Cream Pie

It's a good day to be a banana.

Banana War

I'm pretty excited about football season.

Banana for President

Here are pictures. If some are repeats, please forgive me. More music history coming in two weeks.

Law of the Jungle

Today has part 5 of phase 4.

            The Classics Illustrated comics ordered earlier that summer arrived in three installments (I believe some issues were on back order), so the house was cluttered with stuff for me to read. My parents also purchased a set of Standard encyclopedias from some guy who worked with them at Freddie’s. Like many people who worked at the restaurant, the guy was in the Navy and had duty elsewhere, so he was selling off all the loose ends. As part of the deal he also threw in a stack of Playboys. Thank you, God! I fell in love many times over.

            About midsummer, the gentleman who lived behind us suggested I meet his grandson. Sure. The neighbor introduced us and we started to hang out and toss baseball and stuff like that. He was a couple of years and grades behind me, but was a pretty good kid. I introduced him to Pig and she paid him to work with me in her flower garden. He wasn’t really interested in comics or model planes, and I never asked him about Playboys, so tossing a baseball was pretty much it.

            One day he invited me to his house for lunch and to play and whatnot. The kid met me in my backyard at the appointed time. We walked down a couple of blocks and into a slightly more isolated neighbor then cut through several backyards and finally penetrated a wooded boundary into the kid’s backyard. About thirty yards from the tree line and a little way downhill from the house was a beautiful, blonde woman hanging up laundry. Every time she bent forward to pick a piece to hang her blouse collar hung loosely enough to expose her breasts (she wasn’t wearing a bra) quite convincingly. That heavenly vision nearly stopped me in my tracks. “Hey mom,” the kid said. Mom? Christ, she looked like one of the Playboy girls. It was all I could do to avoid hyperventilation. She had platinum blonde hair, blue eyes, and a perfect body. The clincher: She had an Elke Sommer accent. Yeah, all that and she was a Swede. Sveet.

            Summer dripped away and I returned to Madisonville. It was like going back in time. Everything slowed to a crawl. I always felt, or at least acted like I felt, world weary, like my mere existence was existential bravery in the face of all odds. I hated looking so plastic and unfashionable in my shiny new school duds and worked hard to knock the store bought smell off em. I wore out the toes of my shoes in no time flat. I dipped my comb in Vaseline Jelly and greased the shit outta my hair. I wore rings, yes, even girl’s rings, for the damage they might do if I got into a fight. I’m sure I looked like I was asking for one.

            Other than that, everything went back to the way it had been, and it pretty much stayed that way. Repetitions of the same old routine as the year before and the year to come swept me along. Music was really secondary to television, especially science fiction movies, though I heard some great stuff on Tarzan soundtracks. I regularly watched Sing Along With Mitch, The Dean Martin Show, Hullabaloo, The Andy Williams Show, and The Danny Kaye show, and of course the Saturday country shows continued.

            I went back to Norfolk one last time. It was sort of a bust. We lived in a shitty location in a small upstairs apartment. The owner’s dog hated me and once bit me. My parents did not try to bribe me because they had in their minds returning to Madisonville, and they eventually did. To me the years of 1964 through 1966 were nothing but mushy simulations of the past. I really needed something new, and when the gasoline is ready the fire will come. O youth!

Song and Dance Banana

Thanks for reading. History abounds.

            Time with mom wasn’t wasted either. Before my trip began, and during it, mom touted this place called The Giant Food Market. I didn’t know what to think, I mean, how am I supposed to feel about a supermarket, even a giant one? But the constant build-up had stirred my curiosity, though I couldn’t believe, nor could she really convey, what was in store. On the Monday of my second week in town the whole family arose early and mom drove dad out to the base for his work, then she took me to The Giant.

            Ok, it looked big from the outside, but all the buildings there were bigger than in my hometown. The Giant parking lot could have contained about half of downtown Madisonville, and when I entered the store saw that the other half could easily be contained within. The darned place was huge. The ceiling was twenty feet up, and the walls were about 150 yards apart.

            Our excuse for being there wasn’t grocery shopping but breakfast. A wall-less, open air restaurant section sat roped off to the right of the entrance. Only a few places opened for breakfast (others opened for lunch and dinner only), but the selection was impressive. We ate at a diner like business that served food on Formica tables. I usually had pancakes or scrambled eggs, and maybe cereal with fruit. I didn’t mind waking early that day.

            After breakfast we started to look around and explore. One of the restaurants we walked past had an open flame beneath a rotisserie that skewered an entire side of beef, just like I’d seen in westerns. One path led through the diabetic section, which was nearly as big as Sloan’s entire store in Madisonville. The shelves of low cal stuff emptied into the fresh catch bins of the fish market. I saw silver, beheaded fish better than four feet long. That day was the first time I had encountered squid. “Whatta ya do with those?” I asked. “Some people eat em,” mom answered.

