Last night, reading through Southwestern Bell’s newsletter “Telephone Talk,” I saw that it said electrical Christmastree lights were invented by Ralph E. Morris in 1908. The frontispiece in last December’s issue tells a very different story. Perhaps the question of the “first electric Christmas tree” is somewhat like the question as to whether the hot dog, ice-cream cone, and iced tea all originated during the 1904 World’s Fair; but as one interested in history, I am curious to know which of the two stories is correct.
Adrian DeYong St. Louis, Mo.
Although Christmas-tree lights were a good quarter of a century old when Mr. Morris first turned his on, in a sense he does deserve inventor’s laurels, for he had no idea that the lights were in commercial manufacture. In the winter of 1907, Morris, a Matapan, Massachusetts, telephone man, had a bad scare when his four-year-old son knocked a candle off the family Christmas tree and singed his hair.
Shaken by the near tragedy, Morris next year took small, clear switchboard bulbs, soldered them to a long wire, and wrapped them with colored paper. When night fell, he gathered four generations of his family around the tree and told his grandmother to throw a switch. She did, the display twinkled into life, and Morris went to his grace believing he had invented the Christmas-tree light.
WEEPING BITTERLIE
After reading “Assassin on Trial” in your June/July 1981 issue, I wonder if Charles Guiteau might have sung two songs at his hanging—the one quoted in the article and the one enclosed here, which I’ve known ever since I can remember. I wonder if anyone knows any more verses—if, indeed, there are any more. The song may not be error-free; I’ve only my memory to depend upon:
My name is Charles Guiteau
My name I’ll never deny
I leave my aged parents
In sorrow now to die
But little did they think I
While in my youthful bloom
Would be taken to the scaffold
To meet my fatal doom.
My sister came to the prison
To bid me a last good-bye
She threw her arms around me
And wept most bitterlie.
She cried, “My darling brother,
Today you’ll surely die
For the murder of James A. Garfield
Upon a scaffold high.”
Marian A. Moore Lawrenceville, Ill.
DIGS
The shortsightedness of professional archaeologists and anthropologists as shown by Dean R. Snow in his recent article (“Martians & Vikings, Madocs & Runes,” October/November, 1981) has prompted this letter. He would label me an amateur archaeologist, only because I haven’t been schooled by his good books. We amateurs are looking for answers not grades; we’re interested in results, not grants, we’re looking for truth—not from the good books—but by studying, researching, and analyzing. We’re serious-minded individuals who do more than run off at the mouth. These know-it-alls sit at their desks and ridicule almost everyone who isn’t a “trained professional archaeologistanthropologist.” When it doesn’t fit their theories—books—it’s a fake, hoax, or an outright fraud. They have all the answers, the plow did it, the farmer, nature, or God did it all. …
Should all our learned scientists ever place their heads in the very holes they helped to dig, as Mr. Snow has obviously done, we as a people would never have learned anything.
Thomas J. Mahoney Cropseyville, N. Y.
DIGS
As an armchair archaeologist of many years’ standing, I thoroughly enjoyed the lambasting Dean R. Snow provided Barry Fell, Cyrus Gordon, Immanuel Velikovsky, Erich von Daniken, et al. in his article. However, one statement of Dr. Snow’s drove me to the bookshelf for William H. Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico, the definitive work on this subject—for my generation, at least.
Dr. Snow’s statement was, “The Mexican god Quetzalcoatl, whom Spanish missionaries belatedly equipped with light skin and a beard in order to convert him to Jesus Christ. …” In his chapter on Mexican mythology, Prescott cites two extant codices and several firsthand accounts for the myth describing Quetzalcoatl as being tall in stature with a white skin, long, dark hair, and a flowing beard. According to Prescott, one of the reasons a handful of conquistadors was able to conquer a mighty nation was that the Aztecs strongly suspected Cortes of being Quetzalcoatl returned!
Incidentally, von Daniken is by no means the first to credit Quetzalcoatl as being more than a mere god in the Aztec pantheon. In a fascinating footnote, Prescott tells of a certain Dr. Siguenza (dates not given) who identified this god as the apostle Thomas, who, he supposed, came to America to preach the gospel!
