Limerick Laughs

Due to a clerical error, the runners-up for the Mar/Apr 2011 Limerick Laughs contest will not be posted to the website. We apologize to those of you who submitted poems and were hoping to see them in print. In the future, we plan to post the top 10 limericks for each issue. Keep those submissions coming!

The Saturday Evening Post will award $100 to the author of the winning limerick for this picture.

Limericks must contain five lines. Entries will not be returned. Enter as many times as you wish.

The Jul/Aug 2011 Limerick Laughs winner will be announced in the Nov/Dec 2011 issue. Entries must be postmarked by August 3.

Send entries on a postcard to:
Limerick Laughs
The Saturday Evening Post
1100 Water way Blvd.
Indianapolis, IN 46202

We extend our congratulations and $100 to Joel Kravitz, Houston, Texas for the Mar/Apr 2011 winning entry.

He thought bowling was a way he’d impress.
But he soon had to reasess.
She said with a grin
As she knocked down every pin,
"I’m much better when I don’t wear a dress "

The US Air Force Turns 150 Years Old

We shouldn’t let this month go by without honoring what may be the 150th birthday of the United States Air Force. On June 17, 1861, the first use of an aircraft for military purposes was demonstrated before an appreciative Abraham Lincoln. According to the Post‘s coverage:

The other afternoon, the long-promised balloon ascension for military purposes took place. The elevation attained was not very great [500 feet], though it was perfectly satisfactory as an experiment. The aeronauts were Prof. Lowe, Gen. Burns, of the Telegraph Company, and H.C. Robinson, operator.

Thaddeus Lowe had spent years touring and lecturing on balloon flight in America and Europe. Just months before, he had attempted to fly his balloon from Cincinnati to the east coast. Unfortunately, he came down in Unionville, South Carolina, a distinctly anti-Union town. Local authorities of the recently seceded state arrested him as a spy. He was released only when he convinced the authorities he was flying for scientific, not military, purpose.

Lincoln’s Secretary of War saw the military potential just as quickly as the South Carolina authorities. He summoned Lowe to Washington to demonstrate how a lighter-than-air craft could allow observers to instantly report the movement and disposition of the enemy.

The balloon was connected with the War department by telegraph. The first message ever telegraphed from a balloon was then sent to the United States by Prof. Lowe. It was as follows: —

View of balloon ascension: Prof. Thaddeus Lowe observes the Battle of Seven Pines or Fair Oaks from his balloon “Intrepid” on the north side of the Chicahominy, 1862. Mathew Brady Collection.

Balloon Enterprise,

Washington, June 17

“To the President of the U. States:

SIR: This point of observation commands an area nearly fifty miles in diameter. The city, with its girdle of encampments, presents a superb scene. I take great pleasure in sending you this first dispatch ever telegraphed from an aerial station, and in acknowledging  my indebtedness to your encouragement for the opportunity of demonstrating the availability of the science of aeronautics in the military service of the country.

Yours, respectfully,

T. S. C. Lowe

Mr. Lincoln was very much pleased with the experiment, and endorsed it as certain to prove of great value in military movements.

Washington June 19.— Prof. Lowe made another balloon ascension this morning, and was, as before, provided with means of telegraphing his reconnoisances. He distinctly saw the rebel encampments at Fairfax Court House. The result of his discoveries remains a secret with the authorities of the War Department. President Lincoln also made an ascension. The telegraph wire runs up to the balloon, where an operator is stationed, and thus puts the aeronaut and War Department in constant communications.

If this last statement is to be trusted, Abraham Lincoln might have earned the further distinction of being the first sitting president to fly.

Meet the Cartoonist: Roy Delgado

“Get Washboard Abs!”

Get Washboard Abs
“Get Washboard Abs!” Mar/Apr 2000

This cartoon illustrating the generation gap is a favorite of mine. It makes me think: Of course gramps wouldn’t know the word “abs.” And what kid these days would know what a washboard was?

After graduating from Tucson High School, Roy attended The Billy Hon Cartoon School in Los Angeles. (Now you know—there IS such a thing as cartoon school.) He took a Greyhound bus from Tucson: “I was on my way to become a magazine cartoonist and nothing was going to stop me.” Roy sold his first cartoon to a farm trade journal for four dollars.

“That was a very interesting cell phone conversation. Thanks for sharing it with me.”

That was a very interesting cell phone conversation. Thanks for sharing it with me.
“That was a very interesting cell phone conversation. Thanks for sharing it with me.” May/June 2011

A reader recently commented that a good cartoonist shows just what you are thinking. This is a prime example of just that.

“Warning. Reading all this information about the medicine may cause drowsiness.”

Warning. Reading all this information about the medicine may cause drowsiness. Jul/Aug 2011
“Warning. Reading all this information about the medicine may cause drowsiness.” Jul/Aug 2011

Here’s a side effect not mentioned in the data. This is one of three Roy Delgado cartoons in the latest issue of The Saturday Evening Post, a feat that has to be the envy of the many cartoonists who would kill for just one. Product details these days—TDMI (too darned much information).

“I’ve just accessed your school records. You have a lot of nerve complaining about my grades.”

I’ve just accessed your school records. You have a lot of nerve complaining about my grades.
“I’ve just accessed your school records. You have a lot of nerve complaining about my grades.” July/Aug 2008

Kids today—too smart (even if their grades don’t reflect it). This is another great example of generational differences.

“Look, if this is to be an amicable divorce, one of you will have to back down and take custody of the children.”

Look, if this is to be an amicable divorce, one of you will have to back down and take custody of the children
“Look, if this is to be an amicable divorce, one of you will have to back down and take custody of the children.” Jan/Feb 2008

Love the custody battle twist in this one!

“This one comes with its own garage sale sign.”

This one comes with its own garage sale sign
“This one comes with its own garage sale sign.” Jan/Feb 2008

Good point—why doesn’t exercise equipment just come with garage sale signs? In addition to frequent appearances in The Saturday Evening Post, Delgado’s work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Reader’s Digest, Good Housekeeping, and many, many other publications.

“Your R.S.V.P. for the Turkeyfest just came in.”

Your R.S.V.P. for the Turkeyfest just came in.
“Your R.S.V.P. for the Turkeyfest just came in.” Nov/Dec 2010

That’s one way to return an R.S.V.P.! Roy is drawing cartoons full time (luckily for us) in his mountaintop home and studio with his lovely wife and three cats. Continue reading The Saturday Evening Post for some of the country’s best cartoonists.

Blueberry Buckle

Now that summer is finally here, fresh produce should be readily available at your favorite grocery stores and farmers’ markets. Blueberries make for a great early summer treat—especially at breakfast—so why not try this recipe for blueberry buckle, which pairs perfectly with a nice cup of wake-up coffee? As a bonus, blueberries have one of the highest antioxidant capacities among all fruits. Go, blueberries!

Blueberry Buckle

Ingredients for cake:

Ingredients for topping:

Preheat oven to 350° F. Sift together flour and baking powder in small bowl, then set aside. Beat butter and sugar together until light and fluffy. Mix in well-beaten egg. Add flour mixture alternately with milk. (Note: The resulting dough will be thick, not runny like cake batter.) Place in greased 8×8-inch baking dish and cover with blueberries.

Put all topping ingredients in bowl and mix together with fingertips until crumbly. Sprinkle over top. Bake 1 hour and serve warm.

Classic Covers: The Art of the Haircut

“Woman Gets Bob at Barbershop” – E.M. Jackson

Woman Gets Bob at Barbershop by  E.M. Jackson
"Woman Gets Bob at Barbershop"
E.M. Jackson
Country Gentleman January 17, 1925

Females these days think they can waltz into a man’s territory and get their hair bobbed! What next? In this case the cover is from Country Gentleman (a sister publication to the Post) from 1925. Waiting impatiently (notice the pocket watch) is a disapproving customer.

“Couple in Barber Chairs” – E.M. Jackson

Couple in Barber Chairs by E.M. Jackson
"Couple in Barber Chairs"
E.M. Jackson
May 10, 1930

The same artist, E.M. Jackson, did this charming cover for the Post five years later. Seems as though they’re examining their new dos, but look at their mirrors. They’re checking each other out!

“Bernice Bobs Her Hair” – Coles Phillips

Bernice Bobs Her Hair by Coles Phillips
"Bernice Bobs Her Hair"
Coles Phillips
November 6, 1920

Alas, this lovely lass is having haircut remorse. Artist Coles Phillips worked mostly for Life magazine, but a few of his lithe beauties graced the covers of The Saturday Evening Post.

“Comical Haircut” – Howard Scott

Comical Haircut by Howard Scott
"Comical Haircut"
Howard Scott
February 27, 1943

Talk about haircut remorse! Really, the client can get carried away with comics, but the barber is another matter altogether. The style and humor of this 1943 cover suggests Norman Rockwell, but it was by an artist named Howard Scott. However, this was the issue that introduced Rockwell’s famous Four Freedoms paintings.

