January 2011

My father, George Dudley Vaill, died in April and bequeathed his entire American Heritage collection to my husband and me. It may be one of few that are complete from the beginning. Of all the books, manuscripts, magazines, et cetera, that defined his life, American Heritage was his favorite, and the only set of anything for which he built special bookcases. My family is now rereading the earliest issues and is enjoying what will be years of enlightenment.

I also have a small nit to pick with you about an error in “A Map of Weather History” in your June/July issue. Since moving to the Lexington, Kentucky, area in 1975, we have heard many tales of the day in 1974 when more than one hundred tornadoes terrorized the place. Also, in 1984, the local radio station did a ten-year anniversary broadcast of the April 1974 tornado series, and I’m sure there is no disputing that the tornadoes were in 1974, not 1984.

The letter (August/September “Correspondence”) from Paul V. Lutz, Houston, Texas, is typical Texan braggadocio and hyperbole. The war between the legal and illegal immigrants to the Mexican Territory of Texas was a defensive action to avoid being driven from said territory by the armies of Santa Anna. The establishment of an independent country was ex post facto to the defeat of the Mexican forces.

On the other hand the area now known as the state of Vermont was claimed under “Royal Grant” to be the property of each of the colonies of New Hampshire and New York. The earlier settlers thereof drove out the newcomers from each colony and established an independent republic that fought beside the Thirteen Colonies during the war for independence from England, later becoming the first independent republic to join the Union (as its fourteenth state).

Not to take anything away from Texas as it celebrates the 150th anniversary of its independence, but reader Paul V. Lutz goes a step too far in referring to it as “the only state (outside the original thirteen) to achieve independence by revolution.” Less well known, perhaps, but no less a historical fact, is California’s onetime status as the California Republic following the revolt against Mexican authority in 1846.

True, the “Bear Flag Republic” under President William Brown Ide existed only from mid-June until the Stars and Stripes were raised some three weeks later, but during that short time California was indeed another state outside the original thirteen to achieve its independence by revolution.

I enjoyed Tim Forbes’s story about his grandfather Forbes (June/July). In the same way, I have always thought that a story about my father, also an immigrant, and his friends was interesting. My father was Norwegian, and in 1908 his father gave him a new suit, twenty-five dollars, and a boat ticket to New York City. He eventually got there and continued on to Detroit, where he went to the center of town (Grand Circus Park) and sat on a bench, contemplating his next move. Two men sat down next to him, both immigrants and also newly arrived in Detroit. One of the men was German, the other Irish. They decided to pool their small resources and rent a room for three. For several months they lived on very little—the Irishman ate mainly peanuts, the German sauerkraut, and the Norwegian fish. The Norwegian went to work on the assembly line at Midland-Ross, the German at Ford Motor Company, and the Irishman worked as a song-and-dance man. The German and Norwegian wanted to be engineers, so they bought a course from the International Correspondence School in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

The articles in your special section “The Life and Times of U.S. Weather” by David M. Ludlum and William B. Meyer in the June/July issue brought back an experience I had regarding the science of weather forecasting as it was known in the early 1950s—at least, how it was in New England.

At the time, I was business manager of the old Boston Herald . In our office we had a private dining room where lunch was served to the top brass and where we entertained visiting celebrities such as Congressman John McCormack, or Ted Williams, who was at the height of his baseball career.

In the fall of 1954 a bad series of hurricanes hit New England. So it seemed appropriate to invite an eminent meteorologist to lunch to tell us about it.

The candy bar as we know it was born in America. So too, many centuries earlier, was chocolate itself. Mexican natives cultivated the cocoa bean for more than 2500 years before Hernán Cortés took it to Spain with him in 1528. Spanish royalty drank a cold, sweetened beverage made from the beans, but they liked it so much they kept it a secret from the rest of Europe for the remainder of the century. Not until 1847 did a British firm, Fry and Sons, make the first mass-produced chocolate bar. The candy bar, agglomerating a variety of flavors and textures—almost always including chocolate—in one piece, was a purely American invention, and it’s still not 100 years old.

1. Walnettos

The J. N. Collins Company of Philadelphia began manufacturing a hard caramel candy filled with walnut chip in the early 1920s. After Pete Paul, Inc., of Naugatuck, Connecticut, took over Collins, Walnettos Sponsore “Uncle Don,” one of the most popular children’s radi shows of the 1920s and ’30s, and the bar sold well until the 1950s. Sales dropped further during the next decade, and Peter Paul bega to retire the bar. Then, late in the 1960s, a comedian on the popular television show “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In” whispered into hi companion’s ear, “Do you want a Walnetto?” She hit him over the head with an umbrella, viewers picked up the insinuating phrase, and the Walnetto bar enjoyed a brief and hectic renaissance on candy counters before going out of circulation forever.

2. Vegetable Sandwich

The Creator

Late in the life of the first Henry Ford, a boy named John Dahlinger, who more than likely was Ford’s illegitimate son, had a discussion with the old man about education and found himself frustrated by Ford’s very narrow view of what schooling should be. “But, sir,” Dahlinger told Ford, “these are different times; this is the modern age and—” Ford cut him off. “Young man,” he said, “I invented the modern age.” Dahlinger, who died in 1984, was baptized in the Ford christening gown and slept as an infant in the crib that Henry had used as a baby. His mother was a secretary at the Ford company.— Editor

Put not your trust in princes,” said King David some three thousand years ago, and he knew what he was talking about. But if biographers were to take his admonition to heart, they would go broke—and we would be the worse for it. So long as humans measure their own lives by those of the extraordinary, so long will they find the stories of the great in every field worthy of contemplation. Historians of late have made much of the oppressive shadow cast by the giants of the ages; the “new” historians prefer to focus on the multitude of obscure lives that make up a total picture of historical times. In viewing history from the bottom up, they have done innovative and useful work by illuminating the lives of women, minorities, workers, farmers, and others. But if you asked those neglected groups themselves, they would probably say it was the extraordinary among them who are of the most interest.