            We eventually wandered into the toy section. Christ, they had everything there. I think mom bought me a mask, flippers, and snorkel there that first time. I also stumbled onto the comics rack. To my surprise, many of the titles were packaged in groups of three (for only a quarter) inside a sealed plastic wrapper. The catch, of course, was that the middle title, sandwiched between the other two, was a blind man’s bluff. Still, at three for the price of two, the risk, especially since it was mom’s money, seemed worth the possibility of a pitiful outcome. Well, here’s the thing: the good part was that I got to read, over the summer, about two years’ worth of Spider Man, quite a few Fantastic Four titles, Ironman issues, and some other things to boot. I got several issues of Teen Age Hotrodders, and one or two issues of Space Family Robinson. The down side was that Archie Comics (not the worst, but not what I wanted), or Donald Duck, and sometimes a repeat of a comic I already owned occasionally turned up in the mix.

            Something about The Giant that I discovered in subsequent days (I couldn’t see everything in one trip) was the ice cream counter. They had one treat that I thought was the greatest in the world. It was really a banana split, but instead of a plastic boat, it came in a slightly hollowed-out pineapple. Eating one was usually a two try event. I tried several times that summer.

            I thought nothing could top The Giant, but on the way home we stopped at a more meager department store (sorry, but I don’t remember the name) which turned out to be as important as The Giant because it had toys, especially models, baseball equipment, packages of comics (same as The Giant), an arcade, and a large number of paperbacked publications that I was interested in. I purchased several repackaged collections of Mad Magazine features, including Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions, and a couple of compilations of newspaper funnies. My Virginia model collection began there with a couple of models and all the supplies needed to assemble and paint them. Before the summer wound down I had put together two of the great air forces of WWII, in that I acquired fighters of the US and Germany, and a B-17 bomber.

            Monday was mom’s day off, and I don’t think we missed kicking off the week at The Giant for the entire summer. Sometimes after breakfast we’d go home for bit before heading to the beach in the afternoon, or even to my aunt and uncle’s. On the way home we usually had a Burger King meal, or sometimes stopped at Freddie’s because I loved its spaghetti (still my favorite dish) and pizza. I also tasted my first Chinese food (always pork chow mein) that summer. There was too much to do to ever be bored. Who needed baseball?

What Profit a Banana?

Here's more history.

            Dad joined the Marines in 1948 when he was 17. He was raised and lived in the Steeke community of Loudon County where he had taken numerous jobs after dropping out of school in seventh grade. He apparently couldn’t find one he liked, hence the military. Other than boot camp, I believe his first service was pretty sweet in that he was assigned to the aircraft carrier The Essex for a substantial cruise. He never really talked about his carrier experiences except for two stories about a couple of drunken episodes, one where he got into a fight with a fellow serviceman (which left dad with a broken jaw), and an ever wilder story about leave in Cuba. He claimed to have no memory of the actuality of the Cuban adventure other than waking up after a drunken night to find that he was sharing a bunk with a large snake he had bought and smuggled onto ship. That seemed to me very strange because dad feared snakes. Dad had some tattoos on his arms, one of a naked lady talking on the phone, and a couple of others on his shoulders (the name Dot was inside one shoulder design). I’m not sure the two incidents are related, but I think they may have occurred on the same evening.

            The sweet duty, however, ended with the Korean War. Dad’s tour began near the end of 1950 and lasted into 1952 (I think the duration was 18 months). He spoke, as of most of his past, very little about it. The stories that I remember, that he told me directly, were scant many details. The important aspect of his experience turned out to be that he was once sprayed by shrapnel, and another that he received a minor head wound from a bullet fragment, neither of which yielded decoration. He said he landed in Korea in winter, near Christmastime, and that the temperature was the coldest he had ever known. Not long into his arrival the North attacked at night. Dad was totally unprepared. He said the enemy banged on drums and played a weird, seemingly out of tune gaggle of pipes, whistles, flutes and the like before launching their assault. He gave no real details of the fight, but was horrified the next morning when three Americans who had gone missing during the skirmish were located frozen into a solid block at the bottom of a huge hole filled with ice. As in all wars, what 19 year old could possibly be prepared for that?

            After combat duty ended, he picked up mom, who at the time lived in Loudon, Tennessee, and took her across country in 1952. Along the way they married, first in Mexico, then again when they reached San Diego, California, where dad was stationed. Neither of them talked much about their courtship and I have never had enough curiosity to inquire. Apart from that, mom left California to live at my grandmother’s, now in Madisonville, Tennessee, after she became pregnant in 1954. Dad remained in the Marines and California (he occasionally came to Tennessee on leave, and once AWOL) until his discharge in 1959.

