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My Brush With History
By the Readers
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Bob, Dick, and Harry
When a President Holds a Grudge
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| A young freelancer’s lucky shot, autographed by Eisenhower, Nixon, and Hoover. |
| (© BOB GOLDBERG) |
In 1953, when I was an 18-year-old messenger at the Associated Press and a freelance photographer for the Brooklyn Daily, a stroke of luck put me on the inauguration stand in Washington, D.C., with a four-by-five Speed Graphic camera in my hands as Dwight D. Eisenhower was sworn in as thirty-fourth President of the United States.
The photo editor at the Daily had assigned me to cover the inauguration and had arranged for me to pick up a press pass in Washington. Officials there told me that most of the passes had been given out, but they would see what was left. I was given a pass making me a member of the inaugural party and another admitting me to the inaugural platform. I arrived early and made my way to the stand.
I knew that something had to be wrong, because all the other photographers were stationed in front of the platform. When I tried to leave, though, a Secret Service man stopped me and told me I was where my pass entitled me to be.
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| Truman, ever inscrutable. |
| (© BOB GOLDBERG) |
As it turned out, that inaugural ceremony was unusual because it featured four Presidents, not the customary two: Eisenhower, of course, plus the outgoing President Harry S. Truman, former President Herbert Hoover, and Richard M. Nixon, the new Vice President, who would become our thirty-seventh President 16 years later.
Of the photos I took, one appeared the next day in the Daily, and three more went out on the AP wire. Shortly thereafter I went to work full-time for the Associated Press; I spent the next half-century as a photographer.
As the years went by, I occasionally covered an event that brought me into contact with one of the men who had been on the platform, and each time I would take along a print of my photo so that I could have it autographed. In 1961, when former President Truman came to New York City to attend a political dinner celebrating Mayor Robert F. Wagner’s election to a third term, I tried to get my final signature.
Mr. Truman listened while I explained how I had managed to take the picture and how I had obtained the autographs of the other three Presidents. But when I asked him to sign the picture, he bristled.
Jabbing at the image of Nixon, he said: “I wouldn’t sign a picture with that son-of-a-bitch Nixon in it. He called me a traitor.” Then, clenching his fist, he growled, “This is what I’d like to do to him.” My camera was primed and I got a second photograph of President Truman, doing what he did best: giving ’em hell.
—Bob Goldberg left the Associated Press in 1966 and is now president and CEO of Feature Photo Service.
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Under Two Flags
Integrating a Black Middle School
When I was 12 years old, I sewed a Confederate flag onto my jacket. I didn’t intend to make a stand or provoke my classmates, most of them African-American. I just didn’t know any better.
In the 1960s and 1970s, when I grew up there, Richmond, Virginia, was a hundred years past the Civil War, but remnants of the Confederacy still cast long shadows throughout its former capital. As a white Richmonder I saw the flag decorating caps and T-shirts, flying from houses and museums. I never stopped to question its presence, much less consider its meaning. I believed that Gen. Robert E. Lee and the other Confederate leaders whose statues lined cobblestoned Monument Avenue were heroes. Why else would they sit on pedestals?
I was more preoccupied with finding my own place in the city. My family had moved from Chicago when I was seven, right after my father died of a heart attack. Richmond was my mother’s hometown, and she wanted to be near her family as she grieved.
At my new school, my classmates teased me for talking “like a Yankee.” My fourth-grade teacher made us call the Civil War the “War Between the States,” reflecting the Southern belief that the states had fought solely for the right to make their own laws. She taught us that most slaves had been happy, singing spirituals as they planted tobacco in their homespun clothes.
At my summer camp in North Carolina, where the elite families of New Orleans, Savannah, and Atlanta sent their daughters, we sang “Dixie” in the dining room. I learned to stand every time the song started and raise my fist when we got to the line “In Dixieland I’ll take my stand to live and die in Dixie.”
These lessons hardly prepared me for my assignment to a black school when Richmond started mass busing in 1971. My mother could have found a way out of it, like most of the other parents in my neighborhood. She was a daughter of the South, a graduate of segregated schools. Yet her years in Chicago had shown her that integration worked, at least in our small Hyde Park neighborhood. When busing started, my older sister and I were probably the only white children in Richmond who had already gone to a racially mixed school.
That left me, at the age of 12, caught between a hearty chorus of “Dixie” and my personal experience that going to school with black children was no big deal. I was one of 106 white students assigned to join 513 African-Americans at Binford Middle School. Each day I stepped off the bus to face hundreds of children who viewed me as the enemy and either ignored me or made fun of me. I remember those months in a physical way: my head down, shoulders hunched to avoid the constant glares, elbows, and jostling in the halls. Many of the teachers quit. The principal, afraid of fights, canceled all sports and after-school activities.
Maybe if one of my teachers had explained the African-American view of the Confederacy instead of shunning all topics with the remotest hint of racial controversy, I would have ignored the patch I saw for sale at the Virginia State Fair in 1972. It was a checkered racing flag crossed with the Confederate Stars and Bars.
“Go, Confederates!” said the ponytailed salesman, eyeing my wad of frizzy hair, my dime-store earrings, my eagerness to fit in.
“Yeah!” I said, and handed over the money.
My mother made no comment as I left the next morning, the new patch on the front of my jacket. Despite her support for integration, she didn’t see the flag as anything objectionable. I practically strutted up to the door of the school. Finally I felt like a Richmonder!
