As if this wasn’t enough discouragement, there was the challenge of navigating. Road signs were rare and often incorrect. Travelers were frequently reduced to driving from one roadside stranger to the next, gathering a few miles of directions at a time. The earliest road maps by Rand McNally were printed only after 1904.

A motorist uses this high-tech alternative to maps.

Yet a high-tech alternative appeared in 1909: a real-time, on-board directional guide called the Jones Live Map. It was invented by J. W. Jones, who had also introduced the Jones Speedometer, the Jones Disc Phonograph Record, and the Jones Yobel —“the gentlemen’s automobile horn.”

The idea was revolutionary.  The Live Map was a small turntable device with a cable that attached to an automobile’s odometer.  Before making their journeys, drivers would purchase paper discs with the route to their destination prescribed by The Touring Club of America.

At the beginning of the journey, the driver would place his journey’s disc to the Live Map’s turntable so that the journey’s starting point lined up with an arrow indicator on the glass cover. As the car began rolling, the turning odometer cable caused the map to rotate. The arrow would point to the driver’s changing position in the journey.

Each disc had up to 100 miles of travel details around its perimeter.  If the journey was longer than 100 miles, the driver would replace the first disc with a second, or third part.

A Saturday Evening Post advertisement for the device described it as

the phonograph of the road. It has disc records covering the roads of the entire world. You insert the record of the trip you want to make. The Live-Map “plays” it. Not out loud, but with a pointer that always points the way—that tells you where you are now and what to do about it.

To have it with you is like having in your car a man who knows every road, every corner, every crossing, every landmark, every puzzling fork and crossroad in the entire world.

A 1910 booklet, “The Jones Live Map – What Happens Without It” brags that the Jones Live Map would save the driver from the Evil Genius of the Roads, the stranger who always gave incorrect directions. It was superior to route books, which were hard to follow and led drivers into unlisted trolley and railroad crossings. And it was more convenient than the large, clumsy, origamical maps that could never be refolded and were always tearing in the wind.

Jones Manufacturing offered over 500 map routes by 1919.

Jones Manufacturing was offering over 500 routes by 1919. The routes span the entire country from New York to Los Angeles, and included notification of speed laws where they existed.

However, the problem with this first GPS was the same that plagues such systems today. Roadways are in a state of continual change. Every time the Live Map offered printed directions like “take a right at the fork by the flag pole,” it was fighting a losing battle. Landmarks like flag poles could be removed at any time. The map discs might be corrected and reprinted, but a driver’s old discs, which relied on missing landmarks, could be close to useless.

By the 1920s, there was an abundance of road maps for much of the country. States and counties had begun identifying roadways with standardized signs along the roadside. Jones Live Map ceased production.

The next attempt to provide instantaneous driving directions didn’t appear until 1994, when the Department of Defense launched its Global Positioning System, which could locate the signal from a GPS device through a network of 24 satellites. The system was authorized for civilian use in 1996.

It quickly became popular with women drivers, but it proved just as welcome to men who felt that consulting their Garmin or TomTom wasn’t really asking for directions.

Postscript

The need for reliable navigation hasn’t changed in over a century, but the etiquette of the road certainly has. In 1909, the Jones manufacturing company sold its Yobel horn for its good manners, as this ad copy shows:

There is a vast difference between an automobile signal which says, “I’m coming,” and one which says “Get out of here.”

One is a gentleman’s request for his fair share of the road; the other is an insulting, abusive command to get into the ditch.

At the sound of one signal, a man turns out with quick civility; at the sound of the other, he unwillingly sulks aside.

Mr. J. W. Jones wanted a signal which would get the road without getting everybody mad, so he invented the New Jones Electric Yobel.

It is a signal that carries as far as any of the shrieking horns, but gives no offense. It sounds one harmonious, penetrating note. It is not the loud, coarse, vulgar blast of the rowdy. It is the signal of a gentleman’s car.

The watchman conveyed the request on to Edison, who replied,

“Go back. Tell that fellow that I say the expiration of those patents won’t amount to a hill of beans.

“Tell him that Mr. Edison says he has never had exclusive use of his inventions and never expects to in this world.

“Tell him the expiring of a patent has no effect whatever upon the fortunes of an inventor.”
 
 
 
 
 
 

Hearing Edison’s response, Crawford wrote another note: “What do you mean by ‘no exclusive use’? No protection? Must see you.” Eventually the great inventor admitted Crawford and gave him this statement:

“There is no such thing in this country as an inventor’s monopoly. The moment he invents something that is an epoch-maker in the world of science and commerce, there will be pirates to spring up on all sides and contest his rights to his ideas.

“I might invent a new monkey wrench which could go without infringement, but the moment I take certain forces and work out a moving picture for the first time in history… mark you how the pirates rise up and call it their own.”

Thirty years later, Crawford was back at Edison’s laboratory, again asking about patents and their profitability. Having invented the sustainable electric lighting, the phonograph, and the motion picture camera, Crawford asked him, “Why aren’t you the richest man in the world today?”

Edison’s reply:

The only patent that ever made money for Edison.

“Nearly $10,000,000,000, they tell me, are invested in modern industries which developed from ideas embodied in my inventions and my patents.

“A billion or so dollars, I am told, may be the annual total income to artisans and workers in fields thus created.

“But I have made very little profit from my inventions.

“In my lifetime I have taken out 1180 patents, up to date. Counting the expense of experimenting and fighting for my claims in court, these patents have cost me more than they have returned me in royalties. I have made money through the introduction and sale of my products as a manufacturer, not as an inventor.”
 
 

Edison was one of the fortunate few inventors who knew that great engineering, on its own, never earned a dime. The success of any technology is due to its business model. And the protection of its copyright.

Unfortunately, Edison said, the U.S. had a “miserable system” for protecting inventions from infringement.

Edison in 1906.

“I have never enjoyed a monopoly upon anything that I have ever invented, with this single modification: the producers of motion pictures did pay me royalties until my patents expired. But even in that case I had to fight a long time in court over my claims.

“I frankly acknowledge that on one of the patents I had filed claims that were a little too ambitious, too broad, and one of the courts threw us out.

“But we modified our claims and the patent was reissued to us, and the picture people recognized our rights and paid us royalties until the patents expired.”
 
 
 
 
 

The foundation of America's tattoo-parlor industry: Edison's Stencil Pen from the 1870s.

“I have known of several inventors [whose] ideas would have made them millionaires. But they were kept poor by the pirates who were allowed through our very faulty system of protection to usurp their rights.

“Do you see that little incandescent lamp hanging over my head? Well, I fought in the courts of this and other countries for fourteen years to establish my rights as inventor, even after I had the patents. My associates and I had to spend more than $1,000,000 to prove our rights to the incandescent light, even though our claims had been duly vouched by the United States patent office.

“Everywhere, all around the earth, the pirates kept picking on that little lamp, and they were able to keep me out of the profits on my patents until there were but three years left out of the seventeen. So, while the light was a boon to the world at large, to the inventor the patent was well-nigh useless.”

 

“The first step is to hire a sharp lawyer—one who can make any judge unfamiliar with technology believe that black is white. They set up the claim that they, and not the inventor, should be recognized as the originator of certain ideas. They boldly strut into court and enjoin the inventor from manufacturing anything from his own creations and formulas, even though the inventor may hold in his hands a patent issued by the United States Government.

“Pirates can readily get all the money they require—millions, if needed—to carry on their contests.”

As always, when facing a problem, Edison came up with a solution. The answer to high-tech piracy was a high-tech court.

The source of endless patent battles.

“A separate and special court. Take the whole business out of the regular judicial system. It has never belonged there.

“What does the average judge of our district courts, or circuit courts of appeal—or even of the Supreme Court, for that matter—know about the technical phases of chemistry or physics? These judges have been lawyers all their lives, and they are—some of them—distinguished for their ability as jurists. But when it comes to understanding a contest over amperes, or ohms, or the atomic theory, or subatomic energy, they can be fooled by a smart lawyer quite as soon as… any farmer from the hinterlands.

“I would appoint, to this special court for trying patent cases, judges from the faculties of colleges of technology, men who know something about science. They could travel around the country and hold court, if need be, in the factories and workshops of the inventors and their competitors, and get first-hand data upon each issue involved in the litigation, just as President Wilson’s War Labor Board, headed by William Howard Taft, went around during the war settling labor disputes in the mills, right on the ground. There wouldn’t be much quibbling on the part of lawyers before these scientist judges. Then, and not till then, will an inventor stand some show of being rewarded for the long, tedious labors he has expended through ceaseless experimentation to gain the fruition of his ideas.”

Perhaps Edison’s court of scientist-judges would make more intelligent decisions about the theft of patented technology. It might also spare businesses the overwhelming costs of time, money, and resources for such suits. (Surely the legal profession will profit more from the pending lawsuit of Apple and Google than the technology developers.)

However, an American court would be of little help in protecting U.S. patents in the global markets. According to our International Trade Commission, China’s theft of Americans’ intellectual property, in 2009 alone, cost U.S. businesses $48 billion and 2.1 million jobs.

Muhammad Ali

Muhammad Ali, now 70 years old, is one of America’s most admired athletes. He has received an honorary doctorate at Princeton University, the Spirit of America award, the Presidential Citizens Medal, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

All these honors in late life could obscure the fact that Muhammad Ali, in his youth, was a highly controversial figure—a racial revolutionary, some feared.

Ali had been generally popular up to the day he beat Sonny Liston in 1964 to become boxing’s heavyweight champion. Shortly afterward, though, he announced that he’d joined the Nation of Islam, and changed his name from Cassius Marcellus Clay.

The Nation of Islam was then widely regarded by the American media as a highly dangerous group. There were fearful rumors that the Black Muslims would forcibly create a separate nation for black Americans. So when Ali announced his conversion, the media reacted as if they had been betrayed. A Post editorial from ’64 captures the tone of dismissal and fear.

For a time, when he was confining himself to bad poetry, Cassius was a loudmouth but a likable character who seemed to be harmless in or out of the ring. Then he won the championship and became, in his own estimation, “The Greatest.” After the fight, he acknowledged that he was a Black Muslim, converted by the arch-extremist, Malcolm X, the man who crowed that President Kennedy’s assassination was “a case of the chickens coming home to roost.” Malcolm X was separated from the Black Muslim movement after that remark and is now attempting to organize his own black nation. He wants to arm all the Negroes in the U.S. and ultimately take them back to Africa.

