Airplanes are the biggest things in any museum anywhere. That’s why the National Air and Space Museum, in Washington, D.C., as big as it is, isn’t nearly big enough. On December 15, it will multiply its space by opening a new museum annex, the Udvar-Hazy Center, at Dulles Airport in northern Virginia. Udvar-Hazy (named after its principal donor) will be 984 feet long and 10 storieshigh and will eventually hold more than 300 planes and spacecraft.
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SEARCH 75 YEARS OF ESSAYS!
January 2011
25 YEARS AGO
November 18, 1978 Rep. Leo J. Ryan of California is murdered in Guyana, where he has gone to investigate a religious group called the People’s Temple, most of whose members are American. At the same time, on orders from their leader, Jim Jones, more than 900 members of the group (including over 200 children) commit suicide by drinking poisoned Kool-Aid.
November 27, 1978 George Moscone, the mayor of San Francisco, and Harvey Milk, a hero to many as the city’s first openly gay supervisor, are murdered in San Francisco by Dan White, a former city councilman who, his lawyer will argue, became deranged after eating large numbers of Twinkies and other junk foods.
December 16, 1978 The city of Cleveland defaults on its debt, becoming the first major American city to do so since the Depression.
50 YEARS AGO
On December 19, 1828, South Carolina’s legislature issued a set of resolutions vigorously opposing a tariff that Congress had enacted earlier in the year. The Tariff of Abominations, as it came to be known, imposed onerous duties on a wide range of imported goods and was bitterly resented throughout the South. The reason: High tariffs favored manufacturers and free labor, and the South had little of either. But the document that laid out South Carolina’s resolutions, titled South Carolina Exposition and Protest, went beyond simply decrying the tariff, for it also asserted a new and potentially explosive constitutional principle: nullification, the right of a state to declare federal laws invalid within its borders.
In this homeland security era, there may be no tougher ticket than a White House tour. The landmark is now available only for school and youth groups or veterans’ and military organizations, and requests must be submitted through a member of Congress. But if you can’t come to the White House, the White House may come to you—or at least a 60-foot-wide, 10-ton replica of amazing fidelity and detail, which will be touring the country until 2005.
The replica’s home is the National Presidents Hall of Fame and Museum, in Clermont, Florida, which opened in 1962. This is a private, not-for-profit operation created and owned by John and Jan Zweifel, who, along with 50 volunteers, make sure that smoke comes out of the replica’s chimneys and the Oval Office phones really ring. If a desk in the Washington mansion was carved from mahogany, then the miniature version is made of mahogany as well. The sinks work, and the paintings on the wall duplicate those on display in Washington.
25 YEARS AGO
October 2, 1978 After coming back from a 14-game deficit in August, the New York Yankees capture the American League’s Eastern Division by winning a one-game playoff from the Boston Red Sox, 5-4, on a home run by Bucky Dent.
October 6, 1978 Congress extends the deadline for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment by three years, to June 30, 1982. Opponents contest the legality of the move, but the question becomes moot when no more states ratify the amendment.
50 YEARS AGO
October 5, 1953 The New York Yankees win their fifth straight World Series, a record, by beating Brooklyn 4 games to 2.
100 YEARS AGO
October 20, 1903 An international commission decides a boundary dispute over the Alaska Territory in favor of the United States, giving the U.S. valuable ports in Alaska’s Panhandle.
125 YEARS AGO
On October 31, 1759, Robert Dinwiddie, the royal lieutenant governor of Virginia, dispatched the 21-year-old George Washington into the wilds of the Ohio territory on a delicate diplomatic mission. The French had begun building forts in the Ohio River Valley, which Virginia claimed for its own and was trying to settle. Washington’s mission was threefold: try to persuade the French to withdraw; gain the favor of the local Indians; and assess the military situation in the region.
The dispute had repercussions that extended well beyond Virginia. By the 1750s, Britain had established settlements along most of the habitable portion of the Atlantic Coast. Yet they were hemmed in by the French, whose long, thin arc of settlements stretched from Quebec through the Great Lakes and down the Mississippi River, all the way to New Orleans. The Ohio territory was one of the few remaining places where the British had room to expand westward.
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The sweetness and head-to-toe immaculateness of these two young ladies belie the effort behind the perfect image. Helen Cabrera, who sent us this 1945 picture of herself with her younger sister, reports on “how complicated it was to be cute,” especially when it came to creating those corkscrew curls:
I was a young pastor in Michigan serving in my first church when the clergy of nearby Saginaw organized a citywide revival featuring the Reverend Jimmy Swaggart. It was the summer of 1973, and Swaggart’s evangelistic crusades and television ministry were flourishing. The scandals that would rock conservative Christian evangelists, including Jim Bakker (sent to prison for bilking his followers out of millions of dollars) and Swaggart himself (caught with a prostitute in a Louisiana motel room), still lay in the future. When I volunteered to help plan the Michigan event, I had my own agenda. My mother lay in a Saginaw hospital, dying of cancer, and although she had never really embraced Swaggart’s theology, she did take comfort in his recordings of gospel music. My goal was to persuade Swaggart to visit her.