            Transition to civilian life was not easy for him. He was used to living like the carefree, hard-drinking drill instructor he’d been since 1952, so his return was bumpy. He got a job in construction right off the bat, but his erratic behavior was scary and destructive to the weak family unit. Sometimes he’d leave for work around 6 AM and return drunk as a skunk sometime in the next early morning. After a fight with my mom he’d sleep a little and go off to work. He’d then be good for awhile before the same thing would happen again. After several months of this routine he and mom divorced. I was sad and relieved at the same time. Not long before I began school, dad took classes to become a mechanic. He eventually started coming back around. One night we went to the theatre in Loudon to see Psycho. They told me after the movie that they were going to remarry. I protested, not because I didn’t love my dad, but because I didn’t want to revisit the shit we’d already been through. He assured me that would not be the case, and it wasn’t.

            The troubles weren’t over by a long shot. Dad’s hard living softened, but he just didn’t know what he wanted to be when he grew up (not unlike my own situation now), so he wandered around either working in dead end jobs or moping around the house out of work. Finally mom went to Norfolk to work in the restaurant where both my aunt and uncle worked, and dad followed a couple of weeks later. At first he worked as a short order curb cook with mom (she and my aunt were carhops; my uncle made pizzas) at Freddy’s, but found other work as an auto mechanic.

            I began to bond with dad at the movies in Norfolk in 1963. We went to a drive-in near Hewitt Farms every Saturday night. The first movie we saw was Dr. No. We also saw and enjoyed The Longest Day that same summer. This dad was someone I liked a lot. That was when I really got to know him for the first time. He was still sort of a devil may care kind of guy, but I was too, so we bonded.

            When I returned to Norfolk in 1964, dad was riding high. He had a good job repairing forklifts for Slick Airways, which had a contract to haul things for the Navy. Often, when mom worked, I spent time on the naval base while dad worked. I got to know an aircraft mechanic who took a liking to me and would take me with him to sit in the cockpit of the planes while he did repair and maintenance. How good can a kid have it?

            Not only did dad have a good job, but he also had a new car, a red, 1962 Ford Galaxy 500. We usually rode around in jalopies held together with spit and prayer, so the Ford was a big step up. Dad told me he really liked that car, even years after he’d traded it in for another. When I rode with dad we always listened to country music because that’s what he liked. I don’t know who any of the artists were (unless it was someone I heard on television), and even though I wanted to listen to Top 40, it didn’t matter. We usually had a great time.

Another Day, Another Banana

Musical history continues.

            Yes, the summer of 1964 was a far cry from the summer before. During the summer of 1963 we lived with my aunt and uncle in military housing at a place called Hewitt Farms. I’d made a few friends in those projects, and we played baseball, and occasionally a grownup would lead a tour of the swamp that lined parts of the complex and housed the infamous Grey Shack, which, because of quicksand in the swamp, all kids were ordered to stay away from (though most had said, or lied, that they had been there). I expected to see a hideous witch’s cabin, but instead found something that looked like a playhouse. Big deal! Still, the word came down before I got there that everyone had to leave Hewitt Farms before a wholesale remodeling of the facility. At first you couldn’t see it so much, but as the summer wore on and more people moved out, the place where I’d had so much fun became a ghost town. At some point my relatives may have been the only people staying there. I know we were the only ones as far as the eye could see. And though it was fun to punch and knock holes in the brittle shingle-like siding of the buildings, or to throw rocks through the windows of the apartments, overall the place started to give me the creeps.

            The house where my parents and I lived did not, at first, seem as exciting as the place on the beach from the year before, but time was very kind to the new digs. The house itself was nothing to write home about, just a two bedroom place sided with the same kind of brittle shingles as the buildings at Hewitt Farms. A fence surrounded the tiny backyard and made me feel a little caged, but the area was shady and a fruit bearing fig tree grew against the back fence. I spent most of my outdoor time there.

            We were also surrounded by neighbors. The bunch that lived on one side was not very friendly, and though they pretty much kept to themselves, I decided not to have anything to do with them because they seemed kind of weird from what I was used to. On the other side, in a tiny corner house, lived Pig, the sweetest woman in the world. I don’t know anything about Pig, but we began to talk together shortly after I moved in. As her nickname implied, she was a fairly large woman and could no longer tend to her flower garden as she once had. One day she asked if I could weed her flowers. We’d had gardens and flowers all my life (via my grandmother), and I knew my way around growing things, so she paid me a quarter to weed her flowers once a week. My mom got mad when I referred to the lady as Pig, but Pig told mom that everyone called her that. We became good friends.

            A guy much older than Pig lived on the property behind the back fence. He was a nice old fellow who liked kids and had enlightened me about the fig tree. I saw him nearly every day. He was always very cordial and talked with me every time he came out into his yard. In fact, he kept his lawn chair close to the fence.

            Now I knew good and well that my parents were going to spoil me that summer, because like the summer before, they still held onto the notion that I might change my mind and stay in Norfolk for the school year. I knew all along that wasn’t going to happen, but I decided to let them take their best shots at bribing me. Because I had to quit a Little League baseball farm team to go to Norfolk, they had an uphill battle. I allowed them to lavish upon me anything they could. They did a wonderful job.

