Sir Walter Raleigh lived in an important time in England’s history

A 1937 Roanoke Half Dollar, a commemorative authorized to celebrate the 350th anniversary of the establishment of Sir Walter Raleigh’s North Carolina colony, sold for $43,200 at an August 2020 Heritage auction.

By Jim O’Neal

When I was (much) younger, we thought it was great fun to call a liquor store and ask: “Do you have Sir Walter Raleigh in a can?” If the clerk said yes, we’d shout, “Well, you better let him out! His wife is looking for him!”

This would be followed by raucous laughter and cheering at our clever mischief. What I’m sure we didn’t know was that Sir Walter Raleigh had been beheaded on Oct. 29, 1618, and the severed head given to his wife. She had it embalmed and kept it in a red bag for 29 years until she died.

In a perverse way, our childish phone call may have been technically correct – that his wife had been looking for “the rest of him,” but it was just a much earlier time. Even today, there still exists a controversy over whether the head and body have ever been reunited. Coincidentally, I’ve discovered that Sir Walter Raleigh tobacco is still available (online) in cans or pouches.

Walter Raleigh, born in 1552, lived in an important time in England’s history. As a flamboyant soldier, explorer and would-be colonizer, he owed much of his success to the favor of Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603). She was the daughter of Anne Boleyn, Queen of England from 1553 to 1536 and the second of King Henry VIII’s six wives. Their marriage ended abruptly when Anne was charged with treason, imprisoned in the Tower of London and subsequently beheaded. This was the start of the English Reformation when the Church of England revoked the authority of the Pope and the Roman Catholic Church.

Queen Elizabeth fared far better than her mother and ruled for 45 years. She found the tall, handsome Raleigh of great interest and granted him a cornucopia of titles, estates and monopolies as well as the sole patent to place settlers in America. In addition, working on behalf of the Crown, he led privateering expeditions against the Spanish and played a role in the colonization of Ireland, setting in motion the formation of an English Empire.

He was rewarded with a large estate in Ireland and knighthood in 1585. Within a few years, he became captain of the Queen’s Guard. Sir Walter Raleigh was an early supporter of colonizing North America and invested in an expedition across the Atlantic. This was the first attempt to found a permanent English settlement in the New World. It ended up off the coast of modern North Carolina and was known as the Virginia settlement (in honor of Queen Elizabeth, the “Virgin Queen”). Some of the colonists returned to England, bringing potatoes and tobacco, two things generally unknown in Europe.

A second voyage was sent in 1590, only to find no trace of the colony, other than the word CROATOAN on a piece of wood. It would become known as the “Lost Colony of Roanoke Island.” Although historians claim that tobacco was present in Europe before Raleigh’s time, he is often credited with popularizing it in England, despite never making a single trip to America. His association with tobacco has been enshrined by the Beatles on their acclaimed White Album. John Lennon derided him in the song “I’m So Tired,” with the lyrics, “Although I’m so tired, I’ll have another cigarette, And curse Sir Walter Raleigh, He was such a stupid get.”

Sadly, by the time the Jamestown Colony was established in Virginia in 1607, Walter Raleigh would be a prisoner in the Tower of London. His jealous enemies in the Court falsely accused him of participation in a bizarre plot to kidnap King James. Regardless, he was charged with treason and condemned to die (in the usual fashion). However, he somehow convinced the king that he could lead an expedition to the famed El Dorado and make the king the wealthiest man on earth.

It turned out to be a fiasco. But Raleigh honorably returned to England, where the treason charge was reimposed and he was again condemned to death. On Oct. 29, 1618, Raleigh, now 66 years old, coolly stepped up to the scaffold and asked the executioner to test his blade to ensure it “had a good edge.” Smiling, he said, “This is sharp medicine, but is it a physician for all diseases?”

