France honors foreigners who defended her

The French have long honored such sacrifice as presented by the foreign volunteers for service in the French armed forces discussed in our previous article, with the presentaion of La Croix de Guerre, or The Cross of War. Belgium has a similar tradition.

The decoration was created in 1915 and is presented to individuals or units that display acts of heroism during war. A grand volume appropriately titled La Croix de Guerre is in the collection of rare and unusual books at Lighthouse Books, ABAA.

Col. Jimmy Stewart receives La Croix de Guerre

A previous owner told the sort of tale about the book that always delights bibliophiles. He found it, he said, in a used bookstore on the Left Bank in Paris in 1970. It was being used as a doorstop. The beautiful medal that had graced the cover was missing. In those days, though, such medals were easy to find, and inexpensive, so he replaced it with a World War I era Croix de Guerre.

The book is in French and shares the complete history of the medal during World War I and the first two years of World War II (It was published in 1941). General René Victor Boëlle, a commander during World War I, first proposed the medal as a way to recognize brave soldiers. His photograph appears very prominently in the book, along with a reproduction of a handwritten letter from him explaining the rationale for the medal.

During World War I, numerous Americans received the medal, including William Wellman, who flew with the Lafayette Flying Corps, which included the Lafayette Escadrille squadron. Wellman later became a Hollywood film director and made several movies about World War I and World War II. His last film was Lafayette Escadrille in 1958.

During World War II, even more Americans received the award, including singer/actress Josephine Baker, General Curtis LeMay, General George Patton, most-decorated soldier Audie Murphy, and actor Jimmy Stewart, who was an Army colonel at the time.

Saga of the flying aces of World War I

Eddie Rickenbacker

Two years before the United States got into World War I, American volunteers formed the American Escadrille, a squadron of fighter pilots who flew sorties into German-held territory, shooting down reconnaissance planes, bombing Zeppelin hangars and engaging German pilots in aerial battles.

Shortly after the squadron moved near the front lines, the German government protested to the then-neutral United States about the volunteers. As a result, the group changed its name to Lafayette Escadrille, in honor of the Frenchman who helped American colonists during the American Revolutionary War.

The squadron was founded through the efforts of Dr. Edmund Gros, director of the American Ambulance Service that served France during the war and Norman Prince, an American who was already flying for France.

A French officer, Captain Georges Thenault, commanded the squadron and after the war he wrote a book about the unit and its exploits, L’Escadrille Lafayette. Copies of a French paperback edition published in 1938 and an English hardback edition (The Story of the LaFayette Escadrille) published in 1921 are in the collection of rare and unusual books at Lighthouse Books, ABAA. The French edition was signed by Thenault. Laid into each are various related clippings, photos and other ephemera.

A related book in the collection is a 1963 reprint of I Flew with the Lafayette Escadrille, a 1937 book by Edwin C. Parsons, one of the American pilots. By  the time he got to France, Parsons was already experienced in air combat, having flown for Pancho Villa during the Mexican Revolution. When the unit was transferred to the Americans in 1918, Parsons stayed in the French service.

After the war, Parsons returned to the United States, became an FBI agent, ran a private detective agency and became a technical adviser on such films as Wings (1927) and Hell’s Angels (1930). He wrote screenplays, radio scripts, magazine articles and books. During World War II, Parsons was an instructor at Pensacola Naval Air Station and participated in the Solomon Island campaign. He retired as a rear admiral. Parsons settled in Osprey, south of Sarasota.

His book is inscribed to Arch Whitehouse, a British flyer who served in France during World War I. Whitehouse wrote many exciting accounts about aerial battles during the war, but some historians doubt the accuracy of some of his stories.

When the United States entered the war, a new cadre of pilots arrived in France, among them Eddie Rickenbacker, who would go on to become an ace fighter pilot, shooting down an astonishing 26 German aircraft. It was a record that would not be broken until World War II. Rickenbacker also flew more combat hours than any other American pilot in the war.

