The Fastest Object in History

Back in September 1977, NASA launched Voyager I, a probe to study the outer reaches of the solar system and interspace (the area beyond our solar system).  After flybys of both Jupiter and Saturn, Voyager is continuing on her way at a speed of 38,000 miles an hour relative to the sun.  

Voyager I is the first object designed to leave the Solar System, so it carries a message from Earth to whomever—or perhaps whatever—may discover the itinerant spacecraft.  We will have to wait a while, however, since Voyager will reach the first star system, Gliese I, in only 40,000 years.

At some 15 billion miles, Voyager is the manmade object farthest from earth.

Or is it?

After 1945, the US military had a brand-new toy:  atomic weapons.  Naturally, they wanted to play with them (all in the name of research, of course).  Altogether, we did 1,054 nuclear tests above ground, underground, underwater, in the air, and in space.  The first, back in 1945, was just a little north of my home here in New Mexico.  (You know, where the jackrabbits glow in the dark so we can hunt the varmints at night!)

Some of the weirdest experiments were done in Operation Plumbbob—a series of 29 nuclear tests done in the Nevada desert back in 1957.  Both civilian and military structures were exposed to blasts to test the amount of damage they would suffer.  Surprise!  They were knocked flat.   Over 1200 pigs were left in cages at various distances to see what happened if you let a nuclear bomb go off at a barbecue.   And several tests were done with devices placed down deeply drilled shafts.  This was the same time when our government was thinking of building a new version of the Panama Canal by using nuclear bombs to blast a bigger canal across Nicaragua.

On July 26, 1957, the Army conducted Pascal-A, a test explosion down a 500-foot shaft.  This was supposed to be a relatively small test but the bomb yield proved to be much higher than expected, resulting in a jet of fire erupting from the hole, blasting hundreds of feet in the air.  This not being exactly what the Army wanted from what was supposed to be a secret test, they came up with a cunning plan:  they would weld a thick plate of armor resistant steel plate over the top of the bore hole and redo the test.

To be fair, the Army didn’t conduct the test without doing a little research:  they brought a scientist, Robert Brownlee, from Los Alamos National Laboratory for advice.  Brownlee promptly told them the idea was ridiculous and wouldn’t work, so the army went ahead and welded several tons of steel plating over the top of the tube and conducted the test anyway.  If you get the impression that the Army acted like a bunch of schoolboys playing with fireworks, gleefully ignoring what Brownlee said…. well, you’ve been reading closely.

On August 27, 1957, the test known as Pascal-B was detonated and the resulting nuclear blast, not knowing any better, went straight up the tube ripping the steel plate off, rocketing it into the stratosphere at 150,000 mph—about six times the speed needed for an object to reach escape velocity.  By the time the story made its way into print, that two-ton massive steel cap had been transformed into an ordinary manhole cover.  Well, it was steel and did cap off a round hole, so I guess that technically makes it a manhole cover.  The important thing to note was that the manhole cover was no longer on Earth.

This means a little rewriting of the history books is in order.  First, this was more than a month before Russia launched Sputnik, so technically, an American manhole cover was the first manmade object in space.  And while Sputnik remained in orbit for only three months before its orbit decayed and it burnt up reentering the atmosphere, the American manhole cover never reentered the atmosphere.

Unfortunately, that manhole cover wasn’t tracked because the technology for tracking objects that far out in space did not yet exist (nor did anyone at the test site expect to need it).  At the speed that chunk of steel was traveling, unless it collided with something, it would be even farther from Earth than Voyager I…And still moving.

You can find the story on any number of websites, and it was reported in magazine articles and reputable newspapers and… it’s mostly bullshit.  

There really was an Operation Plumbbob, and the two test explosions really did happen as reported.  What was not reported was that Robert Brownlee predicted exactly what would happen, that the steel plug would be blasted loose and sent soaring into the air.  Brownlee even calculated the top speed the steel cap would reach.  What is generally not reported is the rest of what Brownlee predicted.

The velocity of 150,000 mph was an initial velocity of an object traveling in a vacuum.  Since the steel cap—almost, but not quite a manhole cover—was at ground level it was immediately subject to a lot of air resistance.  The jet of heated plasma coming up that burr hole would have superheated the steel plate and turned it into the exact opposite of a meteor—instead of burning up as it entered our atmosphere, that steel cap burned up trying to leave it.  Until it burnt up, however, it was the fastest manmade object in history.

So, nothing was left of the steel plate long before it could have reached space?  Well, the that’s what the math says.  Or maybe Brownlee made a simple math error?  After all, there is nothing to prove that the steel cap actually burned up before it left Earth.  Maybe the first object to leave the solar system really was a manhole cover launched from Nevada!

Presidential Oaths of Office

Every few years, several thousand people stand in the freezing cold of Washington D.C. and listen to a couple of people recite the following:

 “I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Well, technically, the Vice-President takes a slightly different oath.  The oath the president takes comes straight from the constitution, the one for the Vice-President is the same as for Congressmen and Senators as the Veep’s only real job, besides attending funerals and waiting for the boss to croak, is to preside over the Senate.  And if the incumbent President is reelected, he gets a second inauguration, and though he technically doesn’t have to, take the same oath a second time.

So, if Biden wins the coming (looming) election, he doesn’t have to, but will take advantage of the good photo opportunity to take the oath a second time, but if Trump wins, he will have to take the oath again.  Which brings up the obvious—at least to me—question:  Though the constitution does not mandate that during the oath that the president’s left hand rest on a book, most presidents have elected to use a Bible to symbolizes the importance of the oath and the commitment to uphold the Constitution.  Since Donald Trump is now selling the “God Bless the U.S.A Bible” for only $59.95, will he elect to use one if he is elected?

Technically, the Bible Trump is endorsing is a rather standard large print King James translation of the Bible with a copy of the U.S. Constitution added at the end.  So much for the separation of church and state.

There would be a precedent for Trump using his own Bible.  Thomas Jefferson meticulously extracted and rearranged passages from the New Testament to focus solely on the teachings and moral principles of Jesus, excluding all supernatural elements and miracles.  Though his Bible is commonly referred to as the Jefferson Bible, the actual title is “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth”.  On March 4, 1801, when Thomas Jefferson was sworn in as president, this was the Bible he used for the ceremony.

Both versions of a presidential Bible would have been upsetting to President John Quincy Adams.  An ardent supporter of the separation of church and state, Adams chose to be sworn in on a law book.  Adams also started a fashion trend that remains to this day—he was the first president to wear long trousers at his inauguration, foregoing the traditional knee breeches.

This must have made an impression, since even though we are not sure what kind of book was used by the next four presidents), we do know that immediately after the oath was administered, Andrew Jackson kissed whatever book was used.  Considering the character of Jackson, the book might have been an artillery manual.

