January 2011

When, a little more than 30 years ago, the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci asked Henry Kissinger how he had attained “incredible superstar status,” becoming “almost more famous and popular” than President Richard M. Nixon, Dr. Kissinger, then the national security adviser to the President, immediately conjured up a vision of the Old West: “I’ve always acted alone. Americans admire that enormously. Americans admire the cowboy leading the caravan alone astride his horse, the cowboy entering a village or city alone on his horse.”

Lately the cowboy image has been much in the news, with the term frequently being applied in a disparaging sense to President George W. Bush. As Paul Burka, executive editor of Texas Monthly, put it, “Foreign critics see Mr. Bush as Billy the Kid—lawless, violent, solitary and prone to shoot first and ask questions later.”

In June of 1831, when William Chapman died mysteriously at his home near Philadelphia, suspicion lit on a mysterious stranger who had become friendly with Chapman’s wife. The case grew into a scandal and a trial so well documented that it has now become the basis for an enthralling historical account. In The Murder of Dr. Chapman (HarperCollins, 290 pages, $23.95), Linda Wolfe, whose previous books include Wasted: The Preppie Murder , makes these long-ago characters seem as lurid yet as immediate and real as any today.

Robert Johnson played his blues guitar so well that it was said he’d sold his soul to the devil. Maybe he had, but it’s just as likely he learned his chops listening to other blues greats as they played on the front porches of their sharecropper shacks. That’s how a lot of Southern culture was transmitted for many years. But with the introduction of the mechanized cotton picker in 1944, plantations gave way to agribusiness, and farm laborers started streaming North. The blues became an electrified international institution, as common in the clubs of London as on the front porches of the Delta.

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, two things became instantly clear to Rear Adm. Ben Moreell: The Navy was going to have to build bases and airstrips all over the Pacific, and it couldn’t hire civilians to do it under enemy fire. Members of MoreelPs new Naval Construction Battalions became known as Seabees from their initials, and before the war was over, 350,000 of them had laid 111 major airstrips in the Pacific; led the way ashore on D-day: installed the pontoon ferries that took Patton’s troops across the Rhine; and much, much more.

To find the radios you like best, consult the works of Marty Bunis, an expert whose books are available from Internet vendors.

On the Web, www.etedeschi.ndirect.co.uk/howto2.htm has lists of the most collectible radios, organized by country of origin. Several first models produced by major manufacturers are on its American to-buy roster.

Next year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the transistor radio, which, like the diminutive electronic component it’s named for, was invented in America. Using smaller solid-state devices in place of vacuum tubes, transistor radios could be scaled down considerably, yet the earliest versions sold for sums well out of proportion to their size. Most cost between $50 and $90 at a time when a new car could be had for less than $3,000.

Marketers banked on the portability of the new sets, and the first one from Japan was billed as a shirt-pocket radio when it arrived here in 1957. Sony tried to disguise the fact that the TR-63 was a bit larger than advertised by giving salesmen shirts with oversized pockets expressly tailored for the product.

The most collectible models, from 1963 and earlier, can often be identified by the triangles at 640 and 1240 kHz on their dials. Based on the civil-defense emblem, these symbols indicated the two frequencies that were to be used for emergency broadcasts in the event of a Soviet attack.

On the banks of the Dogue Run Creek in Fairfax County, Virginia, one chilly October morning last year, two men in waistcoats turned their attention away from stirring a pasty sour mash in a hogshead—whose sweet, beery aroma attracted and then drowned multitudes of yellow jackets—to fanning flames out of the glowing embers inside a brick firebox. Anchored to the top of the firebox was a copper pot still, shaped like a dollop of shaving cream. A modern distillery can produce four times as much in a day as George Washington’s could in a year, but the process and technology of pot-still distillation are little changed, and Washington’s venture as a distiller reveals an industrial side of him that is associated with more modern sensibilities.

George Washington Drank Here TRANSISTOR RADIOS TO LEARN MORE TELLING THE SEABEE STORY Happy Hour at the Shack Up Inn EDITORS’ BOOKSHELF WHY DO WE SAY THAT? WORLDS BEHIND CLASS ON EXHIBIT SCREENINGS

Richard Schickel’s comments about The Searchers are quite accurate but over-look the primary reason why many of us enjoy the film. At several key points John Wayne makes the sarcastic comment “That’ll be the day.”

As the story goes, Buddy Holly saw the movie and wrote his famous song that same evening. Many of us teenagers immediately became fans, thus assuring Holly a place in history. The song, which is still popular after 47 years, was even used as a demo by the Beatles.

So when many of us see the movie, we don’t worry about the plot. We think of Buddy Holly.

According to my friend Lawrence McKelvey, a mechanical engineer who is also a veteran of the Battle of the Bulge, the Sherman tank was not designed to fight enemy tanks. Instead, its primary function was to support American troops in the field. Granted, it sat high off the ground and looked somewhat old-fashioned; however, the Sherman was not nearly as prone to getting bogged down in the mud as the much heavier German Tiger.

Also, according to McKelvey, the U.S. Army tank destroyer was very effective at protecting our Shermans; it packed a 90-mm gun and could go up to 60 miles per hour. “It was the original lethal weapon,” McKelvey stated, “because that big gun—combined with speed—could easily take out a Panzer.”

We are very aware of the Sherman tank. However, you virtually never hear or read anything about our tank destroyer. It would appear that this highly effective weapon is one of the unsung heroes of World War II.