January 2011

In Freeport, Maine, diagonally across Main Street from L. L. Bean, stood the Patterson Block, a squat dark green building in which were located Cole’s Drug Store, and a gift shop called Ye Green T-Kettle. In 1933, the year I graduated from Freeport High School, Mr. Cole offered me a summer job as a soda jerk for a dollar a day. My classmates thought I was lucky.

From behind the soda fountain I could watch the comings and goings of the community. Since Bean’s mailorder business filled his building, he had located his salesroom in a small space at the rear of the third floor. To get there, a customer had to climb an open stairway on the outside of the building to a second-floor entrance and pass through the cutting room, redolent of leather and rubber, to an internal stairway to the third floor. Here arrows led through the sewing room and the shipping room and past a glass-enclosed office overlooking Main Street, where one could usually view Mr. Bean himself, a large, leonine man with a wide face, broad hands, and a booming voice.

When I was a seventh grader in the early 1940s, I delivered papers (the old tabloid Chicago Times ) to houses on the 7200 block of South Prairie Avenue. Someone told me that Al Capone’s mother lived in one of the houses on the route. The subscribers at that house didn’t use the name Capone, but when I collected for the paper, a polite, softspoken, and very Italian-looking fellow would pay me.

I didn’t keep the route long, so I had little opportunity to verify the Capone connection. But as I made my way in the world during the course of a Navy career, the fact that I was born and raised in Chicago often elicited remarks about its gangster past. I would pipe up that I was part of that history: I used to deliver papers to Al Capone’s mother.

I was nineteen, and I’d just finished up a year as a member of President Eisenhower’s honor guard. I loved marching in the weekly tattoos at the Iwo Jima Memorial and at our own Marine barracks. I loved the street parades, the diplomatic arrival and departure ceremonies, the sentry duty at Blair House when the President received guests of state. And I loved the two weeks out of every six when our platoon rotated from Washington to the President’s retreat at Camp David.

Now it was time for the general from Kansas to transfer his power to the patrician from Massachusetts, and I wondered if my second year in the guard would prove as memorable as the first.

I didn’t enjoy the inaugural parade. Anyone old enough will remember the deep snow and bitter cold. I remember being outside in the Capitol staging area four hours early, along with the honor guards from the other services—hundreds of marchers and not a restroom in sight.

As a teenager, I liked the sound of guitar music, and I practiced until I was fairly proficient at picking out tunes. Later, I got an electric guitar, and lots of noise became my best creation, musically. After graduating from high school, I moved to Shreveport, Louisiana, and worked days and picked nights. I met Hank Williams, Sr., and saw Hank junior as a diaper baby in Bossier City, across the Red River from Shreveport. Later, they moved to Nashville.

A couple of years later, with delusions of grandeur, I too went to Nashville, intending to pick on the Grand Ole Opry. I soon learned that the city was overrun with guitar players who could beat me, and most of them were starving. I went back South, got a real job, and just picked for fun. I moved to Arkansas, worked for American Oil, and did my picking on KELD radio in El Dorado and at various PTA and church functions.

When I joined the U.S. Navy in January 1960, I was sent to Newport, Rhode Island, to learn Morse code and semaphore. I then reported to the USS Independence , and when I arrived in Norfolk, Virginia, my company commander sent me to officers’ school to learn about radar air interception of unidentified aircraft. I was the ship’s only enlisted man attending officers’ school for air control.

During this training I was always on the radar’s air picture when jet fighters were launched, but otherwise I was on the surface picture. To avoid collisions, whenever other ships appeared on radar, we would figure out CPA (closest point of approach)—time and distance.

Call the Eureka! Humboldt County Convention & Visitors Bureau (1-800-346-3482) for a copy of its guide for visitors and a list of local events, including the Trucker’s Christmas Lighted Convoy in early December, when logging trucks parade through downtown Eureka, the Dolbeer Steam Donkey days in April, and the banana slug derby in August. The summer months are the most rain-free.

Eureka seems to have hundreds of places to stay, from inexpensive motels to the opulent and gourmet Carter House Inns (1-800-404-1390). I stayed at the comfortable Tudor-revival Eureka Inn (1-800-862-4906), which has redwood beams in the lobby’s ceiling and timeless, universal hotel comforts like a Rib Room and a Palm Lounge. “Are you a baseball fan?” Mr. Josephs asked as I was checking out. “Ted Williams slept in your room.”

I told myself I was going for the trees. Humboldt County, in the northwestern corner of California, is part of a narrow five-hundred-mile stretch that is the only place in the world where coast redwoods grow. Nourished by the region’s damp, foggy climate, Sequoia sempervirens live for a thousand years, slowly gaining in girth and stature until they reach more than three hundred feet tall. “Ambassadors of another time,” John Steinbeck called them. Of the two million acres of redwoods covering northern California when the first settlers came, less than 10 percent remains, and Humboldt County has some of the last surviving groves, protected in a string of state and national parks.

Every business has its idiosyncrasies. The Christmas-tree business is the world’s most seasonal. The commercial-airplane business requires an enormous capital investment in order to bring a single new product to market. An operation the size of Boeing (annual sales: $26.9 billion) might have only around a dozen commercial products for sale at any one time (not counting spare parts, of course).

The book business is almost exactly the opposite. Even a relatively small publisher might offer fifty new products a year; a large one, several hundred. And most books make at least 90 percent of their total sales in their first two months on the market. Last season’s mystery novel is usually as commercially dead as a Christmas tree on December 26.

But, occasionally, a book is published that continues to sell in large numbers year after year after year. Publishers call these backlist books, and they love them dearly.

Everyone following the recent White House sex scandal must have felt the uneasy mixture of titillation and guilt that is always present when reading other people’s mail or eavesdropping on a private conversation.

The lurid excerpts from Monica Lewinsky’s taped phone calls made for irresistible reading, yet even the most rabid Clinton hater surely felt like a peeping Tom while devouring them. Some observers have criticized the surreptitious taping as an unethical invasion of the former intern’s privacy. “We will look back on this episode as a dark time in which America took on aspects of a police state,” wrote Jeffrey Rosen in The New Republic. After all, who among us could have their private words and thoughts revealed without embarrassment?

Your interesting article in the October issue about Sputnik caused me to remember the words of a ditty written by a Democratic Party pundit shortly after we Americans had been made aware of the satellite’s “derisive chirp” as it orbited the heavens:

Sputnik, Sputnik in the sky Beeping, beeping as you go by Have you room inside your hullnik For Ike, and Dick, and Foster Dullnik? Readers can direct e-mail to the editors at mail@americanheritage.com.