One of my secret addictions is the past.
It began, I think, when I started writing a novel in the form of a woman’s journal for the year 1914. As part of my research I started visiting the Oakland Library and reading each day’s Oakland Enquirer for that year. (One of my favorite scenes involved nearby Lake Merritt. It’s name, by the way, was not Lake Merritt; but Mayor Merritt had caused it to be created and Mayor Merritt owned a large percentage of the adjoining land that was thereby rendered much more valuable, and citizens therefore started calling it "Merritt’s Lake" as a term of derision, but no one today even recalls its real name. At any rate, on a day in January 1914 two brothers in an airplane flew over the lake, low, and one shot birds and then the other tried to scoop them up with a net of some sort – while many of Oakland’s citizens sat and watched, some of them from their "machines" (automobiles).
As the addiction deepened, I spent days in the Library of Congress, reading magazines and books from that era, and spent dollars on-line buying old novels everyone was reading a hundred years ago and no one remembers now. I finished the novel, though I never sent it out for publication, but I did not finish wondering about the past.
I love tidbits that tell me how different the world was then. For example, in some New England businessman’s autobiography I read that when he lived for a while in Washington his friend Calvin Coolidge, who had become president after the death of Warren G. Harding, would often appear at his house for breakfast, having taken a brisk walk alone through the streets of D.C. from the White House. Can we imagine Bush or Clinton, or even Obama, trying that? Too, in a biography of the fellow who ran both Cadillac and Lincoln, sequentially, I learned that as a young man he’d been frustrated by the prejudice of European craftsmen who believed Americans universally incapable of fine mechanical work – which sounds like something Americans later said about other ethnic groups.
I love tidbits that tell me how little has changed, too. I read a newspaper column one morning that included the complaint that "Baseball now is just a business – nothing like the pure and innocent game it was in the ‘60's." That's not an unusual sentiment these days; but it was written not this year or last but in 1914, and the writer was referring to the 1860's!
I love strange juxtapositions: for example, Gandhi and Will Rogers meeting in a country where each was a visitor, before Gandhi was at all famous; and one I learned more recently, the identity of the first American citizen to hear of the death of Stalin in 1953. He was a U.S. soldier on temporary loan to the Soviet Army, so that he heard the news before it was public internationally. His name was Johnny Cash. A third juxtaposition: Patton and MacArthur, during World War I, were pinned down by enemy fire, but a young lieutenant saved them by going against orders and firing artillery at their attackers, who were outside the area into which his orders allowed him to fire. The young lieutenant, more famous for another situation involving MacArthur, was a fellow from Missouri named Harry S. Truman. (His commanding officer gave him a tongue-lashing for going against orders.) One could even say that if Truman had not been insubordinate in 1917 or 1918, he might not have to deal with an insubordinate general more than thirty years later.
I love knowing odd things. I haven’t looked in any of the new biographies, but I would guess none mention an interesting fact that perhaps none of the writers know: that Abraham Lincoln did most of the writing of the Emancipation Proclamation in a young soldier’s little office somewhere on the White House grounds. He borrowed the office to get away from the press of other business, and as he worked on the writing he often sat staring thoughtfully at the spiders building webs at the windows. I know this only because at some point I happened to read a magazine piece the young soldier, by then older, published perhaps thirty years after the event. It’s not the kind of important fact anyone cares about; but it’s small, personal, quirky, human.
Or consider the bad roads in 1914. They were terrible. To prove it, the U.S. Army, which cared because poor transportation could be a security risk, send a group of young soldiers to cross the country by automobile, a miserable adventure at the time. No one understood about roads better than those young soldiers. Thus you’d imagine that if one of them, decades later, became President, he might create something like the Interstate Highway System. I guess his name would be Dwight D. Eisenhower.
In my heart I honor obscure men such as the D.C. Police Chief Pelham Glassford, who, when reporters inquired shortly after his appointment whether or not he had any relevant experience, replied with a smile that he did: he had been arrested once for driving his motorcycle too fast. His conduct during the Bonus Army episode in 1932 –generally forgotten until a recent history book discussed it – was humane and sensible.
I honor too that fellow who ran Cadillac and later Lincoln. Early in the history of automobiles, most of us know, they were started by cranks. Turning these cranks required a certain strength, and the crank could bounce back and strike person operating it, like the kick of a horse. Women did not usually start cars; and one who did was accidentally killed by the crank. This gentleman – whose name will come back to me in a moment – called in his people and ordered them to make it the company’s highest priority to develop some safer method to start cars. When they managed it, rather than taking the competitive advantage that exclusive possession of such a safety device could have provided, he shared the technology with the other automakers.
Not much of this matters. Now. But I like knowing it. I like wandering among the books and newspapers and popular magazines of the past, as through a strange wood, picking a flower or picking up an odd rock now and then, or photographing an unusual frog.