One Post writer went so far as to hint that Ali was simply using his status as a Black Muslim to increase ticket sales.

Muhammad Ali training in 1964.

Clay’s history of calculated deceptions now prompts the suspicion, of course, that his present case of galloping religion is but another decoy to serve who knows what end. Clay himself strengthened the suspicion when he declared, “Just by my being a Muslim, that should draw a bigger gate…”

On re-examination, however, Clay’s remarks were nothing more than cute verbiage. He well knows… that his commitment to Islam has cost him roughly two million dollars in commercial endorsements.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The quote came from a ’64 Post article, “Muslim Champ,” by Myron Cope, which generally overlooked Ali the boxer to focus on Ali the Muslim. Cope regarded Ali’s new faith with frank derision.

Cassius Marcellus Clay, who now calls himself Brother Muhammad Ali… is convinced he is a beacon of righteousness in a wicked world.

Having succeeded Malcolm X as the loudest [sic] Black Muslim, Clay has been fighting a socio-religious battle with the Christian world, and this, more than anything else, seems to have taken away his former exuberance. He still acts the clown for TV cameras but only to sell fight tickets.

Ali in Harlem.

Reading the article today, it’s clear that Cope’s preconceptions were obscuring his view of Ali. He claimed that Ali had “completely severed communication with whites,” even though Ali spoke freely with Cope for this article. Ali also proves himself to be more tolerant than Cope concerning the use of his old name.

“Call me Muhammad or call me Ali,” Clay advised as we drove to his house, “but if you forget and call me Cassius, that won’t bother me none.”

Cope didn’t forget. He deliberately referred to him throughout the article as Cassius Clay. And though he portrayed Ali as a zealot of his new “cult,” the champion voiced rather middle-of-the-road political opinions.

Cruising along, the new Clay discussed politics. “Kennedy,” he said, “just seemed so nice, he didn’t seem like a President.” He expressed an admiration for Barry Goldwater, saying that “he say what he thinks.”

In fact, Ali showed himself to be little changed from the spirited, sociable boxer Cope had traveled with in his pre-championship days.

I had been unwilling to believe that a young man with so bright a gift for teasing the world could hate. Henry H. Arrington, a Negro attorney and adviser to Martin Luther King, Jr., told me; “I can assure you I have never seen any indication whatsoever of Cassius disliking white people generally.”

Muhammad Ali in 1964.

Whatever the actual teaching propounded in the Muslim meetings, Clay denies that he considers all whites to be devils. “I’m stressing just the works that the whites generally have been doing,” he said in his dressing room. “They blow up all these little colored people in church, wash people down the street with water hoses. It’s not the color that make you a devil, just the deeds that you do.

“It’s as our leader Elijah Muhammad teaches us. Couldn’t nobody argue it. I’m no authority on Islam. I am just a follower. If you be a blue race, and you do the works of the devil, then we can call you a devil. You got white people who died under demonstrations, died under tractor wheels for colored people. I wouldn’t call them no devil.”
 
 

He was attracted to the cult, he explained, because its people neither drank nor smoked, and they deported themselves well.

“I am an American; I was born here,” he said softly, trying to make himself understood. “Our leader and teacher will tell you himself, we respect America and respect whites for coming here and making a paradise from nothing. It’s not hate or fighting or arguing. We just want freedom.”

Ali’s religion was still a hot issue in 1965, when he fought former heavyweight champion Floyd Paterson. In an unpublished story, Post writer Bill Bridges described how the Ali-Patterson bout was being regarded as a test of Christianity and Muslim faiths. Some of Ali’s supporters, who had become estranged when he joined the Nation of Islam, were hoping that a Patterson victory would convince Ali to return to his old faith. After Patterson was defeated, however, there was no more talk about the match proving which was the superior faith.
 
The following photos were taken for Bill Bridges’ unpublished Post feature and were never printed.

Photo at top left: Ali exchanges angry looks at his former trainer, who had departed after Ali joined the Nation of Islam. Bottom left: the trainer can be seen mid-picture, with the arm of sports writer George Plimpton around his shoulders. He had hoped a defeat would return Ali to the Christian faith. Instead, with Ali victorious, the trainer returned to Ali who forgave him and rehired him as trainer.

Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr., who at eighteen won the 1960 Olympic light-heavyweight boxing championship, has not the slightest doubt that he is the future heavyweight champion of the world.

Clay has had only five fights since turning pro last fall, but it is inconceivable to him that he could fail to go all the way.

Sprinkling bold and candid words that must be taken with grains of salt, Clay cultivates fame and popularity the way some fighters cultivate a knockout punch. “Man,” he says, “I love to see my name in print. I love to see my name where everybody can see it.”

Yet, Ali was more than a brash young contender. He charmed Schaap with his friendliness and his surprise at his newfound fame.

When a sports writer pointed out that he seemed more sociable than the usual fighter, Clay agreed. “I don’t pretend to be friendly,” he said, “like most people do when they’re trying to get on top. I am friendly.”

“Back home,” he said, “they’ll think it’s real. They won’t know the difference.”

As Clay strolled through Times Square, a passer-by did a double take and asked, “Aren’t you Cassius Clay?”

“How’d you know who I was?”

The stranger slapped Clay on the back. “I saw you on TV,” he said, “So did lots of people. They all know who you are.”

Clay hung his head, feigning modesty. “Really?” he said. “You really know who I am? That’s wonderful.’” Dozens of people stopped him on the street, and for each Clay had a grin and a fresh air of amazement. “I guess everybody do know who I am,” he conceded.

He entered a penny arcade and had a newspaper headline printed: CASSIUS SIGNS FOR PATTERSON FIGHT.

That headline became a reality just four years later, when Ali beat Patterson with a T.K.O. in the 12th round.

In trying to understand what motivated Ali, Schaap related an event that probably began the champ’s career.

When Cassius was twelve years old, he attended a meeting one night at the junior high school. While he was inside, someone stole his bicycle. Afterward he went to the Columbia Gym, where a Louisville policeman, Joe Martin, trained young fighters. He told Martin about the bicycle theft. “I’d like to get the boy who did it,” Clay snapped.

“Do you know how to box?” Martin asked.

“No,” Clay said,

“Why don’t you come down here? We’ll teach you.”

Clay never did get his bicycle back, but he did learn how to box. At the age of twelve, weighing eighty-nine pounds, he made his amateur debut.

The dream of greatness must have come early because it was firmly fixed in 1960 when he won the Olympic gold medal in boxing.

How good a pro prospect is Cassius Clay? He is almost as good as he says he is. His main asset is speed of hand and foot that enables him to dart in, hit an opponent and dart away before he himself gets hit. He punches in furious combinations, favoring a left-left-right-cross sequence designed to cut and tire his opponents.

The question is—does he have determination? Is he willing to make the sacrifices he has to make to become a champion?

No one knows the answers for certain, but it at least is clear that Clay has no objections to long, strenuous work.

But Ali had more than a strong work ethic. He had an unshakeable sense of future victory. This sense was probably what formed the dream he told Schaap he kept having.

“I dream I’m running down Broadway,” he explains. “That’s the main street in Louisville, and all of a sudden there’s a truck coming at me. I run at the truck and I wave my arms, and then I take off and I’m flying. I go right up over the truck, and all the people are standing around and cheering and waving at me. And I wave back and I keep on flying. I dream that all the time.”

One night in 1941, a member of British Naval Intelligence stops by the Estoril Casino in neutral Portugal. He is Lieutenant Ian Fleming, stopping over in Lisbon, on his way to secret talks in Washington. But tonight, he’s in his civilian clothes and trying his luck at the baccarat tables. He notices two players at another table, and recognizes them as Nazi Intelligence agents. Fleming, a gambler with a high opinion of his skills, has a sudden inspiration:

He decided to play them and take them for all of their secret funds.

Instead of taking the Nazis, however, the Nazis took him, and Fleming sheepishly had to ask his chief for more travel money.

When he used the incident in the first of his novels twelve years later, the story had a different ending. His fictional hero, James Bond, wiped out his villainous opponent.

The story, as Fleming told Post writer Geoffrey Boca, was typical of the difference between Bond and the man who created him. Boca saw little of the superspy in the retired Naval officer he met in 1963:

At 55, slowed in his movements by a heart attack two years ago, Ian Fleming has high cheekbones, close-set eyes, a bashed-in nose, and a rich taste for the luxuries of life.

Each winter, he retreats from the London whirl and writes a new Bond novel at his beach house in Jamaica. Every afternoon he lies face down in the water, looking at the fish through his faceplate. In this manner he thinks out the plot, and contemplates the trick he has been playing ever since Bond was born.

The trick consists of having led his readers to believe that Fleming has modeled Bond on himself. Like Bond, Fleming is a former naval commander. The creator and his creation share a taste for vodka martinis, custom-made cigarettes, and, until Fleming’s marriage, unattached women. Dust-cover photographs of Fleming with a gun help the illusion.

In fact, Fleming has created a character who is the opposite of himself. Bond, Fleming writes in every book, is “cruel.” The essence of Fleming’s personality is his gentleness. He abhors violence.

Fleming is so softhearted, in fact, that he finds it hard to reject a stranger’s request for money. And when a friend is ill he feels compelled to fill the hospital room with flowers.

Fleming also has interests that Bond would scorn. Bond has never read a book, but Fleming is one of England’s principal authorities on rare books. He is publisher of the London Book Collector, perhaps the leading magazine in the world on the subject.

The original James Bond. Fleming named his superspy after this ornithologist because he wanted a name that was bland and nondescript.

Fleming has an almost infinite number of quirks, prejudices and dislikes. Some are apparent in his form of dress, which he has not changed since he was demobilized from the Royal Navy in 1945. In London he invariably wears a dark-blue suit with cuffs on the sleeves, a spotted bow tie loosely tied, a blue shirt with short sleeves, and loafers. “Wearing the same clothes saves me from having to wonder what I shall wear today,” he says rather defensively. “I hate buttons, studs and laces. I wear short-sleeved shirts because I cannot stand dirty cuffs.”

Fleming protests constantly that he is not a gourmet like Bond, and that his favorite meal is scrambled eggs, but he cannot resist an adventure in exotic eating. The food does not have to be good, so long as it carries the spice of danger.

Many readers complain of the torture scenes which keep bloodying his books. Fleming replies that these are exactly what happened to Allied agents during the war. He should know. He worked with Allied agents during the war.

