A Pocketful of History

by Jim Noles

  In 1938, the Opry’s popularity surged with the arrival of Roy Acuff to join the show’s regular repertoire of performers. Like the Carter family, Acuff’s musical roots grew from a childhood in Appalachia. In Nashville, he specialized in sentimental and gospel songs carried by his high mountain tenor. Although Acuff shared the Opry’s stage with such legends as Kitty Wells and Eddy Arnold, it was Acuff who was still performing on the show and being revered as the “King of Country Music” even into the 1980s.

  A year after Acuff’s arrival, the Opry earned a slot on the NBC radio network and, in 1943, the show, which rotated through a wide selection of Nashville venues, settled into the venerable Ryman Auditorium. Designed originally as a “gospel tabernacle,” the Ryman instead became famous as “the mother church of country music.” For the next three decades, the Opry called the Ryman home, even as fiddle and banjo tunes and sentimental crooners gave way to steel and electric guitars, artists like Hank Williams and Ernest Tubbs, and the music of the modern honky-tonk.

  Meanwhile, because of men like master guitarist Chet Atkins and extraordinary soundman and producer Owen Bradley, Nashville’s growing record industry helped the Grand Ole Opry ensure that the city was synonymous with country music. Atkins helped craft the famed “Nashville sound,” while studios such as Bradley’s Quonset Hut helped build Nashville’s soon-to-be-legendary Music Row.

  The 1980s, 1990s, and the first decade of the twenty-first century witnessed further evolutions in country music. But all of those evolutions managed to simultaneously build on country music’s past as the new styles, songs, and artists charted a course to country music’s future. And whether one is speaking of country music past or country music future, it is difficult to imagine country music without a guitar—and equally difficult to think of a better instrument to represent the contributions of Central Tennessee on the state quarter.

  In addition to the fiddle and the guitar, however, Tennessee’s state quarter includes a trumpet, intended to symbolize the blues heritage of West Tennessee. It is a fitting choice, for the trumpet was the instrument of W. C. Handy, the “father of the blues.” By the time Handy settled in Memphis in 1908, a variety of musical forms—ranging from Southern folk tunes to church music to minstrel shows to brass bands—had worked their influence on him. And when Edward H. “Boss” Crump commissioned him to write a campaign song, those influences found expression in a tune Handy first entitled “Mr. Crump” and later changed, in 1912, to “Memphis Blues.”

  “Memphis Blues” was Handy’s first commercial success; two years later he scored his greatest with “St. Louis Blues.” In the decade that followed, major record companies began staging what they termed “field sessions” in Memphis—much like Peer had done in Bristol. The years 1925 to 1935 marked a golden age of blues in the city, when groups such as the Memphis Jug Band recorded such infectious tunes as “Sun Brimmer’s Blues” and “K. C. Moan.” One of the highest compliments that could be paid to these musicians is to recognize that four decades later, they were still finding fans in the likes of Bob Dylan.

  Meanwhile, another sub-genre of the blues, the so-called Delta Blues, found a commercial home in Memphis, where master blues-men (and women) such as Furry Lewis, Frank Stokes, Mississippi Fred McDowell, and Memphis Minnie crafted their own national reputations. In doing so, they laid the groundwork for second- and third-generation efforts by the likes of the iconic Riley “B. B.” King. As a disc jockey on Memphis’s WDIA, King billed himself first as the “Blues Boy from Beale Street” and then “Blues Boy.” But after crafting such classics as “The Thrill Is Gone” and “Lucille,” King proved that simply “B. B.” was more than enough to make his point while simultaneously ensuring that Memphis’s Beale Street was synonymous with the blues across the country.

  Of course, Memphis’s musical heritage encompasses far more than the blues. Elvis Presley made his home in Memphis from 1948 to 1977. Aretha Franklin, the “Queen of Soul,” began her musical career singing in the choir at her father’s Memphis church. And speaking of soul music, Isaac Hayes solidified the city’s reputation as a center for soul music, owing to his brilliantly original scoring of the movie Shaft in 1971. It was more than appropriate, therefore, that when the U.S. Mint celebrated the Tennessee state quarter’s release on January 14, 2002, Isaac Hayes joined Ricky Skaggs, Marty Stuart, and Ruby Wilson in a series of musical performances that not only entertained but underscored the incredible diversity of Tennessee’s musical heritage.

