Bless my homeland forever.
I remember going to the public library when I was a kid and checking out Roger Ebert’s annual Movie Yearbooks, those huge tomes with hundreds of thin pages packed full with Roger’s brief and potent reviews of movie after movie. A bit later I read the first volume of the Great Movies series, with his graceful longform considerations of the classics in question. There are certain lines of some of those Great Movies reviews that I can still recall nearly word for word, ever though I first read them when I about half as old as I am now.
I have spent many, many happy hours in darkened movie theaters - especially since I moved to Chicago - and I hope to spend many more such hours that way, and I have no doubt that my reading Roger Ebert’s writing is behind a lot of that. There is probably no more pertinent evidence of this than the fact that when I heard about Roger Ebert’s death, I was sitting on a train heading to the Gene Siskel Film Center to see, for the first time, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, which Roger reviewed for the Great Movies series in 1998.
I continued to read his writing quite literally up until the very end, and I sit in awe of him not just as a critic and observer, but as a human being. I think all of us could stand to be as open and unprejudiced as he was about seemingly everything. He absolutely deserves a lot more eloquence than I can summon up right now. Rest in peace, man. The cultural conversation of this country is so greatly diminished without your voice.
The following is an excerpt of a letter written in Texas by Benjamin Briggs Goodrich (1799-1860) to his brother Edmund Goodrich in Nashville. March 15, 1836:
“Texas is in mourning, and it becomes my painful duty to inform my relations in Tennessee of the massacre of my poor brother John. He was murdered in the Texas fortress of San Antonio de Bexar (known as the Alamo) on the night of the 6th of this month, together with one hundred and eighty of our brave countrymen, gallantly defending that place against an invading army of Mexicans, eight thousand strong; not one escaped to tell the dreadful tale. The Alamo had been surrounded for many days by a besieging army of the Mexicans, variously estimated at from 3 to 8 thousand men, 2 commanded by Genl. Lopez de Santa Anna in person; the fortress, as before stated, was besieged, and it fell and every man was put to the sword. They effected their purpose by a general charge aided by scaling ladders. Upwards of five hundred of the enemy were killed, and as many more mortally or dangerously wounded. Col. Travis, the commander of the fortress, sooner than fall into the hands of the enemy, stabbed himself to the heart and instantly died.”
Learn more at Christie’s and the University of North Texas. Illustration from the New York Public Library.
REMEMBER!
Henry Fonda in Young Mr. Lincoln, 1939, and My Darling Clementine, 1947, both directed by John Ford.
This is Abraham Lincoln’s actual business card from the Library of Congress.