After D Day, Fleming took control, from London, of No. 30 Assault Unit, which was to become more celebrated among its members as F. P. N., or Fleming’s Private Navy. This was a group of some 300 Royal Marines who advanced with front troops to try to seize secret enemy equipment, codes, and so on.

In 1939 the Admiralty—at that time perhaps the most alert of Britain’s fighting services—decided that it needed men like Fleming: multilingual, imaginative, fit. Called home and commissioned as a lieutenant, he worked as personal assistant to Admiral John Godfrey, Director of Naval Intelligence. Much of his wartime work is still secret today, and most of the stories Fleming tells are farcical rather than daredevil.

On one memorable occasion when he and an assistant were required to question a capture U-boat commander to find out which routes the U-boats were taking through the British minefields in the Kattegat, Fleming had a flamboyant idea. Instead of grilling the commander in a grim prison office, why not soften him up by bringing him to London and questioning him over good food and fine wine?

The German and his first lieutenant, of unmistakably Teutonic bearing, were escorted to Scott’s Restaurant in Piccadilly in civilian clothes. Fleming and his aide were in uniform. Everyone spoke German throughout. Fleming ordered a bottle of Rhine wine and another and another. While the Englishmen were getting progressively drunker, the Germans stayed rigorously sober revealing nothing. In the end Fleming gave it up and blearily took a taxi back to the Admiralty.

“Dammit, Fleming, what the devil have you been up to?” demanded the director of Naval Intelligence. “I have only just saved you from being arrested. You have tied up half of M.I.5 and the C.I.D.—listening to you all afternoon.”

“Baker, the maitre d’ hotel, had reported that we had been behaving suspiciously,” Fleming recalls. It showed an alert and proper attitude on his part, and I have patronized Scott’s ever since.”

Fleming has often mentioned during the war that he might write a novel some day. He finally settled down to the task in 1952, rolling a piece of paper into his battered portable, and started.

He began with the words, “The scent and smoke of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning. James Bond suddenly knew that he was tired…”

It took him just two months to write Casino Royale. Over the next 12 years, he produced 12 novels and 9 short stories with Bond.

Fleming moves in a small society of talented friends who think he can and should do better than write spy novels. Fleming listens to the criticism with a sardonic grin, fits another cigarette into his holder, and goes his own way.

What he thinks of his own work, he does not say, but he shows no sign of changing. He much prefers laying face down in the Caribbean, with a hot sun beating on his back, his mind far away.

He died just one year after the Post interview. His last words, addressed to the ambulance drivers hurrying him to the hospital were,

I am sorry to trouble you chaps. I don’t know how you get along so fast with the traffic on the roads these days.

Hardly the last words you’d imagine coming from James Bond.

Also check out Lewis Beale’s feature “Bond. James Bond.” and vote for your favorite James Bond film.

The War Horse, Model 2011: U.S. Special Forces on horseback in Afghanistan.

The horse was also conscripted during the Korean War. A war horse named Reckless served the 2nd Battalion of the 5th Marines on the Bunker Hill-Panmunjom line with such distinction that she earned the rank of sergeant.

Her story, written for the Post by Col. Andy Geer U.S.M.C.R., began when a Marine raiding force was nearly cut off by Chinese troops as it fought its way back into Allied lines. To cover the incoming marines, the battalion created a ‘fire curtain’ using recoilless rifles — called “Reckless Rifles.”

Ammunition carriers ran over hills and across paddies in an exhausting race against time and space. It was a killing job, man-packing the 75-mm. artillery shells to the firing positions. The fire of the recoilless weapons was slowing to an intermittent cough when the last of the raiders married up with the main body.

The battle convinced 2d Lt. Eric Pedersen a horse was required to supply his portable artillery pieces… The next day, though suffering from leg, hip and face wounds, Pedersen hooked a trailer to his jeep and took the rough road south.

His destination was a race track in Seoul, where all racing had been canceled for the duration of the war. There he met breeders eager to sell the horses they could no longer race. Pedersen found a promising young Mongolian mare and paid $250 of his own money for her. Her name had been ‘Flame of the Morning,’ but the Marines soon rechristened her ‘Reckless.’

T/Sgt. Joseph Latham put the recruit through ” hoof ” camp. Long hours were spent in the hills, teaching the little sorrel to become accustomed to a friendly firing and not to bolt when the recoilless rifles back-blasted their horrendous pathway of destruction.

Latham taught her how to cross over communication and barbed wire and to move into a tent or bunker without invitation. Although the marines had built her an open-faced bunker, Reckless roamed the camp, and when it began to rain she walked into the nearest tent. Upon her appearance, a marine would say, “Here’s Reckless,” while the rest simply pulled up their legs or shifted a sleeping bag or two to make room.

By the end of her training, Reckless was routinely carrying ten rounds of 75mm shells: 220 pounds in all. Then, in July, the Chinese launched an all-out attack on four Marine outposts.

The savagery of the battle for the so-called Nevada complex had never been equaled in Marine Corps history.

A 75 mm. recoilless rifle in use during the Korean War.

Reno [had been] lost with all hands aboard. Vegas was lost with heavy casualties. Elko and Carson held tenuously.

Orders came from higher command to recapture Vegas. The second battalion, 5th Marines, was ordered in for the counter-attack, with Reckless and her rifles in close support.

The fury of the battle reached such heights that veterans of the first and middle wars are unable to compare it with previous engagements. Enemy in-coming artillery and mortar shells were judged to be at the rate of 500 rounds a minute.

Losses were staggering. Capt. John Melvin’s D Company of the second battalion (over 600 men) was shot away from a full complement to sixteen men in less than two hours. E Company of the same battalion suffered nearly as badly.

It was under these brutal conditions that the Marine’s war horse showed her indomitable spirit, following her orders without supervision or even guidance.

To supply the guns that were supporting the assault units, the little sorrel had to carry

Reckless and her combat trainer, Sgt. Joseph Latham.

her load of 75-mm. shells across a paddy and into the hills. The distance to the firing positions of the rifles was over 1800 yards. Each yard was passage through a shower of explosives. The final climb to the firing positions was at a nearly forty-five-degree angle.

Because of the steepness of the climb, Latham loaded her with only six rounds.

On the first few trips Latham or Pfc. Gary Craig or Monroe Coleman — particular friends of hers— led her from to the front lines. After the fourth or fifth trip she returned from the forward position to the dump alone.

Upon being loaded, she took off across the paddy without order or direction. Thereafter she marched the fiery gauntlet alone.

Fifty-one times Reckless delivered her load of explosives. All three weapons were kept in action; one fired so fast the barrel crystallized.

Vegas was retaken and held against murderous counterattacks. The violence of battle ebbed, Vegas was secure (until Turkish forces from the U.N.) relieved the marines.

When the fighing was over the battalion’s gratitude toward Reckless was only exceeded by their pride their war horse.

When the 5th Marines held a regimental parade honoring the heroes of the Vegas battle, Reckless passed in review with her unit. She had become a celebrated marine. Generals and colonels came to call on her; newspapermen interviewed her and she appeared on television.

None of this, however, can be said to have affected the distance between her ears. She was content to do her job, live on marine chow and, of a hot day, have a beer before turning in.

The battalion was still on the front line when the Korean cease-fire was signed. The entire unit, plus its war horse, was assembled for a final parade before returning state-side.

At a ceremony as formal as could be arranged on a wind-swept Korean field, Reckless

Reckless welcomed at the Bohemian Club in San Francisco. Lt. Eric Pedersen is shown on right.

was cited for her bravery. Maj. Gen. Randolph Pate, division commander, pinned sergeant’s chevrons to her shiny new red-and-gold silk blanket. It was Sergeant Reckless now.

Her farewell citation said, “Disregard for her own safety and conduct under fire were an inspiration to the troops and in keeping with the highest traditions of the Naval Service. Reckless’ attention and devotion to duty make her well qualified for promotion to the rank of sergeant. Her absolute dependability while on missions under fire contributed materially to the success of many battles.”

The Marines refused to leave Reckless behind in Korea. Thanks to considerable string-pulling, favor-cashing, and public support stirred by Reckless’ story in the Post, she was eventually brought to California. She spent the rest of her life as the 1^st Marine Division’s mascot at Camp Pendelton. In 1957, the Post offered this one final postscript to the Reckless’ story.

Combat experience is the best preparation for motherhood: Reckless and Fearless in 1957.

Last month Andy Geer got a phone call from Camp Pendleton, California, where Reckless had been pastured with other horses, announcing that the Sergeant, who is lady, had that day foaled a son, named Fearless.

Go to www.sgtreckless.com to learn more about this remarkable war horse, and how you can help build her a memorial monument.

If you read in the newspapers every five days or so that a clean-cut chap, with whom you had been doing dips and spirals at a county fair the week before, had been carried lifeless or dying from the field while a morbid crowd tried to tear off his blood-stained collar and tie as “souvenirs” would you want to chuck it all and let a new crop of youngsters develop the art of flying?

I think you would.

The appalling and ever-growing death-list is making even the daredevils think—they are not laughing the specter off and talking about fatalism as they used to. Poor Eugene Ely’s recent death at Macon, Georgia, drove it home that even the most cautious fliers are not immune; and the fellows I have seen are wondering whether their turn will come next.

It might have been the death of Ely that prompted Elser to reassess the risks of flying the fragile, underpowered airplane of 1911. In his Post article, “The Wings of Icarus,” he said Ely had the reputation of being a cautious pilot who shunned risky maneuvers and stunts.  Not long before his death, another pilot, Lincoln Beachey had suggested it was possible to fly a “loop the loop,” i.e., a complete, vertical circle. This maneuver was nearly impossible for the limited engine power and lift of early biplanes, yet performing a loop was the goal of many young pilots, like Arch Hoxsey and Ralph Johnstone.

Both had stated that some day they would loop-the-loop in an aeroplane; and it is the opinion of one well-known authority… that Johnstone was actually attempting this when he smashed a wing and fell to his death at Denver.

To the cautious Ely, the idea was ridiculous.  He told Beachey, “You can try it. I won’t.” Yet it was only a short later that Ely was killed while making a short dip in his plane, a maneuver he had performed hundreds of times.

