January 2011

Reading Lyrics , edited by Robert Kimball and Robert Gottlieb (Pantheon, $39.50), is about the best anthology of great American popular songs you could hope for, with words to more than a thousand of them from the era between 1900 and 1975, arranged by lyricist. It is a must-have for any admirer of the poetry of Hart, Gershwin, Carmichael, et al. And if you want to know more about those songs and their authors and composers, turn to Easy to Remember: Great American Songwriters and Their Songs , by William Zinsser (Godine, $29.95), an elegantly written and handsomely illustrated appreciation in the form of short essays about individual songwriters and some of their most outstanding masterpieces.

Planning a visit to Palm Springs? Want to make sure you don’t miss such landmarks as the Riviera Resort, “where Sinatra organized several big charity shows featuring such fun-loving pals as wacky comedian Jerry Lewis and fellow swooner-crooner Bing Crosby,” or Riccio’s Restaurant, where he “felt most comfortable in the early '7Os"? Then get a copy of All the Stops Along the Way—The Places Sinatra Loved, the People He Knew , a brochure available for $2.00 from the Palm Springs Desert Resorts Convention and Visitors Authority, 69-930 Highway 111, Department FS, Rancho Mirage, CA 92270. It covers 30 Old Blue Eyes-related locations and is packed with endearing nuggets of inside information (the swimming pool at his second home had to be moved because guests at the bar kept falling in; his best friend, July Rizzo, rests close by him at Desert Memorial Park).

Secrets of the ‘Hunley’ Old Blue Eyes Slept Here EDITORS’ BOOKSHELF Who’s That Girl? ON EXHIBIT The Eames Era FLIP YOUR WIG On ‘Wisconsin’ SCREENINGS

25 YEARS AGO

April 5, 1976 The reclusive and very eccentric mogul Howard Hughes dies in Houston.

50 YEARS AGO

April 5,1951 Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are convicted of spying for the Soviet Union and sentenced to death. They will be electrocuted in 1953.

75 YEARS AGO

April 16, 1926 The Book-of-the-Month Club sends its first selection, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes , to 4,700 members.

100 YEARS AGO

April 19, 1901 Emilio Aguinaldo, the Philippine rebel leader recently captured by U.S. troops, issues a proclamation urging his fellow insurgents to lay down their weapons and accept American rule.

April 25,1901 New York becomes the first state to require automobiles to be equipped with license plates.

On April 10, 1951 in Washington (April 11 in Asia), President Harry S. Truman removed Douglas MacArthur as the Army’s supreme Asian commander, replacing him with Gen. Matthew B. Ridgway. The move, announced at a hastily summoned news conference at 1:00 A.M., after word had begun to leak, was no routine personnel change, for after spending 52 of his 70 years in the Army, MacArthur was as feared as he was revered. In World War I, MacArthur had commanded a brigade, been wounded twice, and received seven Silver Stars. Between 1942 and 1945, his “island-hopping” campaign had brought the Japanese to their knees. Since then, he had ruled Japan as its military governor, adding the command of United Nations forces in Korea when war broke out there.

In 1963 I spent the summer parking cars at the Bohemian Grove, an exclusive all-male retreat on the Russian River in northern California. Although I’d heard rumors of Bacchanalian feasts and highroller negotiations, while I worked there the place seemed essentially a summer camp for grown-up boys. The general mood of heightened relaxation was marred by one significant exception—my boss, whom I shall call Siegfried. Impeccable in dress and manner, fierce in temper, rumored to be a former storm trooper, Siegfried was the manager of the Grove. Although none of us on the parking crew were old enough to have had any military experience, we all felt an urge to come to attention in his presence.

During the Second World War, I was a soldier assigned to Los Alamos, part of the famous Special Engineering Detachment (“SED”). SEDs were soldiers who were selected for duty outside the normal Army units because of some scientific skills they possessed. My qualification consisted mostly of two and a half years as a physics major at the City College of New York. I was given a rather important job, considering my less than impressive rank of private first class. It was to assist in the developing and testing of spark-gap switches for Fat Man, the bomb eventually dropped on Nagasaki. The switches would ignite, as simultaneously as possible, the 32 explosive charges that would compress a spherical shell of plutonium, producing critical mass.

At 7:45 A.M. on May 24, 1962, Aurora 7 blasted off Launch Pad 14 at Cape Canaveral, Florida. The prelaunch countdown had been the smoothest of any American space mission to that date. While some 40 million people watched on television, Lt. Cmdr. M. Scott Carpenter—the fourth American (and sixth human being) in space—began a three-orbit flight.

The Recovery of ‘Aurora’
General LeMay Meets Fat Man Showdown at the Bohemian Grove