Radio – NEARING THE END OF THE LINE

I, JUKE BOX (Please play me…)

People say you are what you eat. I say you’re what you consume (just my short way of saying you are what you eat, what you read, what you watch, what you listen to, and whatever you experience). Because anything and everything that crawls its way into, and gets processed by, your brain becomes a part of you, after which your outlook is never quite the same. Because the ever-growing sum-total of your experience both alters and continuously filters the way you perceive and understand the world you’re living in.

(The above wisdom , courtesy of my vast and venerable 77-years of life experience on the planet, and… you’re welcome.)

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Now, here it is, let’s begin:

Music has always had its way with me. Has practically owned me. All my life. Not that that’s a bad thing. Probably because I was born into a household with the kitchen radio playing pretty much non-stop, its rhythms and vocals rocking me in the crib as soon as I was brought home from the maternity ward. Likely even before that, as I suspect I was grooving to WABI am’s top 40 while still in Mom’s buffered-but-not-totally-soundproofed womb.

And as a side-effect, I’ve developed this condition I call Juke Box Brain Syndrome (JBBS). It’s this often annoying (just ask my wife) tic whereby any random word or phrase spoken in any random conversation I’m having (with you or anyone else) just might act as a trigger, very much like a quarter dropping down the slot of some back-to-the-60’s juke box to play a song. But instead… it’s me. I am that ‘juke box.’ And I have no control over the trigger.

Typical Example: So we’re barreling down I-95, Phyllis driving and pushing 75 in a 70 zone like everybody else when suddenly some car rockets past us in the passing lane! Phyl exclaims, “Whoa! That guy’s gotta be doing 85, 90, 95 miles per hour, if not a hundred!” And then, click!

See, that’s the ‘quarter’ dropping into me, the ‘juke box’ and then, me, bowing to something like a post-hypnotic suggestion, I obediently sing (you could almost say ‘play’) a couple of lines from a song. Weirdly, the song this time turnd out to be from one of those little, yellow, plastic, 78 rpm records I had as a kid back in the 1950s. It’s titled, “The Taxi That Hurried”:

“This is the way he likes to drive, 70, 80, 95…

fast as fire engines go, compared to taxis they are slow.”

Now yes, it’s true, a couple of lines from Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car.” would have much been less annoying.

But see, it’s never up to me. I don’t consciously choose the songs. They just come of their own accord, from the song vault somewhere in my decades-long memory.

Later in the day, in some other conversation, some other word is apt to bring up a line or two from Leonard Cohen, Doris Day, The Beatles, Dolly Parton, Tom Jones, or ABBA. Who knows? It’s like I have Song-Lyrics Tourette Syndrome. And oh, I know… so many many songs. Songs from prctically all genres. (Well except for gospel. And rap. And hip hop. I guess I’m too old for hip hop and rap, being a curmudgeon now. You know– today, having been born in the mid-1940s is like having come from another planet.)

(By the way, I can’t help being hung up on wondering if I’m the only one on the planet suffering from JBBS. I mean, surely there must be others. So please. Let me know in the comments if you, or anyone else you know, also suffers from JBBS. I will appreciate it.)

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So my CD shelf and five computers and cellphone and brain are brimming, bursting at the seams with my lifelong music collection. But fortunately, this go-to jukebox in my head has saved my sanity so many times. The songs have acted as everything from my prozac (for when I’ve been down and depressed) to my much-needed comedy channel, laughter being the best medicine. My mental health owes so much it to this affliction.

And so what I would like to do here… no, what I’m going to do here…is share with you a few of the songs from my personal comedy vault that have often tickled my fancy and pasted a silly smile on my mug over the years, despite me.

So consider this a free, unrequested playlist offered from my JBB to your brain, a sample JBB pot pourri, if you will. I have no guarantee that you’ll listen in, (hope you do give it a shot) but if you do… you’ll know something about why I’ve adopted this first one, “I’m Different” by Randy Newman, as my personal theme song.

(I’m including the lyrics so you can follow along.)

