January 2011

The article on Hudson, New York, in the April/May 2004 issue touched on the town’s American Museum of Fire Fighting. Its exhibits include the first fire engine ever to see service in New York City.

Imported from England, the engine featured “brakes” and a pumping system that supplied water pressure with the strength of stout arms and backs. But the engine lacked a steering mechanism; the firefighters who pulled it had to lift the machine bodily when negotiating a turn.

I enjoyed the fascinating article “The Spirit of ’76,” by David Hackett Fischer, which appeared in the February/March 2004 issue of American Heritage . In fact it made me feel even prouder to be an American.

But although the essay deals primarily with the military aspects of the Revolutionary War, I wish to point out an aspect that should be part of any detailed discussion of the American Revolution.

Mr. Fischer notes: “Indispensable help was given by Robert Morris and his associates in Philadelphia, who found the financial resources that the army urgently needed.” None of this help might have been possible without the aid of a single financier who supported the patriotic cause on the outbreak of the American Revolution.

Ellen Feldman has written a fascinating article on the history of plastic surgery (“Before and After,” February/March 2004) but I was surprised to see no mention of the national organization most responsible for shaping the course of modern cosmetic surgery in the United States. Founded in 1967, the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (ASAPS, www.surgery.org ) was the first medical organization to recognize the importance of cosmetic surgery and offer appropriate education to qualified board-certified plastic surgeons. Liposuction was introduced to American surgeons at an ASAPS annual meeting, as were many other current procedures and techniques, and today ASAPS is widely recognized as the world’s leading organization devoted to cosmetic-surgery education and research.

I thoroughly enjoyed the fine, thought-provoking article “Anatomy of a Crisis” but couldn’t help noticing that the photo on page 54-55 is not of the carrier Constellation as indicated.

25 Years Ago

June 7, 1979 President Jimmy Carter approves the $30 billion MX missile program, in which nuclear weapons will be shuffled around the country on underground rails and pop up when needed. This whack-a-mole concealment scheme will be abandoned two years later.

50 Years Ago

June 17, 1954 A Senate committee concludes its hearings on Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s charges of a cover-up of Communist influence in the Army. The hearings have exposed McCarthy’s slipshod investigative methods.

100 Years Ago

June 21, 1904 At the Republican National Convention, in Chicago, Secretary of State John Hay announces that he has sent a telegram to the Moroccan government reading: WE WANT PERDICARIS ALIVE OR RAISULI DEAD . (An American named Ion H. Perdicaris had been kidnapped in Morocco the previous month by an outlaw named Raisuli.) Soon afterward Perdicaris is released unharmed.

On June 18, 1804, Alexander Hamilton—a Revolutionary leader, then a framer of the Constitution and a farsighted Treasury Secretary, and now a successful New York lawyer and politician—received a polite but peremptory note from Aaron Burr, the vice president of the United States. Burr called Hamilton’s attention to a letter that had been published in an Albany newspaper two months earlier. That letter, from a physician named Charles D. Cooper, said that Hamilton had called Burr “a dangerous man, and one who ought not to be trusted with the reins of government” (Burr had been running unsuccessfully for governor of New York at the time) and that he had privately expressed “a still more despicable opinion” of the vice president. Burr demanded to know: Was this true?

This June, my family and I will gather together to mark the hundredth anniversary of a tragedy. On June 15,1904, my great-grandmother (we called her Nanny) Catherine Connelly, then 11 years old, boarded the excursion steamer General Slocum along with her mother, Veronica, her 10-year-old brother, Walter, and her year-old sister, Regina. They were setting out on a church-picnic trip up Long Island Sound.

As the General Slocum approached Hell Gate, it caught fire. As panic took over, Nanny’s mother grabbed hold of her, but she broke away and ran to the Slocum’s railing, where a man reached from a tug standing close alongside and lifted her aboard.

In “Anatomy of a Crisis” the main armament of our ships is given as “5 inch/.54 caliber” and “3 inch/.50 caliber.” There should be no decimal points in these descriptions. When discussing larger naval guns, the word caliber has two meanings. First, it refers to the diameter of the bore, here expressed in inches (5"); second, it refers to the ratio of the barrel’s length divided by bore diameter (54, a whole number, thus no decimal). The larger weapon should have been called a 5-inch/54-caliber gun. Multiplying the bore (5") by the number of calibers in the length results in 5"x 54=270 inches or 22.5 feet. Using the decimal number in the article results in a length (5"x.54) of 2.7 inches. Incidentally, the USS Iowa , one of our World War II battleships, which mounted the largest guns ever put on American vessels, had a main armament of 16-inch/50-caliber guns (16x50=800) so the barrel length was nearly 67 feet.

Your Tonkin Gulf article brought back many memories of the Cold War and of cruises in the early sixties aboard the USS Coral Sea , as a member of VA-155.

As soon as I finished the article, I was drawn to my library to find a copy of Adm. James Stockdale and Sybil Stockdale’s book In Love and War (Harper & Row, 1984). In the first chapter, “Three Days in August,” Admiral Stockdale tells his own story of the Tonkin Gulf incident, describing his part as a carrier pilot in the air action over the Maddox and the Turner Joy in very exciting detail. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the escalation of the Vietnam War.