January 2011

On July 1 stamps went on sale for
the first time in America’s post offices.
They came in two denominations: five
cents for letters traveling three hundred miles or less and ten cents for
those going farther. The five-cent
stamp was brown and had a picture
of Benjamin Franklin, father of the
American postal service. The ten-cent
stamp was black
and had a picture
of George Washington. They had
adhesive on the
back and had to
be cut from sheets
with scissors or a knife; perforations would not be introduced until 1857.

For generations, Americans reserved their most fervent “landmark reverence” for those rooms that could boast that George Washington— not Abraham Lincoln—slept here.

But that was before the so-called Lincoln Bedroom in the White House assumed, just about the time of his 188th birthday this year, the status of national shrine. And oddly, the sudden transfiguration was attributable not to any new discoveries about the chamber itself or its contents, but to revelations that President Clinton had allegedly violated its hallowed ambience by inviting a procession of more or less unsavory guests to camp out there.

During World War II uniformed servicemen and women were ushered to the head of the lines of would-be diners that gathered each evening at the entrance to Antoine’s. When I presented myself there, a callow young corporal in the spring of 1945, I was seated at once. Le menu baffling me, I summoned le maître d’hôtel and handed it to him, saying, “I place myself entirely in your hands.” Would Monsieur prefer meat or fish? Fish. Avec vin? But of course. “I have twenty dollars,” I told him, and he bowed. I don’t remember what I ate or drank, but it was all delicious. I do recall most vividly that I was attended by two waiters, and whenever I sipped my wine or my water, one or the other would immediately refill my glass to the brim. L’addition avec le pourboire came to exactly twenty dollars. Merci beaucoup , Antoine’s.

The organized displays that professionals fire are just one side of the fireworks business. Equally replete with tradition and nostalgia are the firecrackers, fountains, and bottle rockets that ordinary citizens shoot off in their back yards. These “toy” fireworks, as they are known in the industry, became popular after the Civil War.

“Before then it was popular to shoot guns and cannons to celebrate the Fourth,” says Warren Klofkorn, an author who has written about fireworks history. “The black-powder-based fireworks that were introduced were a less lethal form of revelry than indiscriminate shooting.”

I thoroughly enjoyed J. M. Fenster’s article “The Taste of Time” (April 1997), but there were a couple of niggling errors I thought might be worth mentioning.

Pommes de terre soufflées has long been one of Antoine’s most famous and popular menu items, but it was not created there, as the article states. Antoine’s owner, Antoine Alciatore, said he got the recipe from a chef named Colînet, who was waiting for the arrival of King Louis-Philippe at the newly opened Saint-Gcrmain-en-Laye train station outside of Paris. The king’s delay forced Colînet to throw his already cooked potatoes back into the hot fat, and, voilà , they puffed up—the methodology of which was later perfected by an analytical chemist named Chevreul.

More important—especially if you ever want to get a reservation there—La Caravelle has for more than three decades been happily situated at 33 West Fifty-fifth Street, and is decidedly not on “New York’s East Side.”

A tugboat pushes us slowly past the waterfront of Fall River, Massachusetts. Lined up on the steel decks of two barges are twelve hundred mortars packed with explosive charges. Overhead, evening sunlight drapes white mountains of summer clouds.

“I get a few knots in my stomach about now,” says Frank M. Coluccio, an easygoing mustached man of 50 who is president of Legion Fireworks. He is sorting out the wires that will connect his guns to an electric control panel. The last-minute jitters are understandable. In an hour Coluccio and his partner, Jennie Bradford, will take the stage in front of tens of thousands of eager spectators for one of the company’s biggest shows of the season. While they mount their fireworks extravaganza to cap an annual city celebration, the two will be stationed in the midst of a storm of exploding gunpowder potent enough to heave shells the size of a basketball a thousand feet into the air. It gives, Coluccio says, “an adrenaline rush.”

It is curious that I dreamed of Don Dollison the other night. Don, who is now deceased, was a member of my high school graduating class in 1948, merely a face with a name in those days. But, with one of the quirks of life’s flow, he and I seemed to have been struck simultaneously with the same muse of adventure, because separately and unbeknownst to each other we enlisted for the llth Airborne Division two days apart in August of that year, found ourselves in the same basic-training company, went to jump school together, and were then both assigned to the 511th Airborne Infantry Regiment, he to a line company, I to the Intelligence and Reconnaissance Platoon.

Two years later came the Korean War. The 187th Airborne Regimental Combat Team was formed, and we were transferred to its ranks and soon were sent to join the fight.

The experience of reading the February/ March 1997 issue of American Heritage was to me absolutely poignant, in the deepest etymological sense of pungere , “to prick, pierce.” James Brady’s “Leaving for Korea” brought on a rush of memories from the same places but a different war: Marine Corps Schools, Quantico, Virginia; Camp Pendleton, California; Okinawa; the Republic of Vietnam; and Bethesda Naval Hospital. Brady’s delightful description of politely chatting with Stanford coeds recalled a bright Saturday afternoon at Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Lt. Tom Olds, who was married and lived off base, invited me down to the college golf course, where we made friendly conversation with numerous Virginia belles, as a camouflage for a squirrel-hunting expedition with the .22 rifle in his golf bag.

All that was fun, but history caught up with us all, including our own Doug, who was shot through the heart on a night insertion mission, and me, who ended up in Bethesda Naval Hospital for about eight months.

The charge was not new. Cagney had experienced “professional difficulties” in 1934 when he was linked to a cotton strike in San Joaquin, but he had remained outspokenly liberal and pro-union. Now, Cagney and his producer-manager brother William, about to form their own production company with James as the major asset, took the charge very seriously. William asked for an audience with the Red-baiting congressman Martin Dies, who subsequently certified James as a patriotic American. But William was still worried. He suggested to Jack L. Warner, the production head of Warner Brothers Studios, that “we should make a movie with Jim playing the damnedest patriotic man in the country”: George M. Cohan.

Yankee Doodle Dandy was made because George M. Cohan had not written a hit musical play on Broadway since 1928.