January 2011

FOR A WHILE George Orwell thought of calling his novel about life in a totalitarian future The Last Man in Europe. But in the end that title didn’t quite satisfy him, and he chose another simply by reversing the last two digits of the year in which he finished the manuscript. It is a good indication of the book’s enduring power that as the year thus whimsically chosen approached, a score of magazines came out with articles assessing the actual state of the world in 1984 against Orwell’s vision of it in Nineteen Eighty-Four, and offering edgy reassurances that things aren’t quite so bad as he’d predicted.

ABOUT SUBURBS, ONLY COMMUTERS know for sure. For single-family houses, lawns, off-street parking, and gardens they endure harrowing round trips by train, bus, and automobile, certain that life in the suburbs amply repays the time and money lost in transit. And they endure the smug jibes of residents of city and country, jibes as old as commuting. As one magazine writer put it in 1907, the typical suburbanite “neither gets all the way into the life of the city nor clean out into the country, so his view of things has neither the perspective of robust rurality nor the sophistication of a man in the city and of it.”

THIS IS A LIST of suburbs across the country and the dates they took on their specific character. In many cases the dates are approximate. Discovering when a place becomes a suburb is rather difficult, and in some cases I have chosen a year based on the time when large numbers of heads of households began commuting, or from the beginning of dense streetcar service. On the other hand, some model suburbs such as Forest Hills Gardens, New York, existed as suburbs from the day the first family moved in.

IN MY SENIOR year of college my teacher Kenneth Koch, sick to death of the tenacious obsession that prevented me from writing about anything except the First World War, said he would fail me in his composition course unless I wrote about something I actually had experienced.

After some fretting I produced a story about a party on a friend’s front lawn in my last year of high school. Professor Koch liked it—at any rate, liked it better than another chronicle of tragic folly on the Somme—and he read it aloud to the class.

As he read, the students around me began to get restless. When he was done, Alan Senauke gave voice to the general feeling: “It’s so phony. It’s so— bourgeois . These high school kids doing their worthless crud together—”

Koch cut him short. “You’re just sore because everyone in the story seems rich and happy.”

EXPLORATION HAS A way of destroying as much knowledge and as many features as it reveals. At the first approach of an impartial observer, bodies of water have evaporated into thin air, navigable passages have healed up without a scar, and great lands firmly fixed on the map have sunk beneath the waves, carrying whole species of beings down with them. Exploration claimed new victims in the 1960s, when the Mariner space probes gave the world its first close view of the surface of the planet Mars. Hopes had run high. Ever since the 1890s, popular imagination, fueled by the work of the American astronomer Percival Lowell, had populated the red planet with an advanced race of beings. The Mariner pictures showed no such signs of civilization. The surface they revealed was barren, cratered, and, to all appearances, lifeless.

IN JUNE OF 1976 THE MAINE MARITIME Museum in Bath received a letter addressed simply to “The Curator.” It was from two local women named Carrie Groves and Gladys Castner and described some nautical material including a “large color drawing of a ship” that the two women felt belonged in a museum. Museums, of course, receive hundreds of such offers every year, and in the overwhelming majority of cases the material turns out to be of no particular value.

The first writing was probably a matter of smearing blood—or the juice of some plant—with a finger. When someone figured out that a hollow reed could be used to supply a steady flow of liquid to a flat surface, we had the first pen. This seems to have happened about twenty-seven hundred years before the birth of Christ.

Onward and upward it went, through various implements: the quill pen (introduced in the sixth century B.C. ) reigned for over a thousand years, and steel points appeared in 1780. The latter were elegant enough but involved the inconvenience of continual dipping into the ink supply. Handmade fountain pens came into being in the early nineteenth century, but these had to be filled with an eyedropper and never became popular. Then came Lewis Edson Waterman (1837–1901).

FEBRUARY 7: There were three thousand teen-agers and over one hundred policemen at JFK Airport in New York when the Beatles arrived for their first American visit. They had already sold six million records, and “I Want to Hold Your Hand” had become the top record in the United States. George Harrison was twenty, Paul McCartney twenty-one, John Lennon and Ringo Starr twenty-three.

Lennon was asked how he accounted for the group’s success. “We have a press agent,” he answered. “We have a message,” McCartney added, and the crowd grew still. “Our message is: ‘Buy more Beatle records!’”

Another mob of kids hung about the Plaza Hotel, where the Fab Four were staying; some of these were asked by a reporter just why the Beatles generated all this hysteria. Social anthropologists of the future may find this material valuable:

THE MAN STANDING in the back row, second from right, has every reason to look proud. He is Harry Milford Cadwell, and this is not only his band, it is his family. All but four of the musicians pictured here are related. They all lived in Dallas County, Iowa.

Harry was born in Illinois. When he was ten, his parents moved to an Iowa farm, where he lived the rest of his life, a farmer, blacksmith, and musician.

He formed the Cadwell Farm Bureau Orchestra in the early 1900s and found its members ready to hand. He had taught his children music as soon as they were old enough to learn it. They played at local occasions and received sixteen dollars per night for their efforts, with a special ninety-dollar fee for an epic thirteen-and-a-half-hour performance one July 4.

DURING THE PAST few seasons, more and more readers have asked us when A MERICAN H ERITAGE will be publishing a new cumulative index; the last five-year index ends with 1974, while the more recent annuals decrease in utility as they grow in number. We re happy to announce a new cumulative index that covers every issue from our beginning through October of 1982. Those wishing to order one should refer to the instructions under the masthead on the inside front cover of this issue. Meanwhile, we offer the following excerpt from its preface, which was written—as is only proper—by one of our founding editors.