Julia Child, born Aug. 15, 1912, would have turned 100 years old this week.

The incident has become legendary. People who know nothing else about Julia Child know what she said when the potato pancake she was cooking accidentally flipped out of the pan onto the kitchen counter.

With a truly French sangfroid, she advised, “If this happens, just scoop it back into the pan; remember that you are alone in the kitchen and nobody can see you.”

However, thousands did see her, and were both amused and reassured; even the great Julia Child, the author of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, could make mistakes. But she didn’t stop cooking. She just kept going.

The story symbolizes how Mrs. Child democratized gourmet cooking. She wanted to remove the mystique of French cuisine and make it accessible so anyone could experience the art of the great chefs of Paris.

It was no easy goal in 1961. French cooking was popularly considered to be strange, fussy, exotic, and less satisfying than an American’s meat-and-potatoes dinner.

Enter Mrs. Child, who had fallen in love with the food of Paris and dedicated herself to exploring, mastering, and sharing its pleasures.

French cooking couldn’t have chosen a better champion in America. Julia Child was relaxed, confident, and just as unpretentious as she was knowledgeable. When Lewis Lapham interviewed her for the Post in 1964, he found her “an even more engaging woman than she seems on television.”

She stands over six feet tall (her dress size she describes as “stately”), her eyes are grayish green, her hair brown and her complexion freckled.

A tall and determined woman, cheerful, steadfast and pure in heart, [she] appears as The French Chef on a weekly television show that is as funny as it is instructive.

Although an excellent cook, she possesses none of the pretentious mannerisms so often associated with practitioners of haute cuisine. She moves around in front of the camera utterly preoccupied with the problem at hand, addressing the television audience as if she were talking to herself or to a trusted friend.

Julia Child's home kitchen is now part of the collection at the Smithsonian Institution.

Each of her cooking lessons has about it the uncertainty of a reckless adventure. She has a way of losing things—either the butter, or the carrots she so carefully chopped into small cubes or, on one memorable occasion, a pot of cauliflower. Sometimes she forgets to put the seasoning in the ragout; sometimes she drops a turkey in the sink. But to Mrs. Child these slight misfortunes are of no importance, merely the expected hazards of a long and dirty war. Smiling and undismayed, secure in the knowledge that her cause is just, she bashes on.

When, at the end of the program, she at last brings the finished dish to the table, she does so with an air of delighted surprise, pleased to announce that once again the forces of art and reason have triumphed over primeval chaos.

Since its publication in 1961, Mastering the Art of French Cooking has sold over 2.5 million copies, thanks to Child’s television program The French Chef, which ran on public television for 10 years. It made converts of many a cook who might never have considered working through Mrs. Child’s massive collection of 542 recipes. But she also gained followers among Americans who rarely set foot in a kitchen.

A surprising number of [fan] letters arrive from people who know or care nothing about food but prize Mrs. Child chiefly for her ingenuous wit.

Mrs. Child gives a cooking demonstation to a public television audience.

 In New York’s Greenwich Village, for instance, a coterie of avant-garde painters and musicians gathers each week in a loft to watch The French Chef. …At first they assumed that she was doing a parody of the traditional cooking program, but even the discovery that she was playing it straight failed to dull their enthusiasm. In the garrets around Washington Square the introduction to the lesson on artichokes stands as the authoritative example of Mrs. Child’s humor and style.

The scene opened on an artichoke boiling in a pot of water and shrouded by a piece of cheesecloth, Mrs. Child, looming suddenly into view, lifted the cheesecloth with heavy tweezers and inquired, “What’s cooking under this gossamer veil? Why here’s a great big, bad artichoke, and some people are afraid of it.”

Of the other two remarks still quoted in the coffeehouses, the first concerned a chicken in a frying pan. “We just leave it there,” said Mrs. Child, “letting it make simple little cooking noises.”

The second had to do with crêpes suzette. As she put a match to it, she said, “You must be careful not to set your hair on fire.”

It’s not hard to imagine Mrs. Child, hair ablaze, telling viewers, “Now this is exactly what you don’t want to do,” before nonchalantly dousing the flames with baking soda.

It took courage, plus a sturdy sense of humor, for a Pasadena girl to master the cooking technique of Le Cordon Bleu culinary school in Paris. But Julia Child (née McWilliams) was born courageous. At the start of World War II, she immediately tried to enlist in the Women’s Army Corps, then in the Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service, but was disqualified both times because of her height. So she volunteered for America’s early intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services. “She hoped to become a spy,” Lapham wrote, “but was sent instead to Ceylon as a file clerk.”

Her fearless determination proved invaluable during the 12 years she spent writing her cookbook and the ten years of filming The French Chef. It wasn’t all raw courage, though. She took great care to prepare for the occasional disaster on the program, preparing two sets of all ingredients just in case.

Julia Child poses for a portrait taken by Elsa Dorfman in 1988.

“In the 68 shows that Mrs. Child has so far filmed, the cameras have stopped on only six occasions, the most spectacular of these being the times when a soufflé fell and when a kidney flambé failed to catch fire,” Lapham wrote.

On the day he visited the set, she was cooking lamb stew. “She began with a finished stew in the oven, a half-done stew simmering in a pot on the stove, and the materials for a third stew arranged before her on cutting boards.”

But even the best-prepared chef will meet mistakes, and Julia would move on barely breaking her stride. “At the moment when Mrs. Child proudly picked up the stew and said with a flourish, ‘And now we put it in the refrigerator,’ Mrs. Lockwood [an associate producer] flapped her hands excitedly. ‘Of course I don’t mean the refrigerator,’ said Mrs. Child, unperturbed, ‘I mean we put it in the oven.’”

After reading Lapham’s Everyone’s In The Kitchen With Julia and watching the movie Julie and Julia, you can appreciate Julia Child’s two great contributions to the dinner tables of America. The first was acquainting us with a broad palette of exquisite tastes, which most Americans would never have experienced. The second was encouraging cooks to forget their fears and self-doubts, and boldly explore new worlds of culinary pleasures.

It makes you wonder how many other rewarding experiences in life are waiting for an intrepid pioneer to introduce them to America.

“It Doesn’t Have To Be Perfect”: Honoring the Julia Child Centennial 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

This August marks the 70th anniversary of the assault on Guadalcanal.

But in early August, the U.S. began its offensive in the Solomon Islands, northeast of Australia. On the morning of August 7, 1942, the U.S. Marines made their first amphibious landing in 44 years at Guadalcanal.

The Japanese had landed on the island in June and started building an airfield.

Before the Japanese were finally forced to evacuate the island in early 1943, a total of 48 warships had been sunk. Ashore the Japanese lost 24,000 men; the U.S., 1,752.

When completed, it would enable their bombers to push the U.S. and Australia out of the Solomons and even strike the Australian mainland.

Samuel Eliot Morison was the official naval historian at the time, and had already begun writing the complete naval history of World War II. By the time he finished his 15-volume account, he had studied every naval engagement of the war. This is what he said about Guadalcanal in an article written on July 28, 1962, in the Post:

“You may search the seven seas in vain for an ocean graveyard with the wrecks of so many ships and the bones of so many sailors as that body of water between Guadalcanal, Savo and Florida islands which our bluejackets called Ironbottom Sound.

“There is something sinister and depressing about that Sound. [The marines] who rounded Cape Esperance in the darkness before dawn on 7 August remembered, ‘it gave you the creeps.’ Even the land smell failed to cheer sailors who had been long at sea; Guadalcanal gave out a rank, heavy stench of mud, slime, and jungle. And the serrated cone of Savo Island looked as sinister as the crest of a giant dinosaur emerging from the ocean depths.”

