|
Post by Dave on Jul 2, 2012 7:18:05 GMT -5
By 1955 or so the business of television was ramping up. It was a very conservative business. Executives at NBC and the other networks did not want to offend. They did not feel as free as their friends in Hollywood to broach controversial topics and they stayed away from obvious sexual themes. Hollywood producers could get away with more, because movie patrons specifically left their homes and went to the theatre and bought a ticket to see what was advertised for what it was. But television came into American homes, directly in front of the kids and Grandma and sometimes without any advance notice of content. So you never saw Lucy and Dezi in the same bed during their going-to-bed scenes. Instead, on stage they slept in separate twins. And they never kissed beyond a peck in the bedroom. In any of television’s shows you could expect a fade to black if a kissing couple bent over more than thirty degrees, more than twenty degrees if there was a bed nearby. I've been working on a story off and on for some time about television and the wrestler Gorgeous George. It's far from finished, but I'll borrow a few paragraphs to give you the flavor of my memory of television after it got going in the mid 1950's. From "Gorgeous"The advent of television made quite an impact on our household in 1951. I was nine years old and I can’t tell you what the hell we did in the evening before TV. But with the coming of the “evil eye,” our routine quickly took shape for the new age.
After washing up the dinner dishes and completing our school homework, the whole family filed into position in front of the TV as the sun set slowly in the west. Never in our lives afterward were any of us as punctual as those nights when Lucy or Uncle Miltie or Sid Ceasar came on the air promptly at eight o’clock. The entertainment didn’t last long by today’s standards. Whatever the evening’s fare, we boys were off to bed by 10:00, while Mom, Dad and Grandma watched the news and then closed up the house for the night.
But on Friday nights, my brothers and I were allowed to stay up late to watch anything that was on. (The Big Story followed by boxing.) Parental control was unnecessary, since the advertisers did an extremely good job of making sure absolutely nothing even mildly offensive ever appeared on television. The only ad I remember that could even remotely be considered scandalous showed a brassiere on a mannequin after 11 o’clock at night.. The mannequin had no head and stopped below the rib cage.
Grandma believed going the movies to watch intimations of illicit heterosexual love was all right, but of course she would have never gone to a gay bar. Had anyone said the word "Lesbian" out loud in her presence, I'm quite sure she would have fallen over comatose, maybe even dead.
Grandma's secret entertainment ... and it wasn't much of a secret in a household containing five other people ... was to watch wrestling on WKTV Saturday nights in the 1950's. She was getting pretty old by then, almost seventy, but nothing could stop her from viewing half naked men bounce and strut around the canvas ring, holding each other in aggressive embraces and hammer holds, and thwacking each other with body blocks. Enrique Torres, Don Eagle, and Whipper Watson were the idols of the time, but none was so glamorous as the redoubtable Gorgeous George Wagner. As the night wore on and we boys began to nod off in front of the tiny screen, Grandma kept her vigil, waiting for the other wrestlers to finish, rocking her chair faster and faster until Gorgeous George appeared in the ring. At his entrance, Grandma's enthusiastic clapping would bring us back up to the level of consciousness in time to see a walking refrigerator with a head of blond flowing hair as he entered the ring. Grandma swooned and we kids fell back to sleep. Wrestling was about as risqué as anything Grandma allowed herself, if you didn’t count her special "cough medicine."
When Gorgeous George’s promoters scheduled a match in our town (Utica) in the winter of 1952, Grandma reacted as a teenager would five years later when Elvis came to town.
