January 2011

Lights of Broadway

In early April the dancer Dorothy Denning was the brightest light on the New York stage; the Police Gazette reported that she wore “nearly 100 electric lamps” during her performances “and almost as many feet of electric wires.” The weight of all her electrical rigging—which would have bowed most Christmas trees—apparently was nothing next to the psychological strain on Denning. “I have the greatest confidence in my electrician,” the dancer explained. “I know well that every precaution is taken, but just suppose something unexpected would occur, where would I be?”

Handsome Cabbies

I met Ronald Reagan in late October 1980, just a few days before the election that would put him in the White House. In fact, our encounter occurred under circumstances that might have caused me considerable embarrassment or more.

I was in Washington, D.C., on business and had scheduled lunch with a good friend before heading home to Texas. We had worked together in Washington several years earlier, before I moved to Houston, where I tried to ignore politics and politicians. My friend had stayed active in politics and was then working in the Reagan campaign. We had agreed to meet at the campaign headquarters in Arlington, Virginia.

After lunch I noticed four buses filled with passengers waiting in front of the headquarters building. My friend told me these would take the campaign staff to Dulles Airport to bid farewell to the candidate. Mr. Reagan was flying to Cleveland for a debate with President Carter and then directly to Houston and California, so this would be the last opportunity before the election for the staff to see him and for him to thank them.

I had a hand in kicking the Communists out of the Kremlin. 1 did not run guns, disseminate propaganda, play soccer in the street with a bust of Lenin. But I helped precipitate the fall of Communism, nevertheless. No doubt events would have played themselves out without my meager efforts. But I retain the immense satisfaction of knowing that I helped.

It started in 1988 with something called “Soviets Meet Middle America.” The Physicians for Social Responsibility, vigorous antinuclear activists, planned a massive citizen exchange where four hundred average Soviets, as they were then called, would tour the American heartland. The following year, as many Americans would visit Mother Russia.

I grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, back in the late fifties and early sixties. One day a few friends and I went to Columbia Auditorium. We wanted to learn how to box; we knew how to street fight. Street fighting and boxing were different, like night and day. There was this program called “Tomorrow’s Champions,” an amateurboxing show on television every Saturday evening. We had told our family and our girl friends we would be on television. All three of us won our first fight. We thought we were all that. So the next week we would be on again.

My friend Ronnie was to fight some kid by the name of Cassius Clay, Jr. We had seen this kid working out in the gym. He was always in the ring sparring around by himself. We thought, he’s nothing: “Ronnie, man, you can take him.”

We are looking down the polished marble counter toward the roost of the short-order cook in Lamy’s, a 1946 Worcester Lunch Car. The tools of his trade are all here: the No. 2 Welsbach broiler-griddle; the custom-made, gas-fired, three-burner short-order plate; the stainless steel No. 10 Pitco Frialator with twin baskets; the chrome-topped Hamilton Beach milk-shake mixer; the six-quart Wyott cream dispenser; and the three-gallon coffee urn with glass liner. Set into the sunburst stainless steel backbar panels, dual exhaust fans stand ready to suck out grease and smoke at the flick of a switch. With its mahogany trim, Formica ceiling, milk-glass transom windows, ceramic-tile walls and floor, and chrome stools, Lamy’s represents the zenith of diner design during the diner’s golden age.

The Heritage Route is mapped and described in a brochure available from the Southwestern Pennsylvania Heritage Preservation Commission, P.O. Box 565, Hollidaysburg, PA16648, or from the state Department of Commerce (800-VISIT-PA). The visitors’ bureaus of both Blair County, home of Altoona (814-943-4183), and Cambria County, where Johnstown is (800-84-ALTOONA), offer information packages about local attractions and accommodations, including everything mentioned in this article. Horseshoe Curve National Historic Landmark (814-946-0834) makes available a schedule of some forty trains that pass through most days. The curve is open every day, except Mondays in winter and Christmas; the Portage Railroad is open every day except Christmas.

After the coal and steel industries collapsed, we approached our congressmen about how we could develop tourism around here. A Park Service study found that if we combined our cultural and natural resources, we might have a good chance.” Randy Cooley is explaining how there came to be a Southwestern Pennsylvania Heritage Preservation Commission; he is its executive director. The Altoona region never had much tourism, and rather than try to become something new—say, by building casinos—the area took a chance on playing up its unpretty industrial past. “We ended up with a plan to preserve and promote the stories of iron, steel, coal, transportation, social, and labor history in the region.” Last summer, as a result, a forty-seven-mile Heritage Route opened between Altoona and Johnstown; by 1994 it will be part of a five-hundred-mile loop covering nine counties. Cooley says: “I hope the sum will be greater than the parts. It will give people some insight into the development of the nation at large.”

It is a bromide by now to say that the voters last November were in an anti-incumbency frame of mind. Not only did they turn out the sitting president, but in at least fourteen states they approved measures to limit the tenure of the men and women they send to Congress. All those states would now permit no more than two 6-year terms to senators. The cap on service in the House varied, from six years to twelve.

It’s not clear whether these measures will withstand a Supreme Court scrutiny of their constitutionality. Or whether they are only a first wave or a passing spasm. Some observers have already noted the paradox that most sitting members who ran were re-elected. The urge to mandate “throwing the bums out” seemed to apply only to the bums of someone else’s district. Perhaps the government-bashing storms of the eighties will eventually yield to a sunnier day when the electorate is more tolerant of its chosen servants.

The law of unintended consequences is nowhere more obvious than in the results of man-made laws. Prohibition, by eliminating demon rum, was supposed to alleviate poverty and disease. What we got was Al Capone. More recently, environmental laws have often served those who don’t give a hoot about the environment but care very much about what is built in their own back yards.

Among the earliest environmental laws were zoning ordinances, and they have long been put to use by individuals pursuing their self-interests. In the 1970s, for instance, an exclusive private club in New York used the city’s zoning laws, and not a little chutzpah, as nothing less than an instrument of alchemy, turning the thin air above its clubhouse into five million dollars.

Zoning laws themselves came about because of the unintended consequences of steel construction and the electric elevator, which first appeared in the 1880s. Once limited to six or seven stories, buildings could now soar to the skies.

I’ve recently moved up in the world, from the tenth floor to the seventeenth, and four blocks closer to the Hudson River, a slate gray slice of which I can just see from where I’m writing. Small birds flutter around a feeder outside the window, and last week a red-tailed hawk swooped past it, talons bared, rocketing after a frantically dodging dove.