Lily The Pink - Repost from 2010

I knew, even back in 1969, that the reference was to Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable Compound. But I didn't know, until I looked it up for this post, that Elton John, Graham Nash, and Jack Bruce were all in the original UK version, or that the song was based on an older one.



As for Lydia, she was from north of Boston, and there is a well-baby clinic with that name in Salem, founded by her daughter. Her 19th C patent medicine for "female complaints" - presumably menstrual discomfort - contained, among many other useless herbs, gentian root, which gives Moxie its distinctive aftertaste. It was also 20% alcohol.

Thus, Jonathan, Mrs. Pinkham's 19th C herbal concoction was the original Whixie.

If An Angel Came To Tea

We had an adult Sunday school class recently that used a Bible Project video about the Elohim as its starting point.  One theme which struck me was that they do not view the events of this world the way that we do.  It likely struck me mostly because I wrote a song on that theme over forty-five years ago when I was in college.  I referenced it ten years ago here, and reprint that below. 

It also fits with my recent thoughts on the spiritual dangers of popular culture, though here the idea is more that such things are extraneous or a distraction.  The song, and some others from the Grail opera, are still up over at Myspace Music, which still exists.  I either never had an account or more likely lost my sign in information, but it's right there on the list. I don't sing or listen to my own music very much.

*****

Another from the Grail Opera. This song is Sir Gawain's, on the eve of his abandoning the quest. In the original design, the quest is described from four points of view, in descending order of spiritual rightness: Galahad, who (along with Sir Bors and Sir Percivale) achieves the Grail, takes communion from it administered by a Christ-figure; Lancelot, who is granted to see the Grail but not partake; Gawain, a plain and decent man with no especial Christian intensity; and Mordred, the villain who holds the quest in contempt and seeks Arthur's throne for his own. Very Once and Future King in its delineation.

I was more a seeker than a believer at the time I wrote this, but the writing of the opera was pivotal in my conversion. I think I might now switch Lancelot and Gawain in the ranking of spiritual fitness. But Galahad remains the one almost unearthly pure and devoted, his faith a rock against which others might dash themselves to destruction.

Gawain explains his decision to the young Percivale, who has grown close to.

Friend and band member Bill Whitman popped in on the night of recording to improvise a second guitar part. I believe he still makes a living in music somewhere near Memphis.

Find more artists like Dave Wyman at Myspace Music

The rumor's around that Sir Galahad
Is a prig, and not quite human
In his actions, reactions.
In answer to this I feel that I had
Better point out a mistake
The knights are showing, unknowing.

You expect him to reply like you
And comment that "The sky is blue
Today." I don't know why we do
For he's just not our kind.

If An Angel Came To Tea would you impress him
With the newest tune that's sung across the land?
Would you tell the local scandals to distress him?
No you couldn't, for he wouldn't understand.

Now Sir Galahad's an angel, or close to it;
The most perfect man in all of Arthur's land.
You demand he keep the common touch all through it
For you won't believe he's not a common man.


The Grail is for saints, I've said it before
And there's only three or four of us
That knew it - can do it.
So I'm going home I seek it no more
And may God forgive my lack
Of resolution, contribution.

It's a hard thing to admit you've lost,
Could not afford the final cost
To pay, and now by winter's frost
I'll be safely in my home.

I have followed my best hopes, but hope is dying.
It was futile, I can see that clearly now.
But I don't begrudge the time I spent in trying,
For just trying was impossible somehow.

So farewell to you, Sir Percy, good luck to you.
I have loved you as I would have loved a son.
I shall your give your best regards to those that knew you,
For your old life dies, your new life has begun.

For I don't believe
You'll be unchanged
And most men can't perceive
An angel - here.

Clyde Joy, Willie Mae, and Goodnight Homes

Originally published April 2011. Reposted 2019, #21 on my all-time most-visited list, with over 3000 hits. The many hits over the years must come from NH people looking up Clyde Joy for nostalgic reasons.


I was going to launch into my post about anosognosia, apophatic and cataphatic theology, and all belief as epiphenomenon, but got distracted into country music in New Hampshire instead. Really. That is an absolutely true statement.

These rabbit trails result from living somewhat near the place one grew up. I was on the Daniel Webster Highway North tonight, driving by the place I had my first job out of college.

I graduated in the recession of '75, wanted to return to NH, and was willing to take any job I could get. Apparently people who enter the job market during recessions have some tendency to never recover from that, always selling themselves short and never making as much at graduates in other years. That's true in my case, but also a good thing. I was terribly arrogant and needed to be brought down a few - no, several - pegs. I counted myself lucky to get a part-time job at the Goodnight Motel in Hooksett at $3/hr. The owner's name really was Goodnight - first Fred, and then his son Gary - and their main business was selling mobile homes on the other side of the highway. Marlette mobile homes, I'll have you know. The Cadillac of mobile homes. And they were moving into Yankee Homes (very stylish) and doublewides, 24' x 36'.

Hooksett and the DW Hwy had just started to grow then. A K-Mart and a McDonald's had come in down the road, and the town fathers (or more likely, the town mothers) were trying to squeeze the Sky Ray Drive-In out of showing R-rated movies, which were sorta visible driving by. And not artistic R-rated movies, you understand, but things like Can I Do It Till I Need Glasses Tangentially, I learned in searching for this image that it was Robin Williams's first movie.


