“IN DEFENSE OF BROOKLYN” by Murray Goodwin – November 1946

[Note: If it can be proven that the following editor's note isn't the greatest editor's note of all time I will gladly eat not just my own hat but any additional hat presented to me.]

EDITORS’ NOTE!

ONE DAY not long ago, an arrow sped through an open window of the HOLIDAY editorial rooms, bedded itself in a desk top, and stood there quivering before the startled eyes of the editor. Attached to it was a letter, a letter born of a Brooklynite’s bitter hurt at the story Manhattan Holiday, in the October issue of HOLIDAY, and the snubbing it contained of the writer’s beloved borough. We had of course known all our lives of the feud that existed between Brooklyn and Manhattan, warmest rivals among the five sister boroughs of Greater New York. We know how Manhattanites tend to ignore Brooklyn, and snub it, and how Brooklynites grow sullen and hurt under such cavalier treatment. Knowing this, we have made it a firm part of HOLIDAY editorial policy never to say anything against Brooklyn, just as we never say anything against MOTHER, or FREE ENTERPRISE. We do not believe our article insulted Brooklyn, but perhaps we did somewhat neglect her. In fairness, therefore, we are printing hurt Brooklyn Citizen Goodwin’s letter. Further, we have even made the courageous editorial decision to show actual pictures of Brooklyn.

The Editor,
HOLIDAY Magazine.

“WEIRD WORLD OF THE MODEL” by Alfred Bester – May 1961

[Note: The two women profiled here are now in their 80's—and still modeling, half a century after this article was written. Presumably they now make more than $60 an hour.]

How true is the popular picture of the model as skinny, conceited, overpaid and undersexed? Two of the top come clean about the glamour profession

You are in the giant studio of one of the world’s foremost fashion photographers. It is eleven in the morning, and since nine the studio has been preparing one fashion photograph. The model has arrived in make-up, done her hair and submitted to a complete blue-white body wash because this will be a color shot. She has been walking around for an hour, wearing nothing but a balloon chemise, drying herself in the air.

Now the sitting begins. The model puts on a high-fashion dress and takes her position on the set. The photographer stacks records on the hi-fi and driving jazz blasts through the studio. A giant electric fan is turned on, and its gale whips the model’s dress. Its roar is added to the clamor of music, and everybody has to shout.

Plate after plate is slammed into the camera. At each exposure, the strobe lights explode with a shattering WHAM! The model melts smoothly from pose to pose, experimenting with arms, hands, legs, feet, body, head—always careful to adjust the dress and display it at its best.

The photographer never stops directing, praising, singing with the music: “Arm a little higher, darling. That’s it! Beautiful! Hold it!” WHAM! “You look lovely. One more.” WHAM ! “Perfect!” WHAM! Left leg back. Hold the hem higher. Lovely!” WHAM! “One more!” WHAM! “What’d you just do with your head? No, the other way. That’s it! Beautiful!” WHAM! WHAM! WHAM!

“LAST TRIP TO RAVENSBRÜCK” by Welles Hangen – April 1967

You stop midway between two worlds while an East German guard. his Russian-style carbine slung over his shoulder, ogles you through binoculars. Then your foot touches the accelerator, and you’ve left Checkpoint Charlie and West Berlin. The heavy, candy-striped steel crossbar goes up, and you show your passport at the gate. I had done this hundreds of times before, but this time was different. I wasn’t just crossing into East Berlin for the day. I was heading into what people in Bonn and West Berlin call “the Zone,” meaning the Soviet occupation zone of Germany, better known to most Americans as East Germany.

“KENTUCKY” by A.B. Guthrie, Jr. – March 1951

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Way West” brings you the saga of a great state, homeland of bluegrass, bourbon, and beautiful women

The typical Kentuckian is a goateed colonel with a thirst.

He is a barefoot mountain boy with an itchy finger on a flintlock. He’s the owner of a mortgaged plantation and a Thoroughbred foal with the look of eagles in its eyes.

He’s a backwoods demagogue who can’t spell demagogue. He’s a Southern gentleman.

He’s a private enterpriser, a dealer in corn squeezin’s, and no revenooer better show his nose.

He’s Abner, Devil Anse Hatfield, the Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come, Private Tussie, Happy Chandler, and Gracious Living by Ancestry out of Bluegrass by Or Virginny.

He is all these things, and so, of course, he’s none of them. Kentucky?

Its a heaven of a place (or, to give proper order to an old com­parison, heaven is a Kaintuck of a place).

It’s a brier patch.

It’s Dark and Bloody Ground.

It’s bluegrass and juleps and women fair beyond the fortune of any other realm, not excepting the Egyptian.

It is eroded and sequestered hillsides; it is coal mines in the moun­tains; it is race tracks in the great meadow.

It’s all these and none of them, typically, either.

“LIVING WITH A PEACOCK” by Flannery O’Connor – September 1961

When I was five, I had an experience that marked me for life. Pathé News sent a photographer from New York to Savannah to take a picture of a chicken of mine. This chicken, a buff Cochin Bantam, had the distinction of being able to walk either forward or backward. Her fame has spread through the press and by the time she reached the at­tention of Pathé News, I suppose there was nowhere left for her to go—forward or backward. Shortly after that she died, as now seems fitting.

