January 2011

On the evening of August 15 a small private plane carrying two men crashed in a shallow lagoon just south of Point Barrow, Alaska. The pilot, Wiley Post, a record-setting aviator, was killed. So too was Post’s passenger, a fifty-six-year-old man upon whose humor and clearsightedness the country had come to depend—the Cherokee Indian, cowboy, comedian, actor, columnist, and radio commpntatnr Will Rogers.

It could be said that Rogers was on intimate terms with more Americans than any other man of his day. They saw him in films; they listened to his radio broadcasts; and when they opened their newspapers, many turned first to Rogers’s brief “Daily Telegram” or his weekly column.

When the Red Sox played the Orioles on September 26 in Boston’s Fenway Park, 10,454 fans gathered to witness not only the last home game of the season but also the last game played in Fenway Park by Ted Williams, the Red Sox’s forty-two-year-old hitter who for half his life had been the pride and torment of Boston.

Esteemed as the greatest batter of his age, Williams might have ranked with Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth if he hadn’t lost numerous seasons to military service and injuries. But lost seasons weren’t the only impediment to his career: Williams spat at inopportune moments, rebuked sportswriters, and rarely acknowledged his fans with so much as a tip of the hat. In return, Williams was subjected throughout his career to open hostility from the sports pages and grandstands alike.

In the early fall of 1785, Oliver Evans of New Castle County, Delaware, traveled his region seeking financial support for what everybody frankly told him was a harebrained scheme: Evans intended to convert a conventional flour mill into a fully automatic one. “Ah! Oliver,” one miller chided the inventor as he turned him away, “you cannot make water run uphill, you cannot make wooden millers!” It was without any backing, then, that Evans began redesigning the mill he owned with his brothers on Red Clay Creek. For his persistence, he became regarded as a man “who would never be worth anything,” a neighbor later recalled, “because he was always spending his time on some contrivance or another.”

On September 2, the men and women of Rock Springs, Wyoming, a bleak coalmining town south of the Tetons, loaded their guns and descended on the local Chinese community. A number of Chinese had recently been hired to work in the mines there, and whites felt that their jobs were endangered. In the chaos that ensued, twenty-eight Chinese were killed. Over five hundred others fled into the hills, and their homes were burned behind them.

I read “A Century of Cable Cars” (April/ May) with interest but was concerned that the writer took no note of our incline up Lookout Mountain, which is advertised as the “Steepest in the World!” It was built in the mid-1880s, and a hotel went up atop the mountain a few hundred yards from the terminus.

Cable roads in the West and Northeast are liberally listed in the story, but there is no reference to any system in a Southern state.

The Lookout Mountain incline is a fine operation but, like Angel’s Flight in Los Angeles, it is a funicular, and hence does not strictly qualify as a cable-car line in the classic sense.

I have been a charter subscriber to American Heritage, and I particularly want to compliment you on the February/ March 1985 issue. An article that deserves special praise, in my opinion, is “Robert Ingersoll: The Illustrious Infidel” by Lynne Vincent Cheney. The story is superbly written, and the author merits our praise and appreciation. It is interesting to note that, although many people today are unfamiliar with this once famous American, his work has not been forgotten. His birthday is now being celebrated annually in Peoria, Illinois, his writings are again available on the market, and he has been portrayed on the stage by Roger E. Greeley in a fine performance entitled “An Evening with lngersoll.”

It is unfortunate that John H. White, Jr., confused two places with similar names in the “Postscripts to History” entitled “More on Matthew” (February/March 1985). The West Point Foundry’s location, “fifty miles up the Hudson,” was not Cold Harbor but Cold Spring. It is also referred to as Cold Spring-on-Hudson to distinguish it from the Long Island whaling community of Cold Spring Harbor.

Southern Cable Ingersoll Admirer Cold Confusion Praise over All If He’d Been There Coupon Lure Book Notes Book Notes No Booz Log Cabins

It was 1923. America was singing “Yes! We Have No Bananas,” “Barney Google,” “That Old Gang of Mine,” “Who’s Sorry Now?” On Broadway, Little Miss Bluebeard, The Nervous Wreck, Cyrano de Bergerac , and George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan were packing them in.

And on the silver screen the hit movies—silent, of course —included The Covered Wagon with Ernest Torrence; The Green Goddess with George Arliss; The Hunchback of Notre Dame with Lon Chancy; and Safety Last with Harold Lloyd.