But at the moment, Hooksett was still pretty much what it had been in my childhood: rural, goofy, poor, uncool. It was definitely culture shock for this North End boy to be working at the no-tell motel attached to the trailer park and mobile home sales lot on the way out of town - way out of town - on old Rte 28, headed toward unimaginably backward places like Suncook and Pittsfield. These were not places where anyone you knew lived, but places you drove through on the way to the Lakes Region for vacation.

So I was a clerk at the Goodnight Motel, renting rooms at $12.60 a night (the waterbed room was $17.85) and collecting rents from the trailer park. Goodnight's was apparently where you rented a room for prom night - I hadn't known that, to show you how naive I was, even though my main girlfriend junior year and my junior prom date (different people) were from Hooksett. Had I known, that second girl...

Ah, another rabbit trail. You are not going to hear that story.

But by 1975 in NH, mobile home sales were on their way down, and chain hotels were pushing out those uh, charming little places along the secondary highways. Fred Goodnight had moved away to Costa Rica*, and his son Gary was trying to keep the various businesses afloat. My knowledge of Goodnight Homes up until that point was that they sponsored the country music show on WMUR every week, with Clyde Joy and Willie Mae. (If you are from NH, I really recommend this link, BTW.) Fred was originally from Georgia, so maybe he liked the music, or maybe he liked Clyde, or maybe he just thought it was good advertising to get on local TV. Whatever, Clyde would sing a song to the tune of "Goodnight Irene" every week that plugged Goodnight Homes.

We didn't call it country music then, but Western, or Country & Western, and it was a cowboy thing, not a southern thing. Rural New England had plenty of fans of fiddle music, and actual folk music like Jimmie Rodgers, not any of this new-fangled Pete Seeger stuff. They did accept the whole Hootenanny and Kingston Trio idea even though that wasn't quite the same, because they could at least find the records or see it on TV. But until then, it was Clyde Joy and Willie Mae.

Those of us in Manchester's north end found this humiliating, interfering with our aspirations to be an intellectual, urbane place like Boston or Newport, RI. Maine and Vermont were considered even more backward than us then, and represented what we were trying to escape from. WMUR was the local station, and embarrassing enough in itself, but this Circle 9 Ranch and cowboy hat stuff - in New Hampshire - was beyond the pale. It lasted along time, though.

Ironically, I had become a bluegrass and modern country fan by 1975, via Stephen Stills, the Flying Burrito Brothers, and John Fogerty, but Clyde and Willie Mae were the old, uncool country music - and they were off the air by then anyway.

And now here I was working for these guys. I didn't tell many people. The main office had a little apartment upstairs, where Fred stayed when he was in town, which was hardly ever. The magazine rack had what we called "naturist" magazines then - photojournals of what life was like at nudist camps, an excuse to show naked people. But it was seedy, not like the full-color girlie magazine Playboy, which was quite open about the idea that they were showing pretty girls with little or no clothing. Naturist magazines - I think these were called "Sundial," or "Sunrise," or something -
similar to this, anyway - were more coy, like they were reporting on news from nudist camps, or discussions about the future of nudism or whatever.

I was warned about Willie Mae calling. She was supposedly always looking for money from Fred, because he owed her, and there was a wink, wink, nod, nod that there was something else to the story. I absolutely believed that then, but now I'm pretty sure whatever story is true is forever lost. I got a call only once, out of the blue and quite angry "I want to speak to Fred!" I had never seen Fred, no one had told me he was expected, and I quite honestly said I had no idea where he was. The woman told me I was lying, she knew he was in town, and I had better tell him that Willie Mae had called. Well, okay then.

Fred showed up that evening, breezed through the entrance, introduced himself, told a few stories and treated me like I was his great pal from years gone by. So Willie Mae had heard something, more than even Fred's son had heard. I told him she had called, and he waved it away, laughing with one of those laughs that "we men knew what those things were all about." I didn't actually, but I laughed knowingly anyway. It seemed the wisest move, as this guy was probably still the owner and my boss. I didn't dare ask him the story about the bullet-hole in the office ceiling, which apparently dated from his time, but I kept looking at it, trying to subtly remind him of more interesting times. He didn't bite. He went upstairs, turned on the TV, and told me not to set the alarms when I left.

*Something to do with extradition, I heard. I was instructed never to tell anyone when Fred was back in the US.

Life Expectancy

I've Got Sixpence

Don't you just know you would like these guys?



HT: cobb

Christmas Party

Frosty. Jingle Bells. Yes, Virginia, with its “The eternal light with which childhood fills the world…” stealing from religious imagery for its power, as always. 

But it is our holiday, right? Or was, originally.

War Is Over. Deck The Halls. White Christmas.

Richie comes up and amidst some more secular pieces slips in “Hark the Herald,” then a Christian contemporary of his own composition. Good work.

The Little Drummer Boy.  Marginal – at least it’s got Jesus in it.

From my job I can see the day when an Actual Christian will be brought out as some museum piece to weakly sing a carol no one knows anymore, with all the sentimentalists beaming at the old bird, thinking that they’ve gotten the authentic flavor of the traditional holiday – similar to those old-fashioned peppermints you have to special order now, which they get for their grandchildren every year.

