OneGuyFromBarlick

He is worth a hundred of these city dolls. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance (1841), on the sturdy lad from Vermont.

“Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door.” It is doubtful that Ralph Waldo Emerson ever said this, but the phrase was credited to him for he was unstinting, even aggressive, in his praise for American inventiveness and for the “sturdy lad” who tries all the professions, “in successive years, and always, like a cat, falls on his feet.” But it wasn’t so easy as all that, and quite a few inventors sold their patents for peanuts or never established ownership, fell flat, and died poor. What might be worse is to be thought crazy, “touched in the head,” obsessed by dreams. So when William Kelly, a traveling salesman observing iron foundries in Kentucky, got an idea for making better steel quicker and more cheaply and then dropped everything to pursue that notion, his father-in-law thought him insane and had him examined by a local doctor. The sawbones failed of a cure, however, and Kelly (born in Pittsburgh on August 21, 1811) went on to perfect and ultimately to profit from his idea of using superheated forced air (and a few other tricks) to create cold steel out of hot iron. But ultimately was the right word, for the world did not beat a path to William Kelly’s door. First of all, it took him a decade (the 1840s) to make the process work, and then there were the problems of acquiring capital, finding markets, and weathering the depression of 1857. On top of all that, there was the British patent (1855, Henry Bessemer) for a very similar process. That news impelled Kelly to take out his own patent. To shorten a long legal story, Kelly did finally profit from his idea, not a lot (that was left to Bessemer and Andrew Carnegie) but enough to set himself up in Louisville real estate, banking, toolmaking, and the lecture circuit, in short, like Emerson’s cat, always falling on his feet. Or, perhaps, crazy like a fox. ©

[SCG historical note. The first use of hot blast in a blast furnace for smelting iron was Nielsen in 1828. LINK. Kelly may have got a clue from that. ]

People ask me to predict the Future, when all I want to do is prevent it. Ray Bradbury, 1982.

The Bradburys were among the many thousands of families who moved to California during the Great Depression. They weren’t Dust Bowl farmers, but from Waukegan, Illinois, where they grew up and married within close networks of relatives. Leonard Bradbury was an unemployed electrical and telephone lineman, his wife Esther a Swedish immigrant. Their son Ray Douglas Bradbury moved with them. Born on August 22, 1920, Ray liked Waukegan, but he fell in love with Los Angeles. It was perhaps inevitable (his middle name was for Douglas Fairbanks), and at only 14 he could be found roller skating down Hollywood Boulevard, looking for famous people. Among those he ran into was George Burns, who liked the lad and took him on as a writer. Although Ray was only 14, it wasn’t too surprising. He was already an avid reader and a productive writer (for himself, his uncles, aunts and cousins in Waukegan, and now for his Los Angeles high school) and he would go on from writing comedic one liners for Burns to become an iconic figure in science fiction. Before he was out of his teens he had already published in science fiction magazines. He sold his first story (for $13.75) in 1942, and in 1947 published a volume of short science fiction proclaimed (by The New York Times) to be “suitable for general consumption.” Indeed. His most famous novel is the dystopian Fahrenheit 451 (1953), and Bradbury himself (oddly) claimed that to be his only work of science fiction. Otherwise, he said, he wrote “fantasy,” entering a world where the moral and the mythic were palpably real and dramatically intertwined. Well versed in great literature, Ray Bradbury hoped his work would be regarded as “classic.” To which we can only say that time (a very plastic concept in his fiction) will tell. ©

In retrospect, although many were guilty, none was innocent. A J P Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War, 1961.

