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History Now
The Faces on the Barroom Wall
A Landmark Of Comic Art Is Saved From Destruction
The newspaper comic is among the most ephemeral of art forms, but for almost 30 years a mural featuring cartoon characters has been lovingly preserved by the owners of a bar in New York City. The longtime showpiece of Costello’s, at 225 East Forty-fourth Street, was a wall decorated by America’s most famous cartoonists, but when the bar’s owner sold it earlier this year, the mural seemed in danger of going the way of yesterday’s crossword.
In its first location, around the corner on Third Avenue, Costello’s displayed a mural by the writer and cartoonist James Thurber, who drew it in lieu of paying his bar tab one night during the Depression. With this as his inspiration, in May 1976 the cartoonist Bill Gallo—a friend of the owner, Tim Costello—brought together greats of the cartooning world of the day, such as Stan Lee, Dik Browne, Bil Keane, Mort Walker, and Milton Caniff, to fill Costello’s with a new band of characters. The resulting mural covered an entire wall and included in its pantheon Spider-Man, Hagar the Horrible, Beetle Bailey, and Steve Canyon, along with Gallo’s own creation, the New York Mets fan Basement Bertha.
A favorite hangout of employees of the Daily News, Costello’s changed hands in 1992, acquiring a new name, the Turtle Bay Café, and a new clientele, United Nations workers and actors from the soap opera “Guiding Light,” which taped nearby. When ownership changed yet again this January, word got out that the new proprietors had closed the restaurant for remodeling and planned to demolish the mural. The news sparked objections from the New-York Historical Society, the Museum of the City of New York, the Daily News, and the Turtle Bay neighborhood association’s newsletter. But their concern, while well intentioned, was unfounded. “Of course we weren’t going to tear it down,” proclaims Jeff Perzan, one of the new restaurant’s proprietors. “It was one of the selling points of the building.”
During renovation, the mural was covered with transparent plastic sheeting to protect it from flying debris, allowing a three-foot-tall Bullwinkle to keep an eye on the proceedings as he chatted with a caricature of Woody Alien. Later the plastic was replaced with a sturdy plywood covering, and since the restaurant’s reopening in May as the Overlook Lounge, patrons can view the mural through a thick pane of glass.
Over the years many patrons added their own touches to the mural, and the lower half of the wall is covered in names and dates and the occasional amateur doodle. Perzan did not try to remove the graffiti. “Anytime you clean something like this,” he says, “you lose something.”
Visitors may be surprised at how current the characters in the decades-old mural seem. With some exceptions—Steve Canyon’s run ended when Caniff died in 1988, but Gallo still draws Bertha for the Daily News—the wall’s characters have survived the retirement or death of their creators. Hi and Lois’s Trixie, created by Mort Walker and painted on the wall by Dik Browne, today appears in newspapers under the care of their sons Brian Walker, Greg Walker, and Robert “Chance” Browne. Hagar the Horrible, whose popularity was at a peak when his creator, Dik Browne, included him in the mural, is now written and drawn by Browne’s younger son, Chris. Greg Walker helps produce Beetle Bailey with his father; The Lockhorns is now drawn by John Reiner in place of the late Bill Hoest; and Blanche’s Dagwood has had numerous artists since his premiere in 1930. Luckily enough, in comics, as in the restaurant business, a change of ownership doesn’t always spell the end of familiar friends.
—Benjamin T. Oderwald and Christine Gibson
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Why Do We Say That?
“JAZZ”
“If the truth were known about the origin of ‘jazz,’ it would never be mentioned in polite society,” wrote Clay Smith in Etude magazine in September 1924. A trombonist who had toured Western mining towns in the 1890s, playing in honky-tonks where “the vulgar word Jazz was in general currency,” Mr. Smith knew what he was writing about.
The word was African-American slang for copulation, both as a noun and as a verb. Jazz in its various forms—jass, jasz, and jaz are among the early spellings—may derive from some African language, though no connections have ever been proved. The term has secondary senses of excitement, energy, and invigoration, often in such constructions as jazz up, to enliven; jazz around, to fool around; and jazzy, lively or snappy. To demonstrate the word’s original shock value, Raven I. McDavid, Jr., added the following footnote to his one-volume abridgment of H. L. Mencken’s The American Language: “According to Raven I. McDavid, Sr., of Greenville, S.C., the announcement, in 1919, of the first jazz band to play in Columbia, where he was serving in the legislature, inspired feelings of terror among the local Baptists such as what might have been aroused by a personal appearance of Yahweh. Until that time jazz had never been heard in the Palmetto State except as a verb meaning to copulate.”