“Barber Getting Haircut” – Stevan Dohanos

Barber Getting Haircut by Stevan Dohanos
"Barber Getting Haircut"
Stevan Dohanos
January 26, 1946

Stevan Dohanos was a great artist who did over 120 Post covers, and this was his barbershop in Westport, Connecticut. “A half dozen other well-known illustrators get their hair cut” in this shop, the editors noted, “which will surprise a good many, who might suppose that a barber in an artist’s colony would starve to death.” How would the local barbers like the cover, speculated our sassy editors? “Dohanos’ next haircut will tell.”

Questions and comments about Saturday Evening Post covers are always welcome.

Happy Birthday, Superman!

Superman

Forget what you’ve read in the comics. Superman was not shot into space as an infant moments before his home planet exploded.

Instead, he was born in Cleveland, Ohio—specifically, in the halls of Glenville High School. And his parents were not Mr. and Mrs. Jor-L (original spelling), but Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.

The mythical Superman, as we all know, was faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive (a dated figure of speech that reflects Superman’s age: 77 this month), and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound (before his creators decided he could, in fact, fly.)

The real Superman was a “continuity”—a recurring comic-book character with superhuman powers to create revenue. According to a 1941 article in the Post, the Man of Steel had risen from a long-shot character created by two unknowns to the most popular hero of his time—and the fictional hero market during the Depression was fairly crowded.

No other cartoon character ever has been such an all-around success at the age of three. No other cartoon character ever has carried his creators to such an accomplishment as Siegel and Shuster enjoy at the age of twenty-six.

His noble profile confronts them in two magazines [as comics were called then] and 230 newspapers with a combined circulation of nearly 25,000,000. That boy is growing rare who has no Superman dungarees in his wardrobe or no Superman Krypto-Raygun in his play chest.

When R. H. Macy & Co. staged a Superman exhibit in its New York store last Christmas, it took in $30,000 in thirty-cent admissions. Superman Day at the World’s Fair cracked all attendance records for any single children’s event, drawing 36,000 of them at ten cents a head.

Certificates, code cards, and buttons, setting them apart as members of the Superman Club of America, are proudly carried by some quarter of a million youngsters including Mickey Rooney, Spanky McFarland, Farina, a du Pont, a La Follette, Mayor La Guardia’s two children, and six Annapolis midshipmen.

Translations used to carry Superman all over Europe. But, banned wherever the swastika waves, he is now confined to the British Empire, the United States, Latin America (Super-hombre), Hawaii, and the Philippines.

Superman’s meteoric rise didn’t involve shooting a rocket-bound infant into space to eventually land on earth, but his existence was just as improbable given the two earthlings who invented him.

Co-creator Jerry Siegel was an extremely average student at Glenville High who worked to support his family.

At all leisure moments, however, he nurtured his ingrown soul on an undiluted diet of dime novels and comic strips, especially the Man-From-Mars category.

“It inspired me to devote myself henceforth to writing science fiction literature,” says Siegel, who often talks like that.

Presently he was devoting himself to it so wholeheartedly that it sometimes took two years to move him from one grade into the next.

One day in 1930, a classmate pointed Siegel toward another student with a similar interest in science fiction.

Siegel sought him out. “I understand,” he said, “that you draw science fiction stuff.”

“Uh-huh,” Shuster admitted, his eyes blinking behind double-thick lenses.

[Soon] they were breathlessly discussing Buck Rogers, Tarzan of the Apes, and other exemplars of the contemporary comic strip.

By the noon recess the boys had formed a partnership which has progressed, unmarred by a single dispute, to this day.

For the next six years, Siegel and Shuster turned out several ideas, none of which took them far.

The partners brewed many a strong potion—Doctor Occult, a sort of astral Nick Carter who kept tangling with zombies, werewolves, and such; Henri Duval, a doughty musketeer in the image of D’Artagnan—but no editor hastened to press riches on them.

It was on a hot night in 1932 that Siegel got his best idea: a character who incorporated the strength of every fictional hero he knew. He worked through the night to write a complete story line.

As the dawn rose over Cleveland, Siegel, shirttail flying and script clutched in his fevered hands, raced through the empty streets to the Shuster home—one of the few violent exertions he has ever permitted himself—and roused his partner. Shuster took fire at once. Without pausing for either food or rest, they spent the rest of the day polishing off the first twelve Superman strips.

The idea was turned down by every syndicate and comic-magazine they contacted—sometimes two or three times—before a printer took a chance on these unknowns. By the third issue, Superman’s sales were up, up, and- well, you know the rest.

Unfortunately, the publisher required Siegel and Shuster to sign a release form giving him all rights to the character.

The partners, who by this time had abandoned hope that Superman would amount to much, mulled this over gloomily. Then Siegel shrugged, “Well, at least this way we’ll see him in print.” They signed the form.

For years afterward, the two struggled for a more equitable part of the Superman fortune. Yet they continued to produce Superman comics; even if they were disappointed in their business arrangement, they never lost faith in the character they created. Their readers rewarded their dedication with their own, creating such enraptured fans as this British boy observed by an American reporter.

Touring London’s bomb shelters during a heavy raid, he observed a cockney boy immersed in the pages of Superman. Neither the din of antiaircraft fire nor shells exploding nearby could distract his attention, and in his rapture he began squirming and jostling his neighbors. After a particularly violent detonation, his mother snatched the magazine out of his hands. “Give over,” she bawled, “and pay attention to the air raid.”

Celebrating America’s 125-Year Love Affair with Cars

125 Years of Cars
Cars through the years.

Cars are like clothing. Life would go on without them, but it wouldn’t be the same. To someone like me, who has always believed that anything worth doing is worth doing to excess, it seems only right that we live in a nation with more cars than drivers. A preponderance of Americans agrees with me, which is why we as a country have carried on a 125-year love affair with the automobile. It’s been a love-hate relationship on occasion (think traffic jams, accidents, noise), but overall, it has been an enduring and fascinating one.

In the 1880s, the continental United States wasn’t even united. California, Oregon, and Nevada were states, but separated from their eastern counterparts by nine territories that would ultimately become 10 states. There were not yet cars, but the Industrial Revolution was well under way. The country had more than 160,000 miles of railroad tracks by 1890. That’s almost four times the length of today’s Interstate highway system. But if you wanted to travel where you wanted and when you wanted, you were relegated to the horse. Or the mule.

Conventional 19th century wisdom held that a man on horseback could cover about 20 miles a day without harming his mount. If you lived in rural America, you were unlikely to see much of the country that lay beyond your horse’s range in your lifetime. And such things as emergency medical service, Domino’s Pizza delivery, the Roto-Rooter Man, and the Avon Lady were not even dreams. Had they been, they still would have had to wait for the automobile. The automobile proved to be nothing less than the device that freed every American from the tyranny of geography and the loneliness of isolation.

How It All Started

The average American, if he thinks about early automotive history at all, knows that Henry Ford invented the Model T, that there was a song involving Lucille and an Oldsmobile, that tires lasted about two hours, and that you risked being considered daft if you drove a “horseless carriage.” After all, why would anyone want to swap placid old Dobbin, whose only wish was for some oats and hay a couple of times a day, for a smoke-belching, unreliable creation that not only frightened birds and little children, but also ceased working at frequent intervals? Anyone who aspired to be an early adopter of the thing was at best a person of questionable judgment and at worst deranged.

If you insist on seeing a birth certificate for the automobile, look not to American ingenuity, but the European kind. We start with German patent DRP No. 37435 issued on January 29, 1886, to Karl Benz. The generally accepted birth year, however, is 1885, the year Benz actually built his first gasoline-powered three-wheeler. All of which means that this is either the 125th or 126th anniversary of the car.

To show you that there’s nothing altogether new under the sun, what became known as the Benz Patent Motorwagen had rack-and-pinion steering and a glove compartment. But no cup holders.

Adding some lipstick with a little help from the car.

We are lucky that Benz got as far as he did. His first manufacturing business failed; his second was an unwelcome association between him, a photographer, and a cheese merchant. He and his business partner Gottlieb Daimler remained in the automobile business, however, and in 1926 merged to form what became Daimler-Benz and later Daimler. More than 100,000 patents ultimately contributed to the creation of what we know as the automobile, and among the important automotive pioneers in America were the Duryea brothers. From 1893 to 1896, Charles and Frank Duryea of Chicopee, Massachusetts, built America’s first standardized and series-produced automobile, 13 of them. Alas, the brothers moved the company to Peoria, Illinois, squabbled, and ultimately went their separate ways. Frank remained in Massachusetts and, with the Stevens Arms and Tool Company, built a car called the Stevens-Duryea until 1927.

In 1900, in Europe, Ferdinand Porsche, in addition to insisting that his name be pronounced POR-shuh and not Porsche, produced a remarkable automobile. It was battery powered with four electric motors, one at each wheel. Shortly afterward, he patented the Mixte, or Mixture, which had a gasoline engine driving through a dynamo to power electric motors at the wheels. Sound familiar? It should, because it was essentially a hybrid. And it happened 111 years ago.

In Michigan, which would become the seat of the American car industry, Ransom E. Olds expanded on the Duryea brothers’ feeble run at mass production. He, not Henry Ford, established the first true assembly line and used it to build a tiller-steered car known as the “curved dash” Oldsmobile. By 1902 he was pumping 2,500 cars out the door, and this rose to 5,000 Oldsmobiles by 1904. To put these sales in perspective, Benz sold 572 vehicles in 1899.

