January 2011

Glancing through the Summer, 1977, issue of La Reata , the quarterly newsletter of the Arizona Historical Society, we encountered the rather startling photograph below. After making inquiries, we learned that it was taken sometime in the late 1920's by a staff photographer for the Albert Buehman studio in Tucson, and now reposes among the nearly 200,000 photographs in the Society’s Albert Buehman Memorial Collection.

The picture, it appears, was taken to advertise the sterling virtues of the Hobart meat grinder, which is shown administering a weekly feeding to a rattlesnake, perhaps a denizen of one of Arizona’s tourist-attracting snake farms. We do not know what was ground up and pumped into the snake, but then we also do not know why this would have been considered an important function of the Hobart meat grinder. However, the photo probably attracted would-be buyers in the 1920's, as it attracted us, and that was all that mattered.

PUBLISH AND PERISH? HERPETOLOGICAL NOTES FROMARIZONA FUNNY HATS AND REAL GUNS GEARING UP FOR NUMBER THREE HANG DOWN YOUR HEAD, JOSE MANUEL MIGUEL XAVIER GONZALES, OR JOSE MARIA MARTIN, OR JOSE MANIAH, OR JOSE MARIA MARTINEZ, OR …

In one of those chains of circumstance which cause editors to lie awake late at night gnashing their teeth in frustration, proper credit was omitted from a sidebar in our June, 1977, issue. The sidebar in question was ”… But the patient died,” which accompanied Spencer Klaw’s article on Thomsonian medicine, “Belly-MyGrizzle.” The information in the sidebar was in fact derived from “A Patient Boiled Alive,” by Wesley E. Herwig, an article that appeared in the Fall, 1976, issue of Vermont History . Mr. Herwig, understandably, did his own gnashing of teeth, and we extend our apologies to him and to Vermont History for the oversight.

Eyes narrowed, muscles tensed, galluses straining, mighty Elmer Bitgood of Voluntown, Connecticut, prepares to heft his homemade weightstwin kegs filled with rocks. He was the local Samson—every turn-of-the-century town seems to have had one—a kindly giant about whom legends grew. Elmer was so strong, townspeople swear, that he could carry a full-grown bull, hoist a steamboat boiler, lift a 4,200-pound carnival platform on his back. Clean living, country air, and an awesome appetite were said to be responsible. His mother fixed his meals in a washtub: four chickens at a sitting, eight quarts of peas and beans, a mountain of biscuits, two quarts of strawberries, and still he left the table hungry. Elmer was proud of his strength, but shy. He never married, and a youthful season or two as a side-show attraction were all of the larger world he could stand. He worked the family farm until he died in 1938, but he is not entirely forgotten: each summer, Voluntown stages a weightlif ting contest called “Shades of Elmer” in his honor.

The cowboys are gone, and so are the critters, Owen Ulph tells us in “The Cowboy and the Critter” on the preceding pages. The West, Ulph says, will never see their like again. Perhaps-but the image left behind them, lambent with truth or riddled with error, is not something we Americans are willing to give up easily. Or so it would seem from an event that took place in Arizona in the fall of 1975.

The event was an old-fashioned cattle drive, a real-life, round-’em-up, move-’em-out,git-along-little-dogie re-enactment of the days when meat on the hoof was pried, prodded, and roped out of the brush and bogholes of the West, gathered together, then driven hundreds of miles to shipping points for eventual conversion into digestible protein. It was, as always, dirty, exhausting, sunup-tosundown work and, in this age of cattle trucks and superhighways, completely unnecessary.

The manuscript entitled “Concord, Massachusetts, Its Men and Its Women, “from which the following article has been drawn, found its way to the archives of the Free Public Library in Concord, Massachusetts, some years ago, where its existence was called to my attention by Mrs. Marcia Moss, the curator of collections. No author’s name was attached—just the postscript “Andover, Massachusetts, November 10, ’91“—but it was obvious from its contents that it had been written by a woman who had been a child in Concord during the 1840’s.

The only additional clue was Nathaniel Hawthorne’s identification of the writer as “Doctor’s little girl “However, Mrs. Hawthorne’s doctor at the time her daughter Una was born was Josiah Bartlett, whose daughters were the wrong age to have written this manuscript. Who then did write it? The story of how the author was identified is too long and complicated to tell here, but she eventually proved to be Annie Sawyer Downs, whose father, Benjamin Sawyer, was a homeopathic physician in Concord whom Mrs. Hawthorne occasionally consulted.

On a stifling July night in 1912, Herman Rosenthal bounced into the Metropole Cafe on West Forty-third Street in Manhattan. Rosenthal, a gambler, had recently fallen on hard times and had begun complaining about the long-standing system of pay-offs between gamblers and police that kept New York’s riotous Tenderloin district running profitably. But tonight he seemed in high spirits and was brandishing a copy of the New York World in which he had gotten a young reporter named Herbert Bayard Swope to publish Rosenthal’s claim that a police lieutenant named Charles Becker was his partner in a gambling house. Now, however, Becker had shut it down because Rosenthal wasn’t turning over enough of the take. “What do you boys think of the papers lately?” he shouted jovially to a group of fellow gamblers at a nearby table. “You’re a damned fool, Herman,” one replied. Toward two A.M. a man entered the cafe and asked Rosenthal to step outside. The gambler walked out the door and paused on the steps as four gunmen closed in on him. He took three bullets in the face and one in the neck.

My life among Jews began with a fiery furnace when I was a kid of ten in that pleasant city of Iowa, (Cedar Rapids, and continued at the fireless furnaces of Auschwitz.

My life among Jews began with a fiery furnace when I was a kid of ten in that pleasant city of Iowa, (Cedar Rapids, and continued at the fireless furnaces of Auschwitz.

It all began one day when our neighbor, who worked at a filling station and walked with a gait which my horse-handling father called “gimpy,” stopped at our house; one morning and said bitterly, pointing down the street, “Those damn Jews have moved in.” I had never known a Jew and assumed those people would have a different color or shape from us; in any case, avoid them. Our neighbor, thin, nervous, huge hands dangling from his wrists like untamed animals (his harsh eyes hinted that he used them to beat his wife and children) moved on to his day of gas and tires, leaving me in fear.

Within a century after Columbus and his crew first encountered Cuban natives “with a firebrand in the hand and herbs to drink the smoke thereof,” much of Western civilization had taken to tobacco in all its forms—an addiction brought back to the New World in which the sotweed had been discovered. Tobacco was colonial America’s chief export and it remains— pace the Surgeon General—a steadily expanding, multibillion-dollar industry. Much of our history was witnessed through a haze of tobacco smoke, and those Americans who did not smoke, often chewed: as early as 1704 even the pious citizens of New Haven Colony were alleged by a lady visitor “to keep chewing and spitting as long as their eyes are open.” By the mid-nineteenth century there were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of small-time manufacturers of cigars, pipe tobacco, and chewing plugs scattered across America. Competition was brisk, and then as now, survival often depended less on the product than on the way it was packaged. The finest tobacco labels were masterpieces of the commercial lithographer’s art.