Prof. Boerner's Explorations

by Gerald Boerner

If there is an area associated with African American culture in this country, it would be in New Orleans. More specifically, it would be on Bourbon Street and especially in the Lower 9th Ward of that city. These people may be poor, but they are proud of their people and culture. Having visited this area back in 2000, the houses were apparently run-down on the outside, but filled with pride and family on the inside.

All this was changed when hurricane Katrina hit. It devastated the city, YES, but it especially was brutal on the Lower 9th Ward. Along with the outward destruction of the flood waters, a treasure trove of photography was partially lost as well. Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick had documented the Black community in New Orleans for years and many of their images were “whipped out” by the flooding. Today, we recognize their dedication to their community.  GLB

“If you want the soul of the city, we have images that depict not the tourist part but what you call the black belt of the South.”
— Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick

“We knew we had to get a space. Our work is part of the community. It needed a place to live…”
— Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick

“Me and Chandra knew it would bring a light to the community. We made the whole art world to come to the Ninth ward.”
— Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick

“Fats Domino’s piano in debris and Keith and Chandra’s photographs floating away.”
— Douglas Brinkley

“The message is (from) a very poor neighbourhood that has pollution.”
— Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick

“Many people want to help after a disaster. What I discovered is a situation that existed before the storm, a problem that could even be found in the blood of children…”
— Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick

“It’s a different way of understanding art. Some art now is being made (that) allows the person visiting to be part of it. (Visitors) will find something worthy of protecting. They can enter it and find something that is really valuable.”
— Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick

“The Lower Ninth Ward is kind of the heart and soul of the African-American experience in New Orleans, and what’s New Orleans without the African-American experience? It would be a big statement if we could save the Lower Ninth Ward, and I think some of their cultural photography could be helpful toward that end.”
— Douglas Brinkley

Black Photographers: Keith Calhoun & Chandra McCormick 

Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick both grew up in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans and have documented the city and surrounding areas for the past three decades. Keith and creative partner and wife Chandra have focused their cameras intensively on musicians, dockworkers, churchgoers, and agricultural laborers, as well as inmates at the Angola State Penitentiary. Keith and Chandra’s work has been featured in Aperture Magazine and in Deborah Willis’ landmark compilation Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers, 1840 to the Present. Their photographs have been exhibited at the Smithsonian Institution, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Philadelphia African American Museum, the Civil Rights Museum, and the New Orleans Museum of Art.

McCormick and Calhoun lost two-thirds of their photographic archives when their home and studio were ravaged by the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina. In 2006, Keith and Chandra received a Katrina Media Fellowship from the Open Society Institute to produce 40 post-flood portraits of fellow displaced residents now living in Oklahoma, Louisiana, Texas, and Tennessee. More recently, the two have completed extensive renovations on a shotgun double near the site of their former home and have turned this building into a gallery and community center. Named the L9 Center for the Arts, the facility includes dedicated space for artists-in-residence and will be one of the official venues for "Project.1 New Orleans," the largest biennial of contemporary art ever held in the United States.

It was 1978. A few years later, they were married, and they’ve been documenting life in New Orleans as close collaborators ever since, especially in the Lower Ninth Ward and the Treme, the neighborhood just north of the French Quarter and one of the first free black neighborhoods in the country.

Calhoun and McCormick fled to the Houston area the day before Hurricane Katrina hit. “We left everything,” McCormick said. “We took a box, but it wasn’t that large, and once we got to Texas, it really wasn’t the important stuff.” When they left, the house was full of two lives’ work: thousands of prints, countless negatives. When they returned, ten weeks later, much of it was gone, and that which remained was waterlogged and caked with mud.

Distraught, they threw away a lot of the damaged prints and negatives. Then their son suggested they stop. The water had left swirling patterns of color on some of the transparencies, and the spots of mold on some of the prints looked quite beautiful if you looked past what had been lost. “What do you do?,” Keith said, holding up a mold-marbled image of a young Wynton Marsalis playing trumpet on a streetcorner. “Do you throw this away, or does it become a piece of art?”
— The New Yorker

Chandra McCormick

Chandra McCormick is a documentary photographer who chronicles the sociocultural aspects of human life. Born in New Orleans in 1957, her career background includes photography, activism, and history, which has given her a unique capability to focus on a range of subjects not commonly covered by other documentary photographers.