This set the stage for Henry Ford, his refined and expanded assembly line, and the Model T. Henry Ford’s first automobile was not the Model T, but the Quadricycle, an open, gasoline-fueled, four-wheel, tiller-steered contraption with a seating capacity of two. On June 4, 1896, when he was ready to test his creation, built in a shed behind his home on Bagley Avenue in Detroit, Ford had to remove a wall because the Quadricycle would not fit through the shed’s door.

That was the bad news. The good news was that the Quadricycle worked and led to the formation of the Henry Ford Company and later the Ford Motor Company.
In 1908 Henry Ford brought out the Model T, the car that would put America on wheels. It cost $850 and sold 10,000 units its first year. Four years later, Ford reduced the price to $575. By 1916 some 55 percent of the world’s automobiles were Model Ts, a record that was never equaled. By the time Model T production ceased in 1927, more than 15 million of the cars had been sold. An astonishing number of Model Ts are still with us, and there would be more had World War II scrap drives not consumed thousands of them.

The Race Is On

Mankind being what it is, the invention of the car led almost immediately to the invention of competition, especially for the land-speed record (1911 marks the first running of the Indianapolis 500). Early land-speed record cars, like ships, were given names. And the first goal they pursued was a speed in excess of 100 kilometers per hour (62.5 mph). The first man to accomplish this was a Belgian gentleman racer named Camille Jenatzy.

Known as the Red Devil because of his beard and the ferocity of his driving style, Jenatzy drove a battery-powered electric car—La Jamais Contente, French for “The Never Satisfied.” In 1899 he drove it at the astonishing speed of more than 105 kilometers an hour (65 mph). In addition to fast driving, Jenatzy also liked fast living. In December 1913, he hosted a hunting party on his estate and drank just enough at cocktail hour to think it would be amusing to remove a bearskin rug from the parlor and use it to impersonate a bear.

Jenatzy, draped in bearskin, was crouched behind some bushes snuffling and grunting like a bear, when the editor of the Belgian Star shot and killed him. Auto executives have never quite trusted journalists since.

In 1901 the first Grand Prix race, at Pau in France, was won with an average speed of 46 miles per hour. Seventy years later, Peter Gethin won the Italian Grand Prix, averaging over 150 mph. Today, Grand Prix racers routinely top 200 mph.

Meanwhile, in Cleveland, Ohio, automaker Alexander Winton was the first to install steering wheels in cars, all previously steered by tiller-like devices. In 1901, prior to a match race against Henry Ford, Winton gave Ford the design for his steering wheel. Ford beat him. For the next 110 years, racing teams have been reluctant to share with the competition.

Cars continued to improve, but highways remained significant problems. Roads in America’s outback were awful arteries barely suited for a horse and buggy, much less for motoring. In 1912 a visionary entrepreneur, Carl Fisher, set out to change that. Fisher envisioned a cross-country gravel highway to be called the Coast-to-Coast Rock Highway. Local governments would provide labor and equipment, and the business community the materials. Motorists would be able to drive from New York to San Francisco to attend the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition.

For his cross-country road project, Fisher would attract two allies who realized what this could mean to the fledgling auto industry—Frank Seiberling, president of Goodyear, and Henry Joy, the boss at Packard. Joy suggested the project be renamed the Lincoln Highway.

As you might suppose, the project bogged down over the politics of choosing a route, but by the early 1920s, the Lincoln Highway existed and ran, at some point during its history, through 14 states.

Planning for what would become today’s Interstate Highway system began in 1938, but building it did not get under way in earnest until 1956. Today, more than 46,000 miles of interstate connect our cities. By 1972 cars were traveling Los Angeles freeways at an average speed of 60 miles an hour. By 1982, the average had dropped to 17 miles per hour. Today, discouraged experts have given up calculating freeway speeds.

The Evolution of the Modern-Day Auto

Until 1911 all cars powered by internal combustion engines were cranked by hand, an act of necessity that could break an arm. Charles Kettering introduced the electric starter on 1911 Cadillacs; now even small women and little boys could operate an automobile.

The year 1923 saw the first powered windshield washers on many cars; manual wipers were first invented by a woman in 1903. Also in 1923, a radio was offered as an option for the first time. The radio was not invented by a woman, but in 1924 alone, women inventors came up with 173 devices for automobiles.
In 1924 Walter P. Chrysler introduced the first car bearing his name at the New York Auto Show. In 1927 Ford Model A production began, and so did the sales race between Ford and Chevrolet that would last for decades.

The year 1937 saw the formal establishment of what would become Volkswagen. The so-called “People’s Car,” a pet idea of Adolf Hitler, was designed by Ferdinand Porsche and owed a great deal of its configuration to the Czech-built Tatra, a streamlined rear-engine car of the period. The People’s Car became the Kubelwagen, the German Army’s Jeep equivalent during World War II, but returned to civilian use after the war as the Volkswagen Beetle.

Things you couldn’t do before cars were invented such as taking the gang for an impromptu clambake.

Buick introduced the first electric turn signals in 1938. Seventy-three years later, a surprising number of drivers have been seen using them. During the World War II years, American production switched to military vehicles and aircraft, and one of history’s most famous vehicles, the Jeep, went on sale to the government. Like the Beetle, it would become vastly popular with consumers after the war.

By the late ’40s, GM had long been operating under the leadership dictates of Alfred P. Sloan, who originated the “move-up” strategy that could take you from a Chevrolet to a Cadillac with stops along the way at Pontiac, Oldsmobile, and Buick. Unless you were a doctor, in which case you had to stop at Buick. Sloan also invented the annual model changeover, which cost stockholders and car buyers alike enough money to buy Saudi Arabia.

In 1948 Ford introduced the first F-series pickup. Today, the F-series has been the best-selling vehicle in the United States for 34 consecutive years. You still cannot see over them at a traffic light, a quality they share with the ubiquitous sport utility vehicles (SUVs). The SUV, by the way, is older than you think it is. Most automotive pundits credit Jeep with the first one, the all-metal, two-wheel-drive station wagon that appeared in 1946. If you are of the school that believes a true SUV has four-wheel drive, then the 1947 Jeep station wagon gets the nod. They sold in limited quantities.

The first tailfins, brainchild of GM styling chief Harley Earl, appeared in 1948 and set off a “mine are bigger than yours” styling war between GM and Chrysler that lasted until the early 1960s and lent true meaning to the phrase “wretched excess.”

Rolling into the Future

You know most of what happened after tailfins. Technical advancement after technical advancement came along—arguably culminating in the cup holder. We’ve seen a lot: fuel injection, remote rearview mirrors, electronic engine control, antilock brakes, and so on. A new car now costs the average consumer more than 50 percent of his or her household income (up from 33 percent in 1974), but you can’t have everything.

Cars today are better than anyone ever thought they could be. Diesels don’t rattle or smell anymore. Onboard GPS systems can help you find a hotel or a Starbucks when you’re traveling. Cars are safer and sounder—and they last for years, as do the payments.

Tires, one of the weak points in early automobile travel, now last 50,000 miles with ease. One unsung pioneer in this progress was Benjamin Franklin Goodrich who started the company bearing his name in 1880. B. F. gets credit for the first U.S.-made radial tire, the first “run flat” tire, the first synthetic rubber tire, and the first “space saver” spare. In 1988, B. F. Goodrich, as the firm was by then known, left tire-making to others and is now an aerospace company. The BFG brand is owned by Michelin.

The tailfin’s disappearance in the mid-1960s coincided almost exactly with the appearance of the Ford Mustang. Introduced in 1964 at the New York World’s Fair, the Mustang was the first affordable sporty car available to men with a midlife crisis.

Another affordable car, the Volkswagen Beetle, became a bestseller in the U.S. around this time but was anything but flashy. Almost a half-century later, the Mustang not only survives, but flourishes. The original Beetle is gone, but before it left, it managed to outsell the Model T. More than 21 million customers bought Beetles.
The 1970s saw the OPEC oil embargo, the hated 55-mph national speed limit, and automobiles so uninspired that it’s a wonder the housing industry didn’t quit building garages.

The Japanese auto industry took note, and before you could say “Banzai!” they were a major factor in the U.S. market. By the 1980s, Hondas and Toyotas were regulars on the lists of bestselling cars. A popular perception held that American automakers played golf and office politics while their Japanese counterparts worked at building better cars. That was true except for the golf part; the Japanese are obsessed with the game.

The U.S. industry produced the first minivan in 1983, and not long after, the SUV became the thing for moms and dads to drive because kids didn’t want to be seen in a minivan. The station wagon reappeared in the 1990s, but we now call it a crossover. The hybrid is back, and so is the electric car. Maybe they’ll work this time around.
The love affair between Americans and their cars has lasted for more than a century. Like most affairs of the heart, those years have produced triumph, tragedy, creativity, innovation, and a not insignificant dose of laughter and lunacy.