            Mom was a big believer in reading and such, so I’d already been signed up for The Summer Weekly Reader before the vacation started. One day an order form inside TSWR package advertized a batch of Classics Illustrated Comics for a special low price. Up until that time I hadn’t, mostly due to their 15 cent per issue price, bought many of that brand, and when I did, I was usually disappointed by the more grownup, nee dull, storylines, but the titles list touted Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Hunchback of Norte Dame and made a deal I couldn’t refuse. I marked the list and the order went out in the mail. Of course it was summer and I’d totally forgotten the whole thing before the first issue arrived.

Back to the Past

I usually, well never, use others' names, but my story is coming to a place where others' stories intersect with mine. Today I use the name of a woman I knew nearly 50 years ago. I hope she is at peace.

Phase 4

            The school year played out and I was glad to get out of Madisonville. I wanted some different fun. The first part of 1964 had been cold and miserable and I had been sick several times through the year. Summer couldn’t get there fast enough. The trip back to Norfolk didn’t tire me as it had before. Somewhere along the way my mom bought me a plastic whistle clarinet. I wailed on it until my parents called for a halt. I loved being able to play tunes, but complied with their demands and rested it in the space beneath the back glass of the car. After a couple of hours I decided to test my parents’ nerves and give the horn another go. The clarinet had melted and was still quite warm to the touch. It looked like the first draft of a Dali painting. The sun robbed me of the chance to create my own compositions.

            Entering from the west like a horde of jealous marines, I hit the shores of Norfolk ready to lay the entire town to waste. Horny sailors had nothin on me. Actually, I had the same appetites for mischief as that randy crew. The austere lives we lived in Madisonville were gladly left behind, at least for the summer. The future looked bright. I liked our house, our backyard, our neighbors…and I liked the music.

            The British Invasion was in full swing that summer. I was glad that my mom was listening to Top 40 radio in the car because I really couldn’t get enough of everything playing. Her taste was certainly different than mine, but we did like a lot of the same songs. I found myself drawn more so to R&B (things like My Guy, by Mary Wells) than in the past, while mom liked the more popish stuff by The Supremes and the like. She also liked Bad to Me, which, unknown to us, was a John Lennon song, and A World without Love, a McCartney song.

            I really began to enjoy The Dave Clark Five. For one thing, the production behind the band’s recordings gave them a better fidelity than other artists. The mean snare sound that Clark had was closer to the sound ideal of Hound Dog than other productions where the snare (the drums, even) was often hidden in the mix. The band didn’t hurt itself with the hard stompin rhythms it churned up on the records, especially Bits and Pieces. I also dug The Beach Boys’ I Get Around. That song hit right in the middle of summer and was perfect, to me, in any auto riding situation.

Mash

End of the week. Nice.

Let Loose

The week's nearly over.

Bananas Unite

A new frontier is coming.

Fried Banana

I like football. So what? Yeah. Here are today's pictures.

Heading South

More pictures this week.

Big Doins

Here are three new pictures.

Salt Soup

I often lie about eating salt soup as a poor child. Said mom scraped it off a salt lick cube.

Banana Logic

I wish the musical history would write itself. It doesn't. Got more pictures, though.

Banana Pudding

Here's three more.

Banana Life

I'm doing another two weeks of art. I'm also getting ready for football season. Yippy!

The Last Musical Banana

Today's is the final installment of musical history for a couple of weeks. I'll be posting art for the next two weeks while I write more.

            After Kennedy was shot, I fell into a sort of depressed state. It wasn’t that I loved the man and what he stood for enough to be horribly saddened by his passing, for at age eight I was not that clear on the implications of the occurrence, it’s just that my pain was not so specific. I knew it was bad and felt bad about it, but the issue for me was the feeling of loneliness, of being left alone without a leader, of wandering through a lonely country. LBJ seemed like some old bastard who would pick up a dog or a child by the ears and laugh to the press about it, just like every asshole who owned a business in my hometown might do. The lead colored November sky just pushed my fears deeper in.

            My mood shifted a bit by Thanksgiving, and I had a great Christmas as my parents visited (and brought an incredible entertainment center: TV, radio, and stereo record player in one unit) and I got a load of new and interesting toys. After the holidays they went back to Norfolk and I went back to my usual activities. At that point I felt that the national crisis had ended.

            I met the New Year as a fresh off my birthday nine year old. I greased my hair and tried to wear clothes that looked semi-thuggish. Whatever it was, I was against it. Where did that come from? I can’t write it off as easily as influence of the movies or television, though they played their roles, but something deeper that increasingly made me hate all forms of orthodoxy (I hate them yet). As far as getting along with the rest of the world, there is no getting along with the rest of the world with that sort of character. It put a big chip on my shoulder, but I couldn’t back down from any intellectual (or anti-intellectual) stance that offended my aesthetic sense. Right or wrong (often the latter), I couldn’t let anything go.

