January 2011

On April 12, in an auditorium at the University of Michigan, “amid fanfare and drama far more typical of a Hollywood premiere than a medical meeting” (according to The New York Times), Dr. Thomas Francis announced the results of an investigation into the polio vaccine developed by a former student of his, Dr. Jonas Salk. The verdict: Salk’s vaccine worked. The 150 journalists in the audience rushed off to file their stories, and, by the next morning, thousands of doses of vaccine were on their way to children across America. Just as quickly, Salk was on his way to becoming a scientific celebrity.

The announcement did not come as a surprise. Early results from clinical trials had been promising, leading drug manufacturers to prepare for production more than a year ahead of time. By the date of the announcement (the tenth anniversary of the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a polio patient), 27 million doses had been stockpiled in warehouses around the country.

mail@americanheritage.com LOST OPPORTUNITY PRESS CORPS APPLAUSE HOOKER’S NERVE “RIDE WITH THE DEVIL” “RIDE WITH THE DEVIL” FORGOTTEN HISTORY NATIVE DRESS CHANNELING THE MARX BROTHERS

In the 30s, I played some rough-and-tumble stickball in New York City—on the East Side, the West Side, uptown, downtown, in Chinatown and Little Italy, surrounded by pushcarts and cooking smells. Although the sport was born in Manhattan and its environs, it caught on in many cities where asphalt had replaced grass. The left front fender of a parked car made a good first base. Second was usually a manhole cover or a square chalked out in the middle of the street; third might be a fire hydrant. We measured a prodigious wallop by the number of manholes it passed.

I was reminded of those games a few years ago when the Spalding company announced that it would once again manufacture the pink rubber ball called (in a melting pot of urban accents) a spaldeen. Although not an official ball, it was the one universally used for stickball, and in 1945 a shipping error delivered a supply of them to France, where I was working as a U.S. Army counter-intelligence agent.

Most visitors arrive in Deadwood via Interstate 90, and those approaching from the east skirt the Badlands. Eroded over eons into strange mounds and cliffs with church-like spires, this barren landscape has an eerie beauty.

The foremost tourist site of South Dakota is Mount Rushmore. Ten miles from Rushmore, the Crazy Horse Memorial is being sculpted using detonating cord on, ironically, Custer Mountain. Begun in 1949, it is still a work in progress. The 88-foot head is finished, and there are bus rides to the base of the site. At 641 feet high and 563 feet across, the completed horse and rider will be even bigger than the carvings on Mount Rushmore.

Only three miles from Deadwood is the town of Lead, pronounced leed . The Homestake Gold Mine there closed in 2001. The blasting, drilling, and tunneling that extracted gold ore over more than a hundred years reshaped the mountain on a monumental scale. Tours of the mine are given several times a day in the summer.

In sunshine or darkness, good weather or bad, whether I’m wide awake or dead tired, the most beautiful roadside sight for me is a sign that says WE NEVER CLOSE. I have warm memories of such homes of 24-hour gasoline and coffee: in the Poconos on I-80; another in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania; Sandman Plaza in Bordentown, New Jersey; Diners' Corners on I-40 east of Albuquerque; at the Sacramento River crossing south of Redding, California; on I-90 west of Missoula; a handful on I-80 in Nebraska and Iowa. A few years ago, coming into Wyoming on 80 headed east out of Utah, I saw a billboard that describes my favorite one of all:

LITTLE AMERICA: QUEEN OF THE HIGHWAYS, A PROMISE KEPT, A DREAM REALIZED, 68 MILES

My mother, a lifelong New Yorker, often guided me on what I thought of as ghost walks of New York. Not, however, to search for haunted houses or to attempt communion with the dead, but simply as a remembrance of what had gone before. What was once the Schwab mansion on Riverside Drive, encircled by a glorious and extensive private garden, was demolished in 1948 to make room for Schwab Houses, an apartment complex occupying an entire block. And, as a novelist, she recalled time spent at the splendid old Random House offices on Madison Avenue and 50th Street, themselves created from the impossibly gilded Villard Houses. Now, the only original parts of the building that remain are the entrance to the Helmsley Palace Hotel along with several enticing public rooms. There were homelier ghosts too, like the little Hungarian bakery near her apartment, its fragrant spaces razed 20 years ago to allow a high-rise to loom featurelessly into the sky. And there is the odd memory of what my family continued to call the “Nazi movie theater” on East 86th Street, once the heart of a German neighborhood.

The gorgeously restored 104-year-old Moana Hotel on Waikiki is today the Sheraton Moana Surfrider ( www.moana-surfrider.com , 808-922-3111). Almost next door stands the monumental Royal Hawaiian ( www.royal-hawaiian.com , 808-923-7311), also now a Sheraton.

To see where the last king and queen of Hawaii lived and signed over their land to the Americans, visit the Iolani Palace ( www.iolnipalace.org , 808-522-0822), in downtown Honolulu. Glimpse the lives of Hawaii’s long-gone plantation workers through the meticulous recreation of colonial-era life at Plantation Village, in Waipahu ( www.hawaiiplantationvillage.org , 808-677-0110); a few miles and a world away, arrange a tour (Wednesdays through Saturdays, by reservation only) of the estate of the tobacco heiress Doris Duke and the museum of Islamic art it contains ( www.honoluluacademy.org/shangri , 866-385-5849).