A MINIATURE REPLICA OF UNIMAGINABLE FIDELITY IS TOURING THE COUNTRY
In this homeland security era, there may be no tougher ticket than a White House tour. The landmark is now available only for school and youth groups or veterans’ and military organizations, and requests must be submitted through a member of Congress. But if you can’t come to the White House, the White House may come to you—or at least a 60-foot-wide, 10-ton replica of amazing fidelity and detail, which will be touring the country until 2005.
The replica’s home is the National Presidents Hall of Fame and Museum, in Clermont, Florida, which opened in 1962. This is a private, not-for-profit operation created and owned by John and Jan Zweifel, who, along with 50 volunteers, make sure that smoke comes out of the replica’s chimneys and the Oval Office phones really ring. If a desk in the Washington mansion was carved from mahogany, then the miniature version is made of mahogany as well. The sinks work, and the paintings on the wall duplicate those on display in Washington.
When Christmas approaches, museum representatives meet with White House staff and conduct on-site visits (the Hall of Fame has complete access to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue) to make sure of every seasonal detail, including the mini-tree’s evergreen smell. John Zweifel visits Washington half a dozen times a year and routinely gets faxed photographs of, for example, new White House furniture. The level of devotion can get downright obsessive: To re-create the Easter-egg roll, volunteers get the exact color scheme correct for thousands of miniature eggs.
The museum’s White House is not, John Zweifel will tell you, a dollhouse, although he can’t resist adding that it is listed as the world’s largest dollhouse in the Guinness Book of World Records. And even while it tours the country, visitors to the museum in Clermont can see many other popular attractions. Each of the 43 Presidents has a display case that re-creates one or more important rooms from his life. These rooms are built to 1:12 scale, and each is selected to reflect the President’s personal preferences and habits, revealing a hidden facet of his personality.
For Gerald Ford, a former football star at the University of Michigan, there’s a replicated exercise room that he had converted from a guest bedroom. Bill Clinton’s third-floor music room features celebrity photos of performers he admires, such as Quincy Jones. Richard Nixon’s Lincoln Room contains cigar burns that he would smudge the surroundings with. Abigail Adams’s laundry line hangs in her husband’s East Room, spike marks from Dwight Eisenhower’s golf shoes can be seen in the mini-version of his Oval Office, and Amy Carter’s roller-skate tracks appear in her father’s East Room. “Security guards from the White House are our biggest fans,” John Zweifel says. “They say they worked every day in the real building and never, ever got to see how these rooms actually operated.”
The replica will be at the State Fair of Texas, in Dallas, from September 26 through October 19 and at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum, in Austin, from November 10 through February 16, 2004. For more information on the tour, call 407-876-3631 or the National Presidents Hall of Fame at 352-394-2836.
—Dennis McCafferty
THE BUYABLE PAST
MARBLES
American children have played with marbles since the Civil War era, when most were manufactured in Germany. Around 1910 an American named Martin Christensen, who held the patent on the first machine for making ball bearings, got the domestic marble industry going with another mechanical device, an invention that he said would turn molten glass into “perfectly formed spheres.” After having been handmade of glass or ceramics for millennia, as far back as ancient Israel and the pharaohs’ Egypt, marbles met the machine age, and America became the leading producer.
For the next half-century few adults paid attention to marbles. Then, in the 1970s, a Connecticut businessman named Stanley Block, disappointed by the insignificant assortment on display at the great glass museum in Sandwich, Massachusetts, founded the Marble Collectors Society of America.
Today Block and his son Robert are Most Valuable Players in a large league of marble collectors. Robert Block’s well-illustrated book, Marbles: Identification and Price Guide, quickly conveys the lure of these little orbs. If they’ve managed to avoid the schoolyard of hard knocks, marbles can be lovely indeed.
Some of the most attractive are the vibrantly colored ones made in the late 1920s and very early 1930s. After that, the Depression led companies to cheapen manufacturing, and hues faded. America’s role in the industry diminished when the Japanese moved in after World War II, and Mexico is now the principal supplier.
More than 95 percent of all marbles are worth just a penny or two, and it’s still possible to build a handsome collection with examples that cost less than $10 each. Robert Block, who has an Internet site devoted to marble auctions, reports that more than half go for less than $100 while only a handful in any sale exceed $500. The very best pieces spin into the five-figure bracket.
WHAT TO LOOK FOR
Marbles fall into a variety of evocatively named design categories. Indians have banded patterns over dark bases, while the milk white backgrounds of clambroths contrast with their colorful ribbonlike strands. Lutz marbles, lit by glittering flakes of goldstone, are named for a nineteenth-century artisan at the Boston & Sandwich Glass Company. There are cat’s-eyes and patches; micas and mists; slags, submarines, sulphides, and swirls.
Bright color is crucial to an old marble’s value, and collectors grade condition by subtracting fractions of a point—and whole dollars—for each chip or flake. Remain on the lookout for reproductions, and beware of repaired marbles. Ironically, glass craftsmen now find it worthwhile to restore damaged machine-made pieces by hand.
