January 2011

Editor's Note: This is a true story of a boy and his family living on the high prairie in an adobe house in eastern Colorado and the tragic events that occurred in March 1931. This essay by E.N. Coons of his recollections of the snowstorm won a Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in 1989 for outstanding magazine article of the year.

Satire, according to the playwright George S. Kaufman, “is what closes Saturday night,” but for seventeen years Fred Allen used his satiric brand of humor to create some of the nation’s most popular radio comedy.

“The other comedians … swoon at Allen,” said a onetime editor of Variety, the show business newspaper. In part the admiration of his colleagues was due to their knowledge that Allen, unlike many of his competitors, did not rely on a steady supply of gags from a stable of writers. Allen was his own chief writer, laboring twelve to fourteen hours a day in longhand, six days a week, to produce his scripts. He had only a few assistants, among them the future novelist Herman Wouk, the author of The Caine Mutiny.

The Merrimac did not do battle with the Monitor (Item 69 of “101 More Things Every College Graduate Should Know about American History,” December 1987), nor indeed with any other United States ship in the American Civil War. When U.S. forces had to abandon the Merrimac in the early days of the war, an ill-executed attempt to burn her failed. The Confederate states resurrected her, redesigning everything except the keel, and then christened, launched, manned, and fought her as the Confederate States Ship Virginia . To call that ship the Merrimac is like saying the British sank the Argentine ship USS Phoenix during the Falklands War.

In “Let’s Eat Chinese Tonight” (December 1987), the author states that his wife, “who was a teenager in Kentucky in the 1950s, never ate in a Chinese restaurant until she went on a trip to Ohio. Now her hometown of Louisville boasts at least eighteen of them….” I was also a native of Louisville and remember quite well a Chinese establishment on our main drag. Fourth Street.

Louisville was not part of the last frontier for Chinese food.

Alfred Kazin’s “Where Would Emerson Find His Scholar Now?” (December 1987), brings to mind Emerson’s favorite greeting upon visits from dear friends. “What has become clear to you since we last met?” he would inquire. The greeting presents both an invitation and a challenge to the guests to assess the progress of their thinking. Like much of Emerson’s writing, it shows his profound respect for, and delight in, the life of the mind. With a single question, he probes more deeply than many a multipage questionnaire.

In “History Happened Here” (November 1987), you mention an “unforgettable photograph of Mrs. Glessner’s reading club” in the Glessner house in Chicago. How about letting us see it?

Wallace Stegner’s irritation with cowboys—as expressed in “Who Are the Westerners?” (December 1987 issue)—has always been shared by most residents of smaller Western towns, as is shown very well by the following historical newspaper articles:

A headline in Bernard Weisberger’s “The Forgotten Four Hundred: Chicago’s First Millionaires” (November 1987) calls Samuel Insull a “bad apple.” But Insull’s utility empire didn’t fall until 1932; it was not “balloon financing” (he used pyramided holding companies); and the fall—which was bound to happen due to the deepening effects of the Great Depression—was caused by the refusal of New York bankers to refinance a large loan, causing one of the key holding companies to default. From there it all fell apart. Common stockholders were wiped out while the bondholders and preferred stockholders came away in good shape. The utility companies were strong and survived in most cases. Samuel Insull lost his fortune and all his many positions and died relatively poor.

Jude Wanniski was among the early leaders in the revival of supply-side economic theory. A former associate editor of The Wall Street Journal, he founded and is president of the consulting firm Polyconomics, Inc., which is located in Morristown, New Jersey, and advises leading corporations and institutional investors on economics, politics, and communications. In 1978, his pioneering book on economic theory and history, The Way the World Works., was published. In it, he draws heavily on historical precedent to argue that low tax rates are essential not merely to the wealth of a nation, but to the welfare of its citizens and the progress of society. His ideas have significantly influenced the Reagan administration. Interestingly, he has no formal training in economics (he holds a B.A. in political science and an M.S. in journalism from UCLA); but the late chairman of the Federal Reserve, Arthur Burns, once observed to him that this was precisely his advantage.