January 2011

LIFE ABOARD

My surreptitiously retained file of war-patrol reports of Trigger , Tirante , and Piper (submarine numbers 237, 420, and 409) still makes fascinating reading, to me at least. Trigger (SS 237), completed at Mare Island, California, early in 1942, started her career slowly, but as we learned our dreadful business her improvement was steady. Before she died, a tired old submarine at age three years, she had been, for a time, the highest-ranking sub in the Pacific Fleet in terms of overall damage to the enemy.

HULL:

The external shape [resembled] two tortoise sheik of equal size joined together… . The entrance was elliptical … so small as barely to admit a person …

HATCH:

A brass cover, resembling a hat with its brim and crown, shut water-tight … and was hinged to turn over sidewise when opened.… There were … several small glass windows in the crown, with covers to secure them.

BALLAST:

The vessel is chiefly ballasted with lead [making it] so stiff that there was no danger of oversetting. About two hundred pounds … would be let down forty or fifty feet below the vessel; this enabled the operator to rise instantly to the surface … in case of accident.

PROPULSION:

[The boat moved horizontally] by an oar … formed upon the principle of the screw, fixed in the forepart of the vessel … turned by hand or foot … [and moved vertically by] an oar placed near the top of the vessel.

No less a figure than Robert Fulton picked up where Bushnell left off. In the late 1790's he was in Paris drafting plans for his Nautilus, a “diving boat” which, when launched in 1800, was able to submerge to twenty-five feet and could keep het three-man crew alive under water for more than four hours. He offered his invention to Napoleon, and the emperor was interested, but only on the stiff condition that Fulton find and sink a British warship. After a luckless season spent cruising the French coast, the inventor crossed the Channel and tried to sell his submarine to the English. The decisive victory at Trafalgar put an end to any interest the admiralty might have had in experimental naval devices, and in 1806 Fulton gave up and went home to work on the steamboat that would make him famous.

When Lady Bird Johnson stops by the post office in Stonewall, Texas, to mail a letter, or waves to the tourists visiting the Johnson Ranch, or rides in the elevator of the LBJ Library in Austin, she is greeted with delighted smiles—sometimes of immediate recognition, sometimes of surprise—but always of pleasure. Her unassuming and invariably friendly presence is obviously one of the treasures of central Texas.

Claudia Alta Taylor was born on December 22,1912, in Karnack, a small Texas village near the Louisiana border. Her father was the town’s principal merchant, whose store carried the sign “T. J. Taylor—Dealer in Everything.” She picked up the nickname of Lady Bird as a child, and though she uses Claudia on legal documents, she has been called Lady Bird ever since. Her husband, in fact, who was amused by the fact that they had the same initials, usually called her simply Bird.

To the immigrants on the opposite page, spending their first Christmas in the New World on Ellis Island, the great tree with its dolls hung carefully out of reach of the children may simply have been the first of an endless number of puzzling American customs. But even as those who came before them altered the shape of the holiday with their own customs, so these newcomers’ traditions eventually left their imprint on the season. Just as America is a nation of nations, so our Christmas is a holiday of holidays.

In a recent issue of The American West , Richard Reinhardt, a member of the board of directors of the Foundation for San Francisco’s Architectural Heritage, comments on the astonishing growth of the preservation movement: “Success has turned the good idea of protecting our historic and architectural heritage into a vested economic interest, with a professional and managerial elite, a specialized press, a literature, and a dependent bloc of artisans, contractors, historians, publishers, writers, designers, public employees, and flaks. The ‘movement’ has erected an institutional structure of agencies and foundations, clubs and businesses. It has built up a thick layer of case law and statutory regulations, and a corps of specialists to administer and interpret them.”

1. THE CONNECTICUT WATER MACHINE VERSUS THE ROYAL NAVY HOW IT WORKED 2. THE YEARS BETWEEN

Shortly after a midnight in early September of 1776, a strange little convoy set out from South Ferry Landing at the southern tip of beleaguered Manhattan Island on a mission unique in Revolutionary War history, indeed, in world history. Two whaleboats towed between them an odd craft which, riding nearly awash, carried a crew of one—a young sergeant of the Connecticut Militia. To the rasp of oars in thole pins, the tow headed south toward Staten Island and The Narrows, nearly five miles distant, where a host of lights marked a British armada riding serenely at anchor.

In “The Bohemian Club” (June/July, 1980), Richard Reinhardt’s sprightly treatment of one of our most exclusive fraternal organizations, the author noted that the club rented its first San Francisco headquarters in 1872 “from a local fraternity called the Jolly Corks, which long since has joined the dust of the Tontine, the Pickwick Club, and the Rinky Dinks.”