It hasn’t reached you yet.  This is New Hampshire, which, along with Maine and Vermont have the lowest percentage of Christians, and gee-whiz-who’da-thunk it, the least charitable giving as well. European levels. I am sad to see the gospel leave the place where I live – because Christmas and Easter are the last cultural holdouts, and if we can’t sustain those, we won’t sustain anything else – but I am glad that it has at least found other places to land, in Africa and Asia. 

I am glad of this for other reasons as well.  I used to think that an apophatic faith – one defined by contemplation of what God is not, was rather a dodge, a contrariness with more than a hint of arrogance, looking down on those who used mere worldly attributes to understand what God is.  But I learned in dry years that this is not so.  We lean on the physical and sensory to carry us: if those around us don’t Do Christmas (or Do Worship, or Do Charity) in quite the way we think it should be, it gets ruined for us.*

And yet, Christ comes, just as much in ruined Christmas as in an orderly one.  We walk in a world among people who breathlessly say “…very special moments that remind us of what this holiday season is really about!” – meaning smiling and punch and watching the Grinch with friends – but the ordered steps of the earth and sun are unaffected, the season comes, and the appointed time for preparation is now joined to it as long as the earth spins. Christ was, and is, and is to come.  The apophatic faith which says “Not thus…nor thus…” is more popular in the East, where there are always bad governments, shorter lifespans, more death.   A good approach for tragic times, or even merely irritated ones.  No one sang “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming” this year.  No matter.  Christ comes.  Rejoice.

For contrast to this post, I wrote The Sadness of NPR Christmas a few years ago.

*Can this be AVI, who usually calls us to immerse in the worldly and the physical trappings of the faith – the taste of the wine, the harmony of the music, the dark ceiling recesses of the cathedral?  Yes, the same.  Those are there for our instruction, to teach us great things.  They are the mold of our faith, giving it shape.  Yet the day may come when the mold is stripped away – and the faith has to stand alone.  Rejoice in that day also.

Ron Paul Family Cookbook

One interesting effect of living in NH is getting an up-close look at political advertising every four years. I don’t think there has been anywhere near the fuss this time – perhaps because Iowa and SC have increased importance, perhaps because 24-7 media and instant polling gives the nation much of the information it used to depend on NH for.

But still, the rest of the country may not have received the Ron Paul Cookbook in the mail. Quite the item, and exactly as it says, it has recipes; it’s not using “cookbook” as a metaphor for legislation and attitudes. There are lots of pictures of Ron’s family, and some short essays, including his wife’s about America, but there’s banana bread and brisket as well. Simple, everyday American recipes, including such ingredients as a bottle of catalina dressing for the brisket (only two more ingredients there).

I am trying to imagine when this could have occurred before in American campaigns. I think one would have to go farther back than my parents’ generation (which is Ron’s generation). It looks like something I would have found in my grandmother’s bookcase, kept either because it had a particular recipe worth keeping or because she liked the pol. I can’t imagine who that would be, even then. It wouldn’t be something from the Bass family, or the Greggs, or the Bridges. One of the Straws might have tried something like that as PR for the mills, but not for office-seeking. It’s just not us. Seems like it would go down better with the voters in the Midwest or the South.

OTOH, the styling has a 90’s Rodale Press look about it, which in turn drew some from Grit or Burpee’s seeds from a generation before, so the appeal might intentionally be to a younger audience, hankering for an America that never quite existed in any region but was pretty solidly in the imaginations (and aspirations) of most Americans years ago. Ron Paul apparently does have quite a following among the young, and perhaps that’s why.

I think I’ll keep it. Heck, no other candidate ever sent me a cookbook before. My grandchildren might have a hard time integrating it into history at first glance, though.

Yardbirds

I am playing my son's team, The Yardbirds, in fantasy football this week.  He's going to beat me badly, so this seems appropriate.




I might be big into keeping track of roots, but it pays to remember...

they really did get better over the years.

60's Sitcom

David Kopel over at Volokh has a post about a strange theme he discovers running through 60's sitscoms: the hidden alien and relatedly, the family that doesn't know it is strange. He puts Mr. Ed, My Favorite Martian, I Dream of Jeannie, and My Mother the Car in the former category, while the Addams Family, The Munsters, and Beverly Hillbillies go into the latter. He wonders if there is some suggestion of closeted gays in this repetition.

I can think of many reasons why this is not the case, discussed below, yet would still give it a qualified agreement. The entertainment business was close to the only sector to accept homosexuality, and even there it was not reliable. It was part of a general acceptance of people a little different from the norm. There was a lot of posturing and self-congratulation about it - Hollywood (New York, LA general) was not the only place which accepted Women Who Speak Their Minds or liberal political ideas; nor was it entirely deserved - other American sectors were less racist, for example. But in the main, the arts and entertainment industries were a place where a person could acknowledge or even flaunt homosexuality. So the writers for My Favorite Martian probably never had the idea of gay acceptance cross their minds, but the idea of the hidden, shameful idea actually being quite all right was likely not far from the surface.

The shows remained heteronormative for one obvious reason and one less obvious. A) They had to appeal to an audience, make money, stay on the air. B)Acceptance of gays was less a principle than a tradeoff: don't say my divorces/affairs/fetishes are wrong, and I won't criticise your homosexuality. That is often how such tolerances develop - religious tolerance here and in Western Europe owes much to property rights, for example. I don't care if you hate Quakers, Hiram. He bought the property and it's his and you can't make him move out. Unless you want the deacons to decide whether you own your piece or not. That it was tradeoff, not principle, has come back to bite them when it comes to child molestation. If Whoopi Goldberg objected to it on principle she would never say "It wasn't rape rape." That's the statement of a person being given a pass to say and do what she wants in exchange for extending that to others.