Marine LTVs approached neighboring island Tulagi.

The U.S. forces were understandably intimidated.  “The Japanese army in Malaya, the Philippines, and Java had acquired a reputation of invincibility, especially in jungle fighting, and its losses so far were minute. Their navy, despite its defeat at Midway, still had plenty of ships and planes to throw into the Solomons.” Fortunately, the Marine landing at Guadalcanal and neighboring Tulagi went well. By 4:00 PM, they had seized the unfinished airfield.

“Things looked very bright for the Expeditionary Force. Then, shortly after midnight, [began] the worst defeat in a fair fight ever inflicted on the United States Navy.” A Japanese task force of seven cruisers and one destroyer descended upon the Expeditionary Force, shot up the landing craft, and left the Marines without their naval supply line. Proceeding on to Savo island, they attacked first the Australian, then the American ships. Miscommunication, bad luck, poor judgment, and the element of surprise combined to give the Japanese a sizeable victory.

Japanese bombers attacked the American squadron off Guadalcanal.

“It was not a decisive battle and not an unprofitable defeat,” wrote Morison, “although the cost was heavy—four heavy cruisers and one destroyer a total loss; 1270 officers and men killed and 709 wounded. … The Navy held an investigation, which found the blame so evenly distributed that nobody was punished.  And it is well that Admiral Turner, primarily to blame, was not put ‘on the beach,’ because he became the leading practitioner of amphibious warfare in the Pacific. Many lessons were learned from this disastrous battle.”

As so often before, America’s entry into the war was marked by costly mistakes. Not being a warrior nation, we start each conflict with a civilian attitude and a reliance on what worked in the last war, and we are handed defeats. Fortunately, the American military always learns from these mistakes.

Smoke rose from a burning American ship in Savo Bay.

At night, the Marines threw back repeated suicide attacks by the Japanese garrison. In the morning, Army engineers began to repair the bombing damage to Henderson airfield so vital supplies could be flown in.

Marines operated a howitzer near Mount Austen on Guadalcanal, sketched by Sgt. Howard Brodie.

“Ship losses were fairly balanced; two American light cruisers and four destroyers against two Japanese destroyers and a battleship. … But the enemy bombardment mission was completely frustrated.”

The Grumman F4 at Henderson Field.

America didn’t know it was a turning point in the war. Military planners worried that every island battle across the Pacific would be just as long and bloody. But in 1962, Morison could point to Guadalcanal as “a definite shift of America from defensive to offensive, and of Japan in the opposite direction. Fortune now, for the first time, smiled on the Allies everywhere: not only here but in North Africa, at Stalingrad, and in Papua.”

Marines at rest in a Guadalcanal field, November 1942.

Credit for victory in the Solomons should be given to over 80,000 Allied soldiers who fought there, and especially the 10,000 who died. But just as valuable as their fierce devotion and sacrifice was America’s readiness to learn from mistakes, to bring in better commanders, and to continue fighting when the grim price seemed too high. It was this spirit that prompted Winston Churchill to say, in 1942, “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

A Turning Point in the Solomons The Saturday Evening Post

That sense of powerlessness would only be strengthened by the killing sprees that have become more frequent over the years. Since Charles Whitman shot 14 students at the University of Texas at Austin 46 years ago, 22 other Americans have opened fire on strangers in restaurants, schools, and, most recently, a movie theater. From 1990 to 2000, there were four of these shooting sprees. There have been six in the past two years.

When viewed alongside the current wave of political hostilities and mistrust in the country, some Americans have been tempted into seeing an imminent collapse of society. Sooner or later, the thinking goes, this streak of violence in American society will push the country to some disastrous end.

For perspective’s sake, we thought we’d offer some reflection on this subject from someone who lived in a truly violent and troubled year. In a Post article of 1968, Daniel Patrick Moynihan asked, “Has This Country Gone Mad?”

When Moynihan wrote this article, he was listed as merely a former Assistant Secretary of Labor. Later, he served four terms as New York

“Violence has rarely been altogether absent from American life… But I think the violence of this age is different: It is greater, more real, more personal, suffused throughout the society, associated with not one but a dozen issues and causes.

“The rise of black violence has been an… ominous and irrational turn… White terrorism against Negroes is an old and hideous aspect of American life, but… now it seems to be becoming a pastime for suburban housewives, taking target practice before television cameras, filling black silhouettes with white holes.

“Protest against war has been an old and honorable tradition in America, but with this war [in Vietnam] the peace movement itself has turned violent, threatening elected officials…

“One group after another appears to be withdrawing its consent from the agreements that have made us one of the most stable democracies in the history of the world.

“The espousal of violence, and violence itself, mount on every hand: private crime, organized crime; civil disorder at home to the point of insurrection, violence abroad on a scale unimagined.”

Students occupy an administration building at Columbia University, 1968.

Keep in mind what was taking place as Moynihan was writing. In 1968, black militant activists were promoting violent resistance to white society. Black Panthers and policemen were trading shots in Oakland, Calif. The war in Vietnam was expanding: the Tet Offensive had brought enemy troops to the gates of the American Embassy in Saigon, and the U.S. began moving troops into Laos. Anti-war protestors became more militant; students took over Columbia University and rioted outside the Democratic convention. The murder of Martin Luther King Jr. and the subsequent riots were barely a month in the past. Just a few months later, Robert Kennedy would be assassinated while campaigning for the presidency.

In 2012, as the media reports (and sometimes promotes) messages of bitter social division, the separation between conservatives and liberals seem wider than ever before. But for all the bluster and threats, it still isn’t as great as in 1968. Back then, reactionaries and radicals were trying to overturn society, while a great number of Americans seemed willing to watch the collapse.

Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Killed on April 4, 1968.

“A good many Americans do not hesitate to conclude from all this that American society is doomed, and they make no effort to conceal their great pleasure at this prospect. The ‘lust for apocalypse’… is something formidable to behold, especially in… the Ivy League radicals… [Meanwhile] Gov. George Wallace of Alabama… will have millions of Americans voting for him for President next fall… In East Harlem, a school official advises black children to get themselves guns and to practice using them. On silhouettes of suburban housewives, perhaps.

“Increasingly the nation exhibits the qualities of an individual going through a nervous breakdown. Is there anything to be done?”

Not a great deal, Moynihan answered, but a good beginning would be to abandon the myths that we could either control events or we were helpless. It would help, he said, if we “try to understand our collective strength as a people, and to try to see what is happening to that strength.

“The great power of the American nation…lies in our capacity to govern ourselves.

“Of the 123 members of the United Nations, there are fewer than a dozen that existed in 1914 and have not had their form of government changed by force since that time. We are one of those very fortunate few. More than luck is involved.”

Robert F. Kennedy. Killed June 6, 1968.

What separated us from them was “the ability to live with one another.” America had been so brilliantly successful at this that we no longer appreciated it. It was time to remember what an accomplishment creative harmony was.

“An Englishman, an expert on guerrilla warfare, put it concisely to a Washington friend about a year ago. The visitor was asked why American efforts to impart the rudiments of orderly government seemed to have so little success in underdeveloped countries. ‘Elemental,’ came the reply, ‘You teach them all your techniques, give them all the machinery and manuals of operation… The more you do it, the more they become convinced and bitterly resentful…  as they see it… you are deliberately withholding from them the one all-important secret that you have and they do not, and that is the knowledge of how to trust one another.”

This ability to trust, he continued, would not survive all the reckless talk about dissolution and despair. We shouldn’t come to accept civil hostilities and divisions as the natural state of America. “There must be a stop to this trend toward violence, and in particular, an immediate and passionate objection to any voice that gives aid and comfort to the present drift of events. That is almost a violent statement itself, but one surely warranted in the present state of the American republic.”

