January 2011

Col. Robert Morgan flew 25 daylight missions over Nazi Germany and France and led the first B-29 raid on Tokyo, yet his claim to fame lies in a fetching piece of artwork and a snappy nickname painted on the nose of his plane. Morgan was the pilot of the Memphis Belle , and publicity from William Wyler’s 1944 documentary of that name about Morgan’s devotion to Margaret Polk, his Tennessee sweetheart, proved invaluable for the war effort and inescapable for Morgan and Polk. In The Man Who Flew the Memphis Belle (Dutton, $25.95), Morgan recalls how he survived —though his engagement to Polk did not—the multiple stresses of war and a public courtship.

If Ken Burns’s epic Jazz series left you feeling you had just skimmed the surface, the next place to turn is the epic Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD , a near-definitive paperback just out in its fifth edition, 1,725 pages long (Penguin, $24.00). Its two British authors are strongly opinionated, yet the solidity of their opinions, the musical and historical understanding behind them, and the eloquence with which they’re expressed have commended them to a broad following of jazz players and fans. Louis Armstrong and Earl Mines recording together in the late twenties are “great men speaking almost quietly among themselves” in “something like a reluctant farewell to jazz’s first golden age.” Miles Davis’s Plugged Nickel sessions are “the Rosetta Stone of modern jazz: a monumental document written in five subtly and sometimes starkly different dialects but within which much of the music of the post-bop period has been defined and demarcated.”

www.clevelandpostcards.com

Many regional Web sites allow users to send free virtual postcards by e-mail; www.postcards.com has a good selection. These tend to be heavy on novelties and present-day scenes, with perhaps a handful of historic shots thrown in. But clevelandpostcards.com has more than 200 antique Cleveland cards, which can be browsed by era, place, or mood (including “mysterious,” “kitschy,” and “foreboding”). Now you can send your online friends an 1890s illustration of Cy Young, a march-of-progress 1920s view of Municipal Airport, an almost Asher Durand-like moonlit Rocky River Bridge from the 1930s, or any number of strikingly bland 1970s shots of the Ohio Turnpike.

www.lib.virginia.edu/exhibits/sixties

Many experienced travelers call Going-to-the-Sun Road, a 52-mile highway that cuts through Montana’s Glacier National Park, the most beautiful road in the world. It was built between 1919 and 1932 at a cost of just over two million dollars, and in 1997 the combination of its panoramic setting and the heroic engineering needed to carve it out of the Continental Divide led to its designation as a National Historic Landmark. Now Going-to-the-Sun Road is starting to show its age. After a six-year renovation proposal provoked grumbling from local businesses, an advisory committee has been formed to search for a compromise. For now, the road continues to carry traffic, though routine maintenance and repair of its guard walls provides some lucky tourists with delays of 15 to 30 minutes in which to pause and take in the scenery.

It is a measure of Yellowstone’s vastness that a survey has found some 230 waterfalls—each at least 15 feet tall and two dozen more than 100 feet—that had never been mapped during the century and a quarter since its establishment as America’s first national park. The survey was conducted over seven years by Lee Whittlesey, a National Park Service archivist and year-round Yellowstone resident, and a pair of longtime Yellowstone explorers, Paul Rubinstein and Mike Stevens. Their work, which is still in progress, has boosted the number of recorded waterfalls in Yellowstone from 50 to almost 300.

Not everyone is thrilled with the team’s findings—or, more precisely, with their decision to make their findings public. Yellowstone devotees worry that an influx of hikers and campers will ruin the park’s remaining pristine sections. While Rubinstein is sensitive to these concerns, he and the others hope that the benefits of deepening our knowledge of Yellowstone’s beauty and uniqueness will outweigh the attendant risks.

Frank Lloyd Wright once said, “I used to gloat over the beautiful buildings I could build if only it were unnecessary to cut holes in them.” Fortunately, he not only consented to cut holes but came up with a new style of leaded glass to fill them. Wright’s invention is the subject of Light Screens: The Leaded Glass of Frank Lloyd Wright , at the American Craft Museum in New York City (212-956-3535) from May 10 to September 2. Early pieces reflect the muted palette and symmetrical geometric patterns of Wright’s Prairie houses, while the whimsical, boldly colored windows of the 1912 Avery Coonley Playhouse signal a shift to more syncopated compositions. The exhibition will make a five-city tour and is accompanied by an exhibit catalogue (Rizzoli International, $39.95) and a catalogue raisonné, Light Screens: The Complete Leaded Glass Windows of Frank Lloyd Wright (Rizzoli International, $150.00).

The United States Constitution is an ingenious compromise, a bulwark against tyranny, and a model for other nations to emulate. It’s also a piece of paper, and this role is the focus of Preserving Our Charters at the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, D.C. (202-501-5000; www.nara.gov ). The exhibit shows how NARA conservators through the years have protected and defended the Constitution against heat, light, humidity, and other enemies. The exhibit will remain until July 4, 2001, after which the rotunda of the National Archives Building will close for renovations until 2003.

It is a sign of how far America’s community ideal has fallen that The Good Citizen’s Handbook , compiled and edited by Jennifer McKnight-Trontz (Chronicle, $12.95), can amuse its audience by simply reproducing, without alteration, excerpts from citizenship handbooks published between the 1920s and the 1960s. Today, when the very word community signifies a special interest (as in “the disabled community”), suggestions like “sweep the sidewalk in front of your house every day” or “Be loyal to your school. Learn its songs and cheers” will inspire derision from many readers. Yet those not inclined to irony will find genuinely useful advice here, and everyone can have fun guessing when each item was originally published: Authoritarian instructions in all-capital letters, using a typeface with serifs, are a 1920s giveaway, while illustrations that include African-Americans must date from the late 1960s.