Back to sitcoms: I wrote in 2009 that a stronger theme was Missing Family Members (especially Mom). The possible creepiness of this I discuss there.

The Unusual Family motif may also draw a great deal from ambivalence about families of origin. The Munsters may simply be an exaggerated "My Big Fat Greek Wedding." I mentioned that the weird families tended to be the intact ones: Munsters, Addams, Simpsons. It's comedy by inversion, like Superman's Bizarro. It's been used for centuries because it sets up laffs quite well. It also sets up sentimentality in comedy, of filial bonds despite it all, etc.

Ambivalence is key for comedy. I Dream of Jeannie clearly plays to the subtext "OMG! That guy has a beautiful woman who will do whatever he tells her to!" (Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.) Yet consider - the show isn't funny if she doesn't have superpowers. A guy finds a pretty girl who does what he says - you could sell some episodes of that on a porno channel. You could use it as a comic bit from a minor character in a larger movie. But what are you going to write for jokes for twenty-five episodes? Tangentially, I knew even as a child (12.5) that Tony was entirely oblivious/resistant to the sexual angle of all this, but that his friend Roger wasn't. I don't see it in the scripts - Bill Dailly must've done it entirely with his facial expressions. Bewitched follows the older, Lucy-and-Ethel type of crafty-shemes-behind-hubby's-back comedy, except now the woman is clearly the more powerful one.

Secrecy, where the audience knows things the character onstage doesn't, is also comedy gold. No need to wonder if My Mother The Car is actually My Mother The Secret Drinker But Is Still A Really Nice Person, or Mr. Ed represents Wilbur's B&D dungeon. It's the fun of comedy, and if darker elements are there, they are of necessity vague and far away.

These themes recur in TV in later decades, but in the 70's were largely replaced by Wacky Ensembles: WKRP, Mary Tyler Moore, MASH, Taxi, Muppets, Happy Days, Welcome Back Kotter, Laverne & Shirley - I imagine my clever audience can think of others.

What We Didn't See

Getting lost in YouTube again...

Looking through the 60's music for something fun, and I keep coming upon clips from Shindig!  Wait.  They had the Rolling Stones, The Kinks, The Walker Brothers, Petula Clark, Glen Campbell. The Dave Clark 5, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Bobbie Vee - and four other acts ALL ON THE SAME NIGHT??!!  Where was I?  How did I miss this? and Hullabaloo?

They did this week after week.  The guest list at the link, plus this one for Hullabaloo, is simply astounding.  Both shows lasted about a year-and-a-half before being dropped for low ratings.  How could this be?  How were we not glued to this, all of life coming to a halt?  Whoever chose these bands had a magic touch.

Well, it was 1964-66, so that's a partial explanation for me.  I was nearly oblivious to popular music until very late 1965, when I moved to a more suburban, fashion conscious junior high (and the transition from 6th-7th grade was pretty much the dividing line in those days anyway.  7th graders went to dances; that was improper for 6th-graders). In November 1965 I bought my first 45, "California Dreaming" for $0.79 at Manchester Music (directly across from the Red Arrow, which is still there).  It was a line crossed.  Before that, only Hayley Mills and the Green Bay Packers penetrated the from the outside world into mine highly local one.

But the kids just a few years older - why did they not watch?

My theory is that it was caught between generations.  Television viewing was different in those days.  Families had one TV, it was in the living room, and during prime time, what was watched was a negotiated affair.  It was actually a dictatorial affair by parents, but they wanted to have as few arguments in their lives as possible, so they tolerated some kid-only shows and just went elsewhere for 30 minutes.  Not only was Shindig an hour, it was non-stop music they weren't interested in.  They could put up with single performances by rock bands on Ed Sullivan, but a whole hour was just too much.  Worse, some of these bands were not merely music they weren't interested in, but things they actively objected to.  Hair. Electric. Suspiciously bluesy - which would be the wrong kind of black music.

American Bandstand could get away with it, not being in prime time.

Next, check out the MC's and guest hosts on both shows.  They sometimes get it right - the Righteous Brothers, Peter Noone, Barry McGuire - but more often just don't get it: Pat Boone, Trini Lopez.  Many of these were exactly the performers that hippies were sniggering at and trying to get rid of.  They were, like, so uncool, practically Lawrence Welk material.  Suckered the parents in enough to watch, then smack them with the Kinks Girl, you really got me goin'... and after a few tsks and pointed comments from one parent, the other would cross the room "to see what else was on." (Answer:  Shindig's competitors the first year were The Beverley Hillbillies.  Second year, Munsters and Daniel Boone on Thursdays; Flipper and Jackie Gleason on Saturday.  Hullabaloo was up against To Tell the Truth and Twelve O'clock High.  Mom and Dad would have put any of those ahead of the Rolling Stones singing "Heart of Stone."  Paul Anka, okay, maybe.  But not all those dirty-looking bands that can't sing.)

There was another Shindig, BTW.  Scottish, mid 80's.  Also a variety show.  Fascinating if you are interested in 1. The Scots roots of American country dancing - square, reels, contra - performed by men in kilts and women with petticoats.  2. The return influence of American country music on Scottish popular, and/or 3. Well, that's about it, actually. 