A Voice From a Truly Violent Year The Saturday Evening Post

Women, the company reasoned, were tactful, helpful, dedicated, attentive to details—and they could work harder than most men thought possible. They could deftly handle the callers who became furious when told the number they were calling was busy.

In those days, the job of a telephone operator—also called a “Hello Girl” or “Central”— was far from easy. First, she had to take all responsibility for electric shocks she received from her “operating board.” She also had to memorize the position of 300 phone numbers on the board directly in front of her.

She was expected to use only the language approved by the company. Numbers could be read only one way. (The number 2000 could only be spoken as “two oh, double-oh.” 4001 was “four, double-oh, one.”) The company also directed them to give the time in “railroad style”: not “twelve minutes to nine” but “eight forty-eight.” The rest of her speech was limited to a handful of approved expressions:

“Number?”

“They don’t answer.”

“Line busy.”

“Line out of order.”

“I have no such number; please refer to your directory.”

“Telephone has been taken out.”

“I will give you Information.”

“I will give you Chief Operator.”

Lastly, an operator had to be fast.

Central … takes care of six or seven customers a minute. During the rush hour she supplies 360 connections in 60 minutes; under stress of intense public excitement she has a record of answering 15 calls per minute. [“‘Hello’ Girls” by Harris Dickson, Sept 26, 1908]

There was one small compensation to all the drawbacks of being a “Hello Girl,” according to Dickson:

In her spare time, she dearly loves to listen to telephone chatter—by way of novelty and recreation.

Officially, the Bell Systems didn’t allow operators to listen in to conversations, Dickson reported. (In France, he added, privacy was enforced by the Government.) Operators were prohibited to marry anyone on a long list of forbidden bridegrooms: police employees, detectives, government officials, foreigners, etc. so they wouldn’t be tempted to divulge any secrets they overheard.

The anonymous author of “The Diary of a Telephone Girl: The Work of a Human Spider in a Web of Talking Wires” readily admitted eavesdropping.

There are sometimes long enough intervals … for me to be able to read or write letters. They put on a bell attachment that rings for every call, so I can’t fail to answer.

Of course I had plenty of time for listening, and it was so exciting sometimes that I hated to stop long enough to answer another call.

The other night I switched a friend of mine on to the line, opened his listening key and others in turn, so that for an hour he could overhear all sorts of private conversations, one after the other.

It’s so queer to press down the row of “listening keys” one after another and get bits of the different conversations!  Different voices, different dialects, different emotions, tempers, subjects! All sliced off like Neapolitan ice cream—little bits of pulsing human lives.  The girls do awfully mean things when they’re exasperated by angry subscribers. You can, for instance, switch three or four couples together—a pair of lovers, maybe, two business men and one woman gossiping to another—and then sit and hear them rage at each other.

It was interesting, too, to notice how the character of the talk changed as the hour grew late. The conversations seemed to grow more familiar and confidential and affectionate toward eleven o’clock.

There are several distinct types that I can recognize immediately and I almost know what they’re going to say.

First, at 7 o’clock, there are scattered calls, usually important, for doctors, perhaps; and you have to ring and ring, because the subscribers hate so to get up and answer the ‘phone.

At 8 o’clock, the nice, early-morning women come on to market with patient, affable butchers. They always want a tender joint and fresh vegetables. “Yes, ma’am!” say the butchers.

At 9, the business man in a hurry, in a loud, violent tone, impatient and cross, bullying the operator, and then, when he gets his number, lowering his voice to an amiable growl.

At 10, interminable conversation between women over the “flat-rate” ‘phones with infinite details as to clothes. There’s no five-minute limit to talks with this company and you can’t cut them off. I’ve known them to keep it up for three-quarters of an hour. [Imagine: talking on the phone for 45 minutes!—ed.]

At 11 to half-past there’s a lull, punctuated, perhaps, by nippy ladies calling up employment agencies [looking to replace a servant], or stupid servant girls replying.

At 11:30 till 12:30 there’s a wild rush, everybody trying to catch everybody else for lunch.

From then till 3 or so there are characteristic calls of all sorts: peevish, hurried females who use the nickel ‘phones in the downtown drug stores, and who have just got to have their numbers; silly schoolgirls mischievously calling up men they don’t know; sporting men [placing bets] in an unintelligible racing jargon, and so on.

From 3 to 4 it slows down again. Then there’s likely to be a flurry of women trying to call up stores before they close, or in time to catch the last deliveries.

At 5, wives begin to call up to know if husbands are coming home, and if not, why not? Apologetic replies from offices as business men attempt to explain. Or, if he’s coming, “Be sure to bring home a steak or a lobster.” He (in disgust): “Why couldn’t you have ordered them this morning?”

From 6 till 7 everybody seems to be too busy to call up, except the younger people, girls and youths, who joke and [plan to meet later]. This is a good hour, too, for the obsequious underling, the club hallboy or the clerk of a garage, who has taken orders and been respectful all day, to talk down to the telephone operator. Now, along toward 8, comes the nervous maiden, calling up her men, too uncertain of their reception to bully Central as she usually does.

From 9 on not many calls.

After 10:30 come the calls [for taxis and chauffeurs] and the hotel private exchanges begin to get busy.

Then, at 11 and on through till 2, the reporters with strange tales.

I hate the reporters. They always have the most thrillingly interesting conversations, but if I listen on the line they always know it and get mad. “ Get off the line, Central,” they say, “or I’ll stop talking!” No matter how softly I press back my listening key, they seem to know I’m listening, and then they talk so horridly that I simply have to shut the key.

With automation replacing most phone operators, there are far fewer people to eavesdrop on your conversation. Besides, the whole idea of private phone conversations seem quaint in an age of cell phones. You don’t need to become an eavesdropping operator when callers walk through airports and stores handing out free samples of their private lives.

What The Operators Overheard in 1907 The Saturday Evening Post

Here it is in 1912, as written for the Post by Maude Radford Warren.

Our children are spoiled, bad-mannered and ungrateful… in the American home the child rules from babyhood until it marries or otherwise leaves its home… the parents [provide food and money] to the child, asking for nothing but the chance to sacrifice themselves for their young.

Ms. Warren came to this conclusion by comparing the children of the new century to the offspring of Puritans and colonial pioneers.

 [The child] learned his manners and his morals by implication and example, though perhaps his religion was belted into him more consciously. There was no colonial parent who sighed, “My child is such a problem!” and no child who said, “My parents are so out-of-date!” There were no filial problems—there rarely are when the problem of getting the food supply is still in the nature of a hard adventure.

Perhaps American parents were unrealistic about their children, she reflected, because they’d been unrealistic about marriage.

Parents go on bravely planning and sacrificing for children without dreaming of expecting gratitude—at least, we tell ourselves, not while the children are little.

Our reward is to make them happy; our theory that, if we cannot make up our minds to live for our children, we ought not to have any.  We wish to make it up to them because the world cannot be just as ideal as it seemed when the honeymoon was shimmering.

Like many articles on the continuing crisis in parenting, “The Decay Of The American Parent” (Sep 14, 1912) starts with sensation and ends in moderation.

 Fortunately we are not all decayed parents. Plenty of us have struck the balance between self-abnegation and folly between indulgence and severity. Many of us have adapted the pedagogy of the schools to our own individual needs, throwing away what is stupid or valueless and digging into our own imaginative resources to make the naughty conduct of our children react on their own heads.

And even when we are handling our children badly—even when we have decayed as parents—from the ashes of us spring our young, who, as parents, will profit by our particular mistakes.