This talk of dying, anyway, when your time comes sounds very well in the abstract, but it doesn’t go very far when you stop to think that you are twenty-five and healthy—and perhaps have a wife and baby. Just naturally you prefer a farm in Iowa or a cottage on Long Island to a place in that new department of the newspaper morgue—that list of now more than one hundred under the heading “Killed in Aviation,” which had its beginning when young Lieutenant Selfridge met death at Fort Myer, Virginia, on September 17, 1908.

The news of Ely’s death came shortly after the crash of 19-year-old Cromwell Dixon. Badly shaken by the news, Elser now realized his future lay not behind rudder control but a desk. It was the choice any pilot would make if he lived long enough.

Lt. Thomas Selfridge, the first man to die in an airplane crash.

The men already in the game may improve it by executive ability and scientific experiments; but most of them will degenerate as fliers. Frequency of flight does not necessarily create a feeling of confidence and safety; rather it brings fuller appreciation of its dangers. The men… ears no longer tingle when the crowd waves its hats and cheers are ready to [make way for] the uninitiated, whose nerve is ignorance.

Down the veteran’s spine, when he risks his life and craft in a devil-may-care swoop, the plaudits of the crowd no longer send a thrill.

The wild exhilaration of flight of which we read so much is apt to be tempered with the sober thought of a young woman in the stand, looking upward with troubled eyes as she breathes a prayer that a cranky lever or missing engine may not widow her. How many times have you read “His young wife was in the crowd and saw him fall”?

Elser also recognized that the flying business had changed. Pilots were no longer the celebrities they’d been just two years earlier.

Now that the newness has worn off, [a flier] is treated just like an ordinary human being, and crowds don’t always follow him right to the door of his room in the hotel. Chambermaids, seeking sentimental souvenirs, used to snitch the pajamas of Willard, of the Curtiss staff, when he was out West. It bothered him greatly at the time. Now he laments that, no matter where he goes, his pajamas are quite as safe as a case of beer at a temperance convention.

Even worse, the public had grown tired of the familiar stunts. They wanted to see bigger, more deadly tricks.

Crowds… are becoming more critical and exacting every day, even to the extent of [taunting] a man into the air to his death during a storm. J. J. Frisbie… was jeered at by a crowd until he ventured into the air during a treacherous wind and was killed.

Yet even with the risks, there was no shortage of applicants. As soon as Ely’s death hit the newspapers, his employer was besieged by applicants, most of whom had never been near an airplane. Both men and women saw flying as a quick and glamorous route to fame. One woman saw it as an personal challenge; when John B. Moisant, a famous pilot and air-race champion, was killed while landing his Bleriot monoplane, his sister, Mathilde Moisant, picked up his career. Becoming the second women in the U.S. to get a pilot license, she continued the fame of the Moisant name, racing competitively until her plane crashed on April 14, 1912, the same day the Titanic sank.

The smooth, uneventful air travel we enjoy today is the product of countless flying lessons taught the hardest way possible to early fliers.

At this writing there have been in this country and in Europe, since 1908, one hundred and two deaths due to aviation accidents. Sixty-four of these occurred during the first ten months of 1911—or at the rate of approximately one every five days

Elser’s article listed many of the pilots who’d already been killed.

What he didn’t know in 1911, however, was how many of other pilots would live far beyond their piloting days.

If you correctly foresee events a century before they occur, none of your contemporaries will still be alive to remember your predictions. Furthermore, the marvels you forecast—manned flight, say, or the internet—will seem inevitable and obvious after the fact, robbing you of any credit for foresight. And if you’re wrong, you’ll probably sound ridiculous.

Yet each new year, a new batch of predictors offer us their forecasts for the future. Most are promptly forgotten. One who deserves to be remembered, though, is John Elfreth Watkins, Jr., a Post writer in the early 20th Century.  Back in December 1900, he wrote his ideas about “What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years” for the Post’s sister publication, the Ladies’ Home Journal.

Where he was wrong, he was very, very wrong:

A cynical view of the future from 1898, entitled "A Sunny Day in 1910."

Nicaragua (i.e. Panama) will ask for admission to our Union after the completion of the great canal. Mexico will be next. Europe, seeking more territory to the south of us, will cause many of the South and Central American republics to be voted into the Union by their own people.

There will be No C, X or Q in our every-day alphabet. They will be abandoned because unnecessary.

Mosquitoes, house-flies and roaches will have been practically exterminated… There will be no wild animals except in menageries. Rats and mice will have been exterminated. The horse will have become practically extinct.

A man or woman unable to walk ten miles at a stretch will be regarded as a weakling.

A university education will be free to every man and woman.

Food will be served hot or cold to private houses in pneumatic tubes… The meal being over, the dishes used will be packed and returned to the cooking establishments where they will be washed… These tubes will collect, deliver and transport mail over certain distances, perhaps for hundreds of miles.

But this selection is hardly fair to Watkins. Some of his predictions were only partly wrong.

Trains will run two miles a minute, normally; express trains one hundred and fifty miles an hour.

High-speed trains are traveling over 300 mph. Just not in the United States.

Automobiles will be cheaper than horses are today.

This is just barely true. In 1900, work horses sold for $225 to $250. Adjusting for inflation, that price is approximately $6400, which will buy a new, low-end, import, budget car.

[The future American] will live fifty years instead of thirty-five as at present.

In fact, the overall life expectancy in 1900 was 47.8 years. And in 2000, it was 77.

There will probably be from 350,000,000 to 500,000,000 people in America and its possessions by the lapse of another century.

The figure is high, but at least Watkins was guessing in the right direction. America’s population had grown 14000% between 1800 and 1900. If that rate had continued, the total would have exceeded 1 billion in 2000. Instead, it grew just 360%, reaching 280 million at the start of the new century.

Where Watkins was correct, however, he was unusually far-sighted.

Americans will be taller by from one to two inches.

The average American male in 1900 was 66-67” tall. By 2000, the average was 69”.

Photographs will reproduce all of nature’s colors… [They will be transmitted] from any distance. If there be a battle in China a hundred years hence, snapshots of its most striking events will be published in the newspapers an hour later.

Wireless telephone and telegraph circuits will span the world. A husband in the middle of the Atlantic will be able to converse with his wife sitting in her boudoir in Chicago. We will be able to telephone to China quite as readily as we now talk from New York to Brooklyn.

Man will see around the world. Persons and things of all kinds will be brought within focus of cameras connected electrically with screens at opposite ends of circuits, thousands of miles at a span.

Rising early to build the furnace fire will be a task of the olden times. Homes will have no chimneys, because no smoke will be created within their walls.

Refrigerators will keep great quantities of food fresh for long intervals.

Fast-flying refrigerators on land and sea will bring delicious fruits from the tropics and southern temperate zone within a few days. The farmers of South America… whose seasons are directly opposite to ours, will thus supply us in winter with fresh summer foods which cannot be grown here.

There is one last peculiarity to Watkins’ article.

Every one of his predictions involved an improvement in the lives of Americans. He saw only positive change in the new century. Today’s predictors don’t see the future so optimistically, but will they see it as clearly as Watkins?

Back in 1877, American manufacturing was turning out consumer goods with unprecedented variety and speed. The selection of Christmas gifts was greater than ever. The Post helped its readers stay informed of all the new choices by reporting on appealing new items in local Philadelphia stores.

Elegant Russia leather boxes lined with satin… $10.00. Work baskets lined with silk, large and substantial ($3.00 and upwards)… Fans with pearl sticks mounted with blue and white Marabou stork trimming… $9.00.

Dolls of high and low degree, blondes, brunettes, mistress, child and maid, dressed with consummate taste and skill, dressed in materials of Fashion’s latest design designs. They cost from $2.50 and upwards, while others of less pretentious styles are as low as 50 cents.

Whatever the price of the doll, parents could be fairly certain they would please their youngster. As another Post writer observed, children were happy with any present.

All is fish that comes to their all-embracing net. Dolls, rocking-horses, marbles, balls, tops, kites, arks; it is a lovely way of finding out how brightly [their] eyes can shine. No questioning your motive, or the probable cost of your gift—no invidious comparisons with your possible presents in other quarters; they are satisfied and ecstatically happy for the time.

Men, on the other hand, were a problem, particularly bachelors:

Oh! the torment of finding a suitable male present. There are cigar cases, to be sure, in every form of elaboration and adornment, [and] the unfailing resource of a pair of slippers, or a watch-chain; and having enumerated all these, I will leave it to anybody if I have not exhausted the list. What Christmas gift can we make a gentleman?

Mittens they don’t seem to fancy… night-caps they all look like frights in—what’s to be done? He may keep the watch-chain you give him until after he is married. Some day his wife, rummaging among his old traps, will hold it up between her thumb and finger with, “What’s this thing, Bob?” Bob will reply, as he stops sharpening his razor, “That? Ha! ha! by Jove! it’s a chain a woman gave me who was once desperately in love with me; give it to Willie to play with!” Whereupon Bob and his wife laugh heartily, winding up with a kiss.

Ha, ha! Or maybe that scene will end with a flurry of new questions from the wife about that woman.

_­

The Post’s fashion editor in 1877, Olive King, had a gift idea for men who already had enough dressing gowns and slippers: the smoking jacket.

Oscar Wilde in his smoking jacket—a gift from his greatest admirer: himself.

Never before this seasons have they been brought out in such perfection and elegance.

The most beautiful and expensive ones are of Lyons velvet with collar, cuffs, and lining of quilted satin in blue or scarlet.

They are cut in loose sack form, and are stylish, costly, and comfortable.

It is a fine present from a wife to a beloved husband, because you see it is all in the family.

And if the aforementioned beloved husband don’t behave himself, the aforementioned wife can cut it up into a magnificent cloak for herself.

She also happily suggested fashionable items that husbands should consider for their wives:

Double bracelets are now all the rage—one worn at the wrist, the other above the elbow, fastened together by a heavy chain. [Really?]

Six button gloves [mid-forearm length] are the only one considered comme il faut for full dress.

Yellow and blue are the favorite combination of color for reception dresses this season.

Another Post writer assumed there wasn’t a husband alive who, at Christmas time, wouldn’t think “I wish there was anything half pretty enough, or good enough for my faithful, true wife.” If such a wretched husband did exist, the writer continued —

may he always arrive at the ferry just as the boat is out of jumping distance, may his umbrella turn inside out when he tries to hold it right side up; may bank hours be over when he wants a check cashed; may his baby cry persistently and uproariously all Sunday, while he is at home trying to enjoy himself; and may he lose his pocket handkerchief some 25^th of December, when he has a cold.

