January 2011

By Lonnie Wheeler and John Baskin; Orange Frazer Press, Inc., Wilmington, Ohio; 271 pages.

Cincinnati does not have the most impressive winning tradition in baseball, but it may have the most eminent history. Ever since Harry Wright turned his Cincinnati Red Stockings into the first professional baseball team, in 1869, the city has regularly sprung on the major leagues such innovations as doubleheaders, night games, and Pete Rose. This energetic book combines a fan’s enthusiasm with a historian’s grand sweep to show how much baseball and Cincinnati have meant to each other.

I really enjoyed reading the article on fast food (April), especially the reference to my dad’s early days with the A&W root beer stand. It will be fun for me to share this issue of American Heritage with my mother. I know she will enjoy reminiscing about the good old times.

A letter in your September/October issue was illustrated with a photograph of a White Tower restaurant and the caption made mention of nickel hamburgers.

That wasn’t all! In 1932 my job (at $95 per month) with Container Corporation of America was within three blocks of a White Tower. When I wasn’t brown-bagging my lunch, I ate there—three hamburgers, a piece of apple pie, and a glass of milk—all at five cents each! Even a twenty-fivecent lunch seemed, at the time, like splurging.

The article on Hinton, West Virginia (July/August), was indeed interesting, and I learned quite a few things about the town I didn’t know. It is apparent that the author, Paul R. Lilly, enjoyed telling the story of Hinton—he’s quite a tale weaver. He seems well qualified to tell us about the parts of the town’s past that didn’t make it into our history books.

Congratulations on Fredric Smoler’s excellent interview with Edward Luttwak, “The Strategy of Survival,” in your July/August issue. The important thing to keep in mind with respect to NATO is deterrence. No one in Europe—and few in America—is interested in fighting a prolonged conventional war in Europe. Europe has already been through that twice in this century. Our current military posture in Europe is designed to maximize deterrence. A shift to a “defensive defense” would only invite the very war that we want to avoid.

Those who enjoyed Joseph Fox’s article “Day of the Player Piano” might like to know about AMICA, or the Automatic Musical Instrument Collectors Association, which is an organization founded in 1963 comprising approximately 1,350 collectors of player pianos and countless other automated musical instruments. Its members search for player pianos and other old instruments (almost every musical instrument known to man has been automated in some way), faithfully restore them, preserve and exhibit these amazing mechanical devices of yesteryear, and seek to develop historical background such as that Joseph Fox presented in his excellent article.

I must take exception to Nathaniel Burt’s casual and uninformed appraisal of Thomas Jefferson.

Mr. Burt renders an appraisal of Mr. Jefferson that is obviously influenced by our nasty contemporary notion of forced iconoclasm. Any informed reader knows that Jefferson never claimed to be the creator of American independence, as Burt suggests, although the third President did take great pride in his authorship of the Declaration. It was this act, his work on the statute for religious freedom in Virginia, and his establishment of the University of Virginia for which he most wished to be remembered. Perhaps Burt is reading his history in iambic pentameter, for the Jefferson he describes bears little resemblance to the prose history with which I am familiar.

The wonder of Thomas Jefferson is not that he always succeeded in the widest range of endeavors ever undertaken by a person born on this continent, but that he could have failed at most of them and still earned the respect with which he is currently held by informed people around the world.

Prohibition killed off the great public restaurants of the bigger hotels and old classics like Sherry’s and Delmonico’s. But more modest places for working people, shoppers, and theater- and moviegoers thrived. Ye Waverly Inn chose a colonial costume and a menu of meat loaf, chicken pot pie, succotash, and the like to appeal to sturdy American family tastes. The quaint little place at the corner of the Bank street and Waverly Place is not, in fact, colonial: the building it occupies is a Greek-revival townhouse built in the 1830s, and the Waverly itself began its genteel colonial-revival career in 1920, perhaps in symbolic response to the riotous life all around it in Greenwich Village. In any event, no Waverly diner would ever have asked for a shot of hooch in his teacup; for that kind of thing you went to Lee Chumley’s speak-easy over on Bedford street. There writerS, actors, painters, and the usual hangers-on liked to sit and talk and play chess—and, of course, drink, although Chumley’s was at least as popular for its dollar dinner as it was for its liquor.