“I’M DIFFERENT”

“I’m Different “

“I’M DIFFERENT” by Randy Newman

I’m different and I don’t care who knows it
Somethin’ about me’s not the same, yeah
I’m different and that’s how it goes
Ain’t gonna play your goddamn game

Got a different way a walkin’

I got a different kind of smile

I got a different way a talkin’

drives the women kind of wild (… kind of wild)

He’s different and he don’t care who knows it
Somethin’ about him it’s not the same
He’s different and that’s how it goes
And he’s not gonna play your gosh darn game

I ain’t sayin’ I’m better than you are

But maybe I am

I only know that when I look in the mirror

I like the man (We like the man)

I’m different and I don’t care who knows it
Somethin’ about me’s not the same
I’m different and that’s how it goes
Ain’t gonna play your goddamn game

When I walk down the street in the mornin’
Blue birds are singin’ in the tall oak tree
They sing a little song for the people

And they sing a little song for me (La-la-la-la) (Thanks, fellas)

(He’s different and he don’t care who knows it
Somethin’ about him’s not the same
He’s different and that’s how it goes
Ain’t gonna play your gosh darn game)

I’m different and I don’t care who knows it
Somethin’ about me’s not the same
I’m different and that’s how it goes
Ain’t gonna play no boss man’s game

I can’t tell you how many people over my lifetime have informed me that I’m “different.”And each and every time I heartily thank them.

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Now, I spent 34 years here in this state of Maine enduring life as a career high school English teacher. And as you might imagine, getting and keeping the attention of the typical high school English student for 50 minutes every day is no easy task. It takes a magician, if you really want to know the truth. However, early on I discovered the music really doth have “charms to soothe the savage breast.” (-William Congreve [1670-1929] {whoever the hell he was}).

So now, here’s where being ‘different’ can pay off. Ever since my Mad Magazine-reading early childhood, I’ve been attracted to some pretty bizarre novelty songs, many of which came were played weekly on something called The Doctor Demento Show on the radio. I found Doctor D’s playlists a frickin’ gold mine for stuff that could really catch your typical high school student off guard.

And wheneveer I found myself bogged down trying to keep them awake while trying to teach what a metaphor is… Johnny Cash stepped right up to the plate:

“FLUSHED FROM THE BATHROOM OF YOUR HEART”

From the backdoor of your life you swept me out dear
In the bread line of your dreams I lost my place
At the table of your love I got the brush off
At the Indianapolis of your heart I lost the race

I’ve been washed down the sink of your conscience
In the theater of your love I lost my part
And now you say you’ve got me out of your conscience
I’ve been flushed from the bathroom of your heart

In the garbage disposal of your dreams I’ve been ground up dear

On the river of your plans I’m up the creek
Up the elevator of your future I’ve been shafted
On the calendar of your events I’m last week

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As a teacher, I assigned the kids a lot of creative writing, which I guess is what I loved teaching the most. Usually every year I would have my kids write an original short story. This would include employing the basics of the short story, such as CONCRETE DETAIL, CHARACTER SKETCH, PLOT, CONFLICT, COMPLICATIONS, CLIMAX, etc.

In the early stages of the project, I watched kids struggling with not enough detail or too much detail that was unrelated to the PLOT. I’d coach, “Try not to just use any DETAILS that are unnecessary.Only use specific details that will support the PLOT by helping to move the story right along to the CLIMAX.

“And secondly, the most essential key to a good short story is CONFLICT”. So I would prompt them: “Can you imagine a story without useful DETAILS, or (heaven forbid!) without a CONFLICT? I mean, what would that even look like? How boring would that be?

“Well here, let’ me show you’s find out. Here’s a little song by Bob Dylan.” And boy, would the kids ever really perk right up at his name. “Like wow, Bob Dylan! This class is really gonna rock!”

Unfortunately for them, this particular Bob Dylan song was going to be a real nothingburger, Dylan’s most comically boring recording ever. Which was my point. I mean, just look at the limpid title for starters:

“CLOTHES LINE SAGA”

After a while we took in the clothes
Nobody said very much
Just some old wild shirts and a couple pairs of pants
Which nobody really wanted to touch
Mama come in and picked up a book
An’ Papa asked her what it was
Someone else asked, “What do you care?”
Papa said, “Well, just because”
Then they started to take back their clothes
Hang ’em on the line
It was January the thirtieth
And everybody was feelin’ fine

The next day everybody got up
Seeing if the clothes were dry
The dogs were barking, a neighbor passed
Mama, of course, she said, “Hi”
“Have you heard the news?” he said with a grin
“The Vice-President’s gone mad!”
“Where?” “Downtown” “When?” “Last night”
“Hmm, say, that’s too bad”
“Well, there’s nothing we can do about it,” said the neighbor
“It’s just something we’re gonna have to forget”
“Yes, I guess so,” said Ma
Then she asked me if the clothes were still wet

