January 2011

Our “ Readers ‘Album ” department in August, 1978, featured a baremidriff ed photograph of Union Major General Henry A. Barnum, who lived a long and successful life despite a bizarre Civil War wound that never healed. It reminded the late Bruce Catton of another wounded Union soldier whose story is perhaps even more remarkable and we asked him to write it up:

“They did have some tough characters in the Civil War, and sometimes the toughness developed in an unlikely place. Toughest of all, it may be, was General Joshua Chamberlain, who was mortally wounded in the fighting in front of Petersburg in 1864 but somehow carried the wound around with him for the better part of half a century, building a great career on what a modern army doctor would probably consider total disability.

Bits of glass and clay, buttons, coins, the occasional pipe bowl—these are the unprepossessing stock in trade of archaeologists who are working to reconstruct the daily life of the earliest American colonists. The time in which they lived seems almost impossibly remote to many of us, and it usually takes a gifted historian to reassemble the pieces, consult the written record, and make it all come alive again. But archaeology alone sometimes unearths facts so brutally compelling that they seem to speak to us directly.

Such a find is the skeleton below, recently discovered in Virginia by archaeologists Ivor Noel Hume and Eric Klingelhofer, who work for Colonial Williamsburg under the auspices of the National Geographic Society. It apparently belonged to an English victim of one of the first major Indian attacks in our history, and the time of his violent end can be pinpointed almost to the minute.

THE BARE-KNUCKLE ESSENTIALS A MOTHFUL OF DUST SURVIVOR “CHRISTMAS HERITAGE” A TELEVISION GIFT FROM US TO YOU

Joe Louis, as pointed out in “America’s Great Black Hope” (October/November, 1978), remembered his 1938 championship fight with Max Schmeling vividly. Many ex-fighters, boxing fans will attest, do remember their best fights, and sometimes their worst fights, and sometimes all their fights, and are willing to talk about them in minute, frequently numbing detail.

Bundled up against high-altitude winds. Miss Myrtle Williamson and her determinedly cheerful suitor, Ebert Grout, soar above the roofs of Middletown, Ohio—in a photographer’s studio in 1913. It is not surprising that their flying machine- with its minuscule landing gear, maritime wheel, random struts, and odd, cubistic motor—is unconvincing. It had been just ten years since the Wright Brothers took wing at Kitty Hawk, and the artist who cobbled it together had probably never seen the real thing. Middletown’s skyline has since been transformed. Only the noisome chimneys of the then-new American Rolling Mill Company at lower left remain; the firm is now called Armco Steel, and antipollution equipment keeps the smoke down. The pilot and her co-pilot were married two years after this first flight: their son, George Grout, of Monroe, Ohio, sent us their picture.

We continue to invite our readers to send us unusual, dramatic, or amusing photographs—at least thirty years old—that they own. They should be sent to Geoffrey C. Ward, American Heritage Publishing Co., 10 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, NY 10020.

”I first saw her on October 18, 1878, and loved her as soon as I saw her sweet, fair young face. …” Thus Theodore Roosevelt wrote of Alice Hathaway Lee, the girl he married in 1880 when he was twenty-two and she nineteen—tall and lithe, with curly light hair and “dovegray” eyes; “beautiful in face and form,” he said, “and lovelier still in spirit.…” T.R. wooed her with all the impetuous gusto for which he was later famous, and the wedding took place soon after he graduated from Harvard.

Yet it is doubtful that the young man swept Alice Lee off her feet. Though not a great deal is known about her—few of the letters that passed between them survive, for instance—there are indications that she was a girl of lively intellect and advanced opinions. There is a story that one autumn day she breached the exclusively male precincts of Harvard’s Porcellian Club by lunching there extemporaneously with her suitor, to the consternation of other members.

Ernest Hemingway and His World

by Anthony Burgess Charles Scribner’s Sons, 144 pages, photographs, $10.95

Somewhere in the endless collections of the Smithsonian Institution are the stuffed remains of Cher Ami, and in the case with them is a Croix de Guerre. The bird won the decoration in spite of himself, so to speak, for he was most reluctant to take off on his homing mission back to headquarters. Yet it is not an overstatement to say that Cher Ami saved the Lost Battalion. And when he finally wheeled out of the besieged pocket with Whittlesey’s last, desperate message, Cher Ami—who was about to become the most famous pigeon in history—was taking part in a military tradition that went back forty years.

The army bought its first homing pigeons in 1878, and packed them out to the 5th Infantry Regiment, which was on duty in the Dakota Territory. But the 5th never learned how effective pigeons could be, for large numbers of hawks in the area put a speedy end to the experiment. A decade later, however, the army established a loft at Key West, and when Pershing led his punitive expedition into Mexico in 1916 there were pigeons in the van.

If Joseph P. Lash had decided, back in 1942, to write a book on the wartime friendship between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, he would have been off to a lucky start. He happened to be a guest at the White House on the occasion of the British leader’s first transatlantic visit after Pearl Harbor, and found himself seated next to the famous man at lunch.

“I was too awe-struck to open my mouth,” Lash reported later. “There was no necessity. The language cascaded out of him. In my journal I wrote: ‘He is an exuberant, enormously strong personality, exciting, full of temperament, witty, his phrases resonant with the vigors of the best English stylists, his talk full of imagery.’ ”