Every gold-rush town is worth seeing, but some are especially attractive. Sutler Creek is pretty, and it contains the Sutler Creek Inn, an unusually comfortable bed-and-breakfast place (209-267-5606). Go east out of town on the Sutler Creek-Volcano road; what may be the loveliest twelve-mile drive in California ends in the tiny town of Volcano, which manages to seem at once abandoned and lively. Farther south is Columbia, the sometime “Gem of the Southern Mines.” Like Old Sacramento, it has been laken over as a slale historic park and immaculately restored. If you can, stay in the City Hotel, whose tall bedrooms with their sepulchral Easllake furnishings give you the peculiar and privileged sense of sleeping in a museum (209-532-1479). The Golden Chain Council of the Mother Lode, Inc. (P.O. Box 1246, Auburn, CA 95603), publishes a crowded and useful map of Highway 49. For a fine general history, gel a copy of Joseph Henry Jackson’s Anybody’s Gold: The Story of California’s Mining Towns (Chronicle Books). For the California office of tourism, call 1-800-862-2543.
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January 2011
Revolutionary anniversary
Two hundred years ago this July, the tinderbox of the Old World was kindled by sparks from the New; the French monarchy fell in chaos and terror; and we’ve been feeling the effects ever since. In the next issue a special section examines the long and fascinating connection between France and America.
Liberté, egalité, animosité
France helped win our Revolution for us. Why were we so dubious about hers? Carry Wills explains.
Lafayette, you are here!
The wildly popular Marquis de Lafayette left his name on an astonishing number of American towns—and objects. Herewith, a fine collection of Marquiserie.
Divine emissary
Between the coming of the Statue of Liberty and the coming of the First World War, the great actress Sarah Bernhardt was the most tangible tie with France for tens of thousands of Americans.
Paris, 1924
Although I can sympathize to a degree with the anonymous author of “Then and Now” (November 1988) about the remodeling of the Times Tower back in the sixties, his or her apparent glee that the Allied Chemical Company, which instigated the work, is now “defunct” is based on wishful thinking, not on reality. Yes, Virginia, the Allied Chemical Company is still with us, alive and well, but it is now known as the Allied Corporation. Thousands of businesses in this country, large and small, have shortened, hyphenated, acronymed, or otherwise altered their old names in recent years for reasons varying from fundamental to frivolous. Allied is just one of them. I wouldn’t be so hard on the architects. After all, they too have mouths to feed. In my view they made the best of the lousy proposal they were saddled with. The remodeled building still looks a lot better to me than any in its near neighborhood.
Olivier Bernier captured the spirit of the 1958 Cadillac (“American Made,” May/June 1988) so well that any small correction seems carping, but in the interest of accuracy I will mention two. He writes of the “exceptionally smooth and efficient … Hydra-Matic transmission. …” Smooth it certainly was, but not very efficient. It extracted a penalty of from 10 to 30 percent in gasoline mileage compared with a manual transmission, depending on how it was driven. With gasoline less than thirty cents a gallon, anyone who could pay thirteen thousand dollars for a car in 1958 didn’t worry about gas mileage. Modern automatic transmissions with (our speeds and lockup at cruising speeds are far more efficient.
“The American Christ” (November 1988) is a timely and welcome study of a native religious phenomenon. I commend Patrick Allitt for combining thorough research with clear exposition. Though his assertion may be accurate that there has yet to be an American black Jesus movie, I think there should be a passing nod to the film version of Marc Connelly’s 1930 dramatic success, The Green Pastures . A black Jesus may not have been on screen, but his father, “de Lawd,” and the rest of the angelic panoply were much in evidence.
As general editor of the sixteenth edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations , to be published by Little, Brown and Company, Boston, in 1992, I’m seeking contemporary material, especially (but not exclusively) from popular culture and mass media, that has passed into the language. I’d appreciate receiving photocopies of printed material along with verifiable information about sources and attributions.
As anyone with a family album knows, photographs rarely tell the whole truth. That idyllic couple, snuggling on the dock, were divorced not long after the camera clicked; those Thanksgiving guests did not enjoy the turkey nearly as much as their glassy, flashbulb smiles suggest.
Even the most obscure among us learn to mask our feelings for the camera. Some celebrities make a lifetime of it, fabricating for themselves genial, self-assured public personas that often have little real connection with their insecure creators. Three recent pictorial biographies, of Ernest Hemingway, Babe Ruth, and Louis Armstrong, reveal in different ways how tricky a guide to personality and character the camera can be.
In 1979, RCA announced that it was developing what it called Selectavision, a process that, using Thomas as Edison’s basic technique for recording sound but now hooked up to a television set, produced pictures as well. Edison, no doubt, would have loved it. The public did not.
Selectavision came onto the market in 1981, just when the VCR was catching on, and few people saw any reason to buy a machine that could play back but not record when they could buy one that did both for the same price. In 1983 RCA sold only 250,000 Selectavision machines, against 4,000,000 VCRs sold by RCA and others. The following year it canceled the project, losing $580,000,000 on what the company had once called its Manhattan Project. Certainly, no one could argue that RCA hadn’t produced a bomb.
By Larry Zim, Mel Lerner, and Herbert Rolfes; Harper & Row; 240 pages .
By Barbara Cohen, Steven Heller, and Seymour Chwast; Abrams; 80 pages .
Videotape produced and directed by Tom Johnson and Lance Bird; 83 minutes .