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History now
The Top 10 Makers of the Modern American Summer
by Frederic D. Schwarz
On a blowy March day during a season of cold rain that felt as if it might very well be eternal, the editors pondered the distant pleasures of summer with the goal of choosing the 10 people who are most responsible for the season as we experience it now. The exercise came down to some tough choices (Fred Waller, inventor of water skis, vs. Wally Byam, father of the Airstream, vs. Ed Headrick, the winner among this trio) but finally reached the following consensus:
1 Thomas Midgley, chemist.
In 1921 he gave a big boost to America’s nascent road culture by inventing leaded gasoline, which allowed cars to accelerate, climb hills, and go faster than 50 miles per hour without knocking and wheezing. Then in 1930 he unveiled the Freon family of chlorofluorocarbons. Not only did they make home refrigerators, freezers, and air conditioners practical, but the damage they did to the ozone layer will have us all wearing sunscreen for decades to come.
2 David R. Francis, president of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Company.
The Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904, better known as the St. Louis World’s Fair, can be thought of as the Bauhaus or Xerox PARC of junk food. With varying degrees of reliability, it’s been credited with the invention, or at least popularization, of the ice-cream cone, the hamburger, the hot dog, the club sandwich, cotton candy, peanut butter, Dr Pepper, and iced tea. Some of these attributions are questionable; frankfurters, for example, were sold at Coney Island in the 1860’s and were being put in buns well before the turn of the century. But it’s clear that the fair was a watershed of creativity for American snacking, and every teenager who buys his date an ice-cream cone (almost certainly a legit product of the fair) owes thanks to Francis.
3 Gen. John A. Logan, commander of the Grand Army of the Republic.
As head of the Union veterans’ organization in 1868, he established May 30 as Memorial Day, thereby giving Americans an extra month of summer.
4 George Fret, surfer.
After emigrating from Hawaii in 1907, Fret introduced surfing to Southern California. For good measure, he served as California’s, and possibly the country’s, first lifeguard. In later years his brethren in that profession would save the lives of thousands of bathers—and brighten the lives of millions of women who never even went in the water.
5 Dwight D. Eisenhower, President.
Imagine taking a cross-country drive in a nation where each state and locality was responsible for building and maintaining its own roads. That’s how things were until the 1950’s, when Eisenhower looked at the inadequate patchwork of U.S. routes and saw a vital defense weakness if rapid mobilization ever became necessary. Cold War concerns are less important today, but Ikea’s legacy of interstate highways has made the summer road trip a cherished American institution.
6 William Willett, builder.
As early as 1784 Benjamin Franklin suggested setting clocks ahead in summer, but the idea proved no more popular than his advocacy of the turkey as our national symbol. Not until 1907 was the idea taken up seriously—in Britain, where Willet wrote a pamphlet on the subject and sent it to members of Parliament. During World War I his proposal was finally adopted, first in Germany and Britain, then in most other European countries, and finally in the United States after it entered the war in 1917. Following the Armistice, Congress repealed daylight-saving time, only to reconstitute it temporarily during World War II and permanently (subject to local option) in 1966.
7 Maurice Yock, inventor.
In 1957 this New Zealander patented the “jandal,” a sandal with a thong between the first and second toes, which developed into the modern flip-flop.
8 Steven Spielberg, producer-director.
With the unprecedented success of Jaws (1975), he introduced the concept of the high-budget, special-effects-laden summer blockbuster, inaugurating a durable summer tradition at the minor cost of wrecking American studio films forever.
9 John Muir, naturalist.
As the founder of America’s conservation movement, between the 1890s and 1910s he was instrumental in getting millions of acres set aside as national parks and forests—and establishing, in a nation not long removed from frontier days, the idea that hiking and camping were things to do for fun.
10 Ed Headrick, engineer.
In 1967 he added concentric grooves to the top of the Wham-O company’s Pluto Platter and renamed it Frisbee. The change transformed it from an ephemeral toy to a way of life and an indispensable piece of equipment for beachgoers.
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The buyable past
Shaker boxes
by David Lander
The Communal Shaker Order included master woodworkers whose classic nineteenth-century designs anticipated modernist attitudes by a hundred years or more. Their furnishings, “plain without superfluity,” perfectly suit the precisionist paintings and photographs in which Charles Sheeler depicted them around 1930, and their reductive spirit suffuses the superb Danish furniture that began to appear after World War II. The Shakers marketed some items to outsiders through catalogues, and their oval storage boxes proved highly popular. Brother Isaac Newton Youngs noted in a journal that his New Lebanon, New York, community, the one that made the largest number, built 3,560 in 1836 alone. Production there, which had begun in the 1790s, continued through the early 1940s, but by then the group had dwindled considerably, and hired hands made boxes that were sold through a gift shop.
