September 17, 2012, marks the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest single-day battle in American history.

Late in the second year of the Civil War, the Confederate army switched from defense to offense. General Robert E. Lee marched the Army of Northern Virginia into Maryland, which had remained loyal to the Union.

He had recently defeated the Union forces at the Second Battle of Bull Run and decided it would be better to keep the momentum from this victory by a march into Union territory. Maryland was the natural choice; a large number of slaveholders in the state were strong supporters of the Confederacy. Lee hoped they would join his army and bring needed supplies. If he could score a victory against the Union forces, the Confederacy might win recognition from Great Britain and France. If so, the South could resume trade with Europe. The British Navy would break the Union’s blockade so that cotton could be shipped to the mills that were now laying idle from lack of material. Lincoln would have to fight the Confederacy and the British Empire. If Lee could win a victory.

The odds were in his favor. He was opposed by the Union’s General McClellan—an able administrator but a hesitant commander who always over-estimated the enemy. He had resisted Lincoln’s orders to move south toward Richmond. When Lincoln finally ordered him south, he was bluffed out of a strong position outside Richmond, Virginia, so close he could hear the church bells of the city.

Now Lee was coming at him. For the first time, the great Confederate commander would fight an offensive campaign, which was always more risky. It didn’t help that a union soldier found a copy of his strategy, copied for his generals. McClellan would never again have such an advantage. The Southern command soon realized that the orders had been found by the Union, but Lee stayed with his plan. McClellan attached Lee and, at Antietam, had the advantage for once.

Had he been a more decisive general—as determined as General Grant, for example—he might have defeated and captured Lee’s army. But McClellan wasn’t that bold or imaginative a general. And Lee was. The Confederates were able to withdraw their forces in the face of a large Union army.

All the same, it was a rare defeat for the Confederates. And for both sides, it was particularly bloody. In one day, nearly 23,000 Americans were killed, wounded, or missing.

Lincoln was shocked that General McClellan would not pursue the Confederate army and make it a decisive, war-determining battle. Yet, it was still a victory, and there had been very few for the North. Lincoln used the opportunity to announce a momentous change in policy, and a change in the direction of the war.

The following is taken from “The Recent Contests” from The Saturday Evening Post, September 27, 1862.

A week of anxiety ends with the joyful assurance that the rebel invaders have been forced to fly from “Maryland, My Maryland,” and entirely give up for the present the prospect of overrunning Pennsylvania.

It is evident that it was a most desperate struggle, in which though we can scarcely claim a decisive victory, the balance of advantages was decidedly in favor of the Union forces. The next day both armies were apparently too much exhausted to recommence the contest, the rebels probably secretly employing themselves in commencing their retreat into Virginia. On Friday, judging from our present advices, they completed their passage of the Potomac—with how much loss of men, trains, and artillery, we are yet unable to say. The amount of such loss of course will determine the extent of the disorganization they have sustained, and the character of the defeat they have suffered.

It is probable that the designs of the rebels in their recent movement were as follows:

1. To capture Harper’s Ferry and the 12,000 men at that place, by surrounding it, and moving on it from the North, from which side it is said to be least defensible, the Maryland heights being higher than the Virginia ones.

2. To replenish their supplies.

3. To raise Maryland in their favor, and largely recruit their forces.

4. To menace Baltimore and Washington, and the railroad communications of those cities with the North.

5. To invade Pennsylvania by way of the Cumberland Valley, allow us in this state to feel the ravages of war, supply themselves at will from our overflowing resources, and sicken us of the contest.

Of all these object the rebels have gained the first, and, it may be, in a degree, the second. Owing to shameful incompetency or treachery, Harper’s Ferry was captured. Whether the report of the recapture is true, we are at present unable to say.

But Maryland would not rise—even her secessionists will not put their property and lives in peril on so desperate a venture. For they see that even if the North were defeated, and the Union allowed to be dissevered, the North and Pennsylvania must at least insist on the Potomac for a border line.

To cross the Potomac is in fact to invade Pennsylvania—recent events have impressed this upon the great majority of our population. It therefore does not seem possible for Maryland to be severed from Pennsylvania without exposing both of them to great peril.

Antietam: Our Post-Battle Report The Saturday Evening Post

Comedian Phyllis Diller dies at 95.