On August 23, 1939, Joseph Stalin and German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop signed a non-aggression pact. This treaty freed German Chancellor Adolf Hitler to invade Poland and Stalin to invade Finland. They did so, and as a result World War II began in Europe on 1st September. The Nazi-Soviet pact, as it’s often called, had other effects, as well. For instance, it further disillusioned many communists in western Europe and the USA, some of them already reeling from the Russian purges and show trials of the mid 1930s. It reinforced the sleight of hand by which many western social scientists and political thinkers lumped together two quite different ideologies (communism and fascism) as “totalitarianism”. And it led to an interpretation of the causes of the war which stressed Nazi aggression, Communist perfidy, and western appeasement. That the Nazis were aggressive, Stalin perfidious, and the western powers led by “appeasers” are all true enough to be called “factual,” but important questions about the interpretation of these truths have been raised by historians, perhaps most notably (and very nearly first) by the English scholar A. J. P. Taylor in his intentionally provocative The Origins of the Second World War. First published in 1961 and still in print (an unusual feat for a history), Taylor’s work not only raises important questions about the causes of and responsibility for the war, but is an intelligent exposition on the ways in which historical interpretations depend very much on exactly how historical questions are posed. If you are interested at all in why historians so often disagree about “the facts,” Taylor’s is a great book to read, even today. ©

Kenneth Baker was interviewed on the Radio 4 `Reflections' programme this morning. He recalls going to AJP Taylor's lectures while at Oxford University. They were held at an early hour each Monday morning which prompted Baker to ask Taylor why he didn't hold the lecture an hour later so that it would be likely to attract even more people. Taylor's reply was that if he did there wouldn't be a hall big enough in Oxford to accommodate the audience.

I heard that as well Tiz. I have always rated AJP and as Bob says, his theories have largely withstood the test of time.

You can’t set her on fire, you can’t sink her, and you can’t catch her. William Francis Gibbs, speaking of the SS United States, 1952.

The day of the self-taught expert, especially in engineering and science, is not quite over. I know a (very) few myself, including an engineer. But since I do not know his birthday, I will celebrate the naval architect William Francis Gibbs, born on August 24, 1888. Gibbs, born to wealth, became obsessed with ships at age 8, and over his father’s objections went to Harvard aiming to be an engineer. There he spent a lot of time alone, studying naval blueprints (including those of British warships), and unhappy, for he could not do the math or the physics. So William dropped out of Harvard and, his father having lost his fortune, worked his way through law school, at night, in New York. Meanwhile, he kept reading about shipbuilding, got a few crackpot ideas about making ships lighter, faster, and yet safer, and (after a couple of years of not being a good lawyer) wangled an apprenticeship with US Admiral (Ret.) David Taylor. Taylor then had his own firm but he had overseen the expansion of the navy under Teddy Roosevelt, and he was well connected. Taylor (and, later, Teddy’s cousin Franklin) liked Gibbs’s work, and in the 1930s Gibbs’s own firm designed and built the first of the Mahan class destroyers. Gibbs & Cox went on to design 70% of the navy’s vessels in WWII, including the famous landing crafts and the Liberty Ships (the latter with crucial help from Henry Kaiser, who also learned his engineering the hard way). But Gibbs’s crowning achievement, he thought, was the SS United States (1952), a luxury passenger liner of great speed, grace, and safety, but one that Gibbs had designed to be converted easily and cheaply into a troopship should the need arise. Fittingly, in 1967, the ship’s whistle saluted Gibbs as she sailed into New York Harbor on the day after his death, and only two years before her own, for her day had surely passed. She is now being fitted out as a tourist attraction in Gibbs’s home port of Philadelphia. ©

" I know a (very) few myself, including an engineer. But since I do not know his birthday. . . "

Uncle Bob - you must be the only one on this site who doesn't.

It's 14th February - every year.

I doubt if he was thinking of me..... Nice thought though.

to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations. National Park...