            When it comes to TV viewing, I get bored quickly and always have. This doesn’t mean that I can’t sit through a show (though that was and is often true), but that I have followed very few shows from the beginnings to the ends of their runs. By the time I had turned 9, granny and I watched Bonanza more often than Ed Sullivan, which aired opposite each other. I loved the Cartwrights (and Hop-sing) and all their adventures. Bonanza had everything: gun fights, girls, drama, and plenty of comedy. How could Ed, with the spinning plate jugglers and Senor Wences, who had both appeared, seemingly, a thousand times, possibly compete? He couldn’t.

            On one particular week in 1964, however, CBS had plugged Ed’s show more heavily than usual, touting an appearance of a new group from England called The Beatles. That alone meant very little to me except for the frequency of the promotion, which caught my attention. When Sunday rolled around I was divided, but my curiosity was aroused. I asked my grandmother if we might be able to catch The Beatles on the Sullivan show. She showed little outward interest, but said it would be all right, so I changed the channel and watched Ed long enough to find out that The Beatles would appear near the end of the show. I was totally taken aback by the screaming of the girls every time The Beatles were mentioned. “I can’t stand that racket!” my grandmother said. I switched back to Bonanza, with the idea that I would occasionally check up on Ed.

            Rest assured that I checked in often enough to catch The Beatles, who I viewed rather analytically, almost more as an examination and curiosity than pure enjoyment. The measuring stick for the band’s performance was Elvis, who, for me as well as for The Beatles, was The King. From amid the screaming I listened as carefully as I could to the set. With the unusual mop-top haircuts mopping, Ringo’s nose nosing, Paul’s violin shaped bass, and the “Yeah, yeah, yeahs” yeahing, I thought The Beatles were pretty cool (ok, the longish hair appeared a little too girlish to my young eyes), but I was not really bowled over by those early anthems, at least not that night. No, The Beatles weren’t Elvis (weren’t they never), but I wasn’t ready to merely write them off. I kept an open mind.

            The Beatles’ performance might not have blown me through the roof, but it shook the shit out of the elementary school the following day. Seems that everyone was singing those songs. I heard the “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” everywhere I went for the entire week. No one could avoid it. I didn’t know what to think.

            About the same time as that famous Sullivan Show, a number of Elvis movies began to hit television. Those movies, some fairly recent, had apparently outlasted their drive-in usefulness and were leased to ABC for its various movie of the week slots. And even though I had to go outside and turn the antenna toward Chattanooga to pick up that network (the Knoxville ABC affiliate was a UHF station and we did not have a UHF capable TV), both my grandmother and I watched Elvis films that we would never have seen otherwise.

            A week or so before Easter that year I contracted the mumps. Other than the pain from eating anything sour or tart, mumps didn’t seem that bad. I saw my doctor who suggested that I not jump around too much. Huh? He warned that the mumps might fall if I wasn’t careful. Huh? Let em fall, I thought, not realizing what that meant. The only thing about the visit that interested me was that I was not to return to school until the malady had passed. Thank you, doctor. Unfortunately, he also advised against any travel, and I was supposed to head for Norfolk for the holiday (which in those days meant Good Friday through Sunday). Heeding nothing, my grandmother and I rode with my aunt in her new car to see my parents and oldest aunt and her family in Virginia.

            After a day or so in Norfolk I began to feel a lot better. I became acquainted with my middle aunt’s boyfriend (I’d met him the summer before), and enjoyed the stay. My parents took me to a little amusement park on the beach, in pretty cold weather, and a day or so later to the Oceanview Amusement Park where I rode the big rollercoaster for the first, and only, time (so much for not jumping around). Easter Sunday was a most beautiful day. My parents lived in a different house than the beach place of the previous summer, and the entire family gathered there for dinner, then went out to the backyard to talk while the kids played in the 75 degree air.

            About bedtime a storm blew in from the north and totally changed everything, so that when I was awakened way too early the next morning to return to Tennessee with my oldest aunt, grandmother, and my four cousins in my aunt’s new Chevy station wagon, snow was falling through the freezing assed atmosphere. Along with the luggage, my four cousins and I rode in the flattened rear of the Chevy in the most horrible and uncomfortable trip I have ever made. My body ached nearly all the way since none of us could sit in an upright position in the flatted back area. There was also quite a bit of arguing, whining, and fighting among the kids, and a nearly constant series of angry admonitions from my aunt. The only thing that made any of it bearable was when my aunt would play the radio and allow us to sing along with The Beatles. “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

Don't Slip

Beware: a frank sexual passage will appear in today's post. If that offends, please don't read until tomorrow. Also, there was no natural break from yesterday's post, so the story continues without transition. 

