In the morning I would sometimes catch the 42 bus at 2nd and Spruce, which soon turned onto Walnut and drove along the south edge of Independence Mall. Tourists would already be gathered in back of Independence Hall waiting for tours; few of them paid any attention to the nine-story Beaux Arts building on the west side of the square. True, art lovers sometimes wander in to the lobby to see the glass mosaic, Dream Garden, designed by Maxfield Parrish and created by Louis Tiffany. But not many people gaze at the plaque on the corner with the awe that I do. It proclaims that the building was the home of the Curtis Publishing Company and then it lists the magazines that emanated from it: The Saturday Evening Post, The Ladies Home Journal, Holiday. There are a couple more but my eye always stops at Holiday. In the middle of the 20th century its editors sent many of the finest writers of that era - William Faulkner, James Thurber, John Steinbeck, E.B. White, Arthur Miller, V.S. Pritchett, Evelyn Waugh, Paul Bowles - around the world. (Though Faulkner and White, appropriately, wrote about home, brilliantly.) Decades ago I stumbled upon old copies of the magazine in used bookstores; then in one I found an anthology, Ten Years of Holiday, that occupies an honored place on my shelves. It never ceases to thrill me that American independence and America's greatest travel magazine were born on the same square in Philadelphia.
