Stella's Place

Bayard Winthrop, founder and CEO of American Giant breaks down our supply chain issues, our trade imbalance with the rest of the world, and how his company still managed to produce “the greatest hoodie ever made,” 100% in the United States.

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The author of “America the Beautiful,” Katharine Lee Bates, was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts in 1859 and grew up near the rolling sea.

Bates, who eventually became a full professor of English literature at Wellesley College, made a lecture trip to Colorado in 1893 and there she wrote the words to “America the Beautiful.” As she told it, “We strangers celebrated the close of the session by a merry expedition to the top of Pike’s Peak, making the ascent by the only method then available for people not vigorous enough to achieve the climb on foot nor adventurous enough for burro-riding. Prairie wagons, their tail-boards emblazoned with the traditional slogan, “Pike’s Peak or Bust,” were pulled by horses up to the half-way house, where the horses were relieved by mules. We were hoping for half an hour on the summit, but two of our party became so faint in the rarified air that we were bundled into the wagons again and started on our downward plunge so speedily that our sojourn on the peak remains in memory hardly more than one ecstatic gaze. It was then and there, as I was looking out over the sea-like expanse of fertile country spreading away so far under those ample skies, that the opening lines of the hymn floated into my mind.”

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