McCormick is renowned for capturing many different aspects of New Orleans culture, as well as the lifestyles of her fellow New Orleanians. In addition to documenting the city’s social and cultural history, McCormick has studied and documented religious ceremonies of the Spiritual Churches, which have rarely been captured. She has also focused on African American laborers, such as sugarcane scrappers and sweet potato workers of rural Louisiana. She has produced an extensive body of work on Angola Prison, focusing on its incarcerated men and the impact of the prison system on their families; the work was featured in Aperture in February 2006.

Her work has been published in numerous magazines and newspapers, including Aperture, The New York Times, Houston Chronicle, Chicago Sun-Times, and Albuquerque Tribune. Her photographs have been included in exhibitions at the Smithsonian Institution, Brooklyn Museum, Philadelphia African American Museum, Civil Rights Museum, New Orleans Museum of Art, the Peace Museum, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, New York University, and Aperture Gallery.

Keith Calhoun

Born and raised in the Lower Ninth Ward, Keith Calhoun is a New Orleans photographer committed to documenting the local culture, spirit, and people of his hometown.

Keith began his photographic career running a portrait studio in the French Quarter of New Orleans. Since then, he has documented the African American community in New Orleans and its surrounding areas, creating a unique body of work that chronicles the daily lives and cultural richness of this community over the past thirty years. Past work includes stories on laborers on the loading docks of the Mississippi River, sugarcane plantations on River Road, and day laborers working in sweet potato and cotton fields. In addition, he has produced an extensive body of work on Angola Prison, focusing on its incarcerated men and the impact of the prison system on their families; the work was featured in Aperture in February 2006.

Calhoun’s work has been published in numerous magazines and newspapers, including The New York Times, Houston Chronicle, Chicago Sun-Times, and Albuquerque Tribune. His photographs have been included in exhibitions at the Smithsonian Institution, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Philadelphia African American Museum, Civil Rights Museum, New Orleans Museum of Art, The Peace Museum, The Nathan Cummings Foundation, New York University, and Aperture Gallery. He has received several awards from the New Orleans Press Club.

Their Work

The New York Times featured these two photographers and their work in documenting the life of the Black, Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans. They observed:

NEW ORLEANS — On a hazy summer afternoon several years before Hurricane Katrina, Chandra McCormick spied a juke joint with an open door in the Lower Ninth Ward. She nudged her husband, Keith Calhoun, and they stopped their car.

For a Slide Show, Click on the image below:

Before the hurricane forced his family into exile in Texas, Mr. Calhoun used to love nothing more than to slip inside some neighborhood dive with a camera on his shoulder. Casual and loose-limbed, he would buy a beer, banter with the men, flirt with the ladies and wait for the moment when the light or the vibe was just right.

A photograph of Junior’s Bar,
in the Lower Ninth Ward of
New Orleans.
— Keith Calhoun.

Documenting, he called it, or chronicling. Mr. Calhoun and Ms. McCormick, both photographers who grew up in the mostly African-American Lower Ninth Ward, dedicated their existence to it. They considered themselves "keepers of the culture," guardians of a small-town way of life in black Louisiana that was fading even before Katrina destroyed so much so quickly.

On that afternoon at Junior’s juke joint, Mr. Calhoun did not wait long for his moment. Light was streaming into the storefront bar beside the Industrial Canal. A man paused in the doorway, pouring a beer into a tilted cup, the shadow of his legs tracing stripes across the floor. Perched on carpeted benches beneath a mirror that toyed with their reflections, the other patrons chatted and laughed, their bodies slack in the heat.

References:

Deborah Willis. (2002) Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers 1840 to the Present. W.W. Norton & Co.

Background and biographical information is from Wikipedia articles on:

Wikipedia: Chandra McCormick… 
[None Available]

Wikipedia: Keith Calhoun…
[None Available]

Web Sites and Blogs: 

Calhoun McCormick Photography: Bio…
http://calhounmccormickphotography.com/Bios/Bio.html

The New York Times: When the Lower Ninth Posed Proudly…
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/09/arts/09stre.html

The New Yorker: Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick’s New Orleans…
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2010/02/mardi-gras.html

