When a young George Washington surveyed the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers, forming the Ohio, in 1753, he observed that the land there was “extreamly well situated for a Fort; as it has the absolute Command of both Rivers.” After the English finally wrested control from the French in 1758, they christened the surrounding area “Pittsbourgh.”
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January 2011
It’s a good thing for Ben Loeterman and Eric Stange that they didn’t have a passionate interest in the Thirty Years’ War. Loeterman and Stange are the co-writers and two of the six producers for the forthcoming PBS broadcast The War That Made America , and it took them as long to make it as it took the French, British, colonists, and Indians to fight the real thing.
December 1, 1955, was a cool, drizzly night in Montgomery. James F. Blake, a veteran of World War II and a veteran bus driver, was maneuvering the bus he normally took on the Montgomery Avenue route through downtown toward Cleveland Avenue on the city’s west side.
On Montgomery buses the front 10 seats were reserved for whites. If there were no whites on board, the seats remained empty. The last 10 seats were for blacks, and the middle 16 could be occupied by either race, except a white person was never asked to sit next to or behind an African-American. The driver was given the responsibility and the authority to maintain the separation of the races by adjusting the seating as needed.
We can only imagine what James F. Blake must have been thinking when he pulled his bus into the yard of the Montgomery Bus Lines at the end of his run on December 1, 1955. For the most part, it had been a routine day’s work, but that one incident when the black woman had refused to move to the back of the bus had to have been infuriating. Still, Blake had done what he thought he was supposed to do, and the police had come and taken her off to jail.
the henry ford, dearborn, mich.2005_6_60
June 1, 1926
Norma Jeane Mortensen is born at Los Angeles General Hospital, Los Angeles, to Gladys Pearl Monroe Baker. Gladys Baker will spend much of her life in and out of mental institutions.
September 1935–june 1937
Nine-year-old Norma Jeane is sent to live at a Los Angeles orphanage. Marilyn later said of her childhood, “No one ever told me I was pretty when I was a little girl. All little girls should be told they are pretty, even if they aren’t.”
June 19, 1942
At 16 Norma Jeane escapes foster-home existence and marries a neighbor, a former football jock at Van Nuys High, named James Dougherty.
Spring 1944
Jim is sent overseas. Norma Jeane begins work on an assembly line at the Radioplane Company. The winsome Mrs. Dougherty is photographed for a promotional piece on women in the war effort. This gets the attention of modeling agents.
July 23, 1946
The New York City Fire Museum is in a century-old firehouse on Spring Street. Inside, there is some supremely handsome machinery: hand pumpers, steam pumpers with their heroic nickeled boilers, early internal-combustion-powered trucks whose squared-off snouts look part toy-like, part martial. And, in a room next to them is a glass case filled with dusty rubbish. Here one can see fragments of what look like plumbing fixtures, a garden trowel, broken this and rusty that. All of it is deeply, wrenchingly fascinating, because this is detritus from the World Trade Center. The trowel was used to sift through the wreckage; a riveted triangular piece of metal is a flake of skin from one of the airplanes.
What makes this miscellany hypnotic is authenticity. The piece of airplane isn’t representative of a typical airplane fragment; it is a fragment of one of the planes that brought down the towers.
While Hollywood has effectively captured the essence of many professions, it has consistently missed the mark with firefighting. The three main efforts, The Towering Inferno , Backdraft , and the recent Ladder 49 —along with the cable TV series “Rescue Me”—contain some drama but have very little to do with actual fire conditions or the people who fight the fires.
I have heard actors say that humor is the most difficult part of their trade. Firehouse humor is especially hard to mimic.
Buckets
For almost a century these were the only way of putting water on the flames. In many cities, each house and business had to keep at least one bucket, sometimes painted with the owner’s name. At the cry of “Fire!” everybody was required to race to the site and join the bucket brigade.
Hand Pumpers
Since at least the ancient Romans, man has sought a mechanical means of spraying water on fires. One of the first people to make it practical was Richard Newsham of London. In 1731 New York City purchased two of Newsham’s simple hand-pumped engines, eventually building its first firehouse to store them. When fires broke out, men dragged the engines to the site and formed a bucket brigade to fill their reservoirs. Then the pumps were manned and water began to shoot out of a gooseneck nozzle emerging from the top.
Hoses