Father of his Country

220 years ago today, on April 30, 1789, George Washington was sworn in as the first President of the United States. He wore a brown suit.

The brief ceremony took place on Wall Street, appropriately enough. Few realize this but Washington was the richest president we've ever had. Some of his wealth was in land, but most was in slaves, never mind about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It was acquired wealth: he married a rich widow.

President Washington refused to be called “your highness,” preferring the less formal “Mr. President." But he was not a humble man. Not chummy. Ask his friends privately and they'd probably have told you he was stuffy. People didn't joke about him. He'd spent his whole life learning the mannerisms of an aristocrat and was determined to behave like one. He spent most of the American Revolution losing battles, withdrawing, escaping, hiding, retreating, but always with dignity.

Washington had excellent posture. The chief reason he was chosen to chair important meetings was because he was always the tallest person in the room. And he kept his mouth shut. (Bad teeth.) He was also incorruptible. A consensus choice as leader, and, as it turned out, the perfect president for that moment. He set a high standard nobody came close to until another tall man was elected––from Illinois.

These and a few other stories about Washington are told on pages 12, 38, 68, 89, 167, 170, 213, 218, 229 and 239 in A Book of Ages.

Ellington and Strayhorn

Edward Kennedy Ellington was born on this day in 1899, in Washington D.C. Duke began piano lessons at age 7, but preferred baseball. He got his first job selling peanuts at Washington Senators games. He was 28 when he played his first gig at the Cotton Club in Harlem. The engagement lasted three years.

But it wasn't until 1938 that he met his muse and collaborator Billy Strayhorn. Ellington was 39, Strayhorn 17. Ellington called him "my right arm, my left arm... the eyes in the back of my head." Together they wrote such classic numbers as Lotus Blossom, Chelsea Bridge, Satin Doll and the Ellington band's greatest hit, Take the A Train. Ellington appears six times in A Book of Ages.

As interesting as the lives and incidents are the conversations that strike up between the characters in the book when they find themselves in the same chapter. We have Robert Frost, at age 41, publishing his poem The Road Not Taken, and in the next breath Duke Ellington, also 41, recording Take the A Train, the one artist answering the other. I chose these incidents because both the poem and the song were about choices people make. Choices and decisions are a theme in the book. The juxtaposition was serendipity. A lucky chance I didn't catch until I was sorting the entries in that chapter. These small jokes are here and there in the book, like the casual comment someone makes at a party that you didn't realize was funny at the time, and you laugh about it on the way home in the car.

Alice and Julia

Alice Waters was born on this day in 1944. She was 27 when she opened her famous Berkeley California restaurant, Chez Panisse. On that first night they served a set menu: paté en croute followed by duck with olives, salad, and almond tart; $3.95. But they ran out of silverware.

When I'm reading a life story I am always looking for signposts, points along the way where the person chooses this road instead of that one, where they meet someone or learn something that changes their life. When Alice Waters was 19 she transferred from the University of California at Santa Barbara to Berkeley. Would she have become the same person if she hadn't moved to Berkeley? Could Chez Panisse have started a food revolution anywhere else?

Alice Waters was 21 when she visited France for the first time. France, too, has a habit of changing people in profound ways. In A Book of Ages I note the Paris arrivals of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Giacomo Casanova, Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin, Ernest Hemingway, Josephine Baker, J. D. Salinger, William F. Buckley Jr., Robert M. Parker, Frederic Chopin and Adolf Hitler.

Julia Child was 36 the first time she saw Paris. She'd never cooked before. Up to this point she'd been employed as an American spy. But she would learn to cook in the French manner, and so would we.

Mockingbird

Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac has just reminded me that it's also Harper Lee's birthday. She's written only one novel in her life. Luckily that one novel was To Kill a Mockingbird, which is read by every American school kid between 13 and 15. She was also the childhood friend and helpful writing colleague of Truman Capote. Ms. Lee is noted on pages 110, 118 and 123 in A Book of Ages.

Milton, Paradise Lost and £10

On this day in 1667, John Milton sold the copyright to Paradise Lost for £10. He was blind and hard up and his political party was on the outs. The poem written in blank verse came to 80,275 words, with a vocabulary of 10,148 words arranged in 10,565 lines; do the math. Milton was 58.