Ms. Warren would probably recognize the endless stream of expert advice for parents, though she might be surprised that the extremes range from ‘Tiger Moms’ to Attachment Mothering.

She probably wouldn’t recognize how much the world of the child has changed in 100 years. For the most part, they get the food, clothing, and shelter they need, but Security and Hope are less abundant today than five generations ago.

They cope with endlessly revised school curricula, drugs, violence, rapid and continual changes in technology, and a formidable challenge in escaping the pull of childhood and dependency when 85% of college graduates move back in with their parents for lack of ready work.

It wasn’t easy then. It’s not easy now.

Why Your Great Grandparents Were A Bunch of Spoiled Kids The Saturday Evening Post

The idea for a wireless control had been in development for a long time, as you can see in the 1938 advertisement for a wireless radio controller. Philco called its “Mystery Control” —

the most miraculous radio invention since radio itself… Imagine!  Remote Control, without wires or plug-in connections to radio, to electric outlet or anything else.

[Without] jumping up and running to and fro… Without moving a step… without budging from your chair… you turn the dial on the Mystery Control. Like magic, you hear the station change on the radio! You regulate volume! You even turn the radio off!

The controller worked with 11 different models of Philco radios, including the monstrous-looking console, the 116RX. The unit itself, according to the company, was no larger or heavier than a book. You can judge the size for yourself in this photo.

 You carry it around as easily… place it wherever the mood strikes you—anywhere, in any room, upstairs or downstairs, as near to the radio as you wish or as far away as you can enjoyably listen.

Isn’t this the one radio comfort you’ve wished for?  No more trudging back and forth to run the radio.

What about that old radio of yours, now?

It turned out that Mystery Control wasn’t the “radio comfort” everyone wanted. After three years, Philco took it out of production.

Looking back now, it’s surprising the product wasn’t successful. Philco knew this market. They’d been selling wireless remotes since 1931 in their Lazy X system:

“[S]omething really new in radio… a radio you can listen to in absolute ease and comfort. A radio that doubles the number of stations and variety of programs you enjoy—by making it so easy to change from one to another.”

Hard-wired remote for a 1950 Zenith TV.

Other radio makers must have sensed the demand for remote control, but they relied on the more dependable wired control. In 1950, the remote controls for RCA, Zenith, and Philco TVs were all connected by wire to the set.

Technology purists might protest that a wired controller isn’t truly “Remote Control.” But the term was formerly applied to all sorts of now-unremarkable devices. In the 1920s, the automotive industry, for example, used “remote control” to describe the hood release and door handles inside the car. And when they began mounting a transmission lever on the steering column in 1934, they referred to the new feature as “remote control gear shifting.”

"Remote control gear shifting."

POST script: The Wire Age

As we enter the wireless age, it’s interesting to read this item, written as the era of modern technology was just beginning.

 Future annalists may well describe the present period of our history as the wire age.  In no part of the economy of our daily lives are we divorced from wire. It is our slave, and yet an ever present master.

The editors point out to readers that they sleep on wire mattresses, eat food protected by wire screens, travel by cable car or by electric railways powered by wire, often passing over wire bridges. They announced themselves across telegraph or telephone wires, and made their way through the night streets of their city by great numbers of electric lights wired together.

Across our fields are strung thousands of miles of barbed wire. Our clocks are set by wires, our watches run by wires, our books are stitched with wires, our pictures hung by wires, and…

Wait for it…

… and our politics managed by wires.

Losing Touch: The Evolution of Remote Controls The Saturday Evening Post

It wasn’t always this way. Back in the early 1960s, many Americans were deeply concerned over what they saw as a lack of quality in television programming.

They had allowed television into their homes because it had promised them art, information, and entertainment. But after a decade of network broadcasting, most of what they got was mindless entertainment. Or so Newton Minow believed, and he was the head of the Federal Communications Commission. In 1961, he invited the country’s broadcasters—

“to sit down in front of your own television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day… Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.”

Originally, that line in the speech read “a vast wasteland of junk.” That’s how Minow’s speechwriter, John Bartlow Martin, had expressed it after watching an entire broadcast day of a Chicago station. In those 15 hours, he saw little more than cheap, unimaginative programming and an endless torrent of advertising.

The commercials, loud and frequent and long, seemed stupefying. One commercial asked, “Would you prefer this kind of whiteness?”… [When another] inquired, “Is your bathroom guestroom-fresh? Just one light whizzer whoosh in your bathroom.…” nearly 3,000,000 of us watched.

[By mid-morning, I had] witnessed some seventy commercials.

In the preceding nine hours, except for the news broadcasts and two brief interviews on the Today Show, nobody on Channel 5 had discussed a single idea.

The game shows of the morning were succeeded by soap operas in the afternoon.

We were entertained by Young Dr. Malone, a somewhat mystifying program to a one-time watcher, because so much seemed to have gone before, and From These Roots, which presented the same difficulty, though it did contain one memorable line… “Why, I’m in better shape now than I was before my brain operation.”

By the time he reached prime time, he wasn’t enjoying anything, not even the program called “the hottest show in television”: Sing Along With Mitch.

Mitch said, “Hi. Here we are again—to stir up the fires of memory,” and invited us in 11,700,000 homes to join him in singing “By the Light of the Silvery Moon.” The author did not join him and has no way of knowing how many of his fellow watchers joined him. Mitch introduced elaborate production numbers, with costumed dancers and singers and what looked to be a live horse. He was sponsored by cereal, eye make-up, wine and a soda drink. Near the end he said. “At this point anyone out there who’s not clutching the hand of someone he loves has a cold, cold heart.”

Which, after 15 hours, was Mr. Martin.

After wading through the trite violence of detective shows and the vapid chatter of talk shows, he thought the shows well deserved the description of “junk.”

Many intellectuals think it may be making idiots of us and destroying American culture.

Parents and educators deplore its effect on children.

Denouncing television is a national pastime.

The quality of television was a serious concern to Americans who’d seen the influence of television grow like nothing before it.

In 1946, 8,000 homes had television sets. Today 47,000,000 homes have them. In addition 5,500,000 homes have second sets, and public places have 1,500,000. Television is virtually inescapable.

In one month this year the average American home television set was turned on for six hours a day. Maybe some of that time nobody is watching. Advertisers doubt it; they spent more than $1,5000,000,000 on television in 1959.

All that money, Martin suggested, was pressuring the networks to churn out programs with no merit other than to generate large clumps of viewers.

But Americans still expected the networks to live up to a standard of good taste and service that would earn them the license to use the “public airwaves.” But public good was being outweighed by the desire to attract advertiser with the biggest viewership possible.

"The Government to the TV industry; FCC Chairman Newton Minow said, in effect, 'Clean your house or I will.'"

From this arises the “tyranny of ratings.” The A.C. Nielsen Company… attached an electronic device, to television sets in each of 1200 homes… mintended to represent a true sampling of American families…

Ratings have been hotly attacked.

Critics complain bitterly that ratings are abused. Ratings determine which programs stay on the air
and which go off. An evening show whose rating falls below 17 is likely to be dropped—it simply is not reaching enough people. Yet critics point out that such a program reaches more than 8,000,000 homes—can such a program be called a failure? And many things affect a program’s rating—how many local stations carried it, what programs it competed with, what program preceded it, even the weather.

LeRoy Collins, president of the National Association of Broadcasters, has said, “Ratings are a maze of statistics built from scanty facts. And they are like dope addiction in this industry. There is too much equating with the public interest what interests the public.”

One network producer was still promoting quality of programs over quantity of viewers. Fred Friendly, who would later become president of CBS, thought the FCC should be concerned that television might become a “vast wasteland.”

