January 2011

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.
The Eagle Still Aloft Not Quite Over, Over There Torn Curtain

Shortly after leaving the Navy in the summer of 1968 to become an airline pilot, I was at the third crew member’s station in the darkened recesses of the cockpit of a Boeing 707 airliner on the long, lonely leg from Honolulu to Manila.

Being a flight engineer offered little of the satisfaction of commanding a Navy aircraft, and it presented a formidable challenge in keeping alert during the long night over the featureless Pacific. By the time the purser entered the cockpit with a request from the cabin, I was weary of trying to identify stars and doing mental three-place multiplication problems.

“Captain,” she said, “one of the passengers has asked to visit the cockpit for a few minutes.”

“Do you know who he is?” the captain asked.

“No, I don’t know him.”

But the captain took no chances. “Please talk to him. For all we know he may be some kind of bigwig in the aviation industry or something.”

The November rain came steadily down, cold, persistent, promising snow, as it had for days. The last fallen leaves of autumn floated down the streets, carried along by the steady streams flowing toward the stormsewer gratings. Some people thought the rain was caused by the firing of the guns in Europe, where the Great War had gone on for more than four years. Others said, no, there had been many other Novembers with rain like this, at the beginning of winter.

In northern France the armies—German and Austrian on one side; French and British, and lately American, on the other—had dug miles of trenches, facing each other across the torn and ravaged strips of earth known as no man’s land. From time to time men from one army or the other would climb on crude ladders from the trenches, going “over the top” to try to take the positions held by their opponents. They advanced through no man’s land, in the face of rifle and machine-gun fire, artillery and mortar shells, and, if weather and wind were favorable, poisonous gases.

From the time of Pearl Harbor we were told that Soviet Russia was our friendly ally against Nazi Germany. By the time the war ended it was becoming apparent that the Soviet Union was not behaving as an ally at all. Winston Churchill gave a famous speech in Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946, in which he introduced the term iron curtain to describe the line behind which Stalin was holding Eastern Europe hostage. The term iron curtain is considered by most to be an original product of Churchill’s oratorical genius. It took me forty-five years to discover that I was in personal possession of evidence to the contrary.

The Chippendale card table on the opposite page was made in Massachusetts between 1760 and 1780, about half a century after special furniture for playing games first made its appearance in the Colonies. The idea came from England, where card tables—symbols of growing prosperity and the consequent expansion of leisure time—had become a social necessity in every fashionable home. The same held true in America by the time this beautifully preserved example was produced, and it is fairly typical of card tables in great houses along the Eastern seaboard.

Once more the magazine goes off in quest of the history that lies at the end of every journey. Among the excursions:

“More than any other game,” says Peter Andrews, “golf is played with a sense of history.” As a golf writer, Andrews has a job many people wouldn’t think was work at all: he gets sent all around the country to play the game. As a writer for this magazine, he is more aware than most that when he lines up a putt on the green, many ghosts are standing at his elbow.

When their side lost the Revolution, New Englanders who had backed Great Britain dismantled their houses, loaded them into schooners, and sailed north to New Brunswick, where George HI still ruled. There they established the town of St. Andrews. It flourishes.

The New Mexico tourist council would like you to be aware of the state’s rich Spanish heritage, and its role as a center of the arts, and so forth—but there’s no getting away from the tremendous bucktoothed specter of the world’s most famous outlaw. Robert M. Utley, author of a highly praised biography of the Kid, follows his trail from Santa Fe to Silver City.

The secret history of Yale University, revealed by one who has studied it for six decades … the restorative past of Hot Springs, Arkansas, recalled by Wayne Fields, who takes a bath at the last house still running on what was once known across the nation as Bathhouse Row … the peculiar story of how that Bible got into your hotel room … the railroad that went to sea … and, because there are as many different journeys as there are Americans, more.