Franklin Pierce was sworn in on a law book.  Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn in on a Catholic Missal as he was sworn in on Air Force One following the assassination of John F. Kennedy.  And if you are wondering, Kennedy, as the first Catholic president, was sworn in of a Catholic Bible, meaning that it has seven more books than the 66 book Protestant Bible.  The specific Bible he used was an 1850 leather-bound edition of the Douay-Rheims tome, which had been handed down from his mother’s side of the family.

There are a handful of presidents who were sworn in with no book present at all.  These are all vice-presidents who suddenly became president on the sudden death of the President, including Theodore Roosevelt, Andrew Johnson, and Calvin Coolidge.

Some presidents doubled down and used two Bibles, one placed on top of the other.  Harry Truman used his family Bible placed on top of the Gutenberg Bible.  Both George H. W. Bush and Richard Nixon used their family Bibles and the Washington Bible.  Dwight D. Eisenhower used the Washington Bible and the Bible issued to him at West Point.

Which brings us to the Lincoln Bible, probably the most famous Bible used in Presidential inaugurations.  Donald Trump used it atop his family Bible in 2017 and Barack Obama used it along with the personal Bible of Dr. Martin Luther King.  And most famously of all, of course, Abraham Lincoln used it in 1861.  That was before the book was known as the Lincoln Bible.

After Lincoln won the election in 1860, the South moved slowly towards succession.  Due to the threats of violence, Lincoln had to sneak into Washington, leaving most of his family possessions, including his family Bible, to make their way slowly to Washington.  For the inauguration, he borrowed a Bible from the clerk of the Supreme Court, William Thomas Carroll, who kept the Bible in his office for official use.  

This means the Lincoln Bible is actually the Carroll Bible since Abe only saw the book that one time.  When Lincoln was sworn in again in 1865. Just weeks before his assassination, the Bible used was probably one provided by Chief Justice Chase, who administered the oath.  Later, Chase said the Bible was presented to the Lincoln family, but according to information left by Robert Todd Lincoln, the president’s eldest son, the family never received it.  The location of that Bible is still a mystery.

Sometime after the president’s assassination, the Carroll family donated the Bible used in Lincoln’s first inauguration to the Lincoln Family.  In 1928, Robert Todd Lincoln’s widow gifted the Bible to the Library of Congress where it still remains.

Visitors to the Library of Congress can see a copy of the Lincoln Bible, which is the 1853 Oxford University Press edition of the King James Bible.  These copies are not exactly rare:  if you are interested in owning your own “Lincoln Bible”, they sell for about $50 in the used book market.  Search for an Oxford University Press 1853 edition of the King James Bible to locate one.

Or wait until you are elected president and they’ll let you use the real one.

Elder Math

There was a time when I was very good in math.  Not to brag, but I was particularly good in geometry, especially at visualizing geometric forms in my mind and calculating angles of sides and the area of shapes.  I probably should have studied more math instead of history, since being a history teacher was an occupation only slightly more honorable than being a towel boy in a Turkish bath house and a little lower than being a piano player in a whorehouse.

Unfortunately, somewhere in the last half century, I have forgotten a lot of what I knew about math.  Now that I’m retired from teaching, I have gone back to school to sort of fill in some of the blank spots in my education.  Since retired faculty do not have to pay tuition to attend Enema U, I have discovered that Bachelor’s Degrees are kind of like potato chips—it’s hard to stop after the first one…Or the third…Or the fourth.  If I can hold out another couple of decades, I intend to collect the entire set.

Currently, I’m a senior (pun intended) in Economics—a field that uses a lot of math.  Accordingly, I decided to retake Calculus to try and brush up on what I had forgotten.   In the half century since I took the course, we have stopped using slide rules and have evidently renamed everything.   No matter what we study, I seem to suddenly remember it about three days after the test.

Being the oldest person in the room, by a factor of at least e^.69 (including the instructor) does have a few benefits.   The rest of the people in the room were raised with calculators and seem incapable of doing any math in their heads.  Did they stop teaching the multiplication tables in school?  

So, for the last couple of weeks, I have been refreshing myself on various math terms, trying to jog an aging memory.  Somewhere along the line, I came across the Kaprekar’s Constant, and I thought I would share it with you.

Kaprekar’s Constant is a strange little routine that inevitably produces the number 6174.  Let me explain how it works.  Pick any four digit number that uses two or more different numbers.  5483, 9888, or 1234 or all valid numbers while 1111 or 7777 are not.  Then arrange the four digits in descending order, subtract from that number the four digits in ascending order and note the remainder.  If necessary, add zero’s to the beginning of the number to produce four new digits.  

If you do this a maximum of 7 times, the product is always 6174.  Let me give you an example starting with 6810.

8610     The numbers in ascending order.
0168     The numbers in descending order.
8442     The difference

8442     The numbers in ascending order.
2448     The numbers in descending order.
5994     The difference

9954     The numbers in ascending order
4599     The numbers in descending order.
5355     The difference

5553     The numbers in ascending order.
3555     The numbers in descending order.
1998     The difference

9981     The numbers in ascending order.
1899     The numbers in descending order.
8082     The difference

8820     The numbers in ascending order.
0288     The numbers in descending order.
8532     The difference

8532     The numbers in ascending order.
2358     The numbers in descending order.
6174    The difference and Kaprekar’s Constant

It always ends up with a difference of 6174, and if you keep using the sequence, the difference stays the same.  (7641 − 1467 = 6174.)  The name comes from the Indian mathematician D. R. Kaprekar who discovered the sequence.

Naturally, I had to test this for myself, but didn’t want to sit around all day with a pen and paper, so I wrote a program in Basic to test the sequence.  Yes, I know, Basic is a poor programming language and damn near obsolete, but I first learned to program in Fortran and since Basic is descended from Fortran, I find it the easiest to use while writing simple programs on my Apple iPhone.  (Sue me, I’ve already established that I’m both old and nearly obsolete.)

Thankfully, a company called Misoft has an excellent Basic Interpreter App for the iPhone that allows you to write, execute, and store programs.  I frequently amuse myself by writing useless little programs to pass the time.  Just in case you are interested, I’ll give you the little program I wrote to play with Kaprekar’s Constant.

10 PRINT "Enter a 4-digit number:" 

20 INPUT N

30 IF N < 1000 OR N > 9999 THEN PRINT "Invalid input. Please enter a 4-digit number.": GOTO 10

40 PRINT "Starting number: "; N

50 REM Sort digits in descending order

60 A = INT(N / 1000)

70 B = INT((N - A * 1000) / 100)

80 C = INT((N - A * 1000 - B * 100) / 10)

90 D = N - A * 1000 - B * 100 - C * 10

100 N = A * 1000 + B * 100 + C * 10 + D

110 PRINT "Descending order: "; N

120 REM Sort digits in ascending order

130 A = INT(N / 1000)

140 B = INT((N - A * 1000) / 100)

150 C = INT((N - A * 1000 - B * 100) / 10)

160 D = N - A * 1000 - B * 100 - C * 10

170 N = D * 1000 + C * 100 + B * 10 + A

180 PRINT "Ascending order: "; N

190 REM Calculate the difference

200 DIFF = N - INT(N / 1000) * 1000

210 PRINT "Difference: "; DIFF

220 REM Repeat until Kaprekar's number (6174) is reached

230 IF DIFF = 6174 THEN PRINT "Reached Kaprekar's number!": END

240 N = DIFF

250 GOTO 50

For what it’s worth, Kapreskar also came up with a constant for three digit numbers, but I’ll let you discover it for yourself.

