January 2011

Most Overrated Car:

Definitely the Chevy Corvette, an icon for all the wrong reasons. All power and little finesse, it’s an Iron Age survivor that appeals to the primitive heart of Homo automotus . I admit even my knees can be induced to a certain weakness as I climb behind the wheel of a European-style late-fifties or early-sixties Vette, but since then the Vette has become progressively uglier. If this is the best its male designers can come up with in the way of a phallic symbol, the only hope is a team of women engineers to work on the next incarnation.

Most Underrated Car:

Most Overrated Cocktail:

The vodka martini. I enjoy an icy shot of vodka with a salty fish canapé, or the kick of a well-made Bloody Mary. But I like a big taste and thus prefer the gin martini, sublime with all its intricate flavors: floral, citrus, and herbal notes supported by the bracing astringent alcohol base—truly the king of cocktails.

Most Underrated Cocktail:

The Sazerac. This drink dates from the dawn of the cocktail, which was first documented in 1806 in a New York State periodical called Balance, and Columbian Repository , whose editor explained: “Cocktail is a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water and bitters.” The key difference between this drink and the rum punches, bishops, and grogs that preceded it was the addition of bitters; bitters defined the early cocktail.

mail@americanheritage.com Freedom Fighter or Murderer? Freedom Fighter or Murderer? The Cup That Cheers The Cup That Cheers The Wrong Target? That’s Dad!

Most Overrated Aviatrix:

Amelia Earhart was recruited as deliberately as Eliza Doolittle was plucked from the streets of London by Professor Higgins in Shaw’s Pygmalion . George Palmer Putnam, the air-minded executive of a venerable American publishing company who had scored a triumph in 1927 with the publication of We , Charles Lindbergh’s first-person account of his solo flight across the Atlantic, was searching for a woman flier to repeat Lindy’s feat and, of course, to write a book about it that Putnam could publish. Earhart’s qualifications were perfect. Kansas-born, she was, like Lindbergh, a Midwesterner. She was twenty-nine, neither too young nor too old; she could fly, having learned from another woman, Neta Snook; she was amiable, bright, and daring; and she looked enough like Charles Lindbergh to have been his sister.

One day toward the end of his, life Henry Ford was talking with a local boy named John Dahlinger about the state of things, and they got onto the subject of education. Ford spoke of the virtues of the McGuffey’s Reader era, and this sounded pretty fusty to Dahlinger. “But, Sir,” he protested, “these are different times, this is the modern age and—”

“Young man,” Ford snapped, “I invented the modern age.”

It’s hard to imagine how Dahlinger might have countered the preposterous claim, because it was true. And Ford hadn’t achieved this over a lifetime; he’d done it in little more than a decade, beginning in 1908, when he introduced his sturdy and ever-cheaper Model T.

You will have heard it said that we are living in an era of unprecedented technological change. Certainly, the thought embroidered all the millennial observances; the computer has so altered the way we conduct our business—indeed, our lives—that there has been (as people are finally beginning to stop saying) a “disconnect” with the past.

During the coverage of the thirtieth anniversary of the moon walk, the media also ran stories on the pioneering Soviet cosmonauts Alexei Leonov and Yuri Gagarin. That reminded me of Herr Doktor Hans Kuepfenbender.

The original Zeiss Optical Works had been in Jena, Germany, which in 1945 became part of the Soviet zone of occupation. Renamed Zeiss Industries, the enterprise was re-established in Oberkochen in the American zone, in an area covered by my 516th Military Intelligence Detachment. Dr. Kuepfenbender was the Betriebsleiter , the head of the operation.

On the afternoon of March 18, 1925, a warm day for mid-March, about sixtyfive degrees, threatening clouds began to gather in southeastern Missouri, forming a vast dark, menacing super thunderstorm cell. From this blackness a funnel descended, touching down three miles north of the little Ozark town of Ellington. There it killed a farmer, the first of nearly seven hundred who would perish that day in America’s most deadly tornado.

For the next three and a half hours, the tornado followed a remarkably straight northeastern course, never leaving the ground. Sucking up huge quantities of debris—dirt, houses, trees, barns—it ejected them as deadly missiles along its route. It cut a path of destruction one-half to one mile wide across three states, Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana. Before its wrath was spent, it had traveled 219 miles, the longest uninterrupted track on record.

I remember the darkness that evening at the train station. The crowd, which I could see because of a few dim streetlights, was very large. I heard my grandfather use the word thousands . People in the crowd were talking quietly among themselves. The large, dark throng was eerie, frightening to a six-year-old. My father was carrying me. I had a broken leg at the time, and it was in a cast from my toes up to my hip. He held me high so that I could see.

My grandfather worked for the railroad. He was the president of something called a union. And we were here to meet a president, except he was the President of our country.

Because Grandfather was an important man, he was able to get us closer to the track. He did this by taking us around behind the station and through the ticket agent’s office. From the front door we went out onto the platform, only a few feet from Track 1.