Given the lack—perhaps permanent—of good hard data, most of what gets written about Robert Johnson runs along the same rutted paths: a few facts, a few conjectures, a threadbare reminiscence from one of the usual grizzled informants, and that’s about it—pretty thin gruel, especially considering the richness of Johnson’s music. It seemed wise to me, when I set out recently to write about Robert Johnson for Musician magazine—for the third or so time—to seek less traveled ground: Johnson’s impact on some of today’s most influential pop musicians.
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January 2011
Only weeks before he climbed the University of Texas tower on August 1 and took aim at dozens of his fellow students, Charles J. Whitman had confessed to a university psychiatrist that he thought of “going up on the tower with a deer rifle and … shooting people.” Whitman first killed his wife and mother, then loaded a trunk with ammunition, a knife, two water canisters, several high-powered rifles, and a shotgun bought on credit that day at Sears. He hauled the trunk to the top of the twenty-seven-story tower, got in place, and began firing from an observation ledge just before the tower clock tolled noon. His first victims had to lie for almost an hour in the heat before an armored car could be found to retrieve them. Whitman fired at points all over the campus, hitting a man on a bicycle, another watching from the bookstore, and wounding a policeman in the shoulder. Police fired at the tower from the ground and from an airplane circling above, but without visible result. Such a mass shooting by one gunman was unprecedented in America; after eighty minutes, twelve lay dead and thirty-one wounded.
On the night of August 25 a tracking station in Madrid received the first transmissions of pictures of the Earth as seen from the moon, 240,000 miles away. A camera mounted on NASA’s lunar orbiter, the first American spacecraft to circle the moon, shot the photographs from 24.7 miles above its surface. The initial pictures showed the Moon in huge, curving profile in the foreground; a smaller Earth dangled behind in space, wrapped completely in clouds. The orbiter moved slightly closer to the Moon to take pictures of craters, in search of possible future landing sites; according to a NASA official, a manned voyage to the moon was expected by the end of the decade.
The photographs were also important to scientists for pinpointing the earth’s terminator line, the line dividing the planet into light and dark halves. The lunar orbiter made a complete circle of the Moon every three and a half hours during its mission, sending back pictures each day; they were too clouded to reveal oceans and continents, but the space station scientists nonetheless pronounced them “beautiful.”
That’s it,” Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then U.S. ambassador to India, wrote to a colleague on the White House staff in 1973 on the subject of some issue of the moment. “Nothing will happen. But, then, nothing much is going to happen in the 1970s, anyway.”
On July 30, after procrastinating for nearly two years, Thomas Alva Edison applied for patents on his kinetograph and kinetoscope. He declined to pay an additional $150 to secure an international copyright for what was in fact motion-picture technology, declaring it was “not worth it.”
The nation’s first zoning ordinance became law on July 25 in New York City, restricting the height and mass of skyscraper projects and challenging architects to work under new “setback” rules. Some of the regulations had been first proposed at a City Plan Conference in 1912, but the construction of the then-gargantuan Equitable Building three years later had sped up reform efforts. The Equitable, designed by Ernest Graham, of the Chicago architecture firm of Burnham and Root, rose thirty-nine stories and threw whole blocks of lower Broadway into shadow. At the time, it was the most massive office building in the world— A CITY IN ITSELF , said one newspaper headline, HOUSING 16,000 SOULS . Its 1.2 million square feet of floor space sat on less than an acre of land.
At the time of her death on July 3 in New York City, Henrietta (“Hetty”) Green’s $100 million estate made her the richest woman in America. She had inherited a million dollars each from her father and aunt in 1865, and from then until her death at eightyone, she was known as a shrewd, if obsessive, manager of money. News writers reported—and contrived—stories of her miserliness, dubbing her the Witch of Wall Street. When, during a buying panic in January 1883, she demanded the return of $25 million in securities and $475,000 in cash from J. J. Cisco & Co., the firm went bankrupt, and a series of brokerage failures followed. She was a master lender of money, but even as she was lending $4.5 million to the city of New York, stories were circulating of her failing to pay her streetcar fare, of her moving from one boardinghouse to another in order to avoid tax assessors, and, most famously, of her refusal to pay a doctor to care for her son Ned when he injured his leg in a sledding accident. Her parsimony led to the leg’s amputation.
On July 17, in Cleveland, the Indians’ Ken Keltner made two inspired catches of line drives hit by Joe DiMaggio, and the second catch stopped the Yankee center fielder’s hitting streak at 56 consecutive games. Americans had watched in mounting astonishment as DiMaggio passed George Sisler’s modern record of 41 straight games, then Wee Willie Keeler’s 1897 mark of 44. When the streak nearly died a week before against the St. Louis Browns—DiMaggio managed a single in his last at bat—the Browns’ pitcher had been asked why he hadn’t walked the Yankee star to enter the record books as the man who ended it. “That wouldn’t have been fair—to him or to me,” Bob Muncrief told reporters. “Hell, he’s the greatest player I ever saw.”
The Chautauqua season runs nine weeks, from late June through August, attracting 180,000 visitors and residents. For information on packages, programs, and accommodations, contact the Chautauqua Institution, Chautauqua, NY 14711 (1-800-836-ARTS). The Division of Tourism for New York State provides maps and brochures on the Chautauqua-Allegheny region. Of the dozens of hotels and boardinghouses, the 1881 Athenaeum is the acknowledged star. A huge wooden structure with a cupola and a rambling porch filled with rocking chairs, it demands a visit even if you stay elsewhere. I was perfectly comfortable at its smaller, plainer neighbor on the lakefront, the William Baker Hotel.