Is This Really the Best We Can Do?

A dozen years ago, the late P. J. O’Rourke said, “Don’t vote.  It just encourages the bastards.”  I cannot imagine what the political satirist would say if he were watching the current presidential campaign, but it might be unprintable.

In the last 48 hours alone, the poor American voter has been treated to the spectacles of Donald Trump selling Bibles while Joe Biden castigates the rich for not paying an elusive “fair share”, even as he charges folks $100,000 to have their pictures taken with him, Obama, and Clinton.  We should all note that the only other living president, George W. Bush, has wisely decided to stay distant from all this nonsense.

There is a third presidential candidate, Robert Kennedy, Jr., who evidently has spent the last 48 hours reshaping his tinfoil hat.  If there is a wacky conspiracy theory that Kennedy hasn’t endorsed, it is only because he hasn’t heard of it yet.  Without a doubt, the craziest theory he believes in is that he has any chance of actually being elected.

Are these really the three best men in America to lead the nation?  Obviously not, since according to a recent poll, a majority of Democrats want someone other than Joe Biden and a majority of Republican voters would prefer someone other than Donald Trump.  Think of that:  NEITHER candidate is the first choice of his own party members, yet somehow BOTH still have become their parties’ candidates.  There is obviously something wrong with the way our country’s parties choose OUR prospective leaders.

In case you are wondering, since Kennedy doesn’t really have a party behind him, we can only conjecture that the majority of his supporters would prefer a pony in their back yard.  I totally understand the impulse to vote for a third party candidate as a form of protest, but wouldn’t it be better to have that be a candidate who didn’t learn his science from the National Enquirer?

Ignoring the third and fourth-party candidates, why have the two major parties chosen two men that most of us would not buy a used car from?  Both men are clearly far too old and both have a long history of lying, plagiarism, and going back on their words.  Nor can either man really claim to be a leader since both are deliberately divisive, frequently calling voters who disagree with their policies such names as ‘ultra-MAGA” or “low information voters”.  Real leaders are uniters, whose first priority (not to mention several subsequent priorities) is something better than throwing red meat to their political base in an endless effort to attract campaign contributions.

Take the time to think about it for a few minutes.  Who would you really prefer to be our next president?  How do the two current major party candidates compare with your choice?  Personally, I can think of potential candidates in both parties who would make better leaders than any of the candidates currently vying for the office.  The reason why better candidates don’t end up as the eventual candidates is probably mainly a function of the way the political parties are run.

Political parties end up selecting candidates who are perceived as less suitable or effective for various reasons.  For too often, party candidates are not really selected by the voters but by the  complex interplay of internal party dynamics, including power struggles, factionalism, and influence from special interest groups.  These internal dynamics can lead to compromises and backroom deals that prioritize political expediency over candidate merit or qualifications.

Moreover, the candidate selection process within political parties often involves multiple stakeholders, including party leaders, elected officials, party elites, donors, and activists.  Conflicting interests and competing agendas among these stakeholders can result in candidates being chosen based on loyalty, fundraising prowess, or ideological alignment rather than their leadership abilities or policy expertise.

These various factors frequently end up resulting in a system in which the potential candidate is chosen by seniority.  A good example of this would be the presidential candidacy of Robert Dole back in 1996:  instead, it was widely viewed that he was chosen/should be chosen simply “because it was his turn”.

Party rules about selecting delegates—particularly in the Democratic Party—allow Party insiders to heavily influence who will eventually become the candidate.  In a proportional allocation system, delegates are awarded to candidates based on their share of the vote, allowing multiple candidates to accumulate delegates over time.  This can prolong the nomination process and give candidates with strong grassroots support a chance to remain competitive, even if they don't win outright in early contests.  Conversely, a winner-takes-all approach awards all delegates to the candidate who wins the most votes in a state or district, potentially allowing a front-runner to quickly amass a substantial delegate lead and secure the nomination early in the process.

Perhaps the most egregious sin of political parties is the practice of selecting superdelegates who are not bound by the results of primaries and caucuses.  These party elites, including elected officials and party leaders, have the autonomy to support any candidate they choose at the party convention, regardless of what the voters want.  Superdelegates have enormous influence—far more than their numbers would suggest—on whom the convention eventually selects as their candidates.

Until we change the current party system, we will probably continue to have elections in which we aren’t really voting for someone we want, but in which we are voting against the other party’s candidate.  

That’s no way to run an airline…or a nation!

The Tiara

When Queen Victoria married in 1840, she wore a white wedding dress, thereby setting a fashion trend that continues to this day. 

At least that is the popular version.  The fact that other members of royalty had previously worn white to their nuptials as far back as Mary Queen of Scots in 1558 is just one of those inconvenient facts that we should ignore.  As every native Texan knows, never let a few facts get in the way of a good story.

A score of years later, Abraham Lincoln, after being elected to the presidency, used the four months waiting time before the inauguration to grow a beard.  On the advice of his wife, his advisors, and Grace Bedell (an eleven-year-old supporter who famously wrote Lincoln suggesting he grow whiskers to conceal a weak chin), the president-elect adopted a style of beard known as the chin curtain beard.  The style caught on, and beards became a symbol of his determination and leadership during the Civil War.  (In the case of the author, a beard is a symbol of laziness and an aversion to using sharp implements near the throat before consuming coffee.)

In early twentieth century America, every well-dressed man wore an undershirt beneath his dress shirt.  Usually cotton, they served two functions:  they absorbed sweat, keeping the wearer cooler, drier and more comfortable when wearing a wool shirt.  The fashion quickly died out in 1934 when Americans went to the movie theater and watched Clark Gable take off his shirt in the movie It Happened One Night to reveal a bare chest.  While no documentation exists, sales of the undershirt dropped between 45-75% depending on which version of what may be an urban legend you choose to believe.

In January 1961, John F. Kennedy famously didn’t wear a hat at his inauguration, breaking tradition.  Almost immediately, the haberdashery industry was dealt a death blow, ending the popularity of men wear formal hats.  That’s the popular version anyway.  Actually, JFK did wear a hat to the inauguration, but took it off at the inauguration.

Kennedy was actually being heavily lobbied by the hat industry to wear hats more frequently  in a probably futile effort to revive a dying fashion trend.  In the years before his election, the trend to wear formal hats was already dying out in both Europe and America, perhaps because men in both continents, tired of wearing uniforms during the war, were just rejecting formal hats.  In the end, the Kennedy inauguration wasn’t the death of hats, it was the funeral.

