John Cullen Murphy has spent a long and popular career drawing the “Prince Valiant” comic strip. But in World War II he, like so many million Americans, had to take a different job, and he documented in hundreds of sketches the five-year odyssey that took him from South Carolina to the room in which Hirohito surrendered to MacArthur. A portfolio of the liveliest of his drawings and watercolors recalls moments fifty years past with an intimacy and immediacy that even the camera cannot surpass.
Thomas Hampson, baritone; Angel Records; 17 tracks on one CD.
Stephen Collins Foster, Bernard DeVoto wrote, “was different from fifty contemporaries, and his songs were different from theirs, only in that the obscure chemistry of genius concentrated an era and a society in them.” In this splendid album the baritone Thomas Hampson sings nearly two dozen of Foster’s songs, and if Hampson is perhaps a bit too jocose in “My Wife Is a Most Knowing Woman,” hearing him perform the haunting 1855 temperance ballad “Comrades, Fill No Glass For Me” with utter conviction and not the slightest condescension is a lovely little four-minute history lesson.
by Joseph J. Thorndike; St. Martin ‘s Press; 233 pp.
In a series of trips taken over a number of years, Joseph J. Thorndike traveled the entire length of the Atlantic shoreline from West Quoddy Head in Maine to Key West, Florida. One of the founding editors of American Heritage , Thorndike brings to this account of his journeys all he knows of previous travelers, including the artist Winslow Homer, who summered at Prouts Neck, Maine, and guarded his privacy by planting a sign in his garden: SNAKES, SNAKES, AND MICE .
The author walks Cape Cod in the imagined company of Henry David Thoreau and visits Georgia’s Sea Islands, remembering the English actress Fanny Kemble, who arrived there in 1838 with her husband of four years, the owner of a local rice plantation. It was her first look at the system of slavery that supported her, and what she saw horrified her.
Mayor Richard J. Daley was host to 2,622 visiting delegates and between five thousand and ten thousand protesters from peace groups when the Democratic National Convention opened at the Chicago Amphitheatre on August 26. To meet the threat of the peacenik demonstrators, DaIey had ordered a gathering of state lawmen and Secret Service unrivaled in the history of national political conventions. His total force of nearly twenty-five thousand was, wrote the Chicago columnist Mike Royko, “bigger than that commanded by George Washington. Never before had so many feared so much from so few.” Manholes around the amphitheater were sealed with tar against bombings, and a chain-link fence topped in barbed wire was put up around the building. New wooden fences lined the route from the Loop to the convention hall, shielding the delegates from seedy first glimpses of Daley’s city. The mayor’s face smiled from stickers on the delegates’ hotel phones. In the end he could control everything except his own police force, whose beatings of students, reporters, and bystanders dominated television coverage as well as the tense work of the convention.
The thing everyone knew about Hair , the counterculture rock musical currently packing them in on Broadway, was that it featured a cathartic display of nudity. It turned out, though, that this popular showstopper was optional for its cast, many of whom changed their minds from night to night about whether to undress. Several women in the cast explained their thinking in the July Esquire . “I want to be a singer, and it might hurt my career,” said Melba Moore. “I’m too fat. . . [and] my husband would object vehemently.” Another nonstripper from the show, Diane Keaton, reported: “There isn’t enough meaning in it for me. And I don’t have the nerve; it’s such a personal thing.”
Millions of radio listeners preferred invented terrors to the real war horrors reported nightly overseas. “The Inner Sanctum,” “The Whistler,” “The Hermit’s Cave,” “The Shadow,” and “Lights Out” were among the highestrated shows on the air this summer. Each promised chilling escape up front with its own creepy introduction: a tolling bell, a strolling graveyard whistler, a creaking door. The writer Richard Hubler speculated that the shows’ twelve million nightly listeners slept better after a good scare. And, he added, the programs “are getting a bigger audience of escapists every day the war keeps on.”
The jazz drummer Gene Krupa, who had left Benny Goodman’s band to start his own in 1938 and was known for his tireless driving solos and the shock of hair dangling over his sticks as he worked, was sentenced on July 2 to serve one to six years in San Quentin Prison for using a minor to transport marijuana. He would in fact serve six months.
In August the rainmaker Schermerhorn Montgomery was reported to have brought on torrents that washed out ten acres of corn in American Horse County, Kansas. Montgomery had advertised that his specialty was nighttime and Sunday rain, which would not interfere with work schedules. “Farmers,” asked Montgomery’s pamphlet, “why patronize the defective and old-fashioned rain-makers, and have your hired man sitting in the barn half the time? . . . Get your rain while you sleep, and keep your man humping himself.” With each ordered rain, Montgomery continued, “I throw in a wind . . . the same way you get a baked potato when you order a chop.”