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January 2011
American children have played with marbles since the Civil War era, when most were manufactured in Germany. Around 1910 an American named Martin Christensen, who held the patent on the first machine for making ball bearings, got the domestic marble industry going with another mechanical device, an invention that he said would turn molten glass into “perfectly formed spheres.” After having been handmade of glass or ceramics for millennia, as far back as ancient Israel and the pharaohs’ Egypt, marbles met the machine age, and America became the leading producer.
For the next half-century few adults paid attention to marbles. Then, in the 1970s, a Connecticut businessman named Stanley Block, disappointed by the insignificant assortment on display at the great glass museum in Sandwich, Massachusetts, founded the Marble Collectors Society of America.
Kevin Baker’s “In the News: The Case for the Draft” (June/July 2003) makes a good argument that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld was wrong in asserting that draftees “added no advantage” to our forces in Vietnam. However, Baker does not make the case for reinstituting the draft today. Specifically, he does not take into account the fact that the Vietnam War happened 30 or more years ago. The technology of warfare has changed radically since then, leading to some very strong reasons the draft should not be reinstituted.
In his column about the phrase freedom fries (“History Now: Why Do We Say That?,” June/July 2003), Hugh Rawson writes, “There was less of this semantic tomfoolery in World War II.” I heg to differ.
In World War II the song “The Japanese Sandman” vanished, as did the operetta The Mikado and the “Mr. Moto” stories and movies. A type of freight locomotive called the Mikado was renamed the MacArthur. In Washington, D.C., the Japanese cherry trees were considered a problem, and someone tried to eliminate the problem with an ax. The matter was addressed by referring to the trees as Oriental cherry trees for the duration of the war.
25 YEARS AGO
August 7,1978 President Jimmy Carter declares the Love Canal area of Niagara Falls, New York, a longtime toxic-waste dump, to be a disaster area.
August 17, 1978 Three Americans land outside Paris after the first successful crossing of the Atlantic Ocean in a balloon. They had left from Maine six days earlier.
September 15,1978 Muhammad AIi wins the world heavyweight boxing championship for the third time, beating Leon Spinks by a decision.
September 17, 1978 President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt and Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel sign the American-mediated Camp David Accords,, which will lead to enduring peace, though not friendship, between the two nations.
50 YEARS AGO
September 22, 1953 The American Federation of Labor expels the International Longshoremen’s Association because of its ties to organized crime.
On September 30, 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower named Governor Earl Warren of California as Chief Justice of the United States. Since the appointment came while the Senate was in recess, Warren took his seat immediately. Confirmation followed by a unanimous voice vote on March 1, 1954.
Despite having been the Republican nominee for Vice President in 1948 and having mounted an unsuccessful campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 1952, Warren was popular with Democrats. For this reason, ambitious California Republicans, especially Vice President Richard Nixon, were glad to see Warren, who had dominated the state’s politics for a decade, removed to Washington.
My parents were poor; my grandmother was not. Mother Jenney, as we grandchildren called her, was the richest person in the world. One year she drove a Cadillac from Florida to Massachusetts just to be fitted for whalebone corsets. Three wedding rings and three engagement rings sparkled on her fingers (all her husbands had died), and on her left wrist she wore a Bulova watch enhanced by a zillion diamonds. She proudly oversaw these possessions through funny glasses pinched to the bridge of her nose. And she was about to oversee my sister and me; she had invited us to spend the summer of 1949 at her house in Orlando.
We traveled by train from Massachusetts, my sister and I in a day coach, Mother Jenney in her own roomette. As the world flew by, we dined on white tablecloths, with napkins that we removed from rings. I noticed that just about all the people serving the passengers—even 14-year-olds like me—were black. Back then they were called Negroes. That summer I learned that they were called other things too.
On a Saturday afternoon the week before Christmas in 1935, I walked along Nassau Street in Princeton, New Jersey, looking at the displays in shop windows and daydreaming about a certain high school girl. I soon reached the new F. W. Wool-worth five-and-dime, the only self-service store in Princeton at the time.
Displayed in the front window was a toy, a little wheeled cart on a steeply inclined ramp. The cart was attached to a cord that ran over a pulley at the top of the ramp; at the end of the cord was a counterweight. Perched above the top of the ramp was a hopper full of sand. When the cart was empty, the counterweight pulled it to the top of the ramp, where it tripped a lever to start sand funneling into it. Once the cart filled up, it became heavier than the counterweight and rolled back down the ramp, shutting off the sand flow from the hopper as it departed. When the cart hit the bottom of the track, it did so with enough force to tip-dump the sand. Then the counterweight pulled it back up the ramp for a refill. This went on and on.