January 2011

On May 5 the Democratic National Convention in Baltimore nominated President Martin Van Buren to run for a second term. Unable to choose from a number of favorite-son candidates for Vice-President, the delegates left the selection to their “fellow-citizens in the several states.”

Thirty thousand Whigs had also descended upon the city to stage a raucous parade aimed at drawing the nation’s attention away from the Democrats. In a procession that featured log cabins on wheels and barrels of hard cider symbolizing the roughhewn image of their candidate, Gen. William Henry Harrison, the hero of the Battle of Tippecanoe, and his Vice-Presidential candidate, John Tyler, the Whigs strutted through the streets of Baltimore on the day before Van Buren’s nomination, chanting, “Van, Van is a used-up man” and “Tippecanoe and Tyler too.” The Baltimore Patriot said of the parade that “a thousand banners, burnished by the sun, floating in the breeze, ten thousand handkerchiefs waved by the fair daughters of the city, gave seeming life and motion to the very air.”

Fistfighting and sabotage were as important as lifesaving in the chaotic world of New York City fire fighting. Too many of the city’s volunteer fire companies would race to a blaze chiefly in order to prevent another from putting it out first. Professional fire departments in several other cities had ended the spectacle of rival companies brawling in the light of a fire they had been called to extinguish. They were also less expensive. Paid fire departments in London, Cincinnati, Baltimore, Boston, and St. Louis cost far less in insurance and maintenance combined than New York paid to support its 125 volunteer engine houses. “There is no actual fire in the City of New York which does not attract at least one thousand two hundred firemen and about as many ex-members with the different companies, the children, the nincompoops and the thieves,” complained one newspaper. “The Fire Department of New York is a costly and ridiculous farce.” On May 2 New York abolished volunteer companies and established its own six-hundred-man Metropolitan Fire Department.

By the time Stephen Moulton Babcock arrived at the University of Wisconsin to teach chemistry in 1887, the dairy industry in America was in turmoil. Lacking an effective test to determine the fat content of milk, creameries were buying milk by the pound, paying the same price for a skimmed or watered product as for whole milk. Consumers never could tell the quality of the dairy products they bought. “The creamery business all over the country is going to pot,” complained the university’s dean to his new chemist. “The honest men . . . aren’t taking their milk to the creameries any more.” Two years later, on May 15, 1890, Babcock announced his discovery of the butterfat test that bears his name.

On May 1, as the German government was offering apologies and reparations for having sunk the unarmed American tanker Gulflight , an advertisement appeared in New York newspapers warning Americans that they traveled on British ships through the North Atlantic at their own risk. The British ocean liner Lusitania sailed from New York for England that day.

The piano virtuoso Vladimir Horowitz ended a twelve-year absence from the stage on May 9 with a concert at Carnegie Hall. The “electric lightning pianist” had retired from public performance in 1953 at the height of his popularity. “I hope I am still a virtuoso,” Horowitz told the press when he announced the concert. “It’s nice to be a virtuoso.”

Though Horowitz missed several notes in his first piece before regaining his composure, his powers were clearly undiminished. “I was a little nervous, you know,” he said after the concert. “But if the record is released we must keep those notes .... Let people hear me as I really was.” The drama of a virtuoso’s return overshadowed all else. The album of the concert, with the sour notes included, won three Grammy awards in 1966.

Early in January, as I roamed the shopping mall, a "50% off” sign caught my eye. Stacked on the counter was a pile of small gray boxes. They held souvenir pieces of the now-defunct Berlin Wall. These innocent objects jerked me back to the closest I ever came to being trapped on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain.

In July 1961 we were driving east from Prague in a new Peugeot crammed with a month’s luggage for the four of us, my husband and I and another couple from our home university in Virginia. We were headed for Moscow and the International Congress of Biochemistry, one of the first postwar scientific meetings held in the U.S.S.R. A brash sense of adventure kindled our chatter as we sped over the Czech countryside toward the Soviet border that fair summer day.

In 1970 I was a campaign director in Wisconsin for the Republican gubernatorial candidate. The incumbent governor was not running for reelection, so the race was wide-open.

Wisconsin Republicans had close ties with the Nixon White House, mostly through John Mitchell, who had been bond counsel for the state and was well known by legislative leaders and the administration. It was not difficult, therefore, to arrange a presidential visit to Wisconsin on behalf of our candidate for governor.

In October of 1970 a visit was laid on. The President would come to Green Bay, do an airport appearance, and then go to the Brown County Arena for a big rally with Bart Starr (quarterback of the Green Bay Packers) and the candidate. And that’s what he did.

Most of us associate the pocket flask with the Roaring Twenties era of the bootlegger and the speakeasy, but in fact, the tradition of the portable spirits holder in America is far more venerable. The deep amethyst bottle on the opposite page, for instance, a brilliant example of the blown glass produced at the Pennsylvania glassworks of Henry W. Stiegel in the eighteenth century, was almost certainly filled with an alcoholic beverage and carried in the pocket of some colonial burgher, although it is so decorative that it was undoubtedly considered an ornamental object as well.

The making of glass was actually the first manufacturing industry established in the New World, beginning in Jamestown in 1608. But early efforts there and in New Amsterdam, Salem, and Philadelphia were short-lived. The first generations of settlers, in their gritty struggle for survival, had little use for such refinements as glass drinking vessels.

There isn’t, at first glance, much history in Las Vegas. What happened in the past has no value in the “City without Clocks”; what matters is the bet on the table and the dice in your hand. The present is king here.

Start by calling the Nevada Commission on Tourism (1-800-237-0774). The downtown hotels—Binion’s Horseshoe, the Golden Nugget, the Fremont, and the Four Queens—have a historic quality that the newer, glitzy hotels on the Strip lack. Be sure to visit the Clark County Heritage Museum in Henderson (702-455-7955) and the excellent Marjorie Barrick Museum of Natural History at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas (702-739-3381).