My most vivid brush with history was so slight that although the incident produced one of the most popular photographs of World War II, my presence in the shot is always cropped out.
There were many canteens in America offering servicemen entertainment, but the one held on Saturday afternoons in the ballroom of the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., was unique. For one thing, it offered free beer. Also, in addition to visiting movie stars, many important politicians came to entertain. The movie actors were well received, but I suspect the troops rather preferred the beer to the politicians.
I was one of several sons of reporters pressed into service as volunteers. My war work, which consisted of bringing beer and hot dogs to servicemen and then clearing away the glasses, may not have ranked with rolling bandages at the Red Cross, but it was enormously enjoyable. I once helped the great swing-band drummer Louis Bellson, then in the Army, bring his gear onstage. Bellson gave me a quarter. Ordinarily I would not have taken a tip from a soldier, but I was crazy about Bellson’s music and accepted his coin as a prized souvenir.
Schedules were not published, and we never knew who would appear on any given afternoon. The beefcake movie star Victor Mature, whom I had always thought of as something of an overstuffed turkey, put in an appearance and proved to be so self-effacing in a parody skit making fun of his great lover image that I became one of his most ardent fans.
Vice President Harry Truman showed up on one Saturday afternoon in the winter of 1945, causing something of a stir. Truman had gotten into trouble a few weeks earlier for going to the funeral of the Missouri political boss and his one-time mentor Thomas Pendergast. The old man had been sent to jail for tax evasion, and there was some editorial carping over the propriety of the Vice President of the United States appearing at the funeral of a convicted felon. At the age of thirteen, however, I was full of solemn, obvious judgments and decreed that it took an O.K. guy to stand up for a pal just out of the pen, and I was glad to get a look at him. The Vice President did a small turn for the audience, and when he found there were sailors in the room from the cruiser Marblehead, he said the name of their ship reminded him of some of the senators he had to deal with. It was a pretty feeble gag, but the audience was indulgent, and he got a reasonable laugh before sitting down at an upright piano to play a few tunes.
I was hustling a tray of beer glasses when the spectacularly sexy Hollywood star Lauren Bacall arrived by a side door. I was so startled by her sudden appearance I lost control of the tray and sent several glasses crashing to the floor, splattering Miss BacalPs ankles with beer in the process. Horrified at my clumsiness, I swiftly tried to dry her legs, but Miss Bacall said she thought she could handle that herself.
Miss Bacall swept into the room to great cheers, and in an inspired gesture—inspired, I found out years later, by her press agent—she clambered on top of the piano and lay with her glorious legs crossed as a bemused Vice President Truman continued to play.
The picture got a huge play in newspapers all over the country. Although I was standing near the piano, I am not seen. A wire-service photographer told me he thought I was at least partially visible in his original shot but was apparently lost in the trimming.
I may have missed out on being famous. But at least I’m not a trivia question: “Who is the dopey-looking kid wearing an apron in that picture with Lauren Bacall on top of Harry Truman’s piano?”
—Among Peter Andrews’s screen credits are roles in Sabre Jet and Flight Nurse.
SUBMERINGUE
In 1962, the summer before my senior year in college, I was waitressing in the officers club at the Philadelphia shipyard. One day I was told to pay special attention to the head table because several important people were there for a banquet meeting.
All went smoothly until I approached the table to serve dessert. The highestranking officer did not see me coming up behind him and stood up as I was reaching to serve him. His crisply starched back collided with my lightly fluffed lemon meringue pie—a catastrophe. The room was immediately silent, waiting for the admiral’s reaction. Hyman G. Rickover, father of the nuclear submarine, looked at me and said, “What do you really do?” To which I replied, “I’m studying elementary education.”
—Roberta Dean Shaub teaches kindergarten in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
SEVENTY YEARS BEFORE THE TWIN TOWERS
In the early fall of 1920 I was nineteen years old and one year out of high school, working in the engineering department of an import/export firm that dealt in steel. We were located at 49 Wall Street at the corner of William Street, exactly three buildings from J. P. Morgan & Co. at Wall and Broad. Unlike the nineties when any clerk who can type is euphemistically referred to as a secretary, in the twenties young graduates who took dictation and transcribed it were called stenographers. The president, vice president, and general manager had private secretaries of many years’ experience who were very much older.
All the stenographers occupied a central, windowless room. The junior supervisors occupied one-windowed small offices, and the bosses were on a lower floor in many-windowed, spacious, mahogany-furnished offices.
