January 2011

I have just read your beautiful article on Bernard Maybeck. However, Mr. Reinhardt’s description of Mr. Maybeck is very funny! He really did not have an “odd, gnomelike little figure.” He was five feet five inches tall. He did not wear bib overalls. He had one knitted tam-o’-shanter among the French berets he wore since Paris days. I did not think the “Mickey Mouse” description of the Berkeley hills was valid and it certainly was not dignified—or true.

When Maybeck worked, he wore work clothes. When he was in the city he wore custom-tailored suits—expensive ones from Brooks Brothers! He always gave an impression of dignity—no one ever thought him cute or a gnome or leprechaun. The Bohemian and Commonwealth clubs did not give membership to leprechauns.

Where are the “gunny-sack cloisters,” I wonder, and what makes University of California professors and students “weird”? I was there as a student and became Maybeck’s daughter-in-law in 1927 and I live in that “great redwood timbered house”—not so big, just nice. He would have liked the eighteen-cent stamp of the Palace issued Sept. 29.

Some time ago, I was given a bottle of after-shave lotion that was in production during the American Revolution and was sold to the officers of both sides. I failed to note the manufacturer’s name, and now I have no idea where to go. Can you help?

Mr. Wiley is doubtless referring to Number Six cologne, which has been sold for more than two hundred years by Caswell-Massey, the oldest chemists and perfumers in America. Made from bergamot, musk, orange blossom, lemon, and a score of other ingredients, Number Six was a favorite of George Washington himself, who is said to have sent some to his friend the Marquis de Lafayette. As in the eighteenth century, the cologne is aged for two years in oaken casks before bottling; however, it is now somewhat stronger than it was in Washington’s day, when, says Caswell-Massey’s owner, Ralph Taylor, “people bathed rather infrequently, and it was used as a mild-scented bottled water for sponge bathing.”

In the August/September 1981 issue of the magazine there is, I think, an error in the caption accompanying the story “The Tennis Racket” on page 65.

The copy states that “Richard Sears, U.S. national champion from 1881 to 1887, indulged in a little sedate flakking for Wright and Ditson during the eighties and nineties.”

My eyebrows rose at the spelling of the word “flakking.” The word “flak” originally referred to high-powered, accurate German antiaircraft fire during World War II. Pilots in my fighter squadron back from a tough mission would often say, “That flak was so damned thick you could walk on it!”

What author Peter Andrews has in mind is a “flack”—one who deals in public relations, often in an obsequious or subservient way.

For Mr. Andrews, this letter is not intended as flak at his article. It was well-written from start to finish and I enjoyed it immensely; I hope he takes up his pen again soon. AMERICAN HERITAGE seems blessed with a vast stable of highly talented writers, and he is certainly one of them.

A little over a century ago an ambitious woman named Kate Clark, who kept a house of prostitution at 112 South Eighth Street, St. Louis, decided to move her business to larger quarters at Sixth and Elm. In any other American city she would have kept her intentions secret or quietly arranged to pay off the police. But this was St. Louis; and on March 14, 1873, Madam Clark confidently wrote directly to the chief of police for “a permit to keep the house on the northwest corner of 6th and Elm Streets for bawdy house purposes. If permitted to occupy the house, I will comply with all the rules and regulations of the ordinance.”

The captivating examples of romantic nineteenth-century valentines on these pages are the handiwork of a lady unusual for her time. Esther Howland was born in 1828 in Worcester, Massachusetts, to Southworth A. Howland, a descendant of one of the Pilgrim fathers who was a prosperous stationer and bookseller. In 1845 she entered Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley, Massachusetts, which had opened its doors only eight years earlier. She studied English grammar, ancient geography, and ancient and modern history, for which her father paid sixty dollars a year exclusive of fuel and lights. It was well worth it. For after Esther graduated with forty-three other young ladies in 1847, she embarked on a business venture that eventually achieved sales of over one hundred thousand dollars annually.

One day last October I drove up the Hudson through corridors of brilliant foliage to Hyde Park, New York, where Franklin D. Roosevelt was born a century ago, and where the memory of his personality and his Presidency is preserved in the vast holdings of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library. There I asked to see Dr. William Emerson, the director—and in less than half an hour I was sitting beneath the low ceiling of a soundproof room while Raymond Teichman, the curator of the audiovisual department, played me a private presidential conversation secretly recorded in the Oval Office of the White House more than forty years ago.

The camera is a marvelous instrument,” says the portrait artist Albert K. Murray, “but when it comes to covering a war, it has its limitations. The artist’s imagination can go where the lens cannot and adds a unique distillate to everything he paints.” Born in 1906 at Emporta, Kansas, Murray was already a well-known painter when he joined the Navy shortly after Pearl Harbor as one of only six American Navy combat artists. At first, he remembers, the idea of having an artist aboard was brand new and not particularly palatable to most commanders: “On my own initial cruise,” says Murray, “I was allowed to paint only during sack time.” Artists did not normally paint during actual combat in any case—they manned battle stations—but they sketched incessantly whenever they had the chance, Murray recalls, “constantly accumulating data that we put to good use when the time came. ” For Murray that time came often. Some 210 of his wartime oils and watercolors survive; some of the finest appear here and on the following pages.

With the launching of this new column we more than ever welcome the opinions of our readers. Just write to The Editor, AMERICAN HERITAGE Magazine, 10 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, NY 70020.
OPENING GUNS MEMORIES OF MAYBECK MEMORIES OF MAYBECK THE SCENT OF HISTORY FLA(C)K CITIZEN YORK HARDSCRABBLE SCHOOLING

As American merchant ships call again at the China coast, they are following in the ghostly wake of a sailing ship of 360 tons burden which arrived at Whampoa Reach, the anchorage for Canton, on August 28, 1784—188 days out of New York. She proudly fired a “federal salute” of thirteen guns and was saluted in return by the other foreign vessels already anchored there. As Captain John Green recorded, his ship “had the honor of hoisting the first Continental Flagg Ever Seen or maid Euse of in those Seas.” Thus began United States trade with China—a trade that would have an impact far beyond the exchange of goods.