Educated, But Not Credentialed

There is a phrase I've been increasingly encountering on the internet that goes "credentialed but not educated."  I twisted the title of this post from that.

Credentialed-not-educated refers to the increasingly sorry state of college and university graduates in this country, people holding diplomas who have about the same level of intellectuals skills and background they had when entering.  Not true for all graduates by any means, but frequent enough to be worrisome.

I won't rant on that here.  Instead, I'll deal with a man whose formal education ended with high school: John Cullen Murphy (1919-2004), Wikipedia entry here.  He is best known for his comic strip Big Ben Bolt and for continuing for decades the Prince Valiant strip created by Hal Foster.  Murphy is the subject of a fascinating recent book by his son.

It turns out that John Cullen Murphy was an impressive man. He was good at portraiture even in his mid-20s, could have made a good career in commercial illustration had he not been diverted into the comic strip trade, and was knowledgeable and sophisticated even though his academic education ended with high school. As for the latter point, it's further proof that real education can happen once one has left school -- provided one has the will and wits to learn on one's own.

Murphy was raised in New Rochelle, New York, in the county immediately north of New York City. Nearby lived famous illustrators J.C. Leyendecker and Norman Rockwell. Rockwell even used teen-aged Murphy as the subject of a Saturday Evening Post cover (shown in the book). During World War 2 he was attached to Douglas MacArthur's staff and remained friends with Mrs. MacArthur (whose portrait he painted) for many years thereafter.

Moving Time (Magazine)

It seems that Time magazine and others in its stable have been sold to Meredith.

I'm not sure what Meredith's business plan might be, especially for Time magazine itself.  Back around the year 2000 there were three American weekly news magazines -- Time, Newsweek, and U.S. New & World Report.  The Economist from England also could be found on many news stands.  Nowadays, U.S. News is an on-line operation and Newsweek is the same, but from time to time appears in hardcopy format.

Henry Luce's plan in Time's early days was to summarize the week's news so that people lacking The New York Times and New York Herald Tribune could better keep up with events, and this strategy was exceedingly successful.  When I was young I eagerly awaited the postman to stuff it into our mailbox every Thursday (it took a couple days to get from the Chicago printer to Seattle).  That was when there was reason for its existence.  Out in the provinces/sticks/backwaters, our daily newspapers were adequate, yet lacking depth on foreign affairs and -- especially -- big-time New York City based culture.  And those were gaps that Time filled.

Television by the 1950s and 24-hour radio news stations in larger cities by the late 1960s cut into Time's turf a little.  But it was the rise of the internet starting in the mid-1990s that largely wiped out the reasons for the existence of weekly news magazines.  That is, there was no reason to wait a week or so to stay informed.

Allow me to confess that for years I haven't read a copy of Time, so I don't know much about its current content.  A little Googling suggests that Time now features background-type articles and opinion pieces.

That makes sense.  But how large is the market for this?  Opinion and background information sources are all over the Web.  This suggests that Time needs to provide this in a unique, distinctive way.

I'm not sure that is possible.  If I were Meredith, I'd kill Time magazine and focus on the other titles it bought.

Riding Shotgun

I had finished a week of temporary duty at Stars and Stripes newspaper in Tokyo and was in the waiting room at Tachikawa airport when I heard my name being paged.

Puzzled, I went over to the counter to find out why.  It turned out that I was being assigned as a courier guard.  I was handed a pistol belt with a holster containing a M1911A1 .45 caliber pistol.

"Um," I said.  "I haven't been checked out on this weapon."  (I'd range fired M1 and M14 rifles, the M1 carbine and even a shotgun, but never a pistol.)  The sergeant whipped out the pistol and did a zip-zap pretend round chambering and said "okay, now you've been checked out."  Obviously I would have been worthless if there had been an emergency because I would have fumbled with the chambering and fiddled with the safety for more than enough seconds for disaster to happen.  Nevertheless, I was now a courier guard.

I was guarding a Marine Corps major carrying a stuffed, brown leather briefcase handcuffed to his left wrist.  He and I had priority seating in an Air Force C-121, the military version of the Lockheed Constellation airliner.  All the passenger seats in that plane faced the rear.  In the early 1960s it was demonstrated that this was a more survivable seating arrangement in a plane crash.  So far as I know, no major airline complied with this idea, but obviously the Air Force did, on a few aircraft at least.  Truth is, facing the rear just didn't feel right, and the scheme seems to have been largely abandoned.

The flight was uneventful, and the major and I got priority exiting the C-121 when we arrived at Kimpo airport near Seoul, Korea.  I was happy to turn in the gun I didn't know how to use.

Troopship Arrives in Yokohama, 1963

We finally entered Tokyo Bay on a slightly hazy late afternoon aboard troopship Hugh J. Galley after more than a week at sea.  The haze and sinking early-October sun gave off a slight yellowish-golden hue to the bay, its distant surroundings and to the growing clusters of cargo ships and small craft visible to those of us by the railing as we approached Yokohama.  Some of that haze might have had a touch a gray.  But what I recall seeing were thin patches of pink haze probably caused by chemical plants or refineries.

Our ship moved slowly due to navigation regulations for what was a truly crowded harbor.  Before docking, the sun disappeared behind the city and lights became visible below the darkening, low lying wooden skyline.  In an hour or two we would be allowed to go ashore.

So this was Asia in the fall of 1963.  Viewing the gradually darkening scene made me uneasy.  Had I spent too many hours over the previous 15 or 18 years reading Terry and the Pirates comic strips depicting dangerous adventures in that part of the world?  Plus the art-house cinema movies starring Toshiro Mifune and his Samurai sidekicks?  Or nearly 20 years of leafing through those large pages of Life magazine filled with black-and-white photos of the fall of China, the Korean War and such?

So yes, I was uneasy because all this was seriously foreign and, like it or not, I was going to become part of it for most of the next year.

A Battle of Midway What-If

There is a literary genre called Alternative History where writers speculate as to what might have followed if an actual historical event had a different outcome.  Popular examples include the South winning the Battle of Gettysburg and hence the Civil War, Hitler conquering Britain in 1940, Kennedy not being assassinated, and so forth.

There have been a novel or two having the theme that the United States lost the Battle of Midway in June of 1942.  The result is a follow-on Japanese conquest of the Hawaiian Islands.  In reality, conquest of Hawaii would have been logistically unsustainable -- something most Japanese naval planners recognized.  Even capturing Midway Island was problematical because it would have been fairly easy for the United State to recapture it a year or two later once new naval construction augmented the fleet.

My contribution to alternative Midway battles is a scenario whereby the naval battle is never fought at all.

This scenario assumes that the Battle of Coral Sea was never fought, so that the Kudo Butai strike force had all six large fleet carriers available instead of the four that Admiral Nagumo actually had.  Further, the separate Aleutian campaign (that in fact was not a Yamamoto diversionary tactic) was not scheduled, this freeing up two smaller carriers for Nagumo's force.

American codebreakers would have gleaned an approximate Japanese carrier count, telling Admiral Nimitz that his four available fleet carriers (Lexington, Yorktown, Enterprise and Hornet ... remember, no loss of Lexington at Coral Sea) would be opposed by six or eight Japanese carriers.  Nimitz, a shrewd planner, might well have decided to cede Midway to the Japanese and recapture it at his convenience.  The odds against the Americans were too high, and Nimitz's precious carriers could be better used in other operations.