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January 2011
On September 20, in Houston, twenty-nine-year-old Billie Jean King met fifty-five-year-old Bobby Riggs in a widely promoted “Battle of the Sexes” before the largest crowd ever to watch a tennis match up to that time. The spectacle was the sequel to a Mother’s Day match in which Riggs, the 1939 Wimbledon champion, had wiped out Margaret Court, the Wimbledon champion in 1963, 1965, and 1970, with a tricky assortment of dinks, drop shots, and lobs. That contest had taken place on a makeshift court before three thousand fans in remote Ramona, California, for a purse of ten thousand dollars. The King-Riggs showdown was played in the cavernous Astrodome for ten times the stake in front of ten times the crowd and was preceded by what seemed like ten thousand times the hype.
On September 1 the Clay Street Hill Railroad, San Francisco’s first cable-car line, began regular service over six-tenths of a mile between Kearny Street and Jones Street, at the top of Nob Hill. The Clay Street line was America’s first successful cable railway, though short experimental lines had been tried in New York City and New Orleans. The ingenious system was designed and built by an English immigrant, Andrew Hallidie, and his draftsman, William Eppelsheimer. Hallidie was a veteran of the California mining industry who had previously patented suspension bridges and a wire-rope tramway system.
On the night of September 17, a frontier trader named Fran¡ois Xavier Aubry rode his staggering horse through a driving rain into Independence, Missouri. The disheveled rider stopped outside a tavern and, being too stiff to dismount, was lifted from his blood-caked saddle. In his bag was a copy of the Santa Fe Republican . Its date was September 12. Incredible as it seemed, Aubry had ridden from Santa Fe to Independence, a journey of 780 miles that normally took a month, in five days and eighteen hours.
In September 11 Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral went on sale in London, England. Even before its publication the book had attracted great attention, less for the poems themselves than for their author, a twenty-year-old slave from Massachusetts. During her month-long stay in England, Wheatley had been enthusiastically received and had met with numerous dignitaries, including the earl of Dartmouth, the antislavery crusader Granville Sharp, and Benjamin Franklin.
While no threat to Milton or Pope, Wheatley did show a flair for lyrical imagery, as in “An Hymn to the Evening“:
As a long-time reader of American Heritage and a student of history, I always look forward to each issue and devour it in its entirety. Your cover of the May/June issue on overrated and underrated was quite inviting, but I could see trouble coming from about a mile away. Here in the South we have a saying that opinions are like certain parts of the human anatomy: Everyone has 10 one. But one has to worry what they are teaching in the U.S. Army if one of its professors states that Robert E. Lee was not only overrated but a “traitor.”
The comments regarding John C. Calhoun were particularly disturbing as I am a descendant of the gentleman. Rather than being an apple-polishing “yes man,” which we are accustomed to today, Mr. Calhoun spoke his mind. Instead of waiting for his turn at the Presidency, he acted like a V.P. Washington could use more of this today.
When I saw that Lemonade Lucy was the choice for most overrated First Lady, I was reminded of an old family story. My uncle John Steele’s first wife was Mary Evarts, a great- (or perhaps great-great—I forget) granddaughter of William Maxwell Evarts, Secretary of State in the Hayes administration. She told me that one day he went to the White House for some diplomatic reception or other. When he returned home, he was asked if he had enjoyed the party. “Oh, we all had a wonderful time,” he said. “The water flowed like champagne!”
I especially appreciated Bruce McCall’s section on the Volkswagen Beetle. I am not surprised that people were sold on the ads. They were good. But what is surprising is that even after people bought the car, the ads still seemed to have so strong an effect that most Beetle owners wouldn’t believe they bought a bomb. I was one of the people who fell for the ads. My car overheated and would diesel for five to ten minutes after I turned it off. It had two valve jobs before thirty-five thousand miles and required a third one when I sold it at thirty-six thousand. The rear upholstery fell apart a few months after I bought the car. The Beetle was underpowered and would slow down on the slightest hill or even in a headwind. The front end had to be greased about every two weeks. When I confronted other owners with these problems, they would generally agree that they had the same difficulties, and more, but still believed that they had made a “good buy.”