January 2011

The June/July “Time Machine” states that the 1934 All-Star Game was hosted by the National League in the Polo Grounds in the Bronx. Wrong. The dear departed Polo Grounds were in Manhattan. Yankee Stadium, which sits almost directly across the Harlem River from the site of the Polo Grounds, is in the Bronx.

As an eleven- and twelve-year-old I had the opportunity to see the Mets play at the Polo Grounds several times before they were torn down to make way for high-rise housing. By the time I got to see a game there, whatever charm the place had was quickly disappearing within the dried-out wooden boards of its facade. But it was still a thrill, especially now as I look back on it, to have been in a park where so much baseball history took place. It was ancient, it was decrepit, it deserved to be put to rest. But the Polo Grounds had character; they were a far cry from the antiseptic, geometric, Astroturfed pleasure domes of today. But more important, the Polo Grounds were in Manhattan.

The New York Times may have disapproved when the government decided to put Lincoln on the penny (“The Time Machine,” August/September), but Carl Sandburg thought it was a stroke of genius. He wrote an editorial in the Milwaukee Daily News when the coin was issued in 1909: “The penny is strictly the coin of the common people. At Palm Beach, Newport, and Saratoga you will find nothing for sale for one cent. No ice cream cones at a penny a piece there.

” ‘Keep the change,’ says the rich man. ‘How many pennies do I get back?’ asks the poor man.

“Only the children of the poor know the joy of getting a penny for running around the corner to the grocery.

“The penny is the bargain counter coin. Only the common people walk out of their way to get something for nine cents reduced from ten cents. The penny is the coin used by those who are not sure of tomorrow, those who know that if they are going to have a dollar next week they must watch the pennies this week.

All Whose Jazz? Libertarian Concerns Libertarian Concerns Libertarian Concerns Huck Finnish Manhattan Playground A Penny for Lincoln

SOMEWHERE IN THE emptiness between Hudson Bay and the Rockies, a vagrant puff of wind raised a dusty snow and went skittering over the plains, picking up a spiral here and another one there to create a north-country November blizzard of the kind that rages lustily for a few days and then blows itself out with no great harm done. But in this first week of November 1913, things were a bit different.

Far off to the southeast a low-pressure area had formed over the Great Lakes. The growing disturbance in Canada was drawn by that low-pressure area, and the blizzard went sliding over the curve of the earth, growing wide and deep and strong, carrying great banks of evil clouds as if it were backpacking the material for further growth and development. It grew out of the region where there was little for it to harm and swept down on the world’s busiest waterway, where immeasurable damage could be done.

TAKING STILL ANOTHER cast at the Presidency in 1908, William Jennings Bryan addresses a Lambertville, New Jersey, crowd with an eloquence perfected during the course of two previous campaigns. The year is established by the poster to the right of the train: The Merry Widow had opened in New York in 1907. “When [Bryan] returned from his tours,” wrote his wife, “he had not only spoken to, but had listened to, the mind of America.” But for all his bravura rhetoric, he did not speak persuasively enough to beat Taft in November.

I found it quite disillusioning that Geoffrey C. Ward, in his “Matters of Fact” column (June/July issue), could veer so far from the actual facts. It seems hardly possible, a full twentyfour years after the publication of my book, The Story of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band , that even a careless student of history could echo all the previously printed misconceptions about the first jazz recording.

It is ridiculous to assert so positively that “[Nick] La Rocca and his friends had learned [jazz music] by listening to … the early cornet master Freddie Keppard, after whom La Rocca had patterned much of his playing.” La Rocca had never even heard of Keppard until the Esquire gang of racketeers began to fabricate the mythology of jazz around 1936.

I enjoyed Frederick Allen’s “Saving the Statue” in the June/July issue, but in his account of the restoration of the Statue of Liberty, Mr. Allen did not comment on the torch viewing-area. Will it, and the right-arm access stairway, be reopened or will both areas remain closed to the public?

Mr. Allen replies: Liberty’s right arm and torch balcony will not be reopened to the public. In the statue’s earliest years access was available, but only to visitors who obtained special permission from one of the statue’s administrative bodies. By 1916, if not earlier (archivists are uncertain), the arm was permanently closed to everyone except maintenance people. This was not due to fear that the arm might weaken but because of the inconvenience of the steep, narrow, almost ladderlike single staircase.

THE MOST PRESUMPTUOUS counterfeiter in American history was a blue-eyed, sandy-bearded, German sign painter named Emanuel Ninger. As a sign painter he was adequate; as an impressionist, a historic master. And a soaring egotist. Not for him the ordinary counterfeiter’s conceit that his bills were as good as the government’s. Ninger insisted his were worth more. The Bureau of Engraving and Printing merely turned out mass-impressed inked rectangles, but from 1883 to 1896 Ninger produced carefully rendered individual works of art.

Ninger was thirty-five years old when he came to America in 1882 with his wife, Adele, and $2,000. In the spring of 1883 they bought a farm near Westfield, New Jersey, for about $800. There, when the rest of the money ran out, he began making his own.

May I add an anecdote to John Kobler’s “Bravo Caruso!” in your February/March issue?

In the summer of 1921, when my father was a lad, his family and some neighbors from New York set out on a cross-country trip. Outfitted by Abercrombie and Fitch and traveling in Cadillac touring/camping cars, their little expedition frequently attracted notice as it braved the ruts that served as our nation’s roads in those days.

At one stop for gasoline and provisions in a sleepy, dusty little Southwestern town, they were approached by a resident. The man timidly introduced himself and, gesturing to the cars’ New York license plates, asked if the strangers were from the city itself. My grandfather allowed that they were.

“Ah,” said the man. “Well, I don’t mean to bother you, but I just thought you might like to know that Enrico Caruso has died.”

The group of travelers expressed their surprise and regret. My father’s family had season tickets to the Metropolitan Opera and had frequently heard the great tenor sing.