That is likely to continue. Certainly one hopes that the laughter and lunacy do not disappear entirely.

We the People Make This a Great Country

Editor’s Note: We are reposting this story because of the recent controversy about changes in U.S. immigration policies.

Ehrich Weisz, born in 1874 in Budapest, Hungary, moved to America with his parents when he was a child. His father, a rabbi, had such a hard time finding work in the New World that he ended up in Wisconsin, thousands of miles from most Jewish communities. He lost the job he found there, and Ehrich sold newspapers to support the family and then ran away when he was 12. In his teens he was back with his family, now in New York, enduring what he later called “hard and cruel years when I rarely had the bare necessities of life.”

Ehrich had enormous luck, though. He discovered as a child that he was gifted as an athlete and gymnast. He took up magic, and before he was out of his teens he changed his first name to Harry and then his last name to Houdini—and he became the most famous magician who ever lived.

Ehrich Weisz was just one of 36 million people who poured into the United States in the century between 1820 and 1920. At the beginning of that period, the U.S. had a population of only 10 million. The newcomers dwarfed that number, and America became a land populated largely by recent arrivals and their descendants. Its culture and its character were remade by what those immigrants brought with them and what they created after they were here.

The immigrants came mostly in two great waves, first from northern Europe—places like Ireland, Germany, Scandinavia—and then from southern and eastern Europe—Italy, Russia—but they also came from China and Japan and Mexico and Canada and almost everywhere else on earth. They shaped the nation with their collective independent, pioneering spirit, for it was not easy or inexpensive to abandon all you knew and travel around the globe to a new land, and those who made the journey tended to be stubborn and ambitious. They also shaped the nation with the fortitude they showed after they got here, for almost all of them had to strive long and hard to rise to prosperity, and most of them faced discrimination and disdain from the moment they arrived. As we struggle with the burdens we sometimes feel placed on us by our latest immigrants­—especially illegal ones—it can be heartening to remember what struggles there were before, in a time when there were virtually no limits on who could come to America or what hardships they could be forced to put up with.

Around the same time Ehrich Weisz arrived in the U.S., Luigi Giannini traveled from Italy to try to succeed as a farmer in the lush lands of California, but he wasn’t there long before he was murdered by one of his farmworkers over two dollars in wages. His son, Amadeo, dropped out of school in the eighth grade and went to work for a wholesale produce business. Amadeo proved so good at buying and selling that by 1904 he was able to open a little bank in a former saloon in San Francisco’s Italian neighborhood to serve immigrants who most banks wanted nothing to do with. He called it the Bank of Italy, and under his guidance it opened branches even through the earthquake of 1906 and the Panic of 1907. In the 1920s, he changed its name from the Bank of Italy to the Bank of America. It remains today one of the nation’s great financial institutions.

There are countless stories like those, because to be an immigrant at all you almost had to have unusual resourcefulness, imagination, and drive. The first big group to arrive was the Irish in the late 1840s. More than two million of them—around a quarter of Ireland’s population—sailed to the United States to escape mass starvation caused by the potato disease known as the “blight.” They were so hated by some Americans that they weren’t even considered white—a cartoon in Harper’s Weekly in 1876 showed a black man and a just-as-black Irishman above the caption “The Ignorant Vote.” Yet by the 1880s they were the master politicians of many of the cities in which they dwelled. More than five million Germans came to America during the century of immigration as well; today, Germany remains Americans’ top place of ancestral origin—above England or anywhere else. Germans and Scandinavians tended to move to rural areas in the Midwest, establishing farming communities. By 1890, the United States was a nation of lager beer drinkers and lovers of German food, and there were 800 German-language newspapers across the land. Most large U.S. cities fostered sizable German-speaking communities until the start of World War I, when all things German suddenly came to be considered unpatriotic.

Chinese began arriving on the West Coast in the late 1840s, imported to do grueling labor such as building railroads and mining, work not many whites wanted to do. Often they were the bulk of the population in the mining camps of the West, and in San Francisco in 1870 there were estimated to be two white people and one Chinese person for every job. The Chinese were the victims of especially virulent discrimination, seen as an inferior race that put “real” Americans out of work. In 1882 a law was passed that almost completely stopped them from coming to America. It was the first time there was even a concept that immigration could be illegal. Until then the door had been open to everybody.

The second big wave of immigration began in the 1880s. More than 4 million people left Italy for the United States between 1880 and 1920, and about as many Jews came from eastern Europe, especially Poland and Russia—about a third of all the Jews in those countries. The Jews were driven from their homelands principally by religious persecution, the Italians by unending grinding poverty. At the beginning, both groups stayed mainly in the cities of the eastern seaboard, packed together in crowded, desperately poor neighborhoods. In 1910 there were 500,000 Jews living on the Lower East Side in New York City, which one person called “the filthiest place in the Western Continent.” By 1920 New York was home to 400,000 Italian immigrants.

Jews found that they hadn’t escaped anti-Semitism at all by coming to the New World, although it almost never threatened their lives as it had in the Old. As for Italians, The New York Times once ran an editorial that said, “Our own rattlesnakes are as good citizens as they.” As the twentieth century dawned and poor new arrivals from abroad made up more and more of the population of America’s biggest cities, pressure grew to put limits on immigration.

Where were the laws to control the great influx? They barely existed. In 1790, Congress ruled that any “free white persons” who were in the country for two years could become citizens. In 1868, after the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment affirmed that anyone born in the U.S. was a citizen, protecting not only former slaves but every child of an immigrant. In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, putting an end to immigration from China. In 1892, the federal government opened Ellis Island in New York Harbor, but it turned away only “idiots, insane persons, paupers,” criminals, and people “suffering from a loathsome or contagious disease.” In 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt persuaded Congress to establish a commission to study immigration, and the commission delivered a report that stated that recent arrivals, especially Italians and Jews, were “far less intelligent” than earlier ones with an “absence of family life.” That gravely unfair assessment led to the passage of laws in the 1920s that almost completely stopped immigration. The century of immigration ended. Large numbers of new Americans wouldn’t begin to enter again until President Lyndon Johnson—standing beneath the Statue of Liberty—signed a new law reopening the nation’s doors in 1965.

All through the century of immigration there were fears that the hordes of newcomers from exotic lands would never assimilate into American society. But of course they did—and in so doing they enriched American society immeasurably. To state just the most obvious, imagine Boston without Irish politicians or New Orleans without Cajun (originally French-Canadian) food and music or an entertainment world without Jewish humor or San Francisco without Chinatown. Still far worse, imagine the land without all the people who brought those things. You can’t, because they—and their ideas and hopes and dreams and all of their descendants—became America. America became them. They are no less us than are the original settlers who trekked over the land bridge from Asia to Alaska tens of thousands of years ago, no less us than the first few English who settled a few scattered spots on the coastline or the millions of Africans who were taken across the ocean in chains. It is a cliché, but it is a true one, that America is defined by people who came from elsewhere, what they brought with them, and the new things they created after they got here.

It is encouraging to remember as we face the immigration struggles of the present moment that not only have we seen it all before, but that the history of immigration in America is almost all a story of heroic, difficult struggle—and that it is finally a story of triumph.

Ride of a Lifetime

On a cloudless New England day in early September, the sun beat down uncharacteristically hot, pushing the temperature above 90 degrees. A stiff wind whipped across Lake Champlain. To the east, Vermont’s Green Mountains rose in long, sloping layers of green and blue. In the opposite skyline, the bumpy peaks of the Adirondacks punctuated the brilliant blue day. Despite the heat, Stephen and Donna Gilewski were jubilant as they pedaled across the Lake Champlain causeway on day two of a three-day bike tour. “The only thing I had in my mind was the hills, lake, and scenery—nothing else, no stress, no worries,” Stephen recalls.

And that, in a nutshell, is the deep satisfaction of bike touring. On an extended ride you slowly shed your workaday persona. You become attuned to the rhythm of the road and the beauty of your surroundings. Thanks to the slower pace, you see and feel things with a greater intensity than would ever be possible through the lens of a car window. “It’s an absolutely wonderful feeling,” says Stephen.

The Gilewskis, both 59, had never been on a bike tour nor had they ridden a substantial distance when they signed up for the trip with Bike Vermont the previous spring. “We’re not athletes by any stretch of imagination,” admits Stephen, a retired manager. “We just started riding about a year ago. To go on a bike tour, you only need to have a little experience riding a bike and be in relatively decent shape. If you’re able to go on long walks, you’re okay.”

Organized bike tours have surged in popularity in recent years, in part due to demand from the 41-to-60-year-old age group. Experience-hungry baby boomers comprise more than 40 percent of adventure travel customers—the largest single segment. Cycling tours range from spare and inexpensive self-guided tours (you get a bike, a map, and a pat on the back) to luxe guided tours with five-star accommodations. Itineraries range from grueling, month-long extravaganzas along the Tour de France route through the Alps to week-long fall-foliage tours in New England to two-hour, easy-as-pie, all-downhill coasting rides in Hawaii.