The Star: New Orleans’ Hidden Treasures…
http://www.thestar.com/article/585989

by Gerald Boerner

Yesterday, we considered one of the founders of the Intel Corporation, Gordon Moore. Today we consider the contributions of Andrew Grove who became the CEO of Intel and guided it through the dynamic process of creating RAM and Microprocessor chips. These semiconductors were the basis upon which the modern microcomputer industry rested. We probably would never have heard of innovators like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. We thank you, Intel, for your bravery in entering new niches where the more established feared to go.  GLB

“People can’t memorize computer industry acronyms.”
— Andy Grove

“Technology happens, it’s not good, it’s not bad. Is steel good or bad?”
— Andy Grove

“A fundamental rule in technology says that whatever can be done will be done.”
— Andy Grove

“Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.”
— Andy Grove

“Stressing output is the key to improving productivity, while looking to increase activity can result in just the opposite.”
— Andy Grove

“When TV first came, people tried to look at it as a radio with pictures. We’re at the stage now where the Internet is TV with poor connections.”
— Andy Grove

“Just as you would not permit a fellow employee to steal a piece of office equipment, you shouldn’t let anyone walk away with the time of his fellow managers.”
— Andy Grove

“You have to pretend you’re 100 percent sure. You have to take action; you can’t hesitate or hedge your bets. Anything less will condemn your efforts to failure.”
— Andy Grove

Wizards of the Internet: Andrew Grove

Andrew Stephen "Andy" Grove (Born: 1936) is a Hungarian American businessman and engineer. He was one of the earliest employees of Intel Corporation and ultimately played key leadership roles in its success.

Grove was born to a middle-class Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary. Growing up, he was known to friends as "Andris". At the age of four, Andris was diagnosed with scarlet fever. The disease was nearly fatal, and while he survived, he suffered significant hearing loss as a result. During the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 he left his home and family under the cover of night and emigrated to the United States, arriving in New York City in 1957. Grove and his wife Eva were married in 1958 and raised two daughters.

Grove earned a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the City College of New York in 1960, and earned a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 1963.

Career

Grove worked at Fairchild Semiconductor before becoming the third employee at the nascent Intel Corporation. He became Intel’s president in 1979, its CEO in 1987, and its Chairman and CEO in 1997.

It doesn’t come naturally. In his four decades in Silicon Valley, Grove has earned renown as a scientist and a strategist, an operations wizard and a management guru, an empire builder and a captain of industry. But to each of these divergent roles, Grove has brought two common qualities: the self-advertised paranoia for which he’s famous and a skepticism so thorough and withering it stings. Averse to cant, allergic to hype, he has a hard mind and a cold eye and zero tolerance for bullshit – even when bullshit would play to his advantage. In an industry where the honorific "visionary" is applied as liberally as lip gloss in Hollywood, Grove resolutely refuses the label. Once, we were talking about Intel’s invention of the microprocessor in 1971, and I noted that Grove’s mentor, Gordon Moore, had described it at the time as "one of the most revolutionary products in the history of mankind." Lobbing a blimp-sized softball of a question, I asked Grove if he’d seen the chip’s potential with equal clarity.

"I didn’t," he replied without a moment’s hesitation. "I was running an assembly line designed to build memory chips. I saw the microprocessor as a bloody nuisance."
— Wired Magazine Interview

Grove is credited with having transformed Intel from a manufacturer of memory chips into one of the world’s dominant producers of microprocessors. During his tenure as CEO, Grove oversaw a 4,500% increase in Intel’s market capitalization from $4 billion to $197 billion, making it, at the time, the world’s most valuable company.^[2] He relinquished his CEO title in May 1998 and remained chairman of the board until November 2004. Grove continues his work at Intel as a senior advisor.

While Grove was, in fact, Intel’s third employee, he received employee number four by a clerical error. Leslie L. Vadász was hired by Andy Grove and was designated as employee number three by virtue of the same clerical error.

Robert Noyce and Gordon E. Moore were the co-founders of Intel, along with six others who left Fairchild Semiconductor. Noyce claims to have been the catalyst of the group, and some suggest that the relaxed culture at Intel was a carryover from Noyce’s style at Fairchild. Grove, on the other hand, was fiercely competitive, and he and the company became known for his guiding motto: "Only the paranoid survive". Noyce was essentially anti-competitive, even to the extent that, as Tom Wolfe in "Hooking Up" points out, all spaces in the parking lot were fair game, first come, first served. This difference in styles reputedly caused some degree of friction between Noyce and Grove.

