials based on such prominent figures as Queen Elizabeth I, Gen. George Patton, and Winston Churchill. A recent addition is Nothing to Fear: Lessons in Leadership From FDR, by Alan Axelrod (273 pages, $24.95). In lessons with titles like “Look Beyond Crisis” and “Strike the Right Tone,” Axelrod uses episodes from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s life and excerpts from his speeches to illustrate important principles for managing large organizations. While few Presidents have faced greater challenges in office than FDR, a look back through history reveals that even the less successful ones can teach us something about leadership, if only in a negative way.
James Madison: When the going gets tough, the tough get going.
In August 1814, with British invaders on the outskirts of Washington, Madison knew the city’s defenses were inadequate, so on the principle of “leaving military movements to military men,” he saddled up his horse and set out for the Virginia hills. Fortunately the British contented themselves with burning Washington’s public buildings and withdrawing. When the smoke cleared, Madison and his fellow federal officials returned.
Ulysses S. Grant: Never let your advisers rule you, unless they really, really insist.
When Grant’s Attorney General, Amos T. Akerman, ruled against an attempted railroad property grab in 1871, the nation’s robber barons pleaded with Akerman to change his mind. He refused, so they turned to Grant, who, under severe pressure from party bosses, reluctantly demanded Akerman’s resignation while praising him effusively, apologizing deeply, and offering him the judgeship or ambassadorship of his choice. Akerman declined the consolation prizes and returned to a lucrative private practice.
Warren Harding: Elections come and go, but friends are forever.
And if your friends are a bunch of crooks, you’re in big trouble.
Calvin Coolidge: Timing is everything.
If Coolidge had chosen to run for reelection in 1928, he would have ushered the nation into the worst depression in its history. Instead he is remembered as nothing worse than an aloof but tolerant chaperon with a flawless sense of when it was time to leave the party.
Lyndon Johnson: Humiliation is power.
LBJ often received reporters and staff members while sitting on the toilet.
Richard Nixon: Hush money—it’s the best investment in America.
If Nixon had provided adequately for the Watergate burglars, none of the subsequent scandals would have come out. But he was so chintzy that not only did the burglars themselves squeal, but their legion of co-conspirators realized that from then on, it was every man for himself. (Another lesson: If you’re planning something illegal, it might not be the best idea in the world to tape the conversation.)
Jimmy Carter: When all else fails, tell ‘em they’re crazy.
In July 1979 President Carter, unable to unify the country behind his energy policy, told the citizens of America that they were afflicted with a “crisis of confidence” (or “malaise,” though Carter never used that word in the speech itself). The following year a neurotic America acted out by voting Carter into retirement.
Ronald Reagan: Accept responsibility, avoid blame.
At the height of the Iran-Contra scandal, Reagan simultaneously admitted failure, apologized, deflected personal culpability, and appealed to America to move on, all with a single three-word phrase, “mistakes were made”—leaving Lincoln looking like a windbag in comparison with his 279-word Gettysburg Address.
The Buyable Past
Fountain Pens —David Lander
In 1884 a New York insurance broker named Lewis E. Waterman patented a pen that contained a capillary action to control the flow of ink from the reservoir. The earliest fountain pens had to be filled with eyedroppers, but they eliminated incessant dipping and sparked a revolution in writing.
Notwithstanding the ballpoint’s success during the past half-century, the venerable fountain pen lives on. Sam Fiorella, who with her husband, Frank, owns a vintage pen business called Pendemonium in Fort Madison, Iowa (a town known as the Pen City because it’s home to both Sheaffer and one of the oldest prisons west of the Mississippi), reports a growing interest in older models. That, she says, has kept prices stable or rising over the past several years.
Nostalgia? Only in part. Many collectors use their vintage pens, and Terry Wiederlight of Fountain Pen Hospital, a family-owned New York City specialty shop and repair facility, notes that a fine fountain pen’s solid gold nib flexes, causing it to slide along paper and make writing, which can be arduous, “smoother, much smoother.”
Besides, fountain pens traditionally have been status symbols. In an earlier era, carrying a Conklin, a Crocker, a Cross, a Parker, a Swan, or a Waterman’s Ideal had genuine significance. “It meant you could read and write,” Fiorella says.
Prices of collectible vintage pens start at less than $50 for, say, a mid-1950s Sheaffer Snorkel in black, burgundy, or blue (color, along with condition, helps determine a pen’s value) and reach the six-figure stratosphere for the very rarest pieces hand-decorated in the Japanese makie tradition: powdered tints, including gold dust, married with layers of lacquer.
Fiorella, who is president of Pen Collectors of America, an organization some 2,000 strong, estimates that about 20 percent of her collecting colleagues are female. Yet vintage ladies’ pens, often topped with rings because women once wore them on neck ribbons, remain cheaper than larger men’s models. In collecting, bigger is frequently better.
To Learn More
Web: Sellers of vintage pens rely heavily on the Internet. The Pendemonium site and that of David Nishimura, a Rhode Island-based dealer, at www.pendemonium.com and www.vintagepens.com, offer essential collector information. Jim Gaston, an Arkansas hobbyist/dealer, shows a well of pens at www.jimgaston.com.