Whenever I watch these dances, I think of the line from Tolkien "...and began to dance the Springle-Ring.  A pretty dance, but rather vigorous."

What The World Needs Now

Best parts:

1. How hard is the choreography here?  Except  she can't manage it.
2. At 1:00, watch what happens to the dancers when their platform moves.
3. Listen closely to the lyrics of the second verse.
4. That big pin on the plaid skirt.  I had forgotten those.

Photos

I was sent a link of some Farm Security Administration photos from the late Depression

The vividness of the color puts me in mind of my commentary, dating back to 2005, on the emotional influence black-and-white photography has on our experience of earlier times, and even on our social and political understanding of the times.

Big Mal

I thought I had posted the reminiscence of my best friend from high school, but in trying to locate it to direct friends from my reunion to the post, I find I did not. I suspect I thought it too long, and not of enough general interest to dominate an entire page. I backdated it into last month, so that October is even more the best summary month of the whole blog.

He died around 2004 of an unusual brain cancer.  Out with friends at a restaurant, he looked up and down at the offerings and said "I can't read the left side of this menu."  That's a definite tipoff of something neurological, of the Oliver Sacks type.  He was dead within the year.  I did not learn of it until a few years later, but I heard the end was not as hard as it might have been; he had friends and family around.

I don't know who will be interested. It includes some of my own history of the era, so there may be some audience there.  Certainly, Mal was an interesting character himself, a 6'7" baby-faced boy who took up basketball reluctantly at 16 and found he was good at it.  He was an uncoached walkon from the Manchester NH YMCA league in 1972, banging heads with Kevin Joyce* of South Carolina, then one of the better programs in the country.  He made the squad and played '72-75. He stayed near Columbia after that, finding he preferred the South.  The post will also pop up whenever anyone searches for his unusual last name: Malyerck

*Yes, that Kevin Joyce, of Munich Olympics Silver Medal team fame.

Reunion Update

I spent more time with the people I went to elementary school with, and the people I went to summer camp and a six-week advanced studies program with, than the people I went to Manchester Central with.  Particularly with the two from Straw School, we spent almost no time talking about anything any of us had done since 1965. I don't even know the general outlines of their lives, only that they are both teachers.

We talked about the things that happened 1959-65, and what had happened to the people we knew.  I learned something of their lives then that I had not realised. We shared some tragic news, some humorous updates, and many "do you remember" stories.

There are very, very few people left in the world who have even a remote chance of recalling those events.  We clutch to them, as a reinforcement that they did really happen; that we do remember them at least approximately; that the person we were, that child we have not seen for 50 years who is ourselves really did exist.  I could have made him up, you see. We learn that even events that happened a few minutes ago have no touch-point, no reality save within our memory.  Perhaps, then, events 50 years ago have no reality at all, and we wander in a barely-populated universe. Joan Blajda and Barbara Letendre* remember a boy with my name, and associate him with me as strongly as I do myself.  They remember things about him that accord with my own story.  Perhaps I am real after all.

The connection with a circle of five friends from HS was almost an entirely separate experience.  Other faces came and went.  I tried to give each a little encouragement as they spent their six sentences on me before moving on.

*Ruth Hamilton was also there, but entirely quiet.  She was quiet then, too.  That adds to the reality, for it is not only the word-people who remember.  I am evidently not a mere construction of words who finally became real in the 1980's.

Malyerck

Mal was painfully shy with girls all through highschool.  I don’t think that changed until his second year of college, his first at SC.  He was intensely focused on them, however, and liked to hang out at places where there might be girls.  Away football games were particularly prized, as we would ride on an overcrowded bus and a girl might sit on his lap.  (Even then, he was unable to initiate conversation with her.)  Girls I was going with would talk to him – none of them went so far as to fix him up with any of their friends, now that I think of it – but even that took him awhile to calm down with.  In college he dated very tall, very beautiful girls.  So he got over it, I guess.

Autumn of 1969 or 70 we were at a home football game.  Mal must have been talking with some girl and congratulating himself on that, and I must not have noticed.  I entered a conversation with that girl, cut him out completely, and after a few pleasant minutes she left.  Mal grabbed me by the lapels and said  “And the MOUSE…ran AWAY…with the CHEESE!”

Mal had nicknames for everyone and codenames for everything (see “cheese,” above).  Most of his trial nicknames were banal or clumsy, but he kept up with such persistence that he would find one that would stick.  I don’t know where most of them came from, but they each had a story attached.  By a long and uninteresting chain, my name became “Dubs,” and he called me that through highschool.  How Sarge and Hong Kong Howie got their names I don’t know, because a shortened surname was usually his first try.  He had an ability to make the name stick once he had the right one, until half your other friends called you by that name as well.  “Suds” for Sosnowski, “Corn” for O’Connor, “Jam” for Jamrog – Mal christened all of them.

Several would have been cruel if the recipients had heard them.  A one-armed supervisor at the Holiday Inn restaurant we worked at was called The Sleeve.  Mal could also imitate people’s speech, in an overdone, cartoonish way, and usually had a routine for each elementary school teacher, peppered with typical comments.  There was another boss at our first job (Anderson-Little, Bedford Mall, 1968.  They lied and took advantage of us.  Welcome to the working world, boys), but I only remember the laughing about it, not what Mal’s routine was.

