The Genuine Original

The Internet feeds my need for information. Like that robot on the movie Short Circuit, I need more input. Today while roaming around cyberspace seeking facts and anecdotes about the Gilded Age, I met Kate Carew.

It was a bittersweet meeting. Kate's career title is caricaturist. She has the enviable job of interviewing famous movers and shakers and drawing caricatures to run with her stories in the New York World. Well, that was her job back in the late 1890s and early 1900s. The bitter part of the meeting is that Kate died in the 1960s and I will never get to meet her. Her observant, energetic, skilled interviews will not include any new assignments. I wonder what she would have made of George Bush or Princess Diana or Yo Yo Ma. We'll never know. We'll never see her drawings that capture the attributes a person can not fake. She certainly had an eye and an ear for human nature. Her own caricature included here of 'Kate herself' tells us much about this feisty professional reporter.

But the Internet does include a few of her earlier interviews and that is sweet. I get to sit beside her as she interviews Wilbur and Orville Wright, Mark Twain, Sarah Bernhardt, Picasso....

Kate's true name was Mary Williams and she was born in 1869 in Oakland, Calif. She traveled the world, settled in New York for a time and returned to California to die in 1960. Along the way she wrote with a freedom and unaffected style that I can only wish for.

For example she wrote in one column:

Knowing nothing of politics and caring less, I had the proverbial luck of the beginner at cards.

The Governor of the State of New York waxed confidential with me at a time of great political excitement arising from his having apparently overthrown and usurped the power of the "Boss" of his party, and I treasure a souvenir of the occasion in the shape of a handsome ring sent to me with a letter of commendation by Mr. Pulitzer, the unseen but very-much-felt power behind his great newspaper.

She's a more genteel Dorothy Parker, a fresh voice for a transitional time when Americans were shedding their awe of Europe and finding their own technology. A time when the gap between the wealthy and the poor was widening at an alarming rate. A time when women were fighting for their right to vote and getting rid of corsets and letting machines do the housework and searching for ways to limit family size. And Carew was there to find the humanity in each person she interviewed.

History's Minor Moments

Whenever my brain freezes and I can't break a creative thought free of that ice flow, I turn to 'Moments in History. ' It amazes me how many diverse things happen through history on one particular date. Today I found the History Channel's "This Day in History."

On August 7, the dollar shrank. Literally got smaller. The treasury redesigned and issued the new currency that features many icons we recognize today. George Washington creates the first purple heart medal, Teddy Roosevelt is nominated by the Bull Moose Party, and keeping with a presidential theme -- tomorrow is the date Nixon resigned.

This is also the date in 1947, that the Kon-Tiki, a wooden raft captained by Norwegian anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl, completed its 4,300 mile journey from Peru to Raroia, near Tahiti.

I've had fantasies about becoming a travel writer. Exploring the world and writing about it. But never did I think that riding a wooden raft on the open ocean would be a fun thing.

I remember the hype and excitement when Heyerdahl built a second Kon-Tiki. Even then, it didn't make much sense to me. Obviously I was a minority in this attitude because the subsequent book became a best seller and Heyerdahl's documentary about the voyage became an Academy Award winning documentary in 1951. Little boys played cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers, and raft riding on the ocean in Kon-Tiki.

The raft was a copy of a an ancient Egyptian papyrus vessel and in 1969 Heyerdahl recreated the raft once again. I was a junior in high school. Truthfully I was much more interested in dating and boys, than in some old guy working with a Burundi tribe from Chad in Central Africa to build a replica of an even older raft. Sailing across the ocean to prove some theory about how people might have migrated from the main continent to the small islands. And, I couldn't comit to much more than a Saturday night date, let alone 101 days with six guys on a raft.

Of course if everyone felt as I did about safety and security and staying in familiar territory, we'd all still be living in the Garden of Eden....well, that doesn't necessarily sound like a bad thing. My point being that no one would have set out to find new lands, meet foreign cultures, or learn new ways of living.

We need risk takers, explorers, questioners, and planners, and what-if askers. It is a good thing, this diversity. If we were all jumping into the ocean on tiny rafts -- we'd look like a world of Lemings. And we all know what happened to them.

Maybe it was this little wooden raft that gave men the feeling of possibility. The possibility that led us to the moon and this past week to launch yet another exploration of Mars expedition. Although 'manned' by robotic type machines, this exploration isn't so much different than Heyerdahl's adventure. What else could we learn from past adventurers' and their explorations? It doesn't hurt to look backwards now and then. It thaws the brain and fills it with possibilities. What a great way to spend a hot August day. Almost as good as being there....