January 2011

Editor in Chief Driving Blind

Is there something we should be doing about this?” “This” was the airplane accident that had claimed the lives of John F. Kennedy, Jr., his wife, and her sister, and as soon as the editors gathered in the office on that hot, disconsolate Monday after the crash, we started casting about for some thread that might lead to a story for us.

We always operate under the mandate to put current events in historical perspective, and this one had sent very powerful tremors through the national consciousness. The problem—or, rather, our problem—was that everyone else was busy doing just the same thing. From the moment that the Coast Guard started combing the waters off Martha’s Vineyard, the media were full of pictures and accounts of events long past: of a handsome young flier whose life was snuffed out in a risky, failed experiment in 1944; of that boy’s sister, killed in a plane wreck four years later; of the motorcade in Dallas, of course; and always of the child in the short coat.saluting the caisson.

“If you gotta go, you gotta go” is what they replied when I asked, “Do you want to go into military service?” In 1940, tanks were rolling I across Europe, bombs were exploding, blackness was descending. The United States was in danger. Did these young men leap to our defense? No. They were not volunteering; they had been drafted. “If you gotta go, you gotta go,” they said.

I was a civilian psychiatrist at an induction station examining these draftees to determine if they were mentally fit for military duty. Their resigned, apathetic reply to my question hardly seemed conducive to effective performance, let alone to their mental health.

Later studies determined that that single question, asked at induction, “Do you want to be in the service?,” predicted actual emotional breakdown better than any other. Negative responses heralded subsequent mental disorder.

The Public Broadcasting System has a new hit on its hands for the first time in quite a while. It’s “Antiques Roadshow.” For those not familiar with it, the show rents an exhibition hall in a large city and invites people to bring in their family treasures and have them appraised by experts in everything from Hollywood memorabilia to fine furniture to antique toys. The most interesting items and appraisals get to be on the show.

The program works on many levels. The audience gets a free lesson in the science and art of appraising unique objects; it experiences an occasional dose of schadenfreude watching someone else’s priceless heirloom turn into worthless junk as the appraiser tells why it’s a fake; and it gets to enjoy a sense of cultural superiority over the free market’s bad taste (people would pay $8500 for that thing ?).

This portrait of a primly hatted group, plus one in a baseball cap, came to us from a sister to be, Greta S. Andersson, who, although not yet born at the time, recalls the family lore surrounding the occasion: “Father had a splitting headache, and no doubt it was felt by the three little girls. The littlest one, Vera, in the cap, had sat down some weeks earlier on a pile of coal dust left by a delivery of coal. Father, coming home from work, saw her methodically putting the dust down the front of her dress and massaging it into her hair. He carried her (gingerly) up to the third-floor apartment and said to Mama, ‘Look at your child!’ Tears had already made streaks down Vera’s cheeks.

“A bath did its job, but a shampoo didn’t. So it was necessary to shave off all her hair before getting at the coal dust, which stuck to her scalp like glue. For a while she wore this cap and was called Charlie, until her hair grew out again.”

In October, as the Continental Congress was meeting in Philadelphia, local patriots up and down the Atlantic Coast did what they could to keep the heat on the British government. In Maryland and North Carolina, tea parties were the chosen method. Maryland’s party began on October 14, when the brig Peggy Stewart arrived in Annapolis. Anthony Stewart, a co-owner of the ship, unwisely paid the hated tax on a consignment of tea it contained. A few hours later the outraged citizens of Annapolis convened a town meeting to decide how to deal with him.

On October 18 the University of Illinois inaugurated its brand-new football stadium with a contest against its archrival, Michigan, which was undefeated over the last three seasons. The game started well for Illinois as the halfback Harold (“Red”) Grange returned the opening kickoff ninety-five yards for a touchdown.

In those days a team that was scored upon often chose to kick off instead of receiving, the idea being to bottle up the opponents in their own end (the ball was kicked from the fifty-yard line). The visiting Wolverines elected this option, and this time they managed to tackle Grange at the Illinois twenty. The Illini quickly punted, but a short time later they recovered a Michigan fumble at their own thirty-three. From there Grange ran sixty-seven yards from scrimmage for his second touchdown.