Voices of a Century Heard in Letters

As we draw closer to the big “M,” retrospectives on the 20th century are rolling out ad nauseum. But this one is truly special: “Letters of the Century: America, 1900-1999” (Dial Press, $35) is an extraordinary collection of more than 400 letters by famous figures and ordinary folk, compiled by husband-and-wife team Lisa Grunwald and Stephen J. Adler. The letters, arranged chronologically, provide a fascinating window on the events and trends of 20th century America.

Included in the diverse collection are a hilarious complaint sent to the president of Western Union by author Mark Twain in 1902 (he calls the manager of the local office “head corpse”); Einstein’s 1939 letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt warning about atomic warfare; Martin Luther King Jr.’s brilliant 1963 “Letter From a Birmingham Jail”; and a missive that John F. Kennedy Jr. addressed to Nikita Khrushchev during the 1962 Bay of Pigs crisis.

A Vietnam soldier writes poignantly to his parents in Virginia about his moral conflict over killing an 8-year-old grenade-toting girl. Rock Hudson informs five former sex partners in 1984 about the AIDS virus that would kill him.

The authors mined half a million letters found in libraries, universities, archives, friends’ attics and the Internet for the book, which took four years to research.

“The 1980s and ‘90s were tougher [to research]--not because fewer people wrote letters necessarily, but because the leg work had not been done,” Grunwald told us. “Certainly, we didn’t have to dredge up a Mark Twain letter or write to his secretary asking for one of his letters. We got to go to the library and read six volumes of letters by Mark Twain.

“There were also some [letters] we never got,” said Grunwald, a novelist. (Adler is an editor at the Wall Street Journal.) “I had this notion it would be moving to have a suicide letter from 1929, the year the stock market crashed. I can’t tell you how many books, newspaper articles and biographies we tried to find that letter. We discovered there weren’t as many suicides as we thought.”

“Letters give history a voice,” the authors state simply, and the book celebrates that.

If that is true, we can only hope the illuminating art of letter writing will not be extinguished in the 21st century.

*

Those who have never heard of the H.J. Heinz pickle pin are probably too young, according to the company, which says the pin is one of the most popular merchandising giveaways in history. Henry J. Heinz introduced the tiny gherkins at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, where 1 million were distributed to visitors.

Well, we all know good marketing ideas don’t die, so Heinz is reincarnating the pin--in the form of a ketchup bottle. The tiny red pins will be passed out at the Rose Parade. The inaugural batch of 80,000 are stamped with a “2000” mint mark. Pins may also be requested online at https://www.heinz.com.

Perhaps the pins will help ketchup catch up to salsa--the most popular condiment in America.

*

Moms surveyed about their favorite baby names for 1999 produced a curious tie vote in the girl’s category: Madison was the No. 1 pick for the most favorite name and the least favorite, according to the poll conducted by iVillage (https://www.ivillage.com) in its “Parent Soup” section.

After Madison, Emily and Hannah were the next most popular names for girls. In the least favorite group, Bertha and Jennifer took the No. 2 and No. 3 spots.

The meanings and origins of these and other names are available on https://www2.parentsoup.com/babynames. The site features famous names, religious and ethnic categories, and can recommend possible names according to various criteria. We asked the program to give us a six-syllable girl’s name. It came up with “Janaesaquania.

Booth Moore can be reached at booth.moore@latimes.com.