January 2011

During the summer of 1948, I was captain of a sightseeing boat taking tourists for a waterfront view of the nation’s capital. The boat was available for charter, and, in the days before air conditioning, it was popular with Washington hostesses giving evening parties. We sailed with one deckhand who doubled as bartender and waiter.

One evening, when we were in the river below Alexandria, one of the guests asked permission to come into the darkened wheelhouse. During our brief chat, the boat’s engine developed a noise that I did not like. Since the deckhand was busy with the guests, I asked the gentleman if he would take the wheel for a few minutes while I went below to check on the engine. I showed him the course I was steering and went about my business. He was right on course when I returned, and a few minutes later, he left, remarking that it had been some time since he had been behind the wheel.

Shortly afterward, the hostess came into the wheelhouse asking if Admiral Halsey was still there.

In 1946, I was in the U.S. Navy, stationed at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. In addition to the experimental television-transmitting station and receivers that had been instituted in the New York City area before the war, television broadcasting had been started on a small scale (the legend was that there were just 50 receivers) in the District of Columbia.

At the research lab, some of the crews that had spent the war years installing and testing exotic electronic devices on naval vessels had time on their hands and decided to construct their own television receiver. The hardest part to obtain—the video picture tube—was readily available at the lab because every radar system contained one.

In 1945, I was a member of a super-secret Army intelligence unit attached to the Manhattan Project, which produced the atomic bomb. We were sent to a desert camp called Trinity, northwest of Alamogordo, New Mexico; our assignment was to cover the area within a hundred-mile radius of zero point so that we could remove residents quickly if the mushroom cloud blew toward them spewing radioactive dust.

The blast was scheduled for July 16, 1945, at 4:00 A.M. A fellow agent, Harold Jensen, and I drew Socorro, a little town northwest of ground zero, as our vantage point. A soaking thunderstorm was in progress as we parked our car outside town to avoid attracting attention at that early hour.

We waited until 4:50. Then until 5:00. Strangely, nothing happened even after the storm had abated. Had there been a postponement? We drove into Socorro to call from a pay phone in the lobby of a small hotel—we had been given codes so that we would not reveal the secret—but there was no response from the operator. The phone was dead.

When I was a kid, I had a nervy dad whose dream had been to make it in professional sports, preferably baseball. Failing in that youthful ambition, he somehow succeeded in getting us onto the Boston Red Sox outfield for morning practices during the team’s spring training in Sarasota, Florida. We would be out there with the odd other gate-crasher in street clothes and with numerous Red Sox players in uniform. This was the 1950s, and America wasn’t yet hyper-litigious, so we were generally allowed to remain on the field chasing balls or, more usually, watching someone else snare them. I remember Lew Kiley, a Red Sox pitcher, trying on one occasion to eject us, and my father inventing all sorts of reasons why we ought to be able to stay put. He was quite the con man; for starters, there I was in Florida for close to six weeks, missing a good chunk of school.

When I was a licensed “ramp rat” at the Pacific Airmotive Company in Burbank, California during the 1930s, a parade of American flying legends brought their equally famous airplanes to us for servicing and maintenance. As one of the two at PAC who knew how to take care of any kind of aircraft that came in, I worked with many celebrated pilots—Amelia Earhart, Jacqueline Cochran, Howard Hughes, and Wiley Post among them.

We frequently had Post’s white Vega, the Winnie Mae, in the hangar. Wiley was such a congenial character that we mechanics felt we could talk to him as though he were one of us. One time, I was assigned to re-skin the lower-right stabilizer on the Winnie Mae, and when I finished, I burned in my initials and the date. Years later, when I saw the bird hanging from the roof in the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum, the initials were still there, barely distinguishable under the paint.

If you want to put off dealing with the long lines at the Alamo, a good place to start is the San Antonio Conservation Society’s walking tour of forty homes in the King William Historic District (210224-6163). Make time for the magnificent Carl H. Guenther House and Pioneer Flour Mills (open Monday through Friday from 7:00 A.M. to 3:00 P.M. and Sundays from 8:00 A.M. to 2:00 P.M. ), which has a restaurant that serves German pancakes and also a museum (210-227-1061). Call 210-225-5924 for the Steves Homestead hours.

Many hotels on the River Walk should offer wonderful views of the luminarias . I stayed at the comfortable Mansion del Rio (210-225-2581). One notable off-river favorite is the 1859 Menger Hotel (210-223-4361), near Alamo Plaza. Robert E. Lee and William Jennings Bryan slept there, and Teddy Roosevelt recruited his Rough Riders at the hotel’s bar.

I know I get sentimental about the holiday for which I was named, but I could have sworn that the stuffed “Pancho Claus” on a balcony above San Antonio’s lovely River Walk winked at me. It wore the familiar red-and-white suit over its pudgy belly and shiny boots, but there all recognition ended. This Santa had a decidedly brown and beardless face with a toothy grin and a slick black mustache. Under the weight of a crooked golden sombrero, its head nodded forward as if to both assert the culture of Tejanos (Texans of Mexican or Spanish descent) and command a better view of the soectacle below.

J.P. Morgan did not have much use for either the stock market or reporters. So, when one reporter importunately asked him what the market was going to do one day, he replied, with about equal parts contempt and truth, “It will fluctuate.”

Until the spectacular events of late October, however, the stock market has been doing little fluctuating. Mostly, it has just gone up and up and up. After all, I was just into my 20s when the Dow Jones industrial average first hit a thousand, and I was over forty when it finally reached 2000. Only a decade later it soared, seemingly effortlessly, past eight thousand.

Once again, the voice of the censor is heard in the land, and so are the contesting arguments of the civil libertarian, the artist, and the businessman who markets entertainment. It’s an old fight with a new twist. The Supreme Court has struck down parts of a Communications Decency Act aimed at shielding young people from pornographic material on the Internet. Under threat of similar hostile legislation, the television industry has also been thrashing its way to a system of ratings (like those used by moviemakers) to guide parents in deciding what to let the children watch. It’s significant that while television has been coping with critics for some fifty years now, and movies for a hundred, it’s the Internet that actually drew a federal censorship law.

Edwin Diamond and Stephen Bates’s remembrance of Sputnik (October) was a real attention-getter for me, as I believe I was the unwitting reason for that “hostile” Eisenhower press conference! When Sputnik first went aloft, I was chief of public affairs for the brand-new NORAD (North American Air Defense Command) in Colorado Springs, Colorado. I spent all day on the phone fielding media inquiries about its military significance. It seemed so logical that I winged it in lieu of official guidance, and was saying, “If the Soviets have the propulsion capability to orbit something like this 180 miles over our heads today, why not on our heads tomorrow?” After about four hours of this, the Pentagon press desk was on my phone in some agitation, and I was asked, “What in the hell are you saying out there?”

I told the caller, and he said, “Well, shut the hell up. The White House says it has no military significance!” Over time, and a few billion dollars later on aerospace defense, it seems to me my assessment wasn’t all that bad.