The short happy life of dord

8 Spruce St. Photo by Emmett Hume.

If you’re playing scrabble, and the authority you’re using is a Merriam-Webster Second New International Dictionary published between 1934 and 1939, go ahead and use the word ‘dord.’

That five-year window is the only time you’ll find the word because it was – unusual for a dictionary – a complete non-word.  It happened when the chemistry editor sent a note asking for the addition of  ’D or d, cont./density’ – meaning the letter d, upper or lower case, was a contraction for the word ‘density.’

But entries were usually typed with spaces between letters to make the spelling very clear, which only confused the issue.

No one noticed dord until February 28, 1939, when an editor discovered the error and it was stop the presses time – by 1940, dord was gone.  Like an upside-down postage stamp, I would guess one of those old dictionaries is worth a bit.

* * *

Paul Krugman and John Turturro are having birthdays today, as is Canadian-American architect Frank Gehry – he is 82 today.  Here in Southern California, we get to see a lot of his work, since among his first efforts were his own house in Venice and the Santa Monica shopping mall.  Below, a local retail plaza  (1984) known as Edgemar, and above right, the recently completed tower with a titanium and glass exterior at Beekman Place. To see some Gehry furniture, go here.

Volunteers, please

Coyote in Grand Teton National Park, NPS.

All techies – if you’re asking what you can do for your country, go to the U.S. Fisheries and Wildlife Service and volunteer to help bring their website into the 21st century.  Ditto, the Park Service. They have wonderful images and videos in the public domain, but you could go gray waiting for them to load.

The coyote is in Grand Teton National Park, one of three we’re celebrating today.  In an odd coincidence, both Woodrow Wilson and Calvin Coolidge signed national parks into being on this date.  Wilson made Grand Canyon and Acadia official in 1919 and ten years later, Coolidge did the same for Grand Teton.

I am taking advantage of the occasion to post my holiday snaps of the Grand Canyon, a place that you need to see many, many times in order to believe that it’s real.  Although I hear that Arches, Yosemite, Bryce Canyon and a few others are also pretty stunning.

Sunset, South Rim

 

There is a monarch butterfly in the picture if you can find it.

Busy, busy river.

Good advice

Today is the birthday of Charles Lang Freer, born in Kingston NY, either in 1854 or 1856 – no one is sure.

A bit of the Peacock Room. Photo by TomR.

He grew up to be a bookkeeper and did so well that his employer, Frank Hecker, took him on as a partner in business.  They built railroad cars and got very rich.  Sometime in his forties, Freer was diagnosed as neurasthenic, the Victorian version of chronic fatigue syndrome, and he was urged to avoid stress and stop working so hard.

He followed doctor’s orders and began to collect art, like almost every magnate of the time.  But there was a big difference between Freer and other collectors – he had become friends with James McNeill Whistler and it was Whistler who guided his collecting. Whistler particularly urged Freer to collect Asian art. Freer’s collection eventually numbered more than 30.000 objects.

In 1904, when Frederick Leyland sold the Peacock Room – which Whistler had designed for Leyland (or rather in spite of Leyland) – Freer bought the entire room and had it installed in his house in Detroit.  It is now at the Smithsonian, which recently completed a restoration of the room. You can see all of it there in three dimensions or online here..

The Smithsonian really didn’t want to take on Freer’s vast collection, but he got in touch with a friend – Pres. Theodore Roosevelt – who pretty much ordered them to accept it.

Whistler in a Hat, by Whistler. Freer Gallery

Freer paid a million dollars for his eponymous gallery, but died before it was finished.  Delayed by WWI, the Freer Gallery finally opened in 1923, four years after his death.

The Battle of Los Angeles

It began late on February 24, 1942, with the sound of air raid sirens going off, followed by orders for a total blackout and the call for thousands of air raid wardens to get to their posts.  Then, sometime around 3 a.m., the anti-aircraft guns,12 pounders, began shelling and continued to fire intermittently until after 4.  At 7:21 a.m. the all clear was sounded.

The Battle of Los Angeles was over.

Shell crater at Ft. Stevens, Oregon.

When the Secretary of the Army held a press conference later the same day and called it ‘a false alarm,’ the rumors began to spread exponentially. The press went wild. (It can still be found in some catalogues of unexplained UFO sightings.) A Santa Monica politician called for an investigation and sometime around 1983 a report appeared that pronounced the most likely cause: weather balloons. Radar picked them up, everyone went on general alert and somebody gave the order to fire.