As Stephen points out, it doesn’t require a high degree of fitness to be able to join a bicyle tour. Still, most riders prefer to practice riding and build their endurance before a multi-day trip. The summer before their tour, the Gilewskis rode on the trails near their hometown of Southington, Connecticut. Their practice rides started small and built up to a peak of 30 miles. (The bike touring rule of thumb is to be comfortable riding at least 75 percent of the tour’s longest single-day ride beforehand.)

Although they were both prepared, Donna admits she was a bit concerned about finishing the 45-mile route of the tour’s longest day, particularly in the difficult terrain of the New Hampshire hills. In the end, she made it without a problem, the day seeming to breeze by like the wind across Lake Champlain. But if she’d struggled, there was an easy backup plan: Bike Vermont, like many such companies, trails its riders with a van, ready to give a lift to anyone who feels like packing it in for the day.

As a trail-rider, Donna’s other niggling fear was about road-riding with automobiles zooming past. That concern, too, dissipated as she rolled along with the highly visible pack of nine other riders. The diverse group ranged in age from people in their 30s to their 70s and included a former amateur bicycle racer as well as a couple who hadn’t ridden bikes in decades. Everyone kept up with no pressure to ride too fast, and the afternoon picnic breaks were filled with lively conversation. Stopping along the way for lunch also gave her legs a break from those hills.

The best tour companies offer a high degree of flexibility, not just in the choice of destination, but with daily options depending on energy levels or just mood. On a six-day, five-night Trek Travels tour through Italy’s Tuscany region, Madonna and Jay Williams from Hartland, Wisconsin, were offered the choice each morning to go 15, 40, or 70 miles. “If you’re an avid cyclist, you would take the long route, an okay rider could go the middle distance, and some simply rode 15 miles and still had fun,” Madonna says.

Only needing to meet up with the group for lunch, Jay and Madonna one day found themselves in a small hill town where they stopped to putter around in a family-owned ceramic store. She bought a handmade pot that she couldn’t resist and stuffed it in her saddlebag. Madonna recalls with a laugh that Jay was annoyed with her at the time, wondering why she’d insisted on buying something in the middle of nowhere. Turned out, she’d made a real find. A few months later, they happened across a travel show on television that touted that same ceramics shop as one of the best pottery producers in the world.

“We wouldn’t have found that without stopping and exploring,” Madonna says. “That’s what I love about bike tours. You ride through neighborhoods and get closer to the local culture. It’s a beautiful pace to learn about a country.”

The Tuscany excursion took place five years ago, but the Williamses were hooked. Three years later they went on another cycling vacation, this time to Spain. And this fall they are planning a picturesque bike tour from Prague to Vienna. “What better way to see the world than on two wheels?” Madonna says.

While the Williamses did most of their riding as a couple, others tour to reconnect with old friends. As a 50th birthday celebration this past autumn, Londa Dewey of Madison, Wisconsin, gathered her husband and 16 friends for a four-day bike tour of the Napa Valley. The route took them along Highway 1 and the California coast and Russian River then through towering redwood forests. And let’s not forget the wine-tasting, which, for the most part—displaying impressive discipline—they reserved for evenings.

The trip provided Londa and her circle of friends a remarkable shared experience—the occasional morning-after headaches quickly forgotten. “What’s different about a biking trip is that it’s an active vacation with flexibility built into it,” Londa recalls. “You can see the countryside, ride right next to the vineyards or sunflower fields. You’re not separated from your environment the way you are in a car or a bus.”

Londa and her friends traveled more than 100 miles by bicycle during their four-day California adventure. But like the Williamses, the Gilewskis, and so many other bike travelers, they went so much further.

Wyeth Family Genius

Rain and fog envelope the small farmhouse in the village of Tenants Harbor, Maine, where James “Jamie” Browning Wyeth sits in the parlor talking about what it’s like to be the third generation of America’s first family of art. Although he turns 65 this summer, Jamie is a still-boyish man, handsome with a full head of hair, relaxed, candid, and, like his father, Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009), a dapper dresser given to mandarin collars, turtlenecks, tunics, aprons, and knickers—the habit of a country squire.

Despite all the ways that he is like his father, and they are many, Jamie is a very different kind of artist and very much his own man. “I grew up with the legacy thing. My father did, too,” he says. “That could crush you unless you left it outside the door of the studio. In a funny sense, though, my grandfather, who I never knew, had more of an influence on me.”

Newell Convers “N.C.” Wyeth (1882-1945) died in a tragic train-car accident in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, the year before Jamie was born. N.C. Wyeth was a larger-than-life figure, a swashbuckler of a man whose dramatic illustrations fired the imaginations of generations of readers beginning with his first illustration commission—a bucking bronco painted for the cover of the February 21, 1903, issue of The Saturday Evening Post.

By comparison, Jamie’s father, Andrew, was a quiet, reserved, and far more subtle and secretive man. Growing up in Chadds Ford, young Jamie played in his late grandfather’s studio amidst the costumes and props used in his grandfather’s pictures of cowboys and Indians, pirates and warriors. “For a kid, it was just magical. Then I’d go to my father’s studio where he’d be working on a dead bird or dried grass.”

Andrew became one of America’s most popular painters—the austere poet laureate of rural life in coastal Maine and Pennsylvania’s Brandywine Valley. Like his father and grandfather before him, Jamie paints both these places as well, the personal poles of the Wyeth world. And in each place the family has a museum devoted to its art—the Farnsworth Art Museum’s Wyeth Center in Rockland, Maine, and the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.

Where his father was a somber tone poet who sucked all the air and color out of local scenes in Maine and Pennsylvania leaving only the painted bones for eternity, Jamie paints with a lively, bold, colorful playfulness and freedom that recalls the melodrama of his grandfather’s illustrations for children’s classics such as Treasure Island, The Deerslayer, and Kidnapped.

Jamie generally marks his own decision to become an artist at 1958, the year he completed the sixth grade and, at his own request, left formal education behind to study art—first with his aunt, Carolyn Wyeth, and then with his father. Andrew, too, had been homeschooled and mentored by his father.

Young Jamie had already entered American art history, however, as one of his father’s subjects. “Faraway” (1952) depicts six-year-old Jamie sitting in a field in a coonskin cap with a distant look in his eyes (top, right). Jamie, a big Davy Crockett fan at the time, still remembers the hat, the boots he wore, and the long hours spent posing for his father. “I had a lead soldier that I played with every time my father took a break,” he recalls. “I lost it in the grass. I looked everywhere for it, but I couldn’t find it. I had dreams about that soldier.”

N.C. Wyeth was a hugely successful illustrator, but his attempts to paint landscapes were nowhere near as successful as his son Andrew’s. “His non-illustration work was rather self-conscious,” says Jamie of his grandfather. “There was this tremendous pride in his son but also this terrible jealousy.” The professional relationship between Jamie and his own father had elements of friendly rivalry, too, but it was far healthier. “In terms of painting, we were completely honest with one another,” says Jamie. “That I really miss.”

Although Andrew was enormously popular, his very popularity was the kiss of death in the contemporary art world, which—having embraced abstract expressionism in the 1950s—tended to view him as a throwback, a nostalgic realist. “Andrew Wyeth was one of the most misunderstood painters,” says his son. “He was no more a realist than the man in the moon. He painted a very strange, airless world.”

Jamie compares his father’s New England Gothic imagery to the spare poetry of Robert Frost. “At one level, it’s all snowy woods and stone walls,” he says. “At another, it’s terrifying. It exists at both levels.”

Still, Andrew’s paintings tend to exist in that gray area between critical scorn and public adulation. “I was at the Museum of Modern Art recently and there was a crowd around ‘Christina’s World,’” says Jamie of his father’s most famous painting, the iconic image of disabled spinster Christina Olson crawling back across a field to her Maine farmhouse. “The museum hates it. They hang it in a hall. But the guards will tell you the two most asked questions at the museum are ‘Where’s the men’s room?’ and ‘Where is “Christina’s World?”’”

The other charge that the art establishment throws at the Wyeths—all three of them—is that they are illustrators rather than artists. “I’ve always taken it as a supreme compliment,” Jamie said in a 1998 interview. “What’s wrong with illustration? There’s this thing now that illustrations are sort of secondary to art, and I think it’s a bunch of crap.”

Reminded of that defiant statement today, Jamie notes that the beloved painter Norman Rockwell was denigrated in the same manner. “I’ve always found Rockwell amazing,” he says, “but my father loathed him. He was almost threatened by Rockwell. He said he had no imagination—that he did everything from photographs with syrupy emotions.”

Jamie himself has no qualms whatsoever about answering the call to illustrate. One of his most recent projects was to paint pictures for the children’s book Sammy in the Sky, a realistic tale of canine love and loss by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Barbara Walsh. And, despite his occasional forays across the border into commercial art, his pure-art credentials remain untarnished. That’s partly because, unlike his father, he makes the effort to know and be known in the rarified art world. “He is far more interested than his father was in seeing what’s out there, and living in New York as he does part of the year is itself a statement about his engagement with the world of contemporary art,” says Michael Komanecky, chief curator at the Farnsworth Art Museum. He also notes that as a young man Jamie spent a lot of time at Andy Warhol’s Factory, arguably the epicenter of 20th century American art.

