January 2011

Peter Andrews, whose history of American newspapering anchors this month’s issue, recommends an entertaining study by Stephen Bates, who wrote the accompanying piece on the Hutchins Commission: If No News, Send Rumors: Anecdotes of American Journalism (Henry Holt, 318 pages, $12.95 soft cover, CODE: HHC-3 ).

by Michael Gershman, Houghton Mifflin, 300 pages, $39.95 . CODE: HMF-1

Baseball may no longer be the national pastime, but for the first two-thirds of this century its primacy among American sports was unchallenged. Much of its appeal during that golden age came from the physical environment in which it was played: a group of memorable ballparks with distinct personalities, some stately, some intimate, and all with characteristic quirks.

If you were passing through New York forty years ago, you might well have been heading to the West Side piers to board any one of a score of liners that regularly sailed for Europe. That chapter, as some of us can’t mourn too frequently, has long been closed, but if you visit the city this fall anytime from October 6 to December 9, you can catch “Ships of State,” an exhibit saluting the great liners at the Paine Webber Art Gallery in midtown Manhattan.

The exhibit has been organized by the Ocean Liner Museum, an entity almost as ephemeral as the vessels it celebrates, since for all the wonderful memorabilia donated by its aficionado members it has yet to settle within four walls; it pops up from time to time when a friendly sponsor offers space. Thanks this time to Paine Webber, the passenger manqué can revel in some three hundred artifacts celebrating the culture of transatlantic travel: Deco posters, tableware, menus, scale models, deck plans, furnishings, and photographs. All the famous lines and ships will be represented—and with them, plangent dreams.

by Philip J. Lowry, Addison-Wesley, 288 pages, $24.95 . CODE: ADW-3

by Lawrence S. Ritter, Viking, 210 pages, $30.00 . CODE: PEN-4

by Peter Guralnick (Little, Brown)

A GATHERING OF RECENT BOOKS , videos, recordings, and other items of American Heritage , selected and recommended by the editors.

As a service to our readers, items can be ordered through American Heritage, either by using the order form on page 103 or by calling 1-800-876-6556.

Thanks for the vision of summer placidity in the “Sitting Pretty” photo from 1912 (“Readers’ Album,” July/August). This glimpse at back-yard contentment, featuring a double-benched device known as the Meisner Rocker Swing, afforded me some spiritual succor through this summer’s contemporary swelter.

I was mildly surprised, though, that the wooden swing was described as “a beautiful outdoor and indoor piece of furniture.” So massive an article presupposes an enormous parlor to contain it, and the head of the household would have been thought eccentric to have the thing inside.

Nevertheless, the real beauty of the scene is that the family members are poised to look at and converse with one another. Nowadays, the television set draws the household’s undivided attention.

When Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis died four months ago, magazine and newspaper articles published around the world celebrated the facts of her life. And the fables too, as it turns out. Consider the stark certainty of Newsweek’s claim that as First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy had detested Vice President Johnson and his wife, calling them “Uncle Cornpone and his little Porkchop,” and that as a widow she became “increasingly upset” about LBJ’s presidency. As far back as the 1960s, such stories, anecdotes that purported to demonstrate a serious estrangement between the Johnsons and Mrs. Kennedy, regularly circulated. She refused to vote for LBJ when he ran for president in 1964, it was reported; she turned down all the Johnsons’ invitations to visit the White House; and she wouldn’t attend the dedication of the mansion’s garden, which Mrs. Johnson named for her.

The article “Lucky Strike” by Peter Tuttle in the April issue, with its descriptions of Trinidad, Colorado, and Glenn Aultman, brought back special memories. My wife, two youngest daughters, and I spent four days in Trinidad in 1992 on a research project concerning my great-grandfather, who was a county commissioner there in the 189Os. Part of the research involved a family photograph taken in the Aultman studio.

We found the Aultman Museum, where we met Glenn and were thoroughly charmed by him. Referring to a computer printout, he gave what help he could with our picture and then invited us to a slide show he was to give that evening at the Trinidad State Park campground, where we were staying.

Glenn’s slides were made from photographs taken in Trinidad by his father at a time when it was a booming town and a mingling place of diverse peoples. With its telephones, paved streets, trolleys, streetlights, refrigeration plants, waterworks, and fine residences, it was clearly as progressive in the 189Os as any growing city in America.