I was going to write about Carol’s and my recent visit to Monument Valley, in sweeping Navajo tribal land on the Arizona-Utah border. But I need to spend a tad more time “studying up” on Navajo history and culture in order to put this awesome terrain in context. Next posting, I’ll show you some of Carol’s stunning images and paint some (less-stunning) word pictures as well. I’m pretty sure that the formations of Monument Valley, 65 million years in the making, won’t have changed much in the next few days.

Last week, I was reading one of the “news obituaries” in the Washington Post or the New York Times – I can’t recall which. In fact, I don’t remember the name of, or many details about, the man whose life story was recounted. I asked my VOA colleague and cubicle-farm neighbor, Faith Lapidus, if she had perhaps read the same obit and could help. She replied, “No, I’m not old enough to be reading the obituaries.”

There’s some truth in that.

In case you’re wondering, a news obituary differs from the short testimonials to the ordinary dearly departed that are a staple of every local newspaper. News obituaries are short biographies, not a recitation of the deceased’s job résumés, fraternal affiliations, and extended relatives. News obits don’t describe funeral arrangements or the charities to which donations may be sent in lieu of sending flowers to the survivors.

What jumped out at me about this man, whoever he was, was what the obit writer described as “his passion” – directing and enforcing the strict rules of his condominium association.

What an odd thing to be passionate about, I thought.

Guarded gates greet visitors to some luxury communities across America. And many of them are especially fussy about keeping up appearances

Homeowner, condo, subdivision, and other “co-operative” associations that attempt to establish reasonable neighborhood standards (as one viewpoint would have it) or heartlessly trample the right of free expression (as others see it), are examples of, to put it politely, “dynamic tensions” that exist among neighbors in such communities. Tempers flare when neighbors start telling each other what they can and cannot do with their property. That’s why, as a Las Vegas resident told the local newspaper, “HOA” stands for “homeowners’ association” to some and “Home Owners with Attitude” to others.

This is The Villages, a “retirement lifestyle center” in Ocala, Florida

Homeowner associations are legal entities, and some are registered nonprofit corporations as well. States like Florida and California, where millions of retirees own and live in apartments, attached condominiums, and single-family homes in planned or gated clusters with names like “Sunnyside Commons” and “The Estates at Babbling Brook,” give associations all sorts of power. They can write “covenants” regulating design and behavior standards, enforce the rules with fines and even evictions, and charge monetary “assessments” to each household to cover shared maintenance of trees, parks, swimming pools and tennis courts, strips of grass along the street, and walking trails. Up north, some homeowners’ associations even plow the streets in wintertime with the money they collect.

In co-op apartment buildings, residents pay the doorman and other staff. The doorman usually has the best of it. He gets the most tips

In hotel-sized, owner-occupied apartment towers with swanky monikers like “The Excelsior,” condo associations collect the money that pays the salaries and benefits, if any, of front-desk clerks, doormen, maintenance workers, housekeepers, pool cleaners and the like.

Most residents gladly pay these assessments. Having someone else sweep up fallen palm-tree fronds and negotiate good rates for basic cable service throughout a building or neighborhood is one less hassle that they have to worry about.

But all is not so rosy when it comes to “special” assessments and “architectural control” from the HOA.

Here’s an example of the former:

Townhouses in a long row can look as different as night and day. But they share some walls and a common roof, which means that tough decisions must be made come repair time

You live in a rowhouse community, side-by-side with your neighbors – in individual units but under a common roof. When the aging roof begins to leak above one unit, your condo board decides that the entire roof needs replacing, and it passes a one-time assessment in the thousands of dollars to pay for it – to be divided among all the households.

This may not sit well with you if the roof has never leaked above your place.

Many HOAs have a tolerance for cuties like this

Disputes over pets and kids also get tempers flaring in cooperative communities. A state like Florida has thousands of “55-plus” condo and neighborhood developments, designed and equipped for retirees.

And not so much for bowsers of this size

The homeowner association may allow lap-sized pets like precious Fritzy or Fifi, but ban bruisers named Bruno and Butch. This does not please those who’d like to bring in a mastiff puppy for companionship. Sad or tragic life experiences sometimes force grandparents to inherit the care of young children, and it’s a tricky and contentious matter for the owner association to tell the old folks that their own flesh and blood is banned by covenant and cannot stay.

Homeowners’ associations typically take a dim view of yard signage, not to mention the idea of footloose renters moving into the community

Many HOAs forbid members from renting their homes, or even a room or two, in the belief that itinerant renters have no inherent interest in maintaining the property. They’re viewed as undesirables who’ll introduce large families, loud music and late-night carousing, strange cooking odors, suspicious strangers, drugs and crime.

But homeowners who lose a job or a loved one and could use the extra income from a rental have a hard time understanding why they can’t rent out something they own.

“Excuse me, Madam President, but did you say I CAN’Tscreen in my front porch?”

Thus a seat on a condo or subdivision’s board of directors can be the quintessential “thankless job.” To top it off, it’s usually unpaid. Board members call meetings that few attend – until a storm brews over a controversial issue. Then the room can be packed with snarling people who call them liars, thieves, witches, Nazis, incompetent idiots and worse. Even board members can end up at each other’s throats over volatile matters like opening a private beach to outsiders, making a club room smoke-free, or allowing residents to “run a little business” out of their homes. People have even come to blows over issues as minute as the allowable dimensions of hanging birdhouses.

It’s not like having a disagreement at work. HOA matters involve neighbors who see each other all the time and may be stuck with each other for years to come.

As “The Cooperator,” the monthly online co-op and condo newsletter noted, board membership “is not exactly a walk in the park.” It quoted a 1976 Wake Forest [University] Law Review article: “Too often, Board members approach their Association responsibilities as if they were on the committee of a social club, religious group, or other similar organization.”

Instead, they find themselves in charge of thousands of dollars of community members’ money, and if they don’t do well they can face serious legal problems, including lawsuits and criminal charges.

Earlier I mentioned, but did not explain, “architectural control” – “control” being the operative word. Nothing, but nothing, gets people worked up as much as this facet of condominium or subdivision life.

There’s a certain sameness to many housing tracts – which is just the way some HOAs like it

These communities were often developed by a builder, developer, or apartment-building owner according to a master plan. “Units,” including single-family houses, were designed to project a consistent, predictable “look” based on similar building materials, floor plans, balcony and deck configurations, landscaping features – even exterior paint schemes.

A look that you could accept or walk away from when you considered moving in.

You might, for instance, choose a community because of its Victorian ambience – classic gabled houses painted in a limited variety of pastels and graced with nostalgic wraparound porches. The uniformity of style increases the neighborhood appeal and property values.

“Uh, interesting color scheme, but we don’t think so. And by the way, you’ve hung the American flag backward.”

And homeowner associations exist to keep it that way. No funky, cubist lawn sculptures, please. No day-glo-orange window trim. No loud music after 10 p.m. No liberation flags in the window. No outrageous additions that turn modest dwellings into elephantine “McMansions.”

Inside, you can go wild if you like. Even tear out some walls. But don’t mess with the exterior without permission of the association board.

And don’t hold your breath waiting to get it.

Cute. Warmhearted. Not allowed. Sorry

The homeowner association can even regulate nuanced decorative touches that one wouldn’t think would offend anyone: Display an American flag in the window? Hang a Jewish mezuzah on the doorjamb or string pretty Christmas lights on the roof? Stick a satellite dish of modest size – “modest” being a relative term – out of sight in the back yard? Put a cute white picket fence around the garden?

Maybe, maybe not. Depends on the association covenants and the imperial rulings of its Architectural Control Committee.

Now, to those who argue “a man’s home is his castle,” to which he can do just about anything he pleases, this all sounds as if self-appointed neighborhood vigilantes are preserving mindless conformity captured in Malvina Reynolds’s song “Little Boxes,” famously performed by Pete Seeger in the 1960s . . .

Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky-tacky,
Little boxes, little boxes,
Little boxes, all the same.

Well, like it or not, the condo or homeowner association has the force of law behind its authority. It can fine you or even kick you out if you don’t go along with its dictates.

Rules, rules, rules. They’re what make some HOA volunteers’ world go ‘round

A friend of mine, whom I will not name for reasons you’ll understand once I quote him, lives in a lovely high-rise condominium. He’s kept a close eye on relations between the residents and the condo board. He may even be on it, for all I know. And he sent me an entertaining account of, as he puts it, “a few of the inane, ridiculous and sublime things we’ve run into in the years we’ve been here.”

It’s instructive to quote him in full, minus a few of his intemperate interjections:

“Look out below!”

1. We have a balcony that is partially exposed to anything which our fellow residents may discard from their balconies on upper floors. We make great use of this area to relax in the evenings. This became a problem when the lady [on a higher floor] decided she was entitled to wash her windows and balcony floor. That in itself sounds somewhat innocent. However, her drain scuppers deposited literal cascades of dirty water onto our balcony. There is an absolute prohibition in our bylaws against throwing anything, even CLEAN water, off a balcony since those below might be injured or have their right to enjoy their property impaired.

We made a formal complaint to the management. Presently, the neighbor appeared at our door to negotiate. She took the position that we ought to allow her to dump her waste water off her balcony onto ours on a weekly basis. She was willing to settle for every two weeks if we really pressed the point. She was dumbfounded that we would not agree amongst ourselves to violate the building’s bylaws. She lost that argument and to this day will not speak to us, which I regard as a victory in itself.

“If we let you hang flags, pretty soon you’ll be putting out your wash on the railing.”

2. This one was really dicey. An upper-floor resident began displaying a large American flag on the outer portion of his balcony railing. You could see it for hundreds of yards. Once again, the bylaws are strict and unmistakable. Nothing can be hung from a balcony. No exceptions. The condo Board agonized over how to approach the fellow without seeming to be anti-American or at least anti-flag. One bright fellow, he isn’t even a lawyer, found some obscure (to me) federal statute that specifies exactly how and under what conditions an American flag may be displayed. The resident was in gross violation of this statute, particularly the part which demands that the flag be reverently taken down at sunset. He was horrified to learn of his transgression, and he hasn’t displayed the flag since.

Your HOA is watching you!

3. At virtually every Board meeting I have attended, at least one resident has objected to the presence of security cameras in the building. We have a large number of them strategically placed to record all activity, 24/7, in the COMMON areas of our building. Areas such as the lobby, exercise room, party room, mail room, pool deck and parking garages are all under surveillance. Typically it takes the association President only a minute or two to ascertain that the objecting resident has somehow gotten it into her head that the security cameras are in HER apartment recording every moment of her existence. Even after it is carefully explained that the cameras only monitor activities in the public areas, she usually objects and wants to know if the people who are entitled to review the recordings have had proper background checks. Happily, our President is the proud possessor of federal security clearances that, as he puts it, “I am prohibited by federal statute from describing to you.” That has always ended the discussion.

Has the Architectural Control Committee seen this??

A few people still encourage their precious pets to poop in the terribly expensive landscaping around the building, but we caught a few on camera and they’ve been fined. Some people prop open doors to the outside or garages for their own momentary convenience and then forget to close them. That compromises our security. Similarly, last summer a resident decided to invite a group of friends over for a pool party. Unfortunately, his party took place around midnight after the pool had been closed for hours. The security cameras revealed that it was clearly a “clothing optional” event. I was hoping the videos would be screened publicly with light refreshments served, but legal counsel overruled me.

“I could go on,” my friend’s account wound down, “but you get the picture.”

He noted that in his state, those who enter into a contract to buy a condo are required by law to receive all bylaws and other documents in advance of closing. This allows someone who just can’t live with the regimentation an opportunity to get out of the deal without penalty. “Of course,” my friend noted, “virtually no one actually reads the documents.

“In our case, we did and decided the tradeoffs were ones we could live with.”

Somewhere in this tug-of-war between conformists who like things just so – “condo commandos,” a friend in Miami calls them – and those who think homeowners ought to be able to express their various tastes through the appearance of their property, lies some interesting psychology. It takes a certain kind of person to give up many nights and weekends, drafting homeowner association rules, rewriting charters for obscure committees, calling and faithfully attending board meetings, and keeping a vigil for “architectural” transgressions.

“You can’t fool me. I know you’re with the HOA violation inspection team!”

A colleague here at VOA who served for several years on such a board told me that some of the board members actually walked the neighborhood in a pack, clipboards in hand, peering into their neighbors’ yards to check for obscure “violations” like unburied television cables and fences that aren’t plumb. She believes that gung-ho immersion in neighborhood affairs can be a power trip for some, or a nearly obsessive-compulsive desire to “keep up community standards” for others.

“But in their hearts, they believe they’re motivated by altruism,” she says – “a desire to serve.”

Some people – perhaps like the fellow profiled in that news obituary – seem to thrive on the challenge of HOA service. But others steer so clear of getting involved that many owner associations have been forced to hire hard-hearted outside management companies to run their affairs.

Such is life for condominium, co-op, and homeowners’ associations.

Or Home Owners With Attitude.

If you read a checklist – author or source unidentified – that’s widely circulated on the Web, it’s a miracle that anyone born in America before 1980 is still alive.

Borrowing from and elaborating on it, just think:

When we were in the womb, our mothers ate bleu cheese dressing and tuna from a can, took aspirin, had a drink or two, and smoked.

Look ma, no hands. And no helmet, either

As toddlers, we had no childproof lids or locks on medicine bottles, doors, or cabinets.

We rode our bikes clear across town and back, and the only thing on our heads was a Cleveland Indians baseball cap.

We ate cupcakes and white bread, and we drank sugary soda pop. (I used to spend my paper-route money on cases of returnable bottles of R.C. Cola. If you don’t believe it, ask my dentist today.) Rapture was sinking our teeth into a richly marbled steak, or lobster drenched in melted butter, or – more likely in our modest circumstances – two or three boxes of Good & Plenty licorice candy at the movie show. But we weren’t overweight because we were always outside playing. We even passed around that bottle of pop, and two or three or four friends would put their actual lips on it!

Sometimes we’d go over to a friend’s house – friends were human kids then, not Internet avatars. We’d play football, build treehouses, swing on swings, fall and cut ourselves or break a bone. And – you won’t believe this – no one sued our parents when we did.

We made up games rather than buying them, and some of them involved sharp objects or Red Ryder Carbine-Action 200-Shot Air Rifle guns that did not put out an eye.

Not everyone made the Little League baseball team. Those who didn’t got over it. Only winning teams got trophies. There were no “participation” ribbons.

Some students did better than we did in school. And if we caused trouble and were disciplined, our parents sided with . . . the teachers. Imagine!

In college, we hitchhiked.

We rode in cars with no seat belts or air bags. Riding in the back of a pickup truck was a treat.

We drank water straight from the garden hose. (I swear it!)

We had no video games; had only three fuzzy, black-and-white TV channels to watch; owned no cell phones, had no way to “download” music or take and view photographs on the spot.

We had no computers at all. Imagine!

“What did I tell you about the sun?”

The point that some people take from all this is that since millions of people not only survived these harrowing times but even went on to become risk-takers, innovators, leaders, and blog writers, the government and do-gooder activist groups should butt out of everyday life and let people take their lumps.

It’s a facile and tempting conclusion. But surely there’s a reasonable middle ground between slathering our lives with regulations and letting the weak and strong, poor and wealthy, slow and brilliant, unlucky and lucky fend for themselves.

None of these is Mother

I do miss lead-based paint that spread so smoothly and lasted forever. But then, I don’t, any more, have toddlers crawling across the porch and teething on banister rails. My mom smoked like a steam locomotive and drank a Miller High Life now and then, probably even while she was pregnant with me, and I turned out OK in some people’s estimation.

Yet I’m glad that someone warns expectant mothers to knock those things off today. I won’t so much as back out of the driveway without a buckled seat belt, thanks to safety campaigns. And having once seen what happens when a motorcyclist who’s struck by a car is propelled through a windshield, I’m happy that most states require cyclists to put something hard on their heads. I’m pleased that makers of fast and processed food must now tell me what all they put in their products. Because someone just might put an eye out, I don’t mind it a bit that, inside each box that they sell, BB-gun makers must list firearm-safety rules as long as your arm. Even the ugly health-warning label on my box of poker-game cigars makes a lot of sense to me.

To Carol’s consternation, I still drink out of the garden hose, love bleu cheese dressing, drink a beer and smoke those cigars now and then. Regulators or no regulators.

Here’s another list that makes a good lead-in to WILD WORDS. An old radio colleague, Jim Slade, sends around a gentle humor compendium that he calls “Gadfly.” And in a recent edition, contributor John Taylor asked some questions:

If a word is misspelled in the dictionary, how would we know?
If Webster wrote the first dictionary, where did he find the words?
Why do we say that something is “out of whack”? What’s a whack?
Why do “fat chance” and “slim chance” mean the same thing?
Why do “tug” boats push their barges?
Why do Americans sing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” when we are already there?
At the game, how is that we “sit” in the “stands”?
Why, at night, is it “after dark” rather than “after light”?
And John’s capper: Doesn’t “expecting the unexpected” make the unexpected expected?

You may have to think about that last one awhile!

(These are a few of the words from this posting that you may not know. Each time, I’ll tell you a little about them and also place them into a cumulative archive of “Ted’s Wild Words” in the right-hand column of the home page. Just click on it there, and if there’s another word in today’s blog that you’d like me to explain, just ask!)

Avatar. Lots of young people know this word well. Online, it stands for a computer representation of oneself – an alter ego that looks and acts much like a human. The word traces to Hindu mythology, in which a god comes to earth in human form.

BB gun. An air gun, or one that fires small, round, metal projectiles called BBs using a spring. It’s sometimes said that “BB” was taken from industrial “ball bearing” pellets, but it actually originated from the size of lead shot used in some shotguns – BB was in between the B and BBB sizes. A number of companies have developed less-dangerous toy alternatives that employ plastic pellets.

Cubicle farm. A sarcastic reference to an array of small office workspaces, each surrounded by partitions to give their inhabitants the illusion of privacy. At VOA, we call one such arrangement in our large newsroom “Podland.”

Mezuzah. A small scroll containing handwritten passages from Jewish sacred writings that is stored in a protective case and hung on a doorpost. The mezuzah serves as a reminder of God’s presence in the house.

Slather. To spread generously. Mayonnaise on a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich, for instance.

In 1917 and 1918, many ordinary Americans and most soldiers heading off to fight on the European Continent in World War I crossed the country by rail. And those who passed through Kansas City – once a brawling cowtown on the wide Missouri River that had grown into a brash city of a quarter-million people run by the Pendergast political machine – detrained into a magnificent new, Beaux-Arts terminal, the third-largest in the country.

This is a recent photo of Kansas City’s Union Station and the city skyline, taken from the top of the Liberty Memorial. Closed for awhile, the station again serves Amtrak passengers and is full of shops, restaurants, and a historic museum

Directly across the street to the south, they first beheld a steep rise leading to an ordinary rock outcropping above Penn Valley Park, beyond which automobile enthusiasts had set up a campground at the time. Across Main Street, they saw rows of decrepit buildings and billboards touting cheap bourbon and cigars, moustache waxes, nickel-beer joints and the like.

But that hill in Penn Valley Park would soon be the site of something special, unique in fact, worth a long look on Memorial Day weekend in 2009.

Worth a second look, too, because of what has happened there recently as well.

I should begin with an explanation of Memorial Day, which to the average American, regrettably, has become less a tribute to fallen servicemen and women in America’s wars than the unofficial kickoff to summer and the beach season – another three-day dispensation to eat, drink, relax, shop, and make merry.

Girl Scouts salute at a Memorial Day gathering in Gallipolis, Ohio, in 1943

As you’ll read later, the holiday traces to tributes to the fallen that began in the somber days that followed America’s bloody Civil War almost a century and a half ago. Interest in the tradition surged again half a century later during the conflict that the world idyllically called “The Great War” – four years of carnage now barely remembered and rarely commemorated.

German troops get a break in their trench near St. Michel, France, about 1915

It was the same war to which American “doughboys,” pausing at Kansas City’s Union Station, were heading in 1917 and 1918. A war of barbed wire and mustard gassings, hand-to-hand combat and tank attacks in the stagnant trenches and deadly “no-man’s lands” of Western Europe. This was to be the War to End All Wars but instead spawned the conditions for a deadlier spate of conquest, destruction and death two decades later.

Kansas Citians were front and center when it came to supporting war-bond drives during the Great War

Patriotic fervor for the Great War effort swept the Kansas Cities – for there are two separate and distinct ones: the larger, citified hub in Missouri and a smaller satellite city across the Missouri River in Kansas. Kansas Citians, who lost 441 of their neighbors in the European fighting, gave bountifully to war-bond drives and remained in a thankful mood when an armistice was declared at 11 a.m. on the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918.

The following year, in a span of just 10 days, even more remarkably while an influenza epidemic was sweeping the city, 83,000 contributors – about one in every four persons in town – kicked in $2.5 million for an amazing tribute to the nation’s war dead. That’s about $30 million in 2009 dollars.

The fund drive’s slogan: “Lest the Ages Forget.”

Kansas City outdid itself with its Liberty Memorial, which towered over any other structure in town

With the money, the city demolished a few houses and mangy trees up the hill in Penn Valley Park and erected Liberty Memorial, a 66-meter (216-foot)-high limestone shaft that dominates the city’s southern skyline to this day. Designed in the Egyptian Revival style by New York architect H. Van Buren Magonigle, who won the commission following a nationwide competition, the memorial features four stone guardian spirits – representing courage, patriotism, sacrifice, and honor – sculpted by Robert Aitken. (He is even better known for his “Equal Justice Under the Law” pediment above the entrance to the U.S. Supreme Court Building in Washington.)

And the great tower is further protected at its base by two giant stone sphinxes. One, facing Europe, is shielding its eyes from the horrors of war. The other, facing the opposite direction, also hides its eyes, but from the unknown future. Given the events that followed World War I, apparently it knew something that the world did not.

These are models of Robert Aitken’s guardian spirits that appear facing each direction of the compass at the top of the Liberty Memorial

Among Kansas City folk, the memorial is most appealing at night, when a series of pipes carries steam from a subterranean boiler up the tower and past a series of yellow and red lights. The long-range effect is that of a flame rising into the sky, and it takes $65,000 to pay the utility company to produce it. That’s why there is now a “Save the Flame” campaign for financial support to keep the steam rising.

The tower is fully accessible, by the way. An elevator whisks visitors to a floor near the top; 45 steps later, they are standing on an observation platform, gasping at one of the most spectacular skyline views in North America. There’s no fear of scalding from the steam! It doesn’t start spouting until dark, after closing time.

This is Washington State’s inspiring, but modest in scope, World War I monument outside the capitol in Olympia

The Liberty Memorial is not America’s only monument to those who fought and died in World War I, but it is the most prominent. Many of the nation’s cavernous old “memorial stadiums,” including Soldier Field in Chicago, were named in tribute to service in the Great War, a fact that likely escapes most modern-day sports fans.