“With Warhol,” says Jamie, “I was just curious about him as a person. This peculiar little man in a wig just fascinated the heck out of me.”

Victoria Wyeth, daughter of Jamie’s brother Nicholas and Andrew Wyeth’s only grandchild, is the designated family docent, giving lectures on all things Wyeth when not working as a therapist in the Pennsylvania state hospital system. She sees her uncle’s art as much more varied than her grandfather’s. “Jamie is the future of our family,” says Victoria. “And he’s so different. He’s managed to do his own thing in his own style, and he’s painted everything from pigs to presidents.”

“Jamie’s art is more openly expressive and expansive, soliciting a wide range of emotions,” adds Wanda Corn, professor emerita of art history at Stanford University, author of The Art of Andrew Wyeth, and a board member of the Wyeth Foundation for American Art. “He can be funny, horrific, ghoulish, and theatrical. His brush is often wild and his color riotous. He enjoys provoking his viewers, making them feel extreme emotion. He is a great animal painter.”

A good-humored menagerie of dogs, geese, gulls, sheep, ravens, chickens, cows, horses, ducks, and especially pigs populate Jamie’s paintings. Enormous, pink, intelligent, clean, and forthright, pigs have become almost a totem animal for Jamie. As he explains in the text to the catalogue to his current exhibition, “Farm Work,” he first took a shine to pigs when a neighbor’s pig, a sow with a crooked snout named Den-Den, got into his studio and ate some of his oil paints. “Months later they were sending her to the butcher,” Jamie recalls. “I thought, I can’t have that. By consuming and surviving twenty-two tubes of my paint, she had endeared herself to me. So I took her to our farm at Point Lookout.” A steady stream of pig paintings ensued.

“The whole family has a wonderful sense of humor,” says Victoria, “and Jamie’s the one who paints with it.”

At almost any given time there is a Wyeth family exhibition somewhere in the world. “The Wyeth Family: Three Generations of American Art; Works from the Bank of America Collection” spent the summer of 2010 at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London and will be featured at the Mona Bismarck Foundation in Paris from November 26, 2011, to March 6, 2012. Jamie’s “Farm Work” exhibition, which features his animal paintings, runs through September 11, 2011, at the Brandywine River Museum. And in 2014, Jamie’s own lifetime of art will be featured in a major retrospective at the Museum of Fine Art in Boston.

“I hate having shows,” Jamie confides. “All the inadequacies in the paintings scream out to me. Painting is so difficult, it reduces the three generations thing to nothing.”

But Jamie will soldier on, bearing the Wyeth family banner high into the 21st century, both because he wants to and because his father expected him to do so. It is his pleasure, his birthright, and his duty.

Andrew’s final words to his son were simple and direct—”Just give them hell.”
N.C. Wyeth

 

Learn more about Jamie and his work in our 2016 feature, “Jamie Wyeth: Born to Paint.”

Andrew Wyeth

Jamie Wyeth

The Hero Next Door

Joplin James, a kindergarten teacher at Shelburne Community School in Vermont, tightened his grip on the seatback rail as the school bus lurched toward a treacherous curve of I-89 sliced between huge walls of glaciated rock. Joplin, along with 60 energetic middle-schoolers and their chaperones, was eager to get home from a week-long school camping trip. But this section of roadway was notorious for accidents, and the teacher silently wished for everyone’s safety.

As they came through the turn, he saw the accident. A woman had smashed her car into the rocks, the impact tossing her vehicle across two lanes of traffic and onto the median strip. Debris littered the road.

The bus braked hard to a stop and, without thinking, Joplin leaped to the ground and ran to the car. “I thought the driver was a goner,” he recalls. “Her whole face was bloody, she was unconscious, and the roof was caved in. She had her seatbelt on, but the way she hit…” He shakes his head. “The hardest part was the kids had to watch.”

As he paused for a moment to assess the damage, the driver’s compartment began to fill with smoke. Joplin ran back to the bus and grabbed a fire extinguisher. “By the time I got back, the engine compartment was full of flames,” he says. He emptied the extinguisher over the blaze as other motorists pulled the driver from the wreck.

“She was so banged up I questioned the choice to move her,” he says. “But it was the right thing to do because the fire reignited and totally consumed the car’s interior.”

Joplin is more comfortable hiking the Long Trail high in the mountains of Vermont or reading Blueberries for Sal to his kindergartners than he is being called a hero. But, by anyone’s definition, that’s precisely what he is. When another human being needed help, he acted decisively and put himself in harm’s way.

“I’m not a hero,” he protests vehemently. “When I think of a hero, I think of that guy who stepped in front of the shooter in Tucson when Arizona Congresswoman Gabby Giffords was shot in January. Now he’s a hero!”

Joplin is referring to Bill Badger, the 70-something retired army colonel who leaped at the Tucson shooter as he tried to reload, and held onto his gun arm as two others joined him to subdue the man. Six people died that day, including an elderly woman and a young girl, but Badger undoubtedly saved others from violent death.

Watching the replay of cell phone images and news media interviews with Tucson survivors, the question became inescapable: What makes a person risk himself to save others?

“Helping others in a crisis is a gut response,” explains researcher Paul Slovic, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon and president of Decision Research, a nonprofit institute that investigates human judgment, decision-making, and risk. “We don’t fully understand what’s going on in the brain, but we’re built in a way to respond quickly to emergencies. And in a crisis, we don’t sit back and weigh the costs and benefits with pencil and paper. We react in an instant.”

Essentially, the human default position is to help others.

Most people we tag with the label “hero” are professionals who have been trained as soldiers, firefighters, police, paramedics, or search and rescue team members to hone that instinctive, heroic response and put their lives on the line—so in the split-second it takes to decide to either run or help, they’ll move forward and do what needs to be done. They’ll take the risk, take the bullet, take the consequences.

But so, it turns out, will ordinary people on their way to work or picking up milk at the corner market. There’s the subway hero in New York City who, after a woman commuter fell from the train platform onto the tracks, jumped onto the tracks himself, pulled her between the rails, and covered her body with his as a train passed over the two of them.

There’s the letter carrier in Lexington, Massachusetts, who saw a house on fire, ran in, and pulled a 96-year-old man to safety. Before it was brought under control, the blaze engulfed the house and burst through the roof.

Then there’s the Mississippi football coach who was out fishing with a buddy when he spotted smoke coming from another craft. Acting swiftly, the coach pulled passengers to safety just before the craft burst into flame.

And there’s the Pennsylvania mom who was picking up some milk from the local stop-and-go when she saw a man grab his former wife and force her into a car. As the man tried to hang on to the woman and get into the car himself, the mom leaped forward, opened the passenger door, yanked the woman out of the car, and pulled her into the store to call police.

“Every one of us is a hero in waiting,” says Scott Allison, Ph.D., a psychologist at the University of Richmond and co-author of Heroes: What They Do & Why We Need Them. “We’re just waiting for the opportunity to step forward and do something extraordinary.”

Still, why? Why place oneself in harm’s way—often for a complete stranger? After all, it’s not rational, and it’s certainly not prudent. The explanation may have as much to do with human biology as with altruism, says Allison. “There’s research to show that there’s a biological, evolutionary tendency toward these actions. We’re social animals. And we’ve learned, or at least our genes have learned, that survival is fostered by social relationships. We’ve learned that if we’re helpful to others, we’re more likely to survive ourselves.”

Selfless selfishness: That does sound like a bit of a paradox, but it may well be that the engine of self-interest—on a genetic level, at least—is what drives our noblest deeds.

Another surprising fact about heroism is that it need not be associated with danger or classical ideas of bravery at all. Heroism does not require standing in front of a speeding bullet, leaping through fire, or putting one’s life on the line. Indeed, there are many ways to be heroic, and some do so quietly, without any fanfare. Take Mississippi washerwoman Oseola McCarty. Forced to quit school in the sixth grade to care for an elderly home-bound relative, she took in laundry to support herself. Throughout her life, she never owned a car, walked everywhere she needed to go, attended Friendship Baptist Church every Sunday, held her Bible together with tape, and banked just about every dime she ever made. Eventually those dimes added up to $150,000—and Oseola decided to give it all away.

“More than I could ever use,” the tiny, 87-year-old told The New York Times.

The money went into a trust and, upon her death in 1999, some went to her church and family, but most went to the University of Southern Mississippi, a nearby school that did not admit children of Oseola’s race when she was a girl. The money—quickly matched by a business community humbled by the woman’s generosity—was used to provide scholarships for nine African-American children.

Or take two nuns in Indianapolis, Sisters Rita Ann Wade and Barbara McClelland, who had seen the largely middle-class eastside neighborhood nearby slide into poverty. Based at the Holy Cross convent, church, and school, they watched as older residents—and some of the young ones, too—became afraid to venture into the increasingly hostile streets.

Holy Cross became an oasis of safety and succor. It wasn’t unusual for a homeless or hungry soul to come knocking on the convent’s back door in the middle of the night. “Holy Cross had a food pantry, and the door to the parish office was right next to our kitchen door,” explains Sister Barbara. “So when people got hungry or just wanted to talk, they’d come and pound on our door.”

