January 2011

When I was the chef at the Hotel Cortez in El Paso, Texas, in the spring of 1963, word arrived that President Kennedy would spend a night at the hotel later that year. I would be preparing meals not only for his party but for the President himself. I decided to design a commemorative dinner, a menu strictly in JFK’s honor, and after giving the matter lots of thought, I devised a meal composed of ingredients that were either grown or processed in the immediate vicinity of El Paso.

I never would have believed the amount of preparation necessary for an overnight stay by the President. We had a suite repainted and a local furniture company come in and outfit the rooms with French Provincial furniture. About a week before the visit the Secret Service moved in. They studied the route from the airport. They made a fire inspection and a security check of the hotel. They planned an escape route from the presidential suite through the main kitchen and included me in the escape plan, which flattered me no end.

In the fall of 1951 I was twelve years old and living on the island of Okinawa. My father, an Air Force colonel, was the public information officer for the 20th Air Force, headquartered at Kadena Air Force Base there. At that time the 20th was flying bombing missions from Okinawa to Korea.

Conditions on the island were not ideal. We lived in a Quonset hut, and because of the “night soil” fertilizer used locally, we didn’t have fresh produce or dairy products. We used canned vegetables, cold-storage eggs, and reconstituted milk. There was no television, and the sole radio station was run by the armed forces. Few permanent structures existed, since the island had been virtually destroyed during the war. For a twelve-year-old boy, though, it was a neat place. With all the aircraft activity and countless battlefield sites to visit, I was enjoying it.

Late in the morning of September 21, 1938, my seventeen-year-old brother came home from a flying lesson at a small airport in Revere, Massachusetts, near Boston, and offhandedly told our mother a hurricane was coming. “A warning came over the radio at the airport. It’s off the Carolinas, coming up the coast,” he said.

“Oh, we don’t have to worry,” my mother said. “Hurricanes don’t happen in New England. They have hurricanes in Florida.”

She made no protest when my brother said he was going out again. After all, the weather forecast for that day was “rain, cooler tonight.” She only reminded him to come home early for supper since it was my birthday.

For information on things to do in Richmond, call the Metro Richmond Convention and Visitors Bureau at 1-800-365-7272. I stayed at the Jefferson (1-800-370-9004), an elegant hotel built in the 189Os and included in the National Register of Historic Places. Rooms there are a bit pricey; if you’re on a budget, the downtown area has plenty of other accommodations.

Not far from downtown are the Shockoe Slip and Shockoe Bottom districts, whose nineteenth-century tobacco warehouses have been converted into trendy shops, jazz clubs, and restaurants. Jackson Ward lies just west of downtown. The Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia (804-780-9093) and the Elegba Folklore Society (804-644-3900), a cultural and arts organization, sponsor a variety of events that keep the history of Jackson Ward and its people alive. The society also offers walking tours of the neighborhood. The Convention and Visitors Bureau produces a handsome guide detailing Jackson Ward’s black-heritage sites; to obtain a copy call 804-782-2777.

Since 1861, Richmond, Virginia has been the cradle of the Confederacy—the city the Rebels held so dear that they preferred to burn it rather than have it fall into Yankee hands. After the Civil War, Richmond’s leaders rebuilt the city, sprinkling it liberally with tributes and memorials to the Lost Cause. Today, Richmond is a magnet for Civil War buffs, who come to visit the Museum and White House of the Confederacy, which has the largest collection of Confederate material in the world; Monument Avenue, a broad thoroughfare lined with allegorical statues of Confederate heroes; and the Richmond National Battlefield Park where visitors can retrace the footsteps of generals Grant and Lee.

But, for African-Americans, who make up a little more than half the city’s population, the phrase “cradle of the Confederacy” holds scant nostalgia. So it was with some trepidation that I set off on a trip sponsored by the Metro Richmond Convention and Visitors Bureau.

Many distinguished economists of the mid-20th century predicted an American economy that would be dominated by a relative handful of giant companies, soon nicknamed on Wall Street the Nifty Fifty. And, certainly, the waves of mergers in the last generation have concentrated economic power in fewer and fewer corporate hands, right?

Well, no, actually, they have not. In 1967, the top two hundred non-financial companies held 41 percent of the country’s business assets. By 1988, they held only 32 percent, and that number has continued to drop in the last decade.

The reason, of course, is that the economy has grown even more quickly than its largest companies have merged. And new companies, which tend to grow fastest of all, have been appearing like mushrooms after a rain. In 1967, after all, neither Intel nor Microsoft even existed, and now both are being sued by the federal government as monopolies.

Not long ago, I opened the paper and discovered, without surprise, that the final figures were in on the 1996 election campaign and that it had been—at $2.2 billion—the most expensive in our history (so far). Of the top ten contributing organizations (Philip Morris was first), seven were unions. The piece fed a rising tide of speculation that a once-mighty labor movement, after long hibernation in a wintry climate of public opinion, was reviving. This seemed especially true when Congress killed President Clinton’s request for fast-track authority to make free-trade agreements, particular targets of union dislike. Almost simultaneously, however, labor’s supposedly improving public image was spattered by scandal when a federal overseer invalidated the election of Ron Carey as president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters on grounds of improper diversion of union funds to his own campaign.

William Faulkner, the troubled alcoholic son of the poorest state in the Union, a Mississippi so obsessed by race that it refused to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, is the greatest American novelist of the 20th century. He is also the one Southern writer who, by his imaginative fervor, most completely and deeply put the South back into the Union.

The lasting figures in literature come not from the successes and fashions of a season, but from the depths in which the unpopular, the neglected, the outwardly defeated find the real life of their time and the characters who, for all time, embody it. That fine Southern novelist Walker Percy began his career with an existential novel, The Moviegoer (1951), which coolly communicated his dread of glittering society in the “New South.” When asked why there were now so many significant Southern writers, Percy replied, “Because we got beat.”

The editors reply: Several readers have joined Mr. Hoopes in pointing out that this was not a morning scene. Jerrold Neidig, the owner of the stereograph, acknowledges this but posits that Lincoln might well have made an unscheduled stop in front of the State House on his way from the station to his hotel after arriving in Philadelphia the afternoon before.

HAROLD HOLZKR’S ARTICLE “IS LINCOLN Here?” (February/March 1998) features a photograph that he suggests may represent Abraham Lincoln among an assembly gathered in 1861 to celebrate Washington’s birthday. Lincoln indeed was the guest of honor at the statehouse (Independence Hall) in Philadelphia on February 22, and he did attend the ceremonial raising of the national colors that took place that day at six o’clock in the morning. However, another commitment obliged him later that day to address the Pennsylvania legislature at Harrisburg, some seventy-five miles west of Philadelphia. Lincoln’s friend Ward Hill Lamon, a companion on the President-elect’s journey, noted, “Early in the morning of the twenty-second, Mr. Lincoln raised the flag over Independence Hall, and departed for Harrisburg.”