And then there was Audrey Hepburn and that little black dress in Breakfast at Tiffany’s…. Well, you get the idea.  Sometimes it only takes a single event to rewrite the rules of what is fashionable.

All of the above is an introduction to what I really want to talk about:  tiaras.  You know, the shiny jewelry doohickey that women and little princesses-in-training wear whenever there is even the slightest justification.  I suppose it is scientifically impossible, but this weird craving for all things sparkly shared by women, crows and pack rats might indicate a hidden genetic link of some kind.

The origin of the word tiara comes from ancient Persia where cloth or metal bands were worn by the chiefs or nobility.  From there, the fashion quickly spread to Egypt and Greece.  The Greeks gave the victors in athletic competitions like the Olympics were awarded wreaths made of laurel or olive branches.  As the Roman Empire grew, they, too, adopted the tiara or diadem as a mark of rank, using gold or silver to create the head band.

Note.  Tiara?  Diadem?  What’s the difference.  Well, the tiara is much fancier and might have jewels (think of a grand crown, but smaller and designed to sit on the forehead rather than the entire head).   A diadem is a decorated head band or a simple circlet worn around the head.  Still confused?  Rocky Balboa wore a diadem while running through the streets of Philadelphia, Wonder Woman wears a tiara.

From the Roman Empire, the tiara spread across Europe, its use usually reserved for the highest royalty.  Over time, however, the tiara slowly fell out of fashion until the beginning of the nineteenth century and the rise of Emperor Napoleon.  Wanting the grandest empire in Europe, with the most formality and grandeur, Napoleon gifted his wife, Josephine with many jeweled tiaras, some of which are still the proud possessions of some of Europe’s royal families.

In Europe, as tiaras became popular again, aristocratic women began to wear them to formal occasions.  Etiquette dictated certain rules, however (and pretty much those rules still apply in certain circles today).  A woman could wear a tiara to any “white tie” event. An unmarried woman never wore a tiara, but on her wedding day, she wore a tiara owned by her family.  After the wedding, she wore either a tiara that was her personal property or a tiara owned by her husband’s family.  There was an exception made for royal princesses, who could wear tiaras belonging to the royal family after their eighteenth birthdays.

The height of the popularity of the tiara was the last two decades of the nineteenth century up to the start of the first World War.  The terrible death toll of the war, followed by a depression and yet another war, made the ostentatious wearing of jewelry unfashionable for all but the royal families.  

This suddenly changed when Elizabeth Taylor was given a diamond tiara by her husband, Mike Todd.  If you are counting, he was the third of seven husbands, and the one who probably started her fascination with diamonds.  As she later wrote in her autobiography:

“When he gave me this tiara, he said, ‘You’re my queen, and I think you should have a tiara.’ I wore it for the first time when we went to the Academy Awards. It was the most perfect night, because Mike’s film Around the World in 80 Days won for Best Picture. It wasn’t fashionable to wear tiaras then, but I wore it anyway, because he was my king.”

The tiara was created by Cartier sometime in the 1920's for Florence Gould, the wife of Frank Jay Gould, the famous owner of French Riviera Casinos and the son of the infamous railroad tycoon Jay Gould.  The tiara, known as the "Tiara of Nine Flights" was part of Florence Gould's extensive diamond collection that was sold after her death.

Liz wore the tiara everywhere.  She wore it to film openings; she wore it to Hollywood parties.  She would have worn it to grocery stores if she had stooped to go to grocery stores.  And as a fashion icon, she made the tiara popular again.  I spent a few minutes playing with Google this afternoon.  Think of a woman famous in the last fifty years, then google their name with ‘tiara’ and almost immediately, a photo of her wearing a tiara pops up.  Beyonce, Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Sara Jessica Parker, Ivanka Trump, Angelina Jolie, Madonna, Oprah…. Evidently, everyone.  Even my wife, The Doc, has one, but she won it in a bowling tournament.

When Liz passed away in 2011, her famous jewel collection (which included not only the tiara but the famous pearl known as La Peregrina) sold at auction for $156 million, of which slightly over $4 million was for the tiara.  The identity of the anonymous buyer remains a secret, at least for now.

Sooner or later, someone will show up wearing it.

Alantropa

My eldest son, What’s-His-Name, was helping me install a security camera in the backyard.  Hidden behind a mass of English Ivy climbing the back wall, it was so camouflaged than if either of us turned to pick up a tool, it took us a few seconds to relocate where in the mass of dense green leaves we had hidden the camera.

Finished, the two of us sat down at the patio table to enjoy a couple of beers, (respectively, root and Tecate), as a reward for our work just as my younger son, The-Other-One, came home from school.  

“Hey,” he said, “When did we get a security camera?”

The-Other-One is red/green colorblind, and this was another example of how most forms of camouflage simply didn’t work on him.  There were a lot of things he couldn’t see—like the large piece of red cellophane he hit with the lawn mower, that scattered red confetti all over the front yard—and evidently, things he could see that we couldn’t.  I’ve often wished I could briefly see through his eyes, to see the world differently.

Fresh viewpoints challenge our assumptions and offer new ways of looking at the world.  They can spark creativity and innovation by breaking us out of conventional thinking.

Sometimes, the most important discoveries come from those who see things differently.  Eccentric thinkers might notice patterns or connections that others miss, leading to breakthroughs in science, art, or problem-solving.

Or to put it succinctly, the nut point of view is frequently valuable.  People who see the world differently and come up with new ideas are the essential yeast that keeps society rising.

Herman Sörgel, a German architect in the 1920s, was an entire cake of such yeast.  He came up with a brilliant plan on for preventing another cataclysmic world war by providing so much wealth and resources to Europe that such a war would never again be necessary.  His plan was to provide sufficient Lebensraum by damming up the Straits of Gibraltar and substantially draining the Mediterranean Sea.

Sörgel forsaw a future world that was dominated by the Americas and by an inevitable Pan-Asian Union.  For Europe to compete in such a world, it would be necessary for Europe to acquire more land and resources.  By damming up certain key points around the Mediterranean, and allowing evaporation to lower the water level, there would be  substantially more land in both Europe and North Africa available to colonize.  Sörgel’s plan called for the creation of three large freshwater lakes in the Sahara with canals linking the new farmland to the now smaller Mediterranean Sea.  

At right is an artist’s drawing of what the area would look right after the sea had dropped sufficiently.  If you have a little trouble orienting yourself, slightly to the left of the center is an enlarged Sicily connected to what is now the boot-turned-galosh of Italy.  Greece, upper right, is substantially bigger.

A little over 5.3 million years ago, the sea first crashed through the Straits of Gibraltar, creating a tidal wave that roared across the Mediterranean area in what geologists call the Zanclean Flood.  What Sörgel had in mind was to reverse most of that flood.