I reached up, touched my shirt
And the neighbor said, “Are those clothes yours?”
I said, “Some of them, not all of them”
He said, “Ya always help out around here with the chores?”
I said, “Sometime, not all the time”
Then my neighbor, he blew his nose
Just as Papa yelled outside
“Mama wants you to come back in the house and bring them clothes”
(Woo-hoo)
Well, I just do what I’m told
So, I did it, of course
I went back in the house and Mama met me
And then I shut all the doors

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Back in 2009, my wife and I were fortunate to score front row seats at a concert in Albuquerque, NM. The concert featured the duo of Lyle Lovett and John Hiatt, both singer/songwriters. Both songwriters had a very good sense of humor, as was illustrated in some of their music.

This next song, “Old People” by singer/songwriter John Hiatt, makes me feel grateful because (ahem) I’m not one of them yet…

“OLD PEOPLE”

Old people are pushy
They don’t have much time
They’ll shove you at the coffee shop
Cut ahead in the buffet line

They’ll buy two for a dollar and 50
Then they’ll argue with the checkout girl
They’ve lived so much behind them
They’re tryin’ to slow down this goddamn world

Old people are pushy
Well, they’re not mushy
Old people are pushy ’cause life ain’t cushy

Old people are pushy
They’ll drive how they want to drive
And go as slow as they want to
They don’t care who stays alive

And they’ll kiss that little grand baby
Up and down the back and all around the front
They don’t care what you think of them
That baby has got something that they want

Old people are pushy, well they’re not mushy
Old people are pushy, cause life ain’t cushy
(Old people are pushy, they aren’t mushy)
(Old people are pushy, cause life ain’t cushy)

Old people are pushy, cause you don’t know how they feel
And when you pretend you do
Well they know it’s not real
Pretty soon it’s gonna be all over
Good enough reason not to let you pass
They done seem like sweet, little old people
But they are not about to kiss your ass

Old people are pushy, well they’re not mushy
Old people are pushy, cause life ain’t cushy
Old people are pushy, (old people are pushy)
Old people are pushy, (old people are pushy)
Old people are pushy, (old people are pushy)
‘Cause life ain’t cushy
Old people are pushy,
Old people are pushy
Old people are pushy
Cause life ain’t cushy

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Lyle Lovett also has a quirky sense of humor. He has written some very serious and beautiful songs in his lifetime, but songs like this one, “Don’t Touch My Hat” always put a Lyle Lovett smile on my mug…

“DON’T TOUCH MY HAT”

Man you better let go
You can’t hold on to
What belongs to me
And don’t belong to you

I caught you looking
With your roving eye
So Mister you don’t have to act
So surprised

If it’s her you want
I don’t care about that
You can have my girl
But don’t touch my hat

I grew up lonesome
On the open range
And that cold North wind
Can make a man feel strange

My John B. Stetson
Was my only friend
And we’ve stuck together
Through many a woman

So if it’s her you want
I don’t care about that
You can have my girl
But don’t touch my hat

My mama told me
Son, to be polite
Take your hat off
When you walk inside

But the winds of change
They fill the air
And you can’t set your hat down
Just anywhere

So if you plead not guilty
I’ll be the judge
We don’t need no jury
To decide because

I wear a seven
And you’re out of order
‘Cause I can tell from here
You’re a seven and a quarter

But if it’s her you want
I don’t care about that
You can have my girl
But don’t touch my hat

If it’s her you want
I don’t care about that
You can have my girl
But don’t touch my hat

No it never complains
And it never cries
And it looks so good
And it fits just right

But if it’s her you want
I don’t care about that
You can have my girl
But don’t touch my hat

You can have my girl
But don’t touch my hat
You can have my girl
But don’t touch my hat

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The following story/song was written by one of my favorite songwriters of all time, Harry Chapin, the man who wrote “Cat’s in the Cradle” and so many more. Humor comes in many forms. There are very different flavors of humor. In this case, the humor’s kinda grim. But man, what this wordsmith does with words! WARNING: Fasten your seatbelts, ladies and gentlemen. You are going for one hell of a ride…

“30,000 POUNDS… OF BANANAS”

It was just after dark when the truck started down
The hill that leads into Scranton Pennsylvania.
Carrying thirty thousand pounds of bananas.
Carrying thirty thousand pounds (hit it Big John) of bananas.