If I put this information in the beginning of an article on peacocks, it is because I am always being asked why I raise them, and I have no short or reasonable answer.

“A JOURNEY TO MARS” by Arthur C. Clarke – March 1953

Here’s what it will be like to travel through space, in the words of an expert on interplanetary travel

IN the fall of 1942 two events occurred which set Man’s feet firmly on the road to the stars. The first V-2 climbed to the limit of the at­mosphere, ushering in the age of rocket propulsion—and beneath a squash court in the University of Chicago, atomic energy crept secretly into a world totally unprepared for it.

During the next fifty years, building on this foundation, we will acquire the knowledge and techniques necessary to take us beyond the atmosphere—the know-how of space flight. Chemical fuels are already available which can establish the “artificial satellite,” our first stepping stone into space. They may even be sufficient for scientific reconnaissances of the Moon and nearer planets, though at enormous expense. Truly practical space flight, however, must await the harness­ing of the atom to rocket propulsion. Already at least two ways of achieving this are known, in theory; and when a thing can be done in theory, it is only a matter of time before it becomes reality.

“ON THE ROAD WITH MEMÈRE” by Jack Kerouac – May 1965

NOTE: the following was later included in Desolation Angels. 

My widowed mother’s name is now “Memère”— nickname for Grandma in Québecois—since her grandson, my nephew, calls her that. It is 1957. I am still an itinerant; Memère and I are going from Florida to try to settle down in San Francisco, our meager belongings following us slowly in a moving van.

Here we are in Florida with two tickets to California, standing waiting for the bus to New Orleans, where we’ll change for El Paso and Los Angeles. It’s hot in May in Florida. I long to get out and go west beyond the East Texas Plain, to that high plateau and on over the Divide to dry Arizona and beyond. Poor Memère is standing there absolutely dependent on me. I wonder what my father is saying in Heaven. “That crazy Ti Jean is carting her 3,000 miles in wretched buses just for a dream he’s had about a new life near a holy pine tree.”

“SHARK!” by Peter Benchley – November 1967

Note: Alfred Bester, senior editor of Holiday, encouraged Benchley to turn this article into a novel; Benchley took his advice and wrote Jaws.

ONE WARM SUMMER DAY I was standing on a beach near Tom Never’s Head on Nantucket. Children were splashing around in the gentle surf as their mothers lay gabbing by the Styrofoam ice chests and the Scotch Grills. About thirty yards from shore, a man paddled back and forth, swimming in a jerky, tiring, head-out-of-the-water fashion. I had just remarked dully that the water was unusually calm, when I noticed a black speck cruising slowly up the beach some twenty yards beyond the lone swimmer. It seemed to dip in and out of the water, staying on the surface for perhaps five seconds, then disappearing for one or two, then reappearing for five. I ran down to the water and waved my arms at the man. At first he paid no attention, and kept plodding on. Then he noticed me. I pointed out to sea, cupped my hands over my mouth, and bellowed, “Shark!” He turned and saw the short, triangular fin moving al­most parallel with him. Immediately he lunged for the shore in a frantic sprint. The fish, which had taken no notice of the swimmer, became curious at the sudden disturbance in the water, and I saw the fin turn inshore. It moved lazily, but not aimlessly.

“THE CATSKILLS: LAND OF MILK AND MONEY” by Mordecai Richler – July 1965

Any account of the Catskill Mountains must begin with Grossinger’s. The G. On either side of the highway out of New York and into Sullivan County, a two-hour drive north, one is assailed by billboards. DO A JERRY LEWIS—COME TO BROWN’S. CHANGE TO THE FLAGLER. I FOUND A HUSBAND AT THE WALDEMERE. THE RALEIGH IS ICIER, NICIER, AND SPICIER. All the Borscht Belt billboards are criss-crossed with lists of attractions, each hotel claiming the ultimate in golf courses, the latest indoor and outdoor pools, and the most tantalizing parade of stars. The countryside between the signs is ordinary, without charm. Bush land and small hills. And then finally one comes to the Grossinger billboard. All it says, sotto voce, is GROSSINGER’S HAS EVERYTHING.

“CONVERSATION WITH WOODY ALLEN” by Alfred Bester – May 1969

What’s the name of the game, Woody?

“Basically everybody is a loser,” Woody Allen, high priest of the cult of the loser, says, “but it’s only now that people are beginning to admit it. People feel their shortcomings more than their attributes. That’s why Marilyn Monroe killed herself, and that’s why people can’t understand it.

“I’m a loser, and that’s been one of the appeals of my stage career. I’m a complainer. I’m more acutely aware of the negative side of life. That’s why I don’t like sunny weather. I like gloomy winter days. I like gloomy weather, period. I’d like to spend a winter in Copenhagen.

“Look at San Francisco. It has the highest suicide rate in the United States. It has perfect weather,around sixty-five degrees all year ’round, and the city is lovely—and everybody jumps off the Golden Gate Bridge.”