Humorously insulting male banter was his specialty.  He would tell detailed stories, with great rolling of eyes and mock anger, about how friends had left him in a difficult situation, such as guarding the beer in the snow.  When he recounted the event, the temperature would always be twenty degrees colder, the wind twenty mph harder, the wait an hour longer than it actually was.  Bill Cosby was the reigning comedian then; Mal could recite whole routines of his easily, and owed a lot of his comic style to Cos.

He wanted to be athletic, and did well at many sports.  Interestingly, he was not especially fast or agile of foot, and was not strong until he took up martial arts training, but he was a legitimately good athlete.  I think it was his hand-eye coordination which was exceptional.  He pitched against Mike Flanagan and won in American Legion ball.  He learned basketball in two years at the Y with no instruction, becoming good enough to make a DII team as a walk-on freshman, and a DI team as a walk-on sophomore.  He remained annoyed that the highschool basketball coach never brought him in to work with him.  There were no other 6-7 students at Manchester Central, let alone sophomores that size.  Additional note on hand-eye co-ordination:  I believe Mal still holds the national record for highest score, first time bowling, set while he was at U South Carolina.  He had some advantage, as he had bowled a lot of candlepin and duckpin with the shot-put sized balls up here.  But still, national record – 229 or something – is pretty good.

He resisted playing basketball for years.  With his height, people always asked him if he played, and he finally consented to play one-on-one with me, just to learn the game.  At almost a foot shorter, and not particularly athletic myself, I consistently beat him badly in 10^th grade.  He had no idea what traveling or double-dribble were.  But he found he liked the game, and rapidly became a good jump shooter.  Not many players, and certainly no guards, could contest his shot out there.

He was a better baseball player.  His father had been a minor league or semi-pro player, and Mal had gotten good instruction all along.  I don’t think he ever worked much on other pitches – he was a fastball pitcher with great location.  Unfortunately, he excelled most at a game for which there were no leagues, teams, or scholarships.  We called it Swift Pitch, and it had some similarities to stickball.  It was a pitcher-batter game played with a tennis ball against a wall on which a strike zone had been drawn.  Every open brick wall in the area – schools, backs of stores, even churches -- had those painted rectangles on them in those days.

The six months in which he grew six inches, though, he was amazingly clumsy, banging his head on things, knocking stuff over in restaurants.  But that was a fairly limited stretch of uncoordination.  He was the first person I knew to excel at video games when they came out.

He laughed harder and found more things funny than anyone I have known since, and I am known for that myself.  I don’t recall him being serious with more than one person present, but we did have deeper conversations ourselves when it was just the two of us.  I don’t know if that was true with his other friends as well, but he saw more of Sarge and traveled with him later on, so I’m guessing yes.  He would discuss religious thoughts and experiences, or the difficulty of being away from family, especially after his dad died.  He did not ask himself abstract or philosophical questions much, but his thinking was very straightforward and solid.  His reasoning was good, though not adventurous.  He could get to the heart of an issue quickly.

It is appropriate to reminisce about him, because he was a reminiscer himself.  He was the motive force behind the 8^th grade 25-year reunion – I don’t know of another elementary school class that has done that – and the pivotal figure of the annual Swift Pitch reunions.  Even when I first met him, just before 7^th grade, he was likely to talk about events that had happened to him in earlier grades, or stories about things classmates had done – good and bad.  He knew some stories of his parents’ childhoods and early adulthood and liked telling them.  He even knew something of his grandmother’s life in Denmark and showed curiosity about it when she visited.  His memory was quite remarkable, and I think he remembered because he liked visiting the past.   I had no interest in Swift Pitch – and several of the participants of those reunions, who I hope never to run into again – so I missed his later nostalgias.  Also, I had children by then.

Odd that he never developed an interest in history, as far as I know.  Perhaps he was concerned with events only when he could make a personal connection.  He read few books, but he had his hands on newspapers and magazines a fair bit.  He used to brag most of the way through highschool that he had read only one book, My Life At Bat, by Mickey Mantle.  In late highschool he started reading other sports biographies, like Jim Bouton’s.

I had a habit in the late 70’s of asking people I had not seen in awhile “What have you been thinking?” instead of “What have you been doing?”  Mal could always answer that in a flash; the question never threw him in the least.   He could launch immediately into some idea about how to make his job more efficient, or what God was steering him towards.  He had little interest in any theological questions, except perhaps wrestling with the paradoxes of omniscience or infinity, of the sort that “If God can/is this, then why is the world that?” Those are young men’s questions, not often revisited until one is old, and I don’t know if he found answers which satisfied him.

I don’t think he considered college until he was a senior in highschool.  He took general rather than college prep courses, and clearly saw himself as one of the non-academic students, the plain folk.  He greatly admired his father, who was a workingman in a technical field, and thought he might go in that direction if he couldn’t play minor league baseball.  There was an especially difficult national mathematics test in those days, the MAA.  A perfect score was around 120, and it was possible to get a negative score.  National champions seldom broke 100, and state champions usually got in the 70’s or 80’s.  Senior year Mal was encouraged by his General Algebra II teacher to take the test, and scored sixth in the school (a large school of 2000).  There were 3-, 4-, 5-, and 6-point questions.  All the hotshots and math cowboys would stupidly head for the 5 and 6-point questions, which were near impossible.  He methodically started with the threes, answered about half, and started in on the fours.  When time was up he was in the high 20’s somewhere.  The school champion had a 36.  He was amazed.  “I beat you?  I beat Kontos?  I beat Greenstreet?”  Yes, you clown, and the valedictorian, salutatorian, and half the calculus class.  I think that was when the possibility of college occurred to him: May of senior year, which is why he started at NHCollege (now Southern NH University) before heading south.

