January 2011

In 1921 Wilson & Company, a Chicago meat-packer, was hired by Arthur D. Little, founder of the management consulting company that bears his name, to throw one hundred pounds’ worth of sows’ ears into a big pot, cook well, and provide him with ten pounds of the gluey goo that came out. Little squeezed the goo through a spinneret to turn it into thread. He soaked the thread in a glycerin solution to soften it, and then, on a special loom, he wove the thread into a silky material. Out of that he made two purses, thus proving that an ingenious chemist could, in fact, make a silk purse out of sows’ ears.

Little did not stop there. He was not only a good chemist but a good businessman, and he ordered the preparation of a promotional booklet: “Does it not seem reasonable to you, dear Sir and Reader, that an organization which includes chemists that can make silk purses out of sows’ ears, just for the fun of doing it, is also qualified to do other things? To solve problems for instance which hold back the progress of industry … ? Who says it can’t be done? Let’s dig in and find out.”

When I was ten years old, my parents entrusted me to TWA for a rumbling eternity in a prop-driven plane that pulled me across the continent to California. I was going to visit my aunt and uncle, but they were merely the agents of my real goal: Disneyland. The park had opened two years before, in 1955, and its effect on me was every bit as magical as the publicists had promised.

I was enchanted by all the rides, but the thing that made the strongest impression on me was Main Street, Walt Disney’s evocation of the small-town America of his youth. I remember standing there in the dusk while the lights came on. I watched them outlining the busy cornices while a horsecar clopped quietly past, and suddenly I wanted to stay in this place forever.

I came home from California fascinated by turn-of-the-century America, and my interest never waned. Instead, it expanded to include other aspects of the national past, and it has put bread on my table all my working life.

Anaheim is filled with motels of every grade; but Disney was stretched financially when he was building Disneyland, and even the “official” Disneyland Hotel is under separate ownership. It is up to immaculate Disney standards, nonetheless, and is the only hotel served by the park’s monorail. There are two especially attractive Disney-owned hotels at Disney World: the Contemporary and the more relaxed Polynesian Village. Both are very good, and the fact that they are linked to the monorail—it goes right through the Contemporary’s lobby—makes them particularly convenient. For information on prices and hours in Disneyland, call 714-999-4565; in Disney World, 305-824-4321. Steve Birnbaum wrote the official guides to both parks, and they contain all the information anyone needs to plan a Disney vacation.

In the mid-sixteenth century, a blind and deaf old Spanish soldier named Bernai Díaz del Castillo set out to write an account of what he had seen and done as a follower of Hernando Cortés during the conquest of Mexico. “Unfortunately,” he noted by way of introduction, “I have gained no wealth to leave to my children and descendants except this story, which is a remarkable one.”

There is little doubt that Castillo would have enjoyed having gold, silver, and estates to pass along with his narrative. But he recognized that the simple tale of what happened was a treasure in itself. In that respect he was much smarter than most of today’s Americans.

This series of six postcards, titled “The Greatest Moments in a Girl’s Life,” was painted by Harrison Fisher around 1911. From about 1905 until his death in 1934, Fisher was by far the most popular illustrator of pretty women, the successor to Charles Dana Gibson. Like Norman Rockwell, Howard Chandler Christie, J. C. Leyendecker, and other illustrators of the period, Fisher’s work was found primarily in magazines; he drew most of the covers for Cosmopolitan, for example, from 1912 until his death. Fisher’s work also was featured in books and advertisements (Pond’s soap and Warner’s Featherbone corsets), on calendars, bookmarks, prints, and trinket boxes, and on more than two hundred postcards. Sending postcards during that era was as common as making telephone calls is today.

Richard Samuel Roberts was certainly a talented photographer (“Finding a Lost World,” October/November 1986). But having worked in my father’s photographic studio for more than forty years, 1 would like to question a caption in the article stating that Roberts probably used a cable-release shutter for a picture in which he himself appears. In his day most shutters could have a cable release attached if the owner wished. However, I am sure that there was never a cable release long enough to reach to the hand of a man who put himself into the picture. It sometimes was done with a studio camera that had a long, supple hose with control bulb.

The cable release had to be used with a timing gadget. You could wind this gadget up and hang it on the end of the cable release, and then run to get into the picture. When the gadget’s little spring unwound, it set off the cable release that operated the control on the lens. The device was very easy to operate, and we used it for family groups out of doors.

As an artist 1 welcome the reappraisal of old masters, but I must take issue with Louis Auchincloss’s glorification of John Singer Sargent (“A Sargent Portrait,” October/November 1986). The comparison to Anthony Van Dyck is ill-conceived; Sargent is not his equal. Both painted aristocracy, but Van Dyck’s brush never ran away with itself as if to escape boredom, as did Sargent’s. Van Dyck matched virtuoso technique with a seventeenth-century Flemish ethic of nobility, intelligence, and a telling description of even the most vacuous sitters. Here is an important distinction: It is not that the social class Sargent painted is offensive; what is maddening was his lack of intellectual or emotional interest in his subjects.

Sargent painted some terrific pictures, and his visual pyrotechnics are dazzling replications of surface effects, but I think great artists search out something more integral in their subjects. 1 suggest that “America’s preeminent portraitist” is more likely John Singleton Copley or Thomas Eakins.

Henry Ford has always been for me the most intriguing of the mighty industrial tycoons who arose in this country after the Civil War, so I found Mr. Halberstam’s article on him (“Citizen Ford,” October/ November 1986) particularly entertaining. I was more than a little puzzled, however, by the following statement: “In 1936 … Henry Ford reluctantly built a six-cylinder engine. It went into production a year later.”

I am aware that Ford began marketing a six-cylinder line around 1941, but how can anyone produce a fairly lengthy exposition of the founder’s career without so much as a mention of that great flathead V-8 that was the sensation of the automobile world in 1932? It was just as reliable and durable as Chevy’s fabled “cast-iron wonder,” and it had jackrabbit quickness.

I enjoyed the article “Citizen Ford.” It was enlightening in many respects. However, his fascination with Edsel’s efforts to produce a six-cylinder engine appears to have blinded him to a Ford Motor Company success of major impact—the V-8 engine that first appeared in 1932. That engine was improved in 1933, and it was almost perfect by 1934.

The 1934 V-8, particularly the sport roadster and convertible coupe, became a symbol for my pre-war peers. It was memorialized in song; who of that era can forget “I’m going to Heaven in my Ford V-8,/I’m going to ride right through the Pearly Gate”? That V-8 engine was fast on acceleration, it was economical and durable.

In the fifties and sixties the 1932 was the preferred vehicle to “cut down” for a street dragster. I had the pleasant satisfaction of owning a ’34, ’36, and ’46—a war intervened there.

David Halberstam replies: I stand corrected by those many Ford owners who wrote me about the eight-cylinder engine. I’m delighted by their loyalty to that car and only wish we still had companies and products that could inspire that kind of loyalty.