On the stroke of noon, half of the stenographic pool began their onehour lunch break, and on their return at one the remaining stenographers went out for an hour. I had selected the noon group. All through my life I have been an organized, methodical person at work and at home, and on September 16 I decided to relinquish a few minutes of my lunch break to complete a letter. When I finished it, and while it was still in my Underwood typewriter, I started to proofread it. Then an explosion propelled me from my chair, hitting my head so hard it stunned me.
All the typewriters bounced heavily, and the skeleton force of stenographers had bruises; several had broken ribs. The electric light bulbs fell into shards. While it isn’t now, and was not then, pleasant working from nine to five in a windowless room, windowlessness was what saved us.
The bosses on the floor below all had offices with windows facing Wall Street, and they all had their desks up close to those windows so a modicum of sun could penetrate the canyon of office buildings. Most of the executives lunched after twelve-thirty, so they were all victims of broken glass and the sash-weights that had been packed into the wagon left by the never-to-beapprehended Wall Street bomber.
I always went out to lunch promptly, and I used to walk down to Broad Street, passing the Morgan offices. Their entrance was eater-corner, so that the left side of the building was on Wall Street and the right side on Broad Street. When I reached Morgan I took a left turn and walked past their right side (directly opposite the New York Stock Exchange) until I arrived at the next block, Exchange Place, then I crossed over diagonally to Weber and Heilbroner, the haberdashers, and on to Schrafft’s restaurant, where I enjoyed my daily lunch. Had it not been for that letter, I would have been in the very center of the explosion.
After the debris was cleared and business resumed, a plainclothes detective (always wearing his hat) was stationed as a lookout just inside the entrance to J. P. Morgan & Company. Many years later, after I had moved to another state, I was on vacation in New York and made a nostalgic visit to Wall Street. As I stood at the Morgan Building examining the deep gouges that remained from that fateful day, I noticed the detective, in his hat, just inside the door. I thanked God for having been a lookout for me.
—Ana B. Isaacs lives in Staunton, Virginia.
DICK’S NEW OLD FRIEND
One day in the fall of 1954, I was waiting to meet an old friend in the reception area at the National Press Club in Washington when I noticed a flurry of activity. It seemed clear that an important person had arrived at the club, and I soon discovered that it was the Vice President and an entourage of Secret Service men and White House staffers. Before I realized it, Mr. Nixon came bearing down on me, flashing a campaign smile and offering a friendly greeting. Though I was certain we had never met before, I got to my feet hesitantly and replied in kind.
Though I was certain I had never met the Vice President before, I got to my feet hesitantly and replied in kind.
What ensued was one of those aimless conversations that people sometimes have. Some phrases come back to me even though they were far from memorable: “Didn’t know you were in town.” “You’re looking well.” “Let me know when you’re next in Washington.” “Remember me home.” So saying, Mr. Nixon pumped my hand vigorously and headed off to the dining room.
I was completely mystified by the encounter, and when I told my luncheon companion—a veteran journalist—about it, he offered two possible scenarios. “The first,” he said, “is that he mistook you for a Republican politician who might do him some good. Maybe he didn’t know you, but you look like an old pol, and he probably didn’t want to take the chance of offending you.
“On the other hand,” my friend concluded, saving the better for last, “maybe Nixon is programmed to lunch every Tuesday at the National Press Club, to march straight up to the chair in which you were sitting, and to chat up the occupant much the way he addressed you.”
I have dined out on this story for years, and when I ask people how they explain my encounter with Richard Nixon, they invariably opt for the second scenario. So do I, since I don’t think I look like a Republican politician.
—Arthur R. Kavaler is a retired publishing executive living in New York City.
“USE A MID-IRON”
In the early sixties, when the Bing Crosby National Pro-Am was still played under Bing’s name on the Monterey Peninsula, I had only recently taken up the game. A friend of mine, a dedicated golfer, invited me to accompany him to view one of the rounds at the “Crosby Clambake.” We arrived on this particular morning at the Pebble Beach links.
My friend was eager to follow Tony Lema, a local favorite on the verge of stardom. I, on the other hand, wanted to join the ranks of “Arnie’s Army,” so we agreed to part and meet in an hour or so at the clubhouse.
It didn’t take me long to locate the throng about the redoubtable Arnold Palmer, but its sheer numbers discouraged me, and I opted instead to observe the lesser luminaries whose talents were on display before far fewer spectators.