In 2016, Teddy Roosevelt’s party has announced that federal “ownership” of public lands was not a great idea, that much of that land should be “returned” to the states, where locals will know better what to do with it and might return much of it to private ownership because, the platform suggests, we all know that private property is better cared for than public property. “These are public lands,” the platform intones, and they should not be under the “absentee ownership . . . of official Washington.” While the platform does not specify national parks or wilderness areas, it’s understandable that critics have noted that the scattergun language incorporates principles that seem inherently hostile to national preserves and that offend both common sense and much historical evidence. The words also seem to vindicate (or, à la Voltaire, to understand and pardon) the depredations of the Bundy clan and its band of trespassers, layabouts, and welfare scroungers in Nevada and Oregon. And not a few critics (including distressed Republicans) have noticed the irony that August 25, 2016 is the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service Act. That act was itself born of bitter controversy and the realization that states, localities, and private persons were not good guardians of our public resources, and that opening the national parks to private development and local interests had led to environmental disasters and aesthetic nightmares. More specifically, in 1916, people (in both parties and across the “nation”) were offended by the garish exploitation of Yellowstone’s wonders, of the very “grand” canyon of the Colorado, and by the Hetch Hetchy reservoir at Yosemite (a pet project of the city of San Francisco). There are flaws in our national lands management, but this land is “ours” and “we the people” are the nation; we are not “absentee owners” and it would be better for “us” to put it right than to throw it away. ©

Vice President. It has such a nice ring to it. Geraldine Ferraro.

Since August 26 is (or certainly used to be) Women’s Equality Day, it would be good to remember Geraldine Ferraro, born on August 26, 1935. She would become the first female to be nominated (by a major party) for the vice-presidency. It was 1984, and Walter Mondale thought she might help wean women (and at least a few men) from their allegiance to Ronald Reagan. Ferraro certainly was an effective and attractive stump speaker and a good campaigner, but there is almost no evidence that she attracted a female vote (if such a thing existed in 1984), and she brought a few problems to the ticket, too. The press made much of her husband’s (John Zaccaro’s) failure to release his tax returns (perhaps more than it’s made, this year, about Trump’s refusal to do the same), and then when he did it was treated as an exposure of Geraldine’s wealth and character. Barbara Bush, married to the Republican Vice President, said it showed Ferraro was a “$4 million—I can’t say it, but it rhymes with rich.” There were several other frailties exposed by the Zaccaro returns. Ferraro handled these pretty well in interviews and press conferences, but her Vice Presidential debate with George Bush didn’t go well. Afterwards, he was reported to have exulted that he “kicked a little ass.” Those quotes from the Bushes, and a good deal of polling evidence, suggested that in 1984 the country was indeed not yet ready for a female vice-president or for taking down the “for men only” sign at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. But given the scope of that year’s Reagan landslide, a more sensible conclusion might be that Walter Mondale could not have made a better choice. And it symbolically broke the ice for Sarah Palin in 2008 and now, 32 years on, it may have pierced the glass ceiling for Hillary Clinton. ©

The Deerslayer is not a work of art in any sense . . . it is a literary delirium tremens. Mark Twain on Cooper's literary offenses.

By the time James Fenimore Cooper published The Deerslayer (on August 27, 1841) he had already seen the hero, Natty Bumppo, from the prime of life (Natty was about 30 in The Pathfinder) to the grave (Natty dies in The Prairie, aged 84). In The Deerslayer, Cooper filled things out, taking Natty Bumppo in the late bloom of his youth, more fully explaining Natty’s ‘blood-brother’ relationship with the “good” Indian, Chingachcook (who was himself, of course, The Last of the Mohicans). The five “Leatherstocking Tales” make a great fictional series, widely recognized as a classic and one that my grandfather made sure I read. And as Henry Nash Smith pointed out in his brilliant study, Virgin Land (1951), the Leatherstocking stories, in several critical respects, laid down a template for much later western fiction, from the ‘dime novel’ to the western film classics of the early 20th century, not least that the ‘real’ frontiersman (that is, the Natty type) almost never gets the girl or, if he does, then he becomes (by exactly so much) less heroic and more civilized. Thus, in High Noon, Gary Cooper rides off to married bliss with Grace Kelly, leaving his hero’s badge in the dust as she had originally demanded, but only after dispensing with the villains in a savage gunfight. Mark Twain also saw Cooper’s genius, but in a less favorable light, and in one of his funniest essays mercilessly lampooned “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” (1895), renaming the whole Leatherstocking saga “the broken twig” series because of the tiresome frequency with which broken twigs alert the good guys—or the bad guys—to the presence of an enemy. Twain counted eighteen such offenses, rechristened Chingachcook as “Chicago,” and analyzed several of Cooper’s most dramatic scenes to find them wanting in common sense, bereft of decent diction, and inattentive to the laws of physics and of human nature. ©

I have a dream today. M. L. King, Jr., Washington, DC, August 28, 1963.

