It's a quarter past 8 on the morning of Monday, June 7, 1948, and the Presidential trainFerdinand Magellanis about to pull out of Pocatello, Idaho, after the latest halt on Truman's Whistle-Stop Campaign. Harry and Bess Truman are watching the crowds starting to turn and leave while their daughter Margaret is offering one last wave to the stragglers. There is steam coming from somewhere, or is it just cigarette smoke from the young reporter bending and reading his notes to the wire man banging out that afternoon's front page lead on his Remington portable typewriter?
Um? No Twittering? Just typing real news!
Truman's typewritten schedule
Merriman Smith, circled, among the reporters interviewing
Margaret Truman on board the Ferdinand Magellan in 1948. Below, the Press at work on the Truman Whistle-Stop Campaign train in 1948. Smith can be seen, centre, with his back half turned.
I can't identify the Jimmy Olsen in this extraordinary photo, but the United Press wire service journalist is Albert Merriman Smith (1913-70) and the photographer for LIFE magazine was Thomas Dowell McAvoy (1905-66, below). I wrote a post about Smith. "On the Other End of the Line, with Typewriter", which can be seen here. Also covering the Truman Whistle-Stop in Pocatello for the wires was Joseph Perry Swisher (1923-2012).
Merriman Smith in Denver in 1955.
Thomas McAvoy
"Pace was so fast that reporter still typed as the train was about to leave," read the caption in LIFE magazine's issue of November 15, 1948, which devoted many pages to Truman's stunning triumph in the Presidential election. This spread also included, of course, the far more famous photograph of Truman taken from the back of the Ferdinand Magellan, the "Dewey Defeats Truman-Chicago Daily Tribune" shot captured during a stop at St Louis Union Station on November 4, 1948, while Truman was returning to Washington DC from his home in Independence, Missouri.
The Tribune's catastrophic 150,000-copy blunder came about because Linotype operators were on strike in protest against the Taft–Hartley Act, and copy was composed on Varityper typewriters, photographed and then engraved on to printing plates, a far slower process than using hot metal. The photo LIFE used was taken by William Eugene Smith (1918-78, left), but the one above, taken from a slightly different angle, was by Frank Edward Cancellare (1910-1985, right). Yet another version was taken by English-born St Louis snapper Louis Leonard Phillips (1906-91, left). Below, the President's train, the Ferdinand Magellan, also used by Franklin D. Roosevelt and later by Ronald Reagan.
A typical back-of-the-train gathering on Truman's Whistle-Stop Campaign, this one at Baltimore, with plenty of reporters and photographers ready to gather that day's real news. No reliance on Twitter here!
Margaret Truman
Reporters and photographers covering Margaret Truman's wedding to New York Times reporter Elbert Clifton Daniel Jr (1912-2000) in Independence, Missouri, on April 21, 1956. Daniel later became managing editor of the New York Times (1964-69), after having been the paper's London and Moscow bureau chief. In the photo by Sammie G. Feebackabove are Sheldon Hereschoron at the typewriter, Jerry McNeill with camera and at the rear Ed Hoffman.
Rose Conway, personal secretary for Truman, is seen here at her desk in another McAvoy LIFE shot.
At a time when typewriting poets seem to be proliferating by the day, particularly in a country where the prevailing President wouldn't know a poem from a poke in the eye with a burnt stick, it's interesting to recall that 50 years ago a US Presidential candidate was a typewriting poet. We visited the National Library of Australia in Canberra today, where the library's golden jubilee is being celebrated with an exhibition of all things 1968. Afterwards, discussing many of the tumultuous events which occurred that unforgettable year, the name of Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy came into the conversation. By sheer chance, later in the day, I came across this article (I was looking for something else entirely) from LIFE magazine on April 12, 1968:
When Eugene Joseph McCarthy died in Washington DC on December 10, 2005, aged 89, his obituary described him as "one of the most intelligent and witty American politicians of the post-war period, and the leader of the Democratic revolt against the Vietnam War which forced the withdrawal of Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968. To hardened observers it seemed extraordinary that so fastidious a man - a poet who described himself as 'mired in complexity', an intellectual who recoiled from the crude slogans of electioneering - should have proved such a force. 'How is the Senator this morning?' someone asked McCarthy's daughter Mary in 1968. 'Oh! Alienated as usual,' she replied.
