January 2011

Recently, while listening to the early-morning radio news, I heard an extraordinary report of a retired man in Florida who has made the Social Security Administration the beneficiary of a large portion of his estate—$40,000 to be exact. Asked why he had decided on such an unusual course, he replied that he was proud to be a citizen of the United States, had benefited from its system of government, and simply wanted to show his appreciation of his good fortune.

Despite the social and economic problems of our nation, there is no doubt that this is a fortunate country and we are a fortunate, even blessed, people. Weighed on the scale of world horrors and all those forces that thwart and dishearten mankind, our portions of opportunity and liberty are very great. Telling the story of this remarkable heritage has been the task and privilege of this magazine for almost thirty years.

I DON’T THINK of myself as having a “thing” about lampposts, but when I walk Manhattan’s streets at night— streets naked to the greenish glare of 1,000-watt lights vaulting three stories high—I realize how much I miss those graceful, human-scale streetlamps of my youth.

Mercury-vapor lamps make even the prettiest woman look ghoulish, transform charming streets into the set for The Murders in the Rue Morgue , and imbue the most innocent passerby with the wild-eyed visage of a psychopath.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN was a paradoxical figure to the many artists who portrayed him. He felt ignorant about art, admitted to having an “unpracticed eye,” and he was given to publicly mocking his appearance. Once accused during a debate with Stephen Douglas of being two-faced, Lincoln is said to have replied, “If I had another face, do you think I’d wear this one?”

Yet this diffident, self-deprecating man was unfailingly willing to sit for portraitists. He allowed himself to be painted and sculpted, photographed and sketched, submitting to techniques that ranged from the tedious to the painful. The resulting images were engraved and lithographed, struck on medals and coins, reproduced on banners and broadsides—just as Lincoln had intended.

EVERY THURSDAY , when I leave my apartment in a vast housing complex on Columbus Avenue to conduct a university seminar on the American city, I reflect on a double life—mine. Most of the people I pass on my way to the subway look as imprisoned by the city as my parents and relatives used to look in the Brooklyn ghetto where I spent my first twenty years. Yet no matter where else I have traveled and taught, I always seem to return to streets and scenes like those on New York’s Upper West Side.

PARKER BROTHERS , who bought the rights to the Ouija in 1966, denies that it is more than a game. But over the past century millions of Americans have used it to speak with the dead, to answer life’s questions, and to make their decisions. Common sense says it merely reveals the user’s unconscious thoughts and is subject to overt manipulation as well, but some believers in the occult dread it as the devil’s oracle. This three-legged table on its alphabet board may have no inherent power, but when its users are receptive, there is little it cannot do for them.

American Ouija boards sprang from the first native spiritualist craze. In 1847 in Hydesville, New York, the two teen-aged Fox sisters claimed that mysterious rappings emanated from their bodies. The source of these rappings, they said, was the ghost of a peddler thought to have been murdered and buried in their cellar. The two girls decoded the rappings and built a lucrative spiritualist business.

MY MOTHER DIED in Pittsburgh on the evening of Thanksgiving Day, that is, on November 25, 1937. If she had lived three weeks longer, she would have been seventy-three.

THE TITANIC TREMORS that swept down from the north, ripping through the California coastline and seabed at seven thousand miles per hour, slammed into the sleeping city of San Francisco at 5:13 on the calm, mild morning of Wednesday, April 18, 1906. A few early risers stared dumbstruck as streets crested and broke like ocean waves and church bells began to ring in swaying steeples. For forty seconds chimneys, cornices, whole buildings spilled into the riven streets. Then came a ten-second respite, followed by a greater concussion that jolted the city, one witness said, like “a terrier shaking a rat.”

In the silence that followed, stunned firefighters collected themselves and headed for their engines. There were no fire bells—the whole alarm system was in ruins—but they knew they wouldn’t have to look far. Minutes after the quake the city was burning in fifty separate places.

TELEVISION HAS BEEN accused of many things: vulgarizing tastes; trivializing public affairs; sensationalizing news; corrupting the young; pandering to profits; undermining traditional values. The indictments are no doubt too harsh, and they ignore the medium’s considerable achievements over two decades. Yet even the severest critics have not noticed the way in which television first seduced and then captured the whole American political process.

The fact is that each year fewer people register to vote, and among those who do, an ever-shrinking number actually go to the polls. Since casting a free ballot constitutes the highest expression of freedom in a democracy, its declining use is a grave matter. How did we get ourselves into this perilous state?

The article “Whistling Women” was of particular interest to me. Perhaps you will be interested to learn of a rebuttal to all those dire predictions. When I was a little girl, in the early days of this century, I learned to whistle and was very proud of my accomplishment and practiced diligently. My paternal grandmother, who was tone deaf, repeated the opening bit of doggerel in your article. This naturally stopped my whistling until my maternal grandmother removed the curse. She sang, whistled, played the piano, and loved music. The magic cure? It went like this:

Whistling girls and bleating sheep Are the very best property a man can keep. I’ve been whistling ever since.

Two words in your story about Babe Ruth’s (maybe) calling his home run in 1932 (“The Time Machine,” October/ November 1982) wounded the psyche of every Chicago baseball fan.

Chicago is a highly polarized city when it comes to baseball. White Sox fans detest the Cubs. Cub fans despise the White Sox. Chicagoans who profess to support both teams are either politicians, immigrants who have not conformed to local mores, or subversives who neither appreciate nor understand the national pastime.

The Cubs have won nothing since 1945. That’s thirty-seven full seasons. They haven’t won a World Series since before World War I. Theirs is a record of futility rivaled only by the White Sox, who went forty years between pennants, even if they did win in 1959.

Each Chicago fan glories in the inadequacies of his favorite team. Making a virtue of necessity, he takes pride in his team’s disasters, brags of its misfortunes, and will argue interminably that his team’s blunders are the most horrendous.