The plan had five major components.  A massive hydroelectric dam across the Straits of Gibraltar that would, over the course of the next century, allow the sea level east of the dam to drop by more than 600 feet.  Three additional dams, one located at the Dardanelles to hold back the Black Sea, a second on the Congo River creating the freshwater lakes in the Sahara, and the last between Sicily and Tunisia creating a highway between Italy and North Africa and lowering the water level even more to the east.  Lastly, the Suez Canal would have to be deepened and extended northward through the new area uncovered by the receding water.  The Suez Canal would cease to be a sea level canal, but one requiring a series of massive locks to lower the ships down to the level of the Mediterranean.

Not only would there be new land, prompting new settlements along the newly created coast, there would be expanded canals linking the newly created arable farmland in the Sahara to ports along the sea.  Highways and railroads that crossed the dams at Gibraltar and Sicily would promote trade between the two continents.  Imagine bullet trains connecting Paris with the Congo or Berlin with Kenya.

For Sörgel, the project, which he named Alantropa, had almost endless benefits.  The new land would help alleviate overpopulation, the construction would provide jobs, and the expansion of European political culture into Africa would promote stability and peace.  How could it miss?—after all, since as we all know, Europe has a history almost free from warfare.

Though Sörgel first introduced his plan shortly after the first World War, it was later supported by Adolf Hitler, who firmly believed in acquiring new territory and frequently justified the war by Germany’s need for lebensraum.

Okay, it is a great and ambitious project, but there are a few small problems.  First, it just assumes that all of Africa would go on cheerfully content to be the colonial possession of European powers.   Nor is it likely that every coastal town along the Mediterranean Sea would have been happy to find themselves miles inland.

The scope of the project is enormous, perhaps impossibly so.  When Sörgel first proposed his series of massive dams, there was not enough concrete in the world to complete the project.  Even today, a century later, it would be a massive project, one that would dwarf even the American undertaking of landing a man on the moon.

There are also a few other problems.  It would, of course, be an ecological nightmare, destroying vast numbers of ecosystems.  It would alter enough land that it would change worldwide climate patterns and probably alter the Gulf Stream.

Sörgel passed away in 1952, and with his death the popularity of the project slowly vanished.  Today, the only place where Alantropa is mentioned is in a few Science Fiction books, particularly those that deal with alternative realities.  If such a book interests you, I suggest  “The Atlantropa Articles” by Cody Franklin and Joseph Pisenti.  In their book, the second World War never occurs, and after Hitler creates Alantropa, the protagonist travels through a Europe united under the swastika

There is, of course, one last problem with the plan.  Sörgel was not entirely correct in his belief that most wars are fought over resources, such as land, oil, or (as becomes increasing likely for the near future), water.  Sörgel believed that if he created more resources, this would end the need for conflict, but he failed to realize that what nations really fight over is not the resources, but the control of those resources.

Blacker than Black

Let’s talk pigments, the substances added to other objects to give our world a little color.  And then, we’ll talk about how some artists are engaging in a pigment war.

Shortly after the discovery of fire in prehistoric times, someone discovered that you could use charcoal to make dark marks on rocks and wood.  This was almost immediately followed by the discovery that mixing crushed charcoal with a watery clay paste produced a paint that could be used for cave paintings and rock art.   It probably didn’t take very long before a variety of pigments were sourced from minerals, plants, and animal sources.

Ancient civilizations such as the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans extensively used pigments in their art and architecture.  They developed techniques for extracting pigments from various natural sources, including minerals like malachite and lapis lazuli, plants like madder and saffron, and insects like cochineal.

During the Middle Ages, the production and trade of pigments became more organized, with centers of pigment production emerging in regions known for their natural resources.  Medieval artists used pigments like vermilion, ultramarine, and lead white in illuminated manuscripts, frescoes, and religious art.

The Renaissance and Baroque periods saw advancements in pigment technology, with artists experimenting with new pigments and techniques.  During this time, the availability of pigments expanded as trade routes opened, bringing exotic materials like Indian yellow and Brazilian green to Europe.

The Industrial Revolution brought rapid and significant changes to the pigment industry.  Synthetic pigments, produced from coal tar derivatives and other chemical compounds, were developed, leading to a wider range of colors and more affordable pigments.  Aniline dyes revolutionized the textile dyeing industry in the 19th century because they were less expensive to produce and offered a much wider range of colors than natural dyes.  Synthetic pigments like cadmium red and phthalo blue became popular among artists.  

In the 20th and 21st centuries, the pigment industry continued to innovate, with advancements in organic and inorganic pigment synthesis.  Today, artists have access to a vast array of pigments in various forms, including traditional powdered pigments, oil paints, watercolors, acrylics, and digital pigments used in digital art.  Some of the newer pigments are formulated by scientists who create compounds designed specifically for the way they either absorb or reflect certain wavelengths of light.

In 2014, Surrey NanoSystems announced the development of Vantablack, the black blackest black of anything black.  (If you say that out loud several times in a row, you’ll end up doing a bad impersonation of Dracula.)  According to its creators, this pigment is the "world's darkest material" absorbing up to 99.965% of visible light.  

If you will allow a very non-scientific explanation, Vantablack is a layer of almost perfectly hemispherical rods.  When light hits the surface of the material, the light is “trapped” by reflecting off the mesh of carbon nanotubes with almost none escaping as reflected light.  How big are these nanotubes?  About a millionth of a millimeter each, or roughly about one thousandth of a spider web.

Perhaps this is a case of a picture being worth a thousand words.  The photo at the right shows a crumpled piece of aluminum foil with part of the foil coated with Vantablack.  The coated area is just as crumpled as the rest of the foil. 

As you can imagine, there are a lot of people thinking about military applications for this product.  And there are a lot of artists who would like to experiment with it—but they can’t.

In 2014, Anish Kapoor, a British contemporary artist and sculptor, purchased the exclusive rights to the pigment from Surrey NanoSystems for an undisclosed price.  In the last decade, Kapoor has produced a whole series of works using the super pigment.  I’d show you a couple of pictures of them, but they are too black to make out any details.  (I do like the large round hole in the floor with both the bottom and the sides of the hole are painted with Vantablack—I’ll bet standing on the edge is frightening.)

Kapoor is not the first artist to hog a new pigment, and so far, he has resisted all efforts to allow other artists to even experiment with it.  While other artists had not shared a pigment that produced a tint or color, Kapoor was Bogarting the blackest black.  This was particularly upsetting to Stuart Semple, another British artist, and the founder of Culture Hustle, a London based online art store that specializes in exotic pigments.  Semple publicly denounced Kapoor for not allowing the rest of the art world to use the new pigment.

Semple had previously marketed pigments that claimed to the be the pinkest pink in the world or the greenest green.  I’m not really sure what those terms mean, since while we can easily define black as the absence of light, I’m not sure how to define the essence of pink.  Is it the presence of Barbie? 

