We seem to be in the midst of a Woody Guthrie boom. Its crest was the 1976 film Bound for Glory , which attracted considerable critical attention before it went out into shopping center cinemas across the land. Two collections of Guthrie’s fugitive writings are now in circulation, and there is a handsome, spanking new Woody Guthrie Songbook , as well as two mass market editions of the autobiographical work on which the film was based and the first publication of a work he wrote more than thirty years ago, Seeds of Man . Record bins are amply stocked with “—— Sings Woody Guthrie,” and with reissues of his own recordings long unavailable.
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January 2011
Bears and people have been at war for a long time-possibly longer than two predatory mammals should be, with any hope of mutual survival. In the beginning, the bears won almost every time, though not as often as the great cats did. Together with the great cats, bears provided spice to the human experience. People were obliged to defend themselves, were forced to think . Fires were lit at the mouth of the cave. Weapons were invented. Then the bears began to lose. People pictured them on the walls of caves. In some cultures, bears became as gods, and apologies were offered even as huntsmen plunged their lances through the bear’s hide. Next, there were legends and tall tales at the campfires. Smokey put on his ranger hat. Gentle Ben smiled for the television camera. Soon, a few people began to root for the bear, or at least for a truce.
Long before the energy crunch became a crisis, Rube Goldberg was lampooning the American fascination with gadgetry that helped bring it about. His first invention—an “automatic weight reducing machine ” that employed a doughnut, a bomb, a balloon, a hot stove, and a giant hell to strip pounds from a fat man—appeared in the New York Evening Mail in 1914. Thereafter, until his death in 1970, Goldberg was a national favorite, and his name became synonymous with any complicated device intended to perform a simple task.
Our little feature on diners, “Slice of Pie and a Cup of Coffee—That’ll Be Fifteen Cents, Honey,” in the April, 1977, issue brought forth a note of commendation from Fred E. Magel of River Forest, Illinois. Mr. Magel knows whereof he speaks, for he tells us that “My father was a restaurant buff and a builder. I served the late Duncan Hines grading key restaurants. Perhaps I’ve dined in more restaurants than anyone else in history.”
That is entirely possible, since Mr. Magel has eaten in more than forty thousand restaurants and is listed as the champion restaurant patron in the Guinness Book of Records . “I’m the only one in the book,” he tells us, “who breaks his own record daily .”
One hardly expects to find flights of slightly demented rhetoric in the words a judge uses to sentence a convicted felon. However, there are exceptions.
Take, for example, a diatribe said to have been delivered by Judge M. B. Gerry when sentencing Alferd E. Packer to death for having killed and eaten five companions while caught in a Colorado blizzard in 1873. (See “Postscripts” for the April, 1977, issue.) “Stand up, you man-eating son-of-a-bitch, and receive your sentence!” Judge Gerry reportedly began. “There were seven Democrats in Hinsdale County, but you, you voracious, maneating son-of-a-bitch, you ate five of them. I sentence you to be hanged by the neck until you’re dead, dead, dead, as a warning against reducing the Democratic population of the state.”
Judge Gerry’s outburst was probably apocryphal, but we have found another death sentence from the same era that is equally bizarre but apparently authentic. It was delivered in 1881:
Since the publication of Rodman Paul’s “The Mormons” in our June, 1977, issue, we have learned of a couple of interesting sidelights. The first concerns Nauvoo, the Illinois town from which the beleaguered Mormons fled for the safety of the West in 1844. In April of this year, one Walter Pearce was successful in his second attempt to become Nauvoo’s mayor. He was, it is reported, glad that religion was not an issue in the campaign. The point was well taken; Mayor Pearce is a Mormon.
A little over three hundred years ago, according to an intriguing new theory, the cluster of Dutch settlements that was to become New York City was brought to its financial knees—not by uncontrolled welfare costs, increased labor costs, budgetary bungling, or general mismanagement, but by small beads no more than 9.5 millimeters long and 3.2 millimeters in diameter. Strung together in six-foot lengths (called fathoms), these tiny ornaments, in the view of anthropologist Lynn Ceci of Queens College, New York, were a major cause not only of the Pequot Indian War of the 1630’s but also of a great wampum crisis of the 1660’s that ended in Dutch New Amsterdam’s becoming British New York without a shot being fired.
This hitherto unpublished daguerreo-type was found in the same cache of photographs that included the slave portraits we published in our June, 1977, issue. All the pictures were apparently collected by Harvard scientist Louis Agassiz in the mid-nineteenth century to bolster his theory of “special creations” (which held that each race was a distinct species), and later came to be stored in the attic of Harvard’s Peabody Museum.
This portrait was made by Frederick and William Langenheim, Philadelphia’s most prestigious cameramen of the 1840’s, but the brooding sitter was unidentified. Nonetheless, he struck us as resembling an African Bushman. Anthropologists consulted by the Peabody agreed. But what would a Bushman have been doing in Philadelphia in the 1840’s?
