January 2011

As part of Operation Prairie, the 3d Battalion, 4th Marines attacked North Vietnamese Army installations along Razorback Ridge in the Quang Tri province on September 22. It was the hardest fighting of the seven-week-old campaign. Helicopters assisted ground forces throughout the fighting, now and then bombing the jungle to clear the way for the Marines’ advance and resupplying the men each night to leave them free of extra gear as they searched the hills for the North Vietnamese Army. By early October North Vietnamese Army Division 324B had abandoned the fight and slipped back across the demilitarized zone into North Vietnam.

When it comes to lawn care, my father has always insisted on doing it the hard way. No shortcuts or modern conveniences for him. After my parents bought a new house in San Diego in the early 1970s, he refused to break up the soil with a Rototiller the way most people did. His more thorough alternative involved digging a foot down with a shovel, pulling the rocks out, and forcing the dirt through a mesh screen. Eventually the whole family joined him, flailing at the hard clay soil with pickaxes and shovels like a band of suburban sharecroppers.

The Mother of Lawns

Elizabeth, as they drove along, watched for the first appearance of Pemberley Woods with some perturbation; and when at length they turned in at the lodge, her spirits were in a high flutter.

The park was very large, and contained great variety of ground. They entered it in one of its lowest points, and drove for some time through a beautiful wood stretching over a wide extent.

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.
Melee in San Jose Mystery Host All’s Fair

One October day in 1970, I sat atop a truck in the parking lot behind the Municipal Auditorium in San Jose, California, as President Richard Nixon, inside the auditorium, gave a speech to Republican loyalists, condemning the cowardice and irresponsibility of me and about one thousand others who were there to protest the war in Vietnam. Outdoor loudspeakers had been provided so that we could hear his speech clearly.

The arrangements for security had crammed anybody who looked like a protester into the parking lot, which was full of Oldsmobiles and Cadillacs and other cars of the prosperous establishment folks inside. A line of limousines waited in the street alongside the building, ready to sweep past after the speech. The crowd in the parking lot might well have been the children of those inside and was peaceable enough, wanting only to yell things like “No more war” as the President left the building. Uniformed police officers and Secret Service types clustered at the head of the column of limos and at the exit from the parking lot onto the street. The back of the building was screened by a line of large buses.

From 1929 to 1933 I danced with a traveling stage company for Fanchon and Marco, well-known producers of the day. On June 9, 1931, we opened at the Capitol Theater in Chicago. That afternoon Felix, one of the chorus, burst into the dressing room to tell us we were invited to dinner and a big party at the Lexington Hotel. She said, “There’ll be talent scouts there. Girls from all the big shows are invited!”

When I arrived at the Lexington with my dancing partner, Eve, we discovered an entire floor had been taken over for this party. The men wore tuxedos and most of the women were dressed in formais. Our “best” dresses were not ankle length.

Yet with all this formality something felt strange from the moment we stepped into a room where a band was playing. For one thing, no one seemed to know who our host was. The men appeared to know one another well and kept up a shouting dialogue that we didn’t understand.

“Hey, Al, who’s your bootlegger?”

It was October 1944, and the pundits were busy analyzing Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s bid for a fourth term. His opponent was Thomas E. Dewey, the former crime-busting district attorney of New York County and now governor of the state. FDR had lined up an impressive array of big names to support him in the state. My brush with history involves one of these.

I’m talking about Fiorello H. La Guardia, the mayor of New York City, the Little Flower. While ostensibly a Reform Republican, he was strongly proRoosevelt. In fact, the President had just appointed him director of the U.S. Office of Civilian Defense.

I met Hizzoner on a number of occasions. My father was assistant manager of the New York Philharmonic, and one of his duties was to oversee the summer concerts that took place in Lewisohn Stadium. La Guardia opened the Stadium Summer Series every year by conducting the Philharmonic in “The Star-Spangled Banner.” I had attended many of these opening concerts and had met La Guardia at the receptions that always followed. But now I was to meet him one on one—in a CBS radio studio.

Clay vs. Tyler Leg Show Big-Screen Epic The Kid The War Escalates

All but one of President Tyler’s cabinet members resigned on September 11. The ostensible cause was his veto of national banking legislation; what was really at issue, however, was the future direction of Tyler’s Whig party. Its leader, Sen. Henry Clay of Kentucky, urged the walkout as a test of loyalty to the anti-Tyler party mainstream.

Clay considered John Tyler’s administration a “regency.” Tyler, the first President to ascend to the office through the death of his predecessor, did not share most Whigs’ pro-business sympathies, and Clay wanted an issue to force the President’s hand. Tyler had less sympathy than his fellow Whigs for the idea of a revived national bank. He wanted to limit the bank’s powers by protecting the right of states to accept or refuse local “franchises” of the national system. Clay, a staunch supporter of the bank, said of his President, “I’ll drive him before me,” and created the legislation least palatable to Tyler to force a crisis.

Lincoln once said that three things only make up a nation: its land, its people, and its laws. When the 13 colonies declared independence, they suddenly found themselves, at least in theory, with hardly any laws at all. To meet the emergency, they quickly enacted legislation declaring the common law of England, which was in effect before July 4, 1776, to be once again the law of the newly sovereign states.

But, as the nation developed, the common law had to be adapted to suit American conditions. The complicated laws of land tenure, for instance, a holdover from feudal days, were drastically simplified. Other changes came about for purely political reasons. One of these was the early adoption of the so-called American rule in this country’s courts. Under this rule, each side of a lawsuit pays its own legal costs, regardless of who wins. Under the English rule the losing side pays the costs of litigation.