January 2011

As I walked down a side path at Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, on a bright, sunny day in June, two quite distinct sights converged just in front of me. One was a middle-aged foursome of fellow visitors, all clad in the near-mandatory style of the vacationing 1980s American: immaculate pastel sports clothes and bulbous white sneakers. The other sight was a spectacular tree, one whose branches, instead of ascending toward the heavens, droop mournfully down to the ground—what garden people call a weeping form. Suddenly a member of the foursome broke away from her companions, ducked between the sagging branches, and disappeared completely from view, rather like a chipmunk bolting into the shrubbery.

Longwood Gardens is located about thirty miles southwest of Philadelphia, in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. It’s open from 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. usually and 9:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M. during the summer (as well as many evenings for fountain displays and holidays). Once you’re there, guided tours are available, or you can pick up the excellent self-guided tour book. Additional information is available from the visitors’ center (215-388-6741).

President Martin Van Buren was by all accounts a likable man, but his cultivated manners were not seen as virtuous by the voters who had elected Andrew Jackson before him. The Whig party decided to exploit Van Buren’s reputation as an aristocrat in the 1840 presidential election by reviving the log-cabin populism with which Jackson had beaten them twelve years earlier.

Gen. Philip Sheridan’s Federal cavalry divisions routed a Confederate position held by Gen. George Pickett on April 1 at Five Forks, Virginia, in the last major battle of the Civil War. Having turned the Confederate right flank, the Union commander Ulysses Grant ordered an attack on the center at Petersburg for the next morning.

Powerless before Grant’s immense army, Lee fled and informed Jefferson Davis that his government would have to abandon Richmond. Federal troops entered the Confederate capital on April 3, and President Lincoln visited the next day, displaying boyish pleasure as he sat in Davis’s chair.

Bad press was nothing new to the Shubert brothers, but that didn’t mean they had to like it. Banning particularly negative critics from their theaters in Chicago, Boston, and New York seemed sensible to Jake, Lee, and J. J. Shubert, but the negative reviews kept coming. “I do not mind missing Shubert openings,” said one New York theater critic. “I can always go to the second night and see the closing.” When Alexander Woollcott of The New York Times found himself physically prevented from entering Shubert theaters after he had panned one of the brothers’ productions called Taking Chances , his paper decided to fight back. On April 4 the Times informed the Shuberts that their advertising was no longer welcome on the most important theater page in the city.

The “phony war” ended on April 9, when Germany, after a quiet winter, invaded Denmark and Norway. Claiming a mission to “defend true neutrality in the north,” the German occupation forces rolled over the scant military resistance they met and quickly installed Nazi governments in both countries. The day after the invasion Iceland repudiated Denmark’s control over the island and declared itself an independent state.

∗In Chicago’s Comiskey Park on April 16, twenty-one-year-old Bob Feller pitched the only opening-day no-hit game in baseball history, leading his Cleveland Indians to a 1-0 victory over the White Sox. Feller went on to win a career-high twenty-seven games in 1940.

∗Alfred Hitchcock’s first American film, Rebecca , starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine, opened in April. Adapted from Daphne du Maurier’s novel, Rebecca was to be the only Hitchcock film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture.

NASA launched the first commercial satellite from Cape Kennedy on April 6. The Communications Satellite Corporation, a privately owned company that paid the government to put its eighty-five-pound Early Bird satellite into orbit, predicted the Comsat and others like it would revolutionize telephone, television, and teletype communications between distant parts of the world. “My goodness, now we’ll be able to call everybody!” said Vice-President Hubert Humphrey. “I don’t know if this is a good thing or not. We have enough telephone calls in the office already.”

∗Jack Nicklaus won the Masters golf tournament on April 11 in Augusta, Georgia. His score of 271 was a tournament record.

Okay, let’s start off with a big one, a major triumph. February 27, 1989. We spent the previous night in a Best Western in Durant, Oklahoma. Now, after a quick breakfast, we’re packed and on our way. This is southeast Oklahoma, just a few miles north of the Red River and the Texas border, and we head northeast on U.S. 69 and U.S. 75 for thirty-two miles to Atoka, then cut east on State 3 for another thirty miles. At Antlers we pick up U.S. 271, and we’re going northeast again.

Thirty years into the era of jet travel it’s still possible to sail a great ocean liner out of New York, once “the greatest and gaudiest of the Atlantic ports,” as John Maxtone-Graham, the chronicler of transatlantic travel, observed.

Most of Europe’s ports were fairly remote from the cities they served, but New York’s gateway was and remains part of the city itself, stretching along the western edge of midtown Manhattan. In the 1920s and 1930s festive midnight sailings gave departing travelers the definitively romantic backdrop of the city’s lit skyscrapers. There were bands and banners and confetti and well-wishers on the pier. A 1920s timetable I own tells me that in the summer months as many as eighteen liners a week left New York for Europe.

For information on Royal Viking cruises along the New England and Canadian coasts, call 800-422-8000. Other cruise lines that will be sending ships on the same route include Cunard (800-221-4770)7 Princess (213-553-1770), Bermuda Star (800-237-5361 ), Regency (212-972-4499), and American Canadian Caribbean (800-556-7450). There will be some variety in the ports selected and, perhaps more important, in the time allotted for each port.

In Quebec save a few hours for a visit to the Musée de la Civilisation, opened in 1989 on Rue Dalhousie, just across from where the ships dock. If there were an Academy Award for museums, this one would win—year after year. The permanent exhibit called Mémoires offers a beautifully expressed, historically grounded view of the Quebecois—how they lived in centuries past and where they stand today. Exhibits are in French only, but English-speaking docents stand by to help.