January 2011

In May 1955 I went to work for the city of New York, first as a social investigator for the Department of Welfare and later, in 1957, as a probation officer for teenage girls deemed in need of supervision by court order. We city employees were enrolled in an early health maintenance plan—the Health Insurance Plan, known as HIP. I was allowed to choose a primary-care physician from among the eight or nine doctors in my area. I picked a Dr. Soblen because his office was near my apartment on West Seventy-sixth Street.

The first few times I went to see him, Dr. Soblen struck me as rather grim and unfriendly, but he seemed capable. In his late fifties, he was of above-average height, had dark hair turning gray, and was interesting-looking in a saturnine way.

When I went to see him about a fever, he took my temperature, gave me a thorough examination, and, after looking into my mouth, said, “You had better see your dentist. You have some little sores on your gum.” He wanted to give me a penicillin injection, but I was afraid of needles and refused.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid had just blasted into our local theater, and it was the most exciting movie I had ever seen. I was seventeen years old, and my horse was a ’59 Volkswagen Karmann Ghia.

It wasn’t an ordinary Karmann Ghia by any standard, and to me it was extra special. Well before the hopped-up Volkswagen craze of the late sixties and seventies hit my native Connecticut, this slim model sported tall, fat rear wheels and tires beneath flared fenders and an aerodynamic tail with spoiler and round red lenses à la Corvette. Inside the crowded rear engine compartment, these body cosmetics were rendered legitimate by a Porsche engine breathing fire through twin Weber carburetors and an independent dual exhaust system. The front wheels would easily jump up from the road when I shifted too hard from first to second gear. Through savings from my job at the Clam Box and a small loan from my father, I had obtained the well-used car in unfinished form. I used my limited mechanical knowledge to “mint it out,” and I did a decent “shive job,” as we called it.

It was July 14, 1937, and my family was staying at Soboba Hot Springs and Resort in the mountains east of Los Angeles near the sleepy town of San Jacinto. We visited Soboba frequently; our parents took mud baths at the spa, and my little brother and I spent lazy days at the pool.

That July day we walked into the dining room for breakfast to find the staff and guests buzzing with the news that a Russian airplane had landed in a farmer’s cow pasture outside San Jacinto. After a hasty breakfast my family got into the car and drove down to see for ourselves. Sure enough, there was a big red and white plane, gleaming in the sunlight. Nobody could imagine what it was doing there, and seeing it made our astonishment grow. It is hard to remember, but there was no television then to flash the story around the world with instant explanations and commentary, and the U.S.S.R. was a closed and somewhat forbidding society operating under the dictator Stalin.

In 1933–34, I was a junior at Smith College taking a year to study German literature and medieval art at the University of Munich. I lived with the Count and Countess von Armansperg and their son and daughter.

The count had been a page in the kaiser’s court and was now one of Hitler’s generals. Like so many other Germans, he hoped that the new chancellor would lead their country out of its financial mess.

Both the count and countess were thoughtful, well-educated, and charming people, but thoroughly German. Every now and then, they would have Hitler, Goering, Roehm, and all the rest of them over for tea. I was often invited to attend.

As a 19-year-old blonde, blue-eyed, very naive young girl, I was just the type Hitler liked. He had, I must admit, a great deal of tea-time charisma. Of course, everyone courted the chancellor’s attention.

They had been driven back and hemmed in by gun and telegraph and railroad and barbed wire, and in the end it was upon dreams, trances, and visions that they were forced to rely. So, by the hour and the day, they danced the Ghost Dance, which they wanted to believe would give life to their dead, send whites away, bring back the lost buffalo herds.

Call the New Jersey State Tourism office (609-292-2470); 1-800-BOARDWK for information on lodgings and attractions. It would be hard to say that any of the major hotels in Atlantic City are likable; even those that are not casinos have the same glitzy atmosphere, including the Trump Regency, where I stayed. It is difficult to find a room at any hotel in Atlantic City, especially on weekends, so I ended up making a reservation through the Accommodations Express service (1-800-444-7666). Hotels off the Boardwalk are cheaper and definitely worth considering, but if you stay at, say, the Showboat Casino Hotel, you’ll be able to walk out of the lobby onto the Boardwalk with the ocean in front of you. Walking Atlantic City’s streets gives you the chance—theoretically at least—to walk on top of the Monopoly board, as the game’s inventor, Charles Darrow, took all of the game’s street names from Atlantic City.

My two most vivid memories of Atlantic City both involve storms. Once, in the late 70s I went to Atlantic City with my parents on what became an extraordinarily dark and gloomy afternoon. We walked on the Boardwalk, traipsing in and out of bright, tacky stores and passing by casinos while heavy rain poured down. To my eyes the Boardwalk seemed to be disintegrating. I recall feeling depressed by it all when we left and having a very strange impression of the city, which I was sure would soon be washed away. Another day, when I was younger, my father had brought me to visit my grandmother at the Marlborough-Blenheim Hotel, where she stayed for two weeks every summer. To hear her tell it, there was nothing better than to come to Atlantic City, stay at the marvelous Blenheim Hotel, and stroll the Boardwalk each day to get sun and exercise.

Andrew Carnegie once offered some free advice on how to get rich: “Put all your eggs in one basket, and then WATCH THAT BASKET.” His friend, Mark Twain, borrowed the remark, but had a bad habit of not practicing what he preached, and he was often in severe money trouble.

But Andrew Carnegie followed his own advice with a basket called the Carnegie Steel Company. He watched it very carefully indeed while it grew over 30 years from nothing to the largest, and, by far, the most profitable steel company on the face of the earth.

I am always a little dubious of unanimous votes like the 421-0 landslide by which the House of Representatives passed a bill to regulate lobbying at the tail end of 1995. Already adopted by the Senate 98-0, it duly went to the President, who signed it on December 19 with a ringing official blessing: “Lobbyists in the back room, secretly rewriting laws and looking for loopholes, do not have a place in our democracy.” Bravo, indeed, but my skepticism arises from the fact that lobbyists may have a long-standing bad reputation, yet they have prospered over the years in spite of it. Evidently, they are doing something that Congress does not really want to terminate, and the absence of a single nay vote on the new law suggests to me that no one really expects it to brine painful changes.

My wife, Adriana Williams, and I were interested to see the article on Miguel Covarrubias in the December 1995 issue. Some of the information in it was gleaned from the recent biography Covarrubias, written by my wife and published by the University of Texas Press in November of 1994. The caricatures reproduced from the Library of Congress were donated by us several years ago.

While we welcome any articles about this amazing genius and his works, we regretted the writer’s failure to mention the biography. Surely the ten years’ research and work by Adriana Williams deserve better!