On this day we have three reminders that things do change, sometimes fairly quickly, sometimes at a glacial pace. On August 28, 1955, in Money, Mississippi, Emmett Till, a black teen-ager from Chicago, was abducted from his uncle's home. The white men who took him thought that he had slighted a white woman. For this “crime,” Emmett was brutally murdered. His murderers were well known, were arrested, were brought to trial, and were found not guilty. Almost a century after the end of racial slavery, white supremacy still ruled in Money, Miss. But in the long run of history, “white supremacy” was a late and has proved to be a fragile construction, and only five years after that “trial,” on August 28, 1963, 200,000 people (of many hues) participated in a public meeting at the Lincoln Memorial, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. urged the country to make good on its promissory notes about equality and democracy in the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address. Within a very few years after that, civil rights legislation had secured for African-Americans (in Money, Mississippi, and elsewhere) the right to vote, made cases like Emmett Till’s murder subject to federal law, and required the impanelment of juries that embodied our citizenry’s diversity. So, in this election year of 2016, remember that (if you vote, or if you don’t) politics can matter. For the more theologically inclined, there is another, longer-range coincidence that illustrates how we and our ideas can, in time, alter our landscapes. For, on August 28, 430, St Augustine was born at Hippo (present day Annaba, Algeria). “Augustinian piety” would inspire many to move mountains, not least Martin Luther and Martin Luther King, Jr. ©

Das beste oder nichte. (The best or nothing at all.) Gottfried Daimler.

Under Stalin, the Soviets developed an enthusiasm for claiming they had invented many useful modern things, a tendency satirized in the comic strip Pogo when a couple of Krushing and Bulging communists invaded the Okefenokee Swamp during a World “Serious” and claimed to have invented “beisbul.” But we Americans are a bit too ready to claim primacy, not least when it comes to the internal combustion engine and its various noisy and smelly expressions. In truth, the Germans got there first, and it was on August 29, 1885, that Gottfried Daimler patented the Petroleum Reitwagon (the gas-driven “ride-wagon”). It looks like a motorcycle, and (for instance) the Brits accept it as a motorcycle, but many Americans testily object because of the Reitwagon’s permanently attached stabilizing wheels. But let’s get over it. It was a motorcycle, and it was the first vehicle driven by an internal combustion engine (a belt-drive contraption, although in the next year Daimler (a technically-inclined baker’s son) installed a piston and drive-shaft engine), and it was German. He then installed the engine in a boat, then in a coach, and by 1892 Daimler and his partner Wilhelm Maybach (a technically-inclined orphan whose carpenter father died when he was 12) were designing, building, and selling something that looks very much like an automobile. They were undoubtedly a clever and crafty pair, those Germans, but the history of their inventiveness shows that it had some limitations. They had a workable internal combustion engine by 1876, and it took them nine whole years to get it moving. Up to then it had been used only for stationary drives. It’s a bit reminiscent of the fact that the South American Incas had wheeled toys but had never thought to attach the wheels to a “ride-wagon.” Clearly, a bit of Yankee ingenuity would have speeded things up. ©

Nature abhors a straight line. Capability Brown.