Time Magazine, in its tribute to Grove, observed the Digital Revolution with Grove at its center, as follows:

Fifty years ago this week–shortly after lunch on Dec. 23, 1947–the Digital Revolution was born. It happened on a drizzly Tuesday in New Jersey, when two Bell Labs scientists demonstrated a tiny contraption they had concocted from some strips of gold foil, a chip of semiconducting material and a bent paper clip. As their colleagues watched with a mix of wonder and envy, they showed how their gizmo, which was dubbed a transistor, could take an electric current, amplify it and switch it on and off.

That Digital Revolution is now transforming the end of this century the way the Industrial Revolution transformed the end of the last one. Today, millions of transistors, each costing far less than a staple, can be etched on wafers of silicon. On these microchips, all the world’s information and entertainment can be stored in digital form, processed and zapped to every nook of a networked planet. And in 1997, as the U.S. completed nearly seven years of growth, the microchip has become the dynamo of a new economy marked by low unemployment, negligible inflation and a rationally exuberant stock market.

Honors and Achievements

• On August 25, 2009, Governor Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver announced that Grove would be one of 13 California Hall of Fame inductees in The California Museum’s yearlong exhibit. The induction ceremony is on December 1, 2009 in Sacramento, California.
• Strategic Management Society’s Lifetime Achievement Award (2001)
• IEEE 2000 Medal of Honor (2000)
• Time Magazine’s Man of the Year (1997)
• Industry Week’s Technology Leader of the Year (1997)
• CEO magazine’s CEO of the Year (1997)
• The 1st Annual Heinz Award in Technology, the Economy and Employment
• AEA Medal of Achievement award (1993)
• IEEE Engineering Leadership Recognition award (1987)
• In 2006 he made a 26,000,000 USD donation to City College of New York, the largest donation ever made to that school.

Intel Corporation Microchip Legacy

Intel was on the forefront of the digital revolution, led by men such as Gordon Moore and Andrew Grove. They created the chips upon which the microcomputer revolution was founded, starting with the Altair 8800.

SRAMS and the Microprocessor

The company’s first products were shift register memory and random-access memory integrated circuits, and Intel grew to be a leader in the fiercely competitive DRAM, SRAM, and ROM markets throughout the 1970s. Concurrently, Intel engineers Marcian Hoff, Federico Faggin, Stanley Mazor and Masatoshi Shima invented Intel’s first microprocessor. Originally developed for the Japanese company Busicom to replace a number of ASICs in a calculator already produced by Busicom, the Intel 4004 was introduced to the mass market on November 15, 1971, though the microprocessor did not become the core of Intel’s business until the mid-1980s. (Note: Intel is usually given credit with Texas Instruments for the almost-simultaneous invention of the microprocessor.)

From DRAM to Microprocessors

In 1983, at the dawn of the personal computer era, Intel’s profits came under increased pressure from Japanese memory-chip manufacturers, and then-President Andy Grove drove the company into a focus on microprocessors. Grove described this transition in the book Only the Paranoid Survive. A key element of his plan was the notion, then considered radical, of becoming the single source for successors to the popular 8086 microprocessor.

Until then, manufacture of complex integrated circuits was not reliable enough for customers to depend on a single supplier, but Grove began producing processors in three geographically distinct factories, and ceased licensing the chip designs to competitors such as Zilog and AMD. When the PC industry boomed in the late 1980s and 1990s, Intel was one of the primary beneficiaries.

Intel, x86 Processors, and the IBM PC

 The integrated circuit from an Intel 8742,
an 8-bit microcontroller that includes a
CPU running at 12 MHz, 128 bytes of
RAM, 2048 bytes of EPROM, and
I/O in the same chip.

Despite the ultimate importance of the microprocessor, the 4004 and its successors the 8008 and the 8080 were never major revenue contributors at Intel. As the next processor, the 8086 (and its variant the 8088) was completed in 1978, Intel embarked on a major marketing and sales campaign for that chip nicknamed "Operation Crush", and intended to win as many customers for the processor as possible. One design win was the newly created IBM PC division, though the importance of this was not fully realized at the time.

IBM introduced its personal computer in 1981, and it was rapidly successful. In 1982, Intel created the 80286 microprocessor, which, two years later, was used in the IBM PC/AT. Compaq, the first IBM PC "clone" manufacturer, produced a desktop system based on the faster 80286 processor in 1985 and in 1986 quickly followed with the first 80386-based system, beating IBM and establishing a competitive market for PC-compatible systems and setting up Intel as a key component supplier.