“A woman hits 40 going 90 miles an hour. It’s very embarrassing—you and your mother approaching the same age from opposite directions.”

“Honey, I went from baby fat to middle-age spread so fast I didn’t have a good five minutes. If I had, I would have given a party.”

 If you were anywhere near a television in the 1960s and ‘70s, you would have recognized the material, as well as the voice and that long, snaking laugh. Phyllis Diller was unique—to say the least. For over 55 years, she parodied herself so relentlessly, it’s hard to realize there was a real person inside. But, as she told Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Alex Haley for a 1962 Post article, she was a woman who’d reached success by a long, hard, and not very funny road.

With her husband Sherwood working as an inspector at a Naval Air Station during World War II, Phyllis embarked upon a decade of “working as hard as I think it is possible for a woman to work.”

 ”I scrubbed, washed, ironed, mended, cooked, and had babies. There was never enough money. … It was a nightmare. Sherwood took a second job as a night watchman and a third job driving a taxi on weekends.”

Soon, though, exhaustion caught up with Sherwood. He was found asleep on his night watchman’s job and lost it. The mortgage company dunned them for late payments, the grocer finally refused credit, and the utilities companies threatened. “I just hurt worrying about getting enough food and clothes for our five kids,” says Phyllis. “But there was something worse. Sherry and I fought constantly. We were giving the kids a negative start in life. I even thought of divorce.”

Incongruously, during this bleak time Phyllis created the style of comedy that makes her so successful today. “To hide our awful mess from the neighborhood, I acted as if I didn’t have a care. I think I began being funny almost unconsciously.”

In the corner Laundromat, Phyllis began cracking jokes and satirizing the housewife’s life for the women waiting for their clothes to wash. They found Phyllis so hilarious that, encouraged, she would burst into the Laundromat with roses taped to her ears, yards of frothy tulle around her neck and battered cooking utensils as props for spontaneous takeoffs on her sad lot.

The tension inside Phyllis exploded early one Sunday evening. Neither she nor Sherwood can remember what trivial incident made her scream at him, slam out of the house and walk, she thinks, for miles. Passing a strange church, she turned back.

“Something forced me,” she says. As she slid down in the last pew she heard the minister reading: “Whatsoever things are true … whatsoever things are pure … think on these things.” “The words seemed to be addressed directly to me, as if God Himself were giving me a message,” Phyllis says.

To the dismay of her Laundromat audiences, she did not entertain for the next several weeks. “I stayed home,” she says, “having skull-and-soul sessions with myself and reading self-help books. Before, I had always scoffed at claims that anyone could change his life for the better by positive thinking. But considering the shape we were in, I was willing to try anything. … I didn’t change my life overnight, but at least I glimpsed what I had to do. I had to stop wallowing in negative thoughts about what a hard time we were having. I knew I had to think and work in positive ways with the good things I had—my healthy, obedient children and my hardworking husband. As a start, since we so desperately needed money, I had to go out and get a job.”

The madcap comedian convulses her audience with her favorite prop, a ratty fur piece. "My stole! Isn't that pitiful? How unsuccessful can a girl look? People think I'm wearing anchovies!"

She began working at a radio station and, for a time, had a 15-minute, daytime television show titled, Phyllis Diller, the Homely Friendmaker. She worked with a drama coach to develop skits and worked on her delivery, locked in her room with a full-length mirror and a tape recorder.

She started auditioning at comedy clubs, and was allowed to fill in for a comic who had recently quit. After the first night, she realized how much she still needed to learn. She worked continually on her gags, trying out new gestures and faces. She became more popular, eventually headlining at San Francisco’s Purple Onion and Hungry i comedy clubs. Within a few years after this interview, she was starring in movies with Bob Hope, and had her own primetime TV show.

The fame didn’t change her. She never forgot what it took to be successful. Besides, she told audiences, she didn’t have the looks that would let her grow conceited.

“You know what keeps me humble?” she’d say. “Mirrors!”

Remembering Comedian Phyllis Diller The Saturday Evening Post

Esther Riva Solomon and her ham baked in crust—jambon en croute.

When I was researching Julia Child recently, I came across an interesting 1962 article about French cooking: “French Food—U.S. Style” by Esther Riva Solomon. It must have been part of a work-in-progress because her book, titled, Instant Haute Cuisine, appeared the next year.