Conveying the flavor of the word more explicitly is the heading of a note from one girl to another included in an article by Charles A. Ford in The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology in 1929: “You can take my tie / You can take my coller / But I’ll jazze you / ‘Till you holler.”
The association of the word with the music is hardly surprising, considering that jazz flourished initially in the steamy atmosphere of New Orleans brothels. The earliest example of musical jazz in J. E. Lighter’s monumental Historical Dictionary of American Slang is from 1916: “The shriek of women’s laughter rivaled the blatant scream of the imported New Orleans Jass Band, which never seemed to stop playing.” (The shrieking women would have been called jazz babies, a term that also dates from this era.)
The transfer of the sexual term to music may have been made via the word’s secondary meanings. Lafcadio Hearn, who spent time in New Orleans in the late 1870s and early 1880s, studying local life and customs (and who was fired for not filing stories on Louisiana politics as expected by the Cincinnati newspaper that had sent him there), reported in 1917 that “the word ‘jaz,’ meaning to speed things up, to make excitement, [had been] common among the blacks of the South and had been adopted by the Creoles as a term to be applied to music of a rudimentary syncopated type.”
Herbert Asbury, best remembered today for his book The Gangs of New York (1927), reported in another work, The French Quarter (1936), that the first true jazz group was formed in New Orleans about 1895. Composed of seven boys aged 12 to 15, it called itself the Spasm Band and on occasion was advertised as the Razzy Dazzy Spasm Band. When sometime around 1900 another band adopted the same name for an engagement at the Haymarket dance hall, the original Spasms showed up with rocks in their pockets. Their appearance persuaded the owner of the hall to repaint his advertising placards to read “Razzy Dazzy Jazzy Band.”
Asbury was sometimes too credulous, but he did talk to two surviving members of the Spasms. And if he got this story right, the Haymarket signs just might represent jazz’s earliest appearance in writing in a musical context.
—Hugh Rawson
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200 years of Franklin Pierce
How do you throw a birthday party for one of America’s least charismatic presidents?
In our water-cooler discussions here at American Heritage, when we get tired of dissecting Long-street’s tactical errors at Seven Pines and debating whether George Templeton Strong or Philip Hone was the superior diarist, the conversation often turns to picking the least-known President. Some, like Garfield and Fillmore, are disqualified by being famous for their obscurity (both have cartoon characters named after them). Others, like Hayes and Andrew Johnson, achieved modest notoriety as bit players in grand historical dramas. Strong cases can be made for Tyler and Arthur, both understudies who failed to capitalize on their chances at stardom. But if the choice is restricted to elected Presidents, the winner has to be Franklin Pierce.
While in office from 1853 to 1857, Pierce did little to solve the unsolvable problems of a nation headed toward civil war. On his departure, he burned nearly all his papers. He left no memoirs, and to this day there is no satisfactory biography. The result of all this is that while planning for Abraham Lincoln’s 200th birthday, in 2009, began nearly a decade in advance, Pierce will be lucky to get a line of agate type next to the crossword puzzle on his bicentennial this November 23.
Defying these handicaps, a group of institutions in New Hampshire, his home state, has banded together to promote remembrance of Pierce and commemoration of his 200th birthday. Its Web site, franklinpierce.ws, contains a brief biography; a listing of Fierce-related sites along the Franklin Pierce Highway (state route 9), ranging from Pierce’s homes and law offices to his father’s barbecue pit; as well as links, contacts, and opportunities for volunteers to help keep alive America’s long-fading awareness of the life and times of its fourteenth President.
—F.S.
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Editors’ Bookshelf
• In 1910 a white Army surgeon wrote a black friend about Jack Johnson, the first black world heavyweight champion: “It seems to [whites] a matter of great importance whether his eminence is to be that of the purely sporting, loud, dislike-exciting nigger, or that of a sober, sane, wise and admirable Negro.” Such advice, even from a professed friend of blacks, virtually demands a defiant response and raises the age-old question of whether accommodation or resistance is the more honorable or effective strategy. To his credit, Geoffrey C. Ward, in Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (Alfred A. Knopf, 512 pages, $25.95), refuses to make Johnson a symbol of either of these approaches, seeing him primarily as just an intelligent and enormously gifted man determined to live life as he pleased. (Ward also wrote the Ken Burns film of the same name that will air on PBS in January.) Using a wealth of previously untapped sources, the author, a former editor of American Heritage, shows how the boxer’s indulgence of his desires sometimes became self-destructive; how a racist nation responded with the trumped-up charges that became his downfall; and how, in the end, he managed to rise above the persecution and continue his free-living ways.