Semple’s online store, available here, will gladly sell you a bottle of the ultimate pink or the greenest green, and they even have a new pigment, Black 4.0, that they claim—without proof—is even darker than Vantablack.  There is only one small condition, you have to check a little box next to this notice:

*Note: By adding this product to your cart you confirm that you are not Anish Kapoor, you are in no way affiliated to Anish Kapoor, you are not purchasing this item on behalf of Anish Kapoor or an associate of Anish Kapoor. To the best of your knowledge, information and belief this material will not make it's way into the hands of Anish Kapoor.

Semple may be willing to stop the feud, however:  Culture Hustle also markets a line of luminescent pigments.  The website contains a notice that they will gladly ship Anish Kapoor those pigments free of charge.  As the notice claims:  “We want you to know how lovely it feels to #shareTheLight.”

Lost But Not Forgotten

The French frigate Reine de France pulled up to the docks in Philadelphia and offloaded three large wooden crates. Loaded onto a freight wagon, they were taken to the home of the French Minister, Anne-Cesar de la Cuzerne. There, the first two crates were carefully opened to reveal full-sized portraits, one of King Louis XVI and the other of his spouse, Marie Antoinette. The third crate contained elaborate frames for the paintings.

During the Revolutionary War, Ben Franklin, in his capacity as Ambassador to France, had asked the King for the favor of Royal Portraits to be given to the new nation. At the time, the United States was desperate for French assistance in fighting the British. While the King didn’t particularly like the idea of a independent democracy, he loved the idea of any country fighting the British, so he generously gifted the revolution with muskets, black powder, and a small loan (at 5% interest), and sent a French fleet to patrol off the American coast. Without this French assistance, it is doubtful that the American Revolution would have been successful.

A gift of Royal Portraits was a big deal: it was considered an important diplomatic symbol, and while the revolutionary war was being fought, the King didn’t think the United States was important enough to rate such a gift. On the other hand, several years after the war had ended with the signing of the Treaty of Paris, the King decided it was the time to honor the request because, by sending the paintings, the King was not so subtly reminding the new nation about the promises made to the French people (including that 5% loan).

It was obvious that what Louis wanted was a tiny, little, weak United States, hemmed in by the British to the North, French Louisiana to the West, and Spanish Florida to the South—in other words, a country just big enough to make payments on that loan while staying a thorn in the side of the British.

In the United States, a large number of people no longer wanted either the paintings or to be reminded of their obligations to a French monarch. For two years, the paintings remained in the French Minister’s house and became something of a tourist attraction, as a steady stream of people came to gawk at them. Finally, the two portraits were hung in the government’s offices, first in New York, then in Philadelphia, and then (finally), in the capitol in Washington, in 1800.

The two paintings were actually copies of existing paintings. The original of the King’s portrait was done by Antoine-Francoise Collet and the portrait of Marie Antoinette was done by her close friend, Élizabeth Louise Viegée le Brun. Similar copies of the portrait of the Queen had been given to other countries, but only the original remains today.

By 1812, the United States was at war with the British again, in perhaps one of the dumbest wars ever fought. We were mad that both the British and the French—continually at war with each other—had each forbidden us to trade with their opposite—effectively eliminating all trade with Europe. Going to war with Britain over it was stupid, but we were a young country and had to learn all our lessons the hard way.

The hardest of these lessons occurred August 24, 1814, when the British marched into Washington, and started setting fire to all the government buildings…including the capitol and the White House. We all know the story of Dolly Madison and her slave, Paul Jennings, saving the Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington (the image that appears on the one-dollar bill). What is not as widely known is that the residents of Washington, realizing that the American troops had abandoned the city, seized the opportunity to loot the government buildings. Perhaps they reasoned that it was better that the national booty be grabbed by Americans instead of the British.

Or, maybe, the British stole the portraits, since we know for a fact that the Redcoats did their own share of looting. After setting the town on fire, the Royal Navy sailed to Bermuda with their spoils, included four paintings of King George III and Queen Charlotte, a grandfather clock and President James Madison's personal government receipt book. Today, the paintings hang in the Bermuda government buildings, while the grandfather clock is still held by the descendants of one of the naval officers.

Officially, the last time the two French royal portraits were seen was just before the British troops arrived. By the time they left, the capitol building was destroyed, along with anything that was left inside it. What happened to the two portraits?

Officially, the government decided that the portraits had been destroyed in the fire. Unofficially, rumors started circulating almost immediately that the paintings had been removed before the British arrived. Over the years, several items the locals had stolen found their way back into the newly rebuilt capitol.

In 1850, a Southern newspaper reported that an unnamed plantation owner had purchased the two paintings for his home. Two decades later, a New York newspaper revealed that the paintings were being sold privately by a dealer in town. Similar rumors continued to circulate well into the Twentieth Century.

The portraits probably were destroyed. But, if you are ever in a garage sale and someone is selling a painting of a woman with a widescreen television under her dress, pick it up for me!

Fifty Years!

It’s turned into an epic tale lasting more than half a century, so I guess I have to start at the beginning.  As Mal said, “You can’t open the book of my life and jump in the middle.”

It was spring in 1972 and I was working the graveyard shift at the Plaza Hotel in Houston.  Working at night was great for a college student:  if you finished your work early, there was ample time to study.  And it taught you that sleep was a luxury reserved for weekends.

One night, the night auditor’s girlfriend brought him a pizza and the two of them shared it while I was wasting time with paperwork.  I was more than a little pissed that neither of them offered me a slice of pizza.  That was the first time I saw The Doc.

A month or two later, the lease was up on my prison-cell-sized apartment and I agreed to share an even smaller apartment with the night auditor.  It was a garage apartment, built over a three-car garage, in a run-down section of Houston, far too close to the ship channel—a real dump but the price was right.  Since I saw my roommate’s girlfriend frequently, I eventually forgave her for not sharing that pizza and I even dated her sister a couple of times.  (We saw The Godfather and after the movie, she wouldn’t get into my car until I checked the backseat.)

When summer came, both my roommate and I had some time off, and The Doc suggested that we go to Florida…No particular reason why, since we lived 40 miles from the beach in Galveston, but what the hell?  We jumped in my car and drove to Daytona, Florida.  After enjoying the beach for a few days, we turned around and drove straight back.  Somewhere around Alabama, I realized that I had stopped thinking about The Doc as my roommate’s girlfriend.  Driving all night while the other two slept gave me ample time to think over the situation.

It was very simple.  I had fallen in love with the smartest woman I had ever met.  Now all I had to do was convince her to go out with me.

When we got back to Houston, I announced that I intended to marry The Doc.  Privately, I told her that we were going to get married and have a son named What’s-His-Name.  No one believed me about any of this—there was some discussion of my sanity.

Naturally, my roommate was a little pissed.  There was an apartment for rent across the street, so I moved out.  It took several weeks to convince The Doc to go out on a date with me.  She, too, lived in a truly rotten part of town (on our first date, I killed a rat on her front porch with my pocketknife).  I don’t suppose that is part of modern dating practices.

