Steve Goddard's History Wire

Living Their Music

Not content to sit in their rocking chairs and listen to familiar strains from the swing era, a group of senior citizens in Ohio takes it to the next level and broadcasts its favorite music. As the Los Angeles Times reports:

"The 77-year-old deejay nearly fell asleep there last night, lulled by the wooing of Frank Sinatra and the hum of her hard drive. "The Late Show" was over by the time Hornbaker finished burning songs onto a CD for her show on WMKV — the only FM station in the country licensed to a retirement community. Every day, whether she's on the air or not, Hornbaker makes the five-minute walk from her apartment to the station, tucked in a corner of Maple Knoll Village. Here, she and 125 volunteers, most in their 60s to late 80s, run the nonprofit station."

Redesigning Home and Hearth

Victorian interior designer William Morris, the founder of the arts and crafts movement, created "the beautiful home" as his mantra. Owen McNally, writing in The Boston Globe, tells how:

"Morris and his internationally celebrated artists collective, which is best known as Morris & Co., struck a mighty blow for beauty by driving out the notoriously shoddy, mass-produced, mass-marketed clutter of knickknacks and bric-a-brac from the Victorian home. Because of Morris, Victorian parlors and pews were never the same again."

Is Today Your Birthday?

If November 30 is your birthday, you're in the magnificent company of one of the great figures of the 20th century -- or of any century, for that matter, as A&E Biography reports:

"British statesman, prime minister, and author. Born November 30, 1874, in Oxfordshire, England, the eldest son of Randolph Churchill. Winston Churchill is most notable for his parliamentary career, which spanned the reigns of six monarchs, from Queen Victoria to her great-great-granddaughter, Elizabeth II. His early military service included hand-to-hand combat in the Sudan, and he lived to see the use of atomic weapons as a means to end World War II. He was most familiar as a diplomat in his homburg hat and bowtie flashing the V-for-Victory sign with his index and middle fingers; but he was also a weekend artisan, building garden walls at his home at Chartwell, as well as an accomplished painter. His paintings were regularly exhibited at the Royal Academy, which held a one-man retrospective of his work in 1958."

Where Art Deco Abounds

For those lovers of art deco architecture, New York Times reports on a treasure trove -- not in one of the world's great cities, as one might suppose but on a small island in New Zealand:

"Ghislaine Wood of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and curator of the exhibition "Art Deco 1910-1939" now at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, calls Napier one of the purest Art Deco cities in the world. Its legacy can be traced to the morning of Feb. 3, 1931, when an earthquake measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale hit the Hawkes Bay region. Nearly 260 lives were lost, and the vast majority of the buildings in the town centers of Napier and nearby Hastings were destroyed, either by the quake itself or the ensuing fires. Most remarkably, the area around Napier was pushed upward nearly seven feet, which lifted the inner harbor above sea level and created 2,700 acres of dry land. Rebuilding began almost immediately, and much of it was completed in two years."

Understanding Extreme Aging

Remember when meeting a 90-year-old person was a rare treat? Well, they're all around us today, and the Los Angeles Times thought we'd like to know why and camped out in Laguna Woods to divine the secrets of nonegenarians:

"....a review of lifestyle data showed that diet and intake of antioxidant vitamins appears to have had little effect on longevity. But moderate wine drinking (about one to two glasses a day) was linked to longevity, as was daily consumption of caffeinated coffee. Being even borderline overweight or too skinny decreased the odds of surviving to age 90, while a moderate body mass index in later adulthood increased the odds. Being physically active well into adulthood also increased survival to 90."

The Amazing Marie Curie

Photograph From ‘‘Obsessive Genius''/Curie and Joliot-Curie Association/Curie and Joliot-Curie Fund Marie Curie ARTICLE TOOLS E-Mail This Article Printer-Friendly Format Most E-Mailed Articles Single-Page Format OBSESSIVE GENIUS The Inner World of Marie Curie. By Barbara Goldsmith. Illustrated. 256 pp. Atlas Books/W. W. Norton & Company. $23.95. READERS' OPINIONS Forum: Join a Discussion on Book News and Reviews <> <> TIMES NEWS TRACKER   Topics Alerts Books and Literature Goldsmith, Barbara Curie, Marie Curie, Pierre Track news that interests you.

