January 2011

With a sense of empathy rare among lawmen of the era, members of the Police Chiefs Association of New Jersey gathered in 1915 for a white-stripe dinner. The meal was held at Irvington’s Olympic amusement park, where, the local paper reported, “Pleading guilty to … being a bunch of ‘gourmands,’ some fifty odd men [dined] under the eyes of Warden Hosp of the county penitentiary … on long wooden benches. Tin plates, knives, and forks were … chained to the table in approved fashion. Each diner wore a cap and coat … made by inmates of the Caldwell penitentiary.” After Chief O’ Neill of East Orange gave a speech, the prisoners made a break for it.

In 1961 three rockhounds found an unusual nodule near Olancha, California. It contained ceramic, copper, and iron components and seemed obviously man-made. Although ( California is the home of some of the world’s finest universities, the discoverers took the artifact to the Charles Ford Society, reportedly “an organization specializing in examining extraordinary things.” The results were predictably extraordinary. Rene Noorbergen, an author of books on psychics and other bizarre phenomena, assures us that the artifact is at least a half million years old and therefore must predate the biblical flood. To him, the nodule is an “oopart” (out-of-place-artifact) that demands explanation, the more fanciful the better, Noorbergen has also searched for proof of Noah’s elusive ark on Mount Ararat and has studied yards of lie-detector graphs that testify to the honesty of an old Armenian who claims to have seen the ark as a boy.

When Sir Walter Raleigh’s men set foot on Roanoke Island in 1585 they found the Indians growing a vegetable named “Macócqwer … called by us Pompions … and very good.” It was also very plentiful, and by the seventeenth century colonists were reciting a bit of doggerel that reflected their indebtedness to—if not their delight in—the ubiquitous squash: “We have pumpkins at morning./Pumpkins at noon./If it were not for pumpkins/We should be undoon.”

But the settlers soon found that while stewed pumpkin could sustain life, once it was baked in a pie it actually became good to eat. By the time of the Revolution pumpkin pie had become the reigning delicacy on the Thanksgiving table; and by the nineteenth century it was almost sacrosanct, “a thing of beauty and a joy” to the author of one cookbook, who said that “for the first pumpkin pie of the season, flanked by a liberal cut of creamy cheese, we prefer to sit down, as the French gourmand said about his turkey: ‘with just the two of us; myself and the turkey!’”

MARGINALIA, MAGICAL … … AND MISSOURIAN MOMENT OF RECOGNITION THE PEOPLE, MAYBE THE GREAT AMERICAN THEODORE ROOSEVELT PUZZLE

He looked big, thought big, and built big…

His name was Henry Hobson Richardson, an architect whose ornate and monumental public and private buildings dominated the architecture of the 1870’s and 1880’s—great stone edifices that changed the face of America. John Russell tells his story in an excerpt from a forthcoming American Heritage book.

At war in a “Maytag Messerschmitt”…

Hughes Rudd, the well-known radio and television correspondent, also was a much-decorated participant of World War II as pilot of an artillery spotter plane—called the L-4 by the Army and the “Maytag Messerschmitt” by those who had to fly it. In a memoir at once witty and moving, Rudd tells what it was like trying to stay alive in this flimsy, vulnerable, and utterly indispensable war machine over the battlefields of North Africa, Italy, France, and Germany.

The world turned upside down…

In 1905 the Eastman Kodak Company held a photographic competition that drew twenty-eight thousand entries. The first prize went to a young photographer named Edward Steichen; the third-prize winner was Alfred Stieglitz. Second prize went to a young farmwife from Loveland, Ohio. The name of Nancy Ford Cones is not now commonly known even to the most ardent devotees of photography—an obscurity thoroughly undeserved, as the photographs in this portfolio demonstrate. Born in Milan, Ohio, in 1869, she became interested in photography in her twenties. In 1897 she met and later married a fellow photographer named James Cones, and in 1905 the couple moved to a twenty-five-acre farm outside Loveland. From then until his death in 1939, James printed all his wife’s negatives, making the two possibly the first husband-and-wife team in the history of American photography.

America has been many civilizations in its history, from the ,Stone Age to the age of genetic tinkering. And as each of perhaps a dozen civilizations was washed over by another, it left behind fragments of itself like pebbles scattered upon a beach—a cliff dwelling in the Southwest built by the vanished Anasazi, a crumbling ante-bellum plantation house in Mississippi, a railroad depot in a town where the train no longer stops. …

Such fragments have always presented us with a paradox. The notion that change is, somehow, progress has been endemic to American life for more than two centuries now, and one of the most persistent results of change has too often been the destruction of those very bits and pieces of the past. At the same time, there have always been those among us who cherished them, who fought for their protection and preservation as a link between the time that was and the time that is. We look back even as we move forward.

Colonial Williamsburg, as everybody knows, is the monumental historic re-creation of the onetime capital of colonial Virginia, the place where young Thomas Jefferson listened at the door of the House of Burgesses while Patrick Henry denounced the Stamp Act, the place where Virginia patriots took giant strides toward revolution at an inn called the Raleigh Tavern, the place where George Washington mustered America’s multinational forces for the final battle at Yorktown, eleven miles to the southeast.

On the first day of April in 1905, according to the waspish account in the New York World , James Hazen Hyde drove “jauntily downtown in his private hansom cab, a bunch of violets nodding at the side of the horse’s head, another bunch nodding from the coachman’s hat and a third bunch breathing incense from the buttonhole of the young man himself.” This brave floral display belied the grimness of the errand: Hyde was on his way to surrender control of Equitable Life, the third largest life insurance company in the world. And all because of a party.

In early September of 1831, Isaac Dripps, master mechanic of the nascent Camden and I Amboy Railroad, stood staring at a miscellaneous assortment of bolts, levers, and pipes I that he was expected to assemble into a working locomotive. The engine had been ordered by the New Jersey line from Robert Stephenson of Newcastle, England, then the world’s leading locomotive builder, who had shipped it across the Atlantic in parts, accompanied by nothing much in the way of instructions. Dripps, who was barely out of his teens, had never seen a locomotive before, but he set to work, and within two weeks he had the John Bull ready to run—a clear augury of how successfully we Americans would take to this English invention.