January 2011

In the early fall of 1920 I was nineteen years old and one year out of high school, working in the engineering department of an import/export firm that dealt in steel. We were located at 49 Wall Street at the corner of William Street, exactly three buildings from J. P. Morgan & Co. at Wall and Broad. Unlike the nineties when any clerk who can type is euphemistically referred to as a secretary, in the twenties young graduates who took dictation and transcribed it were called stenographers. The president, vice president, and general manager had private secretaries of many years’ experience who were very much older.

All the stenographers occupied a central, windowless room. The junior supervisors occupied one-windowed small offices, and the bosses were on a lower floor in many-windowed, spacious, mahogany-furnished offices.

In 1962, the summer before my senior year in college, I was waitressing in the officers club at the Philadelphia shipyard. One day I was told to pay special attention to the head table because several important people were there for a banquet meeting.

All went smoothly until I approached the table to serve dessert. The highestranking officer did not see me coming up behind him and stood up as I was reaching to serve him. His crisply starched back collided with my lightly fluffed lemon meringue pie—a catastrophe. The room was immediately silent, waiting for the admiral’s reaction. Hyman G. Rickover, father of the nuclear submarine, looked at me and said, “What do you really do?” To which I replied, “I’m studying elementary education.”

My most vivid brush with history was so slight that although the incident produced one of the most popular photographs of World War II, my presence in the shot is always cropped out.

There were many canteens in America offering servicemen entertainment, but the one held on Saturday afternoons in the ballroom of the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., was unique. For one thing, it offered free beer. Also, in addition to visiting movie stars, many important politicians came to entertain. The movie actors were well received, but I suspect the troops rather preferred the beer to the politicians.

For information about the town call the Oxford Tourism Council (601234-4651), or to tour Rowan Oak, call 601-234-3284. Leave time for Square Books, which has a nice spread of magazines and Mississippiana and an upstairs porch. The university’s handsome pre-Civil War observatory now houses the Center for the Study of Southern Culture.

The trouble with coming to Mississippi in winter is that, throughout his writing, William Faulkner has rarely pictured it that way for you. He almost always has that heavy summer air over everything, and you would not imagine these crisp brown January lawns. Along the sides of the highway from Memphis into Lafayette County the snaky kudzu vine is dormant.

Oxford’s downtown, now as when Faulkner lived here, is built around its centerpiece Lafayette County Courthouse. The proprietors of the stores on the surrounding square have changed over, of course, as have a few of the buildings, but other differences take a little digging to become clear. In 1950, the year Mr. William (as a few around town knew him) went to Stockholm to accept his Nobel medal, someone could start walking from the courthouse with a rifle and in twenty minutes be in woods deep and wild enough for hunting. In that sense, says Howard Bahr, until recently the curator of William Faulkner’s house, this town of ten thousand has seen a sea change.

Peace was not in evidence in the Holy Land last Christmas Eve. Outbreaks of violence still rocked the West Bank and Gaza Strip three months after the signing of the accord between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat at the White House, with a beaming President Clinton standing by. Thinking of how grimly the uneasy mood of December contrasted with September’s euphoria, I was reminded of another sunny fall day in 1978, when Jimmy Carter embraced Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin as those leaders signed the Camp David accord that supposedly began the still unfinished “process” of bringing peace to the whole Middle East.

It occurred to me that, sometime soon, my grandchildren may wonder why two church-going United States presidents played any part at all in these turning-point moments in the history of a faraway Jewish state and its mostly Muslim Arab neighbors. Then I will remind them of something more curious yet: that a third American president, Harry Truman, played a key role in the very birth of Israel.

Taxes, by their nature, distort economies. Sales taxes increase prices and thus discourage buyers, while tariffs allow inefficient industries to flourish at the expense of the public in general. But the corporate income tax is surely the most distorting of all. A corporation, after all, is nothing but a wealthcreating machine, a means whereby individuals pool their resources, talents, and labor in order to create more wealth collectively than they could create individually. Taxing these entities directly—as opposed to taxing each stockholder for his or her share of the profits—might make political sense, but it is economic lunacy.

The presumption of innocence is carried a very long way by the American reading public, at least when it comes to celebrated crimes. Despite the weight of the evidence against them, Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan, and James Earl Ray, all have their dogged defenders in print. So do Lizzie Borden and Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs. We seem to prefer big explanations for big crimes. Just the other evening, clicking through the local public-access channels, I watched a bearded man with blazing eyes lay out an elaborate scheme that purported to link Mark David Chapman, the lunatic who murdered John Lennon, with the CIA.

Reuven Frank’s article was a sparkler with one fizzle. He says nobody rose into the big time as a result of Westminster Abbey coverage of Elizabeth IFs coronation. T’ain’t so. Russell Baker’s memorable lead the next morning in the Baltimore Sun was noted by James Reston of The New York Times , who grabbed the rising young pundit. The rest is not silence but Masterpiece Theatre .

Though I was only six, I recall distinctly the day depicted in Reuven Frank’s “The Great Coronation War” (December) concerning the race to present the first images of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II to American TV viewers. June 2, 1953, was an important day in our home, because that was the date my father brought home our first television, a twenty-one-inch Zenith.

The day stands out clearly in my memory because the 4:00 P.M. broadcast of the coronation bumped “The Howdy Doody Show,” my favorite, and theretofore a reason for visiting nearby young friends whose families owned televisions. I remember my bitter disappointment in discovering that Howdy, Buffalo Bob, Mister Bluster, and the rest of gang had been pre-empted by the proceedings from London.