He appears four times in A Book of Ages, appearing first at age 34 as the author of a cheerful little book titled "The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce." He married three times. I like to tell these stories as well as the happier and funnier ones. They tell themselves, really. Irony requires very little ornament. Coups, pratfalls, lucky breaks and disappointments, and then a sublime masterpiece. That is life.

Strunk and White

I sometimes think putting Strunk's name first was less authorial modesty than a keen eye for the eye-catching name. Strunk sounds like the name of an old ballplayer: "Tinker to Evers to Strunk." "Strunk lines left; Robinson holds third." Strunk and White's little handbook is fifty this month.

Not everyone reveres Strunk and White's classic grammar, but most people set it on a shelf between the Bible and Catcher in the Rye. Holy writ, in other words.

Most picture E. B. White as a shy, avuncular man sitting at a typewriter by an open window on the coast of Maine. This is where he wrote One Man's Meat. Read him closely and his peculiarities come quietly through. After we see him being dragged kicking and screaming to kindergarten at age five (page 10 in A Book of Ages) it's hard to picture him without a white moustache. Otherwise his resumé includes a book about a mouse, one about a pig and a spider, hypochondria, wife-stealing, country life and a deep aversion to crowds. White appears five times in A Book of Ages.

Audubon

John James Audubon was born on April 26, 1785 in Haiti. He's not in A Book of Ages. Auchincloss, Auden, Aung San Suu Kyi, Austen; no Audubon. I wish he were there, just as I wish I'd included a few other interesting people and stories. I either didn't think of them or thought of them too late.

Probably the best Audubon book out there, Under a Wild Sky–John James Audubon and the Making of the Birds of America, was written a few years ago by a friend of mine, William Souder. Every birder should read it.

Joan of Arc, Crick, Watson and Rosalind Franklin

On this day in 1429 seventeen year-old Joan of Arc set out at the head of a French army to rescue Orleans from the English armies who surrounded it. Her forces broke the English siege in ten days. In July, she stood beside Charles VII when he was crowned King of France, and a month later she made her triumphant entry into Paris. But she was subsequently captured by the English, tried as a witch and burned at the stake when the new French monarch refused to ransom her.

In the April 25, 1953 issue of the journal Nature, Francis Crick (age 36) and James Watson (25) declared: “We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxoribose nucleic acid.” They had discovered the double helix structure of the DNA molecule that defines life.

But had they? Or had someone else seen it already?

The controversy here surrounds the important and largely forgotten work of Rosalind Franklin, who was working simultaneously on a parallel study of the DNA molecule. She too had seen what Crick and Watson were writing about, but they were the first to publish their findings. Ironically, it was one of Franklin's brilliant photographs of the DNA molecule which made the lightbulb go off in James Watson's head. Crick and Watson won the Nobel for their work in 1962, four years after Rosalind Franklin died of ovarian cancer at age 37.

Churchill, Trollope, De Kooning

On this day in 1953 Winston Churchill became Sir Winston Churchill when he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. He was 78. She was 27 and had been Queen for a little over a year.

Churchill dominated his era by force of personality more than talent, although he had that too. He was a dismal student, but wrote his classmates' school essays for them. His reputation as a heroic soldier might have had something to do with the vivid personal accounts he wrote for newspapers and in books. At one point he was the highest paid journalist in the world. (People forget that he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953 as well as the knighthood.)

Yet he was constantly in debt, hated paying tailor's bills, drank prodigiously, smoked religiously, alternately charmed and insulted his peers, and, until late in his political career, was considered an unreliable hothead, a rogue, a bit of a charlatan, not to be trusted with high office. At age 40, he was fired from his post atop the Admiralty and retired to the country, where he took up painting. All of this came long before May 1940, when he became the hero of the age. Churchill appears on pages 47, 88, 154, 223, 235, 248, 260, 262, 273 and 275 in A Book of Ages.

April 24 is the birthday of the English novelist Anthony Trollope, born in 1815. Methodical, conservative, retiring, discreet, cautious, predictable, but enormously productive. Novels poured from his pen at the constant rate of 250 words every fifteen minutes. He wrote for three hours every day. But he was a spare-time artist. His days were spent behind a desk at the Post Office. In 1855, at age 40 he invented the familiar red pillar-box where the English still deposit their letters. Trollope appears five times in A Book of Ages

It's also the birthday of the abstract expressionist painter Willem de Kooning. After arriving in America as a stowaway, he worked for a time painting houses in Hoboken, New Jersey before joining the art community in Manhattan. De Kooning appears four times in A Book of Ages.

