Reading “The Rise of the Supermarket” (October/November 1985) reminds me about what happened in Ocean City, New Jersey. It was in the early thirties that a Piggly Wiggly came to Ocean City, and the druggist on the corner opposite the new store took it in stride. You guessed it! His pharmacy window soon boasted one of the newfangled neon signs proclaiming his “Drugly Wuggly.”
First it was NBC’s Today show, then U.S. News & World Report , and now, it’s you. Big deal! Texas is one hundred and fifty years old!
The grand state of Arkansas will be one hundred and fifty years old, too, and I have heard zilch from any news media about it. It’s always Texas, Texas, Texas. Look, they’ve got two television shows on CBS ( Dallas and Knots Landing ), so let those publicize Texas. But I do hope that come June 15,1986, American Heritage will run at least two articles on Arkansas and her 150th birthday, or you’ll be out one subscription.
You might keep in mind, also, that it’s Arkansas where the next big boom in film making is going to be. Did you see The Blue and the Grey ?
What a pity your reference to the Pan American China Clipper flight of fifty years ago (“The Time Machine,” October/November 1985) failed to name the courageous pilot, Capt. Edwin C. Musick, who was the first to fly the famed Clipper ships. The anniversary on November 22 has restored Musick, dubbed the “Lindbergh of the Pacific,” to his rightful niche in the annals of aviation. Musick, since his 1935 air-mapping flights over the Pacific, was lost over Pago Pago aboard the Samoan Clipper just before World War II and after making an initial flight from the United States to New Zealand, where he is still hailed as a hero.
I was interested in the article “Susan B. Anthony Cast Her Vote for Ulysses S. Grant” in the December 1985 issue. May I invite your readers to visit the Susan B. Anthony memorial, her home of forty years, here in Rochester. It is the first National Historic Landmark in Rochester. The home is maintained, much as Miss Anthony left it, by the Susan B. Anthony Memorial, Inc. It is open to the public Wednesday through Saturday.
In the early 1960s, I lived on Beacon Hill in Boston. One weekend afternoon, I remember rolling my infant son in his carriage down the cobbled hillside, past the gold dome of the State House and Saint-Gaudens’s lovely memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and his black Massachusetts regiment, and onto the Common, where a city-wide civil rights rally was in progress. It may have been called to protest dogs tearing at demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama; possibly it marked the disappearance in Neshoba County, Mississippi, of three young civil rights workers—two white, one black—murdered for trying to persuade their fellow citizens to register at the polls. I no longer remember. I do recall the pleasure I felt in the fact that my son was already taking part in history, and in the hope that he, too, would one day be pleased at having participated in an expression of outrage in the cradle of abolitionism at what happened in the deepest, distant South.
"My office is a zoo,” a friend of mine complained a few weeks ago. It’s a sentence I have heard many times, and it makes me think of the good old days, or perhaps they were the bad old days, when, instead of talking about offices that reminded them of zoos, people talked about business as a jungle.
Some especially impressive beasts stalked the American business jungle late in the 19th century. In his famous essay “Wealth,” originally published in 1889 in the North American Review and frequently reprinted under the title “The Gospel of Wealth,” the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie discussed the “law” of competition: “It is here; we cannot evade it; no substitutes for it have been found; and while the law may sometimes be hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department.”
In our last issue, Brock Yates paid homage to America’s greatest automobiles. Here, an equally committed enthusiast takes us far from handrubbed lacquer and sparkling chrome to celebrate the brave derelicts that played a huge part in putting America on the road.
It stood accompanied yet sadly alone, its streamlined body gradually rotting away, balding tires slowly sinking into the mud at the back of the lot. A modest pool of oil had formed on the ground beneath.
In my eyes, she was beautiful.
You’d probably never have noticed this forlorn vehicle from the street, probably not even have been aware of the used-car lot where it sat, which was just one of dozens along a thoroughfare like the hundreds of others that have been part of the landscape of every major city since the early days of motoring.
Clearly this road was not the boulevard on which the new-car dealers erected their bright showrooms. This was the other automotive row, the gritty street where the tired, beat, worn-out japolies waited.
Every American knows that the word jalopy means an elderly, decrepit automobile. Though the word undoubtedly originated in the United States, it is now common in all English-speaking countries and occasionally is used in some other parts of the world.
The earliest known appearance of the word jalopy in print, in a book published in Chicago in 1929, spelled it jaloppi . Nowadays, though dictionaries show different acceptable spellings, the most common is jalopy , even though this is somewhat undesirable in that it makes it appear that the word might rhyme with “soapy” or “dopey.” Instead, of course, jalopy rhymes with “copy” or “poppy.”
Presidential images do change, and Dwight Elsenhower’s new image may be partly justified, but is the euphoria shown in “Why We Were Right to Like Ike” really warranted? Neal correctly mentions the matter of bias in presidential evaluation; but he seems particularly outraged that some partisan Democratic scholars, who had actually written speeches for Adlai Stevenson, participated in the 1962 Schlesinger poll. Since we are all biased to some extent, we should tread softly in accusing others of bias. Perhaps not surprisingly the Republican Chicago Tribune poll of 1982 (did columnist Neal conduct it?), with a different cast of academics (perhaps more Republicans, and a strange mix of Cold Warriors and Cold War revisionists), moved Elsenhower up from twenty-second to ninth on the list of presidential greats.