For several centuries, when the English thought about gardens at all, they thought in French, and so in their gardens they dissected nature and laid it out in highly formal, geometric set pieces, where even individual trees were cut and shaped to human will. But in the 18th century, as the culture prepared itself for William Wordsworth’s wondrous daffodils and J. M. W. Turner’s majestic skies, the gardening possibility emerged that nature was not there to be conquered. Rather, its beauties sympathetically understood, nature could be improved. One who contributed mightily to this trend, even, some would say, created it, was “Capability” Brown. Born Lancelot Brown, in Northumberland, he was baptized on August 30, 1716, 300 years ago today. He was well educated for his time and class, and at 16 apprenticed to the head gardener on the estate where his father was the land agent. By the time Brown had finished work, in 1783, he’d remade gardening taste and fashion, and indeed had “improved” much of the nation’s landscape. He’s most famous today for his large projects, at Blenheim and Warwick castles for instance, or Milton Abbey or Chatsworth or Badminton, but he numbered among his clients many of England’s emergent middle classes and told each and every one of them that their patch of nature, however modest, was “capable” of being made better (hence his nickname). Scores of Capability Brown’s gardens still survive, and if you set yourself the task of seeing them all, you’d want to spend at least a year at it. At most of them, you would not see “natural” landscapes, certainly not wild ones, but the chances are pretty good that you would be seduced into thinking that you had. Capability Brown not only “improved” nature; he idealized it. ©

The pursuit of the good and evil are now linked in astronomy as in almost all science. Bernard Lovell, The Individual and the Universe, 1959.

One rationale for ‘public entertainments’ in science is that their often spectacular demonstrations inspire young people to become scientists. In my case, it didn’t work, but young Bernard Lovell was transfixed and transformed by such a performance while on a school outing: electric arcs, colorful explosions, great mid-air sparks, and the lecturer’s false teeth glowing with ultraviolet light. Born in a small Gloucestershire village on August 31, 1913, Lovell was by his own account a rude country lad interested only in church and cricket, when in 1930 he saw the Bristol physicist A. M. Tyndall rehearse, false choppers and all, for one of his Royal Institution Christmas Lectures. So he moved from his village to a city university, Bristol, and by 1937 had his PhD and a job at Manchester University. He’d shifted over to cloud chambers when war broke out, but right away he was retooled for radar work, both for defense against the Blitz and, later, to guide Allied planes on their own raids over Germany. And so it was by stages that Bernard Lovell (after 1961 Sir Bernard) became the world’s leading radio astronomer, and his great, arched radar dishes a permanent part of the landscape at what had been Manchester’s biological research station at Jodrell Bank in Cheshire. He had indeed, it would seem, moved away from village cricket and the Methodist Chapel, but never very far. At several points in his life he toyed with the idea of giving it all up and ascending to a chapel pulpit, and he played cricket until he was 83 and long retired from radio astronomy. His other “eccentricities” (he campaigned strenuously against “space pollution” and the nuclear arms race and studiously avoided working on the Sabbath) suggest that Lovell had carried some baggage on that first 7-mile trip from birth village to physics lab that he had never quite laid down. ©

If Lovell had lived a few hundred years earlier his journey from a Gloucestershire village to Bristol would probably have seen him experimenting in making brass using calamine (zinc carbonate), then making zinc by smelting calamine and later by smelting sphalerite (zinc sulphide). Bristol became the centre of British brass production. LINK

Self-government is our right, a thing born to us . . . Roger Casement.

In the 20th century, modern Irish nationalism was increasingly identified with Catholicism and Gaelic romanticism, often warring tendencies in themselves, but its origins were even more complicated. Notably, several early leaders were Protestant, indeed Ulster Protestant. The family background of Roger Casement embodied these ambiguities. His father, a British army officer of Ulster extraction, married a Catholic, and even before that had gone off as a volunteer to fight for the failed Hungarian Revolution of 1848. Roger was “born Protestant” in Catholic Dublin on September 1, 1864. Three years later his mother had him secretly baptized in the Roman faith, and then (both parents having died) he was raised in Ulster by staunchly Protestant uncles, aunts, and cousins. Several tours of duty in the British consular service strengthened Casement’s sympathies for colonial peoples, and his reports on atrocities against colonized peoples in the Congo and Peru won him a British knighthood in 1911. Yet already he had self-identified as an Irish nationalist. It’s possible that Irish Home Rule might have kept Casement within the pale of British sovereignty, but the good ship Home Rule foundered on the rocks of Ulster intransigence in the constitutional crisis of 1911, driving Casement into clandestine and semi-clandestine support of an armed uprising. This was already treason, but along came WWI, which drove Casement into the arms of the Germans and made him a marked man. Fresh off a German sub, he was captured, tried, publicly pilloried as a homosexual, and despite appeals from (inter alia) Arthur Conan Doyle, W. B. Yeats, and the United States Senate, Roger Casement was executed in London on August 3, 1916 and buried in quicklime. Today he is memorialized in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin, itself famous for “accepting” both Protestant and Catholic corpses (if only from 1832). ©

If you want to run, run a mile. If you want to experience a different life, run a marathon. Emile Zatopek.