George W. Gentry Atlanta, Ga.
Dean Snow replies: It is, of course, quite true that Quetzalcoatl was an important figure in preconquest Mexico. Moreover, the appearance of the Spanish at a critical point in the fifty-two-year calendrical cycle certainly contributed to the willingness of Montezuma to believe that Quetzalcoatl—in the person of Cortés—had come back to haunt him.
The notion that Quetzalcoatl was additionally supplied with some European characteristics after the conquest is not a new one. Unfortunately, it is also one that has not been sufficiently explored.
Prescott was an early leader in the field, one of the sources that got me into this business in the first place. Much of what he said still holds, but there have also been some refinements in our understanding over the last century.
NO ELIZABETHAN COURTIER, HE
I am writing about your wallpaper article in the December 1981 issue. The Zuber panel of the “Capitulation of General Cornwallis at Yorktown, Virginia” on pages 86–87 has a caption above it with a remark about the “Elizabethan” courtier.
I suggest that the person depicted is Thaddeus Kosciusko, the Polish patriot and Father of Army Engineers. He erected the fortifications at West Point, built the defensive works along the Delaware, and fortified Saratoga so that the colonials won that important battle.
The four-cornered hat with plume was the typical military head covering of Polish officers in that day—although I doubt whether Kosciusko would have been wearing such headgear in America! The long jacket with braid across the chest was likewise Polish in origin.
Anselm W. Romb Chicago, Ill.
NO ELIZABETHAN COURTIER, HE
The “courtier” in his red coat and white cloak is undoubtedly a French officer belonging to a regiment of lancers. His strange hat is a czapka with a mortarboard top tufted with an aigrette. It was worn by lancers as late as World War I (the Prussian uhlans). British lancers were wearing czapkas at the Battle of Balaclava.
Robert S. Borden Abington, Mass.
NOSTALGIC PARTS
In regard to your “Postscripts” item in the August/September 1981 issue: The First Schwenkfelder Church stands at the corner of Thirtieth and Cumberland streets in Philadlephia.
When I was a boy my companion and I would play half-ball (a rubber pimpleball cut in half plus a broomstick for a bat), utilizing the churchyard as an outfield. Cumberland Street at that time was paved with rectangular-shaped cobblestones for the largely horse and wagon traffic. It has since been paved with asphalt.
My friend would stand on the church pavement and throw the ball across Cumberland Street. A hit ball that rolled to the curb was a single; if it hit the pavement it was a double; if it hit the ornamental fence it was a triple; and if it went over the fence it was a home run. The home run presented problems since we had to climb the fence to retrieve the ball. At that point old Reverend Heebner (of blessed memory) would come running out of the church to chase the juvenile trespassers.
Although we were hardly Schwenkfelders (the neighborhood was almost exclusively Jewish), we remember the church with fondness. It was indeed small; in the twenty-one years that I lived there I don’t recall anyone but Reverend Heebner going in or out!
Bernard Millroad Wayne, Penna.
ADJUSTED FIRE
As a sometime reporter and former redleg myself, I must aver that the caption for the photo of a fire direction center in Hughes Rudd’s “When I Landed, the War Was Over” (October/ November 1981) is dead wrong. There could have been no “security reasons” for using the firing chart that obviously appears under the range/deflection fan on the table.
In the absence of a map, American artillerymen were trained to “make their own” by a technique of observed fire on targets and topographic features using a grid sheet.
There were obvious limitations on this technique—weather, visibility, tube wear, and others—when compared with the accuracy obtained from maps, but it worked beautifully as long as there were people like Rudd in the “Maytags” or forward observers with the advanced infantry elements.
As one who once employed more than a hundred artillery tubes against targets in the Remagen bridgehead, I can say that Rudd deserves for his fine article a belated oak-leaf cluster to the Air Medal he is shown receiving from General Keyes. It brought back many memories which are tending too rapidly to disappear into the mists.
