January 2011

Longford Castle, January 19th, 1797.

Sir,

Kite flying is now legal in the nation’s capital. The approval of both houses of Congress was necessary to drop the prohibition, which dated back to the early 1890’s, when kites began getting entangled in the ever-spreading wires along the streets. It is still forbidden to play football, bandy (an old form of tennis), shindy (a schoolboy’s version of hockey), and other games in Washington’s streets.

Gerald V. Niesar, a subscriber from Oakland, California, sent us a letter noting his delight at seeing one of his family’s favorite paintings (C. S. Raleigh’s Chilly Observation 1889 ) on the back cover of our April, 1970, issue. Mr. Niesar, however, expressed surprise that it was credited as being housed at the National Gallery of Art. The painting of the polar bear, he said, had hung above his wife’s desk while she was a staff lecturer at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. We checked and discovered that we had indeed credited the amusing painting to the wrong institution. It is, correctly, a part of Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch’s gift to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

We find to our embarrassment that we identified the infant in the photograph on pages 24–25 of our June issue (“The Past Springs Out of a Picture”) as the child of General George Armstrong Custer and his wife, Libbie. This immediately drew a number of tongue-in-cheek responses from readers, among them John S. du Mont of Greenfield, Massachusetts, and Michael Harrison of Fair Oaks, California. Mr. du Mont wanted to know the name of the child—“another historical first”—while Mr. Harrison credited us with the “photographic scoop of the century.” On rechecking, we discovered, of course, that the Custers never had any offspring. The baby in the photograph is the child of someone else, and we offer an American Heritage cigar to the first reader to tell us whose.

“Fire-engine red is the only color tolerated” we said in our tribute to the ornate splendor of nineteenth-century fire-engine panels in the June, 1970, issue (“Inflammatory Art”). Not so, wrote a number of buffs, including R. L. Nailen of Hales Corners, Wisconsin, who says:

Red is in the majority, yes. But the decor of American fire engines actually spans the rainbow, particularly in the East. For example: Winchester, Virginia, equipment is deep green in color—has been for years. At least one fire company in Belmar, New Jersey, prefers buff and gold. Blue and even lilac can be found. … Baltimore and Jersey City have always used white. In my village yellow is the rule.

The rotunda of the Pennsylvania Railroad Station in Pittsburgh—one of the doomed landmarks noted in our February, 1970, issue (“A Wrecker’s Dozen”) —is going to be saved instead of destroyed. We owe the good news to Mrs. Alan E. Wohleber, a charter member of both the American Heritage Society and the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation, which was instrumental in saving the structure. Three of the thirteen landmarks have now been spared.

Senatorial oratory will be loud and clear this winter. Each lawmaker’s desk in the Senate chamber is being equipped—at a total cost of about $125,000—with a microphone to put humble mumblers on a par with their more bombastic colleagues. However, the amplification system, the first in the Senate’s 181-year history, will not change any rules of the debating game. Every Senator will be able to talk at once. The president of the Senate will still rely on his gavel.

Through a lack of proper communication between editors, we slipped unhappily in our issue of last August: we failed to credit the institution that owns the two fine pictures, Going to and Returning from the Beach , by George Wright, which adorn the back cover of that issue. This entertaining pair of genre paintings belongs to the Thomas Gilcrease Institute of American History and Art, of Tulsa, Oklahoma, who very kindly allowed us to reproduce them, and to whom we express our regrets. The Gilcrease Institute, founded in 1942, has been supported largely with funds given by Thomas Gilcrease, an oil man of Creek Indian descent who for many years ardently collected art and artifacts having to do with the American Indian. With its scope now expanded to include many other aspects of the American scene, the Gilcrease houses one of the finest collections of Americana in the world.

OLD PICTURE, NEW RECORD A CORRECTION MORE AMPLE OROTUNDITY AND A SAVED ROTUNDA FIRE-ENGINE LILAC CUSTER’S FIRST CHILD BEAR WITH US UP, UP, AND AWAY! POSTMARKED 1841