Ms. Solomon wanted to share what she had learned in Paris where, like Julia Child, she had attended the famous Cordon Bleu school for chefs. But her book appears to have sunk into obscurity while Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking became a long-running best-seller.

I’m only guessing here, for I am no chef (although I like to think I have mastered macaroni avec frommage et cut-up hot dogs), but the word “Instant” in Ms. Solomon’s title might explain why she is little remembered today.

In her Post article, she said, “Cordon Bleu was everything I’d hoped it would be, but the most valuable thing I learned there was a principle that would have shocked the chef. To him, it was impossible to turn out haute cuisine—classic French cookery—without spending hours in the kitchen, going through countless steps of preparation. Most American women don’t have that kind of time. Fortunately almost anyone can copy French masterpieces quickly, and so well that gourmets can’t tell the difference.”

“[In the Cordon Blue classes] I began to see that the more involved a dish, the less each subtlety matters in the total taste picture. The more steps, the more you can substitute and get the same effect…

“While the other students took copious notes, I found myself watching for ingredients which I could duplicate with the best of the processed foods available in supermarkets back home. Potato soup, for example. So many French soups start with potatoes. But there’s at least one excellent frozen potato soup I can buy almost anywhere. By substituting it in my Potage Grand Duc recipe (cream-of-cauliflower soup), I can save more than an hour of work. The soup manufacturer has already done the work for me.”

Apparently America’s cooks, and their families, could tell the difference between speedy cuisine and the old, slow method. It must have been surprising for Ms. Solomon to see American women actually finding the time and the patience to cook in the classic, painstaking manner. Given the choice between saving time and producing a classic poulet à l’estragon, most cooks think the extra time worth the investment.

The Other French Chef The Saturday Evening Post

Thank you for a balanced, thoughtful and insightful piece. I believe that, even with Normandy, Iwo and the Bulge, the Canal was the seminal moment, the tipping point, for our victory in the Pacific, a war we (the United States) won alone. As a combat veteran and the son of a WW2 veteran I sincerely thank you.

Respectfully,

– CWO2 Stephen A. (USAFA, Ret.)

Paul A. Nilsson, Col., US Army, as a Captain in Guadalcanal.

I wrote this piece in memory of one of those Army engineers who endured the Japanese suicide attacks, and the bombings every night, huddled in a watery trench in the jungle, waiting for dawn and another day of fixing the holes in Henderson Field.

He was one of the fortunate ones who survived, though he was eventually shipped stateside after contracting malaria and dengue fever and losing over a third of his weight. I know almost nothing of what he experienced. Like many World War II veterans, he would never speak of what he saw or endured to his sons.

Regarding “A Turning Point in the Solomons” The Saturday Evening Post

Philadelphia police search the field where the box, and boy, were found.

Recently, another reader took exception to the first reader’s assumption. According to Katie Sneeds, the complete and baffling anonymity of the child wouldn’t have to be the result of homelessness. It could easily be the collusion of several guilty consciences.

I think both writers have a point (and please don’t accuse me of trying to agree with everyone, or I’ll have to agree with you.) The child may have come from a family of immigrants or displaced persons who had entered the country without papers or official notice. He certainly might have become separated from his family. But he must have come from a home at some time. It’s difficult to imagine someone betraying the boy, selling him, or giving him away to be abused and discarded. But then, what other explanations can there be?

Ms. Sneeds adds:

“Someone knows who he is. Most likely more than one someone. They’re just not talking. Either bc they still don’t want to get invovled or bc they were involved and don’t want to get caught.

Some wife out there kept quiet bc she feared her abusive husband that did this or some husband remained quiet bc he wanted to protect his disturbed and abusive wife that did this. What a shame.”

Each day, the chance of finding a living witness becomes less probable. But 55 years is still within range of living memory for someone who knew about the betrayal of this child.

Just last week, a post by “Rutt” added this intriguing point:

“If the Lord wills, I MAY BE ABLE to help someday. My family rented our Phila home to some ‘out-of-towners’ who made my parents think they may be responsible. My parents died long ago, and this case came to my attention recently. I don’t know for sure, but I feel it is worth checking into.”