But before we judge the war-frenzied residents of L.A. too harshly, we should probably pause and remember that it was, after all, not even three months since the bombing of Pearl Harbor – and only the day before, February 23, the town of Ellwood just up the coast on the outskirts of Santa Barbara had been attacked by a Japanese submarine.

Ellwood refinery

Ellwood was not so much a town as it was an oil refinery and the sub, equipped with only one gun, had fired in its general direction for about twenty minutes before retreating.  Very little damage was done, but enemy submarines off the west coast were clearly not a figment of anyone’s imagination.

The attack on Ellwood was one of the two assaults on the western side of the US mainland during WWII;  the other was a more successful attack on the coast of Oregon.  Anyway, it’s understandable that Angelenos might be a little jittery.

One week after the attack on Ellwood, FDR issued the famous Executive Order 9066 and the round-up of Japanese-Americans began.

* * *

Many happy returns to Steve Jobs, who celebrates his 56th birthday today.  He shares the day with Dr. Jocelyn Bell, discoverer of the pulsar, and Winslow Homer.

Gloucester Harbor, by Winslow Homer

Risky business

In 1898, this turned out to be a bad day for Emile Zola – he was convicted of libel and sentenced to prison. But he had known from the outset what he was risking.

Paul Alexis reading to Emile Zola, by Paul Cezanne

Others were shocked – Zola was famous, respected and wealthy and he had done it all himself, rising from a life of poverty to become a celebrated author and intellectual – an intellectual whose books actually sold.

But he had publicly – very publicly – accused the government and the army of anti-semitism and obstruction of justice in the matter of Alfred Dreyfus.  His accusation, known by its title ‘J’Accuse,’ appeared on the front page of a liberal newspaper on January 13 and events followed quickly.

Zola in 1902.

Captain Alfred Dreyfus was at that point serving his life term for treason on Devil’s Island -he had been found guilty of selling secrets to the Germans. Despite the fact that no evidence could be found against him, Dreyfus, who was Jewish, was tried and convicted. Not long after, an Intelligence officer named Lt. Colonel Henry Picquart found evidence proving that Major Ferdinand Esterhazy was the actual traitor and he reported his findings to his superior officers.

Picquart was told to shut up about his new evidence and quickly given orders transferring him to Tunisia.  Before leaving Paris, Picquart told some Dreyfus supporters what he had found and a member of the Senate publicly asserted Dreyfus’ innocence and Esterhazy’s guilt.  But the government – which went so far as to try Esterhazy – would not allow the new evidence and Esterhazy was acquitted. Picquart, on the other hand, was sentenced to 60 days in prison.

Zola fled to England to avoid prison.  He spent an unhappy year there, then returned to Paris in 1899, just as the right-wing government of Felix Fauré fell.

Dreyfus was offered a pardon by the new government, although a pardon did not exonerate him.  That finally happened in 1906.  He went on to serve in WWI and was awarded the Legion of Honor.

Zola died from carbon monoxide poisoning in 1902.  Since his life had been threatened many times by anti-Dreyfus elements, his friends asked for an investigation; no evidence of a crime could be found.  Curiously, many years later, a Parisian roofer confessed on his deathbed to having blocked Zola’s chimney.

A century after the Dreyfus affair, the French Catholic newspaper Le Croix apologized for the anti-semitic editorials it had published at the time.

Swan song

In 1918, on February 21, a little bird at the Cincinnati Zoo died. It had been alone in its cage since the death of its mate the year before.

Conuropsis carolinensis by John James Audubon

It was the last of its kind in captivity. It would take another 20 years for scientists to realize that it was actually the last of its kind anywhere – the Carolina Parakeet was extinct.

The only parakeet native to eastern North America, the Carolina Parakeet had once flourished from the Ohio Valley to the Gulf of Mexico. But it was doomed by its preference for woodland, which began to disappear with imposition of agriculture on the landscape, by its beauty – its feathers looked good on hats – and by a behavioral quirk that made it easy pickings for farmers.

When parakeets were shot, the flock would take off, but then return immediately to gather around their wounded and dead. Shoot and repeat.

Coincidentally, Incas – the little bird at the Ciincinnati Zoo – lived in the same cage that had housed Martha, the last of more than three billion passenger pigeons that farmers and hunters had managed to decimate completely by 1914.

The pigeons lived in such huge colonies that they could easily be netted and, rather than waste ammunition, hunters crushed the birds’ heads with their hands. In Petoskey, Michigan, in 1878, one of the last great colonies was killed at the rate of 50,000 birds a day for nearly five months. The birds were shipped by the boxcar-load to eastern markets to be sold for food.

