The elm tree is our highest mountain peak;
A five-foot drop a valley, so to speak.
A man’s head is an eminence upon
A field of barley spread beneath the sun.
Horizons have no strangeness to the eye.
Our feet are sometimes level with the sky,
When we are walking on a treeless plain,
With ankles bruised from stubble of the grain.
The fields stretch out in long, unbroken rows.
We walk aware of what is far and close.
Here distance is familiar as a friend.
The feud we kept with space comes to an end.
“In Praise of Prairie” by Theodore Roethke from Selected Poems. © Anchor Books, 1966. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
Today is the birthday of true-crime writer William Roughead (books by this author). Born in Edinburgh, Scotland (1870), Roughead was a lawyer who was so fascinated by murder cases he became an expert criminologist by researching and writing narrative accounts of the trials he witnessed at the High Court of Edinburgh.
He published his first anthology, Twelve Scots Trials, in 1913. Although hard facts and meticulous reconstructions of evidence were the foundation of Roughead's tales, he was also known for pulpy, ironic prose, and he drew admiration from writers like Henry James and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had reserved a special shelf near at hand to the Oval Office just for his books.
Despite his dry humor and use of irony, Roughead's long study of criminal depravity never turned him pessimistic. As he explained it, "The study of criminology has by no means made me a cynic; it has encouraged my admiration for the ingenuity of the human race."
It's the birthday of landscape painter Grant Wood, born near Anamosa, Iowa (1891), who is known for the iconic portrait of a farmer and his spinster daughter, American Gothic (1930), which, along with the Mona Lisa, is one of the most recognizable paintings in the world.
Wood grew up in Cedar Rapids, attended art schools in Minneapolis and Chicago, then traveled to Europe to study Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting. There he first encountered the work of Jan Van Eyck, the 15th-century Flemish artist, and was struck by how the painter achieved great depth and detail in his works by layering thin glazes of color. When Wood returned to Iowa, he was determined to incorporate that kind of clarity into his own work, which is evident in the stylized fields and rolling hills of paintings like Midwest Vineyard and in the lit scenes and elongated shadows of Death on Ridge Road (1935) and The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere (1931).
Returning to Iowa had really been the formative experience of Wood's life. He'd cast himself in the role of a Midwestern farmer from the mythical farmland he was creating, always posing for photographs in a pair of overalls and becoming a champion of regionalism in the arts, explaining that, despite his travels and European training, he'd "realized that all the really good ideas I'd ever had came to me while I was milking a cow. So I went back to Iowa." In a new biography Grant Wood: A Life, R. Tripp Evans presents Wood as a closeted homosexual who adopted Midwest regionalism as a shield for his own bohemianism, and who, when he died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 50, was planning to leave Iowa for California.
It's the birthday of the first man to travel faster than the speed of sound: Chuck Yeager (books by this author), born in Myra, West Virginia, on this day in 1923. Whereas 20/20 is considered "perfect vision," his was better than perfect at 20/10, and he once shot a deer from 600 yards away. This keen vision was a great asset to a future pilot.
He joined the Air Force as mechanic, became a fighter pilot during World War II, was shot down by Germans over France, escaped to Spain and then to England, and resumed air combat, flying many successful missions.
After the war he became a test pilot in the Air Force, flying rocket planes and other aircraft. He was selected as the pilot to fly the rocket-powered airplane "Bell X-1" on a mission to break the sound barrier for the first time. In the weeks before the flight was scheduled, people in the aviation community muttered stuff like, "He better have paid-up insurance." Then, two days before his historic test flight, he broke a couple of ribs while riding a horse. He was so afraid that they would remove him from the mission that he didn't tell anyone except his wife and one friend, who gave him a broom handle to reach up and close the hatch — since he would not be able to reach up and grab it with his ribs broken.
It was on October 14, 1947, that Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier, Mach 1. He was at an altitude of 45,000 feet — about eight and a half miles up in the air. Fourteen minutes later, he was back on the ground, and he went home to bed to recuperate.
The role of Chuck Yeager was played by Sam Shepard in the movie The Right Stuff (1983), based on the 1979 Tom Wolfe book. Yeager has co-authored a few volumes of memoir, including The Quest for Mach One: A First-Person Account of Breaking the Sound Barrier (1997), Yeager: An Autobiography (1985), and Press on! Further Adventures in the Good Life (1988).