  17

  OHIO

  The Illegal Astronaut

  Does Ohio’s quarter violate federal law?

  Perhaps only U.S. Mint engraver Donna Weaver knows.

  Public Law 105-124, also known as the 50 States Commemorative Coin Program Act, directed the U.S. Mint to launch the 50 State Quarters® Program. The act contains a number of restrictions and admonitions regarding the acceptable design of state quarters. In the case of Ohio’s quarter, section 3(1)(4)(E) is particularly relevant. It directs that “no portrait of a living person may be included in the design of any quarter dollar” minted pursuant to the act.

  And that leads to the question: Which astronaut on the Ohio quarter is superimposed over an outline of the state and standing alongside the Wright brothers’ famed flyer? The phrase “Birthplace of Aviation Pioneers,” which is also inscribed on the coin, seems to offer a damning answer—at least as far as section 3(1)(4)(E) is concerned.

  Why? Because Ohio can not only claim to be the birthplace of Orville Wright but also to be the birthplace of two latter-day aviation pioneers, John Glenn and Neil Armstrong. But if it is Glenn’s or Armstrong’s face behind the anonymous astronaut’s face visor, then there is a problem—if only in the most painfully legalistic of minds. Both Glenn and Armstrong are still alive—in fact, they both attended the official launch (no pun intended) of Ohio’s state quarter—and are thus prohibited from depiction on a state quarter.

  Nevertheless, if an exception to the rule is warranted, it would be difficult to think of two more exceptional men. Today, with space shuttles blasting off on increasingly routine missions to support the permanently manned International Space Station, it is far too easy to think of Glenn’s and Armstrong’s aeronautical accomplishments in terms of a historic fait accompli. But a look back at just what they accomplished— and what they overcame to do so—leaves no doubt that their courage and skill should continue to be celebrated today.

  John H. Glenn, Jr., was born in Cambridge, Ohio, in 1921. He later attended primary and secondary school in New Concord, Ohio, where he also earned a Bachelor of Science degree in engineering from Muskingum College. Wartime service as a Marine Corps combat pilot followed during World War II and the Korean War and led to his selection as a Navy test pilot.

  In 1957, Glenn set a transcontinental speed record in an F8U Crusader, streaking from Los Angeles to New York in three hours and twenty-three minutes. Glenn’s was the first transcontinental flight to average supersonic speeds and offered a taste of things to come for the talented, charismatic pilot. Two years later, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration selected Glenn as one of the original seven Project Mercury astronauts, ensuring his place in history as one of America’s most famous astronauts.

  As the pilot of the Mercury capsule Friendship 7, Glenn was not the first man to enter space—Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had claimed that honor ten months earlier. Nor was he the first man to orbit the earth; again, that honor went to a Soviet cosmonaut, Gherman Titov, on August 6, 1961. In fact, Glenn was not even the first American in space. Both Alan Shepard and Virgil “Gus” Grissom logged suborbital flights in the spring and summer of 1961.

  But on February 20, 1962, Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth. For a nation that seemed to be losing the space race to the Soviet Union, Glenn’s three passes around the globe—at a maximum altitude of 162 miles and at an orbital velocity of approximately 17,500 miles per hour—were just the tonic a thirsty American public crave
d.

  In the end, Glenn earned every accolade that he received. First, a malfunction in the automatic control of the capsule’s yaw caused Glenn to have to manually control the capsule in order to maintain its proper altitude. Then a faulty sensor mistakenly warned Glenn that the capsule’s heat shield and landing cushion were not fully in place. In short, it was a very relieved Glenn who splashed down in the Pacific Ocean at the end of that five-hour flight.

  Glenn’s immediate award for his triumph included a ticker-tape parade through the streets of New York before 4 million spectators. Later, his fame helped launch a twenty-five-year career in the U.S. Senate, capped in 1998 by his triumphant return to space at the age of seventy-seven on board the space shuttle Discovery. As the oldest person to fly in space, Glenn again logged his name in the history books on a nine-day mission.

