January 2011

There is something of a 1930s movie about this —a long, hard journey in the heart of the Depression, two plucky youths, and the kindness of strangers. Carolyn Mott Ford describes her father’s odyssey: “Seventeen-year-old Ellison Mott decided to travel from Staten Island to the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago, billed as a Century of Progress. He traveled the eight hundred miles by bicycle, on a single-speed bike that had to be pushed up hills.” After exploring a dirigible hangar in Akron, Ellison returned to his bike to find that workers there had welded on light aircraft tubing to support the baggage carrier, having noticed its poor condition and a sign he had on the bike announcing his intention to ride it to the fair. He never found anyone to thank for it.

On September 16 John Rhodes Cobb of Britain set a land-speed record of 394.2 miles per hour on the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah. By so doing, he broke his own record of 369.7 mph for a measured mile, set at Bonneville in 1939. In keeping with the rules, Cobb made two runs over the salt in opposite directions, with his official record being the average speed of the two. On his second run he covered the distance in 8.93 seconds for a speed of 403.1 mph, the first time anyone had topped 400 mph on land.

Cobb set the record in a low-slung, blob-shaped vehicle called the Railton Mobil Special after its designer, Reid A. Railton, and chief sponsor, Mobil Oil. Its streamlined aluminum skin concealed a pair of 1,250-horsepower, twelve-cylinder, turbocharged Napier Lion aircraft engines that were cooled with blocks of ice. The vehicle was twenty-eight feet eight inches long.

As someone pursuing a master’s degree in broadcast journalism, I found the three stories in the special section “Television Grows Up” in the May/June issue most interesting. However, it bothers me that every article on television coverage of what has become known as the Kennedy Weekend invariably focuses on CBS News.

While NBC was the last of the networks to break into local programming, its coverage was no less thorough than that of CBS. In less than two minutes NBC cleared its more than seventy affiliated stations and stayed on as a network from 1:45 P.M. Friday, November 22, to 1:16 A.M. the following Tuesday.

It was at 2:33 P.M. that NEC’s Bill Ryan confirmed via Associated Press news wire that President Kennedy had been assassinated, ratifying his own report of just minutes before that the President had indeed died. Moments later Robert MacNeil became the first reporter on the scene to report that the President’s wounds were fatal. This was done via telephone to Frank McGee, who was sitting alongside Ryan and Chet Huntley.

Several stories in September’s newspapers showed why the women of New York City were acquiring a reputation for feistiness. Under the headline TROUSERED WOMAN WALKS BROADWAY , a newspaper reported on September 28: “Broadway, birthplace of both the cigarette-smoking and accomplished cocktail-imbibing feminists, has added to its perils trousered women. Strolling near Forty-second Street today was a young woman attired in knickerbockers and a coat of mannish cut, done in robin’s egg blue, and she swung a bamboo cane. Knee length stockings, a masculine collar and a hat striped like an awning completed the outfit, while a defiant eye met the astonished gaze of passersby.” This fashion note was considered newsworthy enough to appear a continent away, in the San Francisco Chronicle .

As autumn fell on New York City, Laura Virginia O’Hanlon wrestled with a crisis of faith. The cherished beliefs of a lifetime were crumbling before her, and she did not know where to turn. It was an innocent age, one in which newspaper editors were considered moral authorities. So a worried Virginia (as she was called) took her concerns to the New York Sun .

“Dear Editor,” she wrote. “I am eight years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, ‘If you see it in the Sun , it’s so.’ Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?”

As her letter reveals, Virginia had initially taken the question to her father, who, in the time-honored fashion of fathers everywhere, told her to go ask someone else. When her inquiry arrived at the Sun , it got passed around until finally it reached the desk of an obscure editorial writer named Francis Pharcellus Church. On September 27 the Sun published Virginia’s letter and Church’s classic reply.

On September 11 Stephen Foster’s first great song, “Oh! Susanna,” received its initial public performance at Andrews’ Eagle Ice Cream Saloon in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Its composer was not identified, and few members of the sweet-toothed audience would have recognized the name of Foster, a twenty-one-year-old Cincinnati bookkeeper who wrote songs as a hobby. (Foster had been born on July 4, 1826, which was also the fiftieth anniversary of independence and the day John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died.) The bouncy tune was an instant hit, and minstrel shows immediately began spreading it across the country. By mid-1849 at least fifteen different editions of the sheet music had been published, most of them pirated. Foster’s name was usually omitted, which did not bother the budding songwriter. He wanted to be recognized as the composer of sentimental songs like “Open Thy Lattice, Love” (1844) and had no wish to be associated with lowbrow “Ethiopian” numbers like “Oh! Susanna.”

Thanks for the wonderful history of the martini (“There Is Something About a Martini,” July/August issue). Nedjeljko Matura’s cover and photograph on page 51 are excellent as well.

However, I would like to point out that in both pictures, the olive in the martini is a salad olive—that is, it has a pimiento in it. It should be a cocktail olive—a plain olive without a pit or any addition.

A pimiento radically changes the taste of the drink, and not for the better. My bottle of Bombay gin just shuddered!

In the summer of 1947 two events
occurred that introduced a darker side
of postwar America. On Friday, July 4,
some seven hundred fifty motorcyclists
and about three thousand camp followers descended on Hollister, California, for a weekend of racing and
carousing. In between firing up their
hogs and injuring bystanders, the visitors rode onto sidewalks and into bars
and restaurants, “their reckless spirits fired in many cases by liquor,” as
one observer reasonably conjectured. Others tossed beer bottles from upstairs windows onto San Benito Street, the town’s main drag.

On July 24 the 25th U.S. Infantry
Bicycle Corps, escorted by a group of
Missouri wheelmen, rolled into St.
Louis to an enthusiastic reception from
the populace. The soldiers had spent
the last six weeks riding fifteen hundred miles from Missoula, Montana, to
test the feasibility of using bicycles instead of horses for military maneuvers. Such a trip would be impressive even today; a century ago, with virtually no paved roads, it was miraculous.

The corps was commanded by Lt.
James A. Moss, an avid wheelman who
thought bicycles had many advantages
over horses. They were cheaper, required no fodder or grooming, made
less noise, raised little dust, and did
not require someone to hold their reins
when riders dismounted. And unlike
hoofprints, a bicycle track would not
betray its direction. In July 1896 Moss
got permission to organize a corps of
bicycle infantry at Fort Missoula, and after training missions in nearby mountains and Yellowstone Park, he got the go-ahead for the St. Louis trip.