January 2011

I awoke at first light on the morning of January 31, 1968, at Landing Zone Evans. I was tired and dirty from a night spent in a shallow foxhole with my friend and wingman Lynn Freeman. I was sitting in the dirt eating a scrounged C-ration breakfast when Bill Woods came over and told me that my fire team was first up that morning and that I was to report to flight operations for a briefing.

My mission was to fly to Phu Bai as soon as the fog lifted and rendezvous with a CH-54 Flying Crane. The Sky Crane was to pick up a bulldozer and sling-load it back to LZ Evans, where it would be put into service cutting an airstrip. CH-54s usually flew high and unescorted, but the operations officer said the day’s poor visibility meant the Crane would have to fly low and slow, making it a tempting target for enemy gunners. “Speaking of enemy gunners,” he added, “there were reports of gunfire around Hue City last night. Probably only ARVN soldiers celebrating Tet, but you never know.” I made a mental note of this; our flight route would take us right over the Imperial City.

The five-string banjo pictured below is a custom, presentation-grade Electric model produced by the A. C. Fairbanks factory in Boston around 1895. Although they possessed great beauty of tone, presentation-grade banjos were works of art designed to be appreciated visually more than aurally. This one has an ebony fingerboard set on a carved oak neck inlaid with mother-of-pearl urns, leaves, flowers, birds, and dolphins. The pearl itself is of exceptional quality, with highlights of green and pink. Both the peghead and fingerboard are bound with ivorylike celluloid to match the real ivory used for the tuning pegs, tailpiece, and nut (the grooved bar holding the strings in place above the fingerboard). The metal fittings of the body—rim, tension hoop, and brackets—are nickel-plated brass. Fairbanks built very few presentation banjos, and those that survive are highly prized by collectors.

On journeys ranging from two nights to two weeks the Delta Queen cruises American rivers eleven months of the year; many of her trips are tied to themes or special events, such as the Kentucky Derby. For schedules and prices call the Delta Queen Steamboat Company, 800-543-7637. Its second vessel, the Mississippi Queen , commissioned in 1976, is the largest overnight paddle-wheeler ever built, a Victorian-style confection, with such modern touches as an elevator, a beauty salon, and a swimming pool. Like the Delta Queen , she is propelled by a paddle wheel and entirely powered by condensing steam engines fueled by a mixture of steam and oil. Recently the company announced plans to built a third boat.

The steam calliope’s sprightly rendition of “Waiting for the Robert E. Lee” bounces off immense lock walls at the Kentucky Dam. As the steamboat Delta Queen descends 46 feet, onlookers are soon no more than barely visible heads, rising to disappear into the mild twilight. We haven’t seen much river traffic so far on this journey from Nashville, but here, at the lock, strings of coal and grain tows line up to transit the Tennessee River. The barges often have to wait at least a day, says the Delta Queen’s captain, John Davitt, adding, “We were real lucky”; our vessel was ushered right through.

It’s not the only time that passengers on the Delta Queen will feel favored. We are here, after all, on a snug, solid survivor of an era that effectively ended even before this steamboat was built, in 1926. We share a sense of being attendant at a sort of miracle, as we travel waterways that are almost as unknown to today’s car-bound or airlifted traveler as they were to the first European explorers.

I have a personal fondness for works about the great World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. I went to graduate school at the University of Chicago, adjacent to the exposition grounds, and I recall many pleasant afternoons wandering around the lagoon behind Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry, housed in what had been the Palace of the Fine Arts, trying to recreate in my mind those lovely fake alabaster towers and exotic pavilions. Now my warmth toward that long-ago jamboree and showcase is rekindled by the arrival of a modest book that owes its existence to the exposition. Shortly before the exposition got under way, the American Press Syndicate, which furnished “boiler-plate” (i.e., prepared and print-ready copy) to weekly newspapers around the country, circulated a questionnaire to 74 writers, journalists, officials, business leaders, clergymen, and other “experts.” They were asked to make brief predictions about what American life would be like in the 1990s, on the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s landing.

As every historian knows, great events are often determined by trivial ones. Benjamin Franklin, in Poor Richard’s Almanack, noted that, for want of a single horseshoe nail, an entire war could be lost. Franklin was being theoretical, of course, but real examples abound. Had any one of a thousand things happened (or not happened), for instance, the Titanic would have missed the iceberg.

Much of the man-made physical world, too, owes its existence to trivialities. In the 1840s, New York banned the noisy, dirty, spark-throwing locomotives of the day from the built-up areas of the city. They were ordered to stay north of Forty-second Street, then no more than a country lane. As a result, New York is the only city in the world with two completely separate main business districts, one downtown, centered on Wall Street, and another, miles to the north, centered near the train station that was, necessarily, built at Forty-second Street.

It has been a disquieting presence on my bookshelf for 26 years now, in four houses and four apartments, a large, handsome volume, bound in white leather and stamped in gold. Its title, also in gold, is in Italian: Leonardo da Vinci S’ul Volo degli Ucelli (Leonardo Da Vinci on the Flight of Birds). It is copy number 152 of a limited edition of 300, and inside, on rich, creamy paper, Leonardo’s drawings and notes are beautifully reproduced and meticulously annotated.

I inherited the book in 1967 from my grandfather, who had been the head of the art department at Oberlin College. He had had it as a gift from one of his former students serving in the World War II Army. A handwritten note, Scotch-taped onto the frontispiece, gives its eerie provenance: “Picked up on the evening of May 7, 1945 from the floor of the hallway adjoining Martin Bormann’s library and office at Obersalzburg, Berchtesgaden, Germany Ted Peck.”

I surely enjoyed your article on North Dakota in the May/June issue ("History Happened Here"). When I was twenty years old—married, with a newborn—I found myself, through a military commitment, stationed in North Dakota. That was 1968.

Each payday we would fill the tank of our 1961 Volkswagen Beetle and venture off to explore some other fantastic place. We saw the Roosevelt National Park Badlands, the geographical center of North America, the International Peace Gardens, Medora (and a Fourth of July parade), the “breaks of NoDak,” which protect the Mouse River and other such streams, and many other thrilling and out-of-the-way sites.

Oil derricks sticking up out of golden wheat fields, incredibly friendly people, the largest flocks of geese and ducks on earth, camps in all their varieties, and even Zap—which was once going to be the next Woodstock—are all in North Dakota.

Richard J. S. Gutman’s article on the diner in the April issue ("American Made") brings to mind a time before World War II when Elliott Bay off Seattle’s waterfront was well stocked with delicious kings and silvers the whole summer long. On any morning there would be upward of five hundred rowboats out there trolling back and forth. No outboards; only the low squeak of oars in oarlocks could be heard. The sun rising on Puget Sound with snowcapped mountains east and west was a beautiful sight.

What does this have to do with a diner? Well, an enterprising fry cook anchored one in the midst of the boats. His diner was about thirty by thirty feet, built like a houseboat on logs, open on three sides with counters and stools and with the cooks inside. When the smell of bacon frying and coffee brewing drifted over the water, it was very hard to find room to tie up a boat and get some breakfast.

Oh what a beautiful mornin’ of an article on Oklahoma! by John Steele Gordon. But to leave My Fair Lady off the top-ten list?! I throw in my all-world favorite, Les Misérables .