What then, did the Post recommend as the ideal gift in 1877? This suggestion appeared in the Nov. 24, 1877, issue. We reprint it for the sake of historic accuracy.

A year’s subscription to a weekly literary and family newspaper, such as the Saturday Evening Post, is always relished, as it has a permanent value, and, arriving every week with its fresh and varied banquet ornamental food, is a perpetual reminder of the kindness, thoughtfulness and good wishes of the giver.

Don’t look at us that way; we’re just including this for the sake of history.

Other presents are forgotten and are allowed to lie around in out-of-the-way corners, but such is not the case with the literary newspaper. On the whole, we know of no more suitable gift than a year’s subscription to a journal, and such of our patrons as feel inclined to present their friends with the Post will find us ready to fill all order they may send.

To read the full orginal article, click here.

We were naturally interested to see what Vogue will offer. The Post is in the middle of a multi-year project to digitize our archives so readers can view our 190 years of issues online. It also prompted us to look back over our own fashion reporting, which covered the art and business of haute couture.

In 1953, for example, a Post article reported how Christian Dior was driving up both hemlines and gown prices. The house of Dior had grossed $7 Million in 1952 by selling his creations for $300 to $2400 apiece:

Will the ladies obey M. Dior?

From Dior's 1953 show

Christian Dior, tyrant of the hemlines, decrees short skirts for American women. This foxy French designer grosses $7,000,000 a year selling $300-$2400 gowns [$2400 to $20,000 today], and says, “Aren’t people crazy to spend so much on a dress!”

[His] hand-sewn, petticoated, boned, and padded product takes an average of 110 hours to complete, and three fittings are compulsory.

Who can afford it?…Dior, who sells some 6500 originals a year—nearly half of them to Americans—has reason to believe that there are just about 2500 women in the world who have the time, the money and the inclination to dress regularly at his house, rated among the three most expensive.

The fabulous fashion queen reigned in the ‘Twenties as a daring autocrat of feminine style. Three decades later she has returned to rule again…

Coco's 'understated elegance.'

When she retired, in 1938, Chanel already was a legend. And then, in 1954, she suddenly emerges from fifteen years’ oblivion, acting as if she had merely been out to lunch, and presently reoccupies the throne of fashion!

If such a comeback would be something to write home about in any business, it is unique in the rough little world of dress designing, where lives and memories are short.

Custom-made to the client’s measurements, the average Chanel costs roughly $500* —a price slightly below the Paris top.

What with virtually all the stitching done by hand and with each garment representing about 150 working hours, the output of “originals” is limited—no more than about 1800 a year. *[$3,700 today]

For reasons no one can explain logically, styles come and go in cycles that last seven to ten years. Skeptics regard the process as a racket to stimulate sales but a strong motivation is behind it.

Oleg Cassini and clients

That’s great for me as a designer and a manufacturer, but I can’t help deploring the aesthetic damage to fashion.

Women seem to need the emotional lift a new fashion outlook gives them. Sure, overhauling wardrobes periodically runs into money, but I submit it is more desirable than the drab uniformity of clothes in countries where individuality is suppressed.

Women who adhere to the old maxim that elegance is the art of omission, seem to be vanishing. The great majority have a tendency to overload themselves with gewgaws and to fuss over superficialities. Proportionately more money is spent on clothes than ever before, and it is thrown around with an abandon that suggests women are latching onto new styles as an escape from reality.

Fashion layouts… began to appear last fall illustrating new styles variously known as “the Plunge, “the V,” “the U,” “the Split,” “the Slash” and “the Scoop” which women would start wearing in February.

"Cleavage crisis extends into the office"

Well, February is here, and obviously we are all in for a nervous winter and spring. Any way you look at it—and almost any way is possible right now—the bosom is back on the national landscape.

Obviously, the new dresses have been plunged, slashed and scooped for [men’s] benefit…it follows that [men] are supposed to gaze at the semiexposed bosom with some sort of favorable attitude: admiration or reverence or plain old friendly respect. Anyhow, we are supposed to notice. In so doing, we are playing our proper role of cavalier.

But we cannot notice too much, or too long. If we do, we play our other traditional role of boor or lecher. Unluckily, the line separating the two is so thin as to be invisible.

Swimsuits with vinyl boots and visors

The clothes [at Rudi Gernreich’s new show] satisfied everybody’s longing for the weird, the dramatic, the uncompromising. There were leather suits and loudly striped stockings, reversible jumpers, aviator suits, helmet-hats and ostrich feathers. The colors, equally bizarre, as vivid as barber poles or billboard advertisements, modulate from purple to lavender to hot pink to murky eggplant.

The violence of the colors and the design bludgeoned the onlooker into sudden attention. Some of the costumers, causing the same kind of confusion as certain abstract paintings, looked as if they could be work backwards with the same effect. “My dear,” said a lady in ruffles, “it’s pop art.”

“Twenty years ago,” he said, “a young girl was supposed to look sweet and innocent. But that ideal no longer applies. Before they’re seventeen they cultivate a wild, conscious, sexy look, which is very unnerving…The generation feels defeated; nothing seems to make any difference. The look in clothes expresses an anti-attitude, the result of being bored…If you’re bored, you go for the outrageous gesture. Everything else seems to have lost any meaning.”

In the aftermath of his last bout of drinking, Wilson once again entered a detoxification program. He was hoping this time he could end the 13-year struggle with alcohol that had destroyed his career and his health.

He soon realized that simply “drying out” in a sanitarium wouldn’t help. But it was during this hospitalization that he got the inspiration for a better program. Between 1935 and ’36, he worked with a physician (and fellow alcoholic) to create a new approach to ending their addiction to drink. Together they created a program called Alcoholics Anonymous, which Wilson described in a book that he wrote under the pseudonym of “Bill W.”

Six years passed. Two thousand Americans had joined the program and many had recovered sobriety and sanity in their lives. But the program was still relatively unknown, and had never promoted itself to the public. Then, in March, the Post published “Alcoholics Anonymous” by Jack Alexander and introduced this unusual program to the rest of America.

A.A. was unusual for several reasons, as Alexander pointed out. First, it threw out the traditional thinking about alcoholism, which regarded it as a moral failing, a mental weakness, or a personal choice. Rather it defined the condition as a disease, which could never be cured but could be successfully managed. The program’s members told Alexander—

There is…no such thing as an ex-alcoholic. If one is an alcoholic—that is, a person who is unable to drink normally—one remains an alcoholic until he dies, just as a diabetic remains a diabetic. The best he can hope for is to become an arrested case.

Another unusual aspect was the program’s emphasis on personal responsibility and spirituality. A.A. required the alcoholic to be fully committed and willing to seek guidance and strength from some “higher power.”

The program will not work…with those who only “want to want to quit,” or who want to quit because they are afraid of losing their families or their jobs. The effective desire, they state, must be based upon enlightened self-interest; the applicant must want to get away from liquor to head off incarceration or premature death. He must be fed up with the stark social loneliness which engulfs the uncontrolled drinker and he must want to put some order into his bungled life.

If he applies to Alcoholics Anonymous, he is first brought around to admit that alcohol has him whipped and that his life has become unmanageable. Having achieved this state of intellectual humility, he is given a dose of religion in its broadest sense. He is asked to believe in a Power that is greater than himself, or at least to keep an open mind on that subject while he goes on with the rest of the program.

Another unique feature was the absence of ministers, doctors, or other professionals. The program was run by alcoholics, who knew all the dodges, excuses, and denials that applicants would bring to the program.

There is no specious excuse for drinking which the trouble shooters of Alcoholics Anonymous have not heard or used themselves. When one of their prospects hands them a rationalization for getting soused, they match it with half a dozen out of their own experiences.

But of all the remarkable aspects of the program, the most important was its success. Over the years, thousands of Americans were able to reclaim their lives, their families, and their careers through the program.

In 1950, when Alexander wrote a follow-up article, the program had grown to 3,000 groups with 90,000 members.

Ninety thousand persons, roaring drunk or roaring sober, are but a drop in the human puddle, and they represent only a generous dip out of the human alcoholic puddle. [Yet] to anyone who has ever been a drunk or who has had to endure the alcoholic cruelties of a drunk —and that would embrace a large portion of the human family — 90,000 alcoholics reconverted into working citizens represent a massive dose of pure gain. In human terms, the achievements of Alcoholics Anonymous stand out as one of the few encouraging developments of a rather grim and destructive half century.

(The top photo, from the Alexander’s 1941 article, illustrated how some member of A.A. managed to continue drinking when their hands were shaking violently: “[They tied] an end of a towel about a glass, looping the towel around the back of the neck and drawing the free end with the other hand, pulley fashion, to advance the glass to the mouth.”)

Here are the pages of the Post article as they appeared in 1941:

Ever since 1931, the U.S. had been pressuring Japan to withdraw the army it had sent to conquer Manchuria and, eventually, all of China. America had tried exerting diplomatic pressure, but to no avail. The Japanese Imperial Government’s primary goal was to become the conquering ruler of Asia.

When diplomacy didn’t work, President Roosevelt reduced, then ended American export of machinery to Japan. When that didn’t work, he stopped all sales of American oil. Even though its operations in China were running out of gas, Japan persisted. Finally the government froze Japanese assets in the U.S. Roosevelt knew how the Japanese would respond when he signed the order locking Japan’s wealth in American banks. “This means war,” he told his chief adviser.

Washington expected a declaration of war from Tokyo, to be quickly followed by an attack on a distant base. In late November, 1941, the Defense Department ordered every military base in the Pacific to remain at high alert because “hostile action” with Japan was possible at any moment.

No one anticipated that, within a week, Japan would launch a massive, long-planned attack on our fleet before it even declared war.

However, readers of the Post knew that Japan was desperate and audacious enough to try something like it. Since 1939, they’d read articles by the Asian correspondent Hallett Abend, which chronicled the rising militancy in Japan. In the Post of March 4, 1939, he wrote about Japan’s vast security and espionage networks and the growing recklessness of its military. In August, he told readers how much Japan was willing to gamble on conquering China:

Japan’s foreign gold reserve, which in 1925 totaled about 2,000,000,000 yen, is now entirely exhausted…the yen is so shaky that Americans, British, French, and Dutch banks in Shanghai will not accept Japanese currency.