Shakespeare and Cervantes

William Shakespeare was born on about this date in 1564, in Stratford-on-Avon, and died in Stratford on this date in 1616. On the very same day in 1616, Miguel de Cervantes died in Madrid. The greatest playwright and poet of any age and the greatest novelist. The two never met and probably never knew of each other.

Shakespeare appears eight times in A Book of Ages, which is remarkable considering how little we know about his life. What we do know comes down to us in the form of anecdotes, gossip dressed up as history, the kinds of stories retold in the taverns described in the various plays, the places haunted by Falstaff, in which writers hung about then as they do now. Shakespeare was the son of a glovemaker and never went to University. He stole his plots from other authors. He was a fierce man of business by all accounts, which is why some prefer to think the plays were written by someone more aristocratic.

It was on April 23, 1597 that Falstaff reappeared in Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor in a performance before the Queen.

Cervantes's father was a surgeon, and Cervantes spent his early career not as a poet or novelist or courtier or a knight errant but as a valet in Italy, a servant. He became a Spanish foot-soldier, was captured by Algerian pirates, became a tax collector and spent time in prison like Señor Quixote. Cervantes was no aristocrat, small gentry perhaps, but like Shakespeare he observed life sharply from every side and wrote about it in a way nobody had before him. It's no surprise Quixote and Falstaff bear a family resemblance. Cervantes also appears eight times in A Book of Ages.

Lenin, Oppenheimer, Nabokov

Vladimir Lenin was born on this day in 1870, and Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the American atom bomb was born the same day 34 years later. I imagine this coincidence was among the proofs offered when Oppenheimer was accused of being a Soviet sympathizer and spy and lost his security clearance in 1954. He was 50. It's true, he had been friends with known communists, and it was a time of witch hunts. He'd also had the audacity to express doubts about the morality of the weapon he had created. A conscience can be a dangerous thing. Oppenheimer appears on pages 157 and 191 in A Book of Ages. Lenin only appears in other people's anecdotes.

Vladimir Nabokov was born on April 22 in 1899 in Russia to an aristocratic St. Petersburg family. They fled Russia in 1919, living briefly in England, where Vladimir entered Cambridge University, then settling in Berlin. Nabokov grew up speaking three languages, Russian, English and French, and actually learned to read English before he learned to read his mother tongue, but he wrote his first nine novels in Russian. He only began writing in English when he was 42. He appears five times in A Book of Ages. My favorite anecdote is from when he was 49 and teaching at Cornell. He had an unusual method of teaching literature, having his students memorize Madame Bovary's hairstyles and the layout of the railway carriage from Anna Karenina. Also in the book are a couple of stories about his most famous novel, Lolita. Nabokov collected butterflies and had several varieties named after him. He never learned to drive a car.

John Muir, Ansel Adams, Yosemite

There are over 700 people in A Book of Ages. Most of them appear several times, doing remarkable things and everyday things, great and funny and foolish things. One or two of them have a birthday every day, which I try to note in this daily blog. Birthdays are apt because it is a perfect birthday book. One day a year we all think about what we have done and how well we are doing; A Book of Ages is a catalog of this kind of observation.

It's a book about years, not about days, but for many years I added to it daily. Often it was someone's birthday that brought them to mind and made me look them up to see what they had done and when. Always this question: how old were they when this happened?

Today is the birthday of the naturalist John Muir. He appears in the book only once, at age 30, when he settles in Yosemite. Yosemite always makes me think of Ansel Adams, who took so many famous photographs of it, summer and winter. Adams appears in the book once too, at age 15, when he takes his first photograph of Yosemite with a box brownie. And so goes the writing of a book, the slow accumulation of facts and names like the laying down of topsoil. The result being a book which is odd and interesting and surprisingly funny. (The perfect birthday gift.)

Joan Miro

Today is also the birthday of surrealist painter Joan Miro. Miro was a good friend of Ernest Hemingway's and was Hemingway's preferred timekeeper in the impromptu boxing matches he sometimes had a the American Club in Paris. On page 99 in A Book of Ages I retell the story of the time in 1929 when Hemingway got his ears boxed by Canadian writer Morley Callaghan. Hemingway blamed F. Scott Fitzgerald who was sitting in for Miro. Miro may have been a reliable timekeeper but he also painted some rather surreal timepieces.

