Growing up in Satellite Beach, Florida, in the shadow of the Kennedy Space Center, in the 1960s, my friends and I often had our routines interrupted by cries of “Missile! Missile!” This was practically a weekly occurrence, but we were never complacent about it. It was our parents’ stock-in-trade. If your dad didn’t work for NASA, he worked for one of the many military contractors; Project Gemini was proceeding alongside ICBM tests and Polaris-missile launches.
It was a clear, quiet Sunday morning. Dad was in the living room reading the Los Angeles Examiner and listening to the radio. Mother and I were in the kitchen discussing Christmas plans while I bathed my two-month-old daughter, Janice. I was trying to decide whether to mail my husband’s presents to him in Hawaii or hope he would be home for the holiday. He had been due for a discharge from the Navy in November but had been told he had to wait for his ship, the USS West Virginia , to return to the States.
Dad came to the door and said he hoped we wouldn’t be disappointed about missing our favorite radio programs; a tube had burned out, and he couldn’t get another one until the next day. Then he asked Mother to come into the living room. Busy with Janice, I paid no attention to his request.
This fall, American Heritage invites you to travel with editor Richard Snow on a sevenday exploration of the sites where the outcome of the Civil War was determined. Visit the fields where Lee’s famous Special Order 191 was found by a Union soldier, tour Gettysburg, Harpers Ferry, and the Antietam battlefield, and walk in the footsteps of Confederates from Spangler’s Woods to the trees at the Angle. For more information, see the advertisement on page 79 or call 800-556-7896.
A judge, the old saw goes, is a lawyer who knew a governor (or a president or a senator). In most states, a judge is a lawyer who knows how to attract voters. Whatever the judge’s secret, the contempt underlying that catchphrase suggests the palpable disdain that tints our view of the whole legal system. We speak with scorn of the “courthouse gang,” meaning the petty politicians who loiter in the temple of justice. We like to think of judges as above all that, yet we continue to regard the administration of justice as a mere extension of politics.
Among the consequences of the 2000 Florida election imbroglio, perhaps the most unfortunate was the pummeling that judges—trial, appellate, and Supreme alike—took from both sides. “These people are too political” was the constant refrain, even as the politicians turned to the courts for salvation. And every court could turn in a day from savior to scoundrel.
I’m 18 years old and a senior at Joel Barlow High School. I absolutely love your magazine! I couldn’t help but smile when I read “Flipping the Meat Train” in your February/March 2001 issue. I have always been fascinated with the hoboes of American history who hopped freight trains. This article was especially informative be cause it was written by someone who actually experienced this “terrible freedom.” I would give it all back—e-mail, computers, cell phones, television, VCRs and DVD players, CDs, and cassette tapes—just to see America as it once was: a country of pride and freedom where SAT scores didn’t matter. If I could experience, just once, the thrill of riding in an open “side-door Pullman,” like the boys in the picture, I’d be the happiest girl in America. Forget the movie stars of today. Dale Wasserman and all the boxcarriding hoboes of yesterday are my idols. Thanks for such an amazing story.
In "Half a Million Purple Hearts" (December 2000 / January 2001), the authors, D. M. Giangreco and Kathryn Moore, in effect refute their own thesis. They say the fact that the United States ordered 9,000 new Purple Hearts during the bombing of Kosovo "had nothing to do with imminent combat," that the medals "were ordered for the simplest of bureaucratic reasons": The United States "had to replenish its own inventory." I would simply emphasize that a half million Purple Hearts on hand when World War II ended does not prove that the military or President Truman believed that a half a million American lives would have been lost in an invasion of Japan. The military is notorious for ordering far more equipment than it needs.
In “Half a Million Purple Hearts” (December/January 2001 issue), the authors, D. M. Giangreco and Kathryn Moore, in effect refute their own thesis. They say that the fact that the United States ordered 9,000 new Purple Hearts during the bombing of Kosovo “had nothing to do with imminent combat,” that the medals “were ordered for the simplest of bureaucratic reasons”: The United States “had to replenish its own inventory.” I would emphasize that a half-million Purple Hearts on hand when World War II ended does not prove that the military or President Truman believed that half a million American lives would have been lost in an invasion of Japan. The military is notorious for ordering far more equipment than it needs.
Probably a bit of disclosure is necessary as you look at the pictures reproduced here. They are drawn from the work of Esther Bubley, one of the pioneer female photo journalists of the mid-twentieth century, who died in undeserved obscurity in 1998. The conclusion you might draw from them is that Bubley belongs to the American aesthetic tradition of haunted, lonely realism. You think of Edward Hopper’s paintings, or Sherwood Anderson’s sketches of “grotesques” in Winesburg, Ohio , while studying Bubley’s deeply etched, beautifully composed portraits of isolated, hard-living people.
Most magicians today know Dai Vernon only through his books and from a wonderful series of videos made in 1982 that show him “sessioning” over 17 hours at a card table with three students. When Steve Freeman, one of Vernon’s most accomplished students, hesitates over a quote from S. W. Erdnase about a unique move called the S. W. E. Shift, the Professor jumps in, confidently citing the phrase practically word for word. At the time, Vernon was 88 and quoting—from memory—a passage he had first read as a boy 80 years before in the book The Expert at the Card Table .
Although Vernon solved the mystery of the center deal by locating Allen Kennedy, he never did determine the true identity of the author of this bible of card conjuring, which lays out in eloquent detail so many of the fundamental sleights employed by card cheats and magicians alike. He was not alone. The book has proved to be one of the great success stories of American publishing, as well as one of its most puzzling mysteries.