January 2011

I was able to spot all of the items on the charm bracelet shown on the back cover of your May/June issue except the bosun’s call, and I wondered why you didn’t identify the little silver whistle in the center.

Gene Franzen’s July/August “Brush With History” could have been written by me. The chief difference is that my family decided months in advance to attend Apollo 11’s launch.

I was twelve years old and became very involved in the planning of our Florida vacation that year. We could find lodging no closer than Orlando, and we arose at 3:30 A.M. to have plenty of time to drive over to Cape Kennedy. The Holiday Inn we stayed at offered a special “Moon Shot Breakfast” at 4:00 A.M. The restaurant was packed with tourists headed for the Cape.

Like Mr. Franzen, we found that parking along the highway was surprisingly simple before sunup, and among all the observers there was an easy, friendly camaraderie. Our family, along with many others, toured the Kennedy Space Center that afternoon, and like the Frazens we were glued to the television for the remainder of our vacation.

Page 34 of the September issue has a picture of “roulette players” taken in Reno in 1921. A roulette wheel is horizontal. The vertical device shown is known as a wheel of fortune, although few fortunes have ever been made on one by players. Proprietors, on the other hand, have done quite well.

by Roger Yepsen, W. W. Norton, 255 pages, $17.95 . CODE: NRT-2

In this compact (5¼-by-6¼-inch), handsomely produced volume, the author, a writer, an illustrator, and a grower, considers ninety of the more than a thousand varieties of apples grown in this country. He provides a fullpage watercolor of each, along with a brief description of its history, appearance, taste, quirks, and charms. Of the Blue Permain he writes, “The fruit glows like plums against the tree’s foliage, and orchard visitors are often stopped in their tracks by the sight.” The Hubbardston Nonesuch, “with its hammered, multicolored surface and russeting,” he calls “a handsomely aging character actor among apples.”

Yepsen includes recipes for cider, brandy, and applesauce, directions for drying and storing, and addresses for ordering fruit or trees by mail. His watercolors are as appealing as old botanical prints, his descriptions as crisp and lively as a Newtown Pippin.

by Peter Schweizer, Atlantic Monthly Press, 284 pages, $22.00 . CODE: ATM-1

by Paul E. Johnson and Sean Wilentz, Oxford University Press, 222 pages, $25.00 . CODE: OUP-9

The authors, both American historians, begin their superb narrative with the improbable 1835 meeting of two selfstyled prophets from upstate New York: Robert Matthews, better known as the Prophet Matthias, fresh from his murder acquittal in New York City, and Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They met in Kirtland, Ohio, where Smith was building the first of his Mormon cities, and they spent a day comparing their religious visions and divine credentials while a scribe tried to keep up. The next morning the Mormon prophet sent Matthias on his way. “I told him,” Smith wrote in his diary, “that my God told me that his God is the Devil.”

photographs by Walker Evans, poetry by Cynthia Rylant, Harcourt Brace, 63 pages, $16.95 . CODE: HTB-2

Looking at a Walker Evans photograph of two teen-age boys holding watermelons at a roadside stand, the poet Cynthia Rylant imagines an inner life for them: “They both loved the same girl, / but she wouldn’t have either of them / because she was married—/and to the store owner by god,/ so it wasn’t worth thinking about./But at night,/they each stretched upon a bed/and had her, / had her whole and leisurely.” “Boys” is one of twenty-nine short poems Rylant has written to accompany Evans’s classic Depression-era scenes. Like the pictures that inspired them, the poems are plain and full of humble detail. Some consist of only three or four evocative lines. Rylant, who grew up in rural West Virginia, makes up plausible scenarios for Evans’s hitchhiker, his pair of work boots, a barn with peeling circus signs, man-and-dog tombstone figures, a town gun shop, and an empty cabin bed.

text by Mimi Melnick, photographs by Robert A. Melnick, foreword by Allan Sekula, MIT Press, 272 pages, $39.95 . CODE: MIT-1

Los Angeles is the only American city to have made its manhole covers protected landmarks. That happened thanks to the work of Robert and Mimi Melnick, a husband-and-wife team that produced a book celebrating them in the early 1970s. Following the book’s success the Melnicks headed out in search of artful manhole covers nationwide, and they found them, turned out by dozens of foundries, stamped in all styles, and going back a full century and a half. In Boston, writes Mimi Melnick, “we were looking at covers stamped with patent dates in the 1840s.”

That marks the rough beginning of the modern manhole era; large-scale water, sewer, and gas systems were rare before then. Some of the most charming early lids were the work of new gas companies trying to put a hopeful face on their supposedly risky fuel.

On a busy Wednesday morning last August, President and Mrs. Clinton found an hour to speak with me in the Oval Office of the White House. Defense Secretary William Perry and Attorney General Janet Reno were preparing for a live noontime conference in the West Wing press room to announce new legal policy regarding Cuban refugees; the taken-for-dead crime bill would finally pass the following day; the tumult over the future of the President’s health-care proposals was still very much in the air. We discussed none of these things, however, instead talking about history, its lessons and comforts, and what it has meant to the first couple.

When the editors at American Heritage magazine and I were talking and thinking about this article, we decided we wanted to look at the forces of history that may have influenced both of you, that may nourish you now, that may provide support and a sense of direction and perhaps a sense of comfort in difficult times.

In 1990, forty-two years after Aldo Leopold completed A Sand County Almanac , it evoked, as it still does today, unusual loyalty. In the incident I have in mind, Steven Wright, then Vermont Commissioner of Fish and Wildlife and later president of Sterling College, was the dinner speaker for a workshop of the Vermont Audubon Council. At one point, quoting from A Sand County Almanac , he stopped and asked for a show of hands of those who owned a copy, and for another show of hands of those who did not. Then he left the hall without explanation. Coming back with eight copies, he passed them out to the eight nonowners, explaining in his wrap-up why every environmentalist should own one.