The intent and scope of Kansas City’s memorial, however, were unmistakable. Architect Edward Durrell Stone, who designed Washington’s John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and other acclaimed buildings, called the Liberty Memorial “one of the country’s great memorials, in a class with the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials.”

Just look at the throng that turned out for the Liberty Memorial dedication in 1921!

A crowd approaching 200,000 people, including American Expeditionary Forces commander John J. “Black Jack” Pershing and military leaders from four other Allied nations, packed the grounds for the groundbreaking ceremony in 1921. And a like number returned to hear President Calvin Coolidge speak at its dedication five years later.

Today, in the words of writer Michael Braude of the Kansas City Business Journal, the Liberty Memorial “stands as a proud symbol of human dignity and the love of liberty for all.”

Kansas City’s devotion to preserving the memory of the First World War was all the more impressive to Carol and me because we have visited, and she has photographed, so many magnificent war memorials here in Washington and elsewhere. Indeed, visitors to Washington’s National Mall will find spectacular and moving monuments to the fallen of World War II, the Vietnam War, and the Korean War; and the city is replete with stone and brass tributes to Civil War heroes and battles.

Bright sunshine and a pretty snowfall spruce up the drab World War I Memorial in Washington, D.C., built in 1931 as a bandstand

But the only nod to World War I hereabouts is a small District of Columbia Doric temple, dedicated in 1931 and now nearly hidden in the trees of West Potomac Park. The monument’s peristyle, or ring of columns, encircles what was designed as a bandstand, not that very many people know there were concerts there or, indeed, even know there’s a World War I monument in town at all.

The neglect of this once-handsome structure “is due in part to the fact that its history had been forgotten by most, both by the federal government and local D.C. citizens” according to The National Coalition to Save the Mall preservationist organization. “The memorial has no signage or explanation except for that carved in the white marble. Part of the problem was that until recently, it seemed unclear who was responsible for maintaining the structure . . . . The [National Park Service] felt it had responsibility for the grounds, but not the structure.” Only after a park service cultural resource specialist examined early records was it determined that the nearly hidden memorial is that agency’s responsibility.

Neglect of World War I and its everyday heroes is certainly not the case in Kansas City, where, you’ll remember (won’t you?) that I mentioned that something else quite special has happened on that hill above Union Station.

Directly below the Liberty Memorial, in fact.

That soaring memorial was built upon a flat stone deck, next to two small, bunker-like buildings. One became a meeting place, and the other a sort of “relic room,” crammed with World War I souvenirs that soldiers and their families had sent in.

This shot by Carol gives you a good look at the Liberty Memorial, the supporting platform, the two sphinxes, and the old buildings that once housed Great War artifacts

Over the decades, the mementos kept coming and coming as Great War veterans died, to the point that Kansas City found itself holding the nation’s largest Great War collection. Too much stuff, and much of it too enormous, to fit into a single, drab room. Meantime, stonework on the tower’s support deck deteriorated to such an unsafe level that the platform had to be fenced off in the 1990s.

What had been a Kansas City treasure became an eyesore once again.

Repairs were urgently needed, but, true to its gung-ho spirit, Kansas City did not stop there. Citizens approved a sales-tax increase that raised $106 million to fix the memorial and build an entirely new, dramatic museum underneath it.

A lovely reflecting pond, out of sight from a distance, graces the below-ground entrance to the National World War I Museum

So impressive was the result, designed by Ralph Applebaum, who also drew the plans for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, that Congress designated it as The National World War I Museum. Yet its opening in December 2006 came as a surprise to many Kansas Citians, since it’s only when you’re upon it that you realize there’s something deep in the hillside, hidden down a long ramp beneath the great memorial.

Inside, its story begins with two movies, one an orientation and one that explains why the United States was drawn, most reluctantly, into the European conflict. After all, President Woodrow Wilson had been re-elected in 1916 on the slogan, “He Kept Us Out of War.”

The museum offers several timelines to help modern-day visitors grasp the increasingly horrifying events of almost a century ago

Exhibits trace the story from the war’s precipitating event – the assassination of Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 in Sarajevo, the capital of Boznia-Herzogovena – through the early years of the conflict among European Great Powers, to the impact of U.S. involvement, beginning in 1917, at home and abroad.

These are sort of “living exhibits” at the museum – volunteers dressed in 1915 German and French infantry uniforms, respectively

There is a host of other things to learn beneath the Liberty Memorial as well. A haunting factoid, for instance: One of three Frenchmen ages 18 to 30 died on battlefields of World War I.

Poignant quotes, too, greet many a step through the exhibits. Here’s just one, from Ernst Bergner, a German infantryman:

The Western Front was a living hell of artillery barrages, machine gun bullets, and sniper fire. Quiet sectors existed, however, where units on both sides, either through exhaustion, poor leadership, or apathy, tried to avoid conflict. ‘Live and let live,’ a phrase coined by a British war correspondent, took a variety of forms. Troops in the frontlines would sometimes refrain from firing at mealtime or on holidays. . . . Night patrols would spot each other in no-man’s land and quietly move away to avoid an encounter. Commanders detested ‘live and let live’ and took various measures to stamp it out.

Now it is Christmas time for the second time in this war. Along the front line all is quiet, only some rifle bullets are crossing the air like lashes. It is three o’clock in the afternoon. I have to look for a Christmas tree. Without a tree, there is no Christmas.

This flag, displayed at the museum, flew over the U.S. Capitol on the day of the nation’s declaration of war against Germany, on April 2, 1917

The opening of the nation’s new World War I museum fueled thousands more donations – 3,200 in the first 29 months alone. “One person gave us his entire hand-grenade collection that he had been amassing his entire life,” museum vice president Denise Rendina told me. One specimen is a British rifle-fired grenade with a cloth “ballerina skirt” that helped guide it aerodynamically. Another gift, Rendina says, “was pieces of fabric that people had put inside cigar boxes, denoting flags from all the nations participating in the war. Someone had taken those and quilted them, and they had been in their family for generations, and they just gave them to us. Both are examples of the personal way in which people experienced the war.”

At some point, museum officials must tell veterans and their families, discreetly, that they have reached a limit on certain kinds of gifts. Rendina wouldn’t specify, but I’m guessing it has all the helmets and buttons, belt buckles and certain uniform patches that it can handle, lest this sweeping museum turn into a crowded “relic room” once again.

This is the “good side” of the prized, French-made tank – the side that’s still intact and doesn’t have a gaping shrapnel hole

The National World War I Museum does occasionally purchase an item, such as its one-of-a-kind, two-man, camouflage-painted Renault FT-17 tank – notable for the huge shrapnel hole on one of its sides. And it didn’t come cheap. The museum paid a collector in Montana a quarter of a million dollars for it.

In just over two years, more than 300,000 visitors, including about 35,000 school kids, have toured the museum. “A lot of them knew next to nothing about the Great War,” Denise Rendina says. “I see people moved to silence, because of the horror of this and all wars, and because of conflicts around us right now.”

This is Frank Buckles next to an ambulance inside the museum a year ago. We should all look so good at 107!

One visitor who arrived by special invitation last Memorial Day.: Frank Buckles, now 108 years old, is the last known living American veteran of the War to End All Wars. Buckles enlisted at 16 – lying about his age– and drove ambulances and motorcycles in the conflict.

Entirely cognizant, he remarked approvingly about the museum’s collection. There was little time to dwell on most of the 52,000 objects, but he was impressed with the re-creations, stretching into several rooms, of the crowded and shell-pocked trenches in which so many of his comrades lived, and lost, their lives 90 years ago.

Naturally, Buckles liked the museum’s ambulance and motorcycles, too.

There are varying explanations as to the origins of Memorial Day, which used to be celebrated in the United States every May 30th. Since 1971, the holiday has been observed on the last Monday in May, whether or not it falls on the 30th, in order to create a three-day holiday weekend. This year, it falls on Monday, May 25th.

The main federal observance of Memorial Day is held at Arlington National Cemetery across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. The president or his designate places a wreath of flowers at the Tomb of the Unknowns, honoring all of the men and women who have died in America’s wars. There’s a celebrity-studded Memorial Weekend concert, too, and a Memorial Day parade, featuring patriotic floats and helium-filled balloons, up Constitution Avenue.

The Grand Army of the Republic, a unit of which is seen here parading up Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue in 1865, was enormously influential

It’s generally accepted that Memorial Day dates to just after the Civil War, which ended in 1865. According to one of many versions, the tradition was established when the people of Waterloo, New York, gathered at the local cemetery the following year and placed flowers on the graves of local men killed in the Civil War. Later, the Grand Army of the Republic – or G.A.R – an organization of northern veterans, endorsed ceremonies that honored the dead and suggested that its members take up the practice. In 1868, General John Logan, a former Union army general who commanded the G.A.R, designated May 30th as the day to decorate graves.

Indeed, the holiday was long called “Decoration Day.” Even before the Civil War had concluded, women’s groups in the South were laying flowers below their loved ones’ tombstones, and an 1867 hymn, “Kneel Where Our Loves are Sleeping,” carried the dedication “To The Ladies of the South who are Decorating the Graves of the Confederate Dead.”

This was actually an Independence Day parade in my current hometown of Takoma Park, Maryland, in 1922. Decoration Day festivities had the same corny trappings

Eighty years later, as a child far to the north in Cleveland, I was festooning my bike or my wagon with crepe paper streamers for the neighborhood Decoration Day parade.

As I mentioned earlier, following World War I Congress set aside May 30th as a day to honor the dead from all American wars. That was the war in which a Canadian field artillery surgeon, John McCrea, wrote the moving poem “Flanders Fields” at a burial ground near Ypres, France. It reads, in part:

Two days before the armistice quieted the fighting, Moina Michael of Athens, Georgia, a Civil War veteran’s daughter working at the YMCA Overseas War Secretaries’ office in New York, got an idea. She had long treasured the last line of McCrea’s poem – we shall not sleep, though poppies grow in Flanders Fields – and when she saw the poem once again, she sat down and wrote a short verse of her own:

A member of a Veterans of Foreign Wars delegation pins a poppy on the lapel of President Calvin Coolidge in 1924

Moina Michael vowed to wear a red poppy in memory of Flanders Field each remaining day of her life, and the idea of marking Decoration Day with the sale and display of red, paper poppies soon spread among the former Allied nations. In Britain, Australia, and Canada, the poppies appear on Armistice Day in November. Less so, any more, on November 11 in the United States, where the holiday has been broadened into “Veterans’ Day.”

On the days that I was whizzing down Winton Avenue on my dolled-up bike each Decoration Day, nearly all the cheering adults along the way proudly wore red poppies. Now, as my cynical friend and colleague Art Chimes points out, a poppy in one’s lapel might be viewed suspiciously as some sort of homage to the opium trade.

This is the poppy field at the National World War I Museum

Poppies have their day at the National World War I Museum in Kansas City as well. Just inside the door, one crosses a glass bridge over an entire field of red, paper ones – 9,000 of them: each representing 1,000 combat fatalities. No doubt only a few of the older folks who visit, and perhaps some history-savvy students, know why poppies were chosen to tell this story.

Everything really is, as the song goes, “up to date in Kansas City.” Carol and I couldn’t believe the difference between this vibrant, clean, architecturally exciting city and another U.S. city of almost identical (475,000) population: my tired, sad-looking hometown of Cleveland, which, you may recall, we had visited a few weeks earlier.

How’s this for funky? It’s one of several giant badminton shuttlecock sculptures outside K.C.’s dynamic Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

Kansas City’s Country Club Plaza district, with its Spanish-inspired architecture, brims with activity – shopping and dining, mostly – day and night. Besides the remarkable World War I museum, one can find delights like the American Jazz Museum and Negro Leagues baseball museum, plus the astounding new Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, whose eerily illuminated façade shimmers at night. I can’t rave too conspicuously, though, about “K.C.’s” famous barbecue, having waxed so lavishly about the barbecue that they cook up in North Carolina, half a continent away. (But the heartland variety is pretty good.)

Refreshing, eh? Through this fountain spray, you get a glimpse of a tower in Kansas City’s genteel Plaza shopping district

One delight from our Kansas City visit wasn’t exactly up to date, since most of the city’s 200 or so fountains – more than anywhere outside Rome, it’s said – go back a ways. The first, built for the locals’ horses and dogs and for wild birds, was erected in 1899. And I learned something about the early fountains: the reason one sees water flowing from nymph and lion and fish figures high above the fountains’ pools was a sanitary one. Animals drank from the reservoir; humans could dip their hands or cups into fresh, clean water streaming from those figures before it fell to the fountain’s floor below.

Today, there’s an unwritten policy in town that a fountain be incorporated into the design of every significant new public or commercial building project.

In fact, one might say that Kansas City is a “font” of such good ideas.

Please leave a comment.

(These are a few of the words from this posting that you may not know. Each time, I’ll tell you a little about them and also place them into a cumulative archive of “Ted’s Wild Words” in the right-hand column of the home page. Just click on it there, and if there’s another word in today’s blog that you’d like me to explain, just ask!)

Doughboys. American infantrymen in World War I. There is debate about the origin of the term. One theory ascribes it to the doughy white clay that soldiers used to clean their white belts. Another states that it was other Allies’ derogatory term for U.S. forces, who were said to be “soft” for showing up late to the war. The term had been used (sparingly) in other conflicts and may also have had its origin in cavalrymen’s contempt for ordinary foot soldiers.

Mangy. Worn or threadbare. The word is often applied to a pitiful animal’s coat, or to a carpet or bedspread.

Sphinx. In ancient Egypt, a sphinx was a tactile representation of a sun god, often in a lion’s shape and wearing a headdress of the pharaohs.

On the banks of the Wabash River that separates southern Indiana from Illinois, there’s a community of 915 people unlike any other small town in America. Different – and unforgettable, too.

The easiest, though not cheapest, way into town is across the Wabash River on a toll bridge from Illinois. The toll is only a buck, however!

New Harmony, Indiana, is clean, safe, historic yet artistically spunky, free of chain fast-food restaurants and mammoth retail stores. It’s a peaceful place in the old-fashioned meaning of the term: restful, contemplative, even spiritual.

As a group of screenwriters who go there each year to write told the locals, they can feel their blood pressure dropping the minute they drive into town. Residents and some visitors, including seminary priests from Austria who journeyed to New Harmony last

That’s New Harmony in the distance, though the beautiful trees obscure much of it

year, call it “The Thin Place,” a rare spot on earth where heaven and earth come close together.

It isn’t heaven on earth, of course. New Harmony has its squabbles, especially between those who wish to preserve its remarkable historic character and those who grump that when they buy a house or a store or a lot, they should be able to do what they damn well please with it. But if clean air, verdant surroundings, a measured pace of life, and culturally and intellectually enriching colloquy are parts of your definition of heaven on earth, New Harmony comes pretty close.

The 1819-22 David Lenz House is a typical example of Harmonist architecture. The walls inside its frame exterior are insulated with kiln-dried bricks

And a little bit of paradise was exactly what the town’s Christian founders sought when they arrived 195 years ago. They were convinced that the Rapture – an-end-of-the-world scenario in which Jesus returns to call deceased as well as living believers to his side – was at hand, and they wished to create a perfect society in which to welcome Him.

So the settlers created their utopia on the Wabash. The first of three quite different utopias, as it turned out, if you count New Harmony today as one of them.

The founders called themselves “Harmonists” and their town Harmonie. There were native Indians in the area – hence the name “Indiana” – but most had moved north and west, away from the onrushing white settlers in what was then the Northwest Territory, 10 years before Indiana became a state.

The Harmonists were German “pietists” – Lutheran separatists who sought to create a simple, strict, hardworking community free from the ceremonial flourishes and what they considered the mystical mumbo-jumbo of their faith. Logical pragmatists, they did not buy the notion, for instance, that an unknowing baby could receive faith and salvation with a few sprinkles from a baptismal font. Baptism should come later in life, they believed, as one’s conscious choice, an acceptance of Christ and the Holy Spirit.

Johann Georg Rapp told a town official in Malbronn, Germany, “I am a prophet, and I am called to be one.” The official promptly had him arrested

The Harmonie Society, as it was called, was led by Johann Georg Rapp, a charismatic, though stern, taskmaster who considered himself a prophet and had the followers to prove it. In 1803, he led German pilgrims to western Pennsylvania, near what is now Pittsburgh, and founded a colony. These were not ragtag dreamers, scratched out a living. The first Harmonie prospered as a communal society in which property was held jointly, and the considerable profits from their vigorous labor on the land and in small craft shops were shared. Even married people lived, or were supposed to live, celibately as brothers and sisters in dormitories. Babies were born, assuredly, but Rapp asked his followers to give up whiskey, tobacco, and pleasures of the flesh as purifying measures in anticipation of Christ’s coming.

The Harmonists were standoffish German speakers who inspired envy among their less industrious English-speaking neighbors. And after 10 years in Pennsylvania, and Rapp’s vision of an even better life on the frontier, Rapp sold Harmonie, “lock, stock, and barrel,” as the saying goes, to local Mennonites – also Germanic but better assimilated into the overall culture – for 10 times what he had paid for the land.

And off they went, down the Ohio River and up the Wabash.

Rapp may well have chosen the location for another reason besides the fertility of its fields. Three years earlier, the area had been riven by a powerful earthquake, centered in New Madrid, Missouri, not terribly far away. (Indeed, one sees sensors, placed by seismologists, at various spots throughout still-tremor-prone New Harmony today). Some say Rapp considered the New Madrid cataclysm another sign from God that the end was near, and his followers might as well get as close to the action as possible.

Harmonie’s earliest cabins were called “blockhouses” because they were made of square timbers. The originals do not survive. These similar examples were imported from a nearby farm

In Harmonie, The Rappites’ pattern of sturdy settlement and curious abandonment repeated itself, almost to the day. They also stayed 10 years in Indiana, built cabins and dormitories and a big church, and prospered to the point that they were soon making rope, bolts of prized textiles, candles and other goods that they sold in 22 states and 10 foreign countries. Somehow as they bustled about, they found time to come together for prayer three times a day.

Then, no doubt to the surprise of their Indiana farmer neighbors, they up and moved again – back to Pennsylvania, founding yet a third town called Economy.

Although some things had changed between Harmonie’s founding and the taking of this photograph in 1892, it gives you a flavor of the old days

“Our [orientation] film says they left because it was tough to get their goods to eastern markets,” Linda Warum, a New Harmony town council member who conducts many tours of the community, told me. “I doubt that was the reason, since they knew that would be the case when they came here. Reading between the lines, I think they felt the town was simply done. These were builders for whom busy hands were happy hands. It doesn’t take the energy to run a town that it does to build it.”

Once again, the Harmonists preferred to sell every stick and stone in New Harmony for a tidy profit and go away.

And in their place came an entirely different sort of utopians: secularists rather than a religious bunch, driven to create human happiness in a communal cooperative based on high-minded ideas and ideals rather than the search for a closer walk with God.

Up the Wabash, to the neat and tidy town that Rapp and his followers had built for them, came what today’s townspeople call a “boatload of knowledge.” It was a barge, actually, carrying Robert Owen and a collection of his very smart friends: scientists, philosophers, educators bent on creating the nexus of a new moral world built upon equal education and social status.

Robert Owen was a brilliant and daring social reformer who brought his ideas, and many idealistic followers, to the Indiana prairie

Owen was a socialist long before the word became fashionable and years before Marx and Lenin came along. Like Rapp, Owen was an immigrant – a Welshman who had prospered as an industrialist in neighboring Scotland. There, in his woolen mills and the company towns that housed his workers, he tested social experiments, including the free public education of children and Chautauqua-like learning opportunities for adults of both sexes.

The Chautauqua movement was a series of assemblies that met each summer for more than 50 years, spanning the turn of the 20th century. Named for the town in New York State where they were first held, away from the smoke and bustle and cares of the big city, Chautauquans sought to impart intellectual enlightenment, oratorical inspiration, artistic and musical enjoyment, spiritual enrichment, and physical rejuvenation. It was an idea that Robert Owen had tried in New Lanark, Scotland, almost a century earlier.

Owen believed that his ideas would flower even more profoundly in adventurous America, where radical ideas found nourishment. Owen met some Rappites, visited New Harmony, bought the place from Johann Rapp and his followers for $135,000, and invited other eminent thinkers to move there. Many, beginning with those aboard the “boatload of knowledge,” accepted.

Gardens were not hobbyists’ playgrounds in busy Harmonie. Their bounty was an important part of the economy

In New Harmony, Owen established a system of “time money” and “time stores,” classic utopian concepts in which citizens were issued local scrip instead of U.S. currency based upon their labors. The currency was then exchanged for goods at the colony’s stores.

But a problem developed almost at once. Unlike Rapp’s Harmonists, Owen’s brainy band had no unifying religious bond; they were individualists with headstrong ideas on how things should run. Rifts developed. So deep, in fact, that roughly half the town, south of Church Street, was occupied by Owen’s family and his disciples; and the neighborhood north of this main street by William Maclure and his followers.

Maclure was a Scottish-born philanthropist and naturalist from Philadelphia – a man so renowned that he was known as “the Father of Geology.” Maclure opened the “Working Men’s Institute,” in a building that still stands, in which common laborers were invited to borrow books and attend lectures aimed at elevating their lot in life. The institute is now the town library.

Robert Owen headed off in search of more intellectual settlers, leaving New Harmony’s management to one of his sons, 23-year-old William Dale Owen. In a piece of local fascination, it is noted that all four of Owen’s sons – Robert, William, David, and Richard – shared the middle name “Dale,” after their mother’s maiden name. Son Robert became a diplomat and U.S. congressman who introduced the legislation that established the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. William ran the local newspaper in addition to the town. David, a geologist for whom the granary was a laboratory, became the state, and then the nation’s official geologist. And Richard, also a geologist, became the first president of Purdue University, up the road in Indiana.

New Harmony was awash in accomplished thinkers, all right, but there weren’t many doers willing to break a sweat tilling the land or producing food and crafts. According to the Web site of the Robert Owen (the elder) Museum in Wales, “Settlers flocked to New Harmony, but most were unsuited to community life, and very few had the necessary skills to farm the land or run small industries. As the settlement became overcrowded the chaos developed. William had to write to his father urging him to send no more settlers.”

Geologist David Dale Owen used New Harmony’s first level for shops and workrooms and the second and third floors for his laboratory and lecture hall

The colony structure collapsed within three years, but many of the intelligentsia stayed put, preserving some of New Harmony’s remarkable early architecture, including the granary, Working Men’s Institute, and several cabins and houses.

