A Name on a Suitcase

I recall one occasion when my grandmother — my father's mother — visited my family when I was a child.

My memory is that my grandmother's visits were rare.

Both sets of my grandparents lived in Dallas, Texas, when I was a child. That made sense. My parents grew up in Dallas.

But, when I was growing up, we lived in central Arkansas, which was more than 300 miles from Dallas. I would have loved to have seen my grandparents more frequently than I did, but distance was a factor.

I lost both of my grandfathers before I was 10 years old, and, by that time, my father's mother was well into her 70s. As a younger woman, she had accompanied my grandfather to places in the U.S. where he taught religion and philosophy — as well as to the Philippines, where they were missionaries for a time — but I guess she didn't have much stamina for road trips after my grandfather died.

Typically, when I was growing up, we visited her in Dallas. We stayed with my mother's mother — she had a house with room for guests whereas my father's mother lived in a one–bedroom apartment that was too small to accommodate a family of four — but we always made time to spend with my father's mother, took her out to eat and stuff like that.

Ordinarily, we made about three or four trips to Dallas each year. My mother's mother often came to visit us, but, as I say, my father's mother rarely did.

It is primarily for that reason, I guess, that I remember her visit.

Another reason I remember that visit is because I had just started taking piano lessons, and my grandmother brought me a music box that was shaped like a bust of Beethoven. When you wound it up, it played Beethoven's Minuet in G.

(I've still got that music box, too. And it still works. It's a little banged up. The paint is missing in places, but Grandmother gave it to me to encourage me, and it still does, all these years later.)

I also remember that visit because I recall, quite vividly, being with Grandmother in the guest room and watching her unpack her suitcase. I noticed the name on the suitcase was Amelia Earhart.

I knew that wasn't my grandmother's name so I asked her, "Who is Amelia Earhart?"

Grandmother replied, "She was a very brave woman," and she proceeded to tell me, in words that would make sense to a child, how Amelia Earhart had been a pioneer for women in aviation.

No one knew what became of her, Grandmother told me. She disappeared while trying to fly around the world.

Maybe her plane went off course and crashed into the ocean. Maybe she managed to land the plane safely but was captured and then executed — perhaps by natives, perhaps by Japanese soldiers. Possibly the plane crashed, but she and/or her navigator survived for awhile. Nobody knew.

I was too young to understand the details of the case, but I have studied it from time to time since then. It continues to intrigue me, as it intrigues others.

And tomorrow, as the search for the wreckage of Earhart's plane resumes in the southwestern Pacific Ocean, I wish the searchers well.

I don't know if they'll find anything, but it would be great if they could. Miraculous even. As I say, it was 75 years ago today that Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan disappeared.

After all this time, no one thinks the remains of either can be found and brought back to the United States for burial.

But it is possible that the searchers will find wreckage from the plane. If they do, it might bring us closer to solving the mystery.

Grainy photographs taken decades ago have prompted some researchers to believe they have seen evidence of a plane in the waters off a coral atoll called Nikumaroro. That — and today's anniversary — prompted the search.

Originally, that search was going to begin today, but it was postponed until tomorrow.

There have been a handful of truly enduring mysteries, and the Earhart disappearance is one of the greatest of them.

Searchers found the Titanic, and Mark Felt revealed that he had been the Deep Throat who kept the Watergate investigation focused.

Perhaps now we will find out what really happened to Amelia Earhart.

Open Up That Golden Gate

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There are a handful of landmarks in the world that I can identify by sight, whether I have ever been near them or not.

For example, I know the Eiffel Tower when I see it. I think I was there once. I was born overseas, and my parents and I returned to the United States when I was about a year old.

I guess you could say we took the overland route back to the States. We traveled through Europe, and I think we were in Paris at one point. If we were, I'm sure we must have been in the vicinity of the Eiffel Tower at some time.

But even if I have never been close to the Eiffel Tower, I know it when I see it.

I know the Egyptian pyramids when I see them, and I know we visited Egypt while we were making our way back to the States. I've seen pictures of myself in the Cairo Airport.

I probably saw the pyramids when I was small, but I have no more memory of them than I do of the Eiffel Tower.

Nevertheless ...

When I was 13, my family spent the summer in Austria, and, at one point, we rented a car and drove through Yugoslavia to Greece, where we saw the Parthenon.

With all the economic woes the Greeks are facing these days, I'm not sure I would want to duplicate that trip today.

But, even before I saw it, I could identify the Parthenon.

I also know the leaning tower of Pisa when I see it.

Of course, how could anyone fail to identify that?

I've never been there, but my father and my stepmother have. They even brought me a coffee mug — which leans, of course. I keep it on my desk to hold my pens.

I know the Gateway Arch in St. Louis when I see it. I've been to St. Louis on a number of occasions, and I have even been inside the Arch a time or two.

And I could identify the Twin Towers in New York — until terrorists brought them down more than a decade ago.

Why all this talk about landmarks?

Well, 75 years ago today, the Golden Gate Bridge was opened in San Francisco (although the finishing touches were completed the next day).

