January 2011

 

 

If you have 20 cents, you can recapture your childhood on the Wildwood boardwalk. For that price, you can play a round of Flipper’s Fascination, a strangely hypnotic, and once widespread, midway game that is a cross between bingo and Skee-Ball. And, if you keep playing and Randy Senna, the owner of the joint, is feeling generous, he might call out, “Next game on the house,” and you, like everyone around you, will focus all your energy into rolling a ball into one of 25 little holes, hoping for the lights on your board to go off, indicating that you have triumphed over all the other crazy vacationers.

Something about ships accentuates the human experience, most obviously because of the breadth of activity that has taken place within such small spaces. Crewmen, especially aboard warships, did not have an inch to waste, and the social microcosms of shipboard life come alive in each vessel featured here. You don’t have to be a sailor to appreciate their beauty and efficiency. Following are 10 destinations featuring historic warships that have helped guard us over the past two centuries, plus a few glimpses into the technology our enemies brought to bear against us. Those who have been anticipating the Mariners’ Museum’s dazzling new Monitor Center in Newport News, Virginia, will not want to miss these.

USS Constitution —The queen of all historic American naval ships is “Old Ironsides,” so called not because her hull is iron but because her sturdy wood construction consistently deflected enemy shot. Today, the oldest commissioned U.S. Navy ship afloat—she was launched in 1798—is open to visitors in Boston. Security is especially tight, so allow for it accordingly.

On March 9, 1862, a naval engagement near Chesapeake Bay in Virginia ended with no decisive victor and without claiming a single life. Yet no one has ever doubted that the bloodless fight changed naval warfare forever. Now, only a few miles from the broad channel where the battle took place, it is changing something else: the way present-day visitors experience Civil War history. 145 years ago, with hundreds of spectators watching transfixed from the surrounding shoreline, two revolutionary high-tech ironclad warships—the hulking Confederate CSS Virginia (né USS Merrimack) and the Union’s sleeker and smaller “iron pot,” the USS Monitor—squared off in a sensational, protracted, smoke-shrouded duel in the eight-mile-long channel of Hampton Roads at the confluence of the James, Elizabeth, and Nansemond Rivers.

Working on this, our 21st annual travel issue, reminded me that I am fortunate enough to have a most agreeable travel destination virtually under my feet. This is the Forbes Galleries in the company’s headquarters at 62 Fifth Avenue in New York City. I first visited them 20 years ago. News had come to our offices in midtown that Forbes had bought American Heritage. I remembered reading in the papers that our new owners had recently opened a museum. I went down to see it right away and emerged thinking: Boy, have we landed on our feet.

For the museum seemed to reflect what I thought—or hoped —was the spirit of American Heritage magazine. It still does.

A “Call it Pork or Necessity, but Alaska Comes Out Far Above the Rest in Spending.” This headline—from The New York Times—was for a story about the $388 billion federal Consolidated Appropriations Act for 2005. “Consolidated” is an apt word for this annual exercise: The act is nearly 1,700 pages long or, looking at it another way, more than a foot thick. Buried within it are thousands of local projects for which funds have been specially set aside. In official congressional parlance, grants of this sort are called “earmarks.” Most people call them pork . The overall spending act itself is the pork barrel.

Not all pork is bad pork. Many local projects are worthy enough. Others may raise eyebrows. For example: $25,000 to study mariachi music in schools in Las Vegas, Nevada, $75,000 for the Paper Industry Hall of Fame in Appleton, Wisconsin, and a cool million to the Missouri Pork Producers Federation to examine the possibility of obtaining energy from what is politely called “hog waste.”

The Founding of the United States Experience (Presidio Press, 64 pages, $50) earns the slightly unwieldy last word in its title, because digging into this handsome volume creates an experience much like rooting through a treasure-filled attic.