The following century, the French Revolution provided a better answer to the issue of paying the executioner a bribe to have a good, sharp edge and be sure it was done with one accurate stroke. They developed a mechanical beheading machine. On Oct. 10, 1789, physician Joseph-Ignace Guillotin proposed to the National Academy that decapitation be done with “a simple mechanism.” During the Reign of Terror (1793-94), 17,000 people – including King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette – had a chance to evaluate this improvement, but the results are generally from people observing rather than actual users of this technique. Dr. Guillotine was not one the participants.

Eventually, the American cowboy made further improvements whenever there was a rustler or back-shooter that needed a taste of frontier justice. All that was required was a rope and a tall tree. A sharp whack on the buttocks of a sturdy horse was usually sufficient. My favorite Western movie … Red River, with John Wayne and Montgomery Clift (1948) … ends on the issue of hanging. For trivia buffs, if you ever watched the Peter Bogdanovich movie The Last Picture Show, you know it was Red River!

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].

Hollywood Westerns Embody Essential History of the United States

This original movie poster for 1953’s Shane sold for $5,676.25 at a November 2008 Heritage auction.

By Jim O’Neal

Inexplicably, there was a 60-year gap between the first Western to win an Academy Award for Best Picture and the next one. Cimarron (1931), starring Richard Dix and Irene Dunne, was based on the 1929 novel by Edna Ferber that told the tales of the Oklahoma land rushes of 1889 and 1893. The next winner was Dances With Wolves, the 1990 Kevin Costner film that won seven Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director.

This was despite the fact that there were a number of notable Western films in the intervening decades: High Noon (1952), Shane (1953), and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), to name a few. My favorite remains Red River (1948), directed by Howard Hawks and introducing Montgomery Clift, the brilliant actor who was Elizabeth Taylor’s close friend and who died too young after a car accident led him to too many pain-killers (that did as advertised).

These were laconic men with a code to live by: Don’t run, stand up and don’t rely on anyone but yourself. Men who liked simple stories that seemed almost incidental to the action. In 1966, Hawks called Robert Mitchum for a role in El Dorado.

“You available, Bob?”

“Sure, Howard. Uh, what’s the story?”

“Oh, you know, Bob. There’s no story.”

Peter Bogdanovich, the director and writer, has six personal favorites and all were directed by either John Ford or Howard Hawks. His nucleus of favorites underscores the Western’s focus: clarity between right and wrong. “Certainly,” Bogdanovich wrote, “the Western is one of the most pervasive icons of Americana; a symbol of frontiers challenged and tamed; a series of morality tales of good and evil that contain within them the essential history of the United States.”

Director John Ford was reputedly prickly and fearless. From his early efforts until his last Western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), his films helped hype the myth of the West and the men and women who belonged there. “When the legend becomes fact, sir, print the legend,” a young reporter tells Jimmy Stewart, playing a U.S. Senator in Liberty Valance. That is advice Ford gave and followed.

The mythic Western theme is pervasive, thanks in part to the movies and television. It was how the rest of the world saw us for a long time. We’re all cowboys, gunslingers operating under some unwritten rules way out in the open spaces. Ford’s stories were simply about the individual as the last line of defense. A man takes a stand, no matter what the price, refusing to ask for help. (He had no regard for High Noon, because “No real Western sheriff would ever ask for help.”)

Then it almost seems like television was made for the Western and in the 1950s, we had plenty to choose from on every network. Even popular radio Westerns found it easy to make the transition. The best example may be Gunsmoke, which had established itself as a Saturday night special on radio with William Conrad in the venerable role of Marshal Matt Dillon. The rotund Conrad didn’t fit the visual image, so CBS tried to lure an ex-Glendale High School football star who had lost his USC scholarship due to a surfing accident. His name was Marion Morrison.

We know him as John Wayne, who Ford had molded into a superstar in Western movies. Wayne declined the offer, but agreed to introduce the first episode in 1955 with James Arness (the elder brother of Peter Graves) in the Matt Dillon role. Not surprisingly, it became the longest-running American prime-time TV drama – 639 episodes from 1955 to 1975 and still running in syndication today, a mere 63 years later!