"But McCarthy's willingness to stick his neck out, and to oppose the Vietnam War, in defiance of both the Democratic Party machine and of the notoriously vindictive President Johnson, bestowed a powerful romantic aura. His stand was in contrast to that of Senator George McGovern of South Dakota, who felt that it would be unwise to oppose the President in a year when he himself was up for re-election as Senator. Likewise, Senator Robert Kennedy refused at first to prejudice his presidential ambitions by striking at the crown too early. For McCarthy the die was cast when the Attorney-General declared that the President need not necessarily obtain the consent of Congress before declaring war. 'There's nothing left but to take it to the people,' McCarthy declared, in announcing his candidacy."
He was certainly very different. He preferred to confer with the poet Robert Lowell than with the pundit James Reston. "I've grown a little disturbed," he told an assembly of agriculturists, "that almost everything the Church tried to give up at the Vatican Council has been picked up by the Defence Department - the idea of grace in office, a little hint of infallibility, a kind of revival of the ideas of heresy and of holy wars, the Inquisition, a kind of index on publications. The Pentagon is even beginning to talk Latin, and has given a contract to a Californian company for a study entitled Pax Americana." When a voter lamented having to choose between Johnson and Richard Nixon, McCarthy readily sympathised. "I know," he said. "That's like choosing between vulgarity and obscenity, isn't it?" He inflicted the first electoral defeat any of the Kennedy brothers in 28 elections. But when the inevitable end to his candidature came - the Democrats heavies hated him - McCarthy turned to sports writing (what else?) and covered the World Baseball Series for LIFE (which patently loved him). (McCarthy had been a very handy baseball player himself, at St John's Catholic College, Minnesota.) As his obituary (obviously written pre-Trump) said about his 1968 exit, "It was a sour, but characteristic end to the most extraordinary campaign in modern American politics."
After entering federal politics in 1949, McCarthy became the ringleader of a group of young liberals, mostly from the Mid-West, known as McCarthy's Marauders. He was also an early opponent of Senator Joe McCarthy's Communist witch-hunting, and in a memorable television debate in 1952 parodied Joe McCarthy's selective way of using of facts to "prove" that General Douglas MacArthur was a Communist pawn in Asia. He once said, "I'm twice as liberal as Hubert Humphrey, twice as intelligent as Stuart Symington, and twice as Catholic as Jack Kennedy." In 1967 he also took up writing poetry, and was a million times the poet Donald Trump is:
In 1997 McCarthy published a collection of poetry entitled Cool Reflections: Poetry For The Who, What, When, Where and Especially Why of It All.
Almost four years ago I posted about George Ely Russell, who in May 1919 set off from Seattle in an 18-foot long, canvas-covered Peterborough canoe to paddle 1000 miles to Juneau, Alaska. Russell took with him a Corona 3 folding portable typewriter (serial number 84165) he had used on the battlefronts of France in World War I. About one third of the way into his epic voyage, while approaching the Heiltsuk First Nation Reserve village of Bella Bella on the east coast of Campbell Island in British Columbia, 98 nautical miles north of Port Hardy on Vancouver Island, Russell dropped his typewriter into seven feet of water. Unable to fetch the Corona 3 off the bay floor with a salmon hook, Russell stripped off, dived in and rescued the portable from a salty grave. He wiped it off with an old rag, dried it in front of his night fire ... and went on to write one quarter of a million words with it! These were incorporated into a book called Eighty Days in the Wilderness: Seattle to Alaska by Canoe.
Russell's great and justified faith in his Corona 3 was replicated 36 years later, when two young American ex-servicemen, the 5ft 8in, 10st 5lb Henry Whiting Ferris Jr (1931-) and John Alexander Thomson (1928-, not Thompson or Thomason, as often reported) took a 9lb Smith-Corona Skyriter with them on a trailblazing, year-long 7000-mile journey canoeing from Venezuela through Brazil and Paraguay to Uruguay and Argentina via those three mighty South American river systems, the Orinoco, the Amazon and the Plate. Later hailed by his local newspaper, the Ithaca Journal, as a modern-day Ulysses,"Whitey" Ferris was a 1952 Yale graduate in psychology and sociology and Thomson a 1954 UCLA arts (geography) graduate, although Thomson gave his home town as Portsmouth, Ohio. The pair bought the $69.50 portable typewriter, the sturdiest lightweight machine they could find, at Rudolph's in Ithaca just before departing for Philadelphia and on to Venezuela. Ferris and Thomson had a similar experience to Russell's, in that they lost one of two 16mm movie cameras and both of their 35mm still cameras when tides swamped their canoes in the early part of the adventure. The cameras were sent back to Caracas for repair. But, as with Russell, the Corona portable survived unscathed - only to be left behind in Buenos Aires in late October 1956.