If Japan can succeed in carrying out her plans for grab in China, she may become one of the richest nations in the world within a decade. But there will be only very small profits, or no profits at all, so long as the Chinese continue their military resistance.

In April of 1941, he exploded the comforting myth that the Japanese would never have an effective air force because they simply couldn’t fly.

Japanese mothers all carry their babies on their backs, you know. Heads wobble around so much in infancy that adult Japanese have no sense of balance.

Very interesting—but nonsense, of course. The story is typical of the dozens of old wives’ tales going the rounds about the congenital unfitness of the Japanese as aviators.

It is believed that the Air Military Academy trained more than 700 new pilots during 1940, with the probability of a much larger class this year.

The present strength of the army’s air force…[and] the navy’s…gives Japan around 6000 pilots.

In September of last year, [Japan] had upward of 4000 efficient war planes. Since then she has been turning out about 250 planes a month, so that by the end of February of this year, allowing deductions for losses in China, Nippon’s war air fleet topped 5,000 planes.

In contrast, Abend admitted, there were no more than 7,000 military aircraft—and 40% of these were sluggish trainer planes.

Japan had planned on building several thousand more planes in 1941. However—

the shortage of alloy steels and the growing difficulty of importing machine tools has prevented this peak from being reached. The United States will sell Japan none.

Just two weeks before the Pearl attack, Abend gave a surprisingly accurate picture of Japan’s current position toward the U.S.

This untitled cartoon by Herbert Johnson appeared alongside Hallett Abend's April 19, 1941 article, "Yes, The Japanese Can Fly"

Japan is exasperated… She finds herself baffled and checked by the two things she fears most—the might of the American Navy in the Pacific, and the possibility of losing her vital trade with the United States. She must retain that trade at all costs. And she must not risk a collision with the American Navy. Yet, if she goes ahead and grabs everything she wants in the Far East, she will almost certainly risk trouble with our Navy.

Japan has jockeyed herself into a position where it is almost necessary to have all or nothing. If she decides that the United States is the barrier to the coveted all, Japan is quite capable of provoking a war with us, just as an individual Japanese commits hara-kiri rather than confess to failure.

America has studiously remained scrupulously neutral during more than two years of the China Japanese hostilities, even though American sympathies have been overwhelmingly on the side of the Chinese. This neutrality has been carried to the extent of continuing a trade in war materials and supplies with Japan. There is only one thing that would drive America to a reluctant abandonment of the neutral attitude. This would be deliberate and intolerable provocation on the part of Japan herself.

That “deliberate and intolerable” provocation arrived two weeks after this article appeared, and left 2,402 Americans dead.

The next time an enemy struck at America, the fatalities—all civilians—reached 2,996. This new enemy, though, hid his intentions even better than did Imperial Japan.

]]> http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2011/12/03/archives/retrospective/knew-pearl-harbor.html/feed 7 http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2011/11/26/archives/retrospective/surprising-familiar-mark-twain.html http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2011/11/26/archives/retrospective/surprising-familiar-mark-twain.html#comments Sat, 26 Nov 2011 14:00:21 +0000 Jeff Nilsson http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=44492 Post describes the author as we know him as well as his less pleasant side.]]> He was America’s best known author when he died, as he is today. But in the 101 years since his death, Mark Twain’s reputation has been so polished by admiring generations that it’s taken on a rich, unnatural luster. It’s hard to distinguish the man from the legend.

Fortunately we have contemporary accounts of Twain, which give a touch of human dimension to the Great Man. One of these contemporaries was the drama critic Brander Matthews. In 1920, he wrote his “Memories of Mark Twain” for the Post, which told of their 30-year friendship.

Much of his account agrees with the popular image of the man. For example, there is his ready wit in public speaking:

A score of American men of letters were invited [to a dinner with Andrew Carnegie] and half a dozen of us were summoned to stand and deliver. When Mark’s turn came, he soared aloft in whimsical exaggeration, casually dropping a reference to the time when he had lent Carnegie a million dollars.

Our smiling host promptly interjected: “That had slipped my memory!”

And Mark looked down on him solemnly, and retorted, “Then, the next time, I’ll take a receipt.”

He referred to Twain’s love of tobacco:

He was an incessant smoker, yet he was wont to say that he never smoked to excess— that is, he never smoked two cigars at once and he never smoked when he was asleep. But [William Dean] Howells has recorded that when Mark came to visit him, he used to go into Mark’s room at night to remove the still lighted cigar from the lips of his sleeping guest.

But Matthews also saw aspects of Twain that are less well known, such as his desire to be taken seriously.

Many of those who have written about him have dealt with him solely as a humorist, overlooking the important fact that a large part of his work is not laughter-provoking and not intended to be.

[He once told me] “I’m glad that you…have been telling people that I am serious. When I make a speech now, I find that they are a little disappointed if I don’t say some things that are serious; and that just suits me—for I have so many serious things I want to say!”

And there was a surprisingly resentful side to Twain, which nearly ended his friendship with Matthews. After Matthews had publicly taken a position different from Twain’s—

I soon heard from more than one of our common friends that Mark was acutely dissatisfied; and when I next met him, he was distant in his manner—and I might even describe it as chilly. Of course, I regretted this; but I could only hope that his fundamental friendliness would warm him up sooner or later.

Twain with Brander Matthews and the editor of Harper's Magazine, Laurence Hutton

I knew that Mark had a hair-trigger temper and that he was swift to let loose all the artillery of heaven to blow a foe from off the face of the earth. I was aware moreover that a professional humorist is not infrequently a little deficient in that element of the sense-of-humor which guards a man against taking himself too seriously. I had been told also that Mark, genial as he was, and long suffering as he often was, could be a good hater, superbly exaggerating the exuberance of his ill-will. His old friend, Twitchell, once wrote him about a piece of bad luck which had befallen a man who had been one of Mark’s special antipathies; and Mark wrote back:

“I am more than charmed to hear of it; still, it doesn’t do me half the good it would have done if it had come sooner. My malignity has so worn out and wasted away with time and the exercise of charity that even his death would not afford me anything more than a mere fleeting ecstasy, a sort of momentary, pleasurable titillation, now—unless of course, it happened in some particularly radiant way, like burning or boiling or something like that. Joys that come to us after the capacity for enjoyment is dead are but an affront.”

But this was Twain being outrageous—something he did well and something he was encouraged to do. In fact, Twain could barely manage to hold a grudge very long. Not a year passed before Twain put aside his resentment when he met Matthews again at an artist’s retreat.

Within a week after our arrival Mark stepped up on our porch, as pleasantly as if there had never been a cloud on our friendship,

“I hear you play a French game called piquet,” he began. “I wish you would teach me.” And we taught him, although it was no easy task, since he was forever wanting to make over the rules of the game to suit his whim of the moment—a boyish trait which I soon discovered to be entirely characteristic.

Things had been different in the 1880s, when every other wage-earning woman was a servant. But domestic service quickly lost its attraction and American women took other jobs. By 1900, the number of servants dropped 25%; by 1920, 60%.

Many Americans wondered why housework had become such an unpopular job. in 1943, Edna Tollman told them in her article, “So You Can’t Keep A Maid!’

It is my forthright opinion that most women have a mean streak in them when dealing with maids—a small, mean streak that makes them domineering, callous, grasping, unbelievably inconsiderate and arrogantly demanding.

Even when they have an urge to be kind, they are so wrapped up in their own lives and so lacking in understanding of the woman who serves them that the reward seldom jells.

Her years of being cook and maid to households from Philadelphia to Hollywood had acquainted her with

the hot resentment, the cold contempt, the bitterness, the animosity that the average woman’s attitude builds up in the heart of the servant she employs.

Somewhere there must be decent, considerate employers of servants. That is a sort of faith I have, but it isn’t based on personal experience.

Her bitter experiences, which she relates in her article, led to question the whole business of domestic help.

For one complacent, able-bodied, indolent woman to demand so much of the weary

"You're not talking to your wife now, chum!"
—The maid in popular culture: indomitable Hazel, from 1946.

flesh of another, as if she were some superior being, is not quite decent.

There is something un-American about…the dozens of other personal services [the employer] demands as her right, simply because she happens to be able to pay for them.

The American girl likes to think she is as good as anybody. That’s the way she has been brought up. But she isn’t allowed to think that in somebody’s kitchen; not, at least, in the kitchens I have known.

Gradually it gets under your skin. And after a while you say to yourself: “This is a helluva life. I’m going out and get a job at the dime store.”

I am off to a defense-plant job in the morning. I don’t expect to find riches at the factory…And I shan’t like the setting as much as I like a nice clean kitchen. But I shall have self-respect.

I hope you have to get up in the morning and get your own breakfast. Chin up. A little practical democracy won’t hurt you.

The article provoked an unprecedented flood of letter to the Post editors. Some writers were outraged:

“It seems incredible that your magazine, noted for its outstanding and sane articles and editorials, could allow to be published such a nasty, poison-minded thing.”

and some concurred:

A Beverly Hills husband plaintively writes, “Every word is true, and I’ve wondered how in hell my own wife could be so nice and lovely, and treat help like I’ve seen her treat our maids.” This gentleman admits he is “too big a coward” to tell his wife this, but adds—rather pathetically, we think—that he served in World War 1.

Many women submitted rebuttal articles, but the editors chose just one, which appeared the following January. Rita Halle Kleeman’s “So It’s The Housewife’s Fault, Is It?” showed that employers felt equally outraged. Ms. Kleeman said she didn’t want to hear any more about downtrodden maids—

who, though competent, willing and noble, are underpaid, overworked and generally abused by ruthless, inconsiderate or slave-driving employers. Most women who read such tales wonder where these paragons have been all their lives. There is probably not one among them who has not had at least one of the following experiences:

Having a maid dawdle for maddening hours over work that could be done in a quarter of the time, and then complain to anyone who would listen that she was overworked.

Having a maid take for granted her right to the family perfume and cigarettes, or worse, discovering…that she had been systematically collecting a trousseau from the family possessions during that time.

Or having her, after marvelous references…turn out to be dirty, disagreeable, intemperate, lazy, or all of these.

The problem with domestic service wasn’t the employer’s fault, Ms. Kleeman concluded.  It was the employees’ basic dislike of housework.

Now, if they don’t like housework, that is their privilege. But in all fairness, so long as they are unwilling to do it on any terms, let them stop blaming their distaste on housewives or on unacceptable conditions and wages.