My favorite stories in the book are the ones in which various artists and literary lions cross paths. A Book of Ages is a perfect gift for Joan Miro's birthday or anyone else's.

Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler was born on this day in 1889. Reading about his strange life one looks for signposts. What events turned him this way or that way? What were the key events?

He was born in Austria but moved to Germany at age 6. His mother smothered him with affection and his father beat him. As a boy he dreamed of entering the priesthood. (A swastika was the most prominent feature in the coat of arms on the monastery across the street.)

At age 12 he attended a performance of Wagner's Lohengrin. At 17 he failed to get into art school. At 20 he was living as a bum on the streets of Vienna. At 24 he ran away to Germany to avoid military service. (He was arrested and returned but found to weak to serve.)

He was 30 when he grew his famous moustache, became an author at 36, a vegetarian at 42, Chancellor of Germany at 43.

He saw Paris for the first and only time on June 23, 1940. He was 51. He spent three hours there, having his picture taken near the Eiffel Tower, being disappointed by the Louvre and meditating at Napoleon's tomb. He died at age 56, in a bunker 24 feet beneath a burning city, having murdered millions and pulled all of Europe down around his ears. These are the moments I include in A Book of Ages.

Why note these events and not others? Are they significant? They are fairly ordinary, actually. (Apart from being a monster, Hitler was unremarkable.) But they are suggestive, just as many of our own remembered moments jump out at us for reasons we don't understand. Lives can be written out in full detail or remembered in odd moments and vignettes, which is how we remember our own. One anecdote suggesting another, like stories told at a party or a funeral.

Bicycle Day & Paul Revere

On this day in 1943 in Basel, Switzerland, a 37 year-old research scientist named Albert Hofmann ingested an experimental alkaloid called lycergic acid and went for a ride on his bicycle, thus experiencing the very first acid trip. April 19 has been remembered as "bicycle day" by druggies ever since.

Lycergic acid, better known as LSD, became the plaything of an adventurous elite for several decades before becoming illegal. Henry Luce and his Republican congresswoman wife enjoyed it in the privacy of their Republican home. Cary Grant tried it for the first time when he was filming Houseboat; he was 54. Aldous Huxley wrapped it in philosophy. Dr. Timothy Leary, age 46, wrote a slogan for it. Albert Hofmann, its inventor, lived to a ripe old age. His is the last entry in A Book of Ages, at age 100, fit as a fiddle, in full command of his faculties and making no mention at all of flashbacks.

On the night of April 19, 1775 Paul Revere, age 40, took a very different trip, on horseback, from Boston to Lexington. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote a famous poem about the event in 1863 when he was 56. Myth is more memorable when it rhymes. Revere appears four times in A Book of Ages, most memorably at age 38 when he dresses up like an Indian and helps dump East India Company tea into Boston harbor. That was more of a consumer protest over prices than a tax rebellion, but again mythology is what people remember.

The House That Ruth Built, Ezra Pound

Yankee Stadium opened on April 18, 1923. It was called the House that Ruth Built, but more accurately it was the house that Ruth paid for. The day in 1919 when Red Sox owner Harry Frazee sold Ruth's contract to the Yankees is one that lives in baseball infamy. Frazee put the $100,000 into a Broadway Show, No No Nanette, but the transaction put a curse on the Red Sox that would last until October 2004.

Babe Ruth, who had been to that point the best left-handed pitcher in the game, quickly became the greatest slugger the game had ever known. He sold tickets. In the aftermath of the Black Sox scandal of 1919, Babe Ruth's larger than life personality and spectacular play probably saved major league baseball from itself. He was 24 when he became a Yankee and was given the number 3.

On April 18, 1958 the poet Ezra Pound was ordered freed from St. Elizabeth's Hospital where he'd been confined for 12 years for treason. Pound was a groundbreaking poet and an advisor, editor and champion of many of the century's great writers, including T. S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway. But with the onset of World War II he also became a champion of fascism, which became a problem. He never relented. On his release from the asylum he was asked "How did it go in the madhouse?" "Rather badly," he said. "But what other place could one live in America?"