[Television] will get like Times Square. Times Square real estate used to have great value. But today it’s all gaudy and trashy, with jukeboxes and popcorn and junk, and much of it has lost property value and gone down, down, down. And television could go the same way.

He couldn’t have known then how prophetic was his next statement:

“If you breed a generation of Americans that wants to see excitement and violence all night, that’s all the audience you’re going to get.

POST script:

Just how bad were the prime-time programs of 1961? Some critics now consider the wasteland year to be the golden age of television, e.g.,

• Ed Sullivan
• Jack Benny
• The Andy Griffith Show
• Cheyenne
• Peter Gunn
• The Rifleman
• Wyatt Earp
• The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis
• Wanted Dead or Alive (with Steve McQueen)

• Hawaiian Eye (with a young Robert Conrad)
• Wagon Train
• The Untouchables
• The Real McCoys
• Bat Masterson
• 77 Sunset Strip
• Route 66
• Leave It To Beaver
• The Lawrence Welk Show
• Have Gun—Will Travel

• Gunsmoke
• Perry Mason
• Bonanza
• Rawhide
• The Flintstones
• Walt Disney Presents
• The Dick Van Dyke Show
• Alfred Hitchcock Presents
• My Three Sons
• The Twilight Zone

The Vast Wasteland The Saturday Evening Post

In the 61 years since then, this remarkable man has inspired a growing number of admirers. After his death, the Army recognized his service with a Bronze Star and Distinguished Service Cross. Today, he is being considered for the Medal of Honor by the President and for canonization by the Vatican.

The Post acquainted its readers with him in 1954, when it carried Ray M. Dowe, Jr.’s account of “The Ordeal of Chaplain Kapaun.” Dowe had been in the same prison, and knew how the Captain’s self-sacrifice had helped save the lives of many GIs.

Even before his internment, Dowe said, Father Kapaun had become a legend. He visited front-line troops on an old bicycle after his jeep was destroyed.

Helmet jammed down over his ears, pockets stuffed with apples and peaches he had scrounged from Korean orchards, he’d ride this bone-shaker over the rocky roads and the paths through the paddy fields until he came to the forward outposts. There he’d drop in a shallow hole beside a nervous rifleman, crack a joke or two, hand him a peach, say a little prayer with him and move on to the next hole.

It was his devotion to the wounded that finally cost him his freedom, and his life.

On November 2, 1950, the 8^th Cavalry was encircled by Communist troops at Unsan. The soldiers were ordered to get past the enemy as best they could and regroup behind American lines.

Father Kapaun, who was unwounded, might have escaped with them. He refused to go. Of his own free will he stayed on, helping Captain Clarence L. Anderson, the regimental surgeon, take care of the wounded. And there, just at dark, the Chinese took him as he said the last prayers over a dying man.

Kapaun and Dowe were marched to a prison camp where they were barely kept alive on 500 grams of millet or cracked corn every day.

Korea 1950: An exhausted soldier is evacuated by Capt. Jerome Dolan and Chaplain Kaplaun.

Then they cut it down to 450 grams. It was obvious, Father said, that we must either steal food or slowly starve. And in that dangerous enterprise we must have the help of some power beyond ourselves. So, standing before us all, he said a prayer to St. Dismas, the Good Thief, who was crucified at the right hand of Jesus, asking for his aid. I’ll never doubt the power of prayer again. Father, it seemed, could not fail.

At the risk of being shot by the guards, he’d sneak at night into the little fields around the compound… and find hidden potatoes and grain.

When men were called out to [the supply shed] Father would slip in at the end of the line [then] slide off into the bushes… He’d come up behind the shed, and while the rest of us started a row with the guards doling out the rations, he’d sneak in, snatch up a sack of cracked corn and scurry off into the bushes with it.

Father Kapaun took his greatest risks, Dowe said, to slip away with food and supplies to the isolated house where the wounded were kept.

He scrounged cotton undershirts to make bandages. He took their old bandages, foul with corruption, and sneaked them out and washed them and sneaked them back again. He picked the lice from their bodies, an inestimable service, for a man so weak he cannot pick his own lice soon will die.

He joked with them, and said prayers for them, and held them in his arms like children as delirium came upon them. But the main thing he did for them was to put into their hearts the will to live. For when you are wounded and sick and starving, it’s easy to give up and quietly die.

He gathered and washed the foul undergarments of the dead and distributed them to men so weak from dysentery they could not move, and he washed and tended these men as if they were little babies.

He traded his watch for a blanket, and cut it up to make warm socks for helpless men whose feet were freezing.

He did a thousand little things to keep us going.

Inevitably, Kapaun fell victim to the starvation and harsh conditions that struck down so many of his comrades. Captain Anderson, the camp surgeon, nursed him through two serious illnesses. Kapaun had just recovered from them when he contracted pneumonia and fell into a delirious fever.

I believe that period of semiconsciousness was the only happy time he knew during his captivity. Around him there seemed to gather all the people he had known in his boyhood on the farm in Kansas and in his school days. Babbling happily, sometimes laughing, he spoke to his mother and his father, and to the priests he’d known in seminary.

Finally, he sank into a deep and quiet sleep, and when he awoke, he was completely rational. The crisis had passed. He was getting well.

He was sitting up, eating and cracking jokes, when the guards came with a litter to take him to the hospital [where] men in extremis were left to lie untended in filth and freezing cold, until merciful death took them.

The doctors protested violently, but the Chinese ordered Kapaun onto a stretcher and forbad anyone from going along to care for him.

Father himself made no protest. He looked around the room at all of us standing there, and smiled. He held in his hands the golden ciborium, the little covered cup in which, long ago, he had carried the blessed communion bread.

“Tell them back home that I died a happy death,” he said, and smiled again.

Then he turned to me. “Don’t take it hard, Mike,” he said. “I’m going where I’ve always wanted to go. And when I get up there, I’ll say a prayer for all of you.”

I stood there, crying unashamed, as they took him down the road, the little gold cup still shining in his hand. Beside me stood Fezi Gurgin, a Turkish lieutenant, a Mohammedan. “To Allah who is my God,” said Fezi Bey, “I will say a prayer for him.”

A few days later he was dead.

We hasten to add that Emil J. Kapaun, while a remarkable and inspiring individual, made no greater sacrifice than any of the 36,000 Americans who died in that war, or the hundreds of thousands who lost their lives defending this country.

All are heroes. All deserve to be remembered for the price they paid for our liberty.

Father Kapaun helping a wounded comrade. Statue located in Pilsen, Kansas. Image taken by Art Davis… Wikipedia

The Non-Combatant Hero: Emil Kapaun The Saturday Evening Post

What we found was more Poe than we’d expected, including some surprises and a few mysteries—which would have pleased Mr. Poe.

One of the surprises was a short story—“A Succession of Sundays”—about a young man who is refused permission to marry his fiancé until, as her guardian puts it, “three Sundays come together in a week.” (This is eventually accomplished, as you might have figured, with some business with the International Date Line.)

The Post also printed one of Poe early poems, “To Helen.” (“Helen, thy beauty is to me/ Like those Nicean barks of yore…”) When it appeared on May 21, 1831, Poe was so little known that the editors felt obliged to give him an introduction:

We extract the following poetry from a small 18mo [octodecimo, i.e., 4” by 6”—ed.] volume of poems, by Edgar A. Poe, a part of which was published in a former edition. The author is, we believe, a member of the U.S. Corps of Cadets, as the volume is dedicated to that body.

Poe had dedicated his book to the cadets of West Point because many of them had loaned him money to have the book printed. By the time of it appeared, Poe was long gone from the Academy.

