The Civil War in one family

Sam Smith During the Civil War, my great great grandfather on my father’s side, Isaac Ogden, vainly argued with his young son Ludlow not to join the Confederates. Ludlow had lived in the south and was opposed to slavery but supported secession. He wrote his father, "I cannot in the hour of danger desert the …

Grounded by US Air

Sam Smith For the modest project of flying from Nashville TN to Portland ME, it recently took me 12 hours, twice as long as scheduled. So far as I could determine accidents or weather were not in any way involved. It started when, at Washington DC, US Airways decided at the last minute to replace …

Fizzle

Sam Smith, 1984 - I am not enthralled by the current tendency of journalists to write interminably of their troubles and illnesses, whether terminal or otherwise, but fate has intervened in the production of the Review with such bizarre consistency over the past year that I feel I should warn you that it in not …

The hazards of estivation

Sam Smith, 2011 - A reader - and Democratic candidate for a New England state legislature - writes: "I have been a subscriber to both Progressive Review as well as Undernews for some time now. Recently the issues have become sporadic and now nothing. As a convert to SHAFARism I feel my 'faith' has abandoned …

On loving trains

Sam Smith, 2011 – An article in the NY Times argues that “The link between trains and autism is well documented. . . People with autism have difficulty processing and making sense of the world, so they are drawn to predictable patterns, which, of course, trains run by.” In fact, only once in her article, …

Bearing Drift

Sam Smith Peter Sloan Eident describes two of the saddest moments in recent Coast Guard history in his book, Bearing Drift. The first was the sinking of the cutter Cuyahoga in 1978 with the loss of eleven lives - then the worst peacetime accident in Coast Guard history. Eident was on the bridge when it …

Lunch with Gene: Notes on a napkin

UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA  From our archives. . . . Sam Smith OVER THE PAST QUARTER CENTURY or so, Mark Plotkin and I would have occasional lunches with Eugene McCarthy. Plotkin, now a political commentator for Washington radio station WTOP, had been McCarthy's campaign manager when he ran as an independent for president in 1976. The …

Why hip is no longer hip

Sam Smith   Lots of slang phrases change their meaning over time. It is far less likely, however, for such phrases to acquire an almost reverse meaning. Among the rare exceptions are hip and hipster. For example, an online dictionary defines hip as Hip: Also hep adj. hipper also hepper, hippest also hippest. Slang 1. …

My first political lesson

Sam Smith  For some four decades I argued for an elected district attorney and comptroller in my hometown of Washington DC. This wasn't just an intellectual argument. When I was 12 I took part in my first political campaign, a successful effort to end 69 years of Republican rule in Philadelphia with the election of …

The Dead Hub Cap Society

Sam Smith Volvo won't be selling any more station wagons in America. The station wagon, whose sales rose from 29,000 in 1946 to 707,000 in 1965 has joined the Dead Hub Cap Society. I don't actually miss our Volvo wagon. It had been a lemon because new features were added without enough testing. But I …

Fifteen years on the web

This was written five years ago, on our tenth anniversary on the web: Sam Smith, 2005 - This fall marks the Review's tenth year on the web - and our 11th year of sending out email updates. In the last quarter of 1995 we got all of 388 page views, and in 1996, we got …

Trip to the old side

Porthleven: Photo by Theitalianpen Sam Smith - The somewhat erratic nature of the Review over the past fortnight, including the absence of our e-mail edition, has been due to the fact that I overcame my antipathy towards lengthy travels and joined my wife, along with Des and Jane Wilson, on a trip that included marvelous …

Elian Gonzalez comes to the ‘hood

RADAR - Remember Elian Gonzalez? He was the kid at the center of an international controversy in November of 1999 when he was found floating off the Florida coast in an inner tube, and eventually taken from the custody of relatives in Miami only to be returned to his father in his homeland of Cuba …

I don’t seem to count for much

Sam Smith I have just received my census form and I don't seem to count for much. I guess I was living in the past, thinking of that time when the friendly woman sat in our living room and asked about our plumbing, the age of our house and so forth. It was fun reducing …

Loran lullaby

Sam Smith The difference between losing your grandmother and losing a technology is that it's much harder to replace your grandmother than it is a technology that, after all, almost inevitably vanishes because something better has come along. Hence perhaps the silence about the disappearance of Loran as of last month - a navigational system …