As nearly as we can tell these things, it was 2,506 years ago to the day (September 2, 490 BCE) that the messenger Phidippides of Athens completed an astonishing set of runs. The Persian Army (Darius I) had invaded Greece and threatened the very survival of the Greek city-states. The city of Athens, then the leader of the Greek coalition, needed help, and sent Phidippides to militaristic Sparta (140 miles distant) for help. It took him only two days. The Spartans weren’t willing yet (some religious thing about the next full moon), so back Phidippides ran (another two days, another 140 miles), and then he accompanied the Athenian army to Marathon, 26 miles away, where against all the odds the Athenians won a miraculous victory. And of course the victory message was carried back to Athens by Phidippides. Perhaps not surprisingly, he collapsed and died at the city gates, but not before uttering his last words: “Rejoice: we are victorious.” He had indeed carried a portentous message. In the short to medium term, the victory over the Persians (repeated two decades later against Xerxes) helped spur the rise of high Greek civilization, especially at Athens: Aristotle, Plato, Pericles, Sophocles, Socrates, Euripides, Aristophanes, and all that. In the longer term it gave some of us shin splints, cramps, and fallen arches, and the rest of us the high point of the Summer Olympics, the 26 Mile “Marathon.” The first modern Olympic Marathon came in 1896, appropriately enough at Athens, and 1897 brought us the first Boston Marathon. Many other places have followed, including St. Louis. The 26.2 mile distance was established at the 1908 Olympics, in London, when 385 yards were added to enable the runners to pass by the royal box before breasting the tape, an absurd codicil to a good story and a “last straw” insult to the brave runner who died at the real finish line and thereby started it all. ©

And she's got brains enough for two, which is the exact quantity the girl who marries you will need. P. G. Wodehouse.

On September 3, 1966, a bit before noon, a young man clad in morning dress could be seen clambering through a high, narrow casement window in an open courtyard at Central Presbyterian Church in Des Moines, Iowa. It seemed hot work, for he perspired freely, but in truth it was only in the low 80s. On the other hand, the young man had reason to sweat. He was getting married later that day, at that church, and the church janitor had locked the bride’s, matron of honor’s, and bridesmaid’s dresses in a broom and bucket closet and then disappeared from the face of the earth, along with his keys. In due course, a burglary was perpetrated and the dresses were liberated. After a slight altercation with the bride’s mother (who feared that it would be bad luck should the couple see each other before they were at the altar), the correct dresses were fitted over the correct bodies, and once the bride’s uncle Clayton was found (though a Lutheran, he was to be the officiating minister) the wedding went ahead. Despite that before-the-altar meeting, our luck has been good. Today Paulette (Jensen) Bliss and I celebrate our 50th wedding anniversary. Fifty years. We are both very pleased about our cumulative good fortunes, chief amongst which are our son and daughter, our son-in-law, and our granddaughter. But it is by no means the least of our good luck that 20 people actually in attendance on September 3, 1966, are on the mailing list for these anniversary notes, including our best man and several others in the wedding party. Many things are needed to make marriages work, and not least among them are good friends and supportive family. Many thanks, then, to all who have been concerned in this marriage. ©

A lovely story! Congratulations for yesterday's 50th wedding anniversary Bob!

The gentle Lieutenant Bliss.