There’s also mystery of unsigned pieces that might be the work of Poe. One is a short story entitled “A Dream” from 1831. The Post gives no more identification of the author than the letter “P.”

The narrator of the story tells of his dream, in which he imagined he was a Pharisee who has just helped to crucify Christ.

I turned away, and wandered listlessly on, till I came to the centre of Jerusalem…… A feeling of conscious pride stole over me, as I looked over the broad fields and lofty mountains which surrounded this pride of the eastern world. On my right rose Mount Olivet, covered with shrubbery and vineyards; beyond that, and bounding the skirts of mortal vision, appeared mountains piled on mountains; on the left were the lovely plains of Judea; and I thought it was a bright picture of human existence

A perfect loveliness had thrown itself over animated nature.

But…… I felt a sudden coldness creeping over me. I instinctively turned towards the sun, and saw a hand slowly drawing a mantle of crepe over it……

I heard a muttered groan, as the spirit of darkness spread his pinions over an astonished world.

Unutterable despair now seized me. I could feel the flood of life slowly rolling back to its fountain, as the fearful thought stole over me, that the day of retribution had come…

I saw a light stream from a distant window, and made my way towards it… A widow was preparing the last morsel she could glean, for her dying babe. She had kindled a little fire; and I saw with what utter hopelessness of heart she beheld the flame sink away, like her own dying hopes.

Darkness covered the universe………

It’s a short work complete with unutterable dread, gloom, and a corpse rising from a grave. If Poe didn’t write this, he would have wanted to meet the author who did.

There are also the mysterious “Edgar poems,” which appeared in 1824-25, when Poe was living in Richmond, VA. The Post gives no clue to the poet’s identity other than what happens to be Poe’s first name.

Why  bury thy charms, lovely maid,

So long in a lone rural glen?

Ah! fly from obscurity’ shade,

And shine to advantage again.

How charming the Empress of Night

Appears from a cloud as she breaks,

And rolling so splendidly bright,

All the soul to wild ecstasy wakes……… etc.

[To Miss M. C. S. of Darby]

The use of “Edgar” might be simply the choice of some poet. (Someone with a better ear for poetry will have to tell us if Poe might have any of these pieces.) But there’s another piece of coincidence connected with a poem that begins

I will bend o’er the tomb of the virtuous and brave;

His deeds of the past I will silently number,

And think, while I pensively view his one grave,

How blest is his couch, and how peaceful his slumber…… etc.

Barnaby Rudge and his pet raven, Grip

This “Edgar” poem is entitled “La Fayette At the Tomb of Washington“ and it appeared in 1824, shortly after young Edgar Allan Poe was lieutenant of the youth honor guard that was reviewed by Lafayette when he visited Richmond.

The Post also printed Poe’s 1841 review of a novel by Charles Dickens. “Barnaby Rudge” was then appearing, by installments, in American magazines. In the review, Poe praised Dicken’s ability to convey “horror” and “terror”—literary matters he could appreciate. He was particularly impressed by the character of “Grip,” a talking pet raven that belongs to the title character.

[His] croakings are to be frequently, appropriately, and prophetically heard in the coarse of the narrative and [his] whole character will perform, in regard to that of the [protagonist], much the same part as does, in music, the accompaniment in respect to the air. Each is distinct. Each differs remarkably from the other. Yet between them there is a strong analogical resemblance; and, although each may exist apart, they form together a whole, which would be imperfect, wanting either.

This is clearly the design of Mr. Dickens — although he himself may not at present perceive it. In fact, beautiful as it is, and strikingly original with him, it cannot be questioned that he has been led to it less by artistical knowledge and reflection, than by that intuitive feeling for the forcible and the true, which is the sixth sense of the man of genius.

If Dickens didn’t know what a great literary device he’d stumbled on with his talking raven, Poe could certainly appreciate its potential: just three years later, it became the heart of his most famous poem.

To read “A Dream” and judge for yourself if it’s by Poe, go here.

Undiscovered Poe? Early Works Before ‘The Black Cat’ The Saturday Evening Post

Well, those days are gone, we’re glad to report. A fresh breeze is blowing money into town—about $6 Billion’s worth. That’s the amount that will be spent on this year’s elections.

But what will they get for that $6 Billion, beside mountains of flyers and hours of TV ads? Will it change the outcome of a presidential election?

No one can tell for certain. But back in 1948, George Gallup was convinced presidential campaigns didn’t change voters’ choices.

In a very real sense, presidential elections are over before they begin.

They are decided to a great extent by events that have occurred in the entire period between two presidential elections, rather than by the campaign.

In politics it is always later than you think.

Gallup had polled voters before and after the presidential elections of 1940 and 1944. He found very few voters switched their choice of candidates between June and November.

Of course, it would be foolish to claim that campaigns have no effect or change no votes. But they appear to have less effect and to change fewer votes than the average party leader would like to think.

Voters listen to campaigns pretty largely to confirm what they already think.

[Yet] in presidential races today, everything is made to depend on the campaign—as if the voters lived in a mental vacuum for three and a half years, and only snapped out of it between June and November of the fourth year.

The ineffectiveness of presidential campaigns prompted Gallup to ponder—

Is this wise—this pitching of all effort and money into a campaign and then coasting along for four years?

Perhaps all the hullabaloo, the verbal blasts and counterblasts, the rallies, parades, blaring of bands, kissing of babies, the feverish rushing about of stump speakers and the millions of dollars spent are not entirely necessary.

[Could] a political party give up campaigning and win? Probably not. Some kind of campaign would be needed to keep in line the voting intentions of those who do make up their minds early.

Perhaps political leaders could profitably spend more time trying to increase public acceptance of their party between elections.

Is this still true today? Will those billions of dollars and hours of politicking ultimately change no one’s mind in the 2012 presidential election?
One recent study indicates that presidential advertisements could persuade voters, but did little to inform or motivate them to vote. Another study found that campaigns could influence voters “but the nature of this influence appears to be rather complex”—a meager return for such a high cost.

Gallup’s 1948 article— “Do Campaigns Really Change Votes?” — challenged several assumptions cherished by politicians. Party platforms, for example, were useless (“most people don’t read them”) and political speeches had almost no impact on voters (“n the course of thirteen years of polling, covering more than 190 state, local, and national elections, we have found little evidence that one speech or even a series of speeches changes many votes”).

He also made this claim:

Don’t worry too much about the women’s vote or “how to win the women over.”

They don’t vote in a bloc and they don’t vote any differently from men.

The division of sentiment among women is almost identical with that among men. Rarely in recent years has it amounted to more than two percentage points. There does not appear to be any such thing as the woman’s viewpoint in politics as distinguished from the male viewpoint when it comes right down to voting on Election Day.

That may have been true in the 1940s, but the granddaughters of those women voters are showing far greater independence in their choice. The “gender gap” has become significant. In 2008, Barack Obama received 49% of his votes from men and 56% from women. Interestingly, 55% of the votes for George W. Bush came from men, 48% from women—again, a 7% difference.

The gap reached 10% in 2000 (43% of women, 53% of men voted for Bush), and in 1996, the difference between men and women voting for Bill Clinton was 11%.

When the gender gap was just 2%, Gallup made several conclusions that—we hasten to add—might have been valid for their time.

Men and women, dissimilar biologically and to some extent emotionally, tend to think almost exactly alike politically.

The reason seems to be that, on political matters, women generally accept the judgment of their men-folk. They take their cue from the opinions or prejudices of a husband, a father, a son or other male member of the family. Of course, this is not true of all women. But in the average household the woman goes on the theory that her man knows more about those things than she does.

This is 1948, remember.

Polls have found that when a change of political sentiment takes place, it almost always starts with the men, not the women. The women catch up with the trend later—after they’ve talked to the boss.