She chuckles. “We had one guy who came every night at 2, 3, or 4 in the morning and woke us up.”

As a result of their nocturnal visitors, the two Sisters jokingly began to refer to their “back door ministry.” But they also recognized the very real need for a place where people in the neighborhood could find food, a place to relax, a place to be heard, a place to be safe—and a couple of loving hearts.

The two women approached the problem the way they approached every other challenge: They thought about it, prayed about it, then talked to their spiritual community. The women’s order ultimately voted to have the nuns quit their jobs and begin serving the neighborhood on a full-time basis. Within a year, Sisters Rita Ann and Barbara had rented and renovated a house on the near eastside and named it “Miracle Place” (amiracleplace.org).

Today, 11 years later, the house is a hive of activity—and the Sisters have also cleared away a pocket park across the street where kids can play safely. Those who have watched the community evolve say that the Sisters will never tell you the half of what they do nor take the credit for any of it. Yet one look at the door constantly swinging open for neighborhood children, their brothers, sisters, parents, and old folks shows the Sisters are saving lives as fully as if they were snatching victims from a burning building.

The point being that heroes come in different forms: the action-hero kind like Joplin James, the secret-giver kind like Oseola McCarty, and the quietly devoted kind like Sisters Rita Ann and Barbara.

There’s heroism in such small gestures as writing a check to your favorite charity, coaching a little league team, or offering a kindness to a total stranger. “It’s all these gifts of self that, put together, really make the biggest difference,” says Diane Heavin, co-founder of the Curves fitness centers and a star of the ABC hit television show Secret Millionaire.

In fact, if you really want to change someone’s life, “Think about the last time you put a smile on someone’s face,” says Heavin. “Then go out there and do it again.”

Ellen Michaud is the author of Blessed: Living a Grateful Life. Contact her at theblessedblog.com.

Meet the Cartoonist: Randy Glasbergen

“If you are not absolutely thrilled and delighted with your purchase, maybe you’re expecting too much from a cheap TV vegetable slicer.”

If you are not absolutely thrilled and delighted with your purchase, maybe you're expecting too much from a cheap TV vegetable slicer.
“If you are not absolutely thrilled and delighted with your purchase, maybe you’re expecting too much from a cheap TV vegetable slicer.”
Mar/Apr 2010

There’s always someone around the corner ready to make a liar out of you. I’ve recently told you how hard it is to be a cartoonist. Except for Randy Glasbergen, who sold his first cartoons to the The Saturday Evening Post while still in high school.

“Unemployment rates are up again. I’d like to tell you more, but I just got canned.”

“Unemployment rates are up again. I'd like to tell you more, but I just got canned.”
“Unemployment rates are up again. I’d like to tell you more, but I just got canned.”
Sep/Oct 2010

With wry humor like this, it’s no surprise that Randy was once a staff writer for Hallmark cards and “currently writes and draws greeting cards and calendars for Recycled Greetings, Nobleworks, American Greetings, and others.”

“Hello, employment agency? There’s been a mistake. I asked for 100 elves!”

 “Hello, employment agency? There's been a mistake. I asked for 10 elves!”
“Hello, employment agency? There’s been a mistake. I asked for 100 elves!”
Nov/Dec 2007

You’ll find Randy in The Wall Street Journal, Woman’s World, Harvard Business Review, Reader’s Digest, and almost every issue, I’m delighted to say, of The Saturday Evening Post. I have a least one Glasbergen T-shirt and mouse pad and there are coffee cups, posters, and other merchandise in specific categories like “Glasbergen Cat Cartoons” and “Glasbergen Holiday Cartoons.” These characters are everywhere!

“I can get by on just 2 hours of sleep every day, as long as I nap for 14 hours.”

 “I can get by on just 2 hours of sleep every day, as long as I nap for 14 hours.”
“I can get by on just 2 hours of sleep every day, as long as I nap for 14 hours.”
Jul/Aug 2007

It seems to me most cartoonists have pets, and you can often tell it in their work, as with this cat. Randy is married with four grown children and five grandchildren, along with “two basset hounds, four cats, two guinea pigs.” Comic fodder, indeed.

“I finally put something aside for my retirement. I put aside my plans to retire.”

I finally put something aside for my retirement. I put aside my plans to retire
“I finally put something aside for my retirement. I put aside my plans to retire.”
May/June 2009

When I said the Glasbergen characters are everywhere, I wasn’t kidding. Several anthologies of his cartoons have been published not only in the U.S., but the UK, Germany, The Netherlands, and China.

“What’s the big idea sending your employees outside to smoke?”

“What's the big idea sending your employees outside to smoke?”
“What’s the big idea sending your employees outside to smoke?”
Sept/Oct 2008

One would think a cartoonist this successful would have a state of-the-art studio, but apparently not. Randy works “at home on the third floor of a creaky old Victorian home, formerly a boarding house for local school teachers.”

“The insurance company won’t pay for your skateboard accident. They said that stupidity is a pre-existing condition.”

“The insurance company won't pay for your skateboard accident. They said that stupidity is a pre-existing condition.”
“The insurance company won’t pay for your skateboard accident. They said that stupidity is a pre-existing condition.”
Jan/Feb 2008

Keep reading the Post for the best cartoonists around.

When LASIK Surgery Goes Awry

LASIK (laser-assisted in situ keratomileusis) surgery to improve visual acuity is a great boon to many; but, as with any surgery, there are risks and complications to consider.

The Post interviewed Dr. Ronald Krueger of the Cleveland Clinic Cole Eye Institute—a veteran of 18,000 refractive surgery procedures—about why vision sometimes gets worse after LASIK and how to avoid or treat this perplexing post-op problem.

To frame the discussion, however, let’s first take a quick look at the eye, specifically its outmost covering, the cornea, which provides two-thirds of the eye’s focusing power.

How well you see depends on the shape and curve of your cornea. A normal cornea is smoothly rounded with even curves from side to side and top to bottom. Vision problems—or refractive errors—affecting about 120 million people in the United States develop when the cornea becomes too curved (nearsightedness), too flat (farsightedness), or curves more in one direction than in another like the back of a spoon (astigmatism).

Eyeglasses and contacts correct refractive errors, but LASIK surgery is an increasingly popular option for convenience and comfort.

So, here’s the rub.

During LASIK, the surgeon creates a flap in the eye’s cornea and then uses a laser to reshape it for good vision correction, explains Dr. Kreuger. In a relatively few cases, the cornea weakens after surgery (a condition called ectasia) and loses its ability to maintain the desired shape. As a result, vision blurs and gradually deteriorates.

We asked Dr. Krueger to discuss the latest information about the symptoms and risks for post-LASIK ectasia, and new advances in what doctors can do when it occurs.

Post: What are the symptoms of post-LASIK ectasia?

Dr. Krueger: Patients with ectasia lose visual acuity—some immediately, others months or even years after the surgery. Images become distorted as the cornea loses its rounded shape, and most find they need new lenses or progressive glasses as those changes occur.

Post: How common is it?

Dr. Krueger: Post-LASIK ectasia parallels keratoconus, a naturally occurring condition in which, although no surgery has taken place, the structural integrity of the cornea is not maintained and begins to bulge in certain ways that distort vision. Probably one out of 2,000 people in the population have keratoconus.

LASIK-induced ectasia, while rare, is presumed to be more prevalent in people with subclinical keratoconus. In other words, patients with previously unrecognized corneal weakening may develop a more prominent problem after LASIK.

Post: Who is most at risk?

The most common risk factor is an irregularity on the corneal topography map, a tool we utilize to help screen out individuals who are not suitable candidates for LASIK surgery. As mentioned, having an irregular or steep cornea may be a telltale sign of subclinical keratoconus that may contribute to post-operative ectasia.

Surgeons also look very carefully at a risk score system that is based on published data collected over many years from large groups of patients who developed post-LASIK ectasia. In developing this system, investigators assigned a certain amount of risk to various factors. For example, corneal thickness less than A amount might have B amount of risk toward ectasia. A topography map showing C amount of irregularity may contribute D amount of risk. Being young presents more risk because the cornea gets a little stiffer with age. Then, they developed a way to tabulate an overall score from the list of individual risks.

While the scoring system is published and based on actual data, it has been criticized. Many patients who fit or exceed that score have done perfectly fine and never developed ectasia. But LASIK surgeons do consider this score before doing surgery in order to avoid this phenomenon.

Post: Are topography maps standard of care in LASIK surgery?

Dr. Kreuger: Yes. But they aren’t definitive. Surgeons have to consider other factors.

Post: Does ectasia usually show up in both eyes?

Dr. Kreuger: It can initially develop in one eye, but the potential could exist in both eyes.

Post: What can be done to help people with post-LASIK ectasia?

Dr. Kreuger: The primary treatment is contact lenses to provide a new, smooth shape for the eye to look through.

What has come along for keratoconus, and is showing benefit for post-LASIK ectasia, is a procedure called crosslinking. Collagen crosslinking is a photochemical method of applying vitamin B-2 (riboflavin) drops on the eye and then shining an ultraviolet light that activates the riboflavin to help create little links in the cornea that make it stronger. It is being used in countries around the world, and FDA trials are underway in the United States.

