The oldest golf joke I know is one about the player who threw his clubs into the ocean after a terrible round and the next day was drowned trying to get them back again. To people who don’t play golf, this is a silly story; to those of us who do, it isn’t. Trying to comprehend the appeal of this frustrating game has engaged the interest of poets and lunatics for centuries with limited success. Passion cannot be explained, only endured.
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January 2011
New Mexico is Billy-the-Kid country. In Santa Fe’s First Presbyterian Church, young Henry McCarty stood by in March 1873 as his mother exchanged vows with William Henry Harrison Antrim. Eight years later, alias Billy Bonney, a.k.a. the Kid, he spent three months in the jail on Water Street. In Silver City, he attended elementary school and, not yet fifteen, pulled off a celebrated escape up the chimney of the jail. In Lincoln he fought as a Regulator in the Lincoln County War and, after breaking out of the county lockup, gunned down two deputies. In nearby White Oaks he disposed of cattle rustled from Texas cowmen. In Mesilla he stood trial for the murder of Sheriff William Brady and heard Judge Warren Bristol pronounce the sentence of death. In Fort Sumner he dealt monte in Beaver Smith’s saloon. Across the old military parade ground, in Pete Maxwell’s bedroom, a .45 slug from Sheriff Pat Garrett’s Colt six-shooter ended his life at the age of twenty-one.
When we began to prepare our first travel issue, published in April 1987, some of us wondered a little about the legitimacy of the subject. Where did it fit into our mandate as a history magazine? But for those of us on the staff to whom travel is only slightly less necessary than breathing, the question posed no problem. We knew that whenever we left home—even if we were just going from the front door to the bus stop—we might stumble upon history, if only we could recognize it. And if we needed a measure of authority to ratify our certainty that place and history are entwined, we had only to recall that their embrace is a central theme of literature. Among those it has fascinated is T. S. Eliot. “The end is where we start from,” he wrote in Four Quartets. So do we; what we see around us is the culmination of everything that has gone before, and that’s how we work to fit together the pieces of geography, history, and travel.
From November 17 to 22, 1963, I was in Dallas to cover a soft-drink convention for a trade magazine. That fateful week produced some unusual coincidences for me. One of the Tuesday speakers was Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who had been lined up by his friend and later aide Cliff Carter, a 7-Up bottler from Bryan, Texas, whom I knew professionally. I was with the reception group when Johnson arrived more than a half-hour late. He made it clear that if he was not put on to speak immediately, he would leave. The presiding officer reluctantly stopped Charles Brower, president of BBDO advertising agency, in mid-sentence, after which Johnson made a decidedly political talk. Mr. Brower got a tumultuous ovation when he returned to the podium with the opening comment “Some of our best programs are interrupted by commercials.”
William Henry Harrison, the Whig who had defeated the incumbent President Martin Van Buren in the election of 1840, died of pneumonia on April 4, after only four weeks in office. Harrison had delivered his inaugural address in a severe March chill, speaking for an hour and forty minutes. Afterward the sixty-eight-year-old President developed a lingering cold that grew into pneumonia. A month to the day after his swearing in, he was dead. Mrs. Harrison, who was also ill, had not yet even taken up residence in the White House. Harrison’s Vice President, John Tyler, arrived in Washington just as the sun rose on the day of the funeral. Although the constitutional rules for succession were still in doubt, Tyler took the oath of office at Brown’s Indian Queen Hotel, in time to attend the funeral as President.
To revive its Civil Rights Act of 1866, vetoed in late March, the Senate on April 9 mustered its first override ever of a presidential veto. In part a response to the Supreme Court’s notorious 1857 Dred Scott decision as well as to the black codes being enacted by many Southern legislatures, the act guaranteed the rights of citizenship for “all persons born in the U.S. and not subject to any foreign powers, excluding Indians not taxed …”
On April 5 Charles Spencer Chaplin became the highest-paid star in Hollywood when he signed a one-year contract with the Mutual Film Corporation for the sum of $670,000. Just three years earlier the English actor had left the London vaudeville stage to make his first one-reeler for Mack Sennett. “Well,” Chaplin declared upon signing, “I’ve got this much if they never give me another cent—I guess I’ll go and buy a whole dozen ties.” In another two years the Little Tramp would sign with First National for one million dollars. Throughout much of April newspaper readers followed reports of scouting patrols of National Guardsmen pursuing the Mexican nationalist Francisco (“Pancho”) Villa and his followers across the desert. The going was often dogged. Pack mules sank knee-deep into the sand; the terrain was bewildering, and captured enemy troops denied ever having seen Villa. The hunt became so frustrating that when the U.S. Cavalry discovered fresh snow tracks in the mountains, it made the front pages.
In April Charles A. Lindbergh became a national political figure as the star member of the America First Committee. He had already made known to Congress his pessimism about France and Britain’s chances against Germany, and his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, had written a curious book, The Wave of the Future , dreamily equating totalitarian and democratic “sins.” On April 17 in Chicago Lindbergh made an address for America First. He said Britain was doomed. In New York five days later he followed by announcing, “France has now been defeated,” and urged America to be pitiless in both cases. As soon as Lindbergh joined the committee its membership swelled from three hundred thousand to eight hundred thousand. The flier became a worry to the administration, for unlike the committee’s other famous members—professional pacifists and movie stars and a millionaire publisher—he was a national hero seemingly above personal interest. Lindbergh, for his part, said it especially pained him to be working side by side with pacifists when he’d rather be fighting a war he could believe in.