In all fairness, it should be said that there is no real reason why women should vote differently from men, even if they paid no attention to the ideas of the allegedly dominant male. No one would argue that women ought to vote differently just for the sake of being different. The only point here is that one must be cautious in talking about the woman’s viewpoint in politics. Although the average male candidate running for office usually makes quite an effort to win the feminine vote, it may be questioned whether such pains are necessary. If the male voters can be won over, the women will generally come along too.

Presumably, some of those billions of dollars are being spent right now to understand just why women don’t vote the same as men.

Big Money and Women Voters: Who Really Chooses the President? The Saturday Evening Post

That fact must surely have occurred to John Wilkes Booth in the days after he murdered Abraham Lincoln. He would have preferred being remembered as the greatest tragedian of his time, but he could be content with the enduring reputation as the Confederacy’s great avenger.

But how would he have felt if he knew he’d be remembered as a dark, leathery figure in a sideshow, exhibited to the general public for 25¢ (5¢ for children)?

The mummy, referred to as “John” by its owners, toured the country in the 1920s and ‘30s, oblivious to all the history books. As Alva Johnston reported in 1938,

Historians of the old school allege that John Wilkes Booth was killed in Garrett’s barn in Virginia on April 26, 1865, twelve days after he assassinated Lincoln.

In 1869 the body was turned over by the War Department to the Booth family and buried in the Booth plot in the Greenmount Cemetery at Baltimore. The body was identified by members of the family and by a dentist’s report.

But stories of Booth’s escape sprang to life from the moment of his death. Revisionists soon had two explanations of how Booth escaped from that barn.

Theory No. 1 is that Booth was warned and made his escape several hours before the barn was surrounded; No. 2 is that he escaped by an unwatched door after the barn was in flames.

For years afterward, people came forward with incredible stories of Booth’s escape.

John Wilkes Booth, before he lost his looks.

In April, 1898, American newspapers had carried reports that John Wilkes Booth had been seen in Brazil… This report brought two witnesses to light who testified that Booth had made his escape in 1865.

The first of these was Mrs. J. M. Christ [no relation]… In 1865, according to her story, she and her husband were on board the Mary Porter in Havana six weeks after the assassination when John Wilkes Booth came aboard and sailed with them to Nassau. She stated that, because Booth was still suffering from a broken leg, she gave up her cabin to him, and at the end of the voyage he rewarded her by giving her his ring with “J. W. B.” engraved inside. Having kept the secret for thirty-three years, Mrs. Christ now felt entitled to talk.

On the following day, Wilson D. Kenzie gave an interview to the same paper. He said that he had known Booth intimately at New Orleans and had been at the Garrett barn in Virginia when the man supposed to be Booth was killed. Kenzie said that the slain man was a sandy-headed fellow who bore no resemblance to Booth.

Then, in 1886, Finis L. Bates notified the War Department that he knew where they could get their hands on the real John Wilkes Booth. He was living in Texas under the name of John St. Helen. Bates had been nursing St. Helen through a long illness and, as Johnston wrote, “On what he apparently thought was his deathbed, St. Helen confessed himself to be John Wilkes Booth.”

The War Department expressed “no interest” in the matter, and Bates let the matter rest until St. Helen’s death in 1903.

The reward Finis Bates couldn't collect.

An undertaker at Enid embalmed the body in the expectation that the Booth family or the War Department would claim it. It remained unclaimed for years. Bates finally procured it.

This transfer was sanctioned by an Oklahoma judge, apparently on the theory that he would accord decent burial to his former client. Instead of this, Bates set out to commercialize his acquisition. He leased and rented his old friend… to showmen from time to time.… and wrote a book with the title The Escape and Suicide of John Wilkes Booth, and the subtitle, “Written for the Correction of History.”

John St. Helen, it turned out, was actually a drifter named David George. Mummified and displayed as John Wilkes Booth, he proved to have none of his namesake’s box-office appeal.

The star's mobile dressing room enabled the owner, when necessary, to leave town quickly.

The post-mortem career of this John Wilkes Booth… has been marked by almost continual failure and disaster. He has scattered ill-luck around almost as freely as Tutankhamen is supposed to have done. Nearly every showman who exhibited John has been ruined.

John … has had a strange knockabout existence. He has been bought and sold, leased, held under bond, kidnapped and seized for debt; has been repeatedly chased out of town by local authorities for not having a license or for violating other ordinances; has been threatened with hanging by indignant [Yankee] veterans. Up until 1937 he has been a consistent money loser.

At the Waco Cotton Palace about eighteen years ago, the mummy attracted the attention of William Evans, the Carnival King of the Southwest, who started John on his big-time career. Evans had intended to use John as the headliner of his carnival, but the new attraction was a disappointment from the start. John never paid expenses.

Bates died. His widow was disappointed in her first efforts to market the Booth chattel, but she finally sold it to the misguided Carnival King for $1000. It brought Evans nothing but bad luck. He suffered setback after setback in the carnival business, until he finally quit and retired to a small potato farm at Declo, Idaho.

Two owners later, “John” became part of the Jay Gould Million-Dollar Show, which toured Minnesota and South Dakota.

The spell of adversity which pursued John for many years was reversed last season, when the Harkins became connected with the Jay Gould Million-Dollar Show which toured Minnesota and South Dakota.

In fact, Johnston told Post readers, it appeared that John Wilkes Booth had just completed his most successful season since 1865.

The mummy toured less frequently over the years, and was last seen in public in 1976, shortly before it became the property of a private collector.

Could the lonely drifter David George have been John Wilkes Booth? Even if Booth had escaped his death in a Virginia barn, would he have denied himself all the recognition and notoriety he’d gain by revealing his identity? As Johnston reflected,

In his days on the legitimate stage, John Wilkes Booth had been a great actor. Some of his contemporaries thought him greater than his father, Junius Brutus Booth, or his brother, Edwin Booth.

John Wilkes Booth was, however, an almost perfect ham. Vanity was his ruling motive. His assassination of Lincoln was an act of pure vanity. Booth had gone through the Civil War without fighting; he could not bear to have the war heroes towering over him; he killed Lincoln in the hope of stealing the show from the fighting men.

The poor ham broke into history, but it might have given him pause, back in 1865, if he could have looked forward to 1920 and could have seen what was left of him competing unsuccessfully with bulldog-faced cows and six-legged sheep.

The Assassin’s Mummy; or, John Wilkes Booth’s Second Career The Saturday Evening Post

In both cases, there was an intense hunger for news—any news—that would explain what had just happened. In 1912, thanks to the telegraphic internet, every major newspaper had most of the details by the next day: the RMS Titanic, the world’s largest ocean liner, sailing from Southampton to New York, had struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic and sunk within hours. Over 1,500 passengers and crew members had drowned.

In 1912, as in 2001, learning what had happened proved far easier than learning why.

Several explanations were offered by American and British newspapers: the helmsman steered the wrong course; the builders used a poor design and cheap steel; the ship was moving at top speed even though the officers had been warned of icebergs; no one saw the iceberg until it was too late because the company refused to issue binoculars to its officers.

But when the Post’s editor wrote about the Titanic deaths, they directed no blame at Captain Smith, the White Star Line, or the Belfast ship builders. They pointed straight at the American and British governments.

The Titanic carried enough lifeboats to hold one third of her full complement of crew and passengers. The question, “What would happen to the other two thirds if the ship sank?” was never raised until it was too late.

A word from the Governments of Great Britain and the United States would have compelled every liner to carry enough lifeboats for all on board. That word was not spoken. The Governments took the chance of an unnecessary loss of over sixteen hundred lives.