Thus the town never fell to rack and ruin. Twice it flowered anew, first during a late-19th-century agricultural bonanza in which many Victorian-style downtown banks and mercantile stores appeared; and then during an oil boom in the 1930s and 1940s that attracted fresh out-of-state capital and talent. In that wave, in 1942, came Kenneth

Downtown New Harmony in 1942 looked a lot like any American small town, though perhaps a tad tidier

Dale Owen, a great-grandson of Richard Owen, the Purdue president. Kenneth Owen had been born in New Harmony but moved away. Upon the couple’s return there, Kenneth Dale’s wife Jane – wealthy from her family’s Esso Oil ties – fell in love with New Harmony and became its biggest investor and preservationist. Still living, she owns a company that runs a cozy inn, small conference center, and little restaurant.

And another entity helped return New Harmony to what some would say is a third utopian epoch. It is the Historic New Harmony Society, originally a private, nonprofit preservationist operation that is now a part of the University of Southern Indiana, based in nearby Evansville. Historic New Harmony has helped restore, or keep

This Harmonist labyrinth, re-created in 1939, is planted in accordance with a Harmony Society plan in concentric circles of privet hedge leading to a stone temple

ship-shape, such local landmarks as the opera house, a double log cabin, a foliage labyrinth on the site of one constructed by the Harmonists, as well as a remarkable, 1960-vintage “roofless church,” designed by noted architect Philip Johnson and funded by Jane Owen. Inside, where the sky is the roof and interdenominational, Easter morning, and wedding services are conducted, stands an unusual – covered – central altar in the shape of an inverted rose.

There’s also another labyrinth in town. This one, flat on the ground, is made of rose granite, not twigs and leaves. It’s identical to one at Chartres Cathedral in France.

Drawing from the Harmonists’ trademark, the golden rose, architect Philip Johnson created a dome in the shape of an inverted rosebud inside his Roofless Church

New Harmony also found donors for other structures, including an atheneum – a place where learned reading materials (and some less-weighty tourist brochures) are available. This shining-white building, which vaguely suggests the structure of a ship, was designed by acclaimed architect Richard Meier. It serves as the visitor center and vantage point for the townsite and the Wabash River Valley, and it’s the envy of small towns across the country. The atheneum is the most prominent modernist example in an

The New Harmony atheneum contains several levels of historic galleries containing artifacts and town models

otherwise historic town; sculptures that pop up in unexpected places and modern additions to traditional homes are others.

New Harmony has a few of the accouterments of any small town, including a kindergarten-through-12th grade school, a movie theater to go with the opera house, and a bandstand in Maclure Park. The town’s abundant supply of local musicians makes sure there are plenty of accessible performances there or under the granary’s 205 tons of oaken beams. One in each location takes place on American Independence Day, July 4th, following the annual parade of “floats.” I put the word in quotes because the vehicles are decorated golf carts! – about 50 of them. These carts are the preferred mode of transportation in town, even though there’s no golf course on which to ride them.

It wasn’t New Orleans’ Mardi Gras or New York City’s Thanksgiving Day parade, but New Harmony’s July 4th golf-cart procession was a hoot

The humming carts contribute to the sense of quietude. Kids walk or bike to school. Signposts direct visitors along numerous nature walks. Meditation is encouraged at the roofless church, in gardens, on or in the town labyrinths, and in New Harmony’s eight traditional churches that do have roofs. Johann Rapp might be pleased to learn that not a one of them is Lutheran.

“I live in paradise,” Linda Warum told me. “On Granary Street.”

Stephen de Staebler’s sculpture, “Pieta,” in a courtyard off the Roofless Church, epitomizes New Harmony’s modernist touches in a historic setting

Is it utopia, heaven on earth? Well, Carol and I didn’t see a black or brown face in town, and the only ones that local residents could think of belong to the family from India who run the local grocery-deli and live in a rented apartment. If devouring a double cheeseburger is your idea of ecstasy, the closest place to get one is on the west side of Evansville, 20 minutes away. And there aren’t many rock concerts or hangouts for young people or, come to think of it, all that many young people past high school age at all. They tend to go off to college and not come back.

Of course, that keeps the noise level down and contributes to New Harmony’s air of contemplation.

Former President Taft arrives in New Harmony for the town’s centennial

In 1914, upon the 100th anniversary of New Harmony’s founding, William Howard Taft, who had just left office as U.S. president, and other luminaries visited and spoke. “No town or city in the United States boasts a history of greater romantic or sociological interest,” the opening statement in the centennial program read. That may be a stretch, but perhaps not too long a one.

The year 2014, just five years away, will mark the bicentennial of this remarkable utopian experiment in the wilderness. By then, the Historic New Harmony Society should have plenty of ideas to work with, including those taken from a wall in the atheneum on which, beginning just this month, visitors have been encouraged to leave their thoughts about what makes a place “utopia.”

New Harmony is a sort of Tranquility Base – not on the moon, but here on earth

Carol and I were running around shooting and gabbing, and we forgot to scribble something on that wall. I doubt it would have been very original anyway, since it seemed to both of us that this serene and prosperous spot on the Wabash is about as close to utopia as you’re going find in today’s tumultuous world.

This is Utopia? I don’t think so!

“Utopia” is a Greek word, used by Plato to describe an ideal, almost unreachable and unrealistically perfect state of communal living, especially for the ruling class. Subsequently in the European Renaissance of the 14th to 16th centuries, when dreamers reconnected with some of those ideals from ancient Greece, the French satirist Voltaire and others wrote of two kinds of idealized places – El Dorado, a “land of milk and honey” where streets were paved with gold, and a plainer Utopia in which humans are held in equal esteem and live free from worries. Both wonderlands, Voltaire realized, were unachievable. Later philosophers, including Marxists, stretched the concept to describe a utopian political system in which life’s fruits and benefits are shared but require a degree of regimentation and even totalitarianism, since too much individuality cannot not be tolerated if a utopia beneficial to all is to be achieved.

Utopian wistfulness reappeared in the 1960s, when communes returned to fashion and eastern mystics and songwriters wrote of the triumph of peace and love over cynical political power. Some say that the vegetarian and “green” environmental movements of today have utopian elements as well.

But before we drift too far off into idyllic reverie, we must remember the words of Clayton Cramer, the California author, historian, and software engineer: “Abandon all hopes of utopia,” he wrote. “There are people involved.”

This is a ca. 1900 shot of the busy Amana Colonies

Amana Colonies. One of the most familiar of America’s utopian communal societies was the Amana Colonies settlement, begun in the 1850s in Iowa. Best-known today because tourists flock to Amana’s seven villages to enjoy the groaning board of homemade food still served family style, and because of the famous Amana refrigerators and other appliances that one of the society’s members began producing in the early 1930s. This settlement of dissident Lutherans, like Harmonie’s Rappists, was an outgrowth of religious persecution and an economic depression in Germany. These colonists, who called themselves “Inspirationists,” founded a communal farm and series of craft shops at a place they called Ebenezer near Buffalo, New York. A decade later, seeking more land to work, the Inspirationists shifted operations to eastern Iowa. Seven villages, including East Amana, West Amana, High Amana, and Homestead, were established to supply the colonists’ farms.

Clockmaking and the production of wool and calico augmented the agriculture, and income was shared communally. According to the colony’s Web site, “Amana churches, located in the center of each village, built of brick or stone, have no stained glass windows, no steeple or spire, and reflect the ethos of simplicity and humility. Inspirationists attended worship services 11 times a week; their quiet worship punctuating the days.” More than 50 kitchens, plus a dairy, smokehouse, ice house, gardens, and orchards kept the colonists amply nourished.

The Amana Colonies lasted a long time by utopian society standards. It was only in 1932, during the Great Depression, that the colonists abandoned communal living in favor of the private enterprise that rewards individual achievement, as practiced in the country at large. But the Amana Church survives to this day in the little Amana villages. So do the village store, blacksmith shop, an original 1858 barn, and those tables piled high with hearty food.

This is an early advertisement of the Oneida Community’s Flower de Luce artist-designed silverplate from Good Housekeeping magazine

Oneida Community. This group was founded by an American, John Humphrey Noyes, the son of a U.S. congressman from Vermont. In 1826, the younger Noyes attended a Christian revival meeting that changed him from a religious cynic to a fanatical believer. He developed a theory of salvation called “Perfectionism,” under which people might live free from sin in a perfect world. This wild-eyed notion got him kicked out of Yale Divinity School, in which he had enrolled in hopes of a career in the ministry. He hit the road in search of converts but found few. So Noyes began writing in a publication called the Battle-Axe. It brought him notoriety and generous financial contributions from a young woman whom he would soon marry. They and other followers began a commune in Putney, Vermont. Their lifestyle, including some unorthodox sexual practices, outraged the surrounding community, so the group moved to what they called “The Promised Land” in Oneida, New York, near the Canadian border. There, the community grew, even as it practiced “complex marriage,” in which every man was married to every woman. As Randall Hillebrand writes on the New York History Net, “no two people could have exclusive attachment with each other because it would be selfish and idolatrous.” While engaging in practices such as “ascending fellowship,” in which virgins were introduced to this “complex marriage,” the group farmed, cut wood into lumber, and made silk thread, animal traps, and silverware.

The Oneida Community was governed by various committees and by the righteous hand of Noyes himself. At its peak in 1878, it counted about 300 members. By this time, John Noyes had moved to an offshoot commune in Brooklyn, leaving the Oneida leadership in the hands of his son, Theodore. But the younger Noyes was anything but a true believer. He was an agnostic, and a poor administrator to boot. Even though John Noyes hurried back from Brooklyn, the community tore asunder, with many members marrying and leaving the fold. John Noyes fled town after the sheriff knocked with an arrest warrant charging statutory rape. Remnants of the community hung on, making what became world-renowned silver cutlery. The last original Oneida Community member died in 1950, and manufacturing of Oneida silverware ceased in 2004, ending a 124-year tradition.

This Shaker woman was photographed at the Hancock, Massachusetts, Shaker Village in 1935

The Shakers. About two centuries ago, followers of “Mother” Ann Lee, founder of the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Coming, or “Shakers” as they were better known, in England established communal settlements from Maine in the U.S. Northeast to Kentucky in the mid-South. One colony, in Ohio, lent its name to what is now the Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights. Onlookers gave the sect its name as they watched its believers twitch and clap loudly – shaking off the sins of the world as they sang and danced. Since the sect, like the Harmonists, was celibate, Shaker missionaries walked the countryside seeking converts to keep their ranks full.

Less than a handful of Shakers remain in the world, at least as of 2006, at this site in Maine

After the U.S. Civil War of the 1860s, tens of thousands of Americans headed westward in search of fortunes and a new life, and lots of Shakers left the fold to join them. It was the beginning of the steady demise of their sect. Some Shaker settlements became museums that still draw visitors, curious to find out what all that moving and shaking were about. In 2006, the Boston Globe newspaper found what it described as the last Shakers – two women, ages 67 and 79, and two men in their 40s, who were still meeting and praying though not dancing and twitching while the Globe reporter was present – in Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village in southern Maine.

Thus it was a thin place, too, in quite a different sense.

(These are a few of the words from this posting that you may not know. Each time, I’ll tell you a little about them and also place them into a cumulative archive of “Ted’s Wild Words” in the right-hand column of the home page. Just click on it there, and if there’s another word in today’s blog that you’d like me to explain, just ask!)

Accouterments. From the French, as you might have guessed, this word describes the trappings or accessories that go with uniforms or dress.

Colloquy. A conversation, especially a learned or formal one.

Gabbing. Chatting, sometimes incessantly. People who talk a lot – and have something worthwhile to say – are said to have the “gift of gab.”

Rack and Ruin. A state of total decay or destruction.

Spunky. Lively, spirited, plucky. The word is said to have devolved from an English and Scottish term for “spark.”

Wistful. Yearning, wishful, usually in a dreamy sort of way.

In Travels With Charley, John Steinbeck, the great American novelist, wrote, “San Francisco put on a show for me.” And it is still true much of the time, though perhaps a little less predictably, for the countless visitors to California’s “City by the Bay” today. There are still plenty of geological and meteorological curiosities, examples of iconic architecture, and delightful eccentricities. But also a growing shabbiness that I hadn’t noticed on previous visits.

Since San Francisco is a city of hills, there are plenty of good vantage points to photograph the skyline

Anyone who has spent much time in San Francisco understands its enticing ambiance: the dappled lemon light or the swirling summer fog rolling, in Steinbeck’s words, “like herds of sheep coming to cote in the golden city’; the pelting rain or the multiple rainbows that burst above at once through the streaming sunshine. And there is the city’s unique topography of roller-coaster hills and lush green parks, and the dignified and tightly packed “painted lady” houses, rouged in creams, pinks, and roses. As O. Henry, the famed short-story writer, so scrupulously pointed out: East is East “and West is San Francisco” ─ a city that, even more than star-studded Los Angeles, seems to encourage people to “do their own thing.”

While the rest of California curls around it, San Francisco is tightly compressed onto a 121-square-kilometer (46.6-square-mile) peninsula. Thus San Francisco can only go up, not out, and that’s a twofold problem:

The populace likes things as they are and doesn’t want a lot of new buildings ─ especially high-rises. And there’s the little matter of earthquakes. More about them in a bit.

This is a classic San Francisco view, showing handsome row houses against a backdrop of the cityscape

San Francisco’s compactness makes it a frightfully expensive place to live, and certainly to buy a home or rent an apartment. Yet almost no incentive could lure the city’s citizens to the suburbs. “It’s so livable,” San Franciscans say. Behind the Victorian doorways are some of the most creative living arrangements in the nation: opposite and same-sex partnerships, roommate groupings of all descriptions, and fewer nuclear families than in other American cities. Fewer than half the married heterosexual couples in town have children, and schools are relatively lightly populated. Adult San Franciscans seem especially dedicated to careers, avocations, club memberships, entrepreneurship, and cultural affairs.

It’s doubtful that these beautiful hotels and office buildings along the Embarcadero would not had risen had an ugly freeway run along the path

While most Californians drive cars that belch exhaust, San Franciscans whir about on electrified trolleys, motorless cable cars, and gliding BART subway trains. And bicycles, even on those hills. Although every house and every place of business in the city’s 20 or so neighborhoods seems to have one or more cars squeezed in front of it ─ with wheels angled to the curb to prevent run¬aways down the pitched avenues ─ trucks are a rarity, and traffic moves rather briskly. One or two freeways lurk among the city’s eucalyptus trees ─ outraged citizens scuttled another one destined for the Embarcadero, the long roadway along the Bay ─ but they use them mainly for jaunts to the airport, nearby wine country, or to Southern California’s cities and desert. In town, they dash up and down the city’s 43 identifiable hills ─ two of the hills present a 31.5 percent grade! ─ usually without much complaint.

Per capita, San Francisco has twice as many neighborhood restaurants as New York, and San Franciscans spend more money each year dining out than do residents of any other American city. One can go from high tea to dinner featuring every cuisine from Zairian to ancient Mesopotamian ─ American chain fast-food joints are rare. They also enjoy a seemingly infinite supply of laundries, corner pubs, coffee and “smoothie” bars, body-piercing parlors, and eclectic art galleries.

This is one of the newest additions to San Francisco’s museum scene. It’s the Academy of Sciences’ “living roof” with biotic domes that metaphorically lift a piece of the park and put a building underneath it

By the way, the city should always be called “San Francisco,” not “San Fran” or “Frisco,” if you want to keep peace with a native. The city and its people consider themselves too civilized to accept a nick¬name. Surprisingly for a Californian city, there are tens of thousands of indigenous San Franciscans to be found, even several generations of them. San Francisco remains the magnet, the crown jewel, the place with “character,” although surrounding Bay Area cities have added a museum here, a gallery there, a restaurant row, a glittering new skyscraper, or a hockey team. San Francisco’s ballet company, for instance, is the nation’s oldest, second-largest, and among the most enthusiastically supported and endowed. Quite simply, San Francisco is “The City” for 10 million people from California’s agricultural Central Valley to the Oregon line.

Uniquely, San Francisco is also the nation’s most tolerant urban place. The city openly encourages mixed-race and homosexual pairings. Indeed, in 2004 in a stunning act of civil disobedience by a top elected official, Mayor Gavin Newsom directed city agencies to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples; that lasted a month until state courts put a stop to the practice.

The Castro Theater is more than a movie theater. It’s a center of activity in the largely gay Castro District

Beginning with its acceptance of homosexuals forced out of the military services during World War II, as well as those who had endured “gay bashings” in other cities around the country, San Francisco ─ and especially the Castro neighborhood out toward Twin Peaks on Market Street ─ became universally recognized as the nation’s gay capital. It was here that the sewing of the gigantic AIDS memorial quilt sponsored by the NAMES Project ─ perhaps the largest community art project in the world ─ began in 1987 and continues today. Estimates of the actual number of openly gay citizens in San Francisco vary, but they have become a powerful, entrenched political and social force here as nowhere else in America. The presence of 100,000 or more avowed gay individuals also accounts for the remarkable percentage of single people in San Francisco (at or above 40 percent in most surveys).

San Francisco’s Chinatown is the largest outside Asia

The clout and power of another minority group, the Asian community, is also growing strong in San Francisco. Asians outnumber blacks in San Francisco by more than two to one ─ and Hispanics by the same margin ─ and many forecasters predict that they will be the city’s largest ethnic group by 2020. In many neighborhoods outside Chinatown, Asian banks and restaurants offering “fusion” Asian-American or Asian-European cuisine are flourishing. In addition, Vietnamese and other Southeast Asians have swelled the number of Asians beyond the confines of Chinatown and Japantown.

The Peace Pagota in the city’s Japantown neighborhood was a gift from San Francisco’s sister city of Osaka, Japan, in 1968

San Franciscans bemusedly tolerate an endless variety of entertainment presentations, streetcorner evangelists, motorcycle menageries, and the gaggles of beggars and sleeping-bag assemblages on the streets and in the parks. Driving through Golden Gate Park the other day, Carol and I noticed a well-dressed drummer, whacking away on a full set of snare drums, in a field far from anyone who could toss him a coin. “Only in San Francisco,” we both remarked.

Someone took an old hotel in a rundown part of town to display funky “art” out of several windows. But the street scene below, of grimy homeless people sleeping on grates, is anything but artistic

The homeless situation, however, is beginning to wear on the patience of even San Franciscans. For reasons (other than that tolerance) that no one can seem to explain, since San Francisco is no balmy place to spend a night on the street, the city is a magnet for homeless people, and the many missions can hardly keep up with the demand for beds and services. San Francisco’s own daily newspaper, the Chronicle, has referred to the situation as “squalor in the streets,” adding that the city budgets more than $200 million annually to address the problem. Tourists leaving even the finest hotels downtown find themselves stepping around and over a sad assortment of the displaced. It is disconcerting to sightsee and conduct ordinary business among people who are swilling alcohol, begging, relieving themselves, cursing and shouting and talking to their demons. “You walk down Market Street and step over comatose bodies, debris and human waste,” the Chronicle quoted a visitor. “It’s just not a pleasant experience.”

The problem only intensifies, critics say, because the city is committed to “breaking the cycle of homelessness” rather than instituting a New York City-style sweep to rid the streets and parks of people wrapped in blankets and sleeping bags. More recently, locals blame the charismatic, 41-year-old Mayor Newsom, who, they say, is spending too much time out of town, talking up his run for governor, than tending to business back home.

You’d never know that a counter-culture revolution, albeit brief, took place at this corner and in nearby parks

But San Francisco’s fabled tolerance does not always equal permissiveness. After the beatnik craze of the 1950s in North Beach (only in San Francisco could one attend a “Be-in”), the neighborhood around the intersection of Haight and Ashbury streets in the 1960s became the center of San Francisco hippie “flower power.” But it was purged of most vagrants and drug dealers when the Haight’s “peace and love” devolved into decadence and violence. Tour buses still roll along Haight Street, and visitors can still spot a few “head shops” that sell hashish pipes and patchouli oil for incense burners. Otherwise, the little shops and Ben and Jerry’s ice-cream parlor look no different than stores elsewhere in town.

Most San Franciscans loathed the Transmerica Tower when it was designed and built. Now, they adore it

So many interest groups have coalesced ─ around issues, causes, ethnic groups, and sexual orientations ─ and grown in political power in San Francisco that any change can trigger paroxysms of protest, even over such minor issues as the closing of a tattered greasy spoon or the removal of a single parking space. For example, in 1971 many San Franciscans mightily opposed, then jeered as unsightly, the 260-meter (853-foot), pyramidal Transamerica Corporation building that rose on Montgomery Street ─ the “Wall Street of the West.” Of course, that tower ─ along with the city’s cable cars, the Golden Gate Bridge, and Colt Tower ─ is now one of the most treasured and photographed landmarks in San Francisco.

The Golden Gate Bridge is said to be the most-photographed structure on earth

A heavily unionized city (even body piercers have a union), San Francisco is accustomed to perennial civic and labor unrest. The people of the city accept this as a tolerable price for its numerous charms: the freshest seafood, sourdough bread, and exotic international cuisines; (nippy) ocean bathing; world-class theater and art, ballet and opera; the lushest landscaped parks west of Philadelphia; and everyday vistas that prompt even lifelong San Franciscans to gasp in amazement. In 1997 the Chronicle extolled the “glory of living anywhere in the Bay Area,” where there is always a convenient peak offering a spectacular view. “From the hilltops,” gushed the newspaper, “the congestion that makes metropolitan life maddening becomes invisible.”

San Francisco temperatures, while averaging out to a pleasant sixty degrees or so, can swing wildly with no notice. “The coldest winter I ever spent,” goes one refrain, “was a summer in San Francisco!” Spared the desert winds that can sizzle Southern California, San Franciscans swelter only in late September and early October’s Indian Summer, when the air is mysteriously still and humid. Otherwise, dressing in layers is wise advice, for a toasty day can turn dank and frigid in an instant when the fog rolls in. How foggy does it get, and how often? It’s notable that there are 26 separate foghorns and other fog signals in the San Francisco Bay alone. In wintertime, waves of rainstorms sometimes roll off the ocean, to be followed by inexplicable periods of climatological perfection.

Perfection? What about those earthquakes? Only tourists ask such questions, as natives are calmly stoical on the subject. Their attitude is: “What will be will be.” However, that has not stopped them from strengthening the city’s buildings or nailing bookcases to the wall, or staying clear of grocery stores and pottery shops when the occasional temblor turns one’s footing to jelly.

Citizens wearily admit that San Francisco lies within trembling distance of not only the great San Andreas Fault but also several parallel fault lines in the earth’s crust. You’ll sway 10 feet at the top of a downtown skyscraper during a quake. (On a previous trip to town, Carol and I stood on the roof of the Mandarin Oriental hotel, high, high above San Francisco. Carol was photographing the skyline, but all either of us could think about was earthquakes.)

