January 2011

Travel Montana (406-444-2654) is a good place to start building your itinerary, and the Butte Chamber of Commerce publishes a visitors’ guide that lists both local attractions and accommodations (1-800-735-6841; 406-494-5595).

As might be expected, Butte has a vigorous historical society, and it publishes an excellent walking tour (P.O. Box 3913, Butte, MT 59701).

Butte’s robust past is thoroughly and handsomely chronicled in George Everett’s Champagne in a Tin Cup: Uptown Butte and the Stories Behind the Facades (Outback Ventures, P.O. Box 4252, Butte, MT 59702; $12.95).

Stone Wall? Take Your Pick JOAN PATERSON KERR

It’s spooky up here on the top floor of the Metals Bank & Trust Building. Shards of glass and crumbled plaster crunch underfoot, obscuring the elegant tile pattern of the corridor floor. Heavy oak doors with pebbled windows and missing knobs stand open to the hallway. Inside what used to be plush offices, the hardwood floors are buckling under porcelain washstands flecked with pigeon droppings. At one time this was some of the most exclusive real estate within a thousand miles. Now it gives me the creeps.

WHEN WE’RE FIGURING out where to go for lunch, history probably isn’t so important a guide as the certainty of good food or the hope of an affordable bill. Still, dining with the past can add real splendor to a meal, as J. M. Fenster shows in our lead story on historic restaurants. “They make a shaft of light even through generations, and if nothing of importance changes, then that is how it happens that a moment that began in 1810 or 1883, or 1912 or 1939, is still lit today, at a table in a room at one of the few hundred historic restaurants in America.”

Mr. Henry Erkins had a flash of inspiration in 1908. He could see every detail of it in his mind. Nevertheless, he resisted the temptation to say too much at his first press conference, in case someone stole the idea and opened their own five-thousand-seat waiterless restaurant with ancient Assyrian decorations.

When the name John Dillinger is mentioned, most people think of a notorious bank robher. My memory is of an unshaven shadowy man who stood behind a dirty screen door and motioned to my father.

Daddy was a feature writer for an Indianapolis newspaper in 1933. His articles were almost always controversial. When you read a Robert A. Butler by-line, you knew the story would contain the unexpected, and a bias toward the underdog.

While other papers were running headlines about the many banks being robbed, all supposedly by Dillinger, Daddy was writing different stories. He tried to point out that the criminal couldn’t be in two places at once, that the distance between two banks was too great for Dillinger to have robbed them both on the same day.

Over a period of several months late in World War II, a ship’s bow of welded steel plate slowly began to take shape at Washington’s Naval Gun Factory. About fifteen feet high overall, it was perhaps twenty feet long fore and aft. Its purpose was not obvious; word around the slip was that it was to be an icebreaking prow for emergency mounting on small vessels assigned to the Navy yard. The slow progress likely reflected both the low probability that the Potomac would soon freeze over and the higher priority of other work at the docks, including the maintenance of a variety of Navy river craft and the presidential yacht Sequoia .

Suddenly in midsummer 1944 all attention shifted to the neglected bow. Painters arrived to cover the rusted shape with a coat of Navy gray. Oddly, they painted a column of numbers much like the draft marks on most Navy ships, except that the range of this block of numbers was appropriate for a huge carrier—wholly out of scale with the modest little bow sitting in the dock.

In September of 1975 I was appointed minority counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on Rules and Administration. I was thirty-four years old and had previously served as a legislative assistant to Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott. Our committee consisted of five Democrats and three Republicans. The Republican members were Mark Hatfield from Oregon, Bob Griffin from Michigan, and Hugh Scott from Pennsylvania. The committee was chaired by the senior Democrat, Howard Cannon of Nevada.

Rules and Administration was a catchall committee having jurisdiction over such disparate areas as Senate office space, the Botanic Gardens, the Library of Congress, and, oddly enough, the federal election law. It was the proposed 1976 amendment to this law that almost cost me my job.

The French Government Tourist Office has a variety of material available for Americans traveling to Normandy, including maps and suggested driving routes for a tour of the D-day beaches. One free brochure, called Highways and Byways for Americans in Normandy , “brings together all the sites where Norman history can be linked with that of the United States,” according to the tourist office, and points out such vital Americana as the town where Walt Disney’s ancestors came from. The organization can be reached by phone at 900-990-0040 or on the Internet at www.fgtousa.org .

The audiotape D-Day—On the Normandy Beaches is first-rate, and it’s a good idea to listen to it as you’re planning your trip, for it offers some great suggestions on hotels and restaurants in the region. The three-hour program is well worth the $19.95 price, and it can be ordered through the Olivia and Hill Press, P.O. Box 7396, Ann Arbor, MI 48107, or call 313-663-0235.

Like my maternal grandfather, I’ll probably always picture Normandy through a veil of cold gray rain. For me the damp climate meant looking at the landscape through a drizzly windshield and scrunching my shoulders up into my denim jacket—the only coat I had brought for the late-May trip—so that the sleeves covered my ringers. For him it meant tramping through miles of mud, crawling into a wet sleeping bag after being on his feet for twenty hours, and operating on pale, wounded bodies that didn’t stop shivering throughout their surgery under flapping canvas tents. In his letters home from the Second World War, Granddad complained about the weather even more than he complained about the Germans. But then most of the Germans he encountered were no longer much of a threat.