In the February/March 1981 “Postscripts,” you published an article concerning the standard-issue postcard used in World War I, which as you said, was a “masterpiece of tight-lipped communication in which the soldier had only to cross out what he didn’t want to say.” I have one of these postcards, which my father, Albert Gall, sent to my mother while he was fighting overseas. I admire his creative cleverness in turning it into a love letter. You’ll notice that his postcard is stamped by the censor, who must have gotten a chuckle out of it.
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January 2011
Victor Salvatore’s article about baseball and Abner Doubleday (June/July 1983 issue) did not get all the facts correct. If he is going to kill a myth, he should do it properly. If he is going to shoot Santa Claus, he should shoot him dead! I grew up with Abner Doubleday. My interest in him came about naturally; it was genetic. My mother used to call him “Uncle.” So did her five sisters and two brothers, and all of her maternal cousins. In 19601 began gathering all the material I could about “Uncle Abner” for a biography of the man. Two characteristics soon emerged. Abner Doubleday was primarily a military man—outspoken, verbose and critical, and an intense nationalist; he was also very much a family man and visited relatives whenever the opportunity presented itself (though he was not always welcome, as one relative testified who thought him “an SOB” and proceeded to spend the whole course of Abner’s visit in the outhouse!).
AT A TABLE IN a cozy Chinese restaurant on the Left Bank of Paris, half a dozen men argue loudly about the Statue of Liberty. Several argue in French, several argue in English, and one argues in both languages while attempting simultaneous translation of everyone else’s remarks. The question at issue: Why wasn’t the statue built the way Gustave Eiffel designed it?
EIFFEL, THE GREATEST French engineer of the nineteenth century, devised an ingenious structure to hold up the Statue of Liberty several years before beginning work on his famous tower. But the structure was clumsily modified by the time the statue was erected in New York Harbor. The change shifted the internal support for the upraised right arm, which holds the torch, eighteen inches off to the side and slightly forward. The weakened connection has needed repairs over the years and needs them again now.
“BY AND BY,” Mark Twain wrote to William Dean Howells in 1875, “I shall take a boy of twelve and run him through life (in the first person) but not Tom Sawyer —he would not be a good character for it.” A month later he knew that the boy would be Huck, and he began work; by midsummer of 1876 Twain was well under way. But something went wrong. He gave up the notion of carrying Huck on into adulthood and told Howells of what he had written thus far: “I like it only tolerably well, and may possibly pigeonhole or burn the ms. when it is done.”
IN THE ERA BEFORE PHOTOGRAPHS could be reproduced in the press, newspapers and magazines sent “special artists”—the photojournalists of their time—out on assignment. Their on-the-spot drawings were then made into engravings. The most famous of these reporters was Winslow Homer, who went on to become one of America’s greatest painters. Alfred Hodolph Waud (1828-91) never achieved such artistic heights, but the thousands of sketches he made earned him the Library of Congress’s praise as “one of the most important illustrators in American history.” The English-horn Want! spent forty years sketching from the East Coast to as far west as Bismarck, Dakota Territory, and covered such national events as the Western migration and the Civil War. He would take on the most strenuous assignments, sketching so fast that he constantly ran out of paper, used any scrap on hand, glued bits together, and drew on the back of other drawings. In his more finished pictures, he often added an ink wash and Chinese white to his pencil drawing.
After reading “What Went Wrong With Disney’s World’s Fair” by Elting E. Morison (December 1983), I cannot help but compare it with the New York World’s Fair of 1939 and 1940. Epcot’s Spaceship Earth sphere is more than just reminiscent of the sparkling white Perisphere, the fifteen-story sphere that housed “Democracity” (the ideal planned community of tomorrow), and served with the seven-hundred-foot Trylon as the theme center of the fair. In addition, the very layout of Epcot is similar to the planned environment envisioned by the Board of Design of the 1939 exposition, with broad, tree-lined avenues and promenades radiating from the theme center. The designers in New York arranged all pavilions into zones determined by the nature of the exhibit and even attempted to organize all pavilions with a rainbow color scheme beginning with the pure white Trylon and Perisphere and progressing with more vivid colors in avenues of concentric rings surrounding the theme center.
By now you have probably heard from a few thousand upset alumni of Oberlin College, after you mentioned in the December 1983 “Time Machine” that Oberlin opened its doors in 1883 as the “first coeducational college in the world.”
I FIRST MET ED MURROW at the Hotel Adlon in Berlin on Friday, August 27, 1937. He had sent me a telegram three days earlier inviting me to dinner. I was not in the best of moods. After three years as a newspaper correspondent in Berlin, I was out of a job, very nearly broke, and my wife, Tess, was pregnant.
As I walked across the Adlon lobby toward the man I took to be Murrow, I was a little taken aback by his handsome face. Black hair. Straight features. Fine chin. Just what you would expect from a radio type, I thought. His neat, freshly pressed dark suit, probably cut in London’s Savile Row, contrasted with my crumpled gray flannel jacket and unpressed slacks. He had asked me to dinner, I was almost certain, to pump me for material for one of his radio broadcasts. Well, I would try to be as civil as possible. He was not the first.
I HATE QUOTATIONS . Tell me what you know,” wrote Emerson. It’s a feeling our grandparents would have understood. For hundreds of years most educated people could unloose a torrent of quotations from the wise or famous on any occasion. Many a stern admonition or well-meaning piece of advice was nailed down by an apt example from the Bible, Shakespeare, or Emerson himself. No longer; the art of the quotation died with the arts of listening, reading, and memorization. What had, in Emerson’s day, become at best a pedantic, at worst an oppressive, way of expressing oneself, today seems like a magical talent. It may be that some harmless English teacher who hasn’t heard the news or a down-home preacher or two are still able to recollect the perfect passage that transforms the commonplace into the extraordinary. But these are professionals; nowadays the average citizen is more likely to be heard quoting the punch line of an unprintable joke.