            One was the coolest white guy in town. To me he was perfection. He wore white clothing that matched his hair (which was cut into bangs and were bleached platinum blond), smoked white cigarettes, drove a white Stingray, and had the perfect girlfriend. Most of the guys on screen couldn’t match his charisma. Not all the guys were Mr. Perfect, though. Most were just regular folks in looks and behavior. Others were thugs or thug wannabes. The girls, many with the still popular beehive do’s, didn’t make the same type of an impression unless one of the more beautiful ones graced the place. If that happened, and you could tear yourself away from watching her long enough to look around, you’d likely catch the eyes of any guy there stealing a glance at her as often as possible. God I loved going to the movies.

            My grandmother gave me a lot of grief about my smart mouth. Usually this was an opportunity to take a dig at a friend of whom she disapproved, and some of it must have been the audacity I exhibited in calling her on some of her shit. She didn’t like to be called. I guess she could have stopped my weekly cinematic excursions if she’d chosen, but the truth was that they were as much a part of her routine as mine.

            When Fridays rolled around and I headed home after school I was usually pretty tired. Because of increased homework demands, and especially my inefficient response to those demands (often influenced by television programming), my school night bedtime was around 11:30 PM (an incredibly late hour I was informed few years later during a sixth grade visit to the principal’s office), so I really wanted to relax at the completion of the school week. I might go out and play army with a friend, but the play was subdued, and often I just watched The Early Show and waited around until dinner. That was followed by the national news, and later, after Route 66, I watched The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock. I usually made it through the local news at 11, and sometimes through the first 15 or so minutes of The Late Show before I crashed.

            Saturday was my grandmother’s day to sleep-in, so I tried to get up as quietly as possible to watch Action Theatre at 7:30 AM. I really liked the Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen serial which bookended whatever movie played. Since there was no alarm clock that day, my actual waking times varied widely. Sometimes I made the entire show, but sometimes I missed an hour or a portion of an hour. On a few days I might miss the thing entirely (I always blamed granny for that), and on equally rare days I got up early enough to see the test pattern before sign-on. Anyway, after the movie I watched cartoons and waited for breakfast.

            A lot of times my next door neighbors’ grandson, who stayed with them on Saturdays, would come over to hang out. In truth, he was the person who got me started going to the movies in the first place, so I owe him a lot. The movie started at 1 PM, so after lunch he and I, or another friend and I (if no one was around I went alone), walked uptown to see whatever flick was showing. Admission was 25 cents, so my grandmother gave me 50 cents for the movie and popcorn (she sometimes even paid admission for one of my friends). Now I don’t really care for popcorn, so that extra quarter fed into another great diversion—comics.

            My love of comic books began when I discovered their existence. What’s not to like? Even before I could read I bought them just to look at the pictures. I started out enjoying war comics, especially Sgt. Rock, and what I called scary comics, like Batman or Superman. The way the movies worked into the comics was simple: I went to the movies, did not buy popcorn, then after the movie went to search the comic rack at Tallent’s Drug Store across the street from The Hollywood for two new titles. With the exception of Classics Illustrated comics, which were 15 cents each, all other comics cost 12 cents each, and a penny in tax for two, so I purchased two each week. The end of the day was well on the way by the time I got home, so I spent the night reading and/or watching TV until I went to bed.

            Like most spoiled baby boomers, I had a lot of toys, and like many boys of that time I had a lot of toy guns. I had a hard plastic, red, spring loaded .45 that fired little suction tipped darts and served me through several years of campaigns. I also had a shoulder holster and a snub nosed .38 that fired plastic bullets when the shell was powered by a cap. Mom got me a machinegun that, when wound up, would make rat-tat-tat sounds at each trigger pull. I had a lot of the usual stuff, cars, Lincoln logs, Tinker Toys, science toys, and lots of plastic soldiers, including Civil War armies with two cannons each, and other things, too.

            Until the late spring of 1963, I received most of my toys as Christmas or birthday presents, with a few wild cards thrown in along the way, but a large package filled with toys from mom and dad appeared one day and changed all that and brought a new obsessions. One was a plastic model of Frankenstein walking over a grave. I was in awe. I didn’t even know those things existed. The others were large, green, plastic soldiers with more realistic detail than I was accustomed to. There were other things in the box as well, but who cared after those two?

            And so it was that every six or eight weeks the packages came. Frankenstein was followed by Dracula, The Wolf Man, The Mummy, and The Creature from the Black Lagoon. The big soldiers also continued, but now included Japanese, German, and Russian troops. I also received my first WWII combat aircraft models in those shipments.

            If all these things weren’t enough diversion from school work and activities, there was the stumbling block of girls in the classroom. Christ almighty, how could I be expected to do a goddamned thing when surrounded by girls all the time? I couldn’t keep my eyes off em. I thought about them all the time. For instance, during Math time I might be in the midst of a sex fantasy about a classmate or teacher (we had quite a number of good looking teachers), or might be mentally sodomizing some beauty during Geography. I walked around with a boner for goodly portions of each school day. So, as I said before, my grades plummeted that first year with granny.