|
|
|
Post by Dave on Jul 2, 2012 11:29:31 GMT -5
Oh, I never answered the question, "What did we do before TV. Well, here's a typical evening. You can take this for what it's worth. Easter BunnyMention of the Easter Bunny in my presence always brings a negative response. I lost all appreciation for that icon many years ago when I was child. Picture little me at maybe seven years old, tired and sleepy after a full day of Catholic school classes and Catechism questions, minding my own business as I sat in the living room, Dad at work on the night shift, Mom devouring a Reader’s Digest shortened novel. (I’m sorry, but I have to interrupt this story to ask what sniveling hack had the gall to cut up great novels and shorten the sentences! If you can’t hold any more than a dozen words in your head without it leaking, limit yourself to Hemmingway or the Daily News!) Anyway, I heard a noise in the kitchen and I set down my novel by Erle Stanley Gardner … well, maybe it was a comic book … and walked to the other end of the flat. On this warm evening in early spring at dusk the sky dribbled a meager light through the kitchen windows to illuminate all but the deeper shadows. I noticed the door to the flat was open to the back hallway. I reached for the wall switch to turn on the ceiling light, but froze in horror as a shape emerged from the hall and stepped toward me in the semi darkness. A five foot high pink rabbit waved at me and a muffled voice cried “Hi!” From my mouth came a screech so loud and piercing the window panes rattled and the rabbit drew back partly into the shadows. The lights magically came on as my mother rushed into the kitchen. The Easter Bunny pulled its head off and dropped to its knees, sending me right over the top. I tried to screech again, but I was still on my first and when I finished I wouldn’t have enough breath for a second. I wouldn’t have enough breath until midnight. Mrs. Hallack from next door, my mother’s friend when she wasn’t drinking (Mrs. Hallack), was laughing and down on her knees crawling to me. I grabbed a RevereWare copper-bottomed pan from the stove and hit her full across the face with it. I wasn’t sure what was coming after me. It didn’t matter. Had it been Pope Pius the Twelfth down on my kitchen floor in a pink rabbit suit selling his encyclicals he would have received the same welcome. Smacked with a frying pan across the face, Mrs. Hallack sobered quickly. As blood began to trickle from her nose, she hauled off and threw a punch at me, but my mother intervened by stepping between us. Mom was on her feet, so she took the blow in the stomach and it was not appreciated. She grabbed Mrs. Hallack by her pony tail and dragged the woman backward on her knees across the linoleum and out into the back hall. She slammed the door and locked it. Mrs. Hallack would never visit us again. My Mom said she’d never been in a real girl fight before. Ever! She was breathing hard, but she looked pretty pleased with herself as she very carefully pried the frying pan from my hands. I haven’t eaten a chocolate bunny since.
|
|
|
Post by Dave on Jul 2, 2012 15:18:50 GMT -5
Sometime during my teenage years, after I had been in the homes of friends from across the city and a few in the suburbs of Utica, it occurred to me that not once had I encountered a home with a sunken living room. And yet we saw them all the time on television. It wasn’t the first time I was forced to consider that not everything I saw in the movies or on television was an example of real life. The sunken living room was a stage configuration designed to allow both the cameras and the studio audience to see the actors. For all I knew, Europeans watching re-runs may have believed Danny Thomas and every American had a pit in their living room.
The media may be subtle or obvious. It can be the only source for those who have a thirst for knowledge. Television in the 1950’s didn’t tell me much, but the movies answered a number of my questions. The first time I tried to kiss a girl, I had only Hollywood as a teacher. I didn’t know how Mom and Dad kissed. I’d run out of the room when they hugged each other. How embarrassing! But I carefully studied the lovers up on the screen. When I bent Mary Louise Callabrese way over backwards on her front porch that night after the dance, she toppled backward and slammed into the front door, startling her parents as they watched The Jackie Gleason Show. I had not known how excitable an Italian father could be. Mary Louise’s head hurt for days.
|
|
|
Post by Dave on Jul 2, 2012 15:20:02 GMT -5
Hollywood provided lessons large and small, and all about a slice of American culture my parents either didn’t care for, or didn’t care about. It was not surprising for a teenage boy from a family of limited means to see in the movies a thrilling lifestyle, compared to my dull existence in upstate New York. What I saw on film WAS life, or at least the life I longed for, driving a Corvette with a pretty girl by my side, plenty of money and the latest clothes. I had no idea how I would acquire such things. I felt I had so much to learn. It never occurred to me until later that I had learned everything of real value in life from my parents by age 10. I’m sure they never reminded me. If they did so, I may have been too busy to listen while I enumerated their faults.