He was a young driver,
Just out on his second job.
And he was carrying the next day’s pasty fruits
For everyone in that coal-scarred city
Where children played without despair
In backyard slag-piles and folks manage to eat each day
Just about thirty thousand pounds of bananas.
Yes, just about thirty thousand pounds (scream it again, John) .

He passed a sign that he should have seen,
Saying “shift to low gear, a fifty dollar fine my friend.”
He was thinking perhaps about the warm-breathed woman
Who was waiting at the journey’s end.
He started down the two mile drop,
The curving road that wound from the top of the hill.
He was pushing on through the shortening miles that ran down to the depot.
Just a few more miles to go,
Then he’d go home and have her ease his long, cramped day away.
And the smell of thirty thousand pounds of bananas.
Yes the smell of thirty thousand pounds of bananas.

He was picking speed as the city spread its twinkling lights below him.
But he paid no heed as the shivering thoughts of the nights’
Delights went through him.
His foot nudged the brakes to slow him down.
But the pedal floored easy without a sound.
He said “Christ!”
It was funny how he had named the only man who could save him now.
He was trapped inside a dead-end hellslide,
Riding on his fear-hunched back
Was every one of those yellow green
I’m telling you thirty thousand pounds of bananas.
Yes, there were thirty thousand pounds of bananas.

He barely made the sweeping curve that led into the steepest grade.
And he missed the thankful passing bus at ninety miles an hour.
And he said “God, make it a dream!”
As he rode his last ride down.
And he said “God, make it a dream!”
As he rode his last ride down.
And he sideswiped nineteen neat parked cars,
Clipped off thirteen telephone poles,
Hit two houses, bruised eight trees,
And Blue-Crossed seven people.
It was then he lost his head,
Not to mention an arm or two before he stopped.
And he smeared for four hundred yards
Along the hill that leads into Scranton, Pennsylvania.
All those thirty thousand pounds of bananas.

You know the man who told me about it on the bus,
As it went up the hill out of Scranton, Pennsylvania,
He shrugged his shoulders, he shook his head,
And he said (and this is exactly what he said)
“Boy that sure must’ve been something.
Just imagine thirty thousand pounds of bananas.
Yes, there were thirty thousand pounds of mashed bananas.
Of bananas. Just bananas. Thirty thousand pounds.
Of bananas. not no driver now. Just bananas!”

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(Iris Dement and John Prine:)

After that one, let’s end on a quirky-sweet “love’ song by John Prine and Iris Dement… “In Spite of Ourselves”

This duet with Iris Dement was written with Iris in mind. Prine’s wife said she called Iris to tease her
about the song and Dement said it took a lot of courage to sing some of the lines the first few times.

She don’t like her eggs all runny
She thinks crossin’ her legs is funny
She looks down her nose at money
She gets it on like the Easter Bunny
She’s my baby I’m her honey
I’m never gonna let her go

He ain’t got laid in a month of Sundays
I caught him once and he was sniffin’ my undies
He ain’t real sharp but he gets things done
Drinks his beer like it’s oxygen
He’s my baby
And I’m his honey
Never gonna let him go

In spite of ourselves
We’ll end up a’sittin’ on a rainbow
Against all odds
Honey, we’re the big door prize
We’re gonna spite our noses
Right off of our faces
There won’t be nothin’ but big old hearts
Dancin’ in our eyes.

She thinks all my jokes are corny
Convict movies make her horny
She likes ketchup on her scrambled eggs
Swears like a sailor when shaves her legs
She takes a lickin’
And keeps on tickin’
I’m never gonna let her go.

He’s got more balls than a big brass monkey
He’s a whacked out weirdo and a lovebug junkie
Sly as a fox and crazy as a loon
Payday comes and he’s howlin’ at the moon
He’s my baby I don’t mean maybe
Never gonna let him go

In spite of ourselves
We’ll end up a sittin’ on a rainbow
Against all odds
Honey, we’re the big door prize
We’re gonna spite our noses
Right off of our faces
There won’t be nothin’ but big old hearts
Dancin’ in our eyes.
There won’t be nothin’ but big old hearts
Dancin’ in our eyes.