Though these notes are not for family reminiscences, I can’t let today pass without noting that it would have been dad’s 100th birthday. He (also Robert McKinley Bliss) was born in Ames, Iowa, on September 4, 1916, the first surviving baby of Ralph Kenneth and Ethel McKinley Bliss. Two brothers came along later, Bill and then Dick, and their annual fishing trips (with their friend Ernie, later with their sons) after the war would become the stuff of family legend. Before the war, the Bliss boys got up to more than the usual number of pranks, my father’s most famous one being a failed hydrogen sulfide attack on his high school’s ventilation system (the stink bomb went off in his pocket between classes). Dad’s war defined his life, and his war was a bad one. But while brother Bill (a surgeon with a great sideline in family psychiatry) knew all about it, I learned only the funny bits (pranks behind the lines and a vodka and eggs breakfast with a Soviet colonel on the banks of the Elbe) until, one night in December 1968 in the mental ward at Ames, I heard the rest, in a 12-hour, non-stop narrative: his captain’s very public suicide, his colonel’s nearly fatal enmity, and towering over it all the absolute horror of the Nazi “labor camp” at Nordhausen. Today we would call it all PTSD, and although the initials tend to hide the agony it’s a good thing to recognize publicly. Despite (or because) of all that, Dad was a super-accessible university teacher; a religious skeptic who enjoyed raising church mission funds because, he said, taxes were too low; a sardonic observer of and yet an active participant in politics (at first as a liberal Republican!!); and quite the best fisherman I have ever known, patience being his strongest suit. He was also great with kids, including me and my sister, but came into his own on that score with his grandchildren, all six of whom remember him lovingly. I do wish they had known him before 1968. ©

Races and varieties of the human family appear and disappear, but humanity remains. Frederick Douglass, circa 1890.

We do not know Frederick Douglass’s birthdate. Neither did he. It was one of the multifarious ways, he later wrote, that masters kept slaves from their own personhood. Once free, Douglass chose February 14 for his nativity, and some of his best celebrations occurred in his home in Washington, DC. He called it Cedar Hill, and on September 5, 1962, Cedar Hill became the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site. A desirable property, with its own extensive grounds, and much improved by Douglass himself, it commands the best views in the city. Douglass bought the house in 1878 thanks to his appointment, by President Rutherford Hayes, as US Marshall for Washington. Like many blacks who held that post in southern districts (if only during Republican administrations), he exercised most of his duties through white deputies. Although a free, indeed an eminent personage, Douglass was still subject to America’s peculiarly demeaning racial etiquette. Perhaps that was why he called the small gazebo he built on the Cedar Hill grounds his “Growlery,” where he retreated to growl about the past and present but also to outline a better future. In Cedar Hill, he lived with his first wife, Anna Murray, his “main pillar” until her death in 1882. Then, in 1884, he married Helen Pitts, an interracial match that outraged many. Douglass responded that he had first married someone the color of his mother, then someone the color of his father. Helen wrote that “love came to me, and I was not afraid to marry the man I loved.” After Douglass’s death, Helen bought the house and began the campaign to make Cedar Hill a national monument. Today, Frederick, Anna, and Helen rest side by side in Mount Hope Cemetery, Rochester, New York, a long way and far too many years (Frederick died in 1895, Helen in 1903) from the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site. ©

I would never have drawn my sword in the cause of America, if I could have conceived that thereby I was founding a land of slavery. Lafayette.

Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier was born in the Auvergne, France, on September 6, 1757. Better known as the Marquis de Lafayette, he was an aristocrat born into a family with military traditions, and in due course (at 13!!!) was commissioned an officer in the French army, the Musketeers to be exact. It seemed a stable life, and from the age of 11 he had a large income to help him enjoy it, but France was a-bubble with radical ideas, some of them emanating from the British colonies in America, and the young marquis (by 1774 a Captain of Dragoons) absorbed enough of them that his “heart was dedicated” to the cause of American independence. It took him three years to clear various emotional and diplomatic hurdles, but in June 1777 he arrived in America ready to do battle. Immediately Commissioned Major General (at the age of 20!!) he was wounded at Brandywine, endured the Valley Forge winter, and won the admiration of Congress for his “gallantry, skill, and prudence” (an interesting triumvir of military virtues). In the process he became close to General Washington, who gave Lafayette a command at Yorktown where all three of his virtues were critically important to the great victory of 1781. An American hero, Lafayette returned to France to become a hero of another Revolution, then an exile from it, and always a crusader for what he thought of as republicanism and the sovereignty of the people. He returned to the USA for a farewell tour in 1821-23, during which he visited old friends (many still lived, including Adams, Jefferson, and Madison) and set foot in, and was feted by, all 24 of the states. The Lafayette tour played an important role in shaping the new nation’s political culture, and it reminded Americans that their Revolution had depended ultimately on foreign help, for the Marquis de Lafayette was by no means the only “alien” who took their side in the revolutionary struggle. ©

