January 2011

My father died in January of 1938, when I was just eight years old. Two months later my mother and I moved from Wisconsin to California to stay with her uncle who owned a ranch in Palm Springs, complete with a swimming pool. I had not yet learned to swim but could float and dog-paddle.

One Sunday morning I was in the shallow end of the pool, floating around to my delight, when unbeknownst to me I drifted out to where the water was substantially over my head. When I suddenly realized where I was, panic prevailed. I screamed for help, and a tall slim figure sitting alongside of the pool jumped to his feet, dived into the pool, and pulled me to safety.

When I stopped gasping and crying, my cousin introduced me to the handsome stranger and his date, Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman. Friends of my uncle and cousin, they had come to the ranch the night before and, fortunately for me, in addition to his dramatic abilities, Mr. Reagan’s background included an earlier career as a lifeguard back in Illinois.

As the Southern Pacific passenger train slowly pulled into the dusty little desert town of Columbus, New Mexico, the passengers leaned out of the windows, eager to see as much as possible of the surrounding scene. Just a day earlier, Pancho Villa and hundreds of his bandits had sacked and raided the town, killing eighteen American citizens.

Gathering bags and parcels, my mother, my aunts, my grandmother, and I got off the train. My mother picked me up and began silently weeping as we crossed the street from the station to the Commercial Hotel, where my grandfather and three of his guests had been shot dead the day before.

My grandfather, William Taylor Ritchie, had built the hotel about 1910 and managed it with my grandmother, Laura Ganette Ritchie. They lived in an apartment there with their three daughters: Blanche, nine years old; Edna, fourteen; and twenty-two-year-old Myrtle, my mother.

Now my widowed grandmother, my two aunts, and my mother stood holding one another for comfort in front of the burned ruins of their home.

Under a dome of stars emerging from the darkening twilight, the air has a Christmasy nip to it and carries the scent of fires in nearby fireplaces, but the breeze is a mild Southern one. Candles, hundreds of them, are set about along the grand allée and around the circular drive in front of the Georgian brick governor’s palace. To one side carolers in capes and tricorns sing; their music wafts through the talk from the line of visitors waiting to enter the mansion. Garlands of boxwood and crab apple and tallow decorate the house’s portico, and candles light every window. I am at Tryon Palace in New Bern, North Carolina, home of the governor of the colony and later the first capitol of the state in the Revolutionary period, and we’re waiting to step inside to see just how it might have been in Christmas 1770. But Tryon Palace is only thirty-eight years old.

The best ideas perhaps are those that, once thought up, are so obvious that it is immediately difficult to imagine the world without them. The wheel (which first appeared about 3500 B.C. ) is probably the premier example. Money (which dates to circa 2000 B.C.) is certainly another. So is the stirrup, which was invented only in the ninth century A.D. Rarely has so simple a device so profoundly affected the world. The stirrup made the knight on horseback possible. This medieval equivalent of the tank quickly became the measure of military power, and the knightly class dominated European society until the invention of gunpowder. The fact that human beings had been riding horses for at least 1800 years before someone finally came up with the stirrup is proof that obvious ideas are not obvious until someone thinks of them.

Readers, our fearful trip through another presidential election is done. Whatever we may each feel about the results, it is time to relax, remind ourselves that the world will go on revolving, and prepare to celebrate the end of another of its rotations. In other words, perhaps it is appropriate in this holiday month to look at changing American fashions in seeing in the New Year.

I especially enjoyed “The Last Powder Monkey” in the July/August issue. What a wonderful boyhood Roy Smith had! Navy juniors tended to live in exotic climes, but few had adventures like that!

Two minor quibbles. The picture of USS Noa “in Shanghai Harbor” can’t show Shanghai; Shanghai doesn’t have a harbor. One moored either at the Bund (destroyers only) or to anchored buoys in the middle of Whangpoo River. (It was difficult to turn cruisers in the Whangpoo, and impossible for battleships. One cast off the bow moorings and let the current swing the ship around the stern buoy before casting off!) In the picture Noa is anchored close to a shore with a water tank but with no sign of a metropolitan area.

The other quibble is the author’s reference to a .50-caliber Lewis gun. No such animal; all Lewises were .30 caliber (British .303). It was a superb mechanism, but .5Os would have shaken it apart (even the .30 rattled it very badly at first, until Lewis redesigned some of the parts).

Thank you very much for reviving “The Time Machine” in your magazine. If asked to explain why I subscribe to American Heritage , I would cite “Sewing-Machine Wars” from the September column, which amplifies an event history students take for granted by giving it life and a new perspective.

Like most people, I rarely take the time to compliment what I enjoy, waiting instead until there is something to complain of. But today I break with a long-standing tradition to say how thrilled I am to see the return of “The Time Machine” in the September issue.

For years it was the first thing I turned to when the latest American Heritage arrived—short little “exercise” pieces to get my brain ready for the feature articles. The latter teach me about the “important stuff” in history; “The Time Machine” and “American Characters” tell me about what mattered to people.

 

Among the celebrants at this festivity are a calf, a donkey, several turkeys, and a smattering of geese. Patrick Shaughnessy, who sent in the photograph, explains that it was taken at the Cholon Officers Open Mess in Saigon on December 24, 1958, and given to his father, Major Michael A. Shaughnessy, by the organizer of the feast, Chiu Wong. Major Shaughnessy, the man standing right beneath the balloons between the two columns, belonged, as all the others here did, to the Military Assistance Advisory Group.