  The success of Glenn’s initial flight in 1962 imbued America’s space program with a renewed sense of confidence. Confidence was an important quality, given that the previous spring, President John F. Kennedy had committed to Congress that the United States would “land a man on the moon and return him safely to the Earth” before the decade was out. In light of the impressive, and seemingly superior, competition from the Soviets, Kennedy’s challenge was decidedly bold. Nevertheless, as Kennedy later told NASA officials, “[W]e chose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

  To command its first mission to the moon, NASA looked to another Ohio native—in this case, Neil A. Armstrong, who was born in Wapakoneta, Ohio, in 1930. After graduating from Purdue University, he served as a naval aviator from 1949 to 1952, logging seventy-eight combat missions during the Korean War. He then joined the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (the predecessor to NASA) and, as a research and test pilot, pioneered many high-speed aircraft, including the sound barrier–breaking X-15.

  In 1962, Armstrong became an astronaut and, four years later, served as the command pilot for the Gemini 8 mission. At the controls of Gemini 8, Armstrong performed the first successful docking of two vehicles in space. In the wake of such success, Armstrong earned a spot on the upcoming Apollo mission to the moon.

  By then, the danger of space flight was all too real to Armstrong and his fellow astronauts. On January 27, 1967, during a ground test of what would be a future moon mission’s command and service module, an oxygen fire claimed the lives of Apollo I astronauts Gus Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee. Trapped inside their capsule as the fire raged within it, the three men never had a chance.

  If memories of the Apollo I disaster were on Armstrong’s mind on July 16, 1969, when he, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, and Michael Collins blasted off from Cape Canaveral on a mission designated Apollo XI, history does not reveal it. But three days later, as Armstrong and Aldrin piloted the lunar module Eagle down to a landing on the southern edge of the moon’s Sea of Tranquility, disaster for the Apollo program loomed once more.

  As Eagle descended, a series of alarms sounded, warning the astronauts and Mission Control back in Houston, Texas, that the rudimentary on-board flight control computers were being overwhelmed with data. Ignoring the alarms, Collins took manual control of the module as planned and began to guide it in for a landing.

  At that point, the two astronauts realized that their prospective landing field was strewn with truck-sized boulders. In response, Collins brought Eagle to a hover 270 feet over the moon’s surface. Nearly three minutes passed as he and Armstrong angled Eagle for a safer spot to land. When they finally did settle in for a landing on the moon’s dusty surface, they had a mere seventy seconds of fuel remaining.

  The close call on the landing did not rattle the two consummate professionals on board Eagle. Rather, they set about making preparations to set foot on the moon. Six and a half hours later, Armstrong squeezed out of the lunar module and, with a careful step off Eagle’s ladder, became the first man on the moon. “That is one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind,” Armstrong declared over the radio to Mission Control.

  Once Aldrin joined him, the two astronauts planted an American flag, collected fifty pounds of moon rocks, and unveiled a commemorative plaque of poetic simplicity.

  “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon, July 1969 AD,” the plaque read. “We came in peace for all mankind.”

  After twelve hours on the moon, Armstrong and Aldrin blasted off to rejoin Collins orbiting overhead. They then turned for home, splashing down in the Pacific Ocean on July 24, 1969. Upon their arrival from mandatory quarantine two and a half weeks later, they were feted as international heroes.

  “Because of what you have done, the heavens have become part of man’s world,” President Richard M. Nixon assured Armstrong and his comrades.

  Thirty-two years later, Ohio’s state quarter matched Nixon’s rhetoric by, in turn, becoming part of the heavens itself. Astronauts Nancy Currie of Troy, Ohio, and Richard Linnehan—like Currie, a graduate of Ohio State University—carried four of the quarters into space on the space shuttle Columbia. Their pocket change provided a fitting tribute to the aviation accomplishments of the Buckeye State and its pioneering progeny.