            So, what do the toys and other diversions, as I call them, have to do with my musical history? Nothing in the narrow sense, but in the larger picture they were all part of the same pop cultural exposure which led to the development of a personal critical aesthetic I would use to evaluate all experience from then to now.

More Monkey Music

Thanks to all friends and readers who have commented the last couple of days. Thanks for reading.

            I settled into life at my grandma’s pretty easily. She wasn’t up my ass as much as my mom would have been, and that was a blessing. In this slightly more relaxed atmosphere I was better able to lie about the completion of my homework assignments. That left plenty of time for the important things like television and my afterschool play activities. My youngest aunt had married and left home (she and her husband lived in my family’s house while mom and dad were away), and I had run of the granny’s house.

            At first the music I was exposed to came mostly from television. Aside from the usual sources like Ed Sullivan or some other variety show, I began to listen more intently to television theme music than before. Some of that changed because of a friend of my middle aunt’s who became a regular visitor at granny’s, and who was also an Elvis fan. She brought by the great Doc Pomus song Surrender performed by The King. Granny hated the song, but I liked it and wanted to revisit the Elvis collection. After some snooping, I was able to find a cache in a special, plastic Elvis folder that my youngest aunt had left behind. The old Phillips record player was hidden nearby, so I started jamming right away.

            I was unfamiliar with many of the songs I found, and some of the 45’s had as many as six songs, three per side, on them. Looking back, I suppose these were re-issues of some sort, packaged for youngsters who didn’t own stereos. Whatever the case, they made me happy.

            I guess Elvis made my grandmother happy, too, because she had seen G.I. Blues and Blue Hawaii while I summered in Norfolk, and since the stereo was still around, someone had purchased the LP soundtracks to those movies. I played the Elvis titles, and the patriotic songs from a Johnny Horton LP, in regular rotation.

            Now anyone who lived in the south between the early 60’s and early 80’s also had another musical source in the telecasts of regional (and some nationally known) artists on Saturday afternoons (I believe they were broadcast on WATE, Channel 6 from Knoxville, though I believe they all originated in Nashville). The constant was Flatt & Scruggs and The Wilburn Brothers, but there were also others like Porter Wagoner and The Stonemans, all of whom played country music or bluegrass. I really liked these shows, but they were a bit like soap operas in that if you watched them only once a month you caught all the new music on tap because they held onto the same playlists for at least that long. A few of these shows, Porter Wagoner’s and Arthur Smith’s, for instance, found places in local stations’ 7 PM time slots, so you really couldn’t miss them.

            I must backtrack a minute to mention my dad’s taste and influence. Dad was a country guy through and through. He could play a little on guitar, and he sang several songs (his favorite seemed to be Down in the Mines). Whenever I rode with dad he always listened to some country station. When I was younger I liked it, but liked it a little less so in my teens. Both he and mom fell in love with the music of Jim Reeves, and I liked it, too. There’ll be more about dad later.

            Things went along at my granny’s pretty much as I described for awhile. Granny loved country music just like my dad, and we listened to a Sweetwater station with a country format as much for weather and school information as anything else. I still got to hear a little bit of new pop music on the radio of a gray 1951 Chevy parked in the family carport. The Chevy had the kind of ignition that would turn without the key. One day I turned it and the radio came on. I knew the battery would eventually go down, so it was used sparingly.

            My grades during that first complete year with my grandmother took a nosedive. Some of the cause, I suppose, could be attributed to the separation from the routines of my parents, but I’m convinced that most of it had to do with competing interests. In addition to music and television were the movies, comics, and toys. I assure you that no homework assignment could possibly outshine any leisure pastime. The fun of the world was all the diversion I needed.

            Going to the movies on Saturday afternoons might seem harmless, and in the big picture it was, but some movies stuck with me past their view dates. I saw The Three Stooges, Elvis, and lots of drive-in fare at the beautiful old Hollywood Theatre, right next to The Big Chief Restaurant. Always attracted to smart mouthed dialog and jokes, I oft carried wise guy lingo and manner home and to school after such a viewing experience. Other influences included the people who came to town to see the show. Of course I saw quite a few from my neighborhood since it was walking distance away, and that meant that kids from all directions of walking distance also came.

Still Swinging

Thanks for all the response from yesterday's post. I'm kinda overwhelmed. No better way to follow that than with another.

            When I began my schooling, in 1961, my youngest aunt began her senior year in high school. Like my other aunt, she was pretty cool, and I was always fascinated with her friends and the things they listened to. As a member of the high school marching band, she played clarinet and wore a soldierish black and gold uniform. She’d been a big Elvis fan as a younger teen, and went through The Twist phase with everyone else in American. Her boyfriend (later husband) liked the usual pop hits and all, but he also had a real taste for R&B, especially The Platters. As usual, I dug it all.

