January 2011

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.

In the Goetzmann and Sloan article on Edward H. Harriman’s 1899 Alaskan expedition (June/July 1982), you have referred to the “brilliant young bird illustrator” Louis Agassiz Fuertes, and his “charming pictures.” But you failed to identify a colored reproduction of his work as belonging to the artist. Below the magpie in a group of “Overland Friends” on page 79 can be seen the artist’s signature, LA Fuertes.

In our October/November 1982 issue we printed a letter from a reader stating that Richard Reeves had wrongly identified California Assemblywoman Maxine Waters in an interview, “If Tocqueville Could See Us Now,” that appeared in the June/July issue. We find on checking with Ms. Waters’s office that Reeves was right in the first place, except that he identified her as majority leader rather than as assistant majority leader.

In “Genealogy: The Search for a Personal Past” (August/September) the membership of the Colonial Dames of America was incorrectly given as 22,000. The proper figure is 2,000.

NOT LONG AGO George Resh, a member of the Pomona, California, School Board, decided it would be nice to honor his colleague C. J. Mendoza, whose term on the board had just expired.

After all, Mendoza had grown up in Pomona, taught in Pomona schools, married a Pomona teacher—so what could be more fitting than to change the name of Hamilton School to Mendoza School?

He proposed it at the next Board of Education meeting:

“Who,” one board member wanted to know, “is Hamilton School named after?”

Resh leaped up from his seat. “I researched that!” he exclaimed. “Hamilton was named after an old American President.”

Someone from the audience whispered to a trustee, Agnes Moreland Jackson, who then turned to her colleagues on the Board of Education and announced:

“Hamilton was never President.”

Laughter.

In respect to the picture of the Stowell Family on pages 16–17 of the August/ September 1982 issue that was taken with a panoramic lens: this type of camera had a lens that was turned from left to right during the exposure, thus allowing the clown on the left end of the group to run like hell around the back of the group and be on the right end by the time the lens was aimed at him again. This is what apparently happened in this picture, and it was a good reason to keep the children seated in front.

Genealogy can be a powerful enlivener of history, and not only for grown-ups. Children love family stories, and if they know that Grandfather was a carrier flier in the Pacific or that Grandmother’s grandparents had the first car in their neighborhood, they will absorb a personal sense of the past that will make history classes more exciting.

Even as a small boy I knew that I was descended from the Mayflower’s John Rowland, which puts me one up on your Judson Hale, who only wishes he were. I can still remember the thrill of reading Bradford’s history about Howland’s falling overboard and wondering, “Where would I be if he hadn’t been rescued?”

I knew about Quaker ancestors on Nantucket and in Pennsylvania and their migration south and to the Midwest. And I knew that my grandfathers had fought, one for the North and one for the South, in the Civil War, which made that war more vivid—though they were both most uncommunicative about it!

P.S. By the way, it was St. Paul, not Timothy, who wrote, “Neither give heed to fables and endless genealogies” (First Epistle to Timothy, 1:4).

In your excellent article “Genealogy” you quote a piece of invaluable advice for would-be family historians: “There is no point in digging up an ancestor if you are not going to make him live.” May I add two suggestions? First, save the letters! These exchanges between parents and children, spouses, other relatives, and friends not only tell what happened but give an invaluable picture of the writers’ character, personality, and opinions. Also their comments often serve to give a needed light touch to a too-staid text. Second, talk to the old folks! How often have I cursed myself for not asking questions, now that those who had the answers are passed beyond recall.

IN THE August/September 1981 issue the article “An Airplane in Every Garage” traced the career of the stubborn American conviction that swarms of private planes would soon be taking the citizenry into the air, just as the automobile had put an earlier generation on the road.

One high point in this stillborn revolution occurred when, in August of 1936, a test pilot landed a strange craft in downtown Washington, emerged to fold back its rotor blades, climbed back into the cockpit, and drove off. The machine was an autogyro, and we gave the pilot’s name as John Ray.

Now Donald Gallager of Fort Washington, Pennsylvania, writes to tell us that the pilot’s name was James—not John—Ray, and that this was not the first time he’d landed an unusual plane in the capital.