We were among the few who went any distance to go away to school.  In our class of 424, about 1/3 of which went to college, I don’t think there were more than a few other people who went out of New England for school. And those were Northeast:  Colgate, Russell Sage.  Even going to Boston was considered pretty cool and adventurous.  It was a different era, and Manchester was still a mill city.  If people visited another country, it was a once-in-a-lifetime trip.  To go to Bermuda on your honeymoon was impossibly chic: most people went to Niagara Falls, NYC, the Poconos, or the Maine coast. 

We quickly perceived that we had become different from our classmates by going away.  Much of it was probably self-congratulation about how cosmopolitan we had become, but we really did find that our old acquaintances seemed to be having the same conversations as when we left.  I hitchhiked from VA down to SC one Thanksgiving break, and he and Sarge came once to William and Mary, but we didn’t really connect about our college experiences much.  When we got together we would tell old stories and insult each other, and interestingly, we both liked puzzling over things that had happened that seemed strange at the time and figuring them out.  Perceiving that the Smyth Road School principal was an alcoholic, for example – we put those pieces together years later.

Mal and I double-dated to the Naval Sea Cadet ball junior year in HS, or more accurately, I fixed him up with a close friend and went with my girlfriend as well, because he was petrified to ask anyone.  It was required for Sea Cadets to go with a date, I think, and he needed some way out.  He had just grown out of the largest of their uniforms and was about to quit anyway, yet somehow he was convinced he had to go and I had to find him a date.  He was so entertaining and hysterically funny that his date ripped her dress laughing and had to wear a coat the rest of the evening.  When I recently told that woman that Mal had died that date was the first thing she mentioned.

I think his over-the-top (read: juvenile) humor that night was derived from his anxiety, but somehow it worked.  Most likely he mimicked the Sea Cadet hierarchy and others present.  I don’t know how he got involved with that crew.  Most likely his ex-Marine father encouraged him, and there were no Marine Cadets.

We both got involved with DeMolay as well – I’m sure that was originally his mother’s idea, and she talked my mother into it.  June was in Eastern Star, so that adds up.  Our mothers tag-teamed a lot on these brilliant ideas that were going to rescue their sons.

There may have been a time when it was cool to be in DeMolay, and when they actually contributed to building young men of character, but it wasn’t Manchester, 1969.  What a collection of bozos we were:  about 1/3 juvenile delinquents, 1/3 nerds, and 1/3 guys whose families were deeply into Masons or Eastern Star.  Unfortunately, we fit in well with all three groups.  We were supposed to learn pages of secret ritual, wear black capes with red linings, and participate in lots of meetings all over the state.  The group had just about collapsed by the time we got there – there weren’t enough guys to do all the speaking parts of the ritual so we had to double up.  Mal, true to form, developed a routine about each of the leaders, especially “Dad” Darrah, who ruled everything.  “The Dad…has SPOKEN!” was a recurring theme.  He hung on for a bit after I’d quit, and got elected to high office because there was no one else and it was his turn. 

DeMolay did give us the opportunity to be onstage escorts at the NH Junior Miss Pageant in 1969, however, and that in turn allowed us to hang around during rehearsals, attempting to be important.  As none of the young goddesses spoke to us, we were apparently unsuccessful at being suave. Connie Kotrosios was our school’s representative, Barbara-Jo Harden of Central had won the year before was present.  Michelle Cote from Immaculata – a folksinger and the older sister of a classmate of ours – was the eventual winner.  None of the four girls referred to in that preceding paragraph said even a polite word to us or could have picked us out of a police line-up after, even if the other suspects were foreign and had name tags.  So Pep Club worked better than DeMolay, at least for one football and one basketball season.

I think he reached his other leadership positions in much the same way:  being present in a small group.  He was an officer at Charlie Brown’s Basement, the teen hangout that no one came to at the Y (he did learn to shoot a good game of pool, though); we were both officers in the Pep Club, which allowed us to hang out with cheerleaders and majorettes;  I got elected king of the Winter Carnival because Mal threw all his votes to me at the last minute so that Tim Whitehead wouldn’t win.  We were the only three contestants, so Mal and I got to tromp around to different ice events with that year’s queen and her best friend, neither of whom was that pretty or entertaining.  I lit torches and had my picture taken; Mal sat in the back, making fun of Tim Whitehead.  And probably me also.

The kind way to put it would be that he (we) did best in small groups.  The more accurate description was that we had an unerring eye for what was hopelessly lame, and ended up in charge because we were the coolest of the nerds.  Our other friends at the time, Sarge and Ainsworth, fit the same description – they were also Pep Club officers, with a photo perpetuating that horror in the yearbook.  But these lame groups were a way of gaming the system of meeting girls.  Later in highschool I developed other strategies, as did Mal and the others: they were better-looking, for starters, and that eventually smoothed over a lot of 10^th/11^th grade dorkiness.  But early on, gaming the system in some way was the only strategy likely to work for us.  Mal found all of the lame groups listed above, I think.  Give the boy credit for persistence.

