January 2011

IN VERMONT
The Ethan Allen Homestead

off Route 127, a few minutes’ drive north of downtown Burlington, is where Alien lived the last two years of his life (1787–89). He may or may not (nobody knows for sure) be buried in the nearby cemetery on Colchester Avenue along with the gaggle of other Aliens there. The site includes the restored farmhouse as well as gardens, exhibits, and an ongoing archeological dig.

Open May through October, 10:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. (1:00 to 5:00 P.M. on Sundays). Telephone number: 802-865-4556.

The Bennington Battle Monument

Four years ago, before heading to Savannah to write one of our travel columns, I sifted through the brochures sent by the city’s tourist office and noticed among the offerings a mention of a blackheritage tour. I confess that I was amazed. That was my first indication that what this Northerner considered the deepest South was starting to acknowledge and even to promote an aspect of its history that might trouble or challenge the traveler in a way tourist offices rarely seem to want to do. In Savannah I visited several of the places listed and was moved and enriched and grateful.

They’re like brothers who, as only the family knows, couldn’t be more different. With a landscape of open, rolling farmland and small villages with white-steepled churches, Vermont is the most rural state in the Union, according to Census Bureau statistics. From an environmental point of view, it’s also the most politically liberal. New Hampshire, so heavily forested that it was once described by Vermont’s Richard Ketchum as looking “like a summer camp that’s been closed for the winter,” is the nation’s fourth most industrialized state and as politically conservative as any you can name.

After a World Cup soccer final won an impressive Nielsen rating on American television in 1966, three groups of United States Soccer Football Association potential franchise owners applied to start soccer leagues in the United States, but only one group agreed to the terms: 4 percent of the gate and 10 percent of any television rights to be paid in tribute to the U.S.S.F.A., as well as a twenty-five-thousand-dollar franchise fee charged to each league team. The new league’s season began in head-to-head competition when it took the field as the United Soccer Association or U.S.A.

Four months after Pearl Harbor it turned out that Japan could be surprised too. On April 18 the world-renowned aviator Lt. Col. James H. Doolittle commanded a daring reprisal mission of sixteen B-25 bombers. The idea for the “Doolittle Raid” had grown out of a December letter by a Fort Worth newspaper publisher, recommending that five hundred American bombers strike Tokyo. A thirty-page Navy analysis of the idea had led to an audacious plan that relied on launching heavily modified Army bombers from the carrier Hornet while it was deep in Japanese-controlled waters but still eight hundred miles from Japan itself. There was no thought of returning to the carrier; the planes would drop their bombs, then fly on another one thousand miles to land in China.

Among those sitting rapt in the Capitol building on April 6 as President Woodrow Wilson requested a declaration of war from Congress was Jeannette Pickering Rankin, representative from Montana. Shortly after taking her seat as the first woman member of the United States Congress, Rankin faced the central decision of her life. At a time when most American women had still not achieved the vote, Montana’s new women voters had sent one of their own to Washington. There, at three in the morning on the day of the House vote, the “lady from Montana” voted against the President’s request, saying, “I want to stand for my country, but I cannot vote for war.”

Declaring in their People’s Constitution that “all political power and sovereignty are originally vested in, and of right belong to, the people,” the followers of Thomas Dorr elected their man governor of Rhode Island on April 18, in defiance of the state government in Providence. The move very nearly led to local civil war.

Dorr and his fellow reformers had been angered by their state’s outdated system of apportionment, which granted a town like Newport six representatives to Providence’s four, although the latter was now more than twice Newport’s size.

Dorr had begun his activist political life as a state representative in the Whig party. When the Whigs resisted his reforms, he jumped to the Democrats, and when they proved equally gutless in his eyes, he helped form the Rhode Island Suffrage Association in 1840.

1842 1917 1942 1967

In October of 1957, in an astonishing series of events, I found myself at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C., as an all-expenses-paid delegate to the First Congress on Better Living, sponsored by McCall’s magazine.

At the time, I was a typical fifties housewife, with a split-level in the suburbs, a husband, three kids, and a dog. However, I had a closet vice—I entered contests. McCall’s had announced a Remodel-A-Room contest and I sent away for an entry blank. The builder of our house had skimped on eating quarters, so I sent off as my entry a plan to convert our garage into a dining room. Early one morning in April the phone rang. It was McCall’s “House and Home” editor. She wanted to fly out to see if the plan I’d entered was feasible. She came, she measured, she nodded: it was. I’d won! In the fall the room I’d designed would be built.

A handful of graduates from my college have gained notoriety, but none, certainly, was more notorious than Sally Rand. In the fall of 1976, early into my senior year at Columbia College in Columbia, Missouri, Sally came back for a visit—and then some.

I was a student of the music department, and all of us in the performing arts had been apprised of her forthcoming participation in an alumni (read that fund-raising) variety show. I was not as prepared for the knock on my dorm-room door by a breathless co-ed saying, “We’re trying to furnish a room for Sally Rand. Can you contribute anything?” The college had made arrangements for Ms. Rand at the finest hotel in town. She had countered by stating emphatically that she wanted to stay in the same dorm she had stayed in as a girl, St. Clair, now the “Nancy-can-we-have-your-bedspread?” dorm. Reportedly Sally had said, “I just want to be one of the girls.”