While oval boxes weren’t unique to the Shakers, they built the best ones, neatly beveling the swallowtails on their sides and tacking them down with rust-resistant copper nails. They finished some in brightly hued paint, which tends to surprise people who think a strict religious code mandating celibacy made the Shakers a dour lot.
Prices start at less than $500, and Willis Henry, a Massachusetts-based specialist who has been holding Shaker auctions since 1982, seems to have set a record two years ago when he knocked down an oval box for $42,250. Boxes dated or initialed by their makers are likely to sell for more, and a gift inscription from one Shaker to another makes a piece especially valuable.
Oval boxes came in different sizes so they could be neatly stacked. The smallest, just under three inches lone, often fetch premium prices because they’re hardest to find. Finish is crucial, and boxes painted yellow, an uncommon color, tend to be pricey. But beware. The veteran auctioneer, who enthusiastically compares these simple but stunning wooden objects to gems and uses a jeweler’s loupe to examine them, warns that painted surfaces are sometimes faked.
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Resources
Every would-be Shaker collector should view the order’s work firsthand and invest in a few good illustrated reference books such as Shaker Design, by June Sprigg. John T. Kirk’s The Shaker World: Art, Life, Belief is a particularly ambitious work that’s out of print but, as this is written, still available from the Shaker Museum and Library in Old Chatham, New York (www.shakermuseumandlibraty.org, 518-794-9100). That institution and Hancock Shaker Village (www.hancockshakervillage.org, 800-817-1137), about 45 minutes away in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, both have ranking collections, as does the Shaker Museum at South Union in Kentucky (www.shakermuseum.com, 800-811-8379). Visit if at all possible, and when you’re ready to buy, consult the Willis Henry auction catalogues, available both online and in print (www.willishenry.com, 781-834-7774).
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Summer Reading
Of our twentieth-century Presidents, William Howard Taft (1909-13) may be the least remembered, and among First Ladies, his wife, Helen Herron Taft, is also a shadowy figure. Yet she has caught the attention of the historian Carl Sferrazza Anthony, and in Nellie Taft: The Unconventional First Lady of the Ragtime Era (William Morrow, 534 pages, $29.95) he presents an appealingly original woman with a lifelong sense of adventure.
In 1900 Nellie took up surfing in Hawaii en route to the Philippines, where her husband had just been appointed governor. When she invited Filipinos to social events, she deflected criticism with a sentiment remarkable for its time and place: “Neither politics nor race should influence our hospitality in any way.” Her strong political instincts helped propel her husband toward the Presidency, and after his victory she broke with tradition by insisting on sitting beside him in the carriage that took them to the inauguration.
Later she shocked her own party by showing a degree of support for the FDR administration. Nellie Taft died in 1943 at the age of 82, her span paralleling, as Anthony shows in his lively biography, a volatile series of changes in American life.
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Summer Reading
In a curious way, the grandeur of George Washington’s reputation can obscure how great he actually was. A splendid reminder of Washington’s true stature, David McCullough’s 1776 (Simon & Schuster, 400 pages, $32.00) follows him through that momentous year. The book opens with the American army driving the British out of Boston and quickly brings that army down to New York, where calamity upon calamity awaits it. Full of the sound and color of the era and deeply suspenseful even though we know how the story ends, this swift, bracing book reminds Americans that while our founding myth is as full of daring and impossibilities as that of Rome, it isn’t a myth at all.
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Summer Reading
In our February/March 2005 issue, Ellen Feldman wrote about the controversial career of The Diary of Anne Frank after its American publication. She had steeped herself in the subject because she was at work on an audacious novel that has just been published: The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank (Norton, 261 pages, $23.95). In 1944 Anne Frank wrote that the 17-year-old Peter, who was waiting out the fraught days with her in the Amsterdam house where they were hiding from the Nazis, told her that if he got out alive, he would reinvent himself. In this historical (or alternate-historical) novel he does, becoming a prosperous American in the 1950s. But of course he is carrying an immense burden of memory, and how he manages to bear this weight through the sunny countryside of Eisenhower’s America is explored in a novel whose sensational theme never tarnishes the passion and delicacy with which Feldman tells her gripping story.
