January 2011

During those years leading up to Pearl Harbor, the Japanese gave way to a weird megalomania of a kind that has affected other peoples from time to time. This was simply the belief that everything had originally been invented in Japan: the first bicycle and the first sewing machine, radios, escalators, and electric toasters. You name it, the Japanese had made the first one, only to have their brilliant idea pinched and exploited by the West (exactly the opposite, of course, of how the West then viewed the Japanese). But I never heard any Japanese lay claim to a first that was undoubtedly theirs: talking pictures. These were being featured in Japanese movie theaters at least ten years before Hollywood startled the world with Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer .

1785 Two Hundred Years Ago 1885 One Hundred Years Ago 1935 Fifty Years Ago 1960 Twenty-five Years Ago

Dear Chief: It is coming up on 25 years since, fresh out of law school, I reported for duty as your clerk on the Supreme Court. It would seem timely that, with a quarter-century of law practice under my belt, I report in—that I give you an accounting of the record since I finished my postgraduate education under your stewardship, that I reflect what, if anything, I’ve learned in the interim about the practice of law and its place as an astonishingly powerful institution in our society.

On July 6, 1942, I was standing on the fantail of the mine-sweeper Fulmar off Portland, Maine when the signal tower started blinking away. By the time I could get to the bridge, the message had already been typed up. It was for me.

ENSIGN RUSSELL E. SARD, USNR HEREBY DETACHED X PROCEED TO PORT YP-438 X MAKE REPORT IMMEDIATE SUPERIOR IN COMMAND IF PRESENT OTHERWISE BY DISPATCH X DUTY IN COMMAND YP-438

Trustworthy, Loyal, Etc. Trustworthy, Loyal, Etc. Blossom’s License Wollworth Sitters Devon Memories Too Competent Anesthesia Forever Neighbor Mark Twain

Of the three basic rites of passage— birth, marriage, and death—the most vital is marriage, according to a historian of wedding customs, because it is the only one at which we are fully present, fully aware. Marriage is certainly the rite of passage that has, through the ages, accumulated the greatest weight of ritual, superstition, and ceremony.

When Oliver Jensen joined the Boy Scouts (February/March 1985), the organization was already about sixteen years old, and early growing pains had ceased. I was a Scout in the very first year, before Mr. Jensen was born.

Shortly after the incorporation of the Boy Scouts of America on February 8, 1910, Asa E. Lewis, principal of schools in Dallas, Pennsylvania, wrote to the National Headquarters in New York requesting that a troop he was organizing be registered, and that he be appointed Scoutmaster. National Headquarters, starting with nothing but a little information from the year-old Boy Scouts in England, was proceeding by trial and error. It eventually complied with Lewis’s request, designating the new troop Dallas, Pa., Troop No. 1.

We received the first edition of Handbook for Boys . No official equipment had been authorized at that time. The first item I recall was the pocketknife. It was recommended that tinned-steel canteens, pint cups, mess kits, and cutlery —Army surplus from the Spanish-American War—be purchased locally.

Oliver Jensen’s memoir of Boy Scouting brought on a horrible fit of nostalgia. I’m still lost in a reverie of the days when I almost became a Boy Scout.

It was 1913 or 1914, Scouting was just spreading across the land, and it had finally reached our town of Menominee, Michigan. Word went out that a Scout troop was forming. The Reverend Mr. Curzon, pastor of the Methodist church, would lend the church hall for the new troop. We were just getting well started when Father Jacques called me aside after a Saturday catechism class.

Didn’t I realize it was bordering on mortal sin to get into something sponsored by the Methodists? And in the church itself, yet! he exclaimed. But, Father, we don’t meet in the church, I said. Makes no difference, it’s a Methodist building, he answered. My suggestion that I thought they were only renting the place was dismissed as of no consequence, and it was strongly intimated that the very foundations of the Vatican were quivering—or would when they heard about my actions—and Father Jacques would be held responsible.

Robert Uhl’s article on Christopher Blossom and the new generation of American marine artists (February/March 1985) brings to mind an important point that I like to emphasize with artists who attempt to portray real ships and waterfront scenes: They are no less responsible for their accuracy than are model-makers and authors. If they intend to depict a specific scene or ship, I say they are obliged to research their subject as would an author of a book or the builder of a model. Not all do, although many are very much aware of this and really do their homework.

In “The Time Machine” for twenty-five years ago (February/March 1985), there appears a very interesting story and photograph of the sitters-in at the Greensboro Woolworth’s lunch counter on February 1, 1960.

Can you supply the names of these immortals? Rosa Parks and her bus have become fixed in the folklore, but the four students at Woolworth’s seem to have achieved an anonymity almost surpassing that of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist (whose name actually was, I believe, Dr. Lewis J. Fielding). It would enhance the record if you could provide these identifications.