The Great Quake of 1906 left little standing in the eastern part of the city. Masonry structures, including grand hotels, collapsed, and fires consumed wooden buildings

Yes, the Great Quake of 1906 killed perhaps 1,000 people (the actual number is inexact because many undocumented residents were killed in Chinatown) and destroyed nearly every structure east of Van Ness Avenue. “City practically ruined by fire,” read the last message coming from the city’s main telegraph office nine hours after the quake. “No water. It’s awful.”

But it was the fires from ruptured gas mains and fallen lanterns, not tremors or giant cracks in the earth, that produced such horrific loss of life. What about the Loma Prieta quake in 1989 that flattened part of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, darkened the city for days, and sparked fires that consumed much of the Marina District? More lessons learned, say the natives. And what about the “Big One” that many seismologists believe to be inevitable, perhaps in the foreseeable future? Would downtown skyscraper office space have quadrupled in 20 years if smart money were worried about such things?

What will he will be.

The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, gorgeous at dusk, wasn’t so attractive after whole chunks collapsed in a devastating earthquake in 1989

Ferries at one time carried 50 million passengers annually from one point to another across the Bay. In its heyday, the great 1898 Ferry Building at the foot of Market Street, with its familiar clock tower and steel-framed concrete piers, was the busiest transportation terminal in America. However, with the opening of the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge in 1936, ferries no longer served as the only link across the Bay. And when the Golden Gate Bridge was finished a year later, a trip up U.S. Highway One no longer required a ferry crossing from Fisherman’s Wharf to the Marin County shore. The bridge, which can sway more than 7.5 meters (25 feet) in a gale, rise two meters due to expansion on a hot day, and drop five meters on a cold one, is a triumph of modern engineering—especially considering the swift currents of the 200-foot-deep water below. So popular is the Golden Gate Bridge today that one survey found it was the No. 1 attraction among foreign visitors to the United States.

This old postcard shows Mission Delores, one of a string of Catholic missions built up and down the coast when California was part of Mexico

To go back the city’s beginnings, in the 1500s, Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, sailing under the Spanish flag, and Sir Francis Drake, the British explorer, both managed to miss San Francisco Bay as they poked around the California coast ─ perhaps because of the fog. It would not be until 1769 that the first Spanish galleon sailed into the bay that American adventurer John C. Fremont would later call “the Golden Gate.” Seven years later the first Spanish colonists arrived from Mexico. They established a presidio (fort), a mission (one in a string of 21 along El Camino Real ─ the Royal Highway ─ from San Diego to Sonoma), and a pueblo adobe village.

Not until Mexico gained control of California many years later did the settlement get a name, Yerba Buena (“Good Herb”) ─ not San Francisco, honoring the Franciscans’ founder. The Spanish paid the place little mind save to keep a wary eye on the Russians, who had established a thriving trading post 111 kilometers (60 miles) north at Fort Ross. Besides, the land surrounding Yerba Buena was largely covered with sand, including gigantic dunes stretching six miles from the ocean, clear across the peninsula.

By the time Mexico lost California to the United States in 1848, following a brief and disastrous war over Texas, Americans had already settled much of Northern California and changed the city’s name to coincide with the name of the bay that surrounded the peninsula.

In 1897, streetcars ─ not cable cars ─ rumbled near a new monument marking California’s admission to the Union in 1850

San Francisco became a port of moderate importance with about five hundred souls, and 150 buildings and tents. But in 1848, James Marshall, a sawmill operator, found gold on a farm owned by John Sutter more than a hundred miles (almost 200 kilometers) away in the foothills of the Sierra Mountains. The discovery quickly ended the city’s days as a muddy shantytown, where one downtown corner was marked with a sign reading, “This street impassable, not even jackassable.” Gold fever, too, quickly roused interest in full-fledged statehood for California. After vigorous debate over whether the territory should enter the Union as a free or slave-holding state, California was admitted as a free state in 1850. In the two years that followed, 125,000 more Americans left their homes in search of the Spanish Conquistadors’ elusive City of Gold, making the arduous journey across the continent, by ship around Cape Horn, or over the swampy Isthmus of Panama and then by ship to San Francisco. Ironically both Sutter, the owner of the mill on which gold had been discovered, and Marshall, the discoverer, would die penniless after the frenzied prospectors overran the goldfield.

Though not a nugget of gold was ever unearthed in San Francisco, it was the City by the Bay that was transformed into the true City of Gold. San Francisco supplied the transportation, foodstuffs, clothing ─ including Levi Strauss’s blue-denim work pants with copper buttons and rivets ─ tools, whiskey, bawdy entertainers, and financing that fueled the boom.

These were raucous times, during which the city’s abundance of singular characters and unconventional lifestyles was most likely born. Boom times, too, from which emerged a self-confident, world-class city that could afford to create Golden Gate Park, a giant horticultural showcase atop those dunes in the western part of the city. In 1894, Golden Gate Park was the site of the first of three great San Francisco world’s fairs.

One of San Francisco’s favorite tourist attractions, the cable car, turns around prior to another ascent of one of the city’s steep hills

Mobility around the city was greatly enhanced with the development of the cable car ─ the ingenious invention of Andrew Hallidie, a transplanted Englishman who was already making cable for use in the mines. After he successfully demonstrated that streetcars might traverse the city’s hills by simply grabbing on to an endlessly moving cable running beheath the street in 1873, eight separate cable-car companies sprang up, and the idea was copied in cities from Sydney to Washington. Not just the middle class benefited from the cable cars. So did the wealthy who built mansions on Nob Hill and financed housing developments in what would otherwise have been inaccessible hillside areas.

The stunning building that houses the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit opened in 1905 and survived the Great Quake a year later

These were the days when San Francisco was by far the dominant city of the West Coast ─ Los Angeles was little more than a sleepy citrus center. The early years of the 20th Century in San Francisco were marked by the explosive growth of unions, built upon resentment of the city’s capitalist elite. Strikes, rioting, wild newspaper wars, and waves of reform swept the city. Then came the terrifying ’06 Quake that would destroy four-fifths of the city and leave an estimated 250,000 residents homeless. But within three years thousands of homes and businesses were rebuilt, and as a symbol of its rebirth, San Francisco’s flag features a phoenix rising from the ashes.

Alcatraz Island, whose federal prison was deemed “escape proof” because of the cold, fast-moving waters of the bay, looms behind Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill

Along came the Golden Gate and Bay bridges, and the art deco Coit Tower atop Telegraph Hill. Offshore, Alcatraz Island ─ long a military prison ─ was turned over to the Federal Government to house the “worst of the worst” federal prisoners. Such infamous criminals as Al “Scarface” Capone, George “Baby Face” Nelson, George “Machine Gun” Kelly, Alvin “Creepy” Karpis, and Robert Stroud were among the new inmates.

This is one of 20 or so murals painted on fences and garages in a Mission District street called “Balmy Alley”

The years since World War II have solidified San Francisco’s reputation as a cultured, comely, and occasionally kooky place. The beatniks were followed, in the 1960s, by the New Left protesters ─ centered, actually, across the Bay in Berkeley ─ the hippies, and the psychedelic “San Francisco Sound” rock groups like the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane. Writer Joan Didion wrote that San Francisco was the flash-point of the nation’s “social hemorrhaging” during the hippie years. Then in 1978 came citywide disquiet following the assassination of Mayor George Moscone and Harvey Milk, the first openly gay supervisor, by Dan White, a disgruntled former supervisor. White and Milk seemed to embody the fractiousness of San Francisco politics, as each represented a different ward and vocal constituency. ‘William Saroyan once described San Francisco as “an experiment in living.”

This is San Francisco new and old. Both are beloved

San Francisco might give Paris and Venice a run as the world’s favorite city. No visit seems to cover it all. When one must leave, it’s with the feeling of privilege at having met this unforgettable grande dame. Suave yet naughty, winsome yet brawling, seagazing as well as seagoing, courtly yet avant garde, San Francisco seizes the senses. Tony Bennett, the great crooner, in his famous rendition of the song about this city, left his heart here. It’s little wonder, for, even in its current run of frowziness, San Francisco is a siren, whose song once heard is not forgotten.

On one of our stops heading east from San Francisco, Carol got the chance to snap some lovely photographs in and above Sedona, Arizona, an increasingly popular resort area tucked in a valley below some stunning red-rock formations. I thought you might like to see some of her images, so Internet guru Anne Malinee has replaced Carol’s slide show in the column to the right with her Sedona photos.

Finally, in my last opus about the evils of air travel, I forgot to mention a brief but charming moment during our layover in Los Angeles. While Carol was tapping away on her computer, I strolled down the concourse to a little burrito joint and ordered a beer. The perky waiter, about my age, looked at me with what I thought was a twinkle in his eye, and said, “See your ID?” “Yeah, right, sure,” I replied with a chuckle, since it’s been a couple of generations of time since I’ve been “carded” to be sure I was old enough to buy alcohol.

“Seriously,” the waiter replied. I pointed to my gray hair and his, but he just shrugged his shoulders. “Policy,” he said. “Everybody shows ID. Saves us the hassle.” I fished out my license, he gave it the most cursory examination in alcohol-regulation history, and I got my beer. And it put perhaps a bit more spring in my step the rest of the day.

(These are a few of the words from this posting that you may not know. Each time, I’ll tell you a little about them and also place them into a cumulative archive of “Ted’s Wild Words” in the right-hand column of the home page. Just click on it there, and if there’s another word in today’s blog that you’d like me to explain, just ask!)

Frowziness. Shabbiness, down on its luck.

Hippies. A youth subculture, originating in San Francisco in the 1960s. These “flower children” sang of peace and love, but much of their utopian innocence was lost when drugs infested the movement.

Please leave a comment.

I’m writing from crisp, clear, cool San Francisco, after a day’s slog by air ─ yes, as you’ll see, it is possible to slog via airplane ─ from muggy, cloudy, hot Washington, D.C. Once I’ve poked around a bit and reacquainted myself with the distinctive “City by the Bay,” I’ll give you a report and some history in my next posting.

In the meantime, I suggest a name change for the blog ─ this time only ─ from “Ted Landphair’s America” to “10D’s America.”

To you, this is a jet airplane or “big bird.” To me, a high-flying, fast-moving stress machine

Humans with names are reduced to alphanumeric characters in today’s world of air travel. Carol was 10A, and I was 10D, not just at the airport and on the jumbo flying shoebox into which we were stuffed for more than five hours in the air from Washington to Los Angeles, but also from the moment we booked the flight and got our “seat assignments.” (Carol wanted a window; I wanted an aisle, and I ended up across the aisle in the same row.)

From the moment the reservations and seats were confirmed until we landed in San Francisco, we lost a good chunk of control of our lives.

What took over that control, for me more than Carol, was STRE$$.

(The $$ of air travel accrues from the cost of tickets, transportation to the airport, a growing array of booking and baggage fees, various gratuities, meals that used to be free, headset rental charges, and more.)

My stress level elevates according to the air travelers’ axiom, borrowed from “Murphy’s Law”: “What can go wrong, will.”

Carol, bless her, is possessed of an annoyingly sunny outlook best summarized with another cliché. Unfailingly she “makes the best of a bad situation.”

At least she agrees with me about the “bad” part.

What’s so tough, you ask, about waking one day on America’s right coast and drifting off to dreamland that same night in a comfortable hotel bed on the left one?

Everything in between, that’s what. Let me count some of the ways:

• The up-and-at-‘em-at-4 a.m. routine for a 9 o’clock departure. Why so ungodly early? Because paranoia about missing the flight strikes deep. There are pets and self to be fed; final packing and last-minute computer work that you meant to finish the night before but didn’t because, gracious, it was midnight already. And since one always “wants to come home to a clean place,” time must be found for light laundry and dishwashing and pick-up-around-the-house duty before the taxi or kind friend is tooting the horn in the driveway in “plenty of time” to get you to the airport.

My preferred plenty of time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.

Carol’s: 30 minutes.

So you have to catch a flight? No hurry, no worry. Take your sweet time

• The knuckle-gnawing ride to the airport, sure to be in rush hour, when a single closure or fender-bumper or drop of rain (Washingtonians drive like sniveling cowards in the rain and severe catatonics in snow) sends the blood pressure to alarm-bell levels.

Why not take trusty public transit?

Because there’s nothing “trusty” about it when you’re in a hurry. Repeat after me: What can go wrong . . .

This fellow is obviously watching one of Carol’s smaller bags for our next trip

• Packing. You have not traveled with Ms. Highsmith, whose photo endeavors require a safari-worthy assortment of steamer-sized trunks. Luckily, she’s an all-digital “photog” these days. Oh, how I remember the days when we’d set off with 13 elephantine cases bulging with lenses, tripods, battery packs, cords, filters, special umbrellas and backdrop cloths, 200 or so packs of 4”x5” large-format film, 300 boxes of Polaroid film, plus whatever clothes and cosmetics and mosquito repellent could be stuffed in between.

In the years since, the parsimonious airlines have whittled their world down to one permitted checked bag per person, and it had better be a little featherweight thing or EL$E.

Do you think all these bags can fit in the overhead luggage bin? Of course they can, with a little ingenuity and the ruthless scrunching of every purse and hat and backpacks that get in their way

That has prompted the flying public, otherwise known as sardines with boarding passes, to cram three lifetimes’ worth of possessions into the “one carry-on item” and one additional backpack, purse, or briefcase permitted on board. Thus, passengers lining up to board resemble stevedores tugging freight containers that onboard, they are repeatedly warned, “must “fit securely in the overhead bin or under the seat in front of you.”

Bag limits, bag sizes, bag bins. Bag stress, as I’ll explain.

Yeah, getting through security may take you a few extra minutes (or days). And yes, those folks up on the walkway are in line. But be patient, and you’ll be just fine

• “Clearing security” at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, or is it Washington National Ronald Reagan Airport? Since its name was changed from just plain Washington National over a decade ago to honor the late president, I can never get it straight. Sometimes I call it “Washington Ronald National Reagan Airport,” just to be ornery.

Imagine the confusion up the road at Baltimore-Washington Thurgood Marshall International Airport. And I didn’t even scramble that one.

I won’t belabor the security ordeal ─ the shoeless, belt-less, have-your-boarding-pass-ready-for-inspection, hands-out-in-front-like-an-undead-zombie pass through the magnetometer under the watchful eye of Mr. or Ms. Uniformed Personality. It’s the same in any large airport. Sometimes the scowls and reproaches for packing a shampoo container larger than a thimble are surlier, sometimes they’re not. Depends on how long the security agents have been on their feet and how many people with belt buckles the size of Rhode Island have set off the scanner that day.

• Arrival at the departure gate. Naturally, in our case, approximately half of the passengers at Washington Ronald National Reagan had booked a single departing flight ─ ours, to Los Angeles. It was the usual assortment of grumpy “night people” who are grouchy any time before noon, plus what must have been 800 teenagers, chattering to each other or into their cell phones about J Lo and Brangelina, and a little bit about their big trip to SoCal.

(Don’t know from J Lo and Brangelina and SoCal? Like, you’re totally unclutch.)

Ladies and gentlemen, we’ll be boarding Flight 6787 in just a moment. I’m sure we’ll get most of you on. The rest of you can meet your luggage in Oshkosh if we can fit you on our next flight

• Getting aboard first. Even though everyone has an assigned seat, it’s important to elbow one’s way to the front of the line to be sure you’re a winner in battle for space in the overhead bin. One doesn’t want to have that maniacally packed carry-on bag banished to the cargo hold. Least of all Carol, who, you’ll recall, had crammed a small fortune in camera equipment, plus one-fourth of our other worldly possessions, into one unpleasantly plump bag.

Recognizing the likelihood of seating stampedes, airline computers now herd passengers into “groups” ─ numbered 1, 2, 3, sometimes up to 8 ─ so that the airplane can be boarded back to front. This makes some sense, since without such a plan, the stampeders would clog the aisles while trying to lift their overstuffed luggage into the bins.

In case you had any doubts, this is not the “back of the airplane” in coach

But the smooth boarding system never works, because the airline also sets aside early, “priority” boarding for a variety of people with potentate status, including the rich and famous in first class, plus “gold-medallion members,” “super-plus” frequent fliers, those who’ve earned points from the airline’s “travel partners,” people “needing assistance” or traveling with families, undercover security agents, and deadheading pilots and flight attendants.

For our flight, by the time all of these special folks had boarded, only those 800 chattering teenagers, Carol, and I were left to straggle onboard.

Making that Carol-like best of a bad situation, I was able to wedge 10A’s bag into the bin. Telling you how I did it would earn me a place on the airline’s “watch list” for future lights. 10A settled into her seat next to an empty middle seat, leaned her head against one of those brick-like airline pillows, and fell fast asleep. I, old 10D, could have moved over to 10B. But come on! Only contortionists, racetrack jockeys, and those who forget to get seat assignments take a middle seat for a five-hour flight.

• Traveling “neighbors” in the sky. You can guess who ended up in 10E and 10F to my right: two of those teen chatterboxes ─ hand-holding boyfriend and girlfriend who, it too quickly became clear, had given adorable pet names to each other. Pookie and Boo, or something. Hour after hour, save for the half-dozen times I “stretched my legs” in the slit they call an aisle or in the phone-booth-sized lavatory at the rear of the plane, I was regaled with sagas of teenage loves lost, found, and dreamed of; loyal and disloyal friends; good parents, bad parents, wicked stepparents, bratty brothers, sisters who get all the attention, and stepbrothers who, you know, are like weird; teenagers who are dorks and teachers who are hunks; and spring break binges and barfs. All this before the lovebirds opened a laptop computer and began aiming the built-in camera at themselves and at me. This produced an hour of giggles, possibly at my expense.

• Reading material. I had brought, but mistakenly stuck in a checked bag, an old-fashioned reading instrument called a book. So I bought one copy of each newspaper that the concourse kiosk offered for sale, save for one in what looked like Yiddish.

This is the kind of place the in-flight magazines want to send you. Right. I’ll pack my flip-flops and snorkel and be right over

The only onboard alternative would be the “in-flight magazine,” which obsesses on exotic or adventuresome destinations on the airline’s route. That would be engrossing if I were into touring lush villas in lusher rain forests or scuba-diving with piranha. I’m not, though, so I was left to read about airport gate alignments, the selection of cocktails and snacks for purchase, and advertisements for zirconium jewelry, golf clubs, and vibrating chairs.

Still, after the six papers, zirconium ads, emergency landing instructions, and T-shirt on the back of an enormous man in 8B, there was nothing left but further adventures of my traveling companions, Pookie and Boo. And this was just to Los Angeles. The dreaded “change of planes” lay ahead there before we could even aim for San Francisco.

Catch a nap like my wife, 10A? Not when the seat reclines only about seven centimeters, the hours are punctured with turbulence and seat-belt warnings from “the cockpit,” note is made on the speaker system of every location “on the right (or left) of the aircraft” of every natural wonder and community larger than Sheboygan, and Pookie and Boo are taking turns stretching their legs.

Fortunately, the layover in Los Angeles and flight up to San Francisco were nearly unremarkable.

Nearly.

The exception was the number of people on the flight whom we observed wearing surgical masks. We counted 20, compared with just 1 on the cross-country flight. Californians, already sensitive to airborne pollution and more attuned than easterners to good health, have been quick to note the recent spread of swine flu; as of this writing, 12 confirmed or suspected cases have been reported in the San Francisco Bay Area alone. Perhaps it was my imagination, but when a man several rows to our rear erupted into a coughing fit, the normal buzz of conversation dipped to an uncomfortable murmur.

Flu fear: one more stressor in the air.

All of this mitigates in favor of nice, sanely paced, drives across America, any time we have a choice. We’ll be driving, not flying, all the way back home over ten days, nabbing stories and photographs. No 10A and 10D going east. No Pookie and Boo, either.

The front page of my San Francisco Chronicle shows the surprising fruits of recent searches of inmate cells in California’s biggest state prison in Vacaville.

Not guns or homemade knives, called “shanks,” fashioned from bedsprings or sharpened spoons. Not drugs or girlie magazines. Not contraband cigarettes or booze.

No, something thoroughly modern: cell phones! 1,800 of them confiscated since 2006. Plus another thousand discovered in the cells or on the grounds of California’s other prisons.

Cell phones in more ways than one.

Needless to say, easy contact with the outside world is not the ideal “perk” for incarcerated bad guys and gals. Not only can they merrily continue their criminal enterprises, such as ordering “hits” on the judges, jurors, prosecutors, and witnesses who put them away, but they can also use their cell minutes to plan such recreational activities as jail breaks.

You’d think it was girlfriends, boyfriends, gang pals, or shady lawyers who smuggled in most of these mobile phones. Naw. In more than half the cases, it was the prison staff ─ cooks, medical personnel, even guards, if you can call them that ─ who sold the phones to “cons” for $100 to $400 apiece.

This raises a question: How many cigarettes or extra bars of soap does a convict have to sell to earn $400 to spend on a cell phone? Apparently cash, as well as electronics, is finding its way behind bars.

Right now, the penalty imposed on a prisoner found hiding a cellular phone in California is the loss of 30 days’ credit for “good behavior.” That’s not exactly throwing them in “the hole” for a month like the good-old days. (Just kidding, prison reformers.)

Seeing the photo of the cell phone pile, the California legislature is springing to action. Bills have been introduced to make the smuggling, sale, or possession of a mobile phone in a state prison illegal.

That’ll put the fear of the law in those cons.

On my last trip, to Ohio and Indiana, I visited and wrote a VOA story about the small Indiana city of Kokomo, an industrial place that is battling economic gremlins. Kokomo’s largest employer is Chrysler Motors, which, after teetering for months on the edge of collapse, filed this week for bankruptcy protection. The gist of my story was that while Kokomoans are worried, naturally, they’re also in the early stages of re-inventing themselves as a model “green” city of biodiesel reactors, algae ponds, rooftop wind turbines and the like.

While there, I came across a fascinating historical oddity that I did not report because it has no relevance to the economic crisis or, that I can see, to the city today.

Kokomo sits in the northern part of a northern state ─ a good 270 kilometers (170 miles) from Kentucky, which was a “border state” between North and South in the American Civil War of the 1860s, and 850 kilometers (525 miles) from former slaveholding, Deep South states like Mississippi.

But it was not in Mississippi or Georgia or Kentucky but in Kokomo, Indiana, in 1923, where history’s largest gathering of the Ku Klux Klan took place. Klansmen were white bigots who paraded in white robes and conical white masks when they were not terrorizing, and sometimes lynching, African Americans, Jews, and other minorities. More than 200,000 Klansmen marched in that record-setting rally in Kokomo that year.