Anyone who says he raised a teenager without having his own shortcomings bared before him is either in deep denial or wasn’t listening. There were a few occasions as a teen when I did a superb job of letting my father know what was wrong with him. However, after I reached a certain age he withheld his opinion of my failings. Instead, he waited for his grandchildren to clearly spell them out to me.
|
|
|
Post by Dave on Jul 2, 2012 17:32:23 GMT -5
Television and the movies provided idealized role models in the 1950’s, with … according to some parents … the exception of Marlon Brando,. Many actors were true blue gentlemen on the screen and some were so in their private lives as well. One star always played the role of a man’s man He was gentle with little children and would never kick his dog. But when he entered a scene, you could tell by his walk that he was in charge. John Wayne said he walked like a sissy until he invented his famous saunter. “The Walk” sort of started in his hips. With his arms just slightly akimbo, elbows out, he moved out like a ship from the dock. For over half a century, he steamed across thousands of movie sets, beginning with silent films in the 1920’s. He told an interviewer he thought himself such a poor actor that he needed to employ gimmicks, and he practiced them daily in front of a full length mirror. For a while I imitated the great man’s gait, moving across the floor like a listing oil tanker. In school, in Utica’s Boston Store and anywhere you’d find a teenager in the 1950’s, I’d walk The Walk. Once, an old lady in Daw's Drug asked what was wrong with my feet.
|
|
|
Post by Dave on Jul 2, 2012 20:58:35 GMT -5
Hollywood provided other cinematic mentors for a teenage boy to mimic. Gregory Peck with his gruff voice was certainly a male role model. The first time I shaved, I used a half can of shaving cream. The lather needed to be an inch thick, as was Peck’s in that scene from “The Big Country.” When I finished cutting up my face with the razor, I wiped the remaining soap off with a towel, just like in the movie. Any sensible guy would have washed it off with water. When my face began to harden in ten minutes, I finally rinsed the soap scum away. I’d also seen Cary Grant artfully stuff his shirt into his pants without unzipping them or opening the top of his trousers. I’m sure he wanted to be modest while getting dressed in front of a million movie viewers, but I can’t say why I was motivated to try it in private, where no one was watching me except my little brother. I guess I wanted to appear classy, even at home. Most of us guys open the fly, spread the knees a little so the pants don’t drop to our ankles, and then sort of hold this and pull that and ….zip! … it’s done. If you can visualize that procedure, you know why it isn’t recommended for a male romantic lead. What Grant accomplished so well was a film device that looked natural on the screen, but was silly in real life. He must have practiced it for hours to get it right and not look like he was playing with himself. The trousers had to have extra room in the waist and the shirt would be more fitted and shorter than usual. His hands needed to move blindly with just the right motions while he spoke to his movie sidekick and the plot moved along.. He couldn’t look down to gauge his progress, or he’d appear to be checking his pants for a dribble spot, always the bane of khakis.
|
|
|
Post by Dave on Jul 2, 2012 21:03:45 GMT -5
This is from ClarenceBunsen.
|
|
|
Post by Dave on Jul 2, 2012 21:13:21 GMT -5
When I look back to the Fifties, I’m always amazed how everyone pretended song lyrics did not mean what they obviously said. Granted, when Little Richard sang “she sure like to ball” about Miss Molly, most of us white kids didn’t understand his meaning. But what else could “making love” mean when Pat Boone sang it. Or Elvis’ hit, “a hunk, a hunk of burning love.” And lyrics in the 1950’s were never as bad as those in a later era that featured brown sugar, crackling Rosie, eight miles high and along comes Mary. More, who could forget Elton John’s bizarre and homophilic “Daniel my brother, do you still feel the pain?”
I don’t believe these were necessarily cases of performers getting it over on the kids of that generation. In fact, most of the time we guessed the meanings and that was probably intended, because the best lyrics capture the imagination while leaving you just a little unsure of what you heard.
I still love this clip!
Of course, you can be totally clueless, as I was at age ten when I bought a 78 from a used record store on Catherine Street. “Chicken Blues” had been a hit on the Rhythm and Blues hit parade, but remember that in 1951 R&B tunes did not play on WGAT or WRUN or WIBX. So, I doubt if a single Irish Catholic ever heard the song. I brought the record home and played it over and over on our console record player in the dining room. Until my mother one afternoon happened to catch the line, “if you don’t like that chicken, keep your hands off my hen.” From there the lyrics got worse. She sent me outside while she carefully listened to the record. Mom had a few days before encouraged me to sing the song with friends at the annual Blessed Sacrament Talent Show. I never heard her mention it again. My record disappeared. Rather than highlight it here, I'll let you search Youtube for “Chicken Blues” (by Billy Ward and The Dominoes) and imagine the nuns’ reaction when three ten year old boys got up on stage and sang, “ She'll give you so much chicken, all you can do is moan.” I thought the song was about a guy in a diner.
|
|
|
Post by Dave on Jul 3, 2012 8:37:35 GMT -5
Not all of us on Cornhill could pull in the Syracuse channel and Ed Sullivan in 1957. So to watch Elvis on that historic night when the cameras showed the star only from the waist up, we all crowded around the TV in the Orlando's living room on Brinckerhoff Ave. Halfway through Heartbreak Hotel, as Elvis ground away down there somewhere, Mrs. Orlando jumped up from the couch and ran to the TV. From the top of the television, she quickly grabbed the statue of the Infant of Prague and rushed it into the next room. I would not have thought he cared.
