Word: virginia
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...announces that there is no news worth mentioning, advises people not to buy a paper that day. From politics, war, or a headlined disaster he may slip into a spiel on Southern cooking: "Where you go'n' to find better cookin' than in your own Virginia? Provided, of course, you use enough corn bread, and enough bacon in cookin' your vegetables." Even some Richmonders who profess to be fed up with his sagelike utterances and sweet-talkin' voice admit that they listen anyhow...
Durable Heroes. This week, in an attic study 69 miles from George Washington's Virginia birthplace, a self-confessed "amateur" scholar was digging away at the formidable task of making the nation's first President a credible man. It was a rescue job-as biography must be-of a historical character buried alive. At 62, Douglas Southall Freeman, the nation's No. 1 military historian, is a past master at converting the legendary dead into durable heroes. He devoted 19 years to a four-volume biography of Robert E. Lee, the untouchable Galahad of the Confederacy; historians...
...young Washington whom Freeman has shaken loose from thousands of documents is first a proud, preoccupied child (here Freeman is weakest, because of the many undocumented blanks in George's boyhood), then a self-made provincial surveyor, land-grabbing and money-seeking; later, a Virginia colonel of militia in the French arid Indian War with "the quenchless ambition of an ordered mind...
...Freeman family moved to Virginia in 1742, which makes them not quite F.F.V., but Biographer Freeman's maternal ancestors were. Young Douglas was a 17-year-old honor student at Richmond College when his father, who had been a private in Lee's army (and later a general in the Confederate veterans organization), took him to a Confederate reunion. The sight of the Confederacy's brave armless and legless old men stirred young Douglas; he decided: "If someone doesn't write the story of these men, it will be lost forever...
...Even a Smile. Dr. Freeman, though no debunker, is too conscientious a historian to duck any ugliness that must out. Young Washington is proof enough of that. He himself is aware that the first two volumes add few cubits to George Washington's stature. In the Virginia of Washington's day, writes Dr. Freeman, "One verb told the story . . . grab, grab, grab." Washington's father and grandfather had been successful grabbers in a relatively small way. Father Augustine (he was called Gus) could afford to send two of his sons to school in England, though George...