In 1975 the company had started a project to develop a highly advanced 32-bit microprocessor, finally released in 1981 as the Intel iAPX 432. The project was too ambitious and the processor was never able to meet its performance objectives, and it failed in the marketplace. Intel extended the x86 architecture to 32 bits instead.

386 microprocessor

During this period Andrew Grove dramatically redirected the company, closing much of its DRAM business and directing resources to the microprocessor business. Of perhaps greater importance was his decision to "single-source" the 386 microprocessor. Prior to this, microprocessor manufacturing was in its infancy, and manufacturing problems frequently reduced or stopped production, interrupting supplies to customers. To mitigate this risk, these customers typically insisted that multiple manufacturers produce chips they could use to ensure a consistent supply. The 8080 and 8086-series microprocessors were produced by several companies, notably Zilog and AMD. Grove made the decision not to license the 386 design to other manufacturers, instead producing it in three geographically distinct factories in Santa Clara, California; Hillsboro, Oregon; and the Phoenix, Arizona suburb of Chandler; and convincing customers that this would ensure consistent delivery. As the success of Compaq’s Deskpro 386 established the 386 as the dominant CPU choice, Intel achieved a position of near-exclusive dominance as its supplier. Profits from this funded rapid development of both higher-performance chip designs and higher-performance manufacturing capabilities, propelling Intel to a position of unquestioned leadership by the early 1990s.

486, Pentium, and Itanium

Intel introduced the 486 microprocessor in 1989, and in 1990 formally established a second design team, designing the processors code-named "P5" and "P6" in parallel and committing to a major new processor every two years, versus the four or more years such designs had previously taken. The P5 was earlier known as "Operation Bicycle" referring to the cycles of the processor. The P5 was introduced in 1993 as the Intel Pentium, substituting a registered trademark name for the former part number (numbers, such as 486, are hard to register as a trademark). The P6 followed in 1995 as the Pentium Pro and improved into the Pentium II in 1997. New architectures were developed alternately in Santa Clara, California and Hillsboro, Oregon.

The Santa Clara design team embarked in 1993 on a successor to the x86 architecture, codenamed "P7". The first attempt was dropped a year later, but quickly revived in a cooperative program with Hewlett-Packard engineers, though Intel soon took over primary design responsibility. The resulting implementation of the IA-64 64-bit architecture was the Itanium, finally introduced in June 2001. The Itanium’s performance running legacy x86 code did not achieve expectations, and it failed to compete effectively with 64-bit extensions to the original x86 architecture, introduced by AMD, named x86-64 (although Intel uses the name Intel 64, previously EM64T). As of 2009, Intel continues to develop and deploy the Itanium.

The Hillsboro team designed the Willamette processors (code-named P67 and P68) which were marketed as the Pentium 4.

References:

Katie Hafner & Matthew Lyon. (1998) Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet. Simon & Schuster

Background and biographical information is from Wikipedia articles on:

Wikipedia: ARPANet… 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPAnet

Wikipedia: The Internet…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Internet

Wikipedia: Andrew Grove…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Grove

Wikipedia: Intel Corporation…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Corporation

Web Sites and Blogs:

TIME Magazine: The Digital Age… driven by the passion of Intel’s Andrew Grove…
http://www.time.com/time/special/moy/grove/opener1.html

Wired Magazine: Interview — Andy Grove’s Rational Exuberance…
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.06/intel.html

by Gerald Boerner

We grew up repeating the Pledge of Allegiance at the beginning of each school day starting in elementary school. We may have even studied the different flags associated with Colonial forces during the Revolutionary War; I know that I did when I was a Boy Scout. We may even have used the term “Old Glory” in a song or some story told around the kitchen table or camp fire without ever knowing that it refers to an actual flag. Today, we look more closely at the flag called “Old Glory”.  GLB

“The symbol of our national life.”
— Justice Felix Frankfurter

“The flag is a symbol of the government.”
— Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“The most famous poem about the flag, The Star Spangled Banner, can be found in our Documents of Freedom section.”
— Francis Scott Key, the “Star Spangled Banner”

“We do not consecrate the flag by punishing its desecration, for in doing so we dilute the freedom that this cherished emblem represents.”
— Supreme Court Decision, Texas v. Johnson

