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This Week:
- Timeline: November 2003
- Places & Culture
- City Scene: Manhattan
- Weekly Digest
"I slipped on a baseball cap," President Bush recalled, "as did Condi. We looked like a normal couple." One of the best-kept secrets in presidential travel was safe, and President Bush was on his way Baghdad to surprise troops there and everyone else (including his parents) back home. Other secrets were harder to keep last month. A House committee uncovered the FBI's efforts to bend the law to protect mob informants in New England, efforts the House called "one of the greatest failures in the history of federal law enforcement." Other secrets, conspiracy theorists continued to insist, remained unexposed on the fortieth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. In Detroit, a federal court ordered the deportation of a 78-year-old Romanian immigrant who worked as a guard at a Nazi concentration camp and was found hiding under his basement stairs earlier this summer.
The banishment of a former guard was not the only turning of history's tables in November. A report found that more women than men are applying to American medical schools for the first time ever. The Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled against a ban on same-sex marriages. Wheaton College held its first dance after lifting a 143-year ban on dancing. Freddy Adu, a 14-year-old soccer player, became the youngest American professional athlete since the 19th century. San Francisco witnessed the first hit-and-run incident involving a Segway scooter. Elsewhere, change was resisted; reports surfaced last month of a farming village in Thailand which successfully cracked down on drug dealers by threatening to withhold funerals and prayers upon their deaths.
Bobby Hatfield, one of the Righteous Brothers, died in November at age 63. Gertrude Edelerle, who in 1926 became the first woman to swim the English Channel, died at 98. Warren Spahn won more games than any other left-handed pitcher in baseball history. Bubba Hyde was one of the first inductees into the Negro Leagues Hall of Fame. Hal Walker was one of the first African-American network news correspondents. Penny Singleton was the voice of Jane on The Jetsons. Irv Kupcinet had written the longest-running newspaper column and was a Chicago institution. Art Carney appeared with Jackie Gleason on The Honeymooners. As obituary editor of the Washington Post, Richard Pearson wrote instant biographies. From literature to technology to cartoons, imaginative scholar and critic Hugh Kenner was a devout Catholic and what he would call a "pattern recognizer."
Mike Yaconelli, who died in a car accident last month, was co-founder of The Wittenberg Door and Youth Specialties ministries, and reminded listeners that God's strength arrives in our weakness. "You and I are incomplete," he once said. "And the reality is that's where God meets me: in the mess of my life, in the unfixedness, in the brokenness."
• Related: B&C editor John Wilson on Hugh Kenner in the Boston Globe
PLACES & CULTUREFrom the Washington Post:
Enrique Acevedo's office is a shady corridor under the ornate arches of Santa Domingo Plaza in the cobblestoned heart of Mexico City's historic center, where two dozen typists sit before old metal desks. Like his father and his grandfather, Acevedo is in the letter-writing business. In a country where love is more common than literacy, his typing and spelling skills make for good business. … Acevedo hauls his old desk and typewriter out of a small storage room, plugs in his machine, unfolds his morning paper and waits for the city to bring him its needs. He never waits long. On this day, a contractor asks him to type up an estimate for a new home. Then a policeman wanders up, needing a letter of resignation. … He collects his fee and waits for something juicier to come along—like love or jealousy or betrayal. Full story
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