Frommer's travel guide calls it "possibly the most beautiful, certainly the most photographed, bridge in the world."

It is certainly one of America's most recognizable landmarks — if not the world's.

Before the bridge was built, the only way to cross San Francisco Bay was by ferry. Construction of the bridge began in 1933, but it was not a new idea then. People had been talking about a proposal to build a bridge for years, but the estimated cost of the project was prohibitive at the time. Also, until the plan that was ultimately adopted — which called for a suspension bridge — was proposed in 1916, it was believed that winds and currents would be too strong to allow construction of a bridge.

The cost was still pretty high when construction began in 1933, but it has proven to be a great investment. Tens of thousands of vehicles cross the bridge every day.

I've never been to San Francisco, but I have friends who lived there, and I have at least one friend who lives there today.

And at least one of my friends used to commute across the bridge to go to work in the mornings and to come home in the evenings. She drove across it on the day in 1989 when the "pretty big one" struck during the World Series between San Francisco and Oakland.

I didn't know about that at the time. If I had, I probably would have been extremely worried. I didn't hear about it until much later.

And, when I did hear about it, I learned that I had the World Series to thank for my friend not having plunged into the bay when the earthquake hit.

A lot of businesses closed early that day, she told me, so that people could either go to the game or get home (or go to a bar or whatever) in time to watch it on television.

As a result, traffic on the bridge was much lighter than it normally would have been during rush hour — and she had been off the bridge for about five minutes when the quake struck. If it had been an ordinary day, she once told me, she would have been in the middle of the bridge when the earthquake occurred.

Last Sunday, the San Francisco Chronicle observed the many ways that the bridge has inspired inner poets.

For example, a San Francisco Examiner editorial in 1925 wrote that a bridge across the bay would be a "perpetual monument that will make this city's name ring around the world and renew the magical fame which the Golden Gate enjoyed in the days of '49."

"The Golden Gate Bridge's daily strip tease from enveloping stoles of mist to full frontal glory is still the most provocative show in town," wrote Mary Moore Mason, editor of the British magazine Essentially America.

It's fair to say that the bridge, like most iconic landmarks, means different things to different people.

Paul Liberatore of the Marin (Calif.) Independent Journal writes that "[w]hen musicians look at its harplike towers and cables, they hear it as much as they see it.

"That's why Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart plans to celebrate the bridge's 75th anniversary by 'sonifying' the span."

Happy birthday, Golden Gate, and many more.

The Hindenburg Milestone

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It is, perhaps, appropriate that a milestone anniversary for the Hindenburg disaster comes less than a month after a milestone anniversary for the Titanic disaster.

In April, of course, we observed the centennial of the sinking of the Titanic. Twenty–five years later, on this day in 1937, the German airship Hindenburg met a fiery end as it tried to land in New Jersey.

Everyone knows the story of how the Titanic was regarded as unsinkable before it struck an iceberg on its maiden voyage and sank to the bottom of the North Atlantic. I don't know if people felt the same way about the Hindenburg in 1937 — if there was a widespread conviction that the Hindenburg would arrive safely at its destination.

Perhaps there was. The Hindenburg had been flying for little more than a year, and it had been used for propaganda purposes at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. It had crossed the Atlantic earlier in the year and was making the first of 10 round trips between Europe and the United States.

The Hindenburg set no speed records. Even in their relatively developmental state 75 years ago, airplanes could still get people across the ocean faster than airships like the Hindenburg — but airplanes couldn't come close to matching the creature comforts available on the airships. The people who traveled in them were paying for amenities, not speed — and they paid a lot for the privilege.

They were not unlike the first–class passengers on board the Titanic, who were pampered in every imaginable way. The Titanic could cross the ocean as fast as or faster than any other ship on the sea, but a huge ship like that simply couldn't slither through an ice field the way a smaller ship could — and that was its fatal flaw.

No conclusion has ever been reached about the cause of the Hindenburg disaster — but it seems to me that a significant contributing factor would be the fact that, in the 1930s, highly flammable hydrogen was the fuel being used on airships. In the last half–century, airships have relied on the far less flammable helium.

That might not have made a difference, though, if the talk of sabotage that has persisted for 75 years is true. Surely, a saboteur would have found another way to accomplish his objective, and the landing that was scheduled for 75 years ago tonight would have been far too tempting to pass up. Heavy preflight publicity virtually guaranteed that the Hindenburg's arrival would be extensively covered by the press of the day.

In spite of the huge fireball that erupted, more than half of the passengers and crew survived. Proportionately, that was far better than the survival rate on the Titanic although the passenger manifest on the Hindenburg was far shorter.

There was never a chance that the fatality rate on the Hindenburg would come close to that on the Titanic. The numbers just weren't there.

Part of it may have been the shock value that comes from an outcome that simply isn't possible. And part of it may have been the experience, the immediacy of seeing it happen on newsreels.

Whatever it was, the Hindenburg deserves its spot in history the same as the Titanic disaster 25 years earlier — or the Challenger disaster nearly half a century later.