Technically, the Titanic broke no law. British ocean liners were only required to carry 16 lifeboats, which could hold 1060 people. (The Titanic had 2,200 passengers and crew members, but only 20 lifeboats, and many of these were lowered away only partly full.)

The rules weren’t changed because the maritime authorities believed modern ships were inherently safe. In the ten years prior to the Titanic’s launch, over 6,000,000 passengers had crossed the Atlantic, and just 6 had been lost at sea. The British Board of Trade had begun regarding lifeboats as unnecessary equipment that took up valuable deck space.

The Saturday Evening Post of 1912 was as strong an advocate of business and capitalism as any American magazine. But its editors believed the businesses, left to themselves, would carelessly endanger lives.

Artist's Version of the Iroquois Fire.

Chicago had a fire ordinance relating to theaters. To enforce it rigidly would have put the manager of the Iroquois Theater to quite a little trouble and expense. It was not rigidly enforce—and [605 customers] died when the theater burned.

From a score of sickening examples, New York knew the danger of firetraps like the Triangle shirtwaist factory; but it didn’t care to interfere with the profits of the landlord—until the catastrophe! [146 garment workers died.]

Many stores in the United States are fire-traps, with inadequate exits, narrow aisles, and counters piled with inflammable stuff that would go up like tinder if a fire started. The Government knows this, but, generally speaking, will do nothing about it—to the injury of profits—until a holocaust somewhere forces its hand.

The Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire.

The public never knows. It reads of the steamer’s tennis court and swimming pool, of the theater’s handsome decorations; of the store’s bargain. The public goes, as a matter of course, with a vague assurance that there are laws and inspectors to make things safe.

Congress proposes to find out where the blame for the Titanic tragedy rests.

It rests, first of all, upon the Governments of the United States and Great Britain.

In fact, the Post reported, the U.S. government had been given fair warning of the problem, in no uncertain terms, two years before the Titanic took 1,500 people to their deaths. In February, 1910, the president of the International Seamen’s Union told Congress:

"Which?— Fate? — Or economy in life boats?" A 1912 cartoon.

There is not sailing today on any ocean a passenger vessel carrying the number of boats needed to take care of the passengers and crew, or a sufficient number of skilled men to handle the boats that are carried…

The average ship-owner knows this; but he must… carry passengers as cheaply as the other fellow.

If vessels are lost the insurance—that is, the public—pays the loss.

If passengers are lost that is very bad, but there is God to be blamed!

If seamen are lost, why there are plenty more idle men to be had on shore. They cost nothing, not even in the training, because they need no training, no skill being required by law.

As to the passengers, are they satisfied with these conditions? The passengers do not know. They are told a lot of rot about bulkheads, vessels so built that they will not sink or burn. Of course, we seamen know this to be the veriest nonsense.”

The warning may have been ignored because it principally concerned sailors, not the public. But the welfare of workers and the public, the editors concluded, was the same thing.

 

We wish to make the moral as broad as possible. Every one of us, every minute of the day, is in the same boat with the workingman. If we ignore his just complaints it is at our own peril.

 

The Inevitable Tragedy of the Titanic The Saturday Evening Post

Roller Derby was just one more of the endurance contests that drew crowds during the Great Depression. Spectators, many of whom were out of work and available for long hours of watching, identified with the contestants who pushed their bodies beyond endurance for desperately needed cash prizes.

The idea of a skating marathon, or ‘derby,’ wasn’t new. As early as 1885, New York’s Madison Square Garden hosted a six-day race so grueling that two contestants—including the winner of the race—died afterwards.

Roller skating was extremely popular that year, as an item in an ’85 Post reported:

There are about 400 persons engaged in the manufacture of these skates, and the monthly product is not far from 300,000 pairs. The most of these cost about 55 cents a pair…and cost the skater $6. [$150.00 today]

There are about 50,000 rinks in the country, and the demand for skates is greater than the supply. The craze will, of course, die out. [April 18, 1885]

Some Americans worried that any pastime that was so popular, particularly among women, might be immoral. In May, the Post observed:

Roller-skating rinks—and the moral and physical dangers to which they expose especially their younger patrons— is growing a more and more common topic of pulpit and newspaper discussion in nearly every part of the country.

Even the Post editors were concerned about all this roller skating among the young people:

Long before the jammer girls: Ladies' Skating fashions for 1906.

As a vehicle for the promotion of impure associations or unbecoming conduct, it is no better than numberless other methods… for gratifying innate propensities to evil which are bound to find outlets wherever they exist.

What we want is genuine “temperance” in all things. Especially if this be the case with amusements. There is not more reason why people should become intoxicated with these than with alcoholic stimulants.

Wherever roller-skating is practiced, let there be good air, good order, good manners, proper hours, and becoming etiquette in associations, and no fears need exist as to proper, immediate enjoyment or ultimate benefits.

[May 16, 1885]

One editor, however, discovered roller skating had a surprising spiritual benefit.

A Brooklyn preacher has threatened to expel members of his church who visit the skating rink. And yet nothing will bring a man to his knees so quickly as a pair of roller skates.

[Feb 28, 1885]

When the roller-skating derby was revived seventy years later, it had two new, popular features.  The first was brawling; the short jams that peppered the bouts led, dependably, to fighting and tumbling on the track. The second attraction was women—teams of determined women athletes who weren’t shy mixed it up in the pack.

By 1950, the sport was enjoying a post-war revival. Four million Americans bought tickets to derby events that year, as John Kobler reported in a Post article. Another 2,000,000 watched it on television, where it was broadcast as often as five times a week.

The sport may have been co-ed, Kobler wrote, but it was the women who stole the show—iconic crowd favorites like Gerry Murray, ‘Maw’ Bogash, and the appropriately named ‘Toughie’ Brashun.

'Slugger' Kealey promises an opponent, "I'll get you for that."

Brashun, though standing only four feet eleven and weighing in at 119, has a renowned knack of bringing her knee into contact with an opponent’s jaw, looking all the while as guileless as a baby.

The ladies of the oval fear nothing in human form. They play an infinitely rougher, meaner, more vindictive game than the men, and bear grudges for years. Masculine tempers will now and then explode into brawls, but peace is usually restored in the locker room. Not so among the women. They will perpetuate vendettas with the implacability of Corsican bandits. The [league owner] encourages this state of affairs in the interests of showmanship and, if no genuine ill feeling exists, invents it.

The rivalries might have been faked, but there was nothing artificial about the stamina and spirit shown by the women.

When cut, the men sensibly reach for the iodine bottle; when fractured, they submit to X-rays.

The women tend to dismiss such trifles. The New Yorks’ Virginia Rushing—described [by the team owner] as “the debutante type,” —played four months after a pulverizing tumble before a nagging pain persuaded her to visit a doctor. X-rays showed a broken pelvis, the specific treatment for which is absolute immobility. Somehow the break was healing anyway and, after a brief rest, Virginia returned to the melee as sassy as ever. Toughie Brashun once ran a splinter six inches into her thigh, requiring prompt surgery. Hustled off to the hospital against her will, she refused to doff her roller skates either in the ambulance or on the operating table. She was back on the track the same night.

A number of the women skaters are married and have children, but did not let pregnancy interrupt their exertions more than necessary. Quite a few skated into the fifth month. None miscarried.

What leads women, many of whom seem normally feminine and in some instances downright dainty, to spend their lives at this breakneck profession would probably constitute an enlightening psychological study. The phenomenon is easier to understand on the economic level. Twenty per cent of the gross box office goes directly to the players.

Up Next: The Roller Derby Resurgence

Women of the Roller Derby: Morals, Manners, and Muscle The Saturday Evening Post