Kenneth B. Holmes, curator of the Barnum Museum of Bridgeport, Connecticut, has written to call our attention to the fact that the credit accompanying the picture of the Legrand Sterling mansion on pages 20-21 of our June, 1974, issue was incorrect. The painting is in the collection of the Barnum Museum. Mr. Holmes also noted that we misplaced the Bridgeport Public Library, which was and is on the corner of Broad and State streets, not on John and Main.
In the 1880’s small horse-drawn diners began to appear in American cities. Between dusk and dawn they trundled around the gaslit streets of every fairsized town dispensing hot and cold food. They were called night owls or dog wagons. Competition boomed in 1897, when the transit companies of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia abandoned horse-drawn streetcars for electric trolleys. Entrepreneurs bought the discarded cars, threw in a stove, and went into business. But soon railroad-car companies began producing ever grander diners; flossy and unwieldy, they were set up in permanent locations. They were bright and big, and eventually they crowded out all but one of the dog wagons.
John H. White, curator of the division of transportation at the Smithsonian Institution and author of “Wood to Burn” in our December, 1Q74, issue, has taken polite exception to the illustrations used in that article: “I don’t wish to be rude,” he writes,
but I would be less than honest if I said I was really very much taken with them. The wood-burning locomotive is copied from a well-known contemporary engraving. The original is a fine, elegant print typical of the nineteenth-century engraver’s art, which I greatly admire. Unfortunately the modern artist has misread the lettering on the tender. It should be B. C. & M. rather than S. R. & W. , and the correct number is 23 rather than 5. Moreover, the locomotive is specifically identified, because the artist inscribed the name Mt. Washington on the cab. Hence anyone with an expert knowledge will spot the incorrect road initials and the mistaken number; and since the illustration is connected with my article, it could cause us both some embarrassment. …
In the booming 1920’s, when business was nearly America’s national religion and advertising its Holy Writ, the Mather Poster Company of Chicago designed a set of texts to inspire greater peaks of productivity from the workingman. These posters, recently shown in New York’s Hundred Acres Gallery, now rate as Nostalgia, possibly even Art; but a half century ago they represented a dead-serious campaign employing an early version of the power of positive thinking.
In a sales brochure addressed to management the company promised to “Stop Losses And Build Large Profits For You.” Further, Mather carolled, the series of seventy-eight placards would “personally implant in your workers principles which have been responsible for your own success. How it would please you to be able to give your people your vision of the business and a real understanding of the responsibility you feel toward the men and women who depend on you for a livelihood!”
Few boys survive their school days without using their fists now and then. If these fights are extemporaneous affairs, fought in the immediate heat of anger, they are little more than animal reflex actions. But if they are of the “I’ll see you after school” variety, allowing time for rage to be replaced by trepidation, they become highly complex manifestations of human emotions and social pressures. By the time the young gladiators arrive on the field of combat, usually one or both of them would much prefer to be home watching television. Nevertheless, urged on by the crowd and the fear of showing fear, even to themselves, they do battle.
Man is, or should be, woman’s protector and defender. The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life.” Thus spake the United States Supreme Court in 1872 in upholding an Illinois statute barring women from practicing law, which a feminine aspirant to the bar had dared to challenge.
Several months earlier another Illinois daughter, transplanted to Oregon, had undertaken to shatter both of the venerable premises upon which the tribunal based its decision. Abigail Scott Duniway, who as a teenager had tramped west over the cholera- and Indian-plagued Oregon Trail and later helped her husband tame a wilderness farm, knew she was neither timid nor delicate. And so far as she could see, man was less defender than exploiter. What unfitted woman in Abigail’s opinion was not God-made emotional and physical characteristics but man-made legal hobbles—hobbles man had applied for his own benefit.