Editors in the United States have more than once suggested to me that Canada is bad literary material because few Americans are seriously interested in her. When they do think seriously of Canada, they picture an empty land with cold weather, extensive wheat fields and forests, and a population quiet enough to be taken for granted. Canada—that good, gray country! If Time Magazine has not already used this phrase, it must have been purely by oversight.
Our readers will recall the author of this story as the charming lady who in our June, 1965, issue described the colorful events that have kept Wickford, Rhode Island, where she spent her turn-of-the-century summers, a very lively place. Wickford was—and it remains —a small town, but it has by no means been the entire compass of Mrs. Hinckley’s life. She comes of an old Providence family, of that class of sweet-faced Edwardian young ladies who took the Grand Tour—or several tours—of Europe and came home with enough memories to last a lifetime. Time might color the memories a bit, and blur the precisions of time and place, but the story is affecting, and a nice one to remember.
—The Editors
In one of the early years of this century the great day had finally come, the one on which a man was going aloft in a real balloon. Oxford had been on edge with this exciting news for weeks, and surely nobody was more keyed up with anticipation and wonder than Bill and John and myself. We were determined not to miss this momentous event. We knew that our father would be either at work or watching the balloon himself, that Mammy Gallic would be helping Mother about the house, and that Mother had paid no more attention to stories about a balloon than she would have to rumors about a visitor from Mars; so all we had to do was to ease out the back door and hurry up South Street the short distance to the town square.
In the mid-twenties a highly successful Minneapolis insurance man named Clinton Odell, ordered by his doctor to find a less arduous pursuit, cast about for something to occupy his energies. In conjunction with a chemist friend he developed a brushless shaving cream that they named “Burma-Shave,” choosing the word “Burma” because that was where several of the ingredients came from. Odell and his sons, trying to sell it from door to door, soon found that this was a “good way to starve to death fast.”
The sea was never far from John F. Kennedy. In Boston and on Cape Cod, where he spent so many summers, il was forever at his elbow. Even the theatre of his war was the sea. When he was away from blue water, it was ever present in his heart and mind. His White House office was filled with reminders of the world of sailors and sailing ships. XVe know that in moments of great stress during the days of his Presidency, the doodlings his secretary found on his scratch-pad often tended to be sailboats.
Three weeks before the election of 1912, Theodore Roosevelt—ex-President and now the Bull Moose candidate against Woodrow Wilson and William Howard Taft—was having a quiet lunch in a Chicago hotel. The day’s mail was brought to the table, and one of T. R.’s aides handed him a newspaper clipping from the Ishpeming, Michigan, Iron Ore . Among a number of other uncomplimentary things, it said: “Roosevelt lies and curses in a most disgusting way; he gets drunk, too, and that not infrequently, and all his intimates know it.” The Colonel read the editorial, and then, speaking almost in a whisper because of a case of laryngitis, he said to the aide, “Let’s go at him.”
It was a flawless September Sunday in 1911. At the race track at Sheepshead Bay, Long Island, some u,ooo people watched as a young lady from Memphis awkwardly poured a bottle of grape drink over the landing skids of a new Wright biplane. She dubbed the craft Vin Fiz Flyer in honor of the grape drink.
The reality of the Civil W;ir prison camp has long .since gone from Ii u man knowledge, The camps themselves have vanished, although in a few places there are quiet parks to mark their sites, each with a cemetery: thousands of men died. North and South, in those camps, and the headstones are there as reminders. Rut the names that once were so terrible, Andersonville and Elmira, Libby and (lamp Douglas and the rest, are just Civil War names now, out of a past that no one really remembers.
The reality of the Civil W;ir prison camp has long .since gone from Ii u man knowledge, The camps themselves have vanished, although in a few places there are quiet parks to mark their sites, each with a cemetery: thousands of men died. North and South, in those camps, and the headstones are there as reminders. Rut the names that once were so terrible, Andersonville and Elmira, Libby and (lamp Douglas and the rest, are just Civil War names now, out of a past that no one really remembers.