—David Lander
FURTHER RESEARCH
The Marble Collectors Society of America Web site, at www.marblecollecting.com, includes a wealth of information, including an illustrated identification guide, a calendar of hobby-related events, an archive of articles from its newsletter, Marble Mania, and a link to Robert Block’s auction site. The organization’s mailing address is P.O. Box 222, Trumbull, CT 06611.
THE RETURN OF FREDDY THE PIG
ANIMAL FARM AMERICAN STYLE
Walter R. Brooks created one of the most unforgettable characters in children’s books in 1927, when he wrote Freddy Goes to Florida. Freddy was a pig on Mr. Bean’s farm somewhere in New York State; in the two dozen volumes that followed, Freddy would become, among other things, a newspaper editor, a magician, a cowboy, a balloonist, a bank owner, and a political boss. As that range of professions suggests, the pig’s stories were both lyrical and hard-boiled, both morally instructive and witty. Freddy Goes to Florida takes as its premise a bunch of farm animals deciding that if birds can head South for the winter, they should be allowed to as well. Here’s how it begins:
“Charles, the rooster, came out of the front door of the chicken coop and walked slowly across the barn-yard. It was still very dark in the barn-yard, for it was half past four in the morning, and the sun was not yet up. He shivered and thought of his nice warm perch in the coop, but there was a reason why he did not go back to it. Mr. Bean, the farmer, did not have very much money, and could not afford to buy an alarm-clock, and he relied on the rooster to wake him up bright and early in the morning. The last time Charles had overslept, Mr. Bean had been very angry and had threatened to have him fricasseed with baking-powder biscuit for Sunday dinner....” Many baby boomers will remember growing up with Freddy, but the books have generally been out of print since the 1970s, forcing librarians sometimes to photocopy them for children in the know. Now at last they all are back, in handsome, sturdy hardcover facsimile editions, at $23.95 apiece, from Overlook Press.
Tell It to the Marines
A PROPOSAL TO RENAME GUADALCANAL’S AIRPORT DOESN’T FLY
Times are tough in the Solomon Islands. With few natural resources, the islands depend on tourism, but their remoteness, often antiquated facilities, and inhospitable environment can make them a tough sell. The government hopes its renovation and expansion of the airport at Honiara (the nation’s capital, on the island of Guadalcanal) will attract more tourists, and earlier this year a Japanese consulting firm supervising the improvement had a helpful suggestion: Give the airport, which has been called Henderson Field since U.S. Marines captured it from Japan in 1942, a more Japanese-friendly name: Chrysanthemum Field.
The idea must have seemed reasonable at the time. The Japanese paid most of the tab for improving the airport, so why shouldn’t they rename it? In Japan the chrysanthemum symbolizes health and happiness. What could be wrong with that?
Plenty. Never mind that Emperor Hirohito occupied what is known as the Chrysanthemum Throne or that a massed Kamikaze attack in World War II was known as a kikusui, or “floating chrysanthemum.” The idea that Maj. Lofton Henderson, the first American pilot to die in the Battle of Midway, might have his name removed from the field to attract a few more Japanese tourists did not sit well at all with Henderson’s fellow Marines—or even with the residents of Honiara. The idea was quickly withdrawn, and the Solomons government learned a lesson about what happens when you listen to consultants. Beyond that, it also learned the importance of choosing one’s enemies: If you have to fight someone, try not to make it the U.S. Marines.
While we’re on the subject of Guadalcanal, this is as good a time as any to correct an article that American Heritage published in 1993. In that piece, Thomas Fleming quoted from a booklet titled Walks on Guadalcanal, whose cheerful tone mixed uneasily with its long and detailed cautions about the island’s potential dangers (scorpions, crocodiles, sudden cliffs, and hostile locals, to name but a few). Fleming imagined the booklet’s author, J. L. O. Tedder, as a struggling freelancer who had accepted the assignment for want of other work and was determined to make the best of it.
We have since learned that Tedder was a longtime British official in the Solomons as well as a distinguished naturalist. Since his retirement, he has been active in environmental organizations and as a farmer in his native Australia. We can only wish him more success in these pursuits than he had in attracting hikers to Guadalcanal.
THE HUNDRED-YEAR DRIVE
WHEN HENRY FORD’S MODEL T CAME ON FAST
In 1912 families descended from immigrants from the hailing area of Norway who had settled around Spring Grove, Minnesota, decided to get together and drive into nearby Caledonia. They arrived on June 19 and had their picture taken. What is notable about this prosperous lot is how avidly they have taken to the Model T. Henry Ford had introduced the car just four years earlier, but clearly the Tm Lizzie is well on its way to accounting for two-thirds of the automobiles in America. As part of its centennial celebrations this year, the Ford Motor Company sent 43 Model T’s from California to their spawning ground in Michigan, and on the way they stopped at the same spot in Caledonia.