The first date was followed by more—thankfully rodent-free—and eventually The Doc agreed to marry me.  I think the deciding factor was that Alice, her cat, obviously loved me more than her.  If you can’t depend on a cat’s judgement, then this world is doomed.

The wedding was a monument to how to get married on the cheap.  There were handwritten invitations mailed out to the twenty-odd guests.  The ceremony was in my parents’ living room.  The bride wore a beautiful blue dress purchased from Foley’s for $14 and her bouquet was Bank’s roses and English Ivy from the front yard.  I splurged—at my brother’s insistence—and spent $30 on a brown sport coat.  

Though The Doc disputes the veracity of this part of the story, it was almost an incredibly short marriage.  The ceremony was performed in my parents’ living room, directly in front of the fireplace.  When the preacher (the same one who had married my parents twenty-seven years earlier) pronounced “You may kiss the bride….” The Doc’s eyes rolled up in her head and she started to fall backward towards the open fireplace.  I caught her—and we’ve been catching each other for decades now.

It was a nice reception (also in my parents’ living room).  The wedding cake was from the local H.E.B grocery store.  I remember my mother being a little wistful after the ceremony and she confided to my new spouse that she thought that I would never finish college.  She was right: starting this Spring, I’m a graduate student pursuing a master’s degree in Art History, which will be my seventh degree (I think).  I’ve decided to homestead the university.

We honeymooned at the Menger Hotel in downtown San Antonio—a distance of almost 15 whole miles from where we were married.  With our extravagant entertainment budget, we watched the Wizard of Oz on television and went to the zoo the next day.  If I remember right, we walked by the Alamo a couple of times.  We are, after all, native-born Texans.

Shortly after the honeymoon was over, The Doc was accepted into medical school.  I was shocked because I had known lots of people who claimed they were going to medical school, The Doc was the first person I knew who actually did it.  

Medical School was expensive and we had to cut more than a few corners to financially survive the next four years.  We still lived in slums, there were no vacations, and we lived about as frugally as possible.  The local grocery store kept a loaded cart in the back of the store, where badly dented cans or cans that had lost their labels were offered for sale for a dime each.  Until I started earning a better wage, most of our meals came out of that cart, periodically supplemented with something I shot.

We waited years, until The Doc was a senior surgical resident, to start a family, and yes…we named our first son What’s-His-Name.  A couple of years later, The-Other-One was born.  Though it has been decades since either has lived at home, I occasionally still wake up in the middle of the night thinking I should go check to see if they are sleeping okay.  How fast those years went by and how much I would pay to experience just one more day of their childhood.

As I’m writing this, it has been 50 years and a couple of hours since that wedding ceremony.  And two children, and a half-dozen grand kids, several moves, and two careers.  I’ve lost a kidney and had a heart attack—neither of which I would have survived if my wife hadn’t been there with me.  I fell in love with The Doc because she was the smartest woman I ever met.  She still is and I still am.  I still wonder why she ever said yes to my absurd proposal!

And marrying her is the smartest thing I’ve ever done.  

P.S.  She says that she married the smartest man she’s ever met, but she's just being kind.  I might believe stubborn.

A Window to Another Time

Kaiser Wilhelm II certainly didn’t cause The Great War—at least not single-handedly—but he didn’t do a whole lot to prevent it, either.  Listing all the reasons for the first of the two world wars of the 20th century would take a complex discussion of rising nationalism and empires scrambling to acquire colonies like children grabbing candy after busting a pinata.

Note.  I’m a little astonished at the cartoon to the right.  I fed that first paragraph into an AI program and asked for a cartoon.  There was a ten-second pause, then it spit out the cartoon.  Don’t bother trying to decipher the caption, it’s either gibberish or the text of another meaningless email from Enema U’s Vice-President of Research.

That’s not to say that the Kaiser was exactly blameless, either.  As he grew up, he was fed a steady diet of tales of Prussian military glory, and once he became Kaiser, he wanted to lead Germany to a victorious future.  By definition, that meant he needed a war.

And there was, however, that small difficulty with the Kaiser’s ship complex.  Great Britain had ruled the seas from long before the days of Napoleon, and since being a great naval power was de rigueur for maintaining an overseas empire, the Kaiser wanted his own great navy.  The fact that both of his cousins, the King of England and the Tsar of Russia, had great navies really rankled Wilhelm, so he started building one of his own, touching off an international arms race that greatly added to the spirit of militarism across Europe and even resonated in the United States.

If you doubt that the Kaiser was envious of the British Navy, look at the photo at left, in which the Kaiser is seen wearing the uniform of a British Admiral of the Fleet while attending the funeral of his grandmother, Queen Victoria.

Early on in the war, Germany did very well…for a while.   The Kaiser’s army successfully pushed into France and his navy fought the British Navy to a draw at the Battle of Jutland, but then the war bogged down into a stalemate.  Two years into the war, there was a power shift within Germany when Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and General Erich Ludendorff seized control, leaving the Kaiser with only a purely ceremonial role and no actual control over conduct of the war.

When the war ended, one of the provisions of the Versailles Treaty required that the Kaiser—who had recently abdicated—be handed over to the Allies to face prosecution “for a supreme offense against international morality and the sanctity of treaties”.  Considering the low opinions both the French and the English had of the Kaiser, it was likely that he would have been found guilty and executed.  Desperate, the Kaiser wrote to another cousin, Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, asking for asylum.

The Netherlands had remained neutral during the war, and while public opinion of the Dutch people was divided on the fate of the Kaiser, Queen Wilhelmina resisted the demands of the Allies and granted amnesty to the abdicated Kaiser.  Since both were direct descendants of Queen Victoria, and Wilhelmina’s grandfather had married the Kaiser’s sister, the queen no doubt wanted to keep peace in the family.

The Kaiser moved to the Netherlands late in 1918 and began house hunting.  Since he was not exactly traveling light—he moved 59 freight cars of antiques, paintings, silver, and memorabilia with him—it took him two years to find the perfect little house.  

Doorn House had started as a 14th century castle and had been steadily improved in the intervening five centuries.  Covering over eighty acres, the estate sports a functioning moat, an elaborate gate house, and extensive English-style gardens.  The former Kaiser was free to live at the estate but was required to stay within ten kilometers of home.  Despite frequent invitations, Queen Wilhelmina never visited her cousin.

In all, Wilhelm lived a comfortable, but somewhat lonely, life. At Doorn house, he frequently spent his time working in the gardens, chopping wood, and futilely dreaming of the day when the German people would demand his return to the throne.  In the 1930’s, Wilhelm had several meetings with Hermann Goering, who wanted the Kaiser to support the Nazi Party.  Disgusted by Kristallnacht, the former Kaiser refused to have anything to do with Hitler or his party, saying:

Of Germany, which was a nation of poets and musicians, of artists and soldiers, Hitler has made a nation of hysterics and hermits, engulfed in a mob and led by a thousand liars or fanatics.

