January 2011

In early 1937 I arrived in Nanking (as it was then called), China. I was twenty-four years old and knew no one, but I was armed with letters of introduction. My purpose: adventure. I wanted a Pearl Buck’s-eye-view of China and believed that actually living there was the way to get it. I hoped to find a modest secretarial job to keep me going.

Smith College had a campus in Nanking, and my letters introduced me to members of the faculty there (some called them missionaries), an elite group of families among whom Pearl Buck had lived.

At teas to which I was invited, I met women whose husbands were seeking office help, and a job turned up that exceeded my wildest dreams. The Chinese government’s Ministry of Railways, looking for Western investors, was publishing a magazine, The Quarterly Review of Chinese Railways , to showcase its achievements. I was hired to edit the manuscripts submitted by Chinese writers. I worked at the ministry among English-speaking Chinese without another foreigner in sight.

On June 22, 1938, Joe Louis was scheduled to fight a rematch against Max Schmeling at Yankee Stadium. (Schmeling had unceremoniously knocked out Joe two years before.) Both fights had political and racial overtones: Hitler was arming Germany and screaming about the master race; Joe Louis was black. Some people were patriotically hoping Joe would win; others wanted the “white hope” to “put Louis in his place.”

My interest was neither patriotic nor racial; it was simply financial. Since we lived only a few blocks from Yankee Stadium, some of my neighborhood friends and I worked selling programs and refreshments there and at the adjacent Polo Grounds. We got to see lots of Yankee and Giants games and still go home with money. How we bragged in the lunchroom. Who wouldn’t play hooky to do what we were doing? Whatever I earned would help me buy clothes and books for college in the fall.

Boosters anywhere will argue that their home feels like a little slice of heaven, but western New York’s more stalwart denizens allege that the region has actually been touched by divinity. They refer to New York’s eleven Finger Lakes, so named because the Iroquois believed the Creator left two handprint signatures there after finishing the world. Geologists now know Ice Age glaciers carved the lakes and enveloping hills as they retreated. But, whether bestowed by glaciers or a polydactyl God, this region’s luscious geography has given rise to surprisingly diverse attractions.

In one of the most famous metaphors in western thought, Plato wrote about a man chained in a cave. Unable to see outside, all he could know of the world beyond his prison was what he was able to deduce from the shadows that were projected on the wall by whatever passed by. Plato was talking about how we all are prisoners of our own bodies and know only what our senses tell us of the world beyond.

We are still imprisoned in our own bodies, of course, and presumably always will be. But in the modern world we all are chained in caves of another kind as well, caves where the shadows on the walls are what we call statistics. We cannot see or touch or hear “the American economy.” So to get a grasp of it, and much of what depends on it, we need numbers, numbers that make an intellectual abstraction “visible” to the human mind.

After ten years of writing this column, I am saying a fond farewell. Not to American Heritage or to writing in general, but merely to “In the News.” I had intended to slip away unnoticed, but my good friend and editor Richard Snow offered me the opportunity for a parting word or two, and I find it irresistible. If, however, you turned to this page expecting another essay on the historical echoes of a recent news item and are disappointed, there will be no hard feelings if you stop here.

I am writing in regard to Roger J. Spiller’s article “War in the Dark,” which appeared in the February/March issue of American Heritage. Like many (if not most) World War II veterans, I experienced that conflict in several different ways: first, as a frighteningly real threat to my immediate well-being; then as a montage of recurrent, if fading, memories; and, finally, through its many historical and fictional re-creations in print and on film. The problem I face in trying to reconcile my own all-too-real World War II experience with Hollywood’s, is that its versions occasionally seem more real than what I remember.

Gene Smith (“The Last Rebel Ground,” April) is a BAD man! Here I was reading some interesting history and he mentions Jeeter Lester.

I looked up, and there was Ellie May standing before me. Grinning at me from above those rising beauties, and my mind was no longer my own. I had regressed to a fourteen-year-old with my copy of Erskine Caldwell’s latest paperback in my back pocket, all the “good” parts dog-eared and worn.

Ah well, they say that a dirty mind is a great comfort on a cold winter’s night. They’re right!