January 2011

25 Years Ago

June 6, 1981 The competition to design a national Vietnam memorial is won by 21-year-old Maya Ying Lin, who proposes a low, sweeping wall inscribed with the names of fallen servicemen.

July 17, 1981 Two walkways filled with people collapse over a crowded hotel ballroom in Kansas City, Missouri. The accident, which kills 114 people, is later traced to a seemingly trivial design change.

50 Years Ago

July 16, 1956 In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey circus performs its last show under a canvas “big-top” tent and ceases operations. It will soon return under new management with an exclusively indoor policy.

100 Years Ago

We were in Washington one may evening in 1972 to attend a concert at the Kennedy Center. Our daughter Joan’s school orchestra, the Interlochen Arts Academy Symphony, from Interlochen, Michigan, was performing, and she would be playing the bassoon. It was a big deal for our family. My wife and I had picked up my wife’s mother in Indiana, and our son, David, had flown in from college.

David and I parked the car in an underground garage at the Howard Johnson Motor Lodge, where we were staying. As we stepped into the elevator to go to our room, two or three men joined us hefting large boxes that looked as if they contained electronic equipment. The thought struck me that maybe somebody was holding a dance.

The concert was well attended. Many government officials were there, including most of the Michigan congressional delegation. The orchestra performed beautifully. Following the performance, we assembled in one of the Kennedy Center’s reception rooms, where the young musicians mingled with members of the audience. We met several members of Congress.

In the summer of 1961, I was assigned temporary duty from Headquarters Company, 3d Medical Tank Battalion, 33d Armor, Fort Knox, Kentucky, to Camp Breckenridge, Morganfield, Kentucky, as billeting officer.

Various reserve and National Guard units were sent to Camp Breckenridge for their annual two weeks of active-duty training. My job was to assign quarters and issue equipment—mattresses, sheets, and blankets—and upon completion of the stint, to inspect, re-inventory, and receipt the return of issued items.

It was the height of the Cold War. The Bay of Pigs invasion had failed. The East Germans were soon to close the border and begin to build their wall in Berlin. Elvis J. Stahr was the Secretary of the Army and a native Kentuckian. The Kentucky National Guard was completing its annual training with a review for the Secretary and the many dignitaries who were present because he was.

 

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When I was growing up in the suburbs of Pittsburgh in the early 1960s, the Kennedys were a vivid presence in our household. My father had Profiles in Courage on the bookshelf by his special chair, and Jackie Kennedy’s outfits were featured in all of my mother’s fashion magazines. Even I, a first-grader, had a Jackie and Caroline paper-doll set that I played with all the time. I was fascinated by Caroline because she was born a mere five days before me in late 1957.

“Gunsmoke,” which made its debut in 1955, is the longest-running dramatic series in television history. “Deadwood” debuted nearly 50 years later and is now in its third season, the only Western on TV. Broadcast on CBS, “Gunsmoke” was, for several seasons, the number-one-rated show; “Deadwood,” one of the most popular dramatic shows on cable TV, is on HBO. The exploits of Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant), a real-life peace officer in “Deadwood,” are viewed by a mere fraction of the audience that followed those of “Gunsmoke”’s Matt Dillon (James Arness), a composite of several famous Kansas lawmen.

“Gunsmoke” began the era of so-called adult Westerns and outlasted all of them; with its ferocious language and raw depiction of frontier sexuality, “Deadwood” has redefined the “adult” Western.

Published in 1929, Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest shocked some reviewers with its frank sexuality, fierce language, and graphic violence. Set in the fictional town of Personville—“Poisonville” to its inhabitants—the novel was based on Hammett’s own experiences as a Pinkerton detective in the mining town of Butte, Montana, a city that he perceived as devoid of moral authority from within and untouched by authority from without.