January 2011

A caption on page 117 of the article on Georgian architecture in the February issue (“The Best of Georgian”) says that the arched doorway on the second story of a Manhattan bank is an “anomaly.” In fact, the second-floor doorway appears to me to be clearly copied from the Old State House in Boston (1713). It is said to have been functional at least once, when George Washington made a speech from the balcony.

Please don’t misunderstand: I do enjoy the magazine, and especially the features on business and art—and now architecture.

The big push” is how the G-3 journal of the 103d Infantry Division described its attack against elements of the German 19th Army on November 16, 1944. At H-plus-15, American guns bombarded enemy lines, and the regiments moved forward. In Company F of the 410th Infantry Regiment, the future author of Wartime, 2d Lt. Paul Fussell, was about to receive his baptism of fire and his first Purple Heart when shrapnel tore up his elbow. That was near St-Dié, on the western slopes of the Vosges Mountains of Alsace.

As one of a very few living natives of Colorado City, Colorado, I was glad to see the place getting some attention in the July/August issue (“History Happened Here”). But Spencer Penrose did not make his fortune “in the gold refineries at Cripple Creek.” The mines were there, but most of the mills were in Colorado City, and they once constituted its chief raison d’être , “Incorporated into Colorado Springs in 1917,” the author remarks, “it has the feel of a real place that the downtown somehow lacks.” Well, the business section of “Old Colorado City” is now gussied up with phony frontier facades and is full of boutiques and other tourist traps. When I was a boy the City was, for tourists, only a stretch they had to get through on the way from the Springs to Manitou and Pikes Peak. It really had “the feel of a real place” in those days.

The “Letter from the Editor” in the May/ June issue states, referring to television, that “technology and the law of supply and demand have made a rich man’s toy into a poor man’s necessity.” Come now, do you honestly believe that? It’s true that technology and the law of supply and demand have lowered the cost of television sets. But that does not make them a necessity. I’m sure many people consider having a television set, or two or three, a necessity, but it really isn’t. I survive very well without one. Of course, among many things that make up for this unusual deprivation, I have American Heritage. For me, having good reading material is more of a necessity than television could ever be.

Mr. Geoffrey C. Ward has misplaced Eleanor Roosevelt’s great-uncle, Irvine Bulloch (“The Wonderful Husband,” September/October). Bulloch served with the Confederate cruiser Alabama , not the Union warship Kearsarge , as stated in the article. He was aboard the Alabama when that ship was sunk by the Kearsarge off the French coast on June 19, 1864.

Margaret Mead believed that one of the best ways to understand a culture is to observe how it goes about work. For twenty-three years I accompanied Mead as her photographer, documenting the societies she studied. I still like to photograph people working, and at flea markets and antiques fairs I find myself drawn to old photographs that proclaim their subjects’ occupations. Of these the least valuable in the marketplace are tintypes like the ones shown here: since millions of tintypes survive, of which perhaps one percent are occupationals, they are of little interest to most collectors. But because of their number and their very nature, tintypes may offer the best portrait we have of working-class America in the nineteenth century.

Reading Richard F. Snow’s article on Yorktown (“History Happened Here,” September/October), I found myself sympathizing with the author’s difficulty in getting where he was going, as the occasional unplanned side trip is far from unknown to me. Americans have long been notorious for their difficulties in geography. Indeed, my native Maryland was literally shaped by geographic imprecision, and by the time Messrs. Mason and Dixon settled the matter, we seem to have misplaced much of what is today southern Pennsylvania and the state of Delaware. However, I was startled by Mr. Snow’s route to Yorktown and Williamsburg. After a much delayed flight to Norfolk, the author says, “I made my way over and under the Chesapeake via the Bay Bridge Tunnel and headed for Colonial Williamsburg, where … a mile and a half away from the biggest tourist attraction on the Eastern seaboard, I got lost.”

Richard F. Snow replies: I am grateful to Mr. Pyle both for his correction and for his tolerance; a less forbearing reader suggested that those “minute, expensive airport drinks” I mentioned might have been the cause of my confusion.

In his column on “technological turkeys” (“The Business of America,” May/June) Mr. Gordon errs in asserting that Thomas Edison heard nothing during the historic first trial of the phonograph. According to Edison’s own account: “I was never so taken aback in all my life. I was always afraid of things that worked the first time.” In addition, the Edison tin-foil recording stylus did not incise but rather indented. (This subtle patented difference from the Bells and Tainter would cause Edison and others many legal headaches during the years 1896-1913.)

It is ironic that Selectavision, a playback-only machine, was overtaken by the VCR with its recording capability. Seventy-five years earlier, the then technically superior vertically reproducing cylinder phonographs, which could also record at home, were being supplanted by lateral-cut disc machines, which played back only.

I would like to thank American Heritage for the excellent article in the May/June issue on the Harrison Gray Otis house (“Behind the Federal Facade”). It is wonderful to see a piece that is literate, thoroughly researched, and beautifully photographed. Several staff members have commented to me that they are seeing the house anew thanks to the view of Alex Boulton.