• Robert Frost liked to write sitting in an upright wooden chair with a board on his lap; Edith Wharton wrote in bed; Nathaniel Hawthorne turned his desk to the wall to keep from being distracted by the view out his window. These are things you learn from American Writers at Home (Library of America and Vendome Press, 232 pages, $50.00), a lavish book full of photographs of the homes of 21 renowned American authors, from Louisa May Alcott to Walt Whitman, with illuminating accompanying text by the poet J. D. McClatchy. As McClatchy puts it, the book introduces us to places where “our history turned into myth, our lives turned into fables, our passions and sorrows turned into the books that have told us, over the years, how we are Americans.”
• Chester Carlson was a poor, awkward, lonely 12-year-old when he told his cousin Roy he was going to invent something big some day. What he invented, xerography (the word for it had to be invented too), was such an utterly new idea that for a long time nobody thought it could work. He made his first rough copy in a little room above a bar in Queens, New York, in 1938, and decades went by- and whole companies were bet- before the idea grew into the office machines that made Xerox the miracle story of the 1960s. David Owen, whose books include The Walls Around Us and The First National Bank of Dad, tells the tale irresistibly in his new book, Copies in Seconds (Simon & Schuster, 320 pages, $24.00).
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The Buyable Past
Accutron Watches
On October 25, 1960, Bulova unveiled a battery-powered watch called the Accutron. It wasn’t the industry’s first electronic model, but it was a breakthrough product.
A Bulova technical whiz named Max Hetzel had begun developing the Accutron in Switzerland in 1952 and later relocated the project !V to the company’s U.S. headquarters. Hetzel’s watch employed a new device known as the transistor and had at its heart an electromagnetic tuning fork that vibrated 360 times per second. It hummed rather than ticked.
Accutrons were exact to within a minute a month; Bulova guaranteed that precision, astounding for its time, in writing. The company’s chairman, Gen. Omar Bradley, a man who knew the importance of timing, may have had something to do with NASA’s decision to use Accutron mechanisms for several purposes. (Nevertheless, the space agency chose the Omega Speedmaster, a mechanical chronograph, for its astronauts to wear.)
A few of them preferred Accutrons. When Scott Carpenter appeared on a 1962 Paris Match cover wearing Accutron’s Astronaut model, the publicity value was incalculable. President Lyndon B. Johnson later made Accutron the official gift of state, and all the clocks on Air Force One employed Accutron technology. By 1977, when the company retired the tuning fork in favor of quartz-crystal technology, millions of the originals had been sold.
Owners of vintage Accutrons face a special set of problems today. Collectible watches have to be in good working order, but not many people can maintain or repair old Accutrons properly, and finding parts for them can be difficult.
And don’t expect aging Accutrons to take a drubbing and keep on humming either. One online dealer and restoration specialist, Christopher Maugham (www.accutrontuningfork. com), recently offered a Deep Sea model for $350. When new, the watch was approved for use under 666 feet of ocean, yet Maugham advised prospective buyers not to wear it while diving.
Other Accutrons for sale on the Internet lately ranged in price from the low to the high hundreds. Finer Times (www.finertimes.com) featured an example of the popular Spaceview, which has a transparent face that exposes the mechanism, for $449, and Maugham was asking $300 for an overhauled 1969 model that had been approved for use by railroad personnel.
—David Lander
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To Learn More
Spend some time online, and you’ll find Web pages with plenty of data, both technical and historical, posted by Accutron enthusiasts. Some sites also offer service and merchandise. Start at Dashto Horological (www.dashto.com), where clicking on the word Links on the home page will take you to a list of other Accutron-related sites.
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Crossroads Of The World
A century ago the New York Times put up a new building in midtown Manhattan (its cheerful terra cotta has long been debauched by a rebarbative gray cladding), and when the subway station there opened on October 27, 1904, the publisher, Adolph S. Ochs, exercised enough clout to get the stop named after his paper. So Longacre Square became Times Square, and within a generation it was known around the globe, its intersection with Forty-second Street the most famous of all crossroads. A wonderfully beguiling and spirited birthday salute, Times Square Style: Graphics From the Great White Way, by Vicki Gold Levi and Steven Heller (Princeton Architectural Press, $20.00), teems with the sorts of images Times Square and its enterprises have used to sell themselves: matchbooks, postcards, menus, chinaware, posters, song sheets, all of them together conjuring a place- at once familiar and exotic—of lobster palaces and showgirls, skyscrapers rising from warrens of bars and trinket shops and penny arcades, and, of course, lights, lights, lights.
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