ON EXHIBIT
Margaret Bourke-White was only 30 when she took the cover photograph for the first issue of Life magazine, in 1936, but she was already well known as an industrial photographer whose images of steel mills, the Chrysler Building, airliners, and the Soviet Union helped define how Americans saw those things. A traveling museum exhibit and companion book reveal hundreds of those pictures in sumptuous prints vastly finer than their first appearances in newspapers and magazines. The show and the book are both titled Margaret Bourke-White: The Photography of Design, 1927-1936. The show opened at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., last winter and will be at the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida, from October 25 to January 4; the Mint Museum of Art in Charlotte, North Carolina, from February 14 to May 2; and the Fort Wayne Museum of Art in Indiana and the Portland Museum of Art in Maine in late 2004 and 2005. The book, with a text by Stephen Bennett Williams, of the Phillips Collection, is published by Rizzoli ($45).
SCREENINGS
THE OTHER GREGORY PECK
When Gregory Peck died this past June, he was mourned and praised as the actor who created the archetypal father and husband figure, exemplified by his idealistic lawyer Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. But earlier in his career there was another Gregory Peck, one with the range to illuminate a wide range of American types from the simple to the sardonic to the sinister.
Spellbound
(1945)—Peck reportedly wasn’t enthusiastic about Alfred Hitchcock’s cold and calculating directorial techniques in this thriller, which Hitch later derided as “just another manhunt story wrapped up in pseudo-psychoanalysis.” Well, yes, just another one, but one directed with Hitchcock’s style and flair, enlivened by dazzling and amusing special effects from Salvador Dali, and anchored by the chemistry between Ingrid Bergman and the 29-year-old Peck, whose stern chin and chiseled profile conceal undercurrents of fraud. Hitchcock and Peck were both wrong: Spellbound is terrific fun.
Duel in the Sun
(1946)—Or Lust in the Dust, as some critics mocked it. The pretensions of King Vidor’s sprawling, self-important epic are undermined by the heavy breathing every time Jennifer Jones’s half-breed bad girl and Peck’s licentious bad brother narrow their eyes at each other. (Joseph Gotten plays the good brother, the role Peck would have gotten had the film been made 10 years later.) It’s an overwrought, half-baked, thoroughly enjoyable Western with Peck having what appears to be the time of his life in the role of a total wastrel.
The Yearling
(1946)—This film, directed by Clarence Brown from Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s great novel—perhaps the consummate coming-of-age story in American literature—is a too-little-seen masterpiece. At first glance, Peck’s role as the father of the boy Jody, who must come to accept the death of his pet deer, seems like an early variation on his later domestic roles. But the father in The Yearling, a dirt-poor farmer trying to keep his family alive in the Florida swamp, is light-years from the high-toned characters Peck would later become famous for. Never far from the father’s affability is his sad acceptance of the pain the boy must endure in his passage to manhood and a parent’s powerlessness to mitigate it. For one of the few times in his career, Peck was able to soften his patrician voice and bearing to play a common man.
Yellow Sky
(1948)—Peck got a chance to be sly and sexy in this offbeat Western version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Flanked by Anne Baxter as the love interest and Richard Widmark as the villain, he artfully holds back for about two-thirds of the picture, then steps in and steals both the movie and the girl.
Twelve O’clock High
(1949)—Peck was never darker or more vulnerable than as the bomber flight commander who cracks under pressure during daylight raids against Germany in World War II. This may have been Peck’s greatest performance; he manages to create a profound empathy for his character and his plight without descending into pathos or playing for audience sympathy.
Moby Dick
(1956)—As Peck settled into romantic comedy leads and impeccable good-guy roles, he was often accused of being a bit wooden as an actor. If his Ahab, though, in John Huston’s often majestic Moby Dick is wooden, the wood is hickory. It’s the one performance in Peck’s career that approached the Shakespearean in depth and emotional power.
—Allen Barra
EDITORS’ BOOKSHELF
One day in 1986 a young reporter for Atlantic City magazine named Jonathan Van Meter spotted an item in the local paper: “Paul ‘Skinny’ D’Amato ESTATE SALE Memorabilia, Photographs, Furniture, Clothing, Etc.” In the house—a shrine to mid-1960s luxe, “all oranges and whites and browns and camels and taupes"—Van Meter looked at photographs of D’Amato with members of the Rat Pack and came away with a wearable pair of white suede loafers and a lasting fascination that eventually led him to write The Last Good Time: Skinny D’Amato, the Notorious 500 Club & the Rise and Fall of Atlantic City (Crown). The contained, publicity-shy D’Amato first brought Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis together to entertain at his 500 Club and taught Frank Sinatra how to hold a cigarette. He had ties to organized crime and the Kennedy White House, and he had a great life until everything began to go catastrophically awry. Van Meter tells his racy story with the greatest relish and in the process traces the history of a fascinating and singular city while exploring how a man can acquire immense influence and yet manage to live out his entire life in the shadows.
