Keeping Ramona fed

 

     Good evening, 919 Gang. The propane truck made a delivery today. I’m glad. The way Mary has been cooking, I knew we were getting low. Today, I took a tray of cupcakes to the sheriff substation. I also delivered two bags of canned goods to the Ramona Food Closet. In the past couple of weeks I have delivered trays of cupcakes and bags of groceries to the church. Trays of cupcakes went to the post office and the pregnancy care clinic. More are set aside for tomorrow. A small package will go to a neighbor who has a one-year-old. A very large tray will go to a neighbor who regularly takes Mary’s baked goods to work to share with his employees.

     I deliver all this food, but Mary is the brains of the enterprise and does all the work.

 

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HANNAH HUI WONG writes:

Add my thanks to Bob Hawkins for a great perspective on music appreciation and age. Your sharing came to my mind when I heard Harry Connick Jr. singing a holiday song on Sirius XM's Hallmark Channel. Even though his crooning style was compared to Frank Sinatra, he brought that style back for my generation to enjoy and appreciate in the 1990s. I was a Connick Jr. fan immediately and bought many of his CDs thanks to one of those "buy 12 for a dollar" clubs. These days my oldest teen and his friends enjoy listening to Michael Bublé songs. He performs a similar style and has the same clean-cut boyish charm. Music is a great way to bring generations together. Since I know my teens enjoy Michael Bublé (maybe they like saying his name too) I share with them songs by Frank Sinatra (their grandparents' generation) and Harry Connick Jr. Also, we have Sirius XM in the car and one of our pre-set channels is "Siriusly Sinatra."

    

NANCY CLEELAND writes:

Dick Barnes' mention of "In My Room" brought me back to the Freehold N.J. pool where I spent most of my summers as a preteen. The song was one of several Beach Boys tunes that (as I remember it) played on repeat across the swim club's tinny outdoor speakers for a couple of years. I didn't pay much attention to the lyrics, which are kinda depressing. But the melody and the harmonies, dreamy and wistful, captured my mood as I left childhood behind and looked ahead to independence and love and adventure. "Surfer Girl" hit the same spot for me. I definitely wanted to be one, with a beautiful boy next to me on the beach, watching the sun set over the ocean. Out of college I applied to newspaper jobs all along the California  coast and landed one at the Blade-Tribune in Oceanside. I rented a room in a house two blocks from Moonlight Beach in Encinitas and hung out on the beach after deadlines with a crew of other young journalists, including a couple of excellent surfers. (One went on to edit Surfer magazine.) This was in the late '70s, when San Diego's north coast, between Del Mar and Carlsbad, was a string of funky surf towns with mostly greenhouses to the east. Even though I never did manage to stand on a board, I was living my Beach Boys dream and I was oh so lucky.

 

DAVID FARMER writes:

Some of the comments about rock music in this forum have reminded me that many of the lyrics were purest dreck. One dictionary defines the word as describing "something that is useless, of no value, or of very low quality."

Here's a drecky example from Danny and the Juniors in 1958:

 

Rock 'n roll is here to stay,

It will never die

It was meant to be that way,

Though I don't know why

Could anything be more pathetic? Still, I ate it up, like most teens and youths in their twenties between 1955 and 1965.

The way I remember it, early rock 'n' roll was rough and loud, often bawdy in ways my unformed brain was not ready to perceive.* In fact, music scholars tell us that the phrase "rock and roll" originally meant "sex."

Some popular songs in the 50s were mellow. The Platters made their hits sound a bit like poetry, as did Nat Cole. Tommy Edwards' "It's all in the game" was pleasant versifying.

But you could hardly call that rock 'n' roll. The guys I think of when I think early rock were raucous rockers like Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis. You just knew they were bad boys in real life too.

Listening to the rock music of the 50s and 60s is like visiting your old home town--it's smaller and less magical than you remember it.

*My wife tells me it's still unformed. Frequently.

 

TOM GABLE writes:

Good documentary. “Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind (2019)” on Amazon Prime.

 

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CHRIS COOK writes:

Ron Hutcherson triggers a memory of long ago, with the name of Gene Fowler, one of the most colorful, wildest and funniest people ever to grace American journalism. For the life of me, I don’t remember where I read or heard this story, but it’s too good not to share. In 1920s, Fowler got an assignment and a huge advance from the New York Daily Mirror to go to Alaska and write about the gold rush, the last great frontier, and life on the dog sled teams. Naturally, being Fowler, before he ever left New York he had great fun with his friends drinking and carousing on the money, He did eventually make the trip and produced stories of gold diggers and mushers, as planned. But when Fowler got back to New York, he could not remember on what or where he had spent the boss’ moolah. So he made up a fantastical expense accounting, part real, part fraud and part shaky reconstruction, which included a sled accident in which all supplies were lost and later replaced, and the lead sled dog was killed. Despite all that, Fowler still came up about one hundred dollars shy of the advance. So, so he closed out his expenses with this: “$100, flowers for bereaved bitch."