“This flag, which we honor and under which we serve, is the emblem of our unity, our power, our thought and purpose as a nation. It has no other character than that which we give it from generation to generation. The choices are ours…”
— President Woodrow Wilson

“We have room for but one flag, the American flag, and this excludes the red flag which symbolizes all wars against liberty and civilization just as much as it excludes any foreign flag of a nation to which we are hostile…”
— Theodore Roosevelt to Richard Hurd

“I just really wonder, during the last war, you know, what business did it have on the news sets to have the American flag flying in the background? I mean it was like the news media covered the Iraq War, at least at the begining of it, almost like it was a football game with us vs. them.”
— Ted Turner

“Americans revere their flag as a symbol of the Nation. Indeed, it is because of that reverence that the amendment is under consideration. Few countries in the world would think of amending their Constitution for the purpose of protecting such a symbol…. If they are destroying a flag that belongs to someone else, that’s a prosecutable crime. If it is a flag they own, I really don’t want to amend the Constitution to prosecute someone for foolishly desecrating their own property. We should condemn them and pity them instead.”
— General Colin Powell, USA (Ret)

“Old Glory”

Old Glory is a common nickname for the flag of the United States, bestowed by William Driver, an early nineteenth century American sea captain.

However, it also refers specifically to the flag owned by Driver, which has become one of the U.S.’s most treasured historical artifacts.

This famous name was coined by Captain William Driver, a shipmaster of Salem, Massachusetts, in 1831. As he was leaving on one of his many voyages aboard the brig CHARLES DOGGETT – and this one would climax with the rescue of the mutineers of the BOUNTY – some friends presented him with a beautiful flag of twenty four stars. As the banner opened to the ocean breeze for the first time, he exclaimed “Old Glory!”

He retired to Nashville in 1837, taking his treasured flag from his sea days with him. By the time the Civil War erupted, most everyone in and around Nashville recognized Captain Driver’s “Old Glory.” When Tennesee seceded from the Union, Rebels were determined to destroy his flag, but repeated searches revealed no trace of the hated banner.

Then on February 25th, 1862, Union forces captured Nashville and raised the American flag over the capital. It was a rather small ensign and immediately folks began asking Captain Driver if “Old Glory” still existed. Happy to have soldiers with him this time, Captain Driver went home and began ripping at the seams of his bedcover. As the stitches holding the quilt-top to the batting unraveled, the onlookers peered inside and saw the 24-starred original “Old Glory”!

Early history

This original Old Glory was made and presented to the young Captain Driver by his mother and some young ladies of his native Salem, Massachusetts. The year is uncertain, but it was probably sometime in the 1820s. It is a large flag, measuring 10 feet by 17 feet, heavily constructed and designed to be flown from a ship’s mast. It originally had 24 stars and, symbolic of its nautical purpose, includes a small anchor sewn in the corner of its blue canton.

The captain was very pleased with his gift, and always kept it with him. By most accounts, he first hailed the flag as “Old Glory,” when he left harbor for a trip around the world in 1831-1832, as commander of the whaling vessel Charles Doggett. Old Glory served as the ship’s official flag throughout the voyage. Some weathering and fraying almost certainly occurred during this severe service, and the flag shows evidence of patching on more than one occasion.

Civil War

Driver retired from the sea in 1837 and moved to Nashville, Tennessee. He flew his beloved flag on all patriotic occasions, using a rope suspended across the street, and Old Glory became well known to the citizenry. By 1861, it was modified to show 34 stars (the number of states then in the Union).

When the Civil War broke out and Tennessee seceded from the union in 1861, Driver knew or feared that the rebel government would attempt to destroy the locally famous Old Glory. He had the flag sewn inside a comforter to conceal it. One curious point, never explained, is that he seems to have had this done by some neighbor girls named Bailey, rather than by his own family. Accounts differ as to whether and how hard the Confederate authorities searched for the flag, but in any event it survived. When Union forces retook Nashville the following year, Driver was able to bring out his flag and hoist it from the state capitol spire, the last time it flew from a flagpole. A unit of Federal troops, the Sixth Ohio Regiment, was present, and adopted “Old Glory” as their motto. These dramatic events were reported by many newspapers, and Old Glory became nationally famous.

Nashville Exhibit

In 2006, the Smithsonian acceded to a request from the Tennessee State Museum to display Old Glory in Nashville once again. Coupled with other Old Glory-related artifacts and memorabilia from the state library and archives, it was shown from March to November, in an exhibit entitled Old Glory: An American Treasure Comes Home. Due to its age and fragility, officials of the Smithsonian stated that after the Nashville exhibit, it will never be permitted to travel again.