As I reread this, an unbiased observer might ask if we were so often among the dorky kids and rising to positions of prominence among them, whether we were not, in strict point of fact, the actual dorky kids ourselves.  A fair question.  It is rather like all the parents who complain that their nice kids got involved in the wrong crowd, and that’s why they went bad.  At some point, somebody actually has to be the wrong crowd. They can’t all be bringing each other down.  In our case it was partly true.  We may have shone a little brighter than the dorks, but we were not immediately recognized as being horribly out-of-place among them. 

Yet I defend us by noting that we recognized even at the time that this was lame, that we were taking a risk.  Pep Club – well, there’s a name straight out of the 1920’s for ya, eh?  Male cheerleaders.  That could get dangerously faggy in reputation quickly. We were prepared to bail instantly if things looked bad.  OK, NH Junior Miss is out, cheerleaders are now out, I think majorettes are going to be likewise.  What about Future Teachers of America?  That will be all girls, right?  You interested in teaching?  Well, we are now. Yeah, well, tell Ainsworth that unless he’s got a better idea he should pipe down.

I remember Mal telling me that he led the (then) world-record Streak at South Carolina – that must have been late 1973 or early 1974 – and made the cover of Newsweek, among the thousands of others.  There’s a legacy for you.

Once already I have encountered something humorous which Mal would have been the perfect hearer for.  In fact, he would have been almost the only person who would appreciate the gourds in 1-2-3 Penguins singing “Muffin Man.”  It was a private joke, and not a very good one, but it went by, and I wanted to steer him to it, and there’s no Mal to appreciate it.  I imagine that will happen increasingly as I age.  CS Lewis once referred to the peculiar sadness of encountering a joke for which the perfect hearer had died years ago.  I’m beginning to encounter that more, and Mal is going to be that deceased perfect hearer a lot, I think.

Reunion

Manchester HS Central, class of 1971, meets twice Saturday, for breakfast and then evening. We have about 100 from a class of 424. There are a few I am expecting, because they have been at previous reunions, and others I have wild hope for, even though they have never come. Probably only one person I am hoping is not there, and she lives over 1000 miles away now, so she's unlikely.

If you are visiting for the first time, I think you can get almost the whole sense of things with the last 30 days of posts. Except there are no ABBA, flamingo, or meerkat posts, all of which I threw in to drive up traffic over the years. Against all standards of proper late 60's freak coolness, I have become grudgingly fond of ABBA (no harm in being fond of Meerkats, I tdon't think). What started as irony has become affection.

Actually this sorta looks like meerkats at a reunion. That's me second from left.

Rapper

Tracy and I sang this often in the car while the boys were growing up.
I learned today that a "calling-on song" comes from rapper sword-dances, more commonly found in the north of England than the south. Rappers are not actually swords, but two-handled blades used for cleaning the pit ponies that were used in the coal mines. The blades look rather like the drawknives one might use to make baskets from ashwood here in NH. The dances are much like the group sword dances of Scotland, with intricate and vigorous steps. The calling-on song is the introduction, in which the 4-7 rapper characters are introduced by being called out one at a time. The traditional characters were similar to those in mummer's plays, but gradually a set group of men purporting to be the sons of famous military men - Nelson, Napoleon - came to dominate.

Ashley Hutchings, then of Fairport Convention, reworked the Winlaton version, eventually recorded in abbreviated form by Steeleye Span, as above.

Old folkies, especially old English folkies, sing in harmony and interact so pleasantly with their audiences that one automatically assumes their relations are generally, er, harmonious. This is completely untrue. The lineup which sang this version in March had already broken up by April, some of them vowing never to perform together again. And they never did. This tends to be true of performers in general, but perhaps more so among those who are trying to do something original. One wants to be more Irish, another wants to be more Renaissance, a third pushes for more electronics, and the fourth and fifth are going through a divorce.

The wonders of the internet. We can all free ride on the enormous work that some fanatic (or unlucky graduate student) did to preserve knowledge. You can learn far more than you ever thought was available about calling on songs (also called pace-egg or peace-egg songs), rappers, and the remaining sources of knowledge about them at Free Library. Well more than even I would read. And Part II references every town in the NW of England that has ever been connected to calling on, rapper, souling, pace-egg, or hero-combat play. About 400 in all. You will note that many of the towns listed no longer exist.

Recent Conversations - Old Route 28

Route 28, a secondary highway in MA and NH, was important in family history, especially above Manchester. I was curious about what the road had looked like in the 30's and the 50's, and put some energy into discovering this.  It was harder than I thought, but quite satisfying in the end.

Rover Boys

I was looking for something on the book series, the first of the Stratemeyer Syndicate that also published The Bobbsey Twins, The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and Tom Swift series. There were multiple authors in each series, each publishing under a single pseudonym. Rover was something of a romantic term in the early 1900's, but less so by the 1950's, so I was surprised to see this group pop up. Their biggest hit, Graduation Day, was done just a touch later in a more lush version by the Four Freshmen, then by the Vogues and the Lettermen. The Beach Boys version is perhaps the one we are most familiar with. But the Rover Boys were there first. Come to think of it, Irish Rovers, Gypsy Rover, naming half the dogs in America Rover - the name had a resurgence in the 50's, and so wasn't so odd after all. I can find no suggestion that the band's name had anything to do with the children's books. That sort of irony did not occur to people then.

Also 1969

No irony this time.  They all had great voices, but hers - outasight.