I want to express my appreciation for the article “Anatomy of a Crisis,” by Mike McLaughlin, which appeared in the February/March 2004 issue. Not only was the information important in clarifying what has always been an obscure series of reported events, but as one who served on a destroyer of the same class as the Maddox during the 1950s, I know that the author did a fine job portraying both the men and ships of the time.
For such an iconic American subject, the literature of the Lewis and Clark expedition is surprisingly sparse, probably because the journals themselves, until the Moulton edition made them widely available, were so difficult to find in a complete authoritative form. We do not have too many books about Lewis and Clark; we have too few. Here are the 10 best. Gary E. Moulton, ed., The Definitive Journals of Lewis and Clark (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983-2001). If you want Lewis and Clark whole, this is the edition to buy. Moulton spent more than two decades pulling the pieces together and did a masterly job. If you don’t want the atlas volume or the herbarium or the index volume, which are available only in hardcover, volumes 2-8, which contain the journals of Lewis and Clark, can be had in paperback. So can volumes 9-11, which contain the journals of Patrick Gass, Joseph Whitehouse, John Ordway, and Charles Floyd.
One dour morning early this March, I had to drive to eastern Pennsylvania. I’d heard that a patch of the sometime-steel town of Bethlehem had been spruced up and was now a bower of post-industrial charm, so, after my errand, I made a detour and headed over to see it. I drove up a hill and across a bridge and came upon something so beyond the proportions of the workaday world that I suffered a moment of utter incomprehension. It was like driving through a stand of trees and finding yourself on a prairie occupied by Darth Vader’s Death Star.
The “sweet Betty Lou” of Rarey’s letters met her future husband on a blind date in the slightly bizarre setting of a Thanksgiving breakfast in Washington, D.C. He was a 21-year-old transplanted Oklahoman working in the art department of the Washington Star ; Betty Lou Hodges, the 19-year-old daughter of an itinerant newspaperman, was finishing business school and working part-time as a secretary. While it was’t love at first sight, she said, things started to “Percolate” a few weeks later, and the couple began talking marriage “darn soon.” The rub: Neither of them had any money. So in the fall of 1940 Rarey moved to New York City to seek work as a cartoonist. Letters flew in both directions, and after just one semester, Betty Lou dropped out of school, packed her bags, and followed Rarey to Manhattan.
On November 23, 1943, a 24-year-old pilot named George Rarey, attached to the 379th Fighter Squadron, boarded the Queen Elizabeth and set sail for Britain. Rarey (he hated his first name and never used it) left behind his wife—Betty Lou, who was five months pregnant—and a most unusual background for a fighter pilot. When he was drafted in 1942, he’d been living in Manhattan’s raffish Greenwich Village, practicing the local trade of artist—specifically, cartoonist. He’d never had a driver’s license and was astonished to discover that the Army thought he’d make a good flier.
As it turned out, the Army was right. But he kept his pen and pad with him and recorded every aspect of his service, not only in spirited drawings—brisk and seemingly casual, yet full of eloquent specifics—but also in letters to his wife. Here is what wrote to her, beginning shortly after his arrival in England.
December 9, 1943
Dearest Betty Lou,
Contact the Grand Rapids/Kent County Convention & Visitors Bureau ( www.visitgrandrapids.org ) for more information on the city and some appealing towns within an hour’s drive. Among these are Saugatuck, a 100-year-old art colony on the Kalamazoo River, and Holland, whose name proclaims the ancestry of its first citizens. Founded in 1847, Holland has a fine small museum to tell its story and a thriving downtown of shops and restaurants. Windmill Island, nearby, has the only real, working Dutch windmill in the United States.