Yet Kleeman conceded that women could be inconsiderate and unreasonable as employers. So she proposed a system that encouraged domestic workers and employers to trade information before hire.

The considerate housewife would be better off if references were given as well as asked.

If it is a serious business to take a stranger into your home, it is equally serious for her to enter it. It recognizes that maid is justified in ascertaining in advance what sort of household she is getting into and what she will be expected to do there.

Does the servant problem still exist? Are there enough maids, cooks, and nannies? And what are they paid? We don’t know. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has no statistics on the domestic work force or its wages.

If the labor problem has been solved, perhaps we can now address the legal problem of illegal workers and tax evasion. According to one estimate, though, there are about 2 million domestic workers in the U.S. Although their employers must pay half their Social Security and Medicare taxes, less than a third of them do.

The country was also learning the difficulty of waging war where there would be no clear victory or immediate benefit to the U.S. In a pattern that was to be repeated in many of our foreign conflicts,  popular enthusiasm quickly faded, and the war seemed almost forgotten.

Certainly this is how James Michener saw it. Writing for the Post in 1952, he said that even among Americans who knew better—

American men are dying… in the barren wastes of Korea, with a heroism never surpassed in our history. Be­cause they are so few, we forget that they contribute so much.

They seem to fight in a vacuum, as if America didn’t care a damn.

The Post had commissioned Michener, who was already a nationally recognized novelist at the time, to write about the war. So, in 1952, he sailed aboard the carriers USS Essex and Valley Forge. In his article, Michener introduced readers to the pilots who were flying the Navy’s fighter jets and rescue helicopters.

One of these extraordinary men was Lieutenant Sam Murphey, whose plane was shot down over enemy territory. Murphey was determined not to become one of the North Koreans’ prisoners of war. So he decided to fly to the coast, “even if I cracked up doing so.”

He cracked up all right. A mile inland, his plane roared down through trees, high-tension wires, and into a rice paddy. It burst into flame, but by that time Murphey was walking away. He was at the edge of a communist village. And he was much worse off than he knew. For his mates aloft, watching the amazing landing and the flaming wreckage, were sure he was dead. They headed home.

Lt. Sam Murphey after his escape from North Korea.

Seeing the villagers starting toward him over the frozen fields, Murphey lay down in an irrigation ditch, “resting on one elbow, trying to survey the situation. I believed I had been seen by the men of my squadron. I believed they would come back to rescue me pretty soon, and that my job was to evade the communists for, say, ten minutes. So I got up and started to run.”

It was a long ten minutes. From the crowd of villagers, two soldiers ran forward with rifles and started firing. Murphey continued running across the rice paddies. He ran for an hour. After the first few minutes, he thought his lungs would explode, but whenever he looked back, there were the two communist soldiers. His big boots cracked through the ice at every step. When he fell, he pitched his face into manure. And the rifle fire kept getting more accurate. Finally one of the bullets passed clean through Murphey’s neck. But by one of those unbelievable miracles of war, this bullet, although passing right through his neck, had hit only loose skin.

He took time out to look back, and there were the two communists, coming steadily.

Suddenly it occurred to Murphey to set off a flare.

“Don’t ask me why I didn’t do it sooner”… his fellow pilots saw him, an aston­ishing four miles away from his burning plane. But Murphey’s run had taken him into a terribly dan­gerous spot. He was now pretty well surrounded by antiaircraft guns. When our people back on board the Antietam plotted Murphey’s position, they could not command any helicopter pilot to fly in there to get the pilot. That would be suicide. But one helicopter man, Jack Stultz, of San Diego, radioed back: “All you have to do is give me cover. I’m going in.”

For any kind of gun, a helicopter is an absolutely dead duck. But somehow Jack Stultz pushed his ‘copter down into the rice paddy where Murphey was still running away from the two communist soldiers. The rescue was made. A few days later, with a patch about his neck, Murphey was flying again.

Michener declared these pilots—

as heroic as any men who have ever fought for the United States. They are as brave as the marines on Guadalcanal or the tank crews in Nor­mandy.

I hold their heroism to be great… for [those soldiers] could feel that his entire nation was behind him, dedicated to the job to which he was dedicated… today the fighter in Korea cannot feel this sense of identification with his own nation.

What kept these pilots aloft and fighting, Michener believed, was their own sense of integrity, their mutual support, and their patriotism.

It is difficult in these cynical days to state in simple words that young men fly dangerous missions to sometimes certain death because they believe that what their country is doing is right. But that is the simple truth.

[In one fighter] group every pilot wears a wed­ding ring, every one has children. Most of them were recalled unwillingly from civilian jobs they had built up painfully after long years in service last time. I doubt if you could find men less eager for war—more acutely aware of what they have surrendered to participate. But they go out day after day over the icy seas, over the high mountains.

They still go out these days, flying or marching into distant, hostile countries. And they continue fighting our wars, even when the public enthusiasm fades.

From a cluttered corner at CBS headquarters in New York, Andy Rooney sips day-old coffee from a plastic Harris Tweed mug and grumbles about his “over­night” success. It took 64 years to get here, and like money, it’s “a pain in the tail,” he insists. It cramps his style when he meanders through hardware stores, is a source of embarrassment down at the lunch counter and sometimes causes him to miss the bus to work.

“A writer should be sitting over in the corner watching the dance and not be out there dancing,” he muses. “I’m not too keen about my recent well-knownness; I don’t han­dle it very well. If somebody comes up to me on the street and says, ‘Hey, I like your stuff,’ well, I can’t hate that. But it never stops there. Pretty soon he wants to be my best friend. I tend to be rude to people like that.”

He comes by his crustiness natu­rally. He’s one of the last of the trench-coat journalists who covered the Big War—World War II—for the print media. He was Sergeant Rooney then, a veteran of several bombing missions and the Stars and Stripes reporter who landed on Nor­mandy Beach four days after D-Day to document the invasion of France. Hardly a suave TV personality in the Dan Rather-Peter Jennings tra­dition, he looks more like a preppy leprechaun with John L. Lewis eye­brows and a fondness for growling at strangers. His bite has earned him a reputation as CBS News’ resident curmudgeon, but his bark is more fun than fact. During a recent 60-minute interview with the SatEve Post, he was downright hospitable as he shared insights, the day-old coffee and all the comforts of his in­famously cluttered nest.

“Sit down, sit down,” he urged, beckoning to a black vinyl chair that had a suspiciously gimpy leg. I sat, and the leg gave way and sent me flailing toward a floor strewn with size 8′/2 EEE shoes, maps destined someday for a wall and a family portrait of somebody else’s family.

“I’ve got to fix this chair,” he muttered resolutely from a squat position as he examined the now splintered leg.

He means it. An avowed do-it-himselfer, he prefers to fend for himself and refutes the notion that celebrity status translates into clout. Forget the limousines, the house on Long Island, the cadre of secretaries poised to take a letter. He commutes daily from Connecticut via train and bus, pecks out his own correspon­dence on an Underwood typewriter three years older than he is, builds furniture and bakes bread. He and wife Marguerite still live in the same house where their four children grew up.

“We paid $29,500 for it, and I have no intention of moving out,” he says.

His home away from home—the modest cubicle in the CBS building on West 57th Street—has a decided­ly less permanent air to it. A hodge­podge of books are stacked every which way on shelves behind his desk and beg to be arranged. A gold-colored statuette, representing some lofty award for past accom­plishments, reclines on its backside atop the books and close to a large box labeled simply “Jane’s stuff.” Pictures, yet to be hung, lean against a sway-backed couch.

“Just move in?” I ask.

He nods affirmatively and adds: “Ten years ago.”

The decor is eclectic—a function­al jumble of treasures that smacks of the owner. Lampshades tilt uniformly off-center, mounds of paper threaten to obscure the desk; an LBJ-Lady Bird commemorative plate is tacked to the wall, and a grouping of black-and-white Holly­wood publicity pictures invite visi­tors to test their knowledge of film trivia. But it’s no contest. Rooney explains the “celebrities” are ac­tually Columbia Studio’s rejects— starlets who didn’t make it big in show biz.

To this unlikely haven comes a network-news crew each week to tape “A Few Minutes with Andy Rooney,” the wildly successful p.s. to television’s top-ranked show, “60 Minutes.” The humorous commen­tary has earned two Emmys since becoming a permanent feature of the show in September 1978. And that’s not bad for a low-budget operation.

“I don’t move a thing,” says Rooney. “It’s been a strange union problem because they say we’ve got to have a set decorator. But we don’t have a set. We shoot right in here. See that microphone? It runs into Bob Forte’s editing room. Believe me, we don’t fuss with this thing. Sometimes the cameraman will say there are too many white papers on the desk—causes a glare—so I toss some yellow paper on top and say, ‘Is this better?’ Sure, we make con­cessions; but it’s very homemade. Remarkably homemade.”

For the show Rooney generally sits at his desk in front of the jammed bookshelves and to the right of LB J and Lady Bird. He peers over horn-rimmed half-glasses and addresses issues close to home, wherever home may be. Viewers sel­dom notice the “set” since his words command their full attention. He’s the folksy philosopher who un derstands little things. He manages to say what others only feel, and this ability has established a kinship with “60 Minutes” aficionados. Often sage, sometimes silly, always suc­cinct, his messages zing in on truths common to everyone. He can evoke chuckles when he sounds off on de­signer jeans and tears when he com­ments on the pain of growing old. The most common topics become special under his treatment, and his way with words has swelled the ranks of Rooney followers to such proportions that a brief Sunday-evening fix of his humor just isn’t enough. Fans have turned in in­creasing numbers to his three-times-weekly newspaper column—now syndicated in 324 publications—and to his books, the most recent, And More by Andy Rooney, a bona fide best seller of 1 million copies in hardback and 2 million in paper­back. Still, it’s television exposure that has brought about the star status and the high visibility he finds so disagreeable.

“I’m irritated that some people think I only got successful when I did ’60 Minutes.’ I was doing things I was proud of 20 years ago,” he grumbles. “Fame is an overrated quality. I don’t think nearly as high­ly of well-known people as I did before I was one. And money. It’s a lot like fame. Overrated. Oh, I en­joy having $150 in my pocket in­stead of $32 or $19, but that’s all. Money is a pain in the tail. I’m no good with it—I don’t know what to do with it.”