The Infant of Prague could be seen on many console television sets in Cornhill. Both became popular around the same time and a console TV was just the right height for a statue that needed access when it was time to change liturgical colors.
I don’t believe any of us kids were scandalized by Elvis. He wasn’t doing anything more than we were doing on the dance floor on Friday night at the St. Francis de Sales dance. Or the twice yearly Record Hop at UCA. We loved the music we heard on WTLB and our records. And if the band was live, we didn’t care what they played as long as it had a beat. Live bands in the 50’s and 60’s did not play Top Forty music. But a live band was like an apparition from Music Heaven to us kids.
|
|
|
Post by Dave on Jul 3, 2012 8:47:00 GMT -5
My Short Life As A Musician Petey Sardini's father played the saxophone when he had a glass of wine or two on a Saturday night. He would stand in the kitchen and lean back against the linoleum covered counter top while his fingers plodded over the round keys and his breath vibrated the reed in the mouthpiece when he held his tongue just right. Out from the horn came slightly sour notes as his wife stood beside him and sang, "See the pyramids along the Nile." Mr. Sardini's brother-in-law, Uncle Angie, who lived upstairs in the two family home, sat against the refrigerator and played chords that almost matched the music as he strummed an old guitar painted the color of baby poop. Uncle Angie’s wife, Petey’s Aunt Dominica, never came downstairs. She hardly left her bedroom anymore. I lived next door to the Sardinis in a carbon copy house exactly 22 feet and 5 inches away, each with two flats, one over the other. When Petey and I were younger, the two of us counted the number of balusters across the front porch on each house. They totaled the same. We also counted window panes and even the nails in the floor of one room. No matter what we compared, the two houses were exactly alike, except for the color of the exterior paint. Petey was always obsessed with details and grew up to become an accountant. I began to slack off on the importance of details and eventually became a writer. We each tried our best to master a musical instrument. Neither of us were very good musicians, but we worked at it for a while in college, trying to earn beer money and hoping to have girls notice us. I played the piano and Petey played an old set of drums that Aunt Dominica brought home one night without any explanation. For reasons I never understood, girls liked drummers better. Continued
|
|
|
Post by Dave on Jul 3, 2012 10:21:17 GMT -5
The Sardini Kitchen Trio was the only live band I ever heard before the afternoon I decided to walk into a bar at Sylvan Beach, NY. I had a lot of nerve at age 15, my authority rooted midway between the privileges of adulthood and the exemptions of childhood. Inside the dark and cool atmosphere of DiCastro's Night Club, I found a stool at the end of the bar near the stage. Few patrons sat there during the day, evidently preferring Daiquiri-laden conversation at greater distance from the loud music of any band that was qualified to play only a day gig. When the bartender came up to me with a dubious look on his face, I ordered a rye and ginger, a drink I’d heard my mother ask for at weddings. Was DiCastro's in the '50's. Today, a shadow of its former self. I didn’t have to wait long for the band to come on stage. A tall thirtyish red headed man wearing a bright white shirt open at the neck and a rumpled blue plaid tux jumped up on the tiny stage and flipped a few switches on the equipment surrounding him. The drummer and bass man soon joined him. Red Nichols swung the guitar strap over his shoulders, gave a little shrug and began to loudly play a riff I recognized as the opening notes of Henry Mancini’s Theme from Peter Gunn. The drummer and bass man came alive and quickly caught up to what was musically the dumbest piece Mancini ever wrote, but no doubt his most profitable. The bass took over the riff when Red began to play what passed for a melody. It might have been the funniest rendition of the song I’d ever heard, but the band didn’t mean it as humor and I didn’t laugh. Their sheer volume assaulted me. I could feel the bass notes pound against my chest. What absolutely amazed and excited me were three ordinary individuals getting up and playing passable music and becoming the center of attention for everyone in the room, even the Daiquiri drinkers. I had heard only John Philip Sousa and Elvis Presley amplified on the tiny speaker of the record player my parents had received as a wedding present. But music from Red Nichols and The Rockin’ Pneumonias at DiCastro’s was like a call from another world. The sound had to be magic, I later realized, because I never smelled the stale beer and cigarette butts until the music stopped. And frankly, the music never did stop for me. I fell totally head over heels in love with the fantastic idea of becoming a rock and roll musician. There is not an iota of difference between convincing yourself you can do it and falling completely in love with yourself.