Post: So this is an experimental procedure at this point?

Dr. Kreuger: It’s an investigational procedure in the United States. But it has been investigated in other countries and has shown good success.

Post: Are corneal transplants an option?

Dr. Kreuger: In advanced cases, yes. A transplant will replace the irregular and weak cornea with a stronger one. Then, you can correct it. But that’s a pretty advanced procedure. Corneal transplants may also be considered when crosslinking is not a good option or has been tried and is not fully correcting the problem.

Post: What advice would you offer to people considering LASIK?

Dr. Kreuger: I would suggest several things: 1) Go to more than one place to have your eyes evaluated so that you can get a sense of what doctors are saying at one place versus another. 2) Do some homework so you can ask lots of questions. 3) Make sure you are going to a place that has a stellar reputation for eye care in general. 4) Find an experienced doctor who has good judgment and the patient’s best interests at heart. 5) Ultimately, find the latest technology. Sophisticated imaging devices are now available to help determine which eyes have any risk for keratoconus or ectasia. Hopefully, there will be even newer and better tools in the future.

Classic Covers: Thanks, Dad!

Father’s Day might be a good time to remember: You weren’t always an easy kid to deal with.

“Early Morning Feeding” by Howard Scott

Early Morning Feeding by Howard Scott
"Early Morning Feeding"
Howard Scott
January 27, 1945

Sydney Field, copywriter for an ad agency and a short story writer, was having lunch with Post artist Howard Scott one day. It struck the artist that his friend would make a great befuddled dad on a Post cover. As his soup grew cold, he studied and sketched his lunch companion, and the next thing we knew, the writer was on the cover of our favorite magazine in January 1945 having a bad “heir” day.

“Swing Set” by Amos Sewell

Swing Set by Amos Sewell
"Swing Set"
Amos Sewell
June 16, 1956

Another Post cover artist, Amos Sewell, saw a father struggling to put together a swing set—and another Saturday Evening Post cover was born. We can understand the impatience of the kids, but for safety’s sake and the sake of their innocent little ears, perhaps they should stand farther back. This is from 1956.

“Sleepy Inning” by Earl Mayan

Sleepy Inning by Earl Mayan
"Sleepy Inning"
Earl Mayan
April 23, 1955

I love this cover from 1955. It’s tied up at the top of the ninth, but the game is called for Dad on account of a conked-out kid. Well, pops, there’s always the radio. Artist Earl Mayan did ten Post covers depicting life in the suburban 1950s, including the next one.

“Amusement Park Carousel” by Earl Mayan

Amusement Park Carousel by Earl Mayan
"Amusement Park Carousel"
Earl Mayan
August 9, 1958

In an amusement park in 1958, Dad is anything but amused. That string of tickets he’s wearing declares this is only the beginning. As he risks whiplash on the Whip or tries not to toss his cookies on the Screamer, he dreams of what a great day this would be on the golf course. Face it; you owe him for this one.

“First Prom Dress” by Kurt Ard

First Prom Dress by Kurt Ard
"First Prom Dress"
Kurt Ard
April, 18 1959

Speaking of owe… is that the going price for a prom dress these days? Poor pops—he not only has to foot the bill, he probably had to sit through the modeling of sixteen frocks… before mother and daughter decided on the first one after all.

“Fathers’ Homework” by John Falter

Fathers' Homework by John Falter
"Fathers' Homework"
John Falter
May 7, 1960

“If one furrow-browed parent spends x hours failing to solve the quadratic equations of one boy,” asked the editors of the Post in 1960, “how long would it take two furrow-browed fathers to fail to solve the quadratic equation of two boys?” Hey, you, kid in the red sweater—the smirk is not helping. Artist John Falter admitted to being hopeless at algebra. No matter. He solved the problem of what to do for a Saturday Evening Post cover 129 times.

“Brushing Their Teeth” by Amos Sewell

Brushing Their Teeth by Amos Sewell
"Brushing Their Teeth"
Amos Sewell
January 29, 1955

Dad seems to be waiting patiently in this 1955 cover—but if he doesn’t get in to shave soon so he can get to work, there will be no toothpaste for anybody. So, dads, for your patience, attempts at homework, baseball games, and prom dresses… we humbly thank you and wish you the best ever Father’s Day!

The Moonshining Tradition

“Freedom and whiskey go together,” wrote the Scottish poet Robert Burns. He was thinking of Scotland, but the principle applied to the United States as well where independent farmers enjoyed the right to distill and drink their own liquor without anyone’s approval.

Burns might have added that money and whiskey keep even closer company. Whiskey enabled farmers to convert their corn into a precious commodity that would keep its value for years. In parts of western Pennsylvania, whiskey was valuable enough to be used as currency and collateral. So it wasn’t surprising that these farmers rebelled when treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton put an excise tax on liquor. The Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, which followed, was put down when President Washington sent Federal troops into the region.

The tax was lowered slightly and pardons were handed out to the penitent. But a stubborn spirit of rebellion smoldered in the countryside and a long tradition of illicit whiskey distilling began.

In southern states, opposition to tax on homemade whiskey became something of an institution. Moonshiners gained a national reputation for continuing their resistance to the revenue collectors. Their reputation grew during Prohibition as they moved vast amounts of illegal whiskey into the cities across moonlit country highways in specially customized roadsters. Post author William Price Fox interviewed moonshiners who had been in business in the ’20s.

Edwin C. Arthur stands amid a collection of moonshine containers taken during a South Side raid.

“We had us some nice races back then,” a veteran recalls. “I had me a 1926 Buick that wouldn’t quit. Had the back end jacked up so high with special heavy-duty springs it looked like a jackrabbit with a sore tail when it wasn’t loaded down with seven- or nine-hundred rounds of whiskey. And smoke screens? Why we had us more smoke back then before anyone ever heard of your Mister Al Capone. Used a specially welded little steel box that held about two gallons. Put maybe a gallon of crude oil in and put the can under pressure with a gas-station air pump. I kept that can right by my right knee when I drove and had her linked up through the manifold. All I had to do was throw a little petcock and that stuff would come out looking like ink.

“Later on we got so we’d add a little creosote in with the crude oil; that would make it stick to the windshield of the Law’s car, and I mean you couldn’t ever get it off unless you used soap and water and a razor blade.”

Moonshiners learned how to compete with bootleggers by giving their product the look of true Scotch whiskey.

Their bottles were appropriately neck-labeled, stamped with the proper Scotch or Canadian tax stamp, and wrapped in salt-water-damaged paper and broom straw to give the appearance of whiskey smuggled into this country after a terrible time on the high seas.

The old-timers swear that when Prohibition ended and the real brands began appearing, people thought they were being duped. They wanted the old rectified and smoke-up corn, and were suspicious of any substitutes.

There are several designs for a still.  The best known uses a pot or “cooker,” which captures vapors from the “mash” of corn and sugar and passes them through a condenser coil.

The simplest model is the 200-year-old Horse-Blanket Still. In this type, the mash is cooked in a big pot over an open fire. A thick horse blanket is laid over the pot to collect the steam. When the blanket is saturated with steam, it is run through a clothes wringer, and the moisture that is wrung out is whiskey. The taste will vary, but basically it’s of wool, of earth, of horse and of very, very strong corn whiskey.

John Bowman (right), in his garage, explains the workings of a moonshine still to Mary Hufford and John Flynn.

I’m betting that this whiskey tasted a LOT more of horse than is suggested here.

When Fox wrote “The Lost Art of Moonshine” in 1966, he believed “private distilling” would soon disappear. He needn’t have worried. Today, thousands of Americas—up to 100,000 according to one author—are distilling their own whiskey despite Federal law that forbids any unlicensed, untaxed distilling. Convicted of moonshining, you may face up to five years in jail and a fine up to $50,000.

Because every dollar spent on liquor yields about 50¢ in taxes, Washington D.C. wants to make sure that money and whiskey continue to go together. And, unlike in 1794, they aren’t handing out pardons.

Food Safety

According to a recent report by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more Americans got food poisoning last year than in years past—with salmonella cases driving the increase. And an unusually aggressive strain of E. coli not yet seen in the U.S. is behind the current large outbreak of food poisoning in Europe, mostly Germany.

Want some good news?

Foods packaged in a new “killer paper” material developed by an Israeli grad student could keep foods safer—while also extending shelf life.

Scientists are reporting development and successful lab tests of a material intended for use as a new food packaging material that helps preserve foods by fighting the bacteria that cause spoilage.

The paper, described in American Chemical Society journal Langmuir, contains a coating of silver nanoparticles—each 1/50,000 the width of a human hair—that act as powerful antibacterial agents.

Professor Aharon Gedanken and colleagues note that the coated paper showed potent antibacterial activity against E. coli and S. aureus—two causes of bacterial food poisoning—killing all of the bacteria in just three hours.

The new coating used on “killer paper” might someday be added to plastic bags and cartons. Silver is already widely used as a germ-fighter in medicinal ointments, kitchen and bathroom surfaces, and even odor-resistant socks.

Source: The American Chemical Society