Personally, I’m quite happy that Wayne kept making movies, because in my opinion, he was the Western. But why? Maybe no one summed it up better than director Raoul Walsh when he said, “Dammit, the son of a bitch looked like a man.” Perhaps that’s it. He did look and act like a man, and we never read or heard anything to make us doubt it. Journalist and writer Joan Didion in a profile spoke for a lot of us when she said, “When John Wayne rode through my childhood, he determined forever the shape of certain of our dreams.”

I miss John Wayne and all the things he stood for.

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].

Navajo Code Talkers Represented One of the Boldest Gambits of World War II

A gelatin silver print of Raising the Flag on Mount Suribachi, Iwo Jima, 1945, signed by photographer Joe Rosenthal, sold for $7,500 at an October 2016 Heritage auction.

By Jim O’Neal

Feb. 23, 1945, was a dramatic day in World War II when six Marines raised the American flag on Mount Suribachi to signal a decisive victory at Iwo Jima. Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal was there and his photo “Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima” won him the Pulitzer Prize for photography in 1945 – the only one to ever win in the same year it was published.

One of the Marines who hoisted the flag, Ira Hamilton Hayes, portrayed himself in the 1949 movie The Sands of Iwo Jima, which was nominated for four Academy Awards. It starred John Wayne, who received his first Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. He would have to wait 21 years to actually win one for Best Actor in the movie True Grit. Sadly, Hayes, an American Indian, died in 1955 at the tender age of 32 from alcoholism-related circumstances.

The battle for Iwo Jima was the first U.S. attack on the Japanese Imperial home islands and soldiers defended it tenaciously since it was the first stepping stone to the mainland. Of the 21,000 Japanese troops dug into tunnels and heavily fortified positions, 19,000 were killed as they had made a sacred commitment to fight to their death. There were numerous reports of soldiers committing suicide rather than surrendering, although there was also a curious situation where several actually hid in caves for two years before finally giving up. The battle for the entire island lasted from Feb. 23 until March 26 and it was considered a major strategic victory.

The first word of this momentous news crackled over the radio in odd guttural noises and complex intonations. Throughout the war, the Japanese had been repeatedly baffled and infuriated by these bizarre sounds. They conformed to no linguistic system known to Japanese language experts. The curious sounds were the U.S. military’s one form of communicating that master cryptographers in Tokyo were never able to decipher.

This seemingly perfect code was the language of the American Navajo Indian tribe. Its application in WWII as a clandestine system of communication was one of the 20th century’s best-kept secrets. After a string of cryptographic failures, the military in 1942 was desperate for lines of communication among troops that would not be easily intercepted. In the 1940s, there was no such thing as a “secure line.” All talk had to go out over the public airwaves. Standard codes were an option, but cryptographers in Japan had become adept at quickly cracking them. And there was another problem. The Japanese were also proficient at intercepting short-distance communications – walkie-talkies for example – and then having well-trained English-speaking soldiers either sabotage the message or send out false commands to set up an ambush.

That was the situation in 1942 when the Pentagon authorized one of the boldest gambits of the war by recruiting Navajo code talkers. Because the Navajo lacked technical terms for military artillery, the men coined a number of neologisms specific to their task and their war. Thus, the term for a tank was “turtle,” a battleship was “whale,” a hand grenade was “potato” and plain old bombs were “eggs.”

It didn’t take long for the original 29 recruits to expand to an elite corps of Marines, numbering 425 Navajo code talkers, all from the American Southwest. The talkers were so valuable that they traveled everywhere with personal bodyguards. In the event of capture, they had all agreed to commit suicide rather than allow America’s most valuable tool to fall into the hands of the enemy. If a captured Navajo didn’t follow that grim instruction, the bodyguard was told to shoot and kill the code talker.

Their mission and every detail of their messaging was a secret not even their families knew about. It wasn’t until 1968, when the military felt convinced they would not be needed in the future, that America learned about the incredible contributions a handful of American Indians made to winning history’s biggest war. The Navajo code talkers, sending and receiving as many as 800 error-free messages every day, were widely credited with giving troops the decisive edge at Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Saipan, Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

Semper fi.

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].