|
|
|
Post by Dave on Jul 3, 2012 10:33:58 GMT -5
Footnote: I made up the Rockin’ Pneumonias, but Jimmy Cavallo was a frequent performer from Syracuse appearing at DiCastros. He was still performing when this video was recorded, in Florida I think. (Maybe that’s Uncle Angie on the guitar solo! I always wanted to play the xylophone, but couldn’t figure out how I’d fit it in the bedroom I shared with my little brother on Brinckerhoff Ave. Not with all my radios, too, and the full size bass viol Jon Hynes loaned to me. Hahahaha!)
|
|
|
Post by Dave on Jul 3, 2012 13:31:57 GMT -5
The few songs I had learned by ear on my mother’s piano in our living room would be replaced after some serious self teaching work with a few riffs, runs and rumbles. The effort was enough to get me into a rock and roll band. I was ready to mount the stage and impress audiences all over the county. Soon my opportunity came along. But I must admit I got the job only because a friend needed somebody … anybody … to play keyboard for the group he started when we were 16. I learned my chords in various keys from a boy who sounded out each note for me on his guitar until I could see their structure and begin to pick them out myself. (Oh, yeah! Two half tones down from the top makes a seventh!) Then I was lucky enough to meet another kid who was in a real band and actually knew how to play piano. He taught me a few bass lines. He also told me that absolutely none of his 3 years of piano lessons helped him to play piano in a rock and roll band. Although that was probably untrue, I believed him. Since I’d never taken a single lesson, this knowledge helped bolster my confidence. An older teen I met at a friend’s house taught me how to invert my chords. Little Richard’s 45 rpm records taught me to bang on the keys way up at the high end of the keyboard. The music of the 1950’s wasn’t very complicated. Chord progressions for the Top 40 songs were almost always I, IV, V for the fast songs and I, VI, IV, V for the slow tunes. (In the key of C that would be C,F,G and C, Am, F, G7 respectively.) That’s all I learned about music before I suited up in my bright red tux and gold cummerbund, ready to wow music lovers everywhere. If I’d been a solo act without other band members playing louder than me, I would have been in a lot of trouble. I didn’t continue to deepen my knowledge of the piano at that time because I was in high school and I was busy. Not with studies, but with day dreaming. I spent a lot of time day dreaming.
|
|
|
Post by Dave on Jul 3, 2012 13:42:13 GMT -5
Footnote:
Here’s some simple stuff very similar to what I used as a teenager. (Youtube doesn't identify the Brit playing.)
This is a bit more advanced and is really Boogie “8 to the bar.” I often used this bass line. Seldom was our music as fast, by the way. (This is Hugo Smulling.)
|
|
|
Post by Dave on Jul 3, 2012 15:49:20 GMT -5
Our first gig provided my initial jolt of that addictive substance known as applause. It occurred at a dance our new band played in South Utica, hosted by a local DJ. I can’t remember the number I sang that first time in public, but the girls swooned and screamed and I was absolutely hooked. For all I knew, the girls were screaming at rats running across the floor. I didn’t realize at the time that teenage girls would swoon over President Eisenhower singing God Bless America, if he hung a guitar over his shoulder. And maybe wiggled his hips. This first job would spoil us, it turned out. We didn’t know it that night, but things would get worse before they got better. The absolutely fantastic Bel Airs! We played at a gas station grand opening, at a hunting lodge that almost burned down during our second set, in dingy bars where as sixteen year olds we were propositioned by prostitutes, at high school and college proms where the kids often got drunk and threw up on us or wanted to beat us up, like the night in Canajoharie when we needed a police escort out of town. We played in so many school gyms we should have made sneakers part of our outfits. And in fact the extra traction of the rubber soles would have been helpful at all the Beer Bashes we played when the floor would become slippery with spilled beer after a couple of hours. And I still feel the sand in my shoes from all the summer gigs we played on weekends at Sylvan Beach.
|
|