  18

  LOUISIANA

  The Pelican Brief

  In 2001, Louisiana became the second—but certainly not the last— state that felt compelled to include its state bird on its state quarter. But in the case of the Pelican State’s coin, the case for the brown pelican’s appearance is indeed compelling.

  The brown pelican (Pelecanus occidentalis) is a large, gray-brown bird tufted with white feathers around its head and neck. It can weigh as much as nine pounds and, in the case of larger individuals, boasts a wing span of over seven feet. Some have been known to live for as long as thirty-one years.

  “One of the most interesting of our American birds,” the eighteenth-century naturalist and artist John James Audubon wrote. “The Brown Pelican is a strong and tough bird, although not so weighty as the white species . . . . It seems never satisfied with food . . . and I must say that, much as I admire it in some respects, I should be sorry to keep it near me as a pet.”

  At one time, the pelican inhabited a range that stretched from North Carolina to Texas and Mexico, with a subspecies inhabiting the Caribbean and South America. In those regions, pelicans could be found soaring above the surf, loafing on off-shore sand spits, or nesting—sometimes on the ground, but usually in trees— on the small coastal islands that isolated them from such predators as raccoons and coyotes.

  During the nesting season of early spring and summer, the male pelicans carry nesting materials—sticks, reeds, straws, palmetto leaves, and the like—to their mates, who in turn construct the pair’s nest and lay a clutch of two to four white eggs. Upon hatching, the nestlings depend upon their parents for food for upward of nine weeks. During that time, a typical nestling consumes as much as 150 pounds of fish.

  Nurtured in that manner, the nestlings grow to inherit the slightly comical appearance of their parents, thanks to the droopy underskin beneath their eighteen-inch bills. Designed for function rather than form, that underskin provides pelicans with a 2.5-gallon capacity scoop net for fishing. And when they soar into the air on a hunting expedition intended to put that bill to use, they leave their ungainly image on the ground. When describing their flight, it is difficult to best Audubon’s prosaic observations:

  The flight of the Brown Pelican, though to appearance heavy, is remarkably well sustained, that bird being able not only to remain many hours at a time on wing, but also to mount to a great height in the air to perform its beautiful evolutions.

  Their ordinary manner of proceeding . . . is by easy flappings and sailings alternating at distances of from twenty to thirty yards, when they glide along with great speed. They move in an undulated line, passing at one time high, at another low, over the water or land, for they do not deviate from their course on coming upon a key or a point of land. When the waves
run high, you may see them “troughing,” as the sailors say, or directing their course along the hollows. While on wing they draw in their head between their shoulders, stretch out their broad webbed feet to their whole extent, and proceed in perfect silence. (Audubon 1844, 33)

  Once airborne, pelicans glide gracefully over the open water, seeking fish such as mullet and menhaden with their sharp eyesight. But whether just off the beach or over the horizon, the pelicans’ signature fishing maneuver remains the same. When they spot their prey, they dive like a Stuka dive-bomber, plunging from heights of as much as sixty feet to smash into the water, bill first. The resulting impact would kill ordinary birds. Pelicans, however, are equipped with air sacs just beneath their skin that cushion the otherwise punishing blow.

  Unfortunately, pelicans were not so well equipped to confront the challenge of sharing their habitat with man. Even in his day, Audubon recognized the pressures human settlement placed on brown pelicans.

  “The Pelicans,” he wrote, “in fact are, year after year, retiring from the vicinity of man, and although they afford but very unsavory food at any period of their lives, will yet be hunted beyond the range of civilization, just as our best of all game, the Wild Turkey, is now, until to meet with them the student of nature will have to sail round Terra del Fuego.”

  In the mid-twentieth century, however, the brown pelicans confronted a menace from which they could not fly away—the widespread use of such pesticides as DDT and endrin. Those chemicals were impressive modern-day marvels and lethally effective at killing insect pests.

  Unfortunately, those same chemicals posed both direct and, more insidiously, indirect threats to the pelicans. Misuse of endrin contributed to catastrophic population crashes, while DDT’s metabolites found their way into the food chain, inexorably worked their way up it, and contaminated the fish ingested by the brown pelican. Those fish, in turn, contaminated the pelicans themselves.