Your photograph of “luxury liner” row under 1958—"Sail Away"— brought back many memories, as my family was in the shipping business in New York and Hamburg. However, the Constitution is not the U.S. ship sailing in Hawaii; it’s the SS Independence . Built in 1951, she is the last of the U.S. ships in service.
When the Queen Mary left New York in 1967, both men and women cried openly. It was not only the Queen Mary ’s last voyage, it was the end of an era—and the end of the magic.
Congratulations on choosing a picture of Jimmy Stewart being sworn into the Army as the “Frontispiece” for your “100 Years—100 Pictures” issue. He was truly a great American. However, I must point out an error in the accompanying text. Stewart did not complete his military career with the 2d Combat Wing, as stated. After World War II he continued to serve in the Air Force Reserve until his retirement as a brigadier general in 1968. His reserve assignments included duty with the Strategic Air Command and with the director of information at the Pentagon, which may provide a clue to the catalyst for the making of Strategic Air Command , in which he starred in 1959. In 1966 Brigadier General Stewart asked for a combat assignment during his two weeks’ annual training and participated in a bombing strike over Vietnam.
Your December 1999 issue confirmed feelings I’ve long harbored: that American Heritage is the brightest, bestedited magazine in the country. What fun you must have had, selecting the sole picture and writing the accompanying text, for each of the century’s one hundred years. My favorite? The year 1968 ("Hell Yes, We’ll Undress!"). How brave. You must have gotten many letters of complaint saying that wasn’t what 1968 was really about. Not to worry. I was born in 1949 and now often find myself explaining the insane era of my youth; young people ask how committed, how passionate were we then. I always reply, “Dates. No protest, no dates. ‘Girls say yes to guys who say no.’'” (Okay, I had it wrong: boys .) Your selection is singularly on the mark—from my point of view, which was ringside.
Duc des Lombards , 42 rue des Lombards, 1st arrondissement Petit Opportun , 15 rue des Lavandièr-Ste-Opportune, 1st arr. Slow Club , 130 rue de Rivoli, 1st arr. Sunset , 60 rue des Lombards, 1st arr. Le Franc Pinot , 1 quai Bourbon, Ile St. Louis, 4th arr. Caveau de la Huchette , 5 rue de la Huchette, 5th arr. Le Chat Qui Pêche ,• 9 rue de la Huchette, 5th arr. Le Petit Journal St-Michel , 71 boulevard St-Michel, 5th arr. Les Trois Maillets , 56 rue Galande, 5th arr. All Jazz Club ,• 7-11 rue Saint-Benoît, 6th arr. Bilboquet and Club St. Germain , 13 rue Saint-Benoît, 6th arr.
In last year’s travel issue, we published an article on places in the Netherlands of special interest to Americans, among them Leiden, which holds a few precious remnants of the Pilgrims’ stay there. Soon, according to a story that was picked up by papers across America, none of that may be left in Leiden. The moss-covered brick wall of a church where Pilgrims worshiped and a hospital building where Miles Standish recovered from wounds he suffered campaigning in the Dutch Army are slated to make way for the kind of commercial strip that Americans know all too well: a shopping mall, a parking garage, and, as a grace note, a disco. Among those protesting this action is Jeremy Bangs, an American scholar of the Pilgrim era who lives in Leiden. “The council has suggested putting up signs where the landmarks once stood,” he said, “but what’s the point if nothing is left?”
For all the books and films that have been done about painters and writers who went to Paris, far less has been written about the lives of musicians from the United States who settled there, some for a while, a few for their whole lives. Yet American jazz musicians have felt the influence of that city on their creative abilities no less than did the Lost Generation of American writers after World War I and the impressionists and their successors before them. Much of their world, and of jazz itself, is still there to be seen and enjoyed.
You can listen to jazz on the radio for hours in Paris—there is plenty of it on the airwaves—and never hear a single piece played exactly the way you heard it back home. Jazz players made many recordings in Europe, where they had especially free rein; they could play anything they pleased, and their music usually had clarity and originality.
In the spring of 1950 I went to a family wedding in St. Davids, Pennsylvania. At the reception in the bride’s home I met Martin Sommers, whom the hostess identified as foreign editor of The Saturday Evening Post . He and I shortly excused ourselves and repaired to the book-lined study in his house across the road, where he told me stories about the Post . (We had something in common, I was able to say; some twenty years earlier I had pedaled about with a bagful of Posts across my shoulder, making weekly deliveries to a select group of citizens in Fort Pierce, Florida.) Describing the challenges faced by some of his far-flung correspondents, Marry mentioned his man in a Middle Eastern kingdom of which I was only vaguely aware who had just been asked to find a cowboy suit for a fourteen-year-old prince.