The Orinoco is the fourth largest river in the world by discharge volume of water. and the river and its tributaries are the major transportation system for eastern and interior Venezuela and the llanos of Colombia. Its source, 3455 feet above sea level near the Venezuelan–Brazilian border, at the Cerro Delgado-Chalbaud in the Parima Range, was not explored until 1951. Three hundred and fifty-six years earlier, Sir Walter Raleigh had sailed down part of the river in search of the fabled city of El Dorado.
Ferris was the grandson of Dr Harry Burr Ferris (1865-1940), professor of anatomy at Yale from 1895-1933 and a pioneer in the study of cancer, and the son of New York pathologist and director of the Tompkins County laboratory Henry Whiting Ferris Sr (1895-1985), a US Navy captain in World War II. Henry Jr served as a field medical aid with the Second Infantry Division and as a psychologist with the Eight Army Psychiatric Department in the Korean War. Thomson served in Japan and Korea in a fleet squadron and on escort carriers as a US Navy pilot after World War II.
Ferris and Thomson began preparations in June 1955, including making a sail out of an old army parachute, and left on a Swedish oil carrier from Morrisville, Pennsylvania, on October 1. Twenty-five days later, at 2am, their joined 59lb, 17-foot Marathon NY-made Grumman aluminium canoes were lowered into the waters at the mouth of the Orinoco in Venezuela. One year and one day later they arrived in Buenos Aires, Argentina. After some weeks of paddling, they branched off on to the Casiquiare, a distributary of the upper Orinoco flowing southward into the Rio Negro, in Venezuela. This forms a unique natural canal between the Orinoco and Amazon river systems. It is the world's largest river of the kind that links two major river systems, a so-called bifurcation. The area forms a water divide, more dramatically at regional flood stage. From the Casiquiare the pair traversed the Negro, Amazon, Tapajós and Juruena rivers, followed by 20 miles by truck and a final 2000-mile stretch of canoeing down the Cuiabá, San Lorenzo and Paraguay rivers to the Plate.
Having achieved the longest inland water journey on record, at least from north to south in South America, Ferris and Thomson crossed the Plate to Montevideo and made their way back to Florida by train to Brazil (where they had their canoes sent from Buenos Aires to be swapped for parcels of land) and plane to Bolivia, Peru and the US. There had been a contract with New York publishers E.P. Dutton for an illustrated book but, perhaps because of the damage to the cameras, it does not appear to have seen the light of day. Instead, Ferris and Thomson gave talks about the trip to various groups back in the US, as well as in Paraguay.
Alfred Mosher "Buttsie" Butts (1899-1993) in his University of Pennsylvania Yearbook in 1924 and in January 1954.
Butts's friend James Thompson Brunot (1902-84) in 1953. Brunot gave the game its name, Scrabble, and from 1949 made and marketed the earliest sets in an old schoolhouse building in Newtown, Connecticut. He's seen here amidst some of the 150,000 letters his small team manufactured each day. Brunot patented the game in 1953-54 and Butts received royalties on each set sold.
Above, US advertising at Christmas 1955, and below, the first ads in Australia at that same time:
How LIFE magazine launched Scrabble at Christmas 1953:
Clare Potter and Peter Pagan in Vogue in 1953 and, below, Anne Gunning Parker in 1954:
The Tribune's catastrophic 150,000-copy blunder came about because Linotype operators were on strike in protest against the Taft–Hartley Act, and copy was composed on Varityper typewriters, photographed and then engraved on to printing plates, a far slower process than using hot metal. The photo LIFE used was taken by William Eugene Smith (1918-78, left), but the one above, taken from a slightly different angle, was by Frank Edward Cancellare (1910-1985, right). Yet another version was taken by English-born St Louis snapper Louis Leonard Phillips (1906-91, left). Below, the President's train, the Ferdinand Magellan, also used by Franklin D. Roosevelt and later by Ronald Reagan.