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Summer Reading
“When I say that for more than seventy years... American Gothic has represented the nation, I mean that, like the American flag, the bald eagle, and the Statue of Liberty (perhaps the only national symbols that continue to surpass it in circulation), it has not only reflected but helped create American identity.” In American Gothic: A Life of America’s Most Famous Painting (W. W. Norton, 160 pages, $21.95), Stephen Biel traces the fluctuating career of Grant Wood’s stolid farmer and his wife (or daughter? This is a debate of more than 50 years’ standing). The couple was first seen as a satire on small-town narrowness, but the intervening years wore the humor away, and in time they evolved to represent granitic national virtues through the same mysterious process by which the Midwest came to embody all that is wholesome in America. Biel’s account of this Iowa apotheosis is shrewd, lively, and highly entertaining.
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Cars, cards, and father
A trio of American Heritage authors have expanded their articles into books
The editors are full of parental pride just now, as recent weeks have seen the publication of three fine books that found their genesis as articles in this magazine. Race of the Century: The Heroic True Story of the 1908 New York to Paris Auto Race, by Julie Fenster (Crown, 400 pages, $25.00), tells the story of an enterprise that in its day was roughly equivalent to a kayak race across the Atlantic. The project was an automobile run from Times Square west to Paris, through a whole palette of obstacles: American prairie; Russian steppes; China; the Bering Strait (the occasional boat was briefly allowed); and no good roads anywhere outside midtown Manhattan. Fenster tells her story with zest and humor and an absolute command of the formidable mechanical challenges but never loses sight of the real courage that fueled the project.
The novelist and historian Thomas Fleming has been a contributor since our earliest days. One particularly memorable article charted Boss Frank Hague’s control of the New Jersey political machine; another, his father’s service in the Argonne during World War I. In 1991 he brought these two strands together in American Heritage in a moving essay called “Visions of My Father.” His father was one of Hague’s most effective lieutenants as well as an exemplar of the hard-handed second-generation-immigrant scrapper who wants better for his children but is resentful when they get it. Fleming details their complex, rich, and often contentious relationship in Mysteries of My Father: An Irish-American Memoir (Wiley, 352 pages, $24.95).
Dai Vernon was a consummate magician who could do any card trick-except the fabled “middle deal.” Then, late one night in a Wichita jail, a prisoner told Vernon that, yes, he’d seen the trick performed. Thus began an obsessive pursuit, a tangy, picaresque odyssey through the salons and gambling hells of 1930s America. Karl Johnson keeps the story hopping in The Magician and the Cardsharp: The Search for America’s Greatest Sleight-of-Hand Artist (Henry Holt, 368 pages, $26.00).
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Brady’s war, revisited
A marine returns to the place where he and his brothers fought and died
First glance, James Brady might seem to have had a life of fir enviable privilege. He has lived in Paris as bureau chief for Women’s Wear Daily and edited New York magazine. Brady currently writes a widely popular column in Advertising Age and another in Parade and is the squire of a handsome house in East Hampton, where he writes about the local populace in amusing mystery novels. But there was a significant interruption in this sunny career: as a young Marine lieutenant he commanded a rifle platoon during the bitter winter fighting on the high ridgelines of Korea. Years ago he wrote a fine memoir about his service called The Coldest War. Now he revisits the subject quite literally in a very different but equally strong book, The Scariest Place in the World: A Marine Returns to North Korea (Thomas Duane Books, 288 pages, $24.95). Fifty years after the fighting, Parade sent him back to the scene of his old battles, and his account of his return is part history, part memoir, part travelogue, and part meditation on the passing of time and the inevitable disappointments of trying to retrieve the past.
Brady describes the long-ago fighting that, once the lines had settled, was strangely like that of the First World War: a static, grisly business of raids and counterraids through barbed wire. It was an unequal fight—we had 6 divisions in Korea, while Mao had 40—and Brady describes it with unsparing vividness. His assessments have pith and bite (“MacArthur was an old man and crazy, but he was still a great soldier, and ambitious”) and can be highly unsentimental (“Behind us, a Chinese shell touched off some of our stored ammo and killed a couple of 11th Marines artillerymen. Which was unfortunate, but you haven’t seen the day Marine infantrymen mourn gunners”). Brady’s book—which flashes with glints of real poetry—is, finally, an intensely moving elegy for the generation of men he served alongside a lifetime ago.
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