January 2011

Clara Boule of Lewiston, Montana, recently heard from her mother. This is less than startling, since her mother, Mrs. Elmer Lazure, lives at Belt, only eighty miles from Lewiston. But—the letter was postmarked November 17, 1969

Friends of Mrs. Edith Knudsen thought she was out of her mind when a group of young adults received vacation post-cards from her mailed from West Palm Beach and conveying greetings suitable for six-year-olds. The ex-planation: the addressees were six-year-olds when the cards were mailed.

In Washington, Senator Clifford P. Case of New Jersey, whose office is in the old Senate office building, reported that a letter mailed to him from the new Senate office building took three weeks to reach him. The two buildings are across the street trom each other.

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. …” It was an odd way for a rich and world-famous young writer to end his third novel— The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Yet looking back now, now that he is even more famous than he was in his short lifetime, with Gatsby made into a multimillion-dollar movie amidst enormous fanfare, we can see how touchingly appropriate that ending was. For Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Sayre, his beautiful, doomed bride, their past was already a romantic lost world while both of them were still in their twenties.

Something called delicacy overtook Americans soon after our successful Revolution. Like an incoming tide, it flowed all over the nineteenth century, reaching its high-water mark about a hundred years ago. From that point it slowly receded, leaving behind rock pools of what came to be identified as prudery. Today, with the tide at a record ebb, the word “delicacy” usually connotes either fragility or a choice food and certainly not “aversion to what is considered morally distasteful or injurious,” which is what it chiefly meant to our ancestors.

Our newspaper reported the other day that former New York Mayor John V. Lindsay had been offered an appointment (which he declined) as Distinguished Professor at Hunter College. Now Mr. Lindsay has charm, wit, and a fine record in Congress, even if he did not turn Fun City into the earthly paradise predicted in his political campaign; but we nevertheless wonder how it would be possible for one who has never before ventured professionally into Academe to become all at once—as if Merlin had simply waved his hand over him—a distinguished professor. In the era of Longfellow, or William Graham Sumner, or the very recent times of our own Allan Nevins, it used to take years.

“When the British came I was at Fox Island, with my uncle—where we went fishing in an open boat. We had news of their coming, and when the fleet came in sight, uncle said, ‘there comes the devils.’ We started for home and when the fleet followed us up we knew it was them.”

Thus did William Hutchings, a young fisherman trolling in the waters of Penobscot Bay, describe the first sighting of the British fleet. It was June, 1779, the Down East weather mild if moist, and the rebellion merely a distant stir. But the sudden appearance of those big ships, dim in the morning haze, signalled the coming of the Revolution to Maine and the beginning of a full-scale battle that American troops would wage with an equal mixture of fierce courage and almost unbelievable bungling.

Dortha Rice Wiggins of Ohio has this to say about Allan Damon’s survey of Presidential expenses in the June issue: Mr. Damon’s plea for limiting Presidential expenses is in poor taste. …

In every other Nation the elected leader has a Residence, the best they can afford, and they are NOT required to tolerate hordes of people roaming the halls every day. Even on the island of St. Helena, the Governor’s Residence is large, well maintained, and private.

Political leaders of other Nations have the facilities to entertain properly. Would Mr. Damon have us act as though we were still an undeveloped Nation? …

Our President’s family needs to be treated with every consideration for their comfort and safety. Sure Margaret Truman travelled by train—there were trains then—besides that was before wholesale assassinations, college riots, Hippies, Hijacking, Kidnapping, Power-mad attorneys for hire by criminals, and spineless judges. …

In the fall of 1844 a thirty-five-year-old lawyer from Springfield, Illinois, returned after an absence of nearly fifteen years to Spencer County, Indiana, to campaign in behalf of Presidential candidate Henry Clay. He had lived in the county—in the Pigeon Creek neighborhood—from the time he was almost nine years old until he was twenty-one, years of his life that later became legendary when the gangly, rustic youth himself became President of the United States. His mother and only sister were buried there. It was a part of the country that, he wrote, “is, within itself, as unpoetical as any spot of the earth; but still, seeing it and its objects and inhabitants aroused feelings in me which were certainly poetry. …” More than a year later, in late February of 1846, Abraham Lincoln put into verse the thoughts inspired by that visit. His eloquent poem, entitled “My Childhood-Home I See Again,” was brought to our attention by Jack LaZebnik, chairman of the English department at Stephens College, Columbia, Missouri.

Outside, winter rains pelted the hard earth and frozen waters where the Hudson and Mohawk rivers meet. Inside the magnificent manor house a sick old man sat with his son. The son noticed the old man’s stillness and tried his pulse. Stephen Van Rensselaer in, seventh lord of the manor of Rensselaerwyck, a rich, semifeudal prince in a young democracy, was dead. The date: January 26, 1839.

As the rains continued to fall that day and into the next the ice in the Mohawk broke up, and great jagged chunks spilled into the already swollen Hudson, which leapt its banks, leaving destruction in its wake, just as Van Rensselaer’s death would smash and sweep away an old social order.

The dusty, busy town of San Antonio, Texas, must have seemed an immeasurable distance from home to the twentyfour-year-old Jean Louis Theodore Gentilz. Two months at sea and a grueling overland journey from Galveston separated the young man from his comfortable life as the son of a wealthy Parisian coachmaker. Now, late in 1843, he first looked upon the life he had traded for it. Many would have regretted the change, but something about the big, untidy new land got under Gentilz’ skin, and Texas would be his home for the rest of his life. His story would not have been much different from that of a thousand other immigrants but for the fact that Gentilz was a gifted artist. Throughout his long career he recorded the patterns of native life in his adopted land in bright and charming paintings. The meager records do not reveal why Gentilz decided to come to Texas; perhaps he was personally influenced by the elegant Count Henri Castro. An energetic and gifted man, Castro had negotiated for a tract of land near San Antonio, where he proposed to bring a group of emigrants to form a community called, not surprisingly, Castroville.

We are proud to announce that Emma Landau, our art director, was highly honored at the recent award dinner given by the prestigious Society of Publication Designers. She took the Award of Distinctive Merit for her layout of Daniel Kramer’s photographs of Death Valley in the October, 1973, issue. Then she went on to receive four certificates of merit for “The Late Late Silents,” December, !9731 “Gems of Symmetry and Convenience,” February, 1973; “Vanishing Heritage,” June, 1973; and War News from Mexico , the cover of our February, 1973, issue.