 

BRIAN CLARK writes:

     Thanks, Ron Hutcherson, for the tip about Timber Line on the battles between the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News. I read them both during my college days in the Centennial State in the early-1970s. As a broadsheet, the Post was considered a little more highbrow and serious. I aspired to write for the Post after graduation, but California drew me farther west. The move had nothing to do with the Beach Boys, though I did eventually learn to surf (sorta/kinda) off La Jolla Shores. Lastly, to nitpick a bit, it's the University of Colorado, not Colorado University, though the school logo is CU, complete with a charging buffalo. As a J-school alum (1975), seeing the Colorado University written out is the visual equivalent of hearing fingernails scraping on a chalkboard. There is, however, a Colorado College, but it's in Colorado Springs. The main University of Colorado campus is in Boulder. Got it? Finally, Go Buffs! (Couldn't help meself.)

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CARL LARSEN forwards:

Times of San Diego reports on 919er Roger Conlee’s ninth novel and the Press Club’s new leadership.

https://tinyurl.com/y2m6xaxg

 

 

Jack J. Reber

P.O. Box 2239

Ramona, CA 92065-0938

United States

 

He was magical

 

          Good evening, 919 Gang.

        ALAN MILLER writes:

May I switch musical gear to a legendary Canadian folk singer, Gordon Lighttfoot, whom I interviewed after a concert in Detroit several decades ago when moonlighting for a small FM radio station in Monroe, Michigan. Rosemary and I thoroughly enjoyed the show as he introduced “Sundown.” inspired by his tumultuous affair with Cathy Smith whose role in John Belushi's overdose death years later would underscore her infamous reputation as Sundown's lyric goes: “She's a hard lovin' woman, got me feelin' mean.” When answering my questions backstage after the show, Lightfoot kept looking at the open door into the hallway. When leaving I discovered why-- he was checking out my beautiful wife who was waiting for me.

          Any case, I did a show around him interspersed with his responses. I still listen to him while working out and marvel at his musicianship as detailed in depth by Robbie Fulks in this piece: https://tinyurl.com/y4rysfnm

There are also a couple of good documentaries on him available for streaming. His classic “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” is all the more amazing because it was done in one take sans rehearsal. A veteran recording engineer says he's never seen this happen.

          Gordon Lightfoot's drug and alcohol abuse have rendered him almost cadaverous and his voice is weaker, which is why we declined to see him perform in Sacramento last year. But in his prime he was magical.

 

DENNIS CORBRAN writes:

Thank you Bob Hawkins! You nailed it with an angle on music appreciation that most folks our age miss. I enjoy watching The Voice, where I hear a lot of unfamiliar, but certainly popular music. Most of it is at best ordinary from the perspective of a guy in his 60s. I find myself sometimes saying out loud to the TV “why is this popular?” Then I remember I’m not 17 years old. Yet there are some gems that surface that transcend differences in age, personal history, and yes, hormones. Now when I listen to some music that I listened to and that was popular in the ‘60s and ‘70s, I realize that a lot of those were ordinary, simplistic and sometimes downright awful too.

Trivia time: Did you know the Pet Sounds cover photo was shot at the San Diego Zoo?

 

DICK BARNES writes:

Thank you, Bob Hawkins, for your fine piece of thinking and writing on music from our mist-shrouded pasts. My feelings exactly. I never surfed or owned a hotrod, but the Beach Boys’ “In My Room” captured by my teenaged years.

 

REBER: Bob was correct about the generation gap in music. In my early years, my elementary school (which later was destroyed by a fire of unetermined origin) taught us to dance the boogie-woogie. (Am I dating myself?). My grandmother hated that music. She said, “It’s the same beat over and over and over). I disagreed. Sure, I knew that music didn’t match up with a good Tex Ritter tune, but I liked it.

 

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RON HUTCHERSON writes:

For a 400-pager on some of the wild journalism that prevailed in my youth in the Forties and Fifties, I recommend Timber Line by Gene Fowler. It's the story of The Denver Post. It's the story of Tammen and Bonfils making their millions. It's the story of the afternoon Post fighting the Scripps-Howard-owned Rocky Mountain News, a morning tabloid. And in reference to our great gang leader's intro, it's the story of the gathering of the wherewithal to procure May Stanton's very high-dollar baubles and beads.

In the vein of today's cleft between left and right, the two papers had hard-line adherents. I recall heated discussions between adults (all men) around me about which was better. They called the tabloid the "Racey Mountain News."

My dad, and I behind him, read the Post in evenings after the cow-milking was done. Issues were left in our mailbox over the years by various souls who had cars. In those years the outside pages were printed on splashy pink paper, and the front page headlines were done in jarring red ink. The content sometimes went more afield than would seem probable these days: cannibalism in the USA (there was some), lynchings in the South with blurry photos and a yarn about a man living in the attic unbeknown to the family in the house below him, for example.

I paid my living expenses for one year of college by hustling the Post. I and a friend had Colorado University's dormitories as a route, and we dropped between three and four hundred papers in a couple of hours every day. Later I drove a delivery van for the Post. Finally, my first paid freelance story went to the Post, a short feature that got me fifteen dollars.

Those were the days, to borrow Jack's words, but for me they ended when I got my "greetings" letter from the draft board. Soon, the cavalry troopers around me jingled, "Hey ho, the PIO," when I came around.

          (BTW, copies of Timber Line, first published on January 1, 1933, are still available for a few dollars, whether from Amazon or other retailers or used book sellers.)

 

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          REBER: We close out the month with a doubleheader. Happy Birthday, Nov. 30, to Joe Gandelman and John McCutchen.

 

 

Jack J. Reber

P.O. Box 2239

Ramona, CA 92065-0938

United States