I hadn’t gotten 20 feet inside when a black girl I didn’t know shoved me. She narrowed her eyes, jabbing me where the patch was sewn on, cursed, and stalked off. Stunned, I went into my homeroom.
It took Lori, a black girl who was in a lot of my classes, to tell me what I had done wrong. Petite but high-spirited, she was the only girl who let me touch her Afro, which was much softer than it looked. After lunch that day Lori pulled me into a corner of the cracked and weedy asphalt that served as our playground.
“That flag on your jacket,” she said, the usual teasing edge gone from her voice. “It’s got to go.”
My stomach somersaulted. Still, I didn’t know exactly what I had done wrong. I waited for her to say more.
“You really don’t get it, do you?” she said. Lori and I had stumbled into the no man’s land of racial misunderstanding. As 12-year-olds we were more open to social change, but we lacked any kind of perspective on history.
“Don’t you see we would still be slaves if they had won?” she said.
No answer I gave could possibly stanch the shame that flooded my face.
I wadded up the jacket and stuffed it into my knapsack. When I got home, I took out my mother’s manicure scissors and cut out every one of my careful stitches. I shoved the patch in the back of my drawer. I’d certainly never wear it again. Yet I also couldn’t bring myself to throw out the reminder of all I still had to learn.
I wish I could say that I made friends with black students in middle school, but the divisions and mutual misunderstandings ran too deep. My next school, an educational experiment called the Open High School, was more successfully integrated, probably because we all applied for admission and felt more like a community. But Richmond’s public schools, which had been 70 percent black when I started sixth grade, were 82 percent black when I graduated from high school. They’re 90 percent black today.
—Clara Silverstein is a journalist in the Boston area and the author of White Girl: A Story of School Desegregation (University of Georgia Press, 2004).
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Mind the Gap
Building the World’s Longest Steel-Arch Bridge
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| Above the clouds; the completed bridge. |
| (NATIONAL PARK SERVICE) |
In 1975 my job in the U.S. Steel Coal Development group involved frequent travel from our Pennsylvania headquarters to a new mine under construction near Pineville, in southern West Virginia. After a few interesting flights over the mountainous terrain I quickly decided that I preferred to drive, even though the trip entailed a 40-minute switchback descent into and ascent out of the New River Gorge just north of Fayetteville. In fact that was the high point of the trip, because at the time the New River Gorge Bridge was under construction. I often stopped at the bottom of the gorge to gaze in awe at the two halves of the world’s longest steel arch as they slowly grew toward each other some 850 feet above the river.
My father was director of Construction Projects Planning for American Bridge (then a division of U.S. Steel), and the span was the grand finale of his 40-year career in steel construction. At his insistence I stopped at the job site on one of my trips and was given a VIP tour by L. M. (“Pete”) Spadey, the project superintendent. He walked me out on the deck to look down on the arch, but as we approached the point where the decking narrowed from perhaps 40 feet to 15 feet I could go no farther. I thanked him but said I’d much rather be that far underground.
On May 13, 1976, the final steel members were to be placed, with much fanfare, to tie the two arch halves into a self-supporting whole. The night before, my wife and I joined my father and and Mr. Spady and various other project dignitaries for dinner at Hawks Nest, a state park near the job site. At about seven o’clock my father approached me with a worried look, said something like, “Keep these people entertained,” and disappeared. I soon noticed that all the American Bridge people I knew had gone, but somehow no one who remained seemed to notice.
Later, sometime long after midnight, my father came to our room to explain. One of the pipes supporting the southern half of the arch had snapped with a clang heard three miles away, and the gap between the arch halves had closed by several inches.
I can only imagine the frenzied atmosphere as engineers tried to understand how the impossible could have happened, calculated and recalculated the stresses, and ultimately concluded that the structure was stable—but could become unstable if temperatures rose and the steel expanded.
The next morning was cool and hazy, but I know I was not the only person sweating as I sat with my family on the hillside overlooking the north landing zone. Below us, people were checking their watches and scanning the horizon for the sight of the governor’s helicopter arriving for the dedication. Finally the steelworkers climbed into a low-walled steel box suspended from an overhead cable, were lifted into the air, rode out, and were lowered into the middle of the unfinished span. In a few moments the box rose again with the crew on board and returned to the landing zone. After a brief, obviously tense conference, my father, Mr. Spadey, and some others climbed into the box with the crew and soon disappeared at mid-span. Then the box returned once more, leaving the crew at their station, and as my father stepped out onto solid ground, the governor’s helicopter chattered toward the south landing zone. Before it touched down, the flag-bedecked critical piece of steel was hoisted and on its way.
That afternoon, as we drove down into the gorge to view the now-completed arch from below, my father told me what had occurred that morning. The members of the crew had been fully briefed about the snapped pipe and were willing to proceed. When they got to mid-span, however, in their state of heightened awareness they heard sounds and saw things they had never noticed before. They needed the bosses to share the risk and reassure them.
“Dad, I never really understood until today what you do for a living!” I joked.
“I never rode anything like that before in my life,” he said with a grin. Then, after a long pause, he added, “You just do what needs to be done.”
Come to think of it, that’s the only explanation I ever heard from him for the Bronze Star he got at the Battle of the Bulge.
—George R. Carter, Jr., has worked in the mining industry for more than 30 years. He lives in western Pennsylvania.
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Readers are invited to submit their own personal “brushes with history” for publication in American Heritage magazine and on our Web site. We will pay our regular rates for all brushes we use, and assume all rights therein. Unfortunately, we can not promise to correspond about or return submissions.
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