Bicycles had been around, in one form or another, since the early nineteenth century, when there was a contraption called the hobby horse–a simple rolling device with two equal- size wheels but no pedals. They were more of a curiosity than anything else, but the idea of a human-propelled vehicle…
Ernie Holden remembers the time he drove his hot rod into a gas station to fill it up. The car was a 1964 El Camino, a beast dating from the days when gas was cheap and engines were big, and its 350 cubic inches put out more than 300 horsepower…
During one of those postcollege years when young men flounder around not knowing what to do next, Allen had a job in a laundry. This was in Los Angeles. At the end of the day, Allen would add up long columns of figures–shirts and trousers, cleaned and pressed–and put a…
In 1989 Garth Brooks had a song called “Much Too Young to Feel This Damn Old.” It was about a rodeo cowboy, and one of the lines went, “a worn-out tape of Chris LeDoux, lonely women and bad booze/Seem to be the only friends I’ve left at all.” Bill Taylor…
It sounded like pretty good news when the Phoenix Art Museum announced the opening of a show entitled “Five Centuries of Italian Painting, 1300-1800.” So along with, apparently, most everyone else in town, a friend and I trooped over to the museum on a recent Friday night to get a…
John Meunier still remembers the first time he walked into a baseball park. It was at the Polo Grounds in 1957. He was an undergraduate fresh from his native England, studying architecture in New York City. Some friends took him to see the national pastime of the country that has…
The nadir came in 1966, when the first baseball game was played on an artificial surface, in a dome, in Houston. Gone were rainouts, outfielders’ claims to have lost the ball in the sun and the bad hops that separate the great infielders from the merely good ones. Gone, too,…
I fell in love with the car the first time I saw it, and would have bought it even if it hadn’t run. It was a 1986 Chevy El Camino, a workingman’s Cadillac, a car good only for passing other vehicles and looking cool in, a vehicle, in all other…
Porkey has a pretty good explanation for why he drops the tennis balls so much while he is juggling. It does not take very many minutes of watching Porkey to establish the fact that the tennis balls do indeed fall to the ground with some regularity. The tennis balls drop…
The man was absorbed in vacuuming the gravel that graced the front yard of his house in Sun City when photographer Allen Dutton cruised past. Dutton was there to document life in the retirement community, and this improbable spectacle was more than he could resist. “How come it doesn’t pick…
When Marie Kelso moved to Sun City five years ago, she was not interested in meeting a man. She was eighty then, and met one anyway. It happened at a pinochle game. He used the direct approach. “Are you married?” he asked. When she said no, he took her out…
Karen Reinhold is sitting in the office she occupies as director of the Sun Cities Art Museum when one of the women working in the gift shop comes in with a pair of earrings. “She says she’ll take them if we can change them to clips,” the woman tells Reinhold…
At twenty pounds, Air Major is a small dog. He is brown and has short hair and a nice wiggly tail. He barks at strangers before he warms up to them and licks their ankles. He is allowed to sleep on the couch, and even on his owner’s bed at…
Introduction Art lovers were agog last week when thieves made off with twelve works from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The haul included a Manet, a couple of Rembrandts and Vermeer’s “Concert,” well-known to all former Art History 101 students. The event set us to thinking. Is all…
For years, David Markham has had a devotion to Napoleon that some of his friends think is a bit unnatural, and that would have driven to distraction a wife less understanding than Barbara. He wears, for instance, a tie decorated with bees, the French emperor’s symbol. He has traced Napoleon’s…
The opening salvo in what ought to develop into quite a lively exchange of gunfire was sounded last week when the first “counter quincentenary celebration” arrived in Phoenix. The quincentenary, as we shall all find out only too well during the next two years, is the celebration of Columbus’ discovery…
One day, just after Christmas in 1984, Marion Bulin was driving to work through the Marina District of San Francisco. All of a sudden, she says, “I realized that I was just driving through this crop of Christmas trees.” This crop, however, was of discards, looking strangely human and sad…
If one cultural artifact exemplifies the Eighties, it is the Day-Timer. The Eighties was the decade when no one had any time. What made the Eighties so boring is that people were proud of this. Drudges who invariably labored in something called “marketing” bragged about working sixty- or even eighty-…
During one of the few days he actually appeared for work at the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, James Abbott McNeill Whistler executed a small engraving of an island in the Santa Barbara Channel off the coast of California. Because he was Whistler, he could not resist adding some…