Ku Klux Klansmen couldn’t have been too proud of what they were doing, considering the lengths they went to hide their identities

An itinerant salesman named David Curtis Stephenson who had settled in Indiana also happened to be the Klan’s “grand dragon.” He spread hate while making a fortune for himself, selling Klan robes and hoods. Stephenson organized the big Kokomo rally at the apex of the Klan’s power. Two years later, he was off to prison for life after a conviction on a rape charge. And subsequent prosecutions of other Klansmen sapped the Klan’s appeal. Estimated membership in Indiana fell from 350,000 to 15,000 in a single year.

I asked the county historian, Fred Odiet, about all this, and he noted that Klan membership was a not-so-secret secret in many northern towns in the early 20th Century. Business leaders in Kokomo and elsewhere were not virulent “night riders,” he says. But they hired some, and they collaborated to keep Catholics, more than the few blacks in the area, in their place. Just about everybody knew who was Klan and who wasn’t, Odiet says, but nobody talked much about it. Some townspeople identified Klansmen by carefully observing their shoes, unhidden by the white robes, then matching the footwear against what “reputable” businessmen would wear to work or civic gatherings.

Kokomo today is still a “white bread” place ─ 87 percent white and just 10 percent African American. But there are countless signs of racial harmony in town, and nobody pays much attention to other people’s shoes any longer.

There are no chandeliers in this section of the massive, refurbished Grand Central Terminal, but there are still plenty of light bulbs to change

A quick thought about a clever New York Times story pegged to the old jokes about how many people of one sort or another it takes to change a light bulb. Six, it turns out, at the city’s Grand Central train terminal. There, just 10 gilt chandeliers alone carry almost 700 incandescent bulbs, and officials are replacing them and thousands of others with compact, screw-in fluorescents that, together, are expected to save the terminal $200,000 a year in energy costs.

Carol and I are sad to see this latest example of the switch away from incandescent lighting. She, as a photographer, because of the beauty of many traditional light bulbs and the sheer ugliness and sickening patina of fluorescent bulbs. And I because, in one motel and restaurant and streetlight after another, the warm glow of Thomas Edison’s invention is being replaced by an institutional, cool-blue sheen better suited to outer-space movies or those mobile-phone-equipped cells at Vacaville.

True enough, money and energy will be saved in the brave new, paler, sickly-looking fluorescent world. And one day, the warm glow of an old-fashioned light bulb will have gone the way of the floppy disk.

(These are a few of the words from this posting that you may not know. Each time, I’ll tell you a little about them and also place them into a cumulative archive of “Ted’s Wild Words” in the right-hand column of the home page. Just click on it there, and if there’s another word in today’s blog that you’d like me to explain, just ask!)

Gremlin. A mischievous fairy. The word also has a more modern application to electronic and mechanical devices that develop inexplicable glitches, blamed on mysterious gremlins or “bugs.”

The hole. Prison jargon for cells to which convicts are sentenced to solitary confinement.

Parsimonious. Not just frugal but downright cheap. Tight with a dollar and not inclined to part with one.

Sniveling. Whining and tearful. Another vocabulary-building word, obsequious, also fits someone who snivels.

Carol and I just got back from a fascinating drive along an interstate highway, parts of which are barely wider than a pickup truck!

It’s a highway, all right, just not a new one. And it was an interstate – in fact, the very first federal highway, begun in 1811, about 140 years before land was cleared for what we now know as America’s Interstate Highway System.

George Washington, the nation’s first president and a surveyor by trade, had fought French and Indian forces in western Pennsylvania, where the woods are as thick as bulrushes. Firsthand, he saw the difficulty of moving armies into the frontier, and he pressed for better roads than the old animal and Indian trails along which travelers struggled to move at the time.

Travel on America’s early roads was, as the innkeeper Thenardier said in “Les Misérables,” “a curse”

Several short, earthen toll roads, or turnpikes, which were mired in mud each winter and spring and choked with dust much of the rest of the year, were cut between the port city of Baltimore on the Chesapeake Bay and Cumberland, Maryland, in the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains. But far beyond those dense mountains beckoned the new “Northwest Territory” that began in Ohio. So in 1806, Congress authorized construction of what it foresaw as a sort of portage road between the Potomac River near Cumberland in the east, and the Ohio River at Wheeling, Virginia (now West Virginia), far to the west.

George Washington commanded, if not slept, here, and this cabin in Cumberland is ground zero of The National Road.

Beginning in a triangular park in downtown Cumberland at a little log cabin that had once been Washington’s headquarters, workers blazed westward along the old Nemacolin or Braddock Trail. Nemacolin was a Delaware Indian chief; Edward Braddock, a British general who had tramped that way, hoping to capture French forts.

But the “National Road,” as everyone soon called this remarkable pathway west, kept right on going, past Wheeling onto Zane’s Trace, a barely improved wilderness footpath to Zanesville in eastern Ohio. The target terminus, far to the west, was the mightiest river of all: the distant Mississippi. The National Road almost made it, stretching about 1,000 kilometers to Vandalia in central Illinois in the 1840s before funding ran out and enthusiasm waned. That’s because speedy, capacious new railroads stole the road’s thunder as well as most of its people and freight.

Here’s Doug, ready with a story about rudimentary early travel on The National Road

Carol and I learned a lot of this from Doug Smith, our enthusiastic guide and traveling companion on an exploration of remnants of The National Road in Ohio. Unlike the many train freaks and vintage-car enthusiasts, Doug, who’s a real-estate broker, Licking County commissioner, and auctioneer – you should hear him speed-talk through an auctioneer’s call! – just loves old roads. Until he and Glenn Harper, a founding member of the Ohio National Road Association, came along, most of the romantic stories of America’s historic byways had been lavished upon U.S. Route 66, which was created in the “roaring” 1920s from a string of state roads out west. Connecting Chicago to the Pacific Ocean via quirky crossroads and scenic desert byways, 66 has come to be known as “the Mother Road.”

If that’s so, The National Road, begun 110 years earlier, is wiry old Great Grandma.

The National Road doesn’t yet have as many trinkets, slogans, or fan clubs as U.S. 66 out West. But folks in Ohio are working on it

“John Steinbeck and [the Great Depression novel] The Grapes of Wrath didn’t hurt the nostalgic craze over Route 66,” Doug Smith reminded me. Doug and Glenn Harper aren’t (yet) in Steinbeck’s league, but they have produced an exceptional little travelers’ guide that is a treasure trove of stories, vintage photos, and maps that help visitors locate, then enjoy, the many, though often hidden, delights to be found on The National Road in Ohio.

Doug and Glenn’s travel guide spans many generations of “The Road That Helped Build America”

Carol and I wore out our copies, even as Doug told us stories and pointed out spots that we’d have never found on our own. And we ended up in one of the most curious, intellectually nutritious museums in America. Curious, as you’ll see, because of the odd combination of themes presented there.

I hope you like history as much as I do – and the wind in your hair as you drive with the top down! We’re gassed up and ready for a trip down The National Road. A smidgen of it, at least.

As I mentioned, The National Road winds from the ancient mountains of western Maryland to the pancake-flat plains of Illinois. Doug Smith’s neck of the woods in eastern Ohio is just a microcosm of an old road that teems with stories dating as far back as the opening of the American frontier.

Signs old and new adjoin each other along the venerable road in eastern Ohio

Much of the way as you whiz past red, white, and blue signs for The National Road, you’re driving U.S. 40, a two- or sometimes four-lane federal highway that was given its number during the same era that Route 66 was strung together out West.

But those colorful signs reflect fiction as well as truth. U.S. 40 does follow the general path of the old National Road, but many of the most compelling remnants of the original, historic highway are little more than offshoots – driveway-size, even – running off that road into the woods or right up to somebody’s farm. If you didn’t have Doug Smith in the car with you, you wouldn’t know the real National Road was there. The original, narrow road twisted and

This is a piece of the original National Road, as first paved with concrete about 1916. Driving along U.S. 40, you’d never see it

turned, loped straight up gentle hills, and curled around steep ones. Come U.S. 40, the highway engineers of the 1920s were determined to proceed as straight as possible from Cumberland west, and they proceeded to widen, cut, fill, and pave over the old road to do it – chewing up, disguising, and discarding much of The National Road as they went.

Allow me to present nuggets from Doug and Glenn’s travelers’ guide, Doug’s genial tour, and my own peeks at roadside markers and overlooks.

The Wheeling Suspension Bridge, over which The National Road still runs, looks its age, for sure

Doug likes to tell about the Wheeling Suspension Bridge, across which The National Road finally spanned the Ohio River in 1849. Originally the world’s longest suspension bridge (at 308 meters), it twisted and torqued and finally collapsed into the river one day five years later, during a frightful storm. Everything but the structural engineer’s reputation survived. When it came time to rebuild, John Roebling, renowned for his Brooklyn Bridge across the East River in New York City, got the job. But the new Wheeling bridge got built only after city burghers upriver in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, stopped bellowing. They were worried that the workhorse steamboats of the period would not be able to pass under Roebling’s creation and deliver goods to Pittsburgh. Clever inventors averted the problem by figuring a way to tilt steamboat stacks backward on hinges, even at full steam, low enough to glide safely under Roebling’s bridge.

The National Road had first reached Ohio via smaller bridges, igniting a human flood so profound that, by the 1840 census, “frontier” Ohio had become the nation’s third-most-populous state.

Safety bikes were all the rage, even among the nation’s “new women,” in 1895, when this poster was produced

And The National Road became its most popular thoroughfare. In their guide, Glenn Harper and Doug Smith include this note about the “safety bicycle” – the low-riding kind with wheels of equal size that we know today – that replaced scary, bone-shaking (and occasionally -breaking), 1.5-meter-high models that had been in vogue. The safety bike, the authors report, “brought new life to the old Road. To prove their physical prowess, young men would sometimes ride one hundred miles or more. Sherman Granger established a record in 1897 by riding his bicycle from Zanesville to Cumberland [337 kilometers] in four and one-half days. Such enthusiasts organized the League of American Wheelmen and in their quest for appropriate places to ride helped champion the ‘Good Roads Movement.’ Advocates for the movement increased dramatically with the invention and increased use of the automobile. In just ten years from 1900 to 1910, the number of automobiles increased from 8,000 to 468,000.”

That’s more than 58 times as many “horseless carriages” in a decade. And an awful lot of them rolled along The National Road.

Site Manager Mary Ellen Weingartner near the end of the National Road/Zane Grey Museum’s meticulously accurate diorama

I mentioned a most unusual museum. Called The National Road/Zane Grey Museum, it’s tucked up on a hill in little Norwich, Ohio. That’s enunciated as “Nor-wick,” not “witch,” in these parts, for reasons known only to denizens of the town. The museum, supported by the state historical society, displays three almost completely unrelated sorts of artifacts. One set, pertinent to our visit, explains The National Road. It includes a superb 41-meter-long diorama, displaying hundreds of tiny, hand-carved natural features, human figures, animals, wagons, tools, and road-building equipment – each individually crafted – plus other treasures and photographs related to the first federal road. The Zane Grey portion tells the story of America’s best-known Old West adventure novelist; he grew up nearby and was a great-grandson of Ebenezer Zane, whose “trace” we mentioned earlier. And there’s a wing devoted strictly to art pottery, which was once a thriving business in eastern Ohio.

Site manager Mary Ellen Weingartner pointed out three artifacts, in particular, that caught my fancy:

One was a “Gunter’s chain,” named after a 17th-Century British mathematician. Its 100 links, precisely, stretch exactly 66 feet (just over 20 meters). The men who blazed The National Road used Gunter’s chains to hew a uniform right-of-way as they went. The traveling portion was usually far narrower, as shallow drainage ditches and space for markers ate up part of the width.

The second notable artifact was an actual Conestoga wagon, which Mary Ellen described as the “semi truck of its day.” This was the pioneer freight wagon that you see in film “westerns” – the sort with billowing white canvas affixed to its high, arching

That’s an ordinary shoe, all right, between the pieces of wood in the braking device of an old Conestoga wagon

ribs. Conestoga wagons, named after the Pennsylvania valley in which they first appeared, carried no drivers or passengers. They were pulled by 6 to 12 horses or oxen, but the drovers rode or walked alongside. The only seat was a short, hard, retractable “lazy board,” sticking out from the wagon’s side, on which an exhausted person could catch what must have been a short, incredibly uncomfortable ride. When these heavily laden “prairie schooners” headed downhill, a lever engaged a brake shoe to prevent the wagon from rolling over the dray animals that were pulling it.

I note this because a Conestoga wagon’s brake shoes were, in fact, real shoes! No doubt hand-me-downs that already had holes in their soles.

Downhill travel on The National Road was indeed an adventure. Approaching a steep decline, a drover would sometimes stop, cut down a large tree, and tie it to the back of his wagon to slow the heavy, rolling loads. There’s even a slightly macabre marker along the Ohio portion of the road that pinpoints the spot where Christopher Baldwin became Ohio’s first known traffic fatality. On August 20, 1835, Baldwin, a Massachusetts antiquarian en route to central Ohio to study prehistoric Indian mounds, was riding “up top” with his stagecoach driver when they passed a pack of grunting hogs. The horses reared, the coach tipped over, and poor Baldwin broke his neck.

In 1912, Congress ordered several “Madonna of the Trail” statues, including this one on the National Road in Ohio, erected along historic roads to salute westward-bound pioneers

That third item of note at the National Museum/Zane Grey Museum is a series of rings that Mary Ellen Weingarten uses for school-group demonstrations. The rings fit around stones of various sizes, gathered in the area during an early upgrade of The National Road. It employed a mélange called “macadam,” developed in Scotland by John McAdam about 1820. A frame was laid ahead across the terrain, into which layers of carefully sorted stones, large ones underneath up to pebbles at road level, were spread, then compacted by a heavy, horse-drawn roller. No adhesives or fillers held these millions of stones together, Mary Ellen told me. The road was no longer a muddy path. It was all rocks, smooshed by that roller, then further compressed by passing wagon wheels and the feet of travelers and livestock.

This was one of the first toll booths travelers would have encountered on The National Road, near La Vale, west of Cumberland

Both Mary Ellen and Doug pointed out The National Road became a toll turnpike once the federal government turned over jurisdiction to the states in 1835. Tollhouses popped up along the “turnpike.” (The word derives from the days when real pikes, or sharpened rods, across the road kept non-paying travelers from passing.) Travelers “coming down the pike” with those Conestoga wagons paid no toll at all, because the freight wagons’ wide wheels helped tamp down the road. Sheepherders were assessed 3 cents a score (20 head) for their herd; cattle – though nice and heavy – had sharp hooves that tore up the road, so their toll was 7 cents a score. Drovers took respite, and enjoyed a drink or two or ten, in roadside inns or in “pike towns” that sprang up along the road. Animal pens and barns corralled their animals.

Here’s a short stretch of the Old National Road that had been paved in brick. Note how narrow it was!

In the 19-teens, engineers introduced still more new paving materials to The National Road. In places where brickyards abounded, row after row (after row after row after row!) of brick were laid. In fact, prison convicts completed an 80-kilometer stretch of brick from Zanesville eastward to Wheeling. Elsewhere, crews tried out various early forms of concrete. On some of those original road offshoots that you find off in the brush next to U.S. 40, you can walk on

You can see the narrow-gauge railroad engine at work alongside highway workers as The National Road was repaved in the 19-teens

95-year-old concrete and break off a stone or two where the surface has crumbled. To lay all that concrete, Doug Smith explained, narrow-gauge railways were created just for that job. They hauled sand and gravel and stones alongside the pavers, and as work moved on down the road, the rails were pulled.

Doug noted that there were rest areas along The National Road, just as you’ll find on today’s Interstate Highway System. There were certainly no information kiosks or giveaway maps, vending machines or men’s and ladies’ rooms, however. These turnouts offered only shade, a water well and pump, maybe a hard bench or two, and pit toilets.

This is part of the inscribed rock at “The Eagle’s Nest” along the National Road

Sometimes various layers of history converge along The National Road. Near the little town of Brownsville, for instance, a granite boulder at a place called the “Eagle’s Nest” was engraved in 1914 with the outline of a covered wagon and an early roadster automobile, as well as a written notation about the repaving of the highway. But attention is also drawn to the valley below, where the world’s first demonstration of contour farming was taking place at the same time.

And this is a look at another old marker on site

Congress stipulated that markers be placed once in every mile along the road. Crews used their Gunter’s chain for that task as well; stretch one out exactly 80 times, and you had a mile. The sandstone mile markers, buried deep in the ground, carry a surprising amount of information, starting with the distance to Cumberland and including the names of, and distances to, the nearest towns. When these markers were broken by wayward vehicles or malicious vandals, concrete ones replaced them.

Here’s what’s left of one of those old strip motels that sprouted along The National Road in the 1940s

Other less formal sentinels of the old road are harder to find. Most period gas stations have been razed, turned into junk shops and the like, or modernized. Most, but not all, of the dreary little tourist courts, such as the “Nighty-Night Motel,” with their rows of identical rooms facing right onto the highway, are gone or empty relics. The clever Burma Shave shaving-cream ads that unfolded in four-line couplets plus a tag line on crude wooden signs . . .

An old, but photogenic, rustic barn along The National Road

. . . are nowhere to be seen. But Carol was thrilled when Doug led us to a couple of classic, extant “Mail Pouch” barns, on which the chewing tobacco company’s distinctive logo had been carefully hand-painted.. In fact, Doug and Glenn Harper note in their travelers’ guide, a fellow named Harley Warrick from nearby Belmont, Ohio, painted hundreds of those signs on barns throughout the Midwest for half a century.

Here’s an early postcard view of an S-bridge in eastern Ohio

It’s hard to drag a “favorite favorite” National Road site out of Doug Smith. He loves every sign and pebble. But he’s awfully partial to the “S-bridges” that you can still see in a few places off U.S. 40. The bridge structures themselves are not S-shaped; that would be engineering folly. Like every bridge I’ve ever seen, save for one that I’ll tell you about in a moment, they shoot straight across the water at a neat 90-degree angle to the shorelines. But remember all those twists and turns of the original roadway? They brought The National Road up to many rivers at odd angles. So the early engineers had to maneuver the connections

And here’s the approach to one of the S-bridges as it looks today

from the road to the bridge this way or that in order to line them up for a perfectly straight shot across. Taken together, the wiggly approaches and the ruler-straight bridge have the look of a big, snaky S. (You can see what I mean in the adjacent photos.)

My favorite stop was a pretty park, high above Zanesville. Below sat not just the town, in postcard splendor, but particularly a bridge over the intersecting Licking and Muskingum rivers.

Zanesville’s world-famous Y-bridge

That’s right: one bridge over the confluence of two rivers! It’s Y-shaped, the only one in the world, by Doug’s reckoning. For sure, it’s the only place we know of where you can go to the middle of a bridge and turn right! Early versions of Zanesville’s Y-bridge were even covered, like the quaint, though conventionally straight, covered bridges you see in Vermont or Indiana.

Here’s the Ohio capitol, past which U.S. 40, successor to the National Road, still runs. No, they didn’t run out of money to finish the dome. The roof is flat, but there’s a rounded dome inside it!

The National Road runs through two state capitals: Columbus, Ohio; and Indianapolis, Indiana, though you have to work to find it in both of those cities. Carol and I were both places on this trip but didn’t try very hard.

One of the treats of our ride along the old National Road occurred at a few spots where it was possible to stand on a fragment of the original pike, look across a field or up a hillside, and see two more generations of the road: U.S. 40 and today’s ultramodern, ultrafast Interstate 70. Not surprisingly, I-70 was the only busy one of the bunch.

I was standing on part of the old National Road when I took this shot of U.S. 40 in the distance. My eye could also see I-70 farther away, but it doesn’t show up very well here

In 2002, The National Road added a name when Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta designated it as “The National Historic Road.” That was rather a waste of effort. The “historic” part, as I hope Doug and I have demonstrated, goes without saying.

[Glenn Harper and Doug Smith’s The Historic National Road in Ohio: The Road That Helped Build America was published in 2005 by the Ohio Historical Society.]

(These are a few of the words from this posting that you may not know. Each time, I’ll tell you a little about them and also place them into a cumulative archive of “Ted’s Wild Words” in the right-hand column of the home page. Just click on it there, and if there’s another word in today’s blog that you’d like me to explain, just ask!)

Capacious. Large in capacity.

Denizen. Strictly, this means any inhabitant of a place. But the word also gives special status to animals and those of mystical powers, as in “denizens of the deep” or “denizens of the fields.”

Smidgen. A little bit. Sometimes shortened to “smidge.”

For some time I’ve been meaning to devote a posting to North Carolina, an incredibly diverse state in many, many ways. Below shortly, I will do so, having mentioned the state thrice recently in reference to my search for the meaning of the term “pressing clubs,” in a passing mention of my annual visits there to Carol’s family reunions, and in a Wild Words exploration of the state’s “Tar Heel” nickname.

And there’s an overriding reason to bite into North Carolina – a metaphor that will become clear late in this post.

First, though, I can’t resist mentioning what seems like a brilliant little piece of economic theory and mischief, rolled into one.

This looks like something an economist would cook up. Why do I get the feeling that I’d find myself falling into the “1%” slice, whatever it stands for?

As you may well have heard, President Obama, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, countless members of Congress, a screaming horde of TV pundits, and just about anybody else over 10 who draws a breath in the United States have come up with a prescription for fixing the struggling U.S. economy. None matches the other, of course, since economics falls somewhere mysticism and humbug. All the new theories have produced a wave of glazed looks across the land.

But thanks to the St. Petersburg Times in Florida, clarity may be at hand.

“How Would You Fix the Economy?” the paper asked recently, and a reader, David Otterson in Largo, Florida, sent in a suggestion that’s staggering in its simplicity.

Otterson says America’s economic woes can be solved in three simple steps with something he calls “patriotic retirement”:

Step 1. There are about 40 million U.S. workers aged 50 and over. Instead of giving multi-bazillions of dollars to the same folks who wrecked the economy, give each of these older workers $1 million! That’s $4 trillion total – admittedly an awful lot of money. President Obama won’t put a total estimated figure on all of the various stimulus packages, rescue plans, loans, and purchases of “toxic assets” left over from the splurge of lending and spending, but others put it in that $4 trillion ballpark or beyond.

So Dave is working with about the right wad of cash.

Dave’s “patriotic” plan would get autos rolling down the line again. Somewhat more modern ones than these, no doubt

Step 2. Insist that each of the 40 million recipients spend part of the million bucks on a brand-new Ford, Chrysler, or General Motors car or truck. Presto. The U.S. auto industry springs back to life, and used cars traded in for the new ones are available to others cheaply as well.

Step 3. Require each of the lucky older workers getting the cash to either pay off his or her mortgage or buy a new house. That would put all kinds of money into the hands of developers, homebuilders, banks and other mortgage lenders, who can then feel free to lend to younger workers again in great numbers. Presto, no more stagnation in housing loans and home construction.