Print: Want just one book? Sam Fiorella suggests Paul Erano’s Fountain Pens: Past & Present, out of print but available from used-book sources. The only American magazine devoted to vintage pens, The PENnant, is published three times yearly by Pen Collectors of America. A $40-a-year membership includes a subscription and access to a library of approximately 7,000 pen-related documents. Visit www.pencollectors.com, write to P.O. Box 447, Fort Madison, IA 52627, or phone 319-372-0881:
Repairs: Users of vintage pens should know that Fountain Pen Hospital lives up to the name Terry and Steve Wiederlight’s father and grandfather gave it in 1946. The store, at 10 Warren Street, New York, NY 10007, is crammed with merchandise, new and old. Visit www.fountainpenhospital.com or phone 800-253-7367.
Editors’Bookshelf
“I am a biologist,” writes Jeffrey C. Hall, a professor at Brandeis, at the beginning of The Stand of the U.S. Army at Gettysburg (Indiana, 415 pages, $49.95), “but I claim to know as much history as biology on one subject: The Battle of Gettysburg.” Unless he’s an amazingly good biologist, he’s being modest. His book is a fascinating, detailed account of the battle with more than a hundred maps. The author has several main points to make: that the Union’s strong position at the end of the first day was no accident; that Sickles’s big blunder on day two actually did the Union much good; that Union artillery and one little-known Ohio regiment were the main players in the defeat of Pickett’s Charge. He also proves himself broadly enough informed about history to reflect on how Meade’s performance after the battle compares with Spruance’s after Midway and how similar the action at Little Round Top was to the 1941 Battle of Crete.
The title of “America’s greatest playwright,” like that of “America’s greatest portrait painter,” is unlikely to change hands in the future, since anyone capable of becoming the greatest in these fields can easily find a less archaic outlet for his or her talents. The drama crown may thus be held in perpetuity by Arthur Miller, whose first full-length biography was published last year: Arthur Miller: His Life and Work, by Martin Gottfried (Da Capo, 496 pages, $30.00). In a detailed and sympathetic account, the author narrates each decade’s crisis in Miller’s life—the Depression in the 1930s; World War II (in which he did not fight) and the failure of his first play in the 1940s; McCarthyism in the 1950s; the breakdown of his wife, Marilyn Monroe, and their divorce in the 1960s; and the decline of his reputation from the 1970s onward—all in the vigorous style Gottfried developed over decades as a theater critic.
Beyond Capitol Hill
A City of Museums Finally Gets One For Itself
The history of Washington, D.C., is so intimately tied up with the history of the federal government that it’s easy to forget that the two are not always identical. Washington has many museums devoted to the government and the nation, but until now there was none about the city itself. Filling this gap is the City Museum of Washington, D.C. (www.citymuseumdc.org), operated by the Historical Society of Washington, D.C., in the old Carnegie Library at Mount Vernon Square. Exhibits include an interactive archeology laboratory and a multimedia show that, in the words of a museum spokesman, “uses surprising twists and turns, including fantasy and time travel, and nifty visual effects to bring Washington’s history to life.” A library with archives and manuscripts dating from the early 1700s is open to the public.
Why Do We Say That?
“The Devil’s Highway” —Hugh Rawson
For 77 years U.S route 666, the two-lane highway that runs some 190 miles northward from Gallup, New Mexico, through southwestern Colorado, and then west to Monticello, Utah, was known as the Devil’s Highway. This was because the number 666 is associated in the Bible with Satan or the Antichrist, though the devil is not mentioned explicitly in the relevant verse from the book of Revelation: “Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.”
But the highway was exorcised this past summer. On July 30 dignitaries from three states and the Navajo Nation, through whose reservation the highway runs, gathered at a rest stop just south of Shiprock, New Mexico, for the renaming ceremony. Route 666 became Route 491, complete with new highway signs all along the way. (Just as well, since most of the 666 signs, which became collectors’ items once the name change was announced, had been stolen.) “We’re kicking the devil out of New Mexico,” commented Rhonda Faught, secretary of the state Department of Transportation.
Changes of this sort are not uncommon. Last June The New York Times reported that South Korea’s contribution to the “coalition of the willing” in Iraq had been increased by 7 soldiers in order to bring the total to a safe, nonsatanic 673. And in Russia in 1999, the Times noted, bus route 666 in Moscow was changed to 616.
Changing the number of Route 666 is just a special case of a general phenomenon. History offers hundreds of examples of place-names that have been changed because of their unfortunate associations. Thus the Park River in Hartford, Connecticut (now largely underground, courtesy of the Army Corps of Engineers), was once the Hog River; Contentment Island, in Long Island Sound, off Darien, Connecticut, was formerly Contention Island; a yellow fever epidemic in 1848-49 gave the Yellow Hook section of Brooklyn, New York, such bad publicity that the neighborhood’s name was changed to Bay Ridge, though the original name had nothing to do with the disease (it came from the color of the clay in the area); and efforts continue to remove squaw from American place-names even though the word is not offensive, at least from an etymological point of view; most likely it comes from an Algonquian word for “woman” or “wife.” The misconception that squaw derives from a coarse term for the female genitalia was popularized on a 1992 “Oprah” show.
And so it goes unto the dawn of recorded time. The ancient Greeks warded off trouble by changing their original name for the Black Sea (the Axine, or Inhospitable Sea) to the hopeful Euxine, or Hospitable Sea. But Byron had it right in Don Juan: “There’s not a sea the passenger e’er pukes in, / Turns up more dangerous breakers than the Euxine.”
As for the new U.S. Route 491, if numeral 1 is a, 2 is b, and so on, then 491 transposes into dia. That’s “day” in Spanish—and also the start of diablo. Could it be that the devil is still lurking along the highway?