Canterbury Tales

It was on April 17, 1387 that Chaucer's pilgrims set out on the road to Canterbury. Chaucer worked most of his life as a bureaucrat, but was also a soldier, a student of law, a traveler, a functionary in the royal court and sometime diplomat, a carrier of messages.

When he was 16 he was captured by the French at the Battle of Rheims and was ransomed by Edward III for £16. We know this for certain, perhaps because kings kept receipts.

He was 44 when he began writing the tales told by the pilgrims on the road to Canterbury. Ten years later, on April 17, 1397, he read the stories out for the first time at the court of Richard II, becoming, at age 54, the first real star performer in English literature.

Chaplin, O'Neill, Salinger

Today is the birthday of Charles Chaplin. Born to theatrical parents in south London in 1889, Chaplin entered the family business on the English music hall circuit, but soon went to America where he was discovered by the motion picture industry. It was on film that he created his alter-ego, a splay footed, moustached, baggy-pantsed figure called "The Little Tramp."

Chaplin left England an obscure comedian in 1910. When he returned in 1921 he was the most famous man in the world. Arriving at Waterloo Station he was lifted onto the shoulders of a large crowd and cheered by thousands along the three-mile cab ride to the Ritz Hotel. He was 32.

Chaplin appears on pages 79 and 112 in A Book of Ages, but he also appears in other people's stories, as in 1941 when he begins dating Oona O'Neill, the daughter of the famous playwright and the girlfriend of J. D. Salinger. This is part of the fun of the book, the crossed paths, the intersecting lives of famous people.

Da Vinci & Lincoln

Today is the birthday of Leonardo Da Vinci, who was born in 1452 in the town of Vinci, hence the name. He was the quintessential Renaissance Man, doing a multitude of things and all of them well. At age 50 he was employed by the Borgias as a military engineer––a defense contractor, if you will; a year later he painted his serene masterpiece la Gioconda, better known today as the Mona Lisa. In difficult times it's good to be versatile. Da Vinci appears on pages 31, 190, 195 and 240 in A Book of Ages.

Abraham Lincoln was felled by an assassin's bullet on April 15, 1865. It's a story repeated often in history: the hero who isn't alive to enjoy the fruits of victory. Martin Luther King Jr., FDR, Bobby Kennedy, Admiral Horatio Nelson, Moses.

The eerie coincidences between the deaths of Lincoln and JFK have become folklore: Lincoln's assassin did the deed in a theater and was captured in a warehouse; Kennedy's assassin fired from a warehouse and was captured in a theater; Lincoln had a secretary named Kennedy, Kennedy had a secretary named Lincoln; both were succeeded by V.P.s named Johnson; etc. Famous stories are full of ironic details.

Writing about Lincoln's death in A Book of Ages I chose to describe the contents of his pockets, which, ironically enough, included a Confederate five dollar bill. Lincoln stories are told on pages 40, 49, 73, 135, 162-3, 189, 195, 199 and 210.

The Grapes of Wrath & Robert E. Lee

John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath was published on this day in 1939. In alternate chapters of documentary and fiction it told the story of Oklahoma farmers forced off the land by dust storms, drought and depression and their sad exodus to California. By early May the novel was selling 10,000 copies a week. Steinbeck was 37.

On April 14, 1861 Robert E. Lee formally resigned his commission in the Union Army. It was the same day that Union forces surrendered Fort Sumter after the brief engagement which began the Civil War. The 54 year-old Lee had been offered the command of the entire Union Army by President Lincoln, and had refused. Lee had graduated second in his class from West Point in 1829. He had hoped to attend Harvard, but his family couldn't afford it. He once said "The greatest mistake of my life was receiving a military education." Lee appears on pages 65, 76, 205 and 232 in A Book of Ages.

Samuel Beckett

Playwright, poet and novelist Samuel Beckett was born on this day in 1906, in Dublin. His most famous play, Waiting for Godot, is a conversation between woebegone characters who are waiting for another who never arrives. Beckett appears on pages 108, 129, 178 and 285 in A Book of Ages. The absurdity and apparent pointlessness of life was his subject. In The Unnameable he wrote “Where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on” He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1969.

