“Squirming & crawling about from place to place can do no good,” Abraham Lincoln once lectured a ne’er-do-well stepbrother ambitious to leave the family’s log cabin for greener pastures. Yet 10 years later, as President-elect, Lincoln admitted: “I hold the value of life is to improve one’s condition.”
Of all the hundreds of personal letters Abraham Lincoln sent during his lifetime, none of the recipients remains more deeply shrouded in mystery than Lydia Bixby of Boston.
Was she the prototype for the Gold Star Mother, the first “Mrs. Ryan.” (One recalls Gen. George Marshall reading the Bixby letter aloud to his staff in Steven Spielberg’s movie Saving Private Ryan to justify excusing the surviving Ryan brother from further military service.) Spielberg’s cinematic validation notwithstanding, did the original Mrs. Bixby legitimately earn President Lincoln’s pity by sacrificing five sons killed “gloriously on the field of battle,” as Lincoln wrote in his famous condolence letter.
June 1, 1934
A direct descendant of the frontiersman Daniel Boone, Charles Eugene Patrick “Pat” Boone is born, to a building contractor and a registered nurse, in Jacksonville, Florida.
1936
The Boone family moves to Nashville, Tennessee.
1947
At the age of 13 croons on a Saturday morning teen-talent radio program, “Youth on Parade,” where he is billed as a young Bing Crosby.
1952
Graduates from high school, and wins first place in the school’s talent contest, beating out a fellow classmate, a budding opera singer named Shirley Foley.
January 1953
Pat Boone Says: You Don’t Have to Wiggle
. . . Do I think performers have a moral obligation to their fans? Well, I do. I have had considerable success in the rock-and-roll field, but I think that some of its exponents, usually the instrumentalists, are giving it a black eye. They are way off-base with their onstage contortions. I don’t think anything excuses the suggestive gyrations that some rock-and-rollers go in for . . . . I like rhythm, too. But the human body consists of about 200 separate bones and I don’t think it’s necessary to call all of them into play even on a jittery ditty like, “Long, Tall Sally.” I belong to the finger-snapping school myself. That, and a little tapping of the feet, is enough to satisfy my soul. And it seems to satisfy my audiences, too.
—Pat Boone, This Week magazine, July 7, 1957
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Every military triumph also contains tragedy—think of the thousands of men who weren’t moving inland at the end of June 6, 1944—and the Battle of Midway, decisive as any victory ever gained by American arms, holds one that Alvin Kernan feels should be better remembered.
Kernan’s new book, The Unknown Battle of Midway: The Destruction of the American Torpedo Squadrons (Yale, 181 pages, $26.00), has elements of autobiography—during the fight he was a member of Torpedo Squadron Six aboard the carrier Enterprise —but his aim is to tell about a series of bad choices and mistakes that stretched back across years and ended in a needless slaughter of our airmen. The ingredients ranged from poor training to class friction, from flawed equipment to equally flawed theories of how to deploy it.
An early advertising campaign for the Zippo, which George G. Blaisdell began producing in 1933 in Bradford, Pennsylvania, featured a young lady lighting a cigarette while leaning into a wind so strong it molded her dress to her body. Later ads made a stronger case for “matchless performance,” including one about Sgt. John Nappi’s Zippo, which flared faithfully throughout a 1969 typhoon on Okinawa.