What would you do if you saw your obituary?

Francis H.C. Crick’s Nobel Prize Medal and Nobel Diploma, awarded in 1962 for his work related to DNA molecules, sold for $2.27 million at an April 2013 Heritage auction.

By Jim O’Neal

In 1888, a French newspaper published Alfred Nobel’s obituary with the following title: “Le marchand de la mort est mort” or “The merchant of death is dead.”

In reality, it was actually his brother Ludvig who had died, but Alfred was appalled that this kind of sendoff could tarnish his own professional legacy. One presumes that the only error was the mix-up in names since the sobriquet seemed apt given Alfred’s contributions to the effectiveness of substances that resulted in death.

In a complicated maneuver, the inventor of dynamite attempted to rectify future obits by posthumously donating the majority of his estate (94 percent) to the establishment of the Nobel Prizes, designed to expunge his reputation for all the deaths resulting from his explosive product. It was only partially successful since he was accused of treason against France for selling Ballistite (a smokeless propellant composed of two explosives) to Italy. The French forced him to leave Paris and he moved to Sanremo, Italy, where he died in 1896. There were five Nobel categories with an emphasis on “peace” … for obvious reasons.

A native of Stockholm, Nobel made a fortune when he invented dynamite in 1867 as a more reliable alternative to nitroglycerin. As a chemist and engineer, he basically revolutionized the field of explosives. Some accounts give him credit for 355 inventions. In 1895, a year before his death, he signed the final version of his will, which established the organization that would bear his name and “present prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit to mankind.”

Nobel’s family contested the will and the first prizes were not handed out until 1901. Among the first winners were German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, who discovered X-rays, and German microbiologist Emil Adolf von Behring, who developed a treatment for diphtheria. The Nobel Prizes were soon recognized as the most prestigious in the world. Except for war-related interruptions, prizes have been awarded virtually every year. The category of economics was added in 1969.

The first American to receive a Nobel was President Theodore Roosevelt, who garnered the prize in 1906 after he helped mediate an end to the Russian-Japanese war. The German-born American scientist Albert Michelson claimed the physics prize the next year. However, the peace and literature prizes would become the most familiar to Americans and are some of the most controversial. Critics voiced concerns over Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson (1919), George Marshall (1953) and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (1973). More recently, winners have included Al Gore (2007) for making an Oscar-winning documentary on climate change, and Barack Obama (2009) “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.” (for more, see Obama’s Wars by Bob Woodward).

William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck and Toni Morrison generally have escaped criticism, as have multiple winners like Marie Curie (the first woman in 1911, and in two separate categories), and Linus Pauling, among others. The Red Cross has snagged three. From a personal standpoint, the most obvious non-winner is Mahatma Gandhi, or as someone quipped, “Gandhi can do without a Nobel Prize, but can the Nobel Committee do without Gandhi?”

I think not.

Intelligent Collector blogger JIM O’NEAL is an avid collector and history buff. He is president and CEO of Frito-Lay International [retired] and earlier served as chair and CEO of PepsiCo Restaurants International [KFC Pizza Hut and Taco Bell].

Artists, writers tapped into America’s traveling spirit

Robert Crumb’s original illustration of Jack Kerouac sold for $33,460 at a February 2011 Heritage auction.

By Jim O’Neal

While we lived in London, I was always fascinated by one common employee characteristic. Irrespective of the school – be it Eton, Oxford or the London School of Economics – every curriculum vitae (CV) included an explanation of a student’s foreign travels the year following graduation. Asia and Australia were the most popular; only rarely did it include the United States. After all the studying, cramming for exams and other typical activities on campus, they felt an overwhelming compulsion to just travel for as long as a year.

America was like that one time not too long ago. Novelist/journalist James Agee (A Death in the Family) wrote about it in Fortune magazine in 1934: Hunger for movement, he said, was “very probably the profoundest and most compelling of American racial hungers.” The road could help satisfy that hunger. Just put the hood ornament on the center line, the speedometer on 80 and let ’er rip. The urge was there before the car … long before … and invariably sent the country westward. As Huck Finn said: “But I reckon I got to light out for the territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.”

The road was our nation’s ticket to ride and, more precisely, to ride away on. Maybe it was away from who we were, but it was, for sure, away from where we were. To where? Who knew? How about just a fresh start? We could put it all behind us as fast as the car could go.

Novelist/playwright William Saroyan, who liked getting behind the wheel of his Buick, wrote about his desire to hit the road: “It isn’t simply driving at night, it’s going on … to find out what’s out there now, not so much along the highway, in the terrain, under the sky, but in the interior of the driver himself.” Romance with the road was all about get up and go. Wherever you want to go, whenever you want to leave. There were no schedules and no reservations. Time of arrival? Whenever.