Jesus of Nazareth and Harry Truman of Missouri

Harry Truman was vice president for 82 days when FDR died on April 12, 1945, making Truman president. Most of America had never heard of the former haberdasher from Missouri. The vice presidency was an obscure post in those days, not worth the proverbial bucket of warm spit. But Truman was no shrinking violet. He'd chaired a senate committee investigating corruption in the defense industry, and had done this while the war was going on, something modern-day patriots would probably call unpatriotic. Truman is the only president who ever dropped the big one. He also uttered the famous line "the buck stops here." Truman anecdotes appear on pages 141, 223, 233, 265 and 281 in A Book of Ages.

Jesus is a difficult figure to pin down in terms of age. He was a minor figure when he died and entirely obscure when he was born, so his dates are rough estimates and vary significantly. Rather than going with the religious accounts I chose the dates arrived at by historians, dates attached to contemporaneous events, but the stories are the ones we know from the New Testament. His remarkable bible knowledge at a young age, the anti-establishment, anti-authoritarian, explicitly liberal sermons, the warnings about what's in store for rich people after they die, the betrayal and his followers' memoirs. Jesus wasn't a shrinking violet either, which makes for good stories. He appears on pages 1, 26,120 and 126 in A Book of Ages.

Mona Lisa, Gatsby, Theroux

The story about the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa is detailed in the new Vanity Fair, but the most interesting anecdote, involving the poet Guillaume Apollinaire and a young painter named Pablo Picasso, appears on page 109 of A Book of Ages.

Today is author Paul Theroux's birthday; he's 68. He was thirty when he quit teaching to be a writer full time. He also was making enough, finally, to own his own telephone. Page 107, A Book of Ages.

The Great Gatsby was published on April 10, 1925. Fitzgerald wrote much of it the year before while living in France. While there he also took the time to recommend a young writer to his editor at Scribners, a writer he hadn't even met yet named Ernest Hemingway, who was also living in Paris. Fitzgerald is already drinking heavily but not disastrously, as his prose demonstrates, but the novel doesn't sell very well, nor will the next or the one following it, all of which leads Fitz to observe that there are no second acts in American life. F. Scott Fitzgerald appears on pages 69, 89, 103, 148, 153, 161 and 171 in A Book of Ages. There are second acts, by the way, you just have to survive to see them.

"Hef"

Hugh Hefner was born on April 9, 1926. He was 26 when he quit his job at Esquire magazine to launch a magazine of his own, which he called Playboy. It had a philosophy and everything. More importantly it had a nude centerfold of Marilyn Monroe. He invested $600 of his own money in this first issue, which he laid out on his kitchen table. He soon prospered. Hef appears on pages 84, 192, 224 and 261 in A Book of Ages.

Eastwood, Cobain, Picasso

On April 8, 1986 Clint Eastwood was elected mayor of Carmel, California. The 56 year-old actor spent more than $40,000 on his campaign. The job only paid $200 a month. Eastwood also appears at ages 24, 34, 41 and 74 in A Book of Ages.

On April 8, 1994 Kurt Cobain was found dead in his home in Seattle. 5000 people attended the memorial service and hear Courtney Love read from his suicide note. He was 27.

When he was 29 Pablo Picasso was arrested, along with his friend, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, on suspicion of stealing the Mona Lisa. Both men were soon released. Picasso appears 10 times in A Book of Ages: at age 20, 25, 36, 45, 55, 75, 84, 87 and 88. He died at age 91 on April 8, 1973.

Wordsworth and Daffodils

Daffodils begin appearing in the stores around this time. An appropriate way to observe the birthday of William Wordsworth, who was born on April 7, 1770. He wrote his poem about daffodils when he was 37. He also appears at ages 20 and 74 in A Book of Ages.

Wilde, Stravinsky, Stein

On this day in 1895, Oscar Wilde was arrested in room 118 at the Cadogan Hotel for the crime of being homosexual. Up until that moment he was a famous playwright, one of the greatest wits and celebrities of the age. (His play the Importance of Being Earnest had recently opened in the West End.) Five years later he would die in a far cheaper hotel in Paris at age 46. Wilde appears on pages 101, 125, 152, 160, 179 and 256 in A Book of Ages.