More Information about William Driver

William Driver (1803–1886) was a U.S. ship captain. He coined the phrase Old Glory for the U.S. flag.

As a birthday present, young Capt. William Driver of Salem, Massachusetts was presented a beautiful flag by his family and a group of friends. Driver was delighted with the gift. He exclaimed, “I name her ‘Old Glory,’” and Old Glory subsequently accompanied the captain on his voyages. (Although Driver later stated that the received the flag on his birthday, Year 1831. Driver made his most extensive voyage in 1831-1832, when he captained the 110-ton whaler Charles Doggett. He called at Tahiti during the trip, where he met some of the descendants of the crew of H.M.S. Bounty. They had moved there from Pitcairn Island, where their ancestors had famously been marooned by the mutineers who had taken control of the Bounty. However, they were unhappy in Tahiti and requested that Driver give them passage back to Pitcairn. He did so, and reportedly slept on deck to allow more room for the women and children in the bunks below.

Captain Driver quit the sea in 1837. He settled in Nashville, Tennessee, where he had relatives living. On patriotic days he displayed Old Glory proudly from a rope extending from his house to a tree across the street. As the Civil War began, after Tennessee seceded from the Union in 1861, Driver feared that Old Glory might be confiscated or destroyed by the Confederate authorities. He hid the flag, having it sewn inside a comforter. When Union soldiers entered Nashville on February 25, 1862, Driver removed Old Glory from its hiding place. He carried the flag to the Tennessee State Capitol and raised it on the capitol flagpole. He is said to have remained on watch all that night to ensure that the flag came to no harm.

Shortly before his death, the old sea captain placed a small bundle into the arms of his daughter. He said to her, “Mary Jane, this is my ship flag, Old Glory. It has been my constant companion. I love it as a mother loves her child. Cherish it as I have cherished it.” Captain Driver is buried in Nashville’s historic City Cemetery, under an unusual marker of his own design–a ship’s anchor leaning against a vine-covered tree. By a special act of Congress, Driver’s gravesite is one of three places in the United States where a flag may be flown twenty four hours a day. His house, where Old Glory so often flew, no longer exists, but a historical plaque near its location on Fifth Avenue South commemorates him.

Mary Jane took the flag with her as she married and moved, first to Nevada and then to California, occasionally displaying it at or near her home. In the early 1900s, she sewed the deteriorating flag to a bedsheet in order to stabilize it.

The flag remained as a precious heirloom in the Driver family until 1922. Then it was sent to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., where it is carefully preserved under glass today. It and the flag which flew over Fort McHenry during the British bombardment of 1814, inspiring Francis Scott Key to write the The Star-Spangled Banner, are considered the two most historically significant flags in the country and two of the greatest treasures of the Smithsonian.

In 2006, the Smithsonian Institution agreed to a one-time loan of Old Glory to the Tennessee State Museum. The exhibit will run from March to November and will include other Driver memorabilia from the Tennessee state archives, such as the Charles Doggett’s logbook and some of Driver’s personal journals. Its title is Old Glory: An American Treasure Comes Home.

Other Events on this Day

• In 1836…
  Inventor Samuel Colt patents his revolver.
• In 1862…
  Captain William Driver flies Old Glory after Union troops enter Nashville.
• In 1870…
  Hiram R. Revels, a Mississippi Republican, becomes the first black U.S. senator when he is sworn in to complete the unexpired term of Jefferson Davis, former president of the Confederacy.
• In 1901…
  J.P. Morgan forms U.S. Steel, the world’s first billion-dollar company.
• In 1933…
  The USS Ranger, the first U.S. Navy ship designed and built as an aircraft carrier, is launched at Newport News, Virginia.

Dates and events based on:

William J. Bennett and John Cribb, (2008) The American Patriot’s Almanac Daily Readings on America. (Kindle Edition)

Background information is from Wikipedia articles on:

Wikipedia: Old Glory… 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Glory

Wikipedia: William Driver… 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Driver

Betsy Ross Homepage Resources: Quotes and Notes…
http://www.ushistory.org/betsy/flagquot.html

The Flag of the United States of America: Old Glory…
http://www.usflag.org/history/oldglorystory.html