When World War II started, Winston Churchill offered asylum to the former Kaiser in England, but Wilhelm refused to leave his home.  When the Netherlands were invaded by the Germans in 1940, German troops guarded Doorn House but were not allowed inside the gate.  Wilhelm died of a pulmonary embolism in 1942, and his wishes to have no swastikas present at his funeral were not honored.  His remains were placed in a mausoleum in the garden, there to await the day when the Prussian monarchy returns to Germany.  

Today, Doorn House is a museum, remaining largely as the former Kaiser knew it, with his books and papers still on display along with the more than 30,000 objects he brought with him from Germany.  Of special interest to probably no one is his extensive collection of ornate snuff boxes.  The estate has become a shrine to a group of German monarchists, who still gather at the house once a year in support of the current claimant to the throne, Georg Friedrich, Prince of Prussia.  His 2014 claim to recover the estate was rejected by the Dutch government.

One last note about Doorn House:  When Wilhelm found the estate, he bought it for 500,000 guilders from the family of the Baron van Heemstra.  Among the Baron’s children who were raised in the old castle was Baroness van Heemstra, who later became a British citizen and a well-known author of children’s book under the penname of Ellaline Vere.  She is better known as the mother of Aubrey Hepburn.

Three Great Letters

In the The House of the Spirits by Isabelle Allende, the author says that “Letters are a gift reserved for the living, denied to those in heaven.”  I think the author is close to the mark, for letters, at least good letters, are immortal and last long after both the writer and the recipient have left this world.

I like letters.  I like to plan letters in advance, then I enjoy writing them—after selecting the right paper and ink—then I like to mail them.  I would probably like to receive them, but that rarely happens any more.  For most people, letters have evidently been replaced by email, which is a sorry substitute.

There are multiple websites that list the ten greatest letters of all time, the five letters that changed history, or the dozen or so most important letters in politics—there are so many that I have no intention of competing with them.  For the last week or so, I have been thinking about three letters in particular—letters that aren’t important in most people’s minds, but letters that I thought were memorable.  They might not exactly be historic letters, but they are interesting.

After winning the election in November 1960, President John F. Kennedy began putting together his government and the newly appointed Ambassador to India was his former Harvard professor, John Kenneth Galbraith.  Galbraith, his wife, and their three sons would all be moving to India, much to the consternation of Peter Galbraith, the ambassador’s second son.

Ten-year-old Peter didn’t want to leave his friends and his school and he didn’t like the idea of leaving his home and moving thousands of miles away for a period of several years.  When the President heard about Peter’s unhappiness, he could understand how the boy felt, since his own father had been appointed Ambassador to the Court of St. James (England) more than twenty years earlier.

Though Kennedy hadn’t been in office for even three months, he took the time to write a personal letter to young Peter, telling the boy about his own experiences in leaving home and friends and moving to a new country.  

“More than twenty years ago, our family was similarly uprooted when we went to London where my father was Ambassador.  My younger brothers and sisters were about your age.  They, like you had to exchange new friends for old.”

Kennedy went on to tell young Peter to look forward to the exotic animals he would see in India, particularly the elephants.  After warning the boy to avoid the cobras, the president said that he considered the children of his ambassadors to be the junior members of the Peace Corps.

By all accounts the boy took the message to heart and felt easier about the move.  The New York Times reported about the letter on April 2, 1961 and the story has made into several books, including one by the ambassador.  What has never made the books, as far as I can tell, is that there was a second letter.

Peter Galbraith had a nine-year-old brother, James, who felt a little left out by the presidential attention that his brother was receiving.  After all, he, too, had moved to India, leaving behind his friends, his school, and his home.  When President Kennedy learned of the boy’s unhappiness, he wrote a second letter, this time to James, thanking the boy for his sacrifice and urging the boy to grow up to be a good Democrat like his father, but perhaps one not so inconveniently sized.  The president was making a small joke about the ambassador being 6’ 8”.

In 1945, a young agent for the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency, ran agents in Germany tasked with tracking, and in a few cases, killing high ranking officers in the German Army.  As Germany collapsed at the end of the war, the young agent made his way to the Bavarian mountaintop retreat of Adolf Hitler, helping himself to some of the Fuehrer’s personal stationary.

On May 8, 1945, VE Day, the young agent took the time to write his three-year-old son a letter commemorating the end of the war.

“Dear Dennis, The man who might have written on this card once controlled Europe—three short years ago when you were born.  Today he is dead, his memory despised, his country in ruins.  He had a thirst for power, a low opinion of man as an individual, and a fear of intellectual honesty.  He was a force for evil in the world.  His passing, his defeat—a boon to mankind.”

The young agent, Richard Helms went on to become the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 1966 to 1973.  The letter still exists and is on display in the OSS Wing of the CIA Museum, a facility that is not open to the public.

The last letter is my personal favorite, you’ll have to forgive me for being a little biased.  My father was born in West Texas, the son of a poor farmer with eleven children, in an area hit hard by the Great Depression.  To survive, my father left home to join the Civilian Conservation Corps, working to build highways and parks near Fort Worth.

After Pearl Harbor, those young boys, already outfitted with khaki uniforms, were more or less just marched into the nearest recruiting office and enlisted into the Army.  My father ended up as an engineer on a B-25 bomber—something that still astounds me, since my father was many wonderful things, but he was absolutely incapable of doing anything mechanical.  At any given time, there was a large collection of inoperable lawn mowers behind our garage, because my father had no idea how to change a spark plug or clean an air filter.  I still have his maintenance manuals for his plane and have no idea how he managed to do any of the routine tasks the book describes.

While stationed for training in Fort Worth, my father met my mother at a skating rink after she managed to fall down in front of him enough times to catch his attention.  They fell in love and planned a wedding after the war.  Shortly after becoming engaged, my father was sent to the Pacific Theater for the duration of the war.  Surprisingly, for a poor ol’ country boy with hardly any formal education, he was a prolific letter writer, writing whenever he could—but at least once a week—and those letters are now in my possession.  

Reading the letters is an emotional roller coaster and often requires a little research to understand the cultural references.  The letters were censored, too, so at times, it is impossible to determine where my father was stationed when he wrote a letter.  My father was very young, and this was the first time in his life that he had left Texas, so the letters reveal almost constant amazement at the new, wider world he was experiencing.  The most common topics of the letters are returning to my mother, his hopes for a life after the war, his hatred of traveling by ship, and a general loathing of everything the Army gave him to eat.  

“Oh, darling, I can’t wait to get back to you.  When I get back to Fort Worth, we can celebrate.  I want to take you to a really nice restaurant, you know, the kind where they bring the food right out to your car.”

I can’t be absolutely certain, but I don’t think my father was joking.  My biggest question is who he was going to borrow the car from.