Igor Stravinsky, whose compositions provoked famous riots by people wearing expensive evening clothes in expensive concert halls in Paris and elsewhere, died on this day in 1971. In 1913, Gertrude Stein attended the second night performance of Stravinsky's Le sacre de printemps, thereby missing all the commotion. In any case it is hard to visualize the phlegmatic Ms. Stein throwing a chair. Stein appears at ages 4, 19, 29, 32, 33, 39, 59 and 72 in A Book of Ages. Oddly, Stravinsky only appears in other people's anecdotes.

Pocahontas, Churchill, Ginsburg

Pocahontas married John Rolfe on this day in 1614. It was not a fairy tale marriage by all accounts, but by 17th century standards it was fairly typical. She was kidnapped by the settlers of Jamestown. Then, when negotiations broke down, she married one of her captors. She moved to England with him but found it foggy and depressing. She died there in 1617, at age 22. She was the granddaughter of Chief Powhatan and thus the first in a long line of American heiresses married off to English aristocrats. Pocahontas appears on pages 25, 44 and 64 in A Book of Ages.

Winston Churchill's mother, Jennie Jerome, was another one of those American heiresses exported to reinvigorate the English aristocracy. On this date in 1955, Winston Churchill left 10 Downing Street and the Prime Ministership of England for the last time. He won his last election to the House of Commons in 1959, when he was 84. Churchill appears ten times in A Book of Ages.

Beat poet Allen Ginsburg died on this day in 1995. He appears in A Book of Ages at ages 6, 18, 19, 26, and at age 29 when he and Jack Kerouac bum a ride in Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Astin Martin to a gallery at Fillmore and Union in San Francisco, where he opens with the famous line: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness..."

MLK

"On the evening of April 3, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. is in Memphis, Tennessee in support of a strike by sanitation workers. He says to his supporters: "I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the promised land." The following morning he is shot and killed on the balcony outside his room at the Lorraine Motel." A Book of Ages, p. 145.

At age 10 he was a member of the boys choir that sang at the Atlanta world premier of the film Gone with the Wind. He was 26 when he learned of the arrest of Rosa Parks and organized a boycott of the bus service in Montgomery, Alabama. He won the Nobel Peace Prize at age 35. He was 39 when he died.

Washington Irving, Jesse James, Graham Greene

Washington Irving, America's first literary celebrity, was born on this day in 1783. He was also the godfather of the New York Knicks. He was 37 when he published Rip Van Winkle and the Legend of Sleepy Hollow. He appears on page 137 of A Book of Ages.

Bank robber Jesse James was murdered on this day in 1882, which was either a bloody shame or served him right, depending which legends you believe. He was hanging up a picture at the time. Mr. James appears in A Book of Ages at ages 15, 29 and 34. He is often confused with Billy the Kid. Also, occasionally, with Henry James; the two were not related.

Graham Greene died on this day in 1991. Novelist, Catholic, spy, adulterer. He never won the Nobel Prize for literature, but would probably have had conflicted feelings about it if he had; he did about everything else. He appears at ages 15, 20, 29, 35, 36, 42 and 86 in A Book of Ages. A life filled with ironic anecdotes.

Hans Christian Andersen, Casanova and Morse Code

Hans Christian Andersen was born on this date in 1805 and Giacomo Casanova in 1725. Andersen, the beloved and peculiar author of fairy tales, appears in A Book of Ages at ages 14, 17, 33, 39 and 70. Casanova (swordsman, rake and memoirist) appears at ages 11, 16, 30, 49, 56 and finally at age 60, when he retires to become a librarian. (True, actually. He was also a bibliophile.)

The inventor of the telegraph, Samuel F. B. Morse, died on this day in 1872. Morse was a remarkable artist, a professor and a rather deplorable politician before he got around to inventing instant communication. He appears at ages 20, 41, 46, 50, 53 and 80 in A Book of Ages.

A Book of Ages is a perfect birthday gift for any memoirist, bibliophile, swordsman or budding inventor.

Martha Graham and L. Ron Hubbard

L. Ron Hubbard was 13 when he was made an Eagle Scout on April Fool's Day in 1924. He went on to become a science fiction novelist and theologian. The two careers dovetailed in an interesting way in 1949, an anecdote which appears on page 141 of A Book of Ages.

Dancer and choreographer Martha Graham died on this day in 1991. She was 96 and busy choreographing a dance for the Barcelona Olympics. She also appears in A Book of Ages at 42 and 76, when she finally retired from dancing.