25 YEARS AGO
April 9, 1979 Post-Vietnam syndrome dominates the fifty-first Oscars as The Deer Hunter wins for best picture and best supporting actor, while Jon Voight and Jane Fonda win best actor and actress awards for their roles in Coming Home .
50 YEARS AGO
May 3, 1954 Bruce Catton is awarded the Pulitzer Prize in history for A Stillness at Appomattox . Later in the year the first issue
of American Heritage , with Catton as editor, will be published.
On May 17, 1954, U.S. Supreme Court announced its decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. The plaintiff, Oliver Brown, had been denied the right to send his daughter to the public school nearest her home. Instead, she had to attend an all-black school farther away. The Topeka board’s policy complied with the “separate but equal” doctrine, as set forth in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). But, as Chief Justice Earl Warren, writing for a unanimous Court, explained in finding for Brown: “In the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”
In Alien Barra’s article “Trying for the Truth About the Alamo” (November/December 2003), he writes of the new movie that “there won’t be any line in the sand….” On April 27, 1881, fully 45 years after the battle of the Alamo, Susanna Dickenson, the only adult Anglo survivor of that day in March 1836, returned for the first and only time to the old mission in San Antonio. As she toured the remains, she was accompanied by a reporter for the San Antonio Daily Express . She told him that during the last moments of the assault, she was secreted inside the chapel and was not witness to the final onslaught. She had, however, been active during the 13 days the mission was under siege. She helped tend the wounded, fed the troops, and assisted wherever she could.
IN 1935, the summer after my first year in college, my friends Tom and Dave and I drove from Pennsylvania to Niagara Falls and then on to Canada. In Montreal we attended a movie theater where Duke Ellington’s orchestra was featured onstage.
Following the performance, Dave decided to pose as a reporter for his college newspaper, with the hope that the three of us could get backstage to meet the Duke. We went to the stage door, the bandleader agreed to be interviewed, and we were escorted to his dressing room.
Pencil and pad in hand, Dave asked Ellington to define swing. The great man answered, “That part of rhythm that causes a bouncing buoyant terpsichorean urge.” We departed with autographed pictures for each of us.
Within a year, Tom died in an automobile accident. Dave was killed in action in Europe during World War II. The photograph is a treasured memory.
IN 1955, when I was 10 years old, Roy Rogers and the World Championship Rodeo came to Madison Square Garden in New York City, and a friend of mine invited me to see the show. We had front-row seats. I was thrilled and dumbfounded when Roy rode Trigger around the arena, shaking hands with the spectators, including me. From the seats along the sides of the Garden where we sat, it was easy to shake hands with Roy. At the two ends of the arena, however, the first row of seats began high above the floor. This made no sense to me. You certainly couldn’t reach out to Roy from those seats.
When I visited the Garden again six years later, I instinctively understood that the floor curved upward to contain the raw force and speed I was about to witness. Now a high school sophomore, I was there to see the start of a six-day bicycle race.
RICHARD NIXON’S loss to John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential
contest seemed to signal the end of what had been a controversial and troubled political career. But Mr. Nixon was anything but a quitter, and two years later he resurfaced as the Republican candidate for governor in his home state of California. He was challenging a wily old campaigner, the incumbent Democratic governor, Pat Brown. A vigorous, hard-fought campaign began to unfold.
In 1962 I was managing a television station in the small Northern California seacoast town of Eureka. I learned that both Mr. Nixon and Mr. Brown planned to make a short campaign visit a few days apart from each other. I made contact with their local officials and offered each candidate 15 minutes of television time for whatever he wanted to say. Both parties were quick to accept the offer.
If the Pony Express (“Remembering Big,” November/December 2003) delivered 34,753 pieces of mail in 308 continental crossings, then the typical rider carried 113 letters. If the average charge per letter was $5.00, then the company received $565 in revenue per crossing. Out of that revenue, the company had to pay the rider, buy the horses, replace the horses that went lame, maintain stations every 15 miles, pay the employees who ran the stations, feed the horses while they were waiting for the next rider, and try to pay some profit to the owners. No wonder it went out of business.