Overnight, the economy would be humming again. Unless the $1-million recipients bought huge, huge mansions and fancy sports cars, each would have plenty left over to spend on consumer goods, travel, gifts to their children and charities, college tuition for the grandkids, and so forth. New money would gush throughout the economy. Even if the older Americans who received these windfalls put some of the money into savings, that, too, would give banks and credit unions money to lend.

None of the cash in Dave’s plan would be shoveled from the government to banks and corporate fat cats that were caught spending some of the bailout money on extravagant bonuses, trips to fancy spas, sleek jets, and payments to foreign entities.

At last report, the U.S. Treasury Department still has an embarrassing number of vacancies near the top. What do you say: Dave Otterson for Deputy Secretary of the Treasury?

Wait, this just handed me from a colleague who’s a tad under 50: “ARE YOU KIDDING ME!????”

***

Carolina on My Mind

We think of North Carolina as a temperate to sweltering southern state, which it is. But up in the Smokies, it’s cool and refreshing – even snowy in the wintertime

No one ever thought to call North Carolina “Long Carolina,” but the name would certainly have fit. It’s 800 kilometers from its barrier islands, which elbow far out into the Atlantic Ocean, to the western tip of the state, high in the rugged Great Smoky Mountains. In fact, it stretches farther west than Detroit, Michigan, which is well into the Midwest.

Until Tennessee was carved out of it in 1789, North Carolina, which is shaped a bit like the pilot’s wings that airline hostesses used to hand young passengers when airlines were still giving things away, stretched even farther westward. All the way to the Mississippi River, in fact. Once one of the South’s most backward regions, “Carolina,” as its residents love to call it, as if South Carolina below them were a yokel cousin, is now the South’s most industrial and technologically progressive state.

Let me pause to explain the “North Cackalacky” title to this posting. “Cackalacky” is a slang, and lately somewhat hip, riff on “Carolina,” especially among the thousands of soldiers who endure basic training at Fort Bragg in the state’s woodsy midsection, and among glib radio deejays who just like the way “Cackalacky” clicks off the tongue. Nobody knows who first coined the term, but at least one North Carolina company that makes condiments has adopted it.

The swamp that straddles the North Carolina-Virginia border is dismal, all right, even in black and white

North Carolina is also one of the nation’s most temperate, scenic, and historic places – America in miniature in many ways. In this single state, one can visit a shoreline so fearsome that it is called the “Graveyard of the Atlantic,” mountain forests so dense that not even a county road can be found for kilometers around, and a swamp whose very name, “Dismal,” says all you need to know about it. North Carolina is also home to exquisite colonial mansions and Civil War battlefields, tobacco and cotton fields, ribbons of superhighways decorated with dazzling median wildflowers, energetic middle-sized cities, and manicured research complexes the likes of which you won’t see again till you reach California.

North Carolina has grown so fast that its population shot past the traditional lions of the Old South – Georgia and Virginia – a decade ago. Almost twice as many people live in North as in South Carolina, helping to explain the smugness that North Carolinians exhibit toward their neighbors.

You still see plenty of unpainted tobacco barns throughout North Carolina

Yet at one time, North Carolina seemed the most unlikely southern state to prosper. Poor but fiercely independent Scots-Irish, Germans, and English Quakers staked out small, red-dirt farms in the piedmont plateau and later the mountain valleys, promoting a sectional divide against wealthier, eastern lowland planters. In 1785 there was even an attempt to create a new, breakaway state called “Franklin” in the Carolina uplands. The insurgents wrote a constitution that forbade doctors, preachers, and lawyers from being members of the legislature. (Not a bad idea, actually.) They wanted yeoman farmers calling their tune. Their leader, John Sevier, was hunted down, arrested, and charged with treason. During his trial in the mountain town of Jonesborough – now part of Tennessee – Sevier escaped, and nobody bothered to pursue him.

When Tennessee became a state, Sevier was elected its first governor! Cantankerous cusses, these mountain men and women, as I said.

Hernando de Soto and his men started their expedition in Florida and wandered all over the South. They got only into the mountainous western tip of North Carolina, though, before heading west

North Carolina was first visited by Europeans in 1524, when a Florentine explorer in the employ of France paused along its Outer Banks but kept going. Two years later Spaniards, sailing northward from Santo Domingo, claimed the territory for Spain but moved on as well. Spanish maps included both modern-day Carolinas in “Spanish Florida,” though few Spaniards settled anywhere near. In 1540 the adventurous Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto tramped all through the mid-South on his way to discovering the Mississippi River, but he never so much as peeked eastward over the Carolina mountains.

So the mid-Atlantic fell to the British to colonize. Walter Raleigh, a wealthy London businessman and courtier to Queen Elizabeth I, financed and led an expedition to find settlement sites. Raleigh became famous in the United States, but not because of his brief visit here. Sir Walter Raleigh, the brand name of one of the nation’s most popular pipe tobaccos, became a running joke when people asked for it at the store: “Do you have Sir Walter Raleigh in a can?” they would ask. What a knee-slapper!

Suave Walter Raleigh was a brilliant poet and ladies’ man as well as explorer. He once threw his expensive cape over a puddle to keep Queen Elizabeth from getting mud on her shoes

Raleigh and his crew got as far as Roanoke Island off the Outer Banks, found the native Indians to be hospitable, and sailed for home, bringing with them two “lustie men, the Indians Manteo and Wanchese,” and glowing descriptions of a “sweete, fruitfull and wholesome” land. Queen Elizabeth knighted Raleigh, who smartly christened the new territory “Virginia” in honor of the Virgin Queen.

I know, we’re talking about North Carolina, but bear with me. North Carolina began as the wilds of a great big Virginia.

Soon afterward the first colonists – 108 men – arrived and found the Indians not so hospitable after all. They abandoned the place and sailed for home. A second band of settlers vanished without a trace, save for the word “Croatoan” carved on one tree and the letters “C-R-O” scratched into another. The Croatoans were one of the inhospitable tribes. Exactly what happened to the “lost colony” – a hurricane? a Croatoan massacre? a deadly epidemic? – has never been determined.

North Carolina’s official boundary stretched way across the country and even beyond. Never this far in reality, though

Virginia’s first permanent settlement would follow far to the north in Jamestown, from which colonization proceeded westward rather than southward. What is now North Carolina was not revisited by whites for more than 25 years. When it was, Charles I was king of England, and its new settlers, carrying his charter, christened it “Carolana,” the land of Charles. Remember that I mentioned how far west North Carolina once extended – clear to the Mississippi in the nation’s heartland? Well, that charter from Charles I gave its owners title to lands even farther – not just to the Rocky Mountains or California’s Pacific Coast, but all the way to “the South Seas.” Geographical understanding had a ways to go in those days.

There are many tours of the sumptuous Biltmore mansion, including one of just the “back of the house,” including maids’ quarters and the electrical system in the basement

I’ll mercifully condense Carolina history from that point: Another British king, George II, purchased most of the land in southern Carolina and turned it into another royal colony: South Carolina. Both Carolinas joined the revolution against the king’s rule and became two of the original U.S. states. North Carolina was twice stripped of many of its heartiest men – first in the nation’s great westward expansion, then in the unsuccessful Civil War rebellion against the Union in the 1860s. At about that time, North Carolina was mocked as the “Rip Van Winkle of the States.” It had no large port, one cotton mill, and only a handful of iron works, gristmills, and distilleries.

Like Rip Van Winkle, North Carolina seemed to sleep for years on end while states around it bustled. But when it awakened, it got real busy

Rip Van Winkle was a character in a Washington Irving story about a man who sleeps for 20 years, during which time, naturally, all sorts of things happened around him. North Carolina was a bit like that between its colonization and the 20th Century. Just to reiterate from that previous Wild Words entry, North Carolina’s nickname – the Tar Heel State – grew out of its backwoods image, since shoeless hill folk boiling sap into pitch and turpentine were known to amble home with tar on their heels. Already poor, North Carolina after the Civil War struggled to assimilate more than 350,000 freed slaves, who had been the working backbone of its economy.

But the 20th Century brought amazing transformations: the emergence of several collegiate academic powerhouses, including the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill and Trinity College (later called Duke University) in Durham; vast military training facilities that would be jammed with recruits in both world wars; the creation of a sprawling Research Triangle Park through the combined efforts of UNC, Duke, and North Carolina State universities; development of a renowned furniture industry in the “Piedmont Triad” of towns like Winston-Salem and High Point; and a surprising explosion of culture in “the coolest spot in the South” – the Carolina mountains around Asheville. Once a resort and rehabilitation town frequented by thousands of “summer people,” Asheville would eventually sport a thriving artists’ colony, imaginative Art Deco architecture, and George Washington Vanderbilt’s Biltmore estate. The last was so magnificent that each year, its minions would concentrate on the lavish furnishing of just one feature: 16th Century Flemish tapestries one year, for instance, hand-carved wood ceilings the next.

Off to the east, so explosive was the growth of banking that bustling Charlotte now ranks behind only New York as a financial center. Of course, it may not be promoting that fact right this moment.

The Wright Brothers’ “flyer” was made of lightweight spruce and powered by an engine constructed in their bicycle shop. Not just getting the heavier-than-air craft off the ground was a wonder. So was stabilizing it in the air

There’s lots more that’s remarkable about North Carolina: 200-year-old historic districts in cities like Wilmington on the coast; championship golf courses; a memorial at Kill Devil Hills to the Wright Brothers’ launching of history’s first powered flight on December 17, 1903; and that Dismal Swamp’s “vast body of dirt and nastiness,” as the head of its first surveying party described it. Little wonder: his men were nearly devoured by the yellow flies, chiggers, mosquitoes, and ticks whose descendants still rule in that area.

Here they come: hot Krispy Kreme classics. And there they go, sweetly sliding down the gullet

I’ve left out one great milestone: the 1937 founding in a little Winston-Salem storefront of Krispy Kreme doughnuts! These delicacies, often served hot right out of the fryers, became a southern institution and spread like wildfire around the world. In 2000, the company took its stock public, and people rushed to buy the initial offering at $21 a share. By 2004, the price had more than doubled, Krispy Kreme was reporting almost $100 million in annual profit, and the number of its shops had tripled to 400, as far away as South Korea. The company would take a severe hit when a “low-carb” [carbohydrate] diet craze swept the land, but “sliders” – hot, airy Krispy Kreme “donuts” that fairly melt in the mouth enroute to joining seven or eight others in the stomach – remain an indulgence for which I, for one, will long thank North Carolina.

One of North Carolina’s most-photographed attractions is the lighthouse on Cape Hatteras in the Outer Banks. It’s the nation’s tallest light station, and its powerful beacon can be seen 30 kilometers out to sea

In The Book of America, Neal R. Peirce and Jerry Hagstrom called North Carolina “the newest megastate.” That was in 1983, well before many of the business and cultural explosions that I have described had fully taken hold. Often overshadowed by courtly Virginia, enterprising Georgia, electrifying Florida, and eccentric Lousiana – and lacking a single magnet city until Charlotte got its big banks and a National Football League team – North Carolina snuck up on the nation’s consciousness.

A megastate it now is, but North Carolina has never let loose of its down-home culture, character, and cuisine.

Which brings me to a delicious final exploration – and I’m not still talking doughnut sliders. If you’ve hung with me this far, you’ll recall my early metaphor about “taking a bite” out of this intriguing state. Now all can be revealed: the bite is from a scrumptious North Carolina barbecue sandwich.

This is “peasant food” at its very best. It’s not hoity-toity luxury fare served at swanky clubs, but a delicacy straight from the hills. I can almost smell and see the smoke a-risin’ from a clapboard smokehouse as I write.

Here are the Holy Smoke authors – the Reeds on the left and McKinney to the right – in their element, before plates of barbecue. Despite their passion for barbecue, any time, anywhere, they all look fit

For a full explanation of this epicurean delicacy, I bow to UNC sociologist John Shelton Reed; his wife, the writer and harpsichord virtuoso Dale Volberg Reed; and their friend, William McKinney. The Reeds are stalwarts of the North Carolina Barbecue Society – a high gustatory honor – and McKinney founded a collegiate version while a student at UNC. The Reeds have also written about such other mouth-watering southern delicacies as grits and cornbread. But we must not digress far from North Carolina barbecue, about which the Reeds and McKinney have written a fat book called Holy Smoke. In it, they quote Tennessee farmer-author Michael Lee West as saying that North Carolina barbecue is “a noun, a verb, and an entire religion served on a bun.”

I won’t say that this is as fancy as a North Carolina barbecue joint gets, but they don’t get much fancier!

Notice that I carefully specify “North Carolina” barbecue, since outposts like Memphis, Tennessee; Kansas City, Missouri; and mesquite-filled ranches of West Texas also claim barbecue superiority. There’s even something called “California barbecue” that’s liable to be slathered in exotica like Chinese hoisin sauce and lime. I’ll probably deny writing this when I post about these places, but their barbecue doesn’t hold a plastic fork to the stuff that slow-cooks in Carolina smokehouses and is served out of some of the plainest shacks in the land. So plain that the only place to sit is outside on a crude wooden picnic bench, if you’re lucky.

Doesn’t matter. Every splinter’s worth it.

True North Carolina barbecue is made of pork, rarely beef. Pigs fare better in the hills than cows – at least until butchering day. The Reeds and McKinney tell us there are still more hogs than people in North Carolina today. That’s a lot of curly tails, since there are more than 9 million North Cackalackians.

This plate of North Carolina barbecue includes a bowl of Brunswick stew, made from whatever meat’s on hand. Out in the country, it can be squirrel or possum or rabbit, plus local vegetables

I wouldn’t say that North Carolina barbecue pitmasters wouldn’t let a catsup bottle on their property, but “ketchup,” as it’s sometimes spelled, is not as prominent there as in other varieties out west. Their speciality begins, unfortunately for the pig, with one that has been slaughtered, skinned, and gutted. Then it’s sloooowly turned over a low, open pit of hot hardwood coals and slathered, several times, with tart, vinegary marinade. The aromatic final product is then sliced or diced into little, forkable strands.

The authors quote the daughter of a Granville County tobacco planter who described her father’s “dipney,” the simmered sauce that he brushed, hot, onto the cooked meat:

“Daddy made it thus: Two pounds sweet lard, melted in a brass kettle, with one pound beaten, not ground, black pepper, a pint of small fiery red peppers, nubbed and stewed soft in water to barely cover, a spoonful of herbs in powder – and a quart and a pint of the strongest apple vinegar, with a little salt.”

I prefer my North Carolina barbecue piled upon a hamburger bun, then topped with coleslaw – a mixture of minced cabbage, salad dressing, and a tad of mustard – onto which I stage a squirt-fest of hot sauce made from even more vinegar and hot red pepper

I’m not sure why the pig is looking so satisfied on the book cover, considering its destination on a spit. It is we, the barbecue diners, who will be smiling

Holy Smoke’s authors explore all sorts of conflicting possible origins of the word “barbecue.” They discredit my favorite one – that somebody “Frenchified” the practice of roasting whole hogs over hot coals, from beard – barbe – to tail – a queue. “Flagrantly fatuous Franco-poop,” the authors quote barbecue expert Smoky Hale on the subject. (Yes, of course, a barbecue man would be named “Smoky.”)

Every indication is that the word first appeared in Caribbean lands, French or otherwise. Holy Smoke’s authors quote the poet Alexander Pope as noting, almost 300 years ago, that “a whole Hog barbecu’d” was “a West Indian Term of Gluttony.”

Here is Smoky Hale again, in Holy Smoke: “Honest barbecue will survive all the assaults of women’s magazine food editors, asinine judges at frivolous competitions, instant experts, smoke blowers, media frenzy [please forgive me, Smoke’] and pop culture.”

The Reeds and William McKinney stuff their book with photos of humble “bar•b•cue” dives, explain how “barbecue” became an occasion as well as a dish, and set our mouths to watering with recipes – not only for barbecued meat but also for the Carolina sweet tea, slaw, and hushpuppies that go with it. What’s a hushpuppy? You’re one paragraph away from finding out in Wild Words.

Carol is not as big as I am on, shall we say, “rural food” that hasn’t been inspected by federal agents in white coats. But she tolerates the ritual that sets in every time I cross the North Carolina line. No matter the place or the price, I find me a barbecue place (“find me” being a southernism that my suspendered hosts seem to appreciate), set myself down (another one) and dig into two or three North Carolina barbecue sandwiches – heavy on the hot sauce. I’m not much on sweet tea, but I can nurse one cold beer with my barbecue and still drive safely. It’s a wonder, though, that the Cackalacky troopers don’t pull me over just to see what’s put that big smile on my face.

Holy Smoke: The Big Book of North Carolina Barbecue, by John Shelton Reed and Dale Volberg Reed, with William McKinney, is published by the University of North Carolina Press.

One quick postscript to my recent observations on the moribund newspaper business. As media analyst Howard Kurtz pointed out in the Washington Post, it was ominously telling that, in his recent prime-time news conference, President Obama called on correspondents from the big broadcast and cable networks, plus representatives from outlets such as Ebony magazine and the relatively new Politico paper. For the first time in anyone’s memory, he did not recognize a single reporter from the top daily newspapers, including the Post, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and USA Today.

First go circulation and advertising revenue, then influence?

(These are a few of the words from this posting that you may not know. Each time, I’ll tell you a little about them and also place them into a cumulative archive of “Ted’s Wild Words” in the right-hand column of the home page. Just click on it there, and if there’s another word in today’s blog that you’d like me to explain, just ask!)

Chiggers. These are tiny parasitic bugs that lurk in the woods and weeds. They attach themselves to your skin, often around exposed ankles, and feed on the fluids in your skin cells. The enzyme that they inject causes little red welts that can itch for weeks on end.

Hoity-Toity. Haughty, stuck-up, much like an earlier Wild Word: highfalutin’. An old English verb, hoit, referred to romping around noisily – another form of showing off.

Hushpuppies. These are bite-sized bits of deep-fried cornbread. They originated as scraps left over after a country chef prepared pans of cornbread. Supposedly, the family hound would whine to be tossed some of these treats, to which its mistress would scold – you guessed it – “Hush, puppy”!

Windfall. Unexpected good luck, especially of the monetary sort. If your long-lost uncle leaves you a million dollars, that’s a windfall! The term may have originated in an orchard. When the wind blows a pear off the tree, you don’t have to climb up and pick it.

Yeoman. As a noun, this refers to a free person who cultivates his own land. (There doesn’t appear to be a feminine “yeowoman.”) In the adjective form, yeoman work is hard, prodigious effort.

Please leave a comment.

When I was knee high to a bobcat, as my mother liked to say, the birthday of our 16th president, Abraham Lincoln, was a huge day in school. We reviewed and recited the many accomplishments of “Honest Abe,” the “Rail-Splitter.”

This classic photographic portrait of Abraham Lincoln was created by Alexander Gardner, a Mathew Brady associate who more famously shot many haunting Civil War battlefield scenes

We pointedly did not learn in second grade the degree to which southerners loathed “the Great Emancipator” for declaring their slaves free and for his insistence upon preserving the union of 34 states and quelling the rebellion of 13 of them. Many in his time called Lincoln “The Ape Baboon of the Prairie.” Even as 11-year-olds, we’d have surely known that “ape” and “baboon” are pretty redundant.

Now, on February 12th, the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth and the day of this posting, few are mocking Lincoln. In fact, as the Washington Post observed in one of its numerous tributes, Old Abe is “venerated as a national saint, part man, part myth.”

Lincoln got more attention in our Ohio school than even George Washington, our first president, whose birth date comes along just eight days after Lincoln’s. That’s because we were in class reading Lincoln stories and examining our Lincoln pennies and Lincoln $5 bills on Lincoln’s big day, but were home building snowmen on Washington’s Birthday because it was a national holiday.

Years later, in 1968, Congress moved the Washington’s Birthday commemoration to the third Monday of February, pretty much assuring, if my calendar math is correct, that it would never again fall on the date of his birth. No matter. The nation craved another three-day holiday weekend. Three years later Richard Nixon declared that all chief executives – including lesser lights like Franklin Pierce, Chester A. Arthur and himself, and not just Washington – deserved some props, so he reconstituted the holiday as “Presidents’ Day.”

Washington and Lincoln get equal billing in this 1865 lithograph as the “noblest sons” of Columbia, a figure often used to represent the nation

Didn’t work. Teachers and advertisers brushed aside the James J. Polkses and John Tylers and assigned the day to George and Abe, virtually guaranteeing at least one payday a year for Washington and Lincoln impersonators.

Monday the 16th is the holiday this year. And this time, Honest Abe is outshining “the Father of His Country” for attention because Lincoln would be hitting the Big 2-0-0 if humans lived into a third century. The Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission’s Web site is bursting with Lincoln tributes, tales, trivia, and lists of events. There’s even one in Annapolis, Maryland, called “The Moustache,” which is curious because Lincoln, though bearded, didn’t have one. This turns out to be an opera, of all things, about a fictional meeting between some Baltimore fellow and John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln’s actual assassin. A stretch, if you ask me.

Lincoln did not mind his image as a simple Kentucky country boy. He sometimes referred to himself as “Log Cabin Lincoln”

Everywhere you look, someone is hawking Lincolniana kitsch: miniature busts, Honest Abe T-shirts, cheap stovepipe hats, photos of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, postcard views of the humble Kentucky log cabin where he was born, and fake Lincoln beards. (They all have to be fake, don’t they?) Lincoln portraits, too, including one in which someone imposed a trim, Lincoln-style beard onto President Obama.

The Lincoln Memorial in Washington, designed by Daniel Chester French, resembles a Greek temple. Its 36 Doric columns represent the number of states in the Union at the time of Lincoln’s death in 1865

In one of the celebratory touches of the Lincoln Bicentennial, the reverse, or “tails,” side of the Lincoln penny has been redesigned. A depiction of the Kentucky cabin replaces the longstanding, and far more imposing, view of the Lincoln Memorial.

The $5 bill had already been reworked in 2007, but for anti-counterfeiting reasons. Lincoln’s image was changed from one pose for a Mathew Brady portrait to another; Abe looks to his left on the old bill and his right on the new one.

The contents of Lincoln’s pockets at the time of his death – as well as a Lincoln life mask and casting of his hands – are displayed at Ford’s Theatre, where he was shot

Ironically, when Lincoln was assassinated while watching the play “Our American Cousin” at Ford’s Theatre in Washington in 1865, the only currency in his pocket was a $5 bill. But it was a Confederate fiver that most certainly did not contain his likeness. No one is positive why he was carrying the worthless southern scrip; likely it was a souvenir from his visit to the fallen Confederate capital of Richmond earlier in the month.

