If in Doubt, Find an Anniversary - 23 August 2002

I was sitting here the other morning all alone - as the poet Berlin says, "All alone by the telephone."

I was stumped, for the moment, for a subject to talk about.

Many years ago an old television producer of mine, once a journalist, used to say to me and to anybody so stumped: "If in doubt, find an anniversary."

Good idea. So let us now consider what was happening here and there one hundred years ago.

I go to the shelves and stagger back with two books each the size of the Gutenberg Bible.

Now let's see - 1902.

Good news right away: I see that Britain and Japan signed a treaty condescending to agree that China and Korea belonged to the Chinese and the Koreans - a nice, modern, progressive touch - leading, as we now know from the African experience, to a joyful celebration and then to chaos, confusion, war lords and dictatorship.

"National bankruptcy declared by Portugal."

That's another modern touch for Americans, for this administration anyway which is, at the moment, trying to divide its attentions into three parts: the war on terrorism, what to do about Saddam, and even more pressing, what to do about the bankrupt or soon-to-be bankrupt economies of three or four South American countries.

The one that has seized and depressed American attention most is Argentina, mainly because of the wide exposure of a stunning documentary film showing Argentineans of all classes out on the streets exchanging goods, purchasing this for that, no longer with currency but with barter.

Well on to the next whopping tome which comes closer to the bone or the daily interests of you and me: the People's Chronicle.

It's full of small, domestic surprises.

For instance, recalling my London tailor's extreme reluctance in early 1970 to abandon buttons on my trousers in favour of what he thought to be the more vulgar - that's to say American - zipper, I should have guessed that the zipper was invented somewhere around 1950, well in the 1930s at the earliest.

Wrong! It was exhibited as a novelty at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, and commercially sold far and wide in America starting in 1902.

I swear it didn't come into England for at least 30 years. But then the People's Chronicle does not go into the time it takes for an American invention, in language say, to pass freely into the United Kingdom without being halted, as the English language pedants used to say, "at the point of a sword."

The late, great EB White, the best American essayist of the early 20th Century, used to say that it took 15 years normally for a bit of American vernacular or slang to be used in the UK and then it was usually used wrong.

As I remember in the mid-30s a popular phrase of reassurance among young Americans was hunky-dory: "Everything's hunky-dory". An alternative was "Everything's jake".

I suppose today the same people would say, "No problem".

One evening in about 1935 the radio correspondent of a London evening paper reported that in the next few days "short wave reception is likely to be hunky-dory - the trouble is due to sun spots".

A more familiar example by now is, I'm sure, the expression "a bomb", as in "Last night's play was a bomb".

In the United States that would mean that last night's performance was probably the last there'd be - a flop. But in England it got picked up to mean a hit.

Well now what about 1902?

In Milan a young Italian tenor, one Enrico Caruso, was persuaded by a young American, Fred Geisberg, to make something called a disc.

Geisberg was a new profession - a recording engineer, the first.

Geisberg cabled his London boss: Would he pay Caruso £100 to record 10 songs on this disc?

The London boss wired back: "No, a preposterous demand".

Nevertheless Geisberg went ahead on a loan and the record, re-recorded, re-taped, re-cassetted was still selling in the late 1970s.

And while Caruso was asking the preposterous fee of £100, in New York a magazine illustrator and a remarkable draughtsman, one Charles Dana Gibson, had created from a friend serving as a model, a drawing of a very pretty girl, at once lithesome and winsome, who became so famous she was known on two continents as the Gibson Girl - the ideal model for every young woman.

The weekly magazine Colliers gladly paid Mr Gibson $100,000 for a hundred Gibson Girl drawings.

While the Ritz Hotel was opening in Piccadilly in London, at 59 West 44th Street in New York a hotel first called The Puritan was about to open in the hope of becoming a salon for actors performing nearby, for artists, friends of both, literati and so on.

Before the actual opening the humble desk clerk suggested to the owner that The Puritan was an unhappy choice for the sort of hostelry he had in mind.

Why not call it by the name of the Indian tribe which had been at various times the Puritans' friend and foe: the Algonquin?

So it was. And it became everything the owner meant it to be.

The humble desk clerk had saved his pennies and 25 years later, in 1927, he bought the place himself.

And from that day till his death after the Second War, Frank Case was the owner, manager, host, the man to see and - in a pinch of one sort or another - the man to know.

It was a happy coincidence for him and a couple of succeeding generations that the New Yorker magazine, founded only a year before Case took over, should have been housed one block away and the Algonquin became the principle watering place for the top New Yorker magazine contributors - writers, artists.

Today the Algonquin has a lion's share of businessmen, clients.

The only writers and artists I know who frequent it are visiting British authors or broadcasters, well along in middle age, who check into the Algonquin in the secret hope that they may sit and drink only an elbow away from Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, James Thurber, et al - all of whom, alas, (including et al) have been dead and gone these 40, 50 years.

If there was in 1902 one artefact that is known, cherished and maybe still bought and nursed it is a toy that was introduced in 1902 by a Brooklyn candy store - all right, sweet shop - owner.

It was a little bear with moveable head, legs and arms. It was called a teddy bear by express permission of the president of the United States.

The president had grown up on Long Island, a descendent of the old Dutch gentry.

He was sickly boy and the family doctor recommended what was then standard treatment for sickly boys, whatever their medical condition: he must straighten up and fly right - build up his muscles, use dumbbells, Swedish exercises, throw around a medicine ball.

Up till that time his ambition had been to be a taxidermist and he toddled around in a cloud of formaldehyde.

But he gave it all up and he took to the medicine ball and flexing his muscles and succeeded far beyond the hope or intentions of his doctor or his family.

He became, in fact, a world famous big game hunter and an explorer in remote and dangerous places.

His name was Theodore Roosevelt and since boyhood he'd been called by the usual American nickname for Theodore - not Edward, for Theodore - Teddy.

A hunting incident happened in Mississippi or was said to have happened.

President Roosevelt was out one day on a hunt and he came on a bear.

Before he drew aim he looked again and he saw that it was a mother bear. He refused to shoot it.

Whether this was truth or legend it was immortalised in a cartoon in a Washington newspaper and the Brooklyn's storekeeper saw it.

He wrote to the White House and humbly requested the president's permission to use his nickname "for my brown plush toy bear". Permission granted.

During the past century I suppose teddy bears have been sold and presented and cherished by millions of children who not only never knew how they came to be so called but have never even heard of President Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt, cousin of his successor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt - who was never called Frankie.

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