Lolita’s Humbert Humbert chose to hit the road to find his interior. Humbert’s creator, the Russian lepidopterist/novelist Vladimir Nabokov, spent two summers on America’s highways, chasing butterflies. A great year for the road was 1957. It was the year painter Edward Hopper gave us his classic Western Motel, the stark symbol of mobility and restlessness. The year that Jack Kerouac, out of the grim mill town of Lowell, Mass., weighed in with his novel On the Road. The road was Kerouac’s characters’ means of escape like the Mississippi was for Huck and Jim. On the Road captured the energy of trying to satisfy that hunger for movement.

The true north of the road was west. The West owned those lonesome, inexhaustible roads with few-and-far between motels designed so that cars could be parked about 20 feet from the beds. There was a lot of nowhere for these roads to cover. Distance was measured by hours (18 hours from Amarillo to Santa Monica), providing time to think. Playwright Sam Shepard used the road for writing and that may explain how he got the West so right.

John Steinbeck wrote that our “Mother Road” was Route 66. The Okies (including my whole family) called it their highway to heaven because it got us to California. We didn’t pick fruit like the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath. We bought real estate in Southern California that had its own fruit trees. I picked peaches and apricots off our three acres and I sold them in front of our house for 50 cents and $1 a lug. One uncle was a carpenter and he bought an entire block, built two houses, sold one for a tidy profit and lived in the other with a semi-alcoholic aunt.

My mother’s three brothers all found great jobs building airplanes and my father bought Pacific Cold Storage in Central Los Angeles (after he divorced my mother). I had two paper routes that netted me $60 a month after expenses (bicycle tires and rubber bands). I could also play night league softball in Huntington Park (we lived in Downey, home of the first Taco Bell 25 years later), and one-on-one basketball every spare minute.

My friends and I lived vicariously through TV shows like Route 66 with Martin Milner and George Maharis playing drifters in a Corvette – the only fictional series that shot all over North America – with their stories of working in shipbuilding, oilrigs and shrimping from Chicago to Los Angeles. (Corvette sales doubled). This was followed by Michael Parks in Then Came Bronson and the classic Easy Rider with Peter Fonda, Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper.

We had scratched our itch and found gold fast (sunshine, beaches, long-legged tan girls), but it was still fun watching others make their way west.

I wonder if space travel is what itches Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos?

JIM O’NEAL is an avid collector and history buff. He is president and CEO of Frito-Lay International [retired] and earlier served as chair and CEO of PepsiCo Restaurants International [KFC Pizza Hut and Taco Bell].

Greatest Generation was Led by Roosevelt, Churchill and Superman

Superman got his own title in 1939. This copy sold for $358,500 at a November 2016 Heritage auction.

By Jim O’Neal

Popular journalist Tom Brokaw in 1998 wrote a book about Americans who lived through the Great Depression and fought in World War II. Millions of others stayed home to support the war effort. Brokaw wrote, “It is, I believe, the greatest generation any society has ever produced,” and went on to argue they did it because “it was the right thing to do,” as opposed to doing it for fame or fortune.

The Greatest Generation became a bestselling book and a term to describe a large group of people who sacrificed in many ways, ended a war, and then came home, went to college on the G.I. Bill, and helped rebuild the world. They certainly preserved our way of life and redirected the domestic economic engine that provided jobs, automobiles, and new homes to a broad swath of our citizens.

However, it seems clear that few Americans alive in 1939 had a hint of this remarkable outcome. All the polls indicated that most were leery of another entanglement in “foreign” wars. They were still acutely aware of the tremendous suffering and loss of life in the last “war to end all wars” – WWI, an “accidental” war that is still a puzzlement today. Historians struggle to explain how or even why it started and, amazingly, how four major empires – German, Russian, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian – were toppled in four short years. Approximately no one would have been able to predict such a remarkable situation.

Besides, by 1939, the United States was still mired in a severe economic depression with 17 percent of the workforce unemployed and the most needy and least organized (domestic workers, sharecroppers, new immigrants, blacks, and unmarried women) unable to reap any of the New Deal benefits. On April 14 of that year, John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath was published and it captured the plight of many by focusing on the economic hardships of tenant farmers driven from their Oklahoma land by drought, the Dust Bowl, and bank foreclosures. The book won the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and was cited prominently in 1962 when Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize.

My family was among the many “Okies” that escaped to California in quest of the milk and honey (no, we didn’t pick any fruit).

Then on Friday, Sept. 1, Germany invaded Poland and democracy around the world was at risk. Economies were in collapse and suddenly communism and totalitarianism seemed to have appeal. There was even talk about revolution in America. When the great British economist John Maynard Keynes was asked if there had ever been anything like the Great Depression, he said, “Yes. It was called the Dark Ages and it lasted 400 years.”

Fortunately, what would become “The Greatest Generation” was led by the greatest leaders: Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. As an insurance policy, Superman #1 debuted that summer, just in time. Between the three of them, the world was saved!

Alas, only one of them is still around and all the other superheroes are untested rookies. (Sigh.)

Intelligent Collector blogger JIM O’NEAL is an avid collector and history buff. He is president and CEO of Frito-Lay International [retired] and earlier served as chair and CEO of PepsiCo Restaurants International [KFC Pizza Hut and Taco Bell].