Rickenbacker became the most celebrated aviator in America and would remain so until 1927, when mail pilot Charles Lindbergh flew nonstop from Roosevelt Field on Long Island to Paris.

Rickenbacker told of his exploits during World War I in a book, Fighting the Flying Circus, a signed first edition of which is also in the collection at Lighthouse Books, ABAA.

Tony Silva and the endangered parrots

When Tony Silva was a boy his parents emigrated from Cuba and settled in the Miami area. He developed an interest in exotic birds and, encouraged by his parents, collected them, raised them, studied them and wrote numerous articles about them. He became a featured speaker for groups of ornithologists. He was outspoken conservationist, and brought attention to the need for endangered parrot species to be protected.

Silva's book, A Monograph of Endangered Parrots, was published in Canada in 1989 in three limited editions. Only a total of 2,226 copies were produced. The most rare of the three editions was the Remarqué Edition, which had only 26 copies, each marked with a letter A-Z and signed by both Silva and the illustrator. Each includes an original drawing by the illustrator.

A volume of the Remarqué Edition, marked with the letter A, is in the collection of rare and unusual books at Lighthouse Books, ABAA. Other copies of this edition are said to be in the collections of wealthy and powerful people around the world, including Prince Charles, the Prince of Wales.

Wildlife artist Gracia Bennish illustrated the volume. Bennish is also a photojournalist and is now based in Tarpon Springs. She says illustrating the rare parrots was a challenge because not many references existed for some of the species. In some cases, she even used tiny postage stamps featuring certain birds. Gracia Bennish is a world class painter of animals, especially parrots. Her work has been selected by the Woodson Art Museum in Wausau, Wisconsin, for its prestigious Birds in Art international tour. Her photography assignments have taken her to Iraq, Haiti, Brunei, Myanmar, Thailand, South Africa and Cuba.

The book was produced in Canada by Silvio Mattacchione & Co., a premier publisher of art animal and bird books. The books are hand sewn, glued with special conservation glues and adhesives, and stamped with 24-karat gold. They are handbound in Nigerian goatskin with raised bands, Irish linen, handmade endsheets, conservation paper and felt-lined slip covers.

By the time he was 30, Silva became the curator of Loro Parque, a huge animal park on Tenerife in Spain’s Canary Islands. He was well known as a leading opponent of the smuggling trade.  At Loro Parque, he participated in a conservation project to breed endangered Spix’s Macaw in captivity.

In 1996, Silva pleaded guilty to smuggling more than 185 hyacinth macaws and other rare birds from South America. He was sentenced to nearly seven years in prison and fined $100,000. Silva always maintained his innocence and continues to do so in extensive articles online.

Getting healthy on summer vacation

View all

Get your own

If you were a wealthy New Yorker in the Gilded Age, you spent the summer in the resorts of upstate New York to escape the stifling heat of the city. Upstate New York meant mountains, snow-fed streams, clean air, and luxury hotels.

There developed a cadre of physicians and clergy who came to believe that those pristine regions were the perfect place for people suffering from diseases and chronic “delicacy of chest” ailments. Among them was Dr. Joseph W. Stickler, a physician and pathologist at Orange Memorial Hospital in New Jersey. Dr. Stickler was something of an authority on respiratory diseases and he wrote a book, The Adirondacks as a Health Resort, published in 1886. A copy of that book is in the collection of rare and unusual books at Lighthouse Books, ABAA.

Dr. Sticker spent considerable time in the Adirondacks and developed his theories partly based on amazing recoveries he had observed among people who had gone to the resorts for health reasons. Some people, he said, had so fully recovered that he would not have known they had been ill had they not told him. He made a convincing case that sick people ought to be spending more time in the mountains and resorts of northern New York.

The wealthy citizenry had long since figured out that those fair climes were the best place to spend a hot summer and were already frequenting places like Saratoga Springs for the socializing, horse racing -- and the therapeutic waters, in which wealthy invalids found solace.