Unbelievable? Not so, says Mr. Rooney, although he concedes per­haps once fame wasn’t quite as dis­tasteful as it is today.

“I did a piece once called ‘Mr. Rooney Goes to Washington’ about seven or eight years ago,” he re­calls. “It was a good piece—an hour long. I remember the next morning a guy came up to me at the bus stop and said he had seen the show and had really liked it. I was pleased. That was about the last time I was pleased.”

His impatience with fame is caused partly by his inability to understand why he deserves it. He refutes all claims that he’s better than Buchwald, more wry than Rog­ers or in the same genre as Menken, Twain or Thurber.

“That’s  baloney. Buchwald  is funnier than I am; Menken and Twain were so much smarter. No, I reject that. I’ll never last as they have,” he protests. “What I do is easy; I can’t believe it’s special or different. But it’s a delight—the most fun I have. I enjoy making it clear to people that we are so basi­cally the same for all our differ­ences. I can’t get over the fact that there is a common thread that runs through all of us. We share so many characteristics. It makes the world a little less lonely place to be, and I like that feeling.”

His talent for tugging at the com­mon thread comes from his ability to totally tune into his subject. Heightened perception, he calls it, and it’s available on command. He explains that when he has to write a column or commentary, he merely turns up his tuner and grabs hold of something he might otherwise over­look. He looks at the subject head-on and dissects it. When the writing is done, the antennae retract and he reverts to being a tourist.

If this perception is a natural gift, it’s been carefully honed by the down-home Hoosier, Borge was veddy sophisticated, Levinson was folksy Jewish and Godfrey was, well, just Godfrey.

“Writing for those guys was a ter­rific lesson. I’ve probably borrowed something from all of them. They were tough; there was a lot of argu­ing. It was highly competitive get­ting your stuff into the mono­logues,” he admits. “There’s no writing more precise than the kind that has to provoke laughter. You know you’re hitting people when they laugh. It has to pay off, and the positioning of words is so important in triggering it.”

Joke writing led to collaboration with Harry Reasoner on several CBS News specials. Rooney pro­vided the words and Reasoner added the voice. Not until he joined the Public Broadcasting Service’s “The Great American Dream Ma­chine” did Rooney actually go on camera himself. Afterward, he was contacted by an advertising-agency talent scout who wanted him to nar­rate a headache-remedy commer­cial. That told him a lot about his voice, he quips.

He returned to CBS, this time to both write and narrate such on-the-air efforts as “Mr. Rooney Goes to Dinner” (he added 14 pounds by the end of the assignment), “Mr. Rooney Goes to Work” and an oc­casional political commentary. Viewers related to his less-than-perfect physique (a pudgy 5′ 9″), his appearance (rumpled) and his voice (restrained whine). When the duel­ing duo of Shana Alexander and James Kilpatrick went on vacation from “60 Minutes” in the summer of 1978, Rooney was tabbed as the replacement. The temporary assign­ment became permanent the next year, leaving him little time for the longer, more in-depth stories he had always enjoyed.

“I miss reporting a lot,” he ad­mits. “But the fact is, I have be­come more valuable to myself and everyone else by doing more writing and less reporting.”

He stops, props his 8 1/2 EEEs up on his desk and engages in a little pipe dream: “You know what I’d really love to do?” he asks. “I’d like to throw myself into writing and reporting for Charlie Kuralt. I’d like to just give him my stuff. For one thing, he does things better than almost anyone in the business. Then I could slip back into anonymity. I’m telling you, it wouldn’t bother meat all.”

He loves the language and the agony of arranging and rearranging words, the shaking-out of a piece of writing until nothing remains except the emotion that propels it forward and makes it reach out and touch the reader or listener. The creative process is tough, causing him to rant, wring his hands and pace as his assistant Jane Bradford reads, edits and passes judgment.

“Jane checks everything I do. If I spell my own name she checks and makes sure it’s all right. She drives me crazy, but she’s very good. I make a lot of mistakes, and she keeps me from making a fool of my­self. The other day I was desperate to get my column done. I finally finished it and gave it to her to read, and she said it just wasn’t good enough. God, I knew she was right. I had to sit down and do it over.”

Even a bit of writing scrutinized and passed into print is not immune to Rooney’s self-criticism.

“I look at things I wrote ten years ago and think, ‘My gosh, how could I have done that?’ Then I look at things I wrote last year and think, ‘How could I have done thafl When am I going to grow up?’ ”

He claims he has a particularly difficult time ending things well, and that holds true not only for his writing but for his other passion, woodworking, as well. Both require patience—not his long suit.

“Actually, it’s a real shortcoming of mine. I guess I’ve gotten better at it in my column, but I’m a big woodworker and I’ve never been able to finish furniture very well, either. I’m interested in the idea of forming a table or a chair or a cab­inet, but then I don’t have the pa­tience to finish it the way I should.”

So immersed is he with his voca­tion—writing—and his avocation— woodworking—that he often de­scribes one in terms of the other. A particularly tough script is called “a real cabinetmakers’s job of writing.” His profession under­writes his passion, and his only splurge since he became a TV celebrity has been a $2,700 power saw. He used it to build, from scratch, a free-standing writing room at the family vacation com­pound in upstate New York. Week­ends from May to October are spent at the New York “cottage,” which is a sprawling, white colonial estate with two outbuildings—one for writing and another for woodwork­ing. From the first he churns out columns and scripts; from the sec­ond come tables and sideboards.

“My kids have a lot of my fur­niture in their houses. Sometimes I make it faster than anyone wants it. I’m not a natural woodworker, but I use good wood and have pretty good ideas. Boy, you talk about being self-taught. When I built my writing room I couldn’t get over how many mistakes I made. I fell off a ladder at one point, and that stopped con­struction for about a month.”

In many respects he’s self-taught in his writing craft, too. His ideas are good, his instincts are on target and if the words feel right to him, chances are he’s succeeded in build­ing a thought people can relate to. He takes care in choosing his topics and is particularly wary of subjects that might amuse the cosmopolitan folks of New York but elude resi­dents of rural America. He frets that a recent piece on the irritations of air travel only touched a small segment of his audience. He rejects the suggestion by a CBS coworker to use telephone answering machines as the object of an upcoming dia­tribe. “How many viewers have answering machines?” he asks.

He stays in touch with his audi­ence by living the normal life he champions. He avoids posh parties and the social set in an effort to pro­tect his averageness. At a time when TV programming is determined by ratings and demographic studies, he refuses to be influenced by scientific data. Don’t burden him with the number of house­holds tuned to CBS at 7 p.m. on Sundays. Don’t tell him which geographic areas of the country appreciate his humor most or which pock­ets of the population prefer a Lawrence Welk rerun.

“That’s the road to death,” he says of market studies. “It’s like trying to understand flight by dissect­ing the entrails of a robin. I would never study the num­bers. A good pilot knows how it feels to fly right.”

And after more than 40 years in the business, he’s flying higher than ever. He’s earned his stripes with a flight plan that has proved to be impeccable: From his cluttered vantage point, he looks out at the dancers and simply wings it.

We’ve come a long way in the past century, when the government discharged veterans with little help to resume their lives and careers, and Americans viewed their return as a challenge to their standard of living. As a Post editorial observed,

In time, millions of Americans will be released from military service and return to civil life… [already] war’s enormous demands upon industry are diminishing or have ceased.

A good many people are disturbed over that prospect.

Various expedients have been suggested—some of them admirable, such as reclaim­ing more land for agriculture by irrigation, drainage, and so on. ["Demobilizing" Nov. 30, 1918]

The expedient to which they referred was the land-reclamation project launched by Franklin K. Lane, the Secretary of the Interior. The Post offered Lane’s own explanation of the project:

“These boys will come back. How are we to meet them? They will be proud; they will have seen the world as we have never been able to see it; they will have a spirit that we will envy and a comradeship that we can never have.We do not want to give them charity. We could not if we wanted to.

“[However] we have approximately from 200 million to 250 million acres of land at present unused which can be made as productive as any agricultural land in the world.

“It is an easy thing to do. The land is there; and we should say to the boys… ‘Here is a job at your hand; current wages, four dollars a day, if you please. Go; build dams on the Colorado Rivera. Go; redeem swamps in Southern Maryland. Go; clear the lands in Northern Michigan.” ["When the Boys Get Back From France," Nov. 30, 1918]

The ultimate goal was to create new farm land in the western states, which veterans could buy with a 10% down payment.

“[The veteran-farmer] will add to the wealth of the nation; but he will add far more than the physical wealth—he will add a richness of life and independence of spirit, and have in his heart always gladness, because he…found on his return that he had come back to a republic that was not ungrateful.

“The opportunity is…to bring the land and the soldier together, to provide work and homes for hundreds of thousands of American citizens, to furnish a supply of foodstuffs sufficient for our growing population.”

It was an admirable idea to many, but Emerson Hough, the Post’s “Out-Of-Doors” columnist, saw it as a threat to the wilderness.

Secretary Lane’s reclamation idea is born out of this war. It surely will tend to kill American outdoor sports.

The interior Department has taken stock of every acre of wild land in America—marsh, forest, desert or foothill. Millions of acres of unused lands have been discovered which are now to be utilized—

Surely this means that the last of the American wild places are to be used as soon as possible. The last resort of wild game—the last home of the last bird and beast—is to be cleared, drained, plowed and planted. Enter industry; exit game; exit sport. Enter a new country and new philosophy of all work and no play—unless that shall be play in some rich man’s yard.

It [could mean] the growth of the law of trespass; a future of less and less open sport in America.["Sport After the War," March 1, 1918]

Both Lane and Hough were wrong.

The wilderness did not disappear. The hydroelectric projects did not destroy the beauty of places like

Crop failures, drought, and falling prices doomed many farms, and farm towns like this one in Keota, Colorado.

Jackson Lake in Jackson Hole, as Hough declared they would. Even more land was set aside for national parks, making the wilderness open to more Americans.

Lane’s hope for a new generation of veteran-farmers never materialized either. When the Federal government stopped buying food for the war effort, farmers had surplus crops at the 1918 and 1919 harvest. Prices dropped. Farms failed. New farms made in the high plains of the Dakotas, Montana, and Colorado quickly depleted the soil, adding to the number of farm failures. In 1920, for the first time, more Americans lived in towns and cities than farms.

Instead of choosing careers for veterans, today’s GI benefits help veterans pursue their own futures. And have proven a much wiser investment.