Sculptor Gutzon Borglum selected the four presidents to be depicted on Mount Rushmore. Lincoln was the most difficult to carve in the granite because of his beard

It’s Lincoln Time in America, all right, especially in Lincoln, the capital city of Nebraska and in “Lincoln” cities and towns in at least 23 other states; on the old, mostly two-lane Lincoln Highway, which starts in Pennsylvania and winds west; at the monumental Mount Rushmore sculpture where Lincoln’s was one of four presidential likenesses blasted into a mountainside in South Dakota about 80 years ago; at the Lincoln Memorial; on the campuses of the six U.S. (and four foreign) colleges or universities that have Lincoln’s name in theirs; at New York’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts; and at Lincoln-brand automobile dealerships. Celebrations are less high-spirited perhaps, at the last of these, given the economy.

You could almost imagine the elephants and giraffes at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo calling each other “Abe” or “Abby” during all the excitement. Or maybe not.

Abraham Lincoln is a much-acclaimed fellow any time of year, at least outside of the once-rebellious Dixie. In the subtitle of his 2008 book Abraham Lincoln, a Man of Faith and Courage, historian Joe Wheeler calls him our “most admired president,” and millions of Americans would agree. While it is an exaggeration to say that he “freed the slaves,” his Emancipation Proclamation did declare slaves under the control of the southern states to be freedmen and women. It was up to Lincoln’s army and navy to win the Civil War and make it so. Notably, the proclamation said nothing about border states like Kentucky and Missouri and Maryland – nominally still in the Union and still embracing that unholy institution.

Lincoln gets a prominent position in cartoonist Thomas Nast’s 1865 depiction of the emancipation of southern slaves

Nor did Lincoln decree enslaved African Americans free out of deep moral conviction. “What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save this Union,” he said. He knew that word of his proclamation would spread throughout the South, weakening slaveholders’ grip. In a letter to New York editor Horace Greeley, Lincoln made his intentions clear: “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave,” he wrote, “I would do it.”

It was not until December 18, 1865 – eight months and three days after Lincoln’s death – when a sufficient number of states had ratified the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that slavery became illegal throughout the land.

It cannot be said, though it often is of Lincoln, that one person “saved the Union.” Two tigers on his general staff, Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, had a lot to do with that. Lincoln had dithered before replacing three ineffective commanders-in-chief of the Union Army, but he made the change to Grant – previously a dyspeptic, slave-owning, mediocre officer – because Grant gave no quarter to the enemy. “Tell me what brand of whiskey that Grant drinks,” Lincoln said. “I would like to send a barrel of it to my other generals.”

In this 1865 litho, John Wilkes Booth is tempted by a Mephistophelian Satan to shoot Abraham Lincoln, who, upon close inspection, can be seen in his theatre seat

John Wilkes Booth, the accomplished actor and impassioned southern sympathizer who, shouting “Sic semper tyrannis” – “death to tyrants” – would mortally shoot Lincoln that April night at the theatre, certainly knew Lincoln had preserved the Union. Or, to his way of thinking, had thwarted the lawful desire of sovereign Confederate states to leave it. Seventeen months before Booth fired the fatal shot, Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln had attended another play at Ford’s – one in which Booth starred. In Katherine Helm’s 1928 biography of Mrs. Lincoln, Mary Clay, the daughter of Lincoln’s minister to Russia, recalled that evening:

Here’s the “Lincoln Box,” where the president was shot, as it appears in the just-reopened and refurbished Ford’s Theatre

“Wilkes Booth played the part of villain. The box was right on the stage, with a railing around it. Mr. Lincoln sat next to the rail, I next to Mrs. Lincoln, Miss Sallie Clay and the other gentlemen farther around. Twice Booth in uttering disagreeable threats in the play came very near and put his finger close to Mr. Lincoln’s face; when he came a third time I was impressed by it, and said, ‘Mr. Lincoln, he looks as if he meant that for you.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘he does look pretty sharp at me, doesn’t he?’”

Young Abe Lincoln reads by the light of the fireplace in this 1868 “An Evening in the Log Hut” lithograph

More books – thousands of them – have been written about Abraham Lincoln than about any other American. Elsewhere in this Lincoln Bicentennial Year, you can search out stories about Lincoln’s religious faith or the lack of it, his seven epic “Lincoln-Douglas” debates in which Lincoln sought to unseat U.S. Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, and myriad other topics. Want to know about Lincoln’s two vice presidents? His childhood nights spent reading by dim candlelight, or his teenage prowess as a woodchopper? His own wartime service in the “Black Hawk” Indian war? The hunt for, and death of Booth, and trials of his alleged conspirators, and the executions of some of them? Now’s a perfect time to look.

But there are several other facets of the man and his character that have long held my fascination and may tweak yours as well:

One gets a different, side view of Lincoln’s famous beard in this unusual left profile

• America’s most famous beard. Republican supporters had urged Lincoln to grow chin whiskers to add a statesmanlike aura to his gangly, disheveled appearance and to distract from his phenomenally long neck. Beards weren’t seen as anti-establishment or professorial back then; they were the rage in the high society set and the general officer corps. But Lincoln waited until the days just after his election as president in November 1860 to sport one. An 11-year-old girl, Grace Bedell, had written Lincoln, advising him to grow a beard: “I have got 4 brother’s [sic],” she wrote, “and part of them will vote for you any way and if you let your whiskers grow I will try and get the rest of them to vote for you[;] you would look a great deal better for your face is so thin.” We know that this impressed the new president, because he ordered his inaugural train, bound from his Illinois home to Washington, D.C., to stop in Grace’s hometown of Westfield, New York, where Lincoln sought her out.

Presidential candidate Lincoln, still sans beard, strikes a calm pose. His presidency would be anything but

• “Honest Abe.” Stories of Lincoln’s sterling character abound. Some were doubtless created by “spin doctors” of the era, but there are so many, from so many sources, that Lincoln’s reputation for rectitude is rarely questioned. More than once while clerking in a country store, it is said, Lincoln walked a long way to deliver a few cents he had overcharged or goods to those he had inadvertently short-changed. When he wrote a memorable speech that he delivered while running for the U.S. Senate in which he warned that “a house divided against itself cannot stand,” his law partner, William Herndon, advised him to delete a statement that “a government cannot endure permanently, half slave and half free.” Proffering an end to human bondage would be an unwise policy, Herndon said, in a nation that was close to breaking asunder over slavery. “No matter about the policy,” Lincoln told him. “The proposition has been true for six thousand years, and I will deliver it as it is written.”

Asked one day whether he was a religious man, Lincoln said he was a member of no church but followed the same religious code as that of a farmer he knew: “When I do good, I feel good, and when I do bad, I feel bad, and that’s my religion.”

Such were the sorts of tales we learned in school, and a Cleveland friend, Susan Griffith, added this in a note to me:

“When I was in the third grade in Casper, Wyoming, there was a series of biographies in our classroom library. The first book I pulled off the shelf was about Abraham Lincoln. It probably was one of the first big books that I read. I just remember his reading by candlelight in the attic of his home, how there was snow outside, and it was cold. It reminded me of Iowa [where Susan spent her earliest years] and how the upstairs of the old farmhouse only got heat from what rose from the downstairs. He also seemed so tall and huge a man. Later on the way home from visiting my sister at her college in southern Illinois in 1966, my dad, mom, sister, and I stopped by his historic home in Springfield and saw the bed he slept in. It was so small compared to a contemporary bed and I thought either he was short or his feet must have stuck out of the end of the bed.”

So Lincoln wasn’t only honest, at least by sympathetic accounts. He was also a “tall drink of water,” to use a country term. Which brings me to . . .

In this photo with his security chief, Allan Pinkerton and General John McClernand, you get an idea of Lincoln’s great height, even minus the stovepipe hat

• Lincoln’s Odd Appearance. First of all, can we agree that he was not what you’d call much of a looker, probably even by 19th Century standards? He was 1.9 meters tall – about a full head taller than the average American male of his time. And a lot more about him – face, hands, arms, legs, and feet – was long and thin as well. Herndon said Lincoln had “a sunken breast,” and some accounts describe him as walking with a loose-jointed lope, fueling the “ape” taunts of his haters.

Speculating on the reasons for Lincoln’s spindly, emaciated appearance has become a cottage industry. In the 1960s, a long-posthumous diagnosis of Marfan Syndrome, a disorder of the connective tissues, was advanced in many journals. Marfan sufferers are typically tall, have disproportionately long arms and unusually shaped chests, and are nearsighted. All of these descriptions appear to have applied to Lincoln, and if he also had other Marfan indicators like heart irregularities and painful joint inflammation, it would help to explain his frequent brooding.

Lincoln doesn’t look odd, exactly, in this portrait. But you get an idea of his narrow head, sunken chest and unusually long arms

But the Marfan theory has, to use a journal term, “lost currency” of late. In his 2008 book, Dr. John Sotos, an eminent former Johns Hopkins University cardiologist, postulated that Lincoln exhibited a rare genetic cancer syndrome called “MEN2B” and would have died from cancer within a year had Booth’s bullet not felled him. Though no one has yet gained permission to exhume Lincoln’s bones in Springfield or been given access to rare specimens of Lincoln’s DNA for conclusive study – samples do exist in closely held remnants of his and others’ clothing spattered with his blood – Dr. Sotos minutely examined photos, down to some suspicious bumps on Lincoln’s lips, along with descriptions of his gestures and gait. There is strong evidence that Lincoln’s mother and three of his sons had the killer disease, Sotos writes. “The three sons who had bumpy lips like Lincoln himself died before the age of 20, while the one son with normal lips lived to the age of 82.”

• Lincoln’s brilliant writing. Lincoln had no stable of speechwriters. Or even one, for that matter. He had his own gift of words and a straightforward way of delivering them that was unusual in an era of orotund orators. (I just had to put those two words together. Orotund means lofty, pompous, deliberately bombastic.) Where others fluffed up their importance with high-sounding pronouncements, quotations from the ancients, and melodramatic gestures, Lincoln got to the point without the grandiloquence. He could talk for hours if he had to – he certainly did in the debates with Douglas, the “Little Giant” – but he filled the time with stories laced with wisdom of his own making.

Recent accounts have discredited the old story that Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg address on an envelope while riding to the cemetery dedication. He may have touched up his remarks on the train, however

Many Americans know the story of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, delivered at the newly dug soldiers’ cemetery on the site of the decisive battle of the Civil War in Pennsylvania. Lincoln was not even the featured speaker; he was asked to say just a few final words of dedication. Beforehand, one of the stentorian types, Edward Everett, fulminated for two hours! Lincoln followed, ever so quietly, for just two minutes. Those in attendance were probably stretching to get over their Everett fatigue. Many later admitted they did not even realize the president had spoken. Yet Lincoln’s 272 words have become some of the most quoted in American history. A sampling:

“…[W]e here highly resolve these dead shall not have died in vain; that the nation shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Two other examples of Abraham Lincoln’s power-packed rhetoric:

The central portion of the U.S. Capitol, including its dome, was still under construction when Lincoln first took the oath as president in 1861

From Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861, in which he made a final plea to southerners to remain loyal to the Union:

“We are not enemies, but friends. . . . Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

From Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865:

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan – to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.”

And one of my favorites, because it underscores Lincoln’s brevity and humility, quoted in the diary of his private secretary, John Milton Hay:

“Common looking people are the best in the world: that is the reason the Lord makes so many of them.”

So human, simple and direct, yet profound, Lincoln’s words – which he often jotted onto scraps of paper as thoughts came to him, then retrieved to fit certain occasions – no doubt surprised many an unsuspecting audience, who may have anticipated a country bumpkin. Or that baboon.

• Lincoln’s voice. It would be twelve years after Lincoln’s death before the human voice was first recorded when inventor Thomas Edison captured his own recitation of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” on a cylinder of tinfoil. So we have only others’ accounts to describe Abraham Lincoln’s timbre.

It should not surprise you that his was not the booming basso of a classical lecturer. Herndon gave this rather unflattering account: “Lincoln’s voice was, when he first began speaking, shrill, squeaking, piping, unpleasant; his general look, his form, his pose, the color of his flesh, wrinkled and dry, his sensitiveness, and his momentary diffidence, everything seemed to be against him.”

Lincoln’s friend Noah Brooks, a California reporter, noted that the president’s second inaugural address “was received in most profound silence. Every word was clear and audible as the ringing and somewhat shrill tones of Lincoln’s voice sounded over the vast concourse.”

Lincoln’s vocalizing was nothing to marvel at, agreed Abram Bergen, a lawyer of the time. “But whenever he began to talk his eyes flashed and every facial movement helped express his idea and feeling. Then involuntarily vanished all thought or consciousness of his uncouth appearance, or awkward manner, or even his high keyed, unpleasant voice.”

So if you hear one of the thousands of Lincoln impersonators who are performing this month, and the fellow struts and pontificates and bellows, lower your grade of him. And give extra credit to squeakier, geekier renditions.

• Happy Lincoln, despondent Lincoln. When he was about 16, Lincoln wrote this ditty:

“Abraham Lincoln is my name
“And with my pen I wrote the same
“I wrote in both hast[e] and speed
“And left it here for fools to read.”

They didn’t call General George McClellan, a fine engineer but timid fighter, “the Little Napoleon” for nothing

Even in the grimmest days of the Civil War, Lincoln unleashed his dry wit. His top general, George McClellan, a spit-and-polish poseur adept at drilling and inept at fighting, held his commander-in-chief in open contempt, even keeping Lincoln waiting when he came to see him. Asked if this offended him, Lincoln replied, “I’ll even hold McClellan’s horse if that will bring success.”

And this surely fanciful story is recounted on the Web site Angelfire.com:

“Lincoln was stopped one day by a man who stuck a revolver almost into his face. Under the circumstances Lincoln quickly realized that any resistance was unwise. Trying to remain calm, he inquired, ‘What seems to be the matter?’

“‘A long time ago,’ replied the man, ‘I swore that if I ever came across an uglier man than myself I’d shoot him on the spot.’

“‘Well,’ supposedly said Lincoln. ‘Go ahead and shoot me then, because if I am an uglier man than you I don’t want to live.’”

Would you agree that even though Lincoln manages a weak smile in this photograph, sadness and the toll of a trying presidency peek through?

These are droll observations for a man who is painted as a lifelong depressive. In Lincoln’s Melancholy, a recent book on the subject, Joshua Shenk wrote that Lincoln “often wept in public and cited maudlin poetry. . . . As a young man he talked of suicide, and as he grew older, he said he saw the world as hard and grim, made that way by fates and forces of God. ‘No element of Mr. Lincoln’s character,’ declared his colleague Henry Whitney, ‘was so marked and ingrained as his mysterious and profound melancholy,” which former partner Herndon said “dripped from him as he walked.’”

Of course Lincoln had plenty to be sad about, including:

– A lonely childhood, in which he lost his mother when he was 10, a brother who died at birth, and, emotionally, a father who was often elsewhere and who rebuked him for sticking his nose into books.

–The death of his 9-year-old son, Willie, from a typhus-like illness while Lincoln was in the White House. “It is hard, hard, hard to have him die!” Lincoln told friends.

Mary Todd Lincoln was well bred, abrasive, and high-strung, quite the opposite attributes of her husband

–A volatile marriage to a woman whom the Lincolns’ eldest son, Robert, would one day commit to a mental asylum. Mary Lincoln came from a life of privilege; Abraham from rural poverty. Mary was a spendthrift; Abe was a frugal fellow. Mary was boisterous and temperamental; her husband, who could go for hours without speaking, intensified her outbursts by ignoring them. Mary Lincoln, inconsolable after Willie’s death, slipped into delusions in which she continued to converse with her departed son.

Thoughts of scenes like this mass burial following the second battle of Cold Harbor, Virginia, in 1864 haunted the melancholic president

–And of course the bloody war, which went badly for a year. This was not some distant conflict. Death was a valley or two away, and the hatred that some people hurled at Lincoln must have been daunting. The very day he was shot, Lincoln told his wife, “We must both be more cheerful in the future. Between the war and the loss of our darling Willie, we have both been very miserable.” When Lincoln died the next day, a Texas newspaper declared, “The world is happily rid of a monster that disgraced the form of humanity.”

Lincoln looks every bit the rough-hewn westerner in this 1860 Republican Party poster promoting his presidential candidacy

• Lincoln the “Father of the G.O.P.” When Abraham Lincoln was elected in 1860, he became the nation’s first Republican president. The political party was but six years old, having been founded by a diverse group of men who were outraged over a law that would open some of the West to slavery. Their opposition was more economic than principled; they did not want to compete against unpaid workers on the prairie. There were many other issues that stoked their rise as well, including their support of a new transcontinental railroad. Immediately successful, Republicans soon supplanted the old-line Whigs as the Democrats’ opposition. In the party’s first year of trying, 1854, the Republicans won enough seats to take control of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Lincoln rode into office as a “westerner” when Illinois, barely one-third of the way across the country, was still “the West.” He defeated New Yorker William H. Seward. Then, in classic Lincoln fashion when he took office, he appointed Seward as his secretary of state. And other old rivals to high offices as well, putting into action his beliefs that “a house divided against itself cannot stand.”

Over the decades Republicans have made good use of the idea that they are “the party of Lincoln,” but Lincoln’s legend has outgrown any one political brand. Barack Obama, a liberal Democrat, openly admires Lincoln and, in naming four Republicans to his own Cabinet, emulates him. So much so that a Republican blogger recently grumbled that Obama is “drenched in Lincoln.”

The “wigwam” to which this song about candidate Lincoln refers was not an Indian tipi. It was the name of a wooden building constructed in Chicago for the 1860 Republican convention

There have been hundreds of songs about Lincoln, many written in the years immediately following his assassination. I never learned the words to “Abraham’s Tea Party,” the “Emancipation Quickstep,” “Lincoln Schottisch” (whatever a “schottisch” is), or “Old Abe Lincoln Came Out of the Wilderness.” But I remember, dimly, either my own singing in school, or one of my children’s singing for me, this Lincoln verse, set to the old children’s tune, “If You’re Happy and You Know It, Clap Your Hands.”

Ready, class? Sing along, now!

“Mr. Lincoln, Mr. Lincoln,

“You were brave.

“Mr. Lincoln, Mr. Lincoln,

“You were good.

“You stood for what was right,

“You did not give up the fight,

“Mr. Lincoln, Mr. Lincoln,

“You were good.”

(These are a few of the words from this posting that you may not know. Each time, I’ll tell you a little about them and also place them into a cumulative archive of “Ted’s Wild Words” in the right-hand column of the home page. Just click on it there, and if there’s another word in today’s blog that you’d like me to explain, just ask!)

Dither. To nervously fuss while trying to make a decision. In the long-running “Dagwood” comic strip, office worker Dagwood Bumstead’s indecisive, never-satisfied boss was named “Mr. Dithers.”

Dixie. There are many theories advanced about the origin of this nickname for the Deep South states. One is that it ties to the survey of the Pennsylvania-Maryland border, called the “Mason-Dixon” line, that is often used as the informal boundary between North and South. Another traces to $10 banknotes issued in French-speaking Louisiana prior to the Civil War. They were known as “dixes” or “dixies.”

Dyspeptic. Sour, morose, grouchy. Dyspepsia is a recognized medical ailment, involving stomach pain caused by ulcers or other conditions that certainly do not lighten the sufferer’s mood.

Fulminate. To rant and rave and fume. The word is often applied to speakers who make a habit of, and a living from, denouncing others.

Grandiloquence. High-flown style; grandiose prose. Note that the word is not “grandeloquence.”

Kitcsch. Cheap, tasteless, often garish art and collectibles. The German or Yiddish word was first applied to really bad paintings, like bright, velvet depictions of jungle beasts or Elvis Presley.

Props. A relatively recent addition to the English lexicon of slang. When you extend someone his or her proper due, you’re “giving props.”

Rectitude. Righteousness. The moral high ground taken as a matter of honor.

Oh, I did break down and check into the meaning of “schottish.” It’s a Bohemian country dance with two short runs, a hop, and four turning hop steps. Doesn’t sound like something the awkward, gangly Abe Lincoln himself would have executed well. Or me, either.

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I’m at it again with another made-up regional name. Just as there is no such place as MassConnIsland to encompass the three southernmost states in the New England region, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine to the north don’t really come together as NewVerMaine. But they have enough in common to set them apart from the states below them.

Winter is the time of year that tests one’s love of this land of old, weathered mountains, vast evergreen forests, and rocky seashores. And when I say rocks, I mean gigantic ones, piled all along the Maine coast in particular. You can build only so many ski resorts, stack only so many cords of firewood, and pull only so many fish and lobsters from the frigid sea to pull a profit out of such places at this time of year. Steady employment is pretty hard to find in this northland abutting Canada. Many residents of these states survive on seasonal, warm-weather jobs at resorts, tourist cabins, fishing camps and the like. But just as hardy people have stuck it out on the icy winter plains of North Dakota in the Midwest, people who have these north woods in their blood love it too much to leave. Somehow, year after year, they get by.

As in southern New England, tourism – including those ski resorts – has become a lifeline in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. In no other region are bed-and-breakfast inns more plentiful and in demand, especially during picturesque “leaf season” in the fall. Whereas tourists mosey around the southern New England states in search of historical and cultural landmarks like whaling museums, colonial-style villages, monuments and other remnants of the American Revolution of the late 18th Century, visitors seek out the North Country for its scenery, snow, and wildlife – including moose, brown bears, mink, bobcats, river otters and eastern coyotes.

Visitors come in search of simple serenity as well.

This is Ruth and Wimpy’s lobster shack in Hancock, Maine. And the red fellow in the foreground is “Wilbur”

And great food. Maine lobsters are a delicacy too expensive to afford very often back home, but they’re so commonplace in Maine that every little shack along the coast serves “lobster rolls” made with hunks of lobster meat. Or you can order-up clams on the half-shell, mussels marinara, locally caught and fried octopus, or puffers. Puffers? They are strips of mild whitefish breaded in tempura batter, which puffs up when the fish is deep-fried. Tempura in Maine! – where, I guarantee you, the batter is not mixed with chopsticks.

This may be the hard-edged land of flannel shirts and chest waders, but inside some of the simple cabins from which you see fireplace smoke curling are some of the nation’s finest restaurants. Northern New England even sports an internationally renowned school for chefs. At the New England Culinary Institute in Vermont, young people pay handsomely for the chance to work at the bottom rung of the food-service business, from chopping greens to scraping bread crumbs off guests’ tables, in hopes of someday becoming master chefs. Their laboratories are real-life restaurants in Essex and the state capital of Montpelier. There, they do almost 90 percent of the work in the kitchen – the “back of the house” as it’s called in the trade – as well as the lion’s share of the serving out front. Talk about a good deal for restaurateurs!

So fine is the food and enthusiastic the service that many patrons would never know they are exhibits in a culinary classroom save for one little detail that cannot slip their notice:

Tipping is not allowed.