I urge the writer to pass along any information to a group of people who are trying to keep the case open. You can find them at America’s Unknown Child.

Regarding “The Boy In The Box” The Saturday Evening Post

“We need to keep being reminded of the way things were a few years back, as well as the horror of more recent catastrophes . It’s amazing how the American spirit seems to gain strength after such terrible events. As the song says . . . ‘proud to be an American.’” 

One of the great benefits of history is its ability to put current events in context. Looking back over the decades, recalling all the crises Americans have faced, I’m reminded that today’s troubles are almost always surpassed by some past disaster. (I’ll admit there is no precedent for the attack on the World Trade Center, though it’s not incomprehensible: we lost 2,800 Americans on Sept. 11, 2,400 at Pearl Harbor.)

Our old friend Bob McGowan added this thought.

“I’m glad this feature from ‘POST and Present’ appears this week. I’d actually forgotten (or blocked out) the complexities and violence that prevailed so heavily in 1968. I actually turned 11 that May, right between the two assassinations. Those do stand out in my mind, but when I read about so many of the other terrible things before and after that, all in 1968, it really is still shocking, 44 years later. We do need to be grateful that things aren’t worse than they are when put in this perspective.”

I think 1968 was a much more challenging year than 2012, which is less disastrous than disappointing. I will say, however, that when we have a problems we recount them with the volume turned ALL THE WAY UP.

Regarding “A Voice From A Truly Violent Year” The Saturday Evening Post

July Covers III – 75 & 25 Years Ago The Saturday Evening Post

July Covers II – 100, 75 & 25 Years Ago The Saturday Evening Post

July Covers I – 100, 75 & 25 Years Ago The Saturday Evening Post

Tens of thousands of [horses] died in a few days from the blistering sun a year ago. In one week 1,200 alone perished in the streets of New York City.

While on the subject of hot-weather advertising, I thought I’d throw in this item for the Autocrat, made by Oldsmobile (now in its 14th year!)

Reflections on a Scorching Weekend The Saturday Evening Post

Here’s to the Hydrox cookie (1908—2003, revived briefly in 2008). Even though it preceded the Oreo, there was a common perception that Hydrox was the imitation, not the original.

Its many fans claim that it was altogether superior to the Oreo: less sweet and slower to lose its crunch when dunked in milk. Unless the recipe is revived someday by its owner, Kellogg’s, the taste of a Hydrox cookie will be one of those lost pleasures of our past, and grandchildren will roll their eyes when we tell them of its superiority to the common Oreo.

Hydrox The Saturday Evening Post

June Covers III – 100, 75 & 50 Years Ago The Saturday Evening Post

This week’s Cover–50, 75, and 100 Years Ago The Saturday Evening Post

Continued from “The Familiar.”

At the same time, there’s a foreign ‘sense’ in the articles and illustrations a century ago.

It was an America where street corners were serenaded with hurdy-gurdy operators instead of saxophonists. An America that seemed to be continually shopping for socks (i.e., “hose”) and garters, straight-edged razors, long underwear, typewriters, and cigars.

It was an America with a sense of humor that included bit more of cruelty than we appreciate now. For example, this item—

When Fred Kelly first broke into Cleveland journalism he was put on police. One night he was sent to a big fire down on the flats. A reporter named Brown was sent with him. The fire was a ‘whale,’ and presently Brown disappeared. A wall had fallen and Kelly was sure Brown was under it. He rushed to the telephone and called up his city editor.

“Say!” he shouted into the telephone; “Brown is gone! He’s burned up!”

“What’s that?” asked the city editor.

“Brown is burned up, I tell you! He fell into the fire!”

“All right,” said the city editor, hanging up the telephone. “I’ll send down another man.”

There was a Fred C. Kelly who wrote for the Cleveland Plain Dealer in the 1900s. Perhaps it was considered funny because it actually happened.

Still.

May 25, 1912 — The Foreign The Saturday Evening Post

The articles cover the Democratic presidential campaign, the upcoming party conventions, the cost of living, and the continuing troubles on Wall Street. And the pages are strewn with brand names “as familiar as household words”: Firestone, Goodyear, Florsheim, and Smith & Wesson.

(The big craze of 1912: dis-attachment parenting)

May 25, 1912 — The Familiar The Saturday Evening Post