March 2005

Mary Jane Armstrong Henney, of Mansfield, Ohio, who is 87 years old, writes: “I compile books on local history. My contention is that the original text, written at the time history happened, is more accurate and revealing than what is written in later years.” With her letter, Mrs. Henney included these two photographs that nail down a bit of her own history: “When Carl, my little brother, received his Kiddie Car for his third birthday in 1923, he could hardly wait for nice weather when he could take it outside to ride on the sidewalk. All of four years older, I was charged with watching and caring for him. Wearing his fireman’s hat and issuing his verbal siren, he rode contentedly for hours, occasionally stopping, as he put it, to ‘fill air in the tires’ before going to fight a fire.”

During World War II Carl Armstrong served four years in the Pacific with the 27th Infantry Division. Today he is retired from Abbott Laboratories. As you enter his living room, Carl’s sister writes, the first thing you see is the Kiddie Car, a survivor after 80-some years.

Close Call on a Tight Runway

The early summer of 1945 found me in Kunming, China, a second lieutenant C-47 pilot in the 27th Troop Carrier Squadron of the Chinese American Composite Wing. Our primary job was to pick up the war supplies that Air Transport Command (ATC) flew in from India and to distribute them to the joint Chinese-American observation teams scattered all over China, many of them behind Japanese lines.

One clear, bright summer day I had returned from a mission, arriving at Kunming about 4:00 p.m. I had been reloaded and was ready to leave for our base at Chengkung, about 15 miles south of Kunming. My loaded plane would then fly out the next day with another 27th crew.

Standing at the Crossroads of the Blues 

In his 1949 song “Canary Bird,” Muddy Waters sang, “Well, canary bird, when you get to Clarksdale, please fly down on Second Street / Well, you know I don’t want you to stop flying until you take the letter out to Stovall for me.” And you can still walk down Second Street to a bridge that leads to Stovall Farms, the plantation where Waters grew up. Nearby you’ll find Wade Walton’s barbershop, a low, rectangular building of whitewashed cement blocks on Issaquena Avenue, which runs through the New World district, where live blues once thrived; now you can hear the music at Ground Zero, a club in an unassuming brick warehouse near the museum. Walton cut the hair of blues greats Sonny Boy Williamson II, Ike Turner, and Howlin’ Wolf and was a musician in his own right. He recorded an album, Shake ’Em Down, in the 1960s and can be heard on a cut in the 1990 compilation Clarksdale Mississippi: Coahoma the Blues, playing percussion with his razor and strop. Walton died in 2000 and the shop closed. His barber chair is in the Delta Blues Museum.

150 Years Ago

On March 3 Congress appropriated $30,000 for the U.S. Army to import camels from the Levant and put them to work in the deserts of the Southwest. The law was a pet project of Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, who as early as 1851, when he was still a senator, had suggested using camels as a way to ease communication with California. Along with Maj. Henry C. Wayne, another camel enthusiast, Davis had made an extensive study of camel breeds and habits, and in June, with funding in place, Wayne set sail for the Mediterranean in the USS Supply.

The ship was commanded by Lt. David Dixon Porter, later a highly decorated commander for the Union in the Civil War. (Wayne would side with the Confederacy, whose president, of course, was Davis.) The Supply called first in Tunisia and then went on to Greece, Malta, Turkey, and Egypt. Wayne proved to be a shrewd judge of camelflesh, selecting 33 sturdy beasts of various breeds. In April 1856 the camels arrived in Texas, and Porter returned to the Mediterranean to fetch more.

A Strikingly Detailed Architectural Model Survives 

The World Trade Center’s architect, Minoru Yamasaki, considered about 100 scale models before settling on the design that is now etched in our national consciousness. Between 1969 and 1971, after construction had begun on the World Trade Center and before the first tenants went to work there, Alex Tunstall, the director of Minoru Yamasaki & Associates’ in-house model shop, built a final model for presentation to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Tunstall and Yamasaki intended the presentation model, an exact rendering of the site, to reflect the significance and grandeur of the structures it anticipated. Its surface was coated with glistening automotive paint to produce an enlivening sheen. To emphasize the buildings’ unprecedented scale, Tunstall’s team glued 175 miniature cars to asphalt-colored paper streets and placed approximately 300 tiny people throughout the plaza. Most remarkably, the towers themselves rose 7 feet above the 8-by-10-foot base.

The port of Bruges lies eight miles inland from the Belgian coast, served by a canal that opens to the sea at Ostend and Zeebrugge. In the bitter spring of 1918 Bruges Harbor teemed with German destroyers and U-boats that regularly came out to continue their years-long effort to starve Britain into surrender.

To counter these forays, Rear Adm. Roger Keyes, in command of the Dover Patrol, came up with a plan whose audacity verged on the suicidal. He would have several of his own cruisers sunk in precisely chosen spots, where their hulks would bottle up the German fleet.

The British went in on April 22. The whole coast was heavily defended, but at Zeebrugge things were made even more difficult by the presence of a long mole, a massive seawall hooking out into the sea and now thickly planted with German artillery. This British marines and sailors would storm and hold for long enough to allow the cruisers to run the batteries and scuttle themselves.

… And Why You Almost Never Feel Them Coming

The Democratic candidate was crushed. An urban, ethnic liberal from the Northeast, he had been caught flatfooted by the waves of vitriolic attacks that smeared his background, his years of dedicated public service, the character of his beloved wife, as well as his religious beliefs and cultural values. He lost the heartland, and even the traditionally Democratic South had turned against him in unprecedented numbers, and it looked as though Republicans would continue to control not only the White House but also both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court for a long time to come.