In my last post, I mentioned the ecology theme of the Rose Island Lighthouse down in Rhode Island. Environmental tourism is even stronger up north. Most of the visitors to an Atlantic Ocean salt marsh once known as Laudholm Farm, near Wells, Maine, for instance, stow their litter and are careful to keep to the footpath as they peer at wetland bogs, migratory birds and marsh animals. This is the land of Rachel Carson, the marine biologist and nature writer whose book Silent Spring launched an environmental movement so strong that it led to a nationwide ban on DDT and other toxic pesticides.

This is the beautifully preserved milking barn at Laudholm Farm on an estuarine salt marsh in Maine

At Laudholm Farm, too, you’ll find a big Jamesway milking barn of the sort that were once the centerpieces of model farms throughout northern New England. The entire estate is part of the 728-hectare Wells National Estuary Sanctuary – Maine’s largest stretch of open land. At its dedication many years ago, then-U.S. Senator William Cohen of Maine welcomed the nature preserve. There is more to the Maine lifestyle than “condominiumizing the coastline,” he said.

That’s less of a problem during our present economic troubles, of course, since fewer speculators are building condos and fewer consumers are buying them.

The northeasternmost state in the nation’s upper-right-hand corner, Maine was part of a much larger Massachusetts until 1820. It is almost as large as the other five New England states combined but holds only 9 percent of the region’s population.

You want rocky? Here’s one view of Maine’s rocky coastline, which wiggles in and out of the sea

And here’s my favorite Maine factoid. Take a look at a U.S. map, if you can, perhaps by zooming in on the upper-right corner of the country on the interactive map you’ll find over in the column on the right: Suppose the rocky coastline of Maine, including all the little detours into its many inlets, were a string. If you pulled that string tight, the Maine coast would be longer than California’s long coastline that runs more than halfway up our West Coast. Yet look at the two states on a map, and Maine’s coastline looks to be just a fraction of California’s.

At the end of one of Maine’s innumerable little peninsulas, you’ll find Pemaquid Point Lighthouse. Check out the layers of granite to see why the beacon protected many a mariner from a shipwreck

All these inlets are a nuisance to travelers. You can’t just roll along the coastline, admiring the scenery, the way you can along California’s Pacific Coast Highway. If you wind down a narrow road to one of Maine’s quaint fishing villages or little resort cities with their grand sea captains’ mansions at the end of one of Maine’s countless peninsulas, you have to retrace your steps to go anywhere else. If you wanted to visit all the little towns, you’d be driving for weeks!

Check out how hard it is to see this moose cow on a clear day. Try spotting it on the road on a foggy night

In Maine’s largely empty interior, pines are plentiful and houses are few and far between. When Carol and I last visited Maine a few years ago, there were even signs along the Maine Turnpike displaying a puzzling series of letters and numbers rather than the name of the town you’d reach off the next exit. That’s because there was none. Instead, the ramps would lead to unincorporated and virtually uninhabited tracts of land, identified by those mysterious codes. You might meet a moose there, though, or even a brown bear. And you were almost guaranteed a whitetail-deer sighting.

No wonder Mainers, with their famously wry humor, sometimes call their state “The Next to Last Frontier” – barely conceding that Alaska, far, far away to the west, is the last.

Which reminds me of another Maine tale to go with the one from the last posting:

Question: When is summer in Maine?

Answer: The Fourth of July.

Now naturally, the state does get a whiff of warm air for a few more days than that, but it’s not a blessing. The wind blows in mosquitoes the size of condors and blood-sucking black flies that only a werewolf could love.

If you want to see Maine’s seals up close – and there are five varieties, including harp, hooded, and ringed – or a lobster anywhere but in a tank or in chunks at the end of your fork, you’ll have to take a lobster-boat excursion. Two layers of sweaters advised.

On it, you’ll get an inkling of the backbreaking work of a lobsterman, who must set and haul up traps from dawn till dusk. And you’ll learn invaluable things about the creatures, including the fact that they smell with their leg hairs. I’m not sure that this information could be of any practical use, but you never know.

This is a view from atop Cadillac Mountain in Acadia National Park. Below in the distance is swanky Bar Harbor

For those less prone to seasickness, Maine is home to one of the nation’s most beautiful – and most visited – national wonders. It’s Acadia National Park, which is spread over an island with the unusual name of “Mount Desert Island” as well as smaller islands and an onshore peninsula. Created in 1916, Acadia is the nation’s oldest national park east of the Mississippi River. At the summit of its Cadillac Mountain on a clear day, you can see Mount Katahdin, the starting point of the Appalachian foot trail, 130 kilometers to the north. And spread out directly below are the yacht-filled slips of the resort town of Bar Harbor. Or as they say in New England, “Bah Hahbuh.”

You’ll recall that I said that New Englanders practice a studied wariness, and that’s nowhere more true than in Maine. Mainers are still sizing up people years after they move to the state, and you may never be accepted as true “Mainiacs.” “Just because your cat has kittens in the oven,” goes the explanation, “you wouldn’t call them biscuits.”

I say this and have observed it. Yet Maine, which calls itself “Vacationland,” is delighted to accept all the tourist dollars it can get. It’s just when people come and never leave that there can be tensions.

Montpelier, Vermont, at 8,000 people, is the nation’s smallest state capital. One of the coldest, too, as you can guess by looking at it

Winters are long, cabin fever runs high, and during spring’s “mud season,” newly thawed dirt roads are all but impassable. Maine is not a bedroom community for bigger cities to the south, the way southern Vermont and New Hampshire have become. Nor have the “summer people,” as the Mainers call them, moved in to the same degree. For many years, the people of this state have turned down nearly every proposal to widen the Maine Turnpike, even though 70 percent of them lived within 25 kilometers of the road and could have used a faster trip. They just didn’t want to encourage development.

Only the little sign off to the right would give away the identification of this pretty little building in Freeport, Maine, as a McDonald’s restaurant

Maine’s quiet pride bubbles at the mention of two institutions: the state university, whose hockey and baseball teams often make College World Series appearances; and the L.L. Bean outdoor clothing and equipment company in Freeport, which is famous for its conservative clothes and solicitous customer service. Even Freeport’s McDonald’s fast-food outlet is located in a historic house. So many people drove up to Maine to shop in Freeport that 13 separate malls of outlet stores sprang up along the coast, offering discounts on famous-name brands. At this contender for Outlet Capital of the Nation, stores sometimes spill their goods onto the sidewalks, creating a “shop till you drop” frenzy the likes of which I hope to never experience again.

What does one do for fun in Maine? There are lobster bakes, lighthouse tours, snowmobiling trips and organized moose-picture safaris. I kid you not. In Maine, drivers are advised to watch out first for automobiles, then for moose, unless it’s dark, when the order is reversed. Adult moose are darker, taller and weigh as much as many cars.

This is New Hampshire. Or is it Vermont?

If you’ll turn to that map again and look at the shapes of Maine’s neighbors to the east – New Hampshire and Vermont – you’ll notice that they look a lot alike, like two long pork chops side by side, with the thin “handle” of one pointing northward, toward Canada, and the “handle” of the other pointing south, toward Massachusetts.

I asked web guru Anne Malinee how many Americans out of 10 would know which is which.

“Half,” she said.

“No way,” I protested. “I’d be surprised if three out of 10 would know New Hampshire from Vermont if only the outlines appeared.”

“I meant half a person”! she replied. One-half of one person in 10 might know them apart, presumably excluding most who live there. Anne is from Kansas, a long way away. So count her among those who are never sure. I’ve been to both states several times, and I still get them confused unless they’re clearly labeled.

So pay attention!: New Hampshire is the one with the skinny “handle” at the top, and it’s the only state to border Maine. That’s possible only because a tiny bump of New Hampshire sticks out eastward to the Atlantic Coast, barely separating Maine from Massachusetts below. Yet the 21 kilometers of New Hampshire’s Atlantic shoreline offer a great deal. There’s a quiet, state-owned swimming beach. Then an old-fashioned amusement beach with a five-kilometer boardwalk that includes a “casino” – the old fashioned word not for a gambling house but an entertainment arcade and ballroom.

In Portsmouth harbor, these three-thousand-horsepower tugboats await assignments to tow ships up the Piscataqua River

And finally there is graceful, historic Portsmouth, one of the best-preserved maritime centers in New England. It was a whaling town and a shipbuilding center. And in the middle of it all is Strawbery Banke, a remarkable cluster of buildings saved from ruination. And not just colonial ones. At Strawbery Banke you’ll find corner stores from the 1940s; little bungalows from the 1950s complete with big, blocky, black-and-white television sets and early refrigerators; and gardens in the styles of many eras. (And if you think the name “Strawbery Banke” sounds odd, wait till you hear the name of the Portsmouth neighborhood it’s in. It’s “Puddle Duck.”)

Ever since the first mountain climbers showed up in 1640 to test a peak called Mount Washington – and more on it in a little bit –, New Hampshire has had a bemused tolerance of tourists. Artists hung out at the foot of that mountain, founding an entire “Bretton Woods School.” More about Bretton Woods to come, too.

Every unusual building is fair game for tourists’ cameras, including this old train station in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire. The town simplified the name from the original “Wolfeborough” many years ago

The upshot is that New Hampshiremen – that’s what they’re called, though there don’t seem to be a lot of references to New Hampshirewomen – have a little joke going. They like visitors so much that many say the license plate motto should be changed from “Live Free or Die” to “Bring Money.”

The ‘Live Free” motto is attributed to Revolutionary War general John Stark, and it was picked up by William Loeb, editor of the arch-conservative Union Leader newspaper in the state’s largest city, Manchester. In part because of Loeb’s influence, New Hampshire has voted Republican much more often than Democratic in statewide and presidential elections. One of its rural counties on the Maine border has even been the most reliably Republican in presidential voting in the nation.

Our new, liberal Democratic president, Barack Obama, just nominated U.S. Senator Judd Gregg to be his secretary of Commerce, even though Gregg is a Republican. And to get him, the president had to get New Hampshire’s Democratic governor, John Lynch, to agree to appoint another Republican in Gregg’s place.

What’s so special about this New Hampshire liquor store? It’s the prices. People drive there from all over the Northeast to stock up, because prices are so low. In part, that’s because the state charges no sales tax

As evidence of New Hampshire’s prized independence and self-sufficiency, the state has stoutly rejected efforts to impose income or sales taxes. It is the only state in the Union that has neither. “We’re stubbornly self-reliant,” is one explanation, which may explain why New Hampshire routinely ranks in the top five or six in per capita income among the 50 states, and near the bottom – sometimes even 50th – on the annual “generosity index” of charitable giving.

The lush forests of upper New England are dotted with cozy little lakes like this one

Americans can thank New Hampshire for national forests. When the gentry of New York, Washington, and Philadelphia, sitting on the verandas of the numerous grand resorts in the shadow of the state’s White Mountains, saw the mountains being stripped of wood by loggers, they complained. It’s not that they were raging environmentalists. The bare spots on the mountainside spoiled the view. So in 1911, Congressman John W. Weeks of New York, a New Hampshire native, pushed through the nation’s first law allowing the federal government to purchase vast forest lands, using the rationale that saving trees would protect stream banks from dangerous runoffs, and turn them into preserves. The result is that the view of Mount Washington, around which the first national forest was established, is remarkably free of condominiums, fast-food signs, ski chalets, and electrical towers.

The largest and most lavish of the White Mountains resorts was the Mount Washington Hotel, which overlooks the long, unspoiled Bretton Woods Valley at the foot of the Presidential Range.

The setting of the regal Mount Washington Hotel is almost breathtaking

Whole families – or at least the women, children, and household servants – “summered” there for generations. (Fathers stayed on the job in the cities, perhaps dropping in at the resorts for a long weekend or two.) Arriving in first-class Pullman cars or private railroad coaches, guests were greeted by a coachman and then the same solicitous general manager and maitre ‘d hotel who had waited on them the previous year. “Seeing and being seen was the name of the game” for these grand hotels’ clientele, many of whom came from a prominent listing of the top 400 members of the nation’s mercantile gentry, according to White Mountains historian Edward Camara Jr. “It was one of the reasons you went there, to promenade down the long porch to dinner or through the lobby to the ballroom.”

Come wintertime the staffs – and several of the guests – of these northlands resorts would simply move south to “winter” in similarly opulent style in Florida.

Here’s another view of the Mount Washington, with a bit of the flair from the days when it and other grand North Country resorts attracted the East’s elite

The Y-shaped Mount Washington Hotel was titanic, its lobby so cavernous that it was first called the “assembly hall.” Its 300 or so guest rooms boasted more than one thousand windows, five thousand electric lights, and oversized brass doorknobs that became a trademark. And the most remarkable features of this great palazzo in what seemed like the middle of nowhere in the North Woods were the wraparound veranda that extended for almost half a kilometer, Turkish baths, boot and gun rooms, indoor and outdoor swimming pools “fed by water from the Ammonoosuc, tempered by jets of steam,” and six separate refrigeration rooms off the kitchen, each with its own temperature that was ideal for meats, cream, fruit, vegetables, pastry, or frozen treats.

It was at the Mount Washington Hotel in 1944 that the New Hampshire mountains met the world. With the outcome of World War II still much in doubt, the United States invited world leaders to the Bretton Woods Conference to formulate postwar economic plans. Two results: a world monetary fund and a new world bank.

This is Franconia Notch, one of New Hampshire’s few routes through the White Mountains

Today only the Mount Washington Hotel and the Balsams Hotel in little Dixville Notch, population 75, survive among New Hampshire’s grand hotels. (A notch is the New Hampshire term for a narrow cut in the mountains.) The Balsams is the site of the nation’s first vote and vote count, just past midnight on primary and general-election days each presidential election year. Sometimes as few as 25 people vote, and the results are carried across the nation as something for the analysts to talk about before meaningful results stream in.

If Boston is the informal capital of the southern New England states, Mount Washington and all it surveys could be called the locus of the northern ones. “Agiocochook,” as the native Abenaki Indians called it, was not only the centerpiece of the eastern American alps, it was, to them, also home to the Great Spirit. For sure, at 1,917 meters, what would later be called Mount Washington was the highest point east of the Mississippi River and north of the Carolinas.

This is the old observatory building atop Mount Washington, coated with “rime,” a form of ice caused by the deposit of super-cooled fog droplets whipped by howling winds

Those early mountain climbers arrived with their ropes and picks, but not many followed, for the weather atop Mount Washington is documented to be the worst in the world. Right at that very point, three great storm tracks converge, and when they are all cranking, there’s hell to pay at the observation station. Not only can temperatures drop 40 degrees Celsius or more in an hour on an otherwise balmy July day, but you don’t know from cold until you’ve stood there in winter. On April 12, 1934, during a raging storm, a gust was measured at 372 kilometers per hour, the strongest ever recorded on earth. When remnants of a coastal hurricane passed one day in 1978, they blew a heavy construction van onto its side. Then the wind changed direction and blew it upright again.

In one of the funniest silent “shorts” I have ever seen, a man emerges from the observation tower on Mount Washington in what is obviously a howling gale. He is carrying a box of cereal flakes, a bottle of milk, and a bowl. He sits at a table, which has been anchored to the deck, sets the bottle of milk down, holds the bowl tightly on the tabletop, and attempts to pour his flakes. As you can imagine, they fly off in the distance the moment they leave the box, perhaps fluttering clear to Canada or Maine on the jet stream.

But the conditions up high did not keep entrepreneurs from building, at more comfortable elevations, all manner of cabins, tourist inns and, eventually, luxurious hotels from which to admire the mountain and the adjoining peaks of the Presidential Range. When railroad lines finally broke through the rugged mountains in 1875 – New Hampshire’s not called the “Granite State” for nothing – the rush was on. Not of settlers, but of those wealthy visitors seeking the fresh mountain air. Soon, horse-drawn coaches were struggling their way upward, along the gorges, until they reached the summit of Mount Washington. And just as at Pikes Peak in the Colorado Rockies years later, automobiles soon tested the serpentine path as well. The first race was won by F. O. Stanley and his wife, driving a six-horsepower “Locomobile” in 1899.

Two Mount Washington cog railway engines push coaches up the mountain. Each coach requires its own funny-looking locomotive, and the trip is very, very slow

The world’s first cog railway, which climbs 2,000 meters up a western spur of Mount Washington, was developed here as well, and it runs to this day. It and its funny-looking mountain-climbing locomotives became tourist attractions of their own, drawing tens of thousands of visitors to area hotels. Funny-looking? Their boilers ride at a sharp forward angle, pointed downward. This keeping them parallel to the steep terrain, but it also gives them the look of an elephant resting on its knees.

In one of the most dramatic sections along the cog railway’s route, called “Jacob’s Ladder” – a reference to a ladder to Heaven in the Biblical book of Genesis – the track inclines at a 37.41-degree grade on its wooden trestle. That’s about the angle of your arm if you pointed to a bird, high in a nearby tree.

The trips, in old-fashioned passenger cars into which smoke and cinders routinely fly, are powered by steam locomotives whose drive power transfers to two cog wheels that catch the track as they ascend or descend the mountain. Astoundingly – are you ready for this? – the engine and passenger coaches are not coupled. That’s because the engine pushes, rather than pulls, the cars up the mountain. Coming down, the coaches usually do not even touch the engine. They work on their own braking system that handles the coach’s own weight.

Off to the west, neighboring Vermont has its north-south range – the Green Mountains. Considered the oldest mountains in New England, they wore down over geologic time to become a much more gradual, less imposing range than New Hampshire’s Whites.

The owners of a company that made “palace cars” for grand railroads kept a grand estate and model farm called “Shelburne” on Vermont’s Lake Champlain. This is its barn

Once derided as being a “long place from anywhere,” Vermont, despite its presence in the heavily populated East, is still, by some measures, the nation’s most rural state. It doesn’t have Montana’s wide-open western spaces or the almost-impregnable valleys of a Kentucky or West Virginia, but it is packed with quaint little towns. As the state has yuppified, every one of those towns seems to have a real or faux general store of the kind that supplied the entire countryside with everything from beans to nails a century ago.

And seemingly, too, in Vermont, every other house hangs out a bed-and-breakfast or pension sign.

Vermont’s largest city, Burlington – home to the state’s largest public university – has just 39,000 residents, and there’s a big drop-off to the next-largest town, Rutland, which barely cracks 17,000. Only about 8,000 people, not counting meandering lobbyists, live in Montpelier, the state capital.

Vermont is odd, and in a way unique, in that it was first explored – by whites, anyway – from the west and north rather than from the east. Those Green Mountains got in the way. Thus Vermont – French for “Green Mountain” – retains a strong French Canadian flavor. For decades, Montreal was the state’s entrepót, and it took the coming of the railroads from the south to connect Vermont with the rest of New England.

And there was a time when connections were exactly what Vermonters did not want. Unlike New Hampshire, which was an original American colony, and Maine, which began as the northern reaches of Massachusetts, Vermont was a self-declared free and independent republic before becoming our 14th state and the first after the original 13 colonies declared themselves states.

Vermont is also the nation’s most reliably liberal state – you’ll recall that its neighbor to the east is among the most conservative – and among the nation’s most patriotic. It banned slavery even before entering the Union in 1791 and sent the highest percentage of its young men to fight for the North in the great Civil War of the 1860s. On the Gettysburg battlefield in that war, Major General John Sedgwick’s order read, “Put the Vermonters ahead and keep the column well closed up.”

This is one of Vermont’s many covered bridges. Another, which I showed you when I wrote about such bridges several posts back (check the archive!) connects Vermont with New Hampshire and is the longest in the nation

Because Vermont has what a lot of people want, its rolling dairy farms and climbable mountains have been discovered – big time – by developers, tourists, enthusiastic new residents, and parents looking for summer camps for their children. The developments have outraged the locals, who have blocked them when they can. But outsiders continue to pour in, changing the culture and outvoting old-timers at Vermont’s legendary town meetings to pass tax measures. That has elevated the quality of schools and kept towns looking crisp and clean, but prosperity has also brought Chinese restaurants and microbreweries and chain motels, even to small towns. One of the nation’s richest (in butterfat) and most adored ice creams is made in Vermont and exported as a delicacy.

Life is so good in Vermont these days, in fact, that critics say the newcomers have brought a nouveau riche “drawbridge” mentality to Vermont, meaning, “I’m here now. Close the drawbridge.”

Spring is Vermont’s busiest time of year. In addition to tending to the usual chores, many farmers trudge up the woodland hillsides, gathering sap to make the state’s famous, sticky-sweet maple syrup. Not only have some of them opened successful gift shops and plants that make sugary maple candy, but they also ship syrup all over the world. After a long, cold, dormant winter, sugar maple trees spring to life and produce the sap that the farmers tap. The state seems to have the ideal conditions for this trade: a hearty stand of maples, ideal soil, and just the right spring weather, with freezing nights followed by warm, sunny days that make the sap flow.

Is this serene enough for you? It’s early sunset at Old Harbor, Maine

Some time back, I used the word “serenity” to describe one of the allurements of NewVerMaine. It’s a quality that’s getting harder and harder to find as development spreads. But when you consider how crowded the nation’s Northeast Corridor, starting down in northern Virginia and reaching to Canada, has become – and how far away are the true wide-open spaces of the American prairie and western peaks – Maine and its lobster shacks, New Hampshire and its cool mountain valleys, and Vermont and its dairy farms and tidy Colonial-era towns provide at least a taste of serenity. Plus bright, shimmering autumn leaves, a sample of the French language if you’d like to hear it, a railroad ride straight into the clouds, and all the decadent, high butter-fat ice cream and crunchy maple candy you care to buy and eat.

(These are a few of the words from this posting that you may not know. Each time, I’ll tell you a little about them and also place them into a cumulative archive of “Ted’s Wild Words” in the right-hand column of the home page. Just click on it there, and if there’s another word in today’s blog that you’d like me to explain, just ask!)

Chest waders. Waterproof clothing that incorporates boots, pants, and a top held up by suspenders, all in one. Add a colorful flannel shirt, and you look backwoodsy but natty, all at once.

Mosey. To amble or walk leisurely at an unhurried pace. Sometimes, out in the country, you’ll hear people ask someone else to please “mosey on down.”

Solicitous. Expressing care or concern. A solicitous person solicits information about you, your family, and your well-being.

Wry. The word derives from an Old English word for bent or twisted, and wry humor is similarly offbeat and, sometimes, a little contorted from the norm. Similarly, a person’s “wry smile” is a bit skewed.

Yuppify. To give a place the quality of yuppies. The word “yuppy,” coined in the 1980s, derives from the acronym for “Young Upwardly-mobile Professionals, and described the mostly college-educated city people who set out on a career path to well-paying jobs. They kept everything as perfect as possible in order to achieve their materialistic goals. Thus a town that has been yuppified has lost its rough spots and, some say, its character, in favor of a scrubbed, orderly look.

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