January 2011

Despite the six New York City officers supposedly guarding him at Coney Island’s Half Moon Hotel, the mob informer Abe “Kid Twist” Reles flew six stories to his death on the morning of November 12. Two of his former colleagues, Louis Lepke and Lucky Luciano, had issued separate fifty-thousand-dollar contracts on his life, but police at the time publicly theorized that Reles had been trying to lower himself either to the room below or to the ground when he fell. No one could explain why he had landed twenty feet out from the side of the hotel.

On November 4, after nearly seven months on the trail, the Bidwell-Bartleson caravan crossed the Stanislaus River and reached Mount Diablo, fifty miles from San Francisco, becoming the first train of Western emigrants to enter the new California Territory.

The party, led by John Bartleson and Paul Geddes, had left Sapling Grove, Missouri (now Kansas), in the spring and joined forces with the missionary Father Pierre Jean De Smet and several Jesuit priests. Bartleson’s group hoped to establish homesteads and live in the perpetual spring that explorers had promised awaited them in the Pacific territory. The twenty-two-year-old John Bidwell, who had heard similar stories as a member of a Western Emigration Society in his Missouri town of Weston, helped organize the caravan and eventually became its secretary.

Father De Smet’s goal was to build a mission among the Flathead Indians in Montana, and his group was headed there. De Smet’s group depended entirely on a mountain man, Thomas Fitzpatrick, who had been a trapper in the Rockies and was the only member of the party familiar with the country.

When Jack London committed suicide on November 22, the author’s years of drinking and tireless work and his experiments with arsenic as a cure for several exotic diseases had already ravaged him. After determining a fatal dosage on a writing pad, he swallowed two vials of morphine sleeping pills. He was dead two months before his forty-first birthday.

For years afterward London’s myth resisted the true facts about his death. Some accounts still insist he died from uremie poisoning and was not a suicide. But his final scene could not have been acted out more clearly even in his own novel Martin Eden , in which a depleted American writer kills himself.

My wife and 1 moved to Texas in the early fall of 1963. We’d lived in Germany for a year while I finished my Army tour of duty, and decided to settle in Houston to be near her sister.

I worked with native Texans, who were deeply suspicious of anyone not from the Lone Star State, and it didn’t help that I was a Yankee Wasp from Massachusetts who thought that JFK was the cat’s pajamas. They knew that Kennedy was the Devil incarnate and were convinced that that Eastern Establishment so-and-so was letting the Catholic Church run the country. They were also in perpetual mourning for LBJ, who, as Vice President, had been shoveled into a corner.

I learned quickly that discussing politics was not the intellectual exercise I was accustomed to but rather like a declaration of war. After being soundly defeated a number of times, I knew to keep my mouth shut. Arguing with my Texas co-workers had only convinced them that I was just like every other Yankee—addled. Nice people, but don’t let them near the good china.

California Dreaming Literary Vagabond Can’t Land in Cleveland The Long Count The Conversation Flight of the Canary

Elegant geometric patterns, dynamic figures, and sophisticated draftsmanship unite in the ceramic bowl on the opposite page, which shows a man with rabbit ears and tail carrying a basket on his back. It is an excellent example of the pottery created between A.D. 1000 and 1150 by a few anonymous Native American artists. They were members of a group called the Mimbres, early ancestors of the Pueblo Indians, who inhabited large portions of southwestern New Mexico, and their pottery is considered the finest ancient art tradition in North America.

Bowls, the most common form of Mimbres pottery, were used for food storage and preparation, but they also served a final, significant role as funerary objects, buried with the dead beneath the earthen floors of Mimbres homes. While some held mortuary offerings, others, like this one, were ritualistically “killed”—a hole punctured the center of the bowl, making it useless to the living—and placed over the corpse’s head.

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Moscow Memories Kennedy in Texas

Delta-Bravo-Zero-Four-Black were our code words in Moscow that summer of 1954. The Cold War was on, and, despite our adolescence, we were right in the middle of it. Armed with Defense Department charts that showed the silhouettes, names, ranges, and blood-red stars of Soviet military aircraft, we scanned the skies and reported any unidentified sightings to our uniformed handlers at Fairchild Air Force Base. We peered through government-issue binoculars, watching for a sneak attack on Moscow—a small, rural, college town surrounded by contoured wheat fields in the panhandle of northern Idaho.

Blest be the man that spares these stones, And curst be he that moves my bones.

Such, I understand, is the inscription on the grave of William Shakespeare, and I would feel precisely the same way about my bones. And not only mine, but Zachary Taylor’s, which were rudely disturbed this June to satisfy the suspicions of a Florida author and one-time humanities professor named Clara Rising. While doing research for a book on “Old Rough and Ready,” our 12th president, she began to find something out of joint about the official story that Taylor died of cholera morbus or acute gastroenteritis as a result of eating bacterially tainted cherries and cold milk on the hot Fourth of July of 1850.

When I think back to a few days spent in Puerto Rico’s second city, Ponce, the recurring image is of a stage in the busy moments just before the curtain rises, an impression that probably harks back to my two seasons as a production assistant in summer stock many years ago. I envision the stagehands sprinting through the Belle Epoque set that is Ponce, arranging the last props, while the performers wait in the wings for their cues to stroll onstage.

Last spring I was privileged to watch the curtain going up in Ponce on a moment of great change. The city is partway through a five-hundred-million-dollar restoration effort timed to coincide with the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s 1493 voyage to Puerto Rico and the 300th year of Ponce’s settlement. Located on the island’s sere south coast, overlooking the Caribbean Sea, Ponce is known as the Pearl of the South and is considered the most indigenous of Puerto Rican cities, a place that despite its two hundred thousand inhabitants retains the pace and intimacy of a small town.