Your recent article on the 1936 General Motors strike (April/May 1982) interested me greatly, as I was a young GM staff assistant then. I remember that after the strike was over and production resumed, a meeting was called in Detroit of manufacturing and personnel people from all the plants. Over two hundred people must have been in the big meeting room, where we listened to the boss of all GM production, William S. Knudsen. After calling the meeting to order, he started out by saying in his wonderful Danish accent: “Gentlemen, the reason for this meeting reminds me of a story. An actor friend of mine once went to New York to get in a play. He needed a place to live, and so he went to a boardinghouse he had heard about. He knocked, and the landlady came to the door. ‘Good morning, madam,’ he said. ‘What are your best terms for actors?’ ” ‘My best terms for actors are bastards and sons-of-bitches.’ Then she closed the door in his face. “Now, gentlemen, we cannot treat the labor people that way any more.”
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I strongly suspect that the Colonel Plympton whose portrait appears on page 112 of your April/May issue is Peter Plympton of Missouri and not “Old Ring”—Joseph Plympton of Massachusetts.
The portrait (which is printed backwards) is that of an infantry officer of the period from 1851 to 1861. He appears to me to be about thirty years of age, which is thirty-five years younger than Joseph Plympton, a War of 1812 veteran, would have been.
Peter Plympton (U.S.M.A. 1847) was born about 1827 and was brevetted lieutenant colonel in 1862 for gallantry and meritorious service at the battle of Peratta, New Mexico. He would therefore have been addressed as “colonel” until his death in 1866.
The officer may, of course, be someone else. I am sure, however, that “Old Ring” would have shown more tarnish in the 185Os than the gentleman portrayed here.
The portfolio of Albert Murray’s combat art that ran in February/March of 1982 includes a marvelous portrait of Admiral Thomas L. Sprague. The caption describes him as having engaged a vastly superior Japanese force off Samar on October 25, 1944. You have the wrong Admiral Sprague. Clifton “Ziggy” Sprague was the commanding officer in that fight. Mr. Pierett is quite right. It was Rear Admiral Clifton Sprague who took in his escort group “Taffy-3”—six small escort carriers and seven destroyers and destroyer escorts—against four Japanese battleships and a clutch of heavy cruisers. “I didn’t think we’d last five minutes,” he said, but “I thought we might as well give them all we’ve got before we go down.”
In the article “Lincoln’s Life Preserver” in the February/March 1982 issue, Charles Strozier refers to a Third Republic ban on the Marseillaise . I am sure Professor Strozier meant to refer to Napoleon III’s Second Empire as the source of the ban on the republican hymn. After all, the Third Republic was not founded until 1871, six years after Lincoln’s death.
In 1938, at the age of nine, I discovered one of life’s cruelest ironies: the best comic strips invariably appear in the worst newspapers. Since Hearst’s Evening Journal-American was, according to my mother, the worst “fascist rag” in New York, it was inevitable that Popeye, Maggie and Jiggs, and Krazy Kat would be locked up in its pages. With the Journal banned at home, my glimpses of Krazy were destined to be fleeting. I carried on as best I could through childhood and early adolescence, seeing her now and then for a minute or two, until she disappeared completely in 1944. (I say “her,” but Krazy was a cat of seemingly ambiguous gender. ) I thought I had forgotten her, had put her entirely out of my mind, when, in 1969, I saw her again—exactly as I remembered her—in a large anthology of Krazy Kat strips published by Grosset & Dunlap. Krazy, Ignatz Mouse, Offissa Pupp, and the other residents of Coconino County still seemed as enigmatic as ever, but it didn’t matter now because I had E. E. Cummings to explain everything.
Fireflies? Glowworms? Whatever the right name for them, in St. Louis we called them lightning bugs. On summer evenings we used to chase them across our lawns, which were not divided from one another, and collect them, when caught, in little medicine bottles. We had grandiose ideas of getting enough lightning bugs together to make lamps, but it never worked out like that because they died first. I remember that they had a not unpleasant smell when clutched in my sweaty hand, a smell like that of a dilute miner’s lamp, and their glow was greenish. Lightning bugs (or fireflies, have it your own way) are, I suppose, a tropical or at least subtropical phenomenon, and St. Louis was, is, subtropical. Nowadays we hide the fact from ourselves with air conditioning, but it is, or was, awfully hot through the long summer, and the heat began before our vacation did. There was a board of education rule that classes were not to be held when the mercury rose to ninety degrees, so on suspiciously warm days the principal came to the classroom just before the noon bell to inspect the thermometer.
Whistling women and crowing hens Always come to some bad ends. —American folk-saying
A lady who grew up on a farm near Wabash, Indiana, recently recalled that any unfamiliar crowing from the henhouse would cause her father to rush out and identify the offender. Before the week was out, that hen ended up in the oven or the stewpot, according to its age. As a ritual for the departing bird, her father would intone his version of the old saw:
A whistling woman and a crowing hen Sure don’t come to no good end.
Needless to say, the lady in Wabash grew up without whistling. But she still questions why you’d lump together a chicken trying out a male call with a maiden who puckers.
March 1925. Baron Pierre de Coubertin, president of the Comité International Olympique, in a confidential letter from Paris to William May Garland, president of the California Olympiad committee: “In case of Holland failing to fulfill her engagements … in the IX Olympiad … would Los Angeles be willing or not to take up 1928 instead of 1932? An answer must be given immediately. Therefore we beg that you shall consult without delay upon receiving this letter with the mayor of Los Angeles and the organizing committee. … You can telegraph if you like.… Yes or No .”
The “Garland Group”—some three dozen industrialists, oil-field developers, tourism promoters, and assorted businessmen—discussed the matter. There was disagreement, but Garland’s view prevailed, and within a week he sent a polite no-thanks reply: he sympathized with the plight of the Comité International, but America would not be rushed on such an important matter. Nineteen thirty-two it was to be.
On July 28,1984, if the world survives, ten thousand athletes and officials will march into the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum for the opening ceremonies of Olympiad XXIII. It is estimated that about half the earth’s population, some 2.5 billion people, will watch all or part of the proceedings via television. The sale of television broadcast rights to ABC for $225 million sets a new record. Early this year Peter Ueberroth, president of the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee, announced that licensing and other contracts signed to date exceeded $321 million. Future income, chiefly from the sale of several million tickets, should bring the total up to $500 million. Los Angeles is already blessed with the Coliseum and the Rose Bowl. “We’ve saved a fortune by using again what was used in 1932,” says official John C. Argue. There is one small cloud on the horizon. The United States boycotted the 1980 games in Moscow, and there is some concern that the U.S.S.R. and its satellites may retaliate in kind in 1984. Informed opinion holds this to be a possibility but not a likelihood.