January 2011

“My room mate (tent mate, rather) is Dwight Eisenhower of Abilene, Kansas.…” On JuIy 30, 1911, Paul A. Hodgson thus informed his mother of the beginning of a close friendship, about which General Eisenhower commented in December, 1942: “The four years we spent in the same room more than a quarter of a century ago are still one of my most treasured memories.”

The new cadets had been at West Point six weeks when they were thrown together more or less accidentally because each had lost his initial roommate. It was a happy accident, for they had much in common. Both were Kansans, both came from large families, and both loved sports.

The Kentucky rifle, which because of its astonishing accuracy earned. A substantial credit for American victories in both the Revolution and the War of 1812, was unknown by that name until after the Battle of New Orleans in 1815. A highly popular ballad of that year described how ”…Jackson he was wide awake and wasn’ t scared at trifles/ For well he knew what aim we take, with our KENTUCKYRIFLES.” It was true that most of Jackson’s riflemen at New Orleans were from Kentucky; but in fact, most of their rifles had been made in Pennsylvania. For it was in gunsmith shops along the Pennsylvania roads leading to the West that the tall and deadly weapon evolved between 1740 and 1830. I n origin it was the offspring of a mating between the long, light, and graceful smoothbore fowling piece developed by the English and the French, and the short, large-calibre, rifled “jaeger” developed by the huntsmen of central Europe. Technically, the Kentucky rifle was the final phase in he three-hundred-year evolution of the muzzle-loading rifle. Aesthetically, its history is also one of evolution.

Seen from the high oval windows of Boston’s City Hall on that sultry June morning in 1920, the line of stiffbrimmed straw hats bobbing along School Street resembled a roiled, wheat-colored stream. Among the straws were dark blotches of cloth caps, women’s brighter hats, and even the official visors of the police. On the honky-tonk outskirts of Scollay Square the stream grew denser and contracted into the cleft of Pi Alley. Then it flooded left down City Hall Avenue past the blank, rusticated side of City Hall and left again beyond the pigeon-spattered statue of Mayor Josiah Quincy. The stream dissolved into a jabber of individuals who stormed up the dark stairway of Twenty-seven School Street, just below City Hall, to wedge themselves, seething and shoving, along the corridor and into the office of the Securities and Exchange Company.

According to Alexander Hamilton, he was with his family in Philadelphia on a certain summer day in 1791 when a young woman called at the door and asked to speak with him in private. He led her into a room apart from the rest of the house, where she introduced herself as Maria Lewis Reynolds of New York —Mrs. James Reynolds, a sister of a Mrs. G. Livingston of that state. Her husband, she said, had for a long time treated her very cruelly and now had left her and their young daughter for another woman. She was in so destitute a condition that she had not the means to return to her friends in New York. She appealed to his humanity. Would Colonel Hamilton assist a woman in despair?

Physical descriptions of Maria Reynolds are sparse. An acquaintance of Hamilton said that “her innocent Countenance appeared to show an innocent Heart.” Several persons observed that she had a highly emotional temperament and was much given to weeping. In the original draft of a pamphlet he later wrote on the incident, Hamilton called her “Beauty in distress” and “a pretty woman,” but he did not use the phrases in the published work.

Perched on the edge of a rocky mesa six hundred feet above the desert of northeastern Arizona is the Hopi Indian village of Hotevilla. A stronghold of Hopi traditionalists Indians who remain profoundly loyal to the religious teachings and values of their ancestors—the little settlement of fewer than a thousand people is something of an anachronism on the American scene, a remnant of another day and another way of life that defies many of the influences of the white man’s modern-day civilization and at the same time challenges it to do as well in providing mankind with enduring answers for an existence of happiness and contentment.

That eighteenth-century British curmudgeon Dr. Samuel Johnson once remarked, “I would rather see a portrait of a dog that I know than all the allegorical paintings they can show me in the world.”

The new teacher, Miss Flock, was hired just one week before country school opened. Through Mother’s last-minute influence,, two neighbor children, DeWayne and Orban, who were to attend the Catholic parochial school, enrolled instead in the rural schoolhouse, thus keeping it open one more year. My cousin Lois and I were the last of our family still in the lower grades, and everyone thought it best if we could continue at the one-room schoolhouse three-quarters of a mile away, rather than attend public school in town. As the year developed, I don’t know how we could have gotten along without Orban, a first-year scholar, for we taught him to play pinochle, and counting Miss Flock we totalled eight—the right number exactly for a double round.

On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court of the United States destroyed the legal basis for racial segregation in public schools. As it almost had to be in a case that stirred elemental passions, the decision was unanimous. It was also, as Chief Justice Earl Warren had told the other justices ten days earlier it must be, “short, readable by the lay public, non-rhetorical, unemotional, and, above all, non-accusatory.”