Worth a thousand words

This is the birth date of Ansel Adams. He was born in 1902 and died in 1984.  Not  only a talented photographer, he was also our guide to the spectacular beauty of the country.  In 1941, he went to work for the government, taking a series of stunning photographs of national parks.  And, as we’ve seen, he took a great series of photos at the Japanese relocation camp at Manzanar.  Prints developed by Adams himself are astronomically expensive, but you can get archival quality prints of his government work – which we all own – from the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division duplication services. Prices start at $35.

Here is a wonderful Manzanar photo, followed by examples from his national park series:

Richard Kobayashi, 1943.

The Tetons and the Snake River.

Leaves in Glacier National Park.

Church, Taos Pueblo.

In old New York

As we all know, the island of Manhattan was bought by the Dutch West India Company from the Lenape Indians in 1624 for 60 guilders – which was not equivalent to $24,btw, but more like a thousand.

Then it got to be a British colony and somehow the history books skimmed over that part, as I recall, probably because the next fifty years were very complicated for the little colony.  One minute they were Dutch and the next British and then back to Dutch again.

What was happening was something called the Dutch-Anglo Wars, fought almost entirely at sea, since they were fighting over trade routes and new world possessions. The Dutch kept New York via the first treaty, lost it again, refused to take it back the next time and finally lost it with the Treaty of Westminster, signed on February 19 in 1674.

Castello plan revision

(The Dutch had gotten rights to the island of Run in one of the treaties, which gave them a monopoly on the world’s supply of nutmeg and they refused to take New Amsterdam back in exchange.)

Meanwhile, the residents of the little town on Manhattan were busy planting, building, and making a life.  You can see what it looked like in 1664, above, in a lovely drawing discovered in the Austrian National Archives in 1991.

And, if so inclined, you can find almost every one of their names on this list and match them with the houses on the Castello Map, drawn by surveyor Jacques Cortelyou in 1660.  The map was bound with other documents and sold to Cosimo de Medici in 1667.  It was found in the Villa di Castello in 1900 and later reprinted.

That project is underway, actually – here’s the beta version.

The Know-Nothings

Millard Fillmore

It didn’t start in 1849. but that was the year it got organized – Charles Allen founded the Order of the Star Spangled Banner.

The rules were simple: to join, you had to be free, white and 21.  And Protestant of course.  You also had to agree to follow the policies of the Order absolutely without question.  Policy included secrecy – if anyone asked you about the Order, you were instructed to reply, ‘I know nothing.’

Horace Greeley made the leap and  simply called Allen’s followers ‘Know-Nothings.’

The Know-Nothings – which included all similar groups forming throughout the country – were by definition nativists.  They were appalled by the swell of immigrants that flooded the country between 1830 and 1850.  Irish-Catholics and German Catholics were arriving in great numbers and to the Know-Nothings, it meant secret control of the country by the Pope.

Levi Boone

Their rise came at the exact moment the old Whig party was declining. As the Democratic Party included many Irish-Americans and the Republican Party didn’t exist until 1854,  the Know-Nothings attracted a large following.  They weren’t secret anymore, of course. By 1854, Know-Nothings had collected under the banner of the American Party.  Their candidates swept mayoral races in most big cities, including Chicago and Boston.

The American Party platform included limits on immigration, especially from Catholic countries; restricting political office to native-born Americans of English/Scottish lineage who were Protestant and mandating a wait of 21 years before an immigrant could gain citizenship. Public school teachers could only be Protestants.

Chicago Mayor Levi Boone stuck to the tenets of his party, banning immigrants, whether naturalized or not, from city jobs.

In February of 1856, the American Party convened in Philadelphia to pick a presidential candidate to support.  Their choice was Millard Fillmore, whose Whig party had ceased to exist.  Fillmore, who had been president for three years as a result of the sudden demise of Zachary Taylor, was trying to get back into the White House and agreed to be the American Party’s candidate.  He came in third, after Republican John Fremont and winning Democrat James Buchanan.

They didn’t know it, but the Know-Nothings had peaked.  They fell apart over the issue of slavery for the most part, but even occasionally over temperance.  (Boone had caused what was called the ‘Lager Beer Riot’ in Chicago when he ordered bars closed on Sundays, the only day most workers had off.)

Most of their fears were channeled into politics, but the Know-Nothings did manage to accomplish one act of vandalism that delayed the construction of the Washington Monument – they stole a block of granite that had been donated by the Pope.

Musical interlude

In honor of Corelli’s birthday today, we almost had a performance of his Concerto Grosso, but the group performing turned out to be more interesting than the concerto.  This explains A Far Cry – the orchestra without a conductor – pretty well: