January 2011

Women Readers Razors for the Front The Fire Superman Goes to War Cool It for Carl What We Have Here…

Detroit, 1932. Diego Rivera, the Mexican artist, had been hired by Edsel Ford to execute his stylistic, controversial murals on the walls of the garden court at the Detroit Institute of Arts.

At the time, I was a grammar school student and had been chosen by my art teacher to attend a select weekly sketching class at the institute. The medium was charcoal, and the models were mostly the marble statues on display at the museum. The Mexican muralist’s frescoes were in brilliant contrast to the black-and-white charcoal sketches I was doing, and I was fascinated by his style and palette.

Here is an event that took place while I lived in Jasper, Texas, in the 1930s and was employed by the H. N. Gibbs & Co. department store.

Late one Saturday night Mr. Singletary, our hardware manager and part owner of the business, and I, buyer and manager for the men’s department, were alone in the store. As I was going to the door with Mr. Singletary to lock and go home, a young, goodlooking lady appeared and asked if we had boots and riding pants. I told her we did and asked her to come in.

I measured her feet and showed her a pair of H. J. Justin’s Lady Boots for thirty-five dollars. She asked to see the riding pants. I proceeded to measure her and showed her a pair of D. J. Riding Pants, also for thirty-five dollars, and asked her to step into the ladies’ dressing room to try on the slacks. She looked me straight in the eye and replied, “Hell, I don’t have the time to go to dressing rooms. I’m in a big hurry.”

In the fall of 1961 I was an English major at the University of Virginia and William Faulkner was writer-in-residence there.

Mr. Faulkner was at that time finishing The Reivers , his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that would be published the following spring. I was doing some rudimentary research into Shakespeare’s Richard III for a paper that would never be published.

One day an announcement appeared on the English Department bulletin board stating that for the next six Thursday evenings Mr. William Faulkner would be pleased to hold a small symposium, open only to English majors and graduate students. The number of attendees would be strictly limited to the first twenty who signed on.

Readers are invited to submit their personal “brushes with history, ” for which our regular rates will be paid on acceptance. Unfortunately, we cannot correspond about or return submissions. The Best Part of the Hunt No Time for Dressing Rooms A Paintbrush with History

I feel strangely rejuvenated,” said the aging photographer Walker Evans after he began shooting pictures with Polaroid’s SX-70 camera. The instant color camera, he argued, meant that for the first time “you can put a machine in an artist’s hand and have him then rely entirely on his vision and his taste and his mind.”

This was just the sort of response Edwin Land had hoped for. Ever since his first, famous snapshot of inspiration in 1943—when his three-year-old daughter Jennifer asked him why she could not see the image immediately—Land had sought “absolute one-step photography.” He introduced his first Polaroid Land camera in 1948, but it would take a quarter of a century and $250 million in development costs to produce what he fervently believed was the ultimate realization of that ideal.

Call the Washington, D.C., Tourist Office (1-800-VISIT-DC) to find out what’s happening around town when you plan to visit.

THE SCANDAL TOUR (301-587-4291) is given weekly, generally departing the Washington Hilton at 1:00 and 3:00 P.M. on Saturdays. Reservations are required, and tickets are twenty-seven dollars.

SUPREME COURT : Oral arguments are heard Monday through Wednesday for two weeks out of each month. After April the Court meets as announced until July. Be in line at the Court building by 7:30 A.M. ; there is one line for those with at least an hour to spend, from 10:00 A.M. through 3:00 P.M. , and another for those who want only a five-minute taste of the proceedings.

It is best to arrive in Washington on a weekend, when the official part of town seems empty. This way the high-minded architecture speaks for itself; the neat lawns, the fountain of Zeus and the maidens, the Capitol and its deserted steps belong to you without a congressman in sight. This place, which seems so utterly familiar from postcards and news backdrops, is very different on a quiet Saturday in mid-May, a little closer to the sleepy Southern capital David Brinkley recalled where, a few years before the Second World War. the White House still had no gates and “on summer days government employees had lounged on [its] lawns eating picnic lunches out of paper sacks.” I arrived several weeks after the city’s convulsions over its cherry blossom season but in time to see the azaleas full-blown. There were mockingbirds in the trees on my way from the station, but the carved generals on the public greens were Union to a man.

When Ross Perot dropped like a stone out of the presidential race last July, he gave as his ostensible reason the fear that the contest would end up in the House of Representatives because no candidate could win a majority in the Electoral College. That, he claimed, would cause delay and disruption, which it was in the national interest to avoid.

Perhaps. We will now never know. But when Perot quit, there must have been sighs of relief from many representatives who saw themselves in a potential bind between voting for the candidate of their party or the candidate who had carried their state—supposing them to be different—or even the third candidate, who might be neither of the above. The Constitution would have left it entirely up to them.

Imagine the media sensation that would result if, say, Donald Trump were to be gunned down in the Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel by a Rockefeller who had taken up with Maria Maples. That, I hope, will give you some idea of what gripped New York on the evening of January 6, 1872, when Edward Stokes pumped two bullets into James Fisk, Jr. at the Grand Central Hotel on Broadway.

Fisk had had a meteoric Wall Street career. At the beginning of 1868 he had been completely unknown outside the Street itself. By the end of 1869, with the help of his partner Jay Gould, he was the most famous speculator in the country.

But, while his financial exploits are still remembered on Wall Street today, it was Fisk’s outsize personality and extracurricular activities that most bedazzled the country and endeared him to the common man. “Boldness! boldness!” wrote a Wall Street contemporary trying to imprison the essence of Jim Fisk on paper, “twice, thrice, and four times. Impudence! cheek! brass! unparalleled, unapproachable, sublime!”