This is from the late 1940s.  For me in New York in the 1980s, wearing a tuxedo, smoking a cigarette and hanging out with an elegantly dressed woman in a bar wasn’t an everyday occurrence, or a weekly occurrence, or even a monthly occurrence, but it wasn’t so rare as to be automatically memorable.  It was just something that happened from time to time, in the normal course of life.

I can’t imagine that any guy born in the 1980s or later could really relate to that.  Our strain grows weaker.

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Omaha Beach — first wave.  Photo by Robert Capa.

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. . . has become unfashionable in some circles. One looks to the past for evidence that this fashion trend is misguided, as in this nude study by Edward Weston.

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. . . in the 1950s. Photo by Saul Leiter.

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. . . pretending to threaten my friend Hugh, who worked for Al on Screw magazine in the 70s.

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[Photograph © 1973 by Langdon Clay]

[©1971 Langdon Clay]

Bolivar Peninsula, Texas — on a trip across the country Lang and I made in 1971.

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. . . one of the heroes of the Battle Of Gettysburg and, it might be argued, the most important of them.  If his regiment had not held off the Confederate assault on Little Round Top during the second day of the battle, and Lee had been able to station artillery there, at the far left of the Union line and commanding all of it, there is every probability that Lee’s assault on the Union center the next day would have succeeded, and Lee could have marched on Washington.

Before the war Chamberlain was a college professor in Maine.

. . . and two aides, photographed by Matthew Brady in Richmond soon after the surrender at Appomattox.

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. . . victor of Gettysburg, one of the most important battles in American history. He was criticized, probably unfairly, for letting Lee’s army get away after the battle, and his star was further dimmed when U. S. Grant was brought east soon after the battle and placed in charge of all Union forces, making Meade a glorified lieutenant.

Meade was a cautious, methodical general, but that methodical caution at Gettysburg probably saved the Union, even if Meade himself never inspired the adulation of his countrymen.  Grudging respect was his fate.

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A brilliantly colorized version of the famous portrait by Matthew Brady — from the amazing web site Colorized History.

Lee is such a mythological figure in American history that it sometimes seems surprising that that are any photographs of him at all. Seeing him in the flesh would have been a major life experience — “Virgil, quick come see, there goes Robert E. Lee”. This image is probably as close as we can come to the experience today.

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