Our Germans are insensitive, nest-feathering and kinky, the French are devious, nest-feathering and immoral, and the British are real twits David Croft, explaining the success of his sit-com about the French Resistance, ‘Allo! ‘Allo!

The great strength of British theater (broadly construed to include radio, television and films) depended on what we call in US football a “deep bench.” Local theaters, some amateur but a surprising number of them fully professional, fed youngsters up into the big time and, as importantly, offered a soft landing and elongated careers for journeymen actors (and producers, directors, and writers) who never made it big. We learned something of this when (circa 1985-95) we let rooms for actors at Lancaster’s repertory theatre, The Duke’s Playhouse. Young or old, and in between, they knew their trade and plied it with dedication and talent. The career of writer David Croft illustrates this ‘deep bench’ notion almost perfectly. Born to a theatrical family on September 7, 1922, Croft started percolating upwards at age 17 with a bit part in Goodbye Mr. Chips but then got his real training in military entertainments, 1939-45, first with ENSA in India and then with Combined Services Entertainment. It took Major Croft a while to find his feet after the war, but soon he was writing classic comedy, by himself or with other great names: Frank Muir, Dennis Norden, Benny Hill, and Frankie Howerd. But he really hit his stride after 1968, first with Jimmy Perry and then Jeremy Lloyd, between them writing up an honor roll of British TV comedy, including Dad’s Army (1968-77), It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum (1974-81), Are You Being Served? (1972-85), and ‘Allo! ‘Allo! (1982-92). These classic “sit-coms” in turn recruited fine actors, some not yet famous, many well past their early promise, from the “deep bench” of British theater and turned them into household names, insuring a star-studded gathering at Croft’s memorial service, St. Martin-in-the-Fields, London (the “actors’ church”), on March 15, 2012. ©

We ourselves unhorsed three knights with a single lance. Richard I on his conduct at Gisors, France, 1198. He was the first English monarch to use the royal we.

September 8, 1157 is traditionally (and accurately) the birthing date of Richard I of England, otherwise known as Coeur de Lion, Duke of Normandy, Duke of Aquitaine, and Count of Anjou. It was he who (in legend) was the “good King Richard” off winning the Holy Land for Christ while his bad brother, John, rode roughshod over England and, with his Normandized nobles, wrung treasure out of England’s remaining Saxon lords and tears, sweat, and blood from the Saxon peasantry. In revolt, Robin of Locksley rose up with his merry men, robbed from the rich to give to the poor, and was a particular headache for the sheriff of Nottingham (a villain’s role played with great gusto in 1991 by Alan Rickman). Like several other legends there is a bit of truth to it. But it would be a better start to look at Richard’s titles. Courageous he was, “lionhearted” indeed. He was often at war and often appeared at the head of his troops. Indeed he died of a crossbow wound incurred while out scouting a siege site on his own. But that last war was fought in France, Richard died and was buried in France, and like most “English” kings of this period it’s plausible to say he was more interested in his French lands and his dynastic ties to the French crown than he was in England or, indeed, in the Holy Land. He did set in motion an efficient English administration, from which he was able to bankroll very generously his great Crusade (of 1190-1192). Apropos of which he is alleged to have said he would have sold London had he found a buyer. He is not loved in Muslim lands, not so much because of his victories as for his bloodthirsty “no quarter” sacking of Acre. And to top it all off, dying of gangrene infection in April 1199, Richard made quite sure of his dynasty’s place by conferring his English kingdom, his French dukedoms, and all his treasure on that bad brother John. Robin Hood could not have been less pleased. ©