When it was about time to rejoin my companion at the clubhouse, I set off on what I thought was a shortcut through some woods dotted thickly with bushes. After a few minutes I came upon a small clearing, and there, lying at my feet in pristine elegance, I spotted a golf ball. New to the game, I could not conceive that the object could have been propelled there but by the rawest beginner.
I was reaching down to pick it up when a voice to my right inquired, “Have you seen my ball in here?”
Startled, I turned to see a husky young man emerging from the bushes. At once I recognized the great man himself—Arnold Palmer!
“There it is,” I said as coolly as possible.
“Thanks,” he nodded at me, smiling.
Palmer stood over his ball for a moment and then squatted down in a catcher’s crouch, I along with him. For the first time I noticed that there was a narrow opening among the bushes leading to a swath of grass, and beyond that we could see the edge of the green, perhaps forty feet away.
“How do you think I should play this?” asked Arnie.
Of course, it was a rhetorical question, addressed to me only as a friendly gesture, but in my naivete I had the temerity to say, “Well, I’d use a midiron and punch it out and run it on to the green.”
The waitress came down the counter distributing menus. John did not get one: we don’t serve blacks, she explained.
Arnold Palmer grinned at me and nodded again. He had three or four clubs in his hand and selected one of them. Honestly, I don’t know which iron it was, but he promptly hit his shot through the opening perfectly, and the ball bounded once or twice on the grass, then rolled expertly onto the green.
Arnie winked at me in satisfaction and quickly followed the ball through the opening. I stood there at the edge of the bushes and watched him make his putt.
The crowd moved on with Palmer, but I remained there for a minute or so, basking in the glow of the event.
Forever after, I would be able to say truthfully: “I once gave Arnold Palmer advice on how to play a golf shot.”
—J. E. Driscoll lives in Danville, California.
JUST ACROSS THE RIVER
On a crisp, cool, sunny Saturday in January, a Midwestern café—a freestanding building with one counter, stools in front, grill behind —became the site of the most memorable experience of my high school years.
It was 1960. I was a senior member of the debate team from John J. Ingels High School, in Atchison, Kansas. I was growing up within sixty miles of the origin of the 1954 Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education, but, as of 1960, had never heard of Linda Brown or the case that bears her name. I was soon to discover that there was a great deal about which I was unaware.
We finished the Saturday-morning rounds and then went out for lunch before returning to the college to hear the semifinalists announced. We chose an appealing-looking cafeteria near the college. I was the only girl on the trip, and I was still just entering when Mr. Phipps and the boys turned around and came back out. I was busy talking and didn’t ask why we had left. I assumed the cafeteria was too crowded. We got into Mr. Phipps’s old car and drove a few blocks to a café. Business was sparse, and we spread out down the red-plastic-covered stools along the counter. John, my partner, was seated beside me. The waitress came down the counter distributing menus. John did not get one. We called this to her attention, and she quickly informed us that blacks were not served in there. I was shocked. I had never heard of such a thing. We all got up and went to the car, and Mr. Phipps went to a nearby hamburger stand and bought hamburgers and sodas for us all to eat in the car.
John wouldn’t eat. He sat in the corner of the back seat, speechless. We didn’t know what to say either. We just ate our hamburgers and went back to the college.
As I thought about the incident, I realized that John was the victim of our ignorance as well as of the prejudice of the management of the cafeteria and the café. He had probably never been exposed to such humiliation before, protected by parents or other adults who would have avoided such an incident. Strange as it may seem, a earful of high school students and their teacher were unaware of the segregation of public services just across the river from where they lived.
The look on John’s face as we ate our hamburgers ensured that I would never forget that crisp January Saturday or the Kansas City café where I met Jim Crow.
—Joan W. Musbach teaches American history at Ladue Junior High School in St. Louis County, Missouri.
MARTIAL MUSIC
During the summer of 1972, my wife and I took an automobile tour of Europe. Only in Budapest did we see Russian soldiers, in uniform, parading up and down the sidewalks.
One evening, while we were having dinner, the band at our hotel struck up “Lara’s Theme,” the title song of Dr. Zhivago.
Knowing the Russians’ hatred of the book, I pointed to the soldiers outside and said to the maitre d': “With them outside, I’m surprised you play that song.”
Thrusting a fist into the air, he said with vehemence: “We show them.”
—James D. Williamson lives in El Paso, Texas.
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