John H. White, curator of the division of transportation at the Smithsonian Institution and author of “Wood to Burn” in our December, 1Q74, issue, has taken polite exception to the illustrations used in that article: “I don’t wish to be rude,” he writes,
but I would be less than honest if I said I was really very much taken with them. The wood-burning locomotive is copied from a well-known contemporary engraving. The original is a fine, elegant print typical of the nineteenth-century engraver’s art, which I greatly admire. Unfortunately the modern artist has misread the lettering on the tender. It should be B. C. & M. rather than S. R. & W., and the correct number is 23 rather than 5. Moreover, the locomotive is specifically identified, because the artist inscribed the name Mt. Washington on the cab. Hence anyone with an expert knowledge will spot the incorrect road initials and the mistaken number; and since the illustration is connected with my article, it could cause us both some embarrassment. …
We are pleased to report that so far this error has provoked no subscription cancellations. It had been our art director’s intention to get a pair of drawings, one obviously of a wood burner and the other of a coal burner; the wood burner is not meant to be a specific locomotive but rather one of the 4-4-0’s of the era. To this end our artist, CaI Sacks, deliberately fuzzed the lettering so that the inscription Mt. Washington cannot quite be read as such. As for the S. R. & W., Cal explains that this is a mythical line invented to honor his daughter, Sandy, and his son, William. The line, says CaI, runs between the Sandy River and Williamstown.
LUCY
In 1881 a real-estate agent named James V. Lafferty, faced with the problem of attracting customers to the then-vacant oceanfront south of Atlantic City, was inspired to invest thirty-eight thousand dollars to build a huge tin-plated wooden elephant on the beach of Absecon Island. Known as Lucy, the seventy-foot-long, sixtyfive-foot-high elephant has served variously as a summer cottage, a tavern, and a bathhouse. Her eyes, each a foot and a half in diameter, are in fact windows. In addition, she has twentytwo other windows in her interior rooms, which are reached by way of spiral staircases in her hind legs. Lucy stands in Margate, New Jersey, where she has endured almost a century of fierce Atlantic gales. In 1903 one of these sank her up to her knees in sand, and in 1928 her howdah was blown away. By 1970, when Lucy was donated to the city with the stipulation that she be moved to make way for a plague of condominiums, the elephant was in very shabby shape. Now, however, a Lucy committee, formed by Sylvia Carpenter and Josephine Harron, is working to restore the elephant. Steel girders are replacing rotten timbers, and Lucy is now enclosed in scaffolding and covered with tarpaper, which will protect her from the elements until her original tin sheathing is replaced. Despite these disfigurements more than ten thousand visitors tramped through her interior last summer, a pleasant indication that time has not dimmed the ingenuous appeal of Lafferty’s unlikely vision.
MUCH HAVE I TRAVELLED IN THE REALMS OF DROSS
Variety, the show-business paper, recently reported a curious product now being offered by a French tapecassette company. Peerless Services of Paris is selling Richard Nixon’s resignation speech along with typewritten transcripts of it in French and English. And there’s a bonus: “Since the speech was a shortie, they’ve padded the cassette with six poems by John Keats.”
CLUCK
A surprising addition to the National Register of Historic Places was announced late last fall. It is a chicken coop in Georgetown, Delaware, where America’s broiler industry was started in 1923 by the late Mrs. Wilmer Steele. The coop has been restored to its former glory by the Delmarva Poultry Industry Association.
BUREAUCRACY
Allan Damon has spotted two errors in his article on the federal bureaucracy, which ran in our August, 1Q74, issue. On page 65, second column, the fourth line should read: “last available total (fiscal 1972) is 10.8 million, more than 5.6 million of whom are in education—3.1 million as teachers, 2.5 million in administrative, auxiliary, and custodial services.”
On page 66, first column, the third paragraph should read: “The proposed budget for fiscal 1975 is $3o4 billion, a figure roughly 70,000 times greater than the two-year budget for 1789-91.”
BRIDGEPORT
Kenneth B. Holmes, curator of the Barnum Museum of Bridgeport, Connecticut, has written to call our attention to the fact that the credit accompanying the picture of the Legrand Sterling mansion on pages 20-21 of our June, 1974, issue was incorrect. The painting is in the collection of the Barnum Museum. Mr. Holmes also noted that we misplaced the Bridgeport Public Library, which was and is on the corner of Broad and State streets, not on John and Main.
LAST OF THE NIGHT OWLS
In the 1880’s small horse-drawn diners began to appear in American cities. Between dusk and dawn they trundled around the gaslit streets of every fairsized town dispensing hot and cold food. They were called night owls or dog wagons. Competition boomed in 1897, when the transit companies of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia abandoned horse-drawn streetcars for electric trolleys. Entrepreneurs bought the discarded cars, threw in a stove, and went into business. But soon railroad-car companies began producing ever grander diners; flossy and unwieldy, they were set up in permanent locations. They were bright and big, and eventually they crowded out all but one of the dog wagons.
That one was Kennedy’s Lunch Cart, of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which appeared in Market Square most every night. It was small and hot, seated eleven patrons at its short counter, and, with its surprising leaded stained-glass windows, recalled an era when everything, however humble, had to have pretensions to elegance. The present writer has an indelible memory of entering it one windy September night a decade ago. All eleven stools were occupied, and people were standing two deep behind them waiting for their orders. “Gilly” Gilbert, the chef, was preparing all the orders on a gas range no larger than a square of linoleum. The veins stood out on his forehead, and his arms were windmilling like a Cape Cod whirligig. A friend of his called up from the tiny entrance, “How’s it going, Gilly?”
“Aw,” he replied, turning four hamburgers with a smooth, unconscious motion of his right hand and setting up two plates of franks and beans with his left, “It’s kinda quiet tonight.”
Now that final, persistent night owl is gone. Last September Gilly, who stood the long night shift alone for more than thirty years, stepped down forever. His wagon, forbidden by unsentimental local ordinances, has followed him into retirement. But, to Portsmouth’s credit, the town did it up right. Last August 28 was designated Gilly’s Day by the city fathers—there was a parade with bands, floats, and local and national politicians, including Eugene McCarthy. Gilly and his wife received, among the plaudits, tickets for a Caribbean cruise. More than two thousand people turned out to bid farewell to a seedy but splendid anachronism.