            Record listening became secondary, mostly because no new material was introduced into the house collection. For satirical purposes, product commercials became an influence. Beer commercial jingles lent themselves to clever word substitutions. My best buddy from across the street was a witty wordster, and between us many a tune was subjected to our often scatologically juvenile alterations. The same treatment was afforded the ever changing flood of television themes.

            Near the end of second grade, in 1963, mom and dad moved to Norfolk, VA to temporarily stay with my oldest aunt and her husband in their military housing apartment while saving a stake to get their own place. They left me with my grandmother to finish out the year (just a few months), then mom took me on a bus to the great home of the nation’s largest military base. I was quite excited about a long bus ride and the chance to live in a city full of military personnel, ships, planes, and more.

            Living, at first, with my aunt and uncle was ok, but with their four kids (later five), me, mom and dad, and my middle aunt, the restrictive nature of the crowd made me feel like a sardine. We finally got a place, to my delight, right on the beach. I could walk 50 yards from my back door and look out on the Atlantic. About a mile north of our stretch of beach The Oceanview Amusement Park (home, at one time, of the world’s largest rollercoaster ride, and old wooden thing that scared the crap outta me the only time I rode it) colored the night with reflective, carnivalesque light.

            During that summer I mostly listened to Top 40 radio, but another source of music was the jukebox system at the restaurant where my mom, dad, aunt, uncle (who was also in the Navy), and my future uncle (whose hitch was nearly over) all worked during the night shift. While the radio played youth oriented songs (this was just before The Beatles), the jukebox was a different animal. If any youth songs made it to the playlist, they tended to be the softer in tone than some. Rather than combos thrashing earnestly away, orchestral arrangements with lush strings and full vocals prevailed. I regret that I have little knowledge of many of the titles on that system (or the radio, for that matter), though I do remember the Nat King Cole song, Those Lazy, Crazy, Hazy Days of Summer.

            As the summer drew to a close, I became worried. My parents’ plan had been to bring me to Norfolk, show me a great time, spoil me a little, then put me into the school system in the fall. The flaw in their plan was that they had promised me the final decision on whether to attend school in Norfolk or return to my grandmother’s to attend school in Madisonville, TN. It really wasn’t a difficult decision. Although there were many enticing things the city offered, I just neither dug the people, nor the idea of being the other in a foreign land. It was bad enough in Madisonville, for if I am anything, I am other, even in my own land. But at least in my hometown I knew where everything happened, and unlike in any city, was free to roam all over the place. Regardless of my parents’ feelings (and I won’t ever try to BS and allow that I was immune from the emotional aspect of such a decision), it was the best move for me.

Monkey Music

I'm taking a break from art this week to bring five days of my musical history. I have not, nor shall I, list the names of any but the very famous. Try not to get too confused, and I'll attempt to make everything as clear as possible.

Phase 3

            In 1960, my mother and I moved back into my grandmother’s house. Like times before, something wonderful happened when my aunt purchased a red and white colored stereo from the Western Auto. I didn’t know stereo from mono or anything else, but a shiny new record player was good news. Equally good was a cache of new music she had bought to fully appreciate the stereo experience.

            This was all, on many levels, a very big deal to my six year old self. Just looking at the machine, with its tiny, LP accommodating spindle, and dual speakers hanging from little hinges, was a nearly religious experience. That I was not allowed, at first, to touch it, made it even more godlike. The touching restriction vanished quickly, in part, no doubt, to my constant needling to hear music.

            One of the great LP’s she bought was Ray Charles’ Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music. Like everyone else, I loved Georgia, but nothing compared to the opening of I Can’t Stop Loving You. It gave me the same sort of feeling that several Elvis songs had earlier. I was all in whenever it played.

            Another of her noteworthy purchases was The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart. Since I watched television, comedy was nothing new, but even my young ears heard something different. A news writer from the local paper once commented to me at a party that I had a sense comic timing. True or not, it is due in no small measure to Bob Newhart. I listened so often that I learned many of the entire routines by heart.

            The stereo also allowed me to revisit music I had lost touch with for a couple of years. Nearly all the records I had previously enjoyed were still lying around, so I had a go at the lot. In addition, my collection of kids’ records, useless since my player’s demise, made another round. I felt like I was back on top.

            My aunt and I grew very close during that time. She baby sat me on Friday nights, which began with a trip to the restaurant where my grandmother cooked the evening meals, and where she taught me how to consume, in a mannerly way, my dinner. We didn’t have a car, so we walked the mile or so to and from Maxwell’s Restaurant on Happy Top, at times in very cold weather. When we got home we always fought over whether to watch Route 66 or The Flintstones. She also took me to The First Baptist Church, where she taught a class in crafts, every Sunday. Eventually, as young adults are wont to do, she left home for other vistas. Fortunately for me she left the stereo behind.