INDSIGHT is the bane of biography. Feminism is one of the most distorting of lenses. To see Marie Curie forced to sit among the audience in Stockholm while her husband, Pierre, gave the lecture following their joint receipt of the Nobel Prize in 1903 is infuriating. What a way to treat a woman! One of the strengths of ''Obsessive Genius,'' Barbara Goldsmith's excellent short biography.

The author, who wrote the authoritative biography of Victoria Woodhull, has struck again, albeit in shorter form. The New York Times reviews her new offering.

Why Are They Leaving?

As members of the first Bush cabinet seem to be leaving in droves, Slate examines the institution and reasons why cabinet members aren't eager to stay:

"The deterioration of the Cabinet as a consultative body actually began the day George Washington gave his farewell address. When Washington was president, the Cabinet was an important decision-making entity. Then again, Washington had a small Cabinet: Thomas Jefferson at State, Alexander Hamilton at Treasury, and Henry Knox at the War Department, along with Attorney General Edmund Randolph (and some sources consider the postmaster general back then to have been part of the Cabinet as well). Because the president lacked other advisers, he naturally turned to these sages for guidance on major decisions, such as whether to accept a national bank and where to locate the federal capital."

Attention Gadget Gurus

Who doesn't thrill to the prospect of innovation, of new products that change the way we live and steadily expand the envelope of contemporary life? Time returns to its Nov. 29, 1960 edition to unveil the new, new thing, some of which caught on while others fell on their face:

"The outpouring of new products and processes is a rich harvest [including] ... Can opener-less cans. Now being test-marketed by Alcoa, the new aluminum orange juice cans have tabbed tops that peel away with a twist of the thumb ... Paper clothes. High-style paper clothes that can be thrown away after a few wearings ... A pocket-size portable record player. Put on sale by Emerson, the Wondergram plays all sizes of LP records without a turntable, is powered by four flashlight batteries, [and] weighs less than 2 lbs. ... A language- translating computer. Built by IBM, it translates Russian into English. Its first assignment: translating each day's Pravda for the Air Force. It works at a rate of 1,800 words per minute, turns out rough but readable English ... The pace of research is such that man's next great discovery may come next month, next week — or tomorrow."

Life on the Open Road

America in the 1950s and 1960s luxuriated in the knowledge that as you traveled the open (but increasingly antiseptic)American road, you could look forward to a reassuring sameness, as quality control took hold as a marketing virtue. American Heritage asks what we, as a culture, lost by not finding the unexpected in our travels:

"The mid-1970s Holiday Inn slogan, “The best surprise is no surprise,” may have reflected a comforting predictability in road travel, but it also signaled a decline in one of its greatest pleasures: being in a place very different from home. Before long, backlit plastic replaced the Holiday Inn’s exuberantly tacky “Great Sign,” and another roadside icon transformed itself into an interchangeable component of a nationwide neighborhood. In Duluth, Georgia, a prototype Holiday Inn has begun an impressive effort to reclaim the sprightly spirit radiated by the original sign."

China: The Past and the Future

Aroused by capitalism, China -- the sleeping giant -- has understandably attracted renewed interest in a wide array of fields. The New Yorker profiles a new exhibit at the Met:

"The new exhibition in the Tisch Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—“China: Dawn of a Golden Age”—opens with a beautiful parade of bronze figures. There are fourteen horses, four chariots, ten human riders, and three attendants on foot. Each object stands less than two feet tall, and the horses are remarkably detailed: alert eyes, flared mouths, intricate saddles. The bronzes were tomb offerings, and they date to the third century, at the end of the Han dynasty. The Met’s display caption includes a single sentence describing the artifacts’ rediscovery, in 1969: “They were found in Wuwei, Gansu, in northwest China, in the tomb of a senior official, probably the governor of the province.”