(spoken) In spite of ourselves

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So yeah… Now you know a little more about me, and where me brain’s been.

Stay tuned if you dare for Part II, coming soon, wherein I will share with you music from my stash that I feel is not only creatively composed,but has been honestly impactful and instructive in my life.

Thank you for Listening.

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“If you could read my mind, Love…” Part 2

“If You Could Read My Mind, Love…” Part 1 ended with…

“At long last, he launches right into it. And all of us, the vast, entire WGUY radio listening audience everywhere, is finally given the lowdown.

“And the lowdown is… kind of incredible.”

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Yes, I’m here to tell you that the “lowdown” (note the quotation marks here) was indeed a tad incredible. And I remind you that you were warned in Part 1 that the story, though true, was a rather silly story as well. So there’s that.

But OK. The voice that came on the air came across as dark, authoritative, and rather harrumphing, leaving all of us 17 year old “adults” and younger (we, the demographic majority of WGUY’S listenership) suspecting that the man might be the President or CEO of WGUY, if not of the American Broadcasting Association itself. And in the following not-verbatim-nutshell, here is what he “regretted having to impart”:

(stock photo– not Jack Dalton)
It had long been no secret that our DJ, Mr. Jack Dalton, considers himself a champion of Democracy, and had long been feeling seriously distressed about the indefensible state of affairs in East and West Germany— namely the Berlin Wall.

Mr. Dalton, who was obviously feeling the frustration of his utter sense of powerlessness that many lone individuals feel in the face of his inability to take effective action when needed, decided to take it upon himself to perpetrate a one-man protest.

Consequently, and unfortunately, he arbitrarily chose our WGUY broadcast radio station to be the platform to rally the largest population possible into action.

In so doing, he impulsively locked himself inside the station’s sound studio, and refused to come out.

He then began the playing and replaying of that dreadful song that had become his personal anthem.

And finally, our listeners must rest assured in the confidence that any other such event such would never be allowed to re-occur at WGUY. Mr. Dalton had just had been summarily fired. End of story.

Now, I think a lot of us 17 year old and younger “adults”felt that firing the poor man was excessively harsh. We were used to seeing our own age group getting summarily punished, for our own little crimes and misdemeanors, all the time, but never an adult. Especially not an adult that we looked up to and who, in our callow opinion, had done little wrong.

First of all, the incident had given us something that was mysteriously fun to speculate on throughout the day. Something that wasn’t boring for a change. Secondly, we all pretty much loved our Jack the DJ Dalton. His was the disembodied radio voice that woke us up practically every morning, that spoke to us every day— an adult who actually seemed to ‘get’ us, you know? Plus, our daily entertainer; he’d come out with the wildest and craziest funny things sometimes. It was easy to feel he was one of the few adults who seemed… on our side. In a way, he seemed one of us.

But more importantly, he was the bringer of our MUSIC, which was our daily bread.

And then, there was something else to consider. Just what, exactly, was his “crime?” Standing up for something he believed in? Being against the Berlin Wall? I mean, who wasn’t? What, were we kids the only ones willing to look at this and see The Big Picture? I mean, the boys in my circle were starting to take the man’s firing personally. It was an injury, an injustice that had been perpetrated on them, damnit! And for them, this was a cause worth fighting for. The hornets’ nest had been stirred up. Oh, my pals were talking it up, big time. Like something needed to be done.

Honestly? I felt somewhat that way myself, onlynot nearly so strongly. In my home and upbringing, the parents laid down the law, and the parents administered the justice, so to speak. The rules were (well, mostly) common sense rules and you just had to go with them, didn’t you. I mean even to me, the little delinquent of the family, that seemed fair. Hey, I was a real little sneak when it came to breaking some of the rules, but every time I got caught at it, like it or not (and oh, I never liked it), it always turned out it to have been my own stupid damn fault.

So I guess what I’m saying is, I‘d grown up feeling that in the long run you just had to accept the status quo. Didn’t seem to me like there was that much of a choice anyway. So… when this WGUY flap went down, I felt bad for the guy, sure. And yeah, I felt some of the emotional turmoil too. But in the long run like I said, I was like, he got fired, that’s too bad. Yeah, I liked his show and everything, but… oh well then. What can you do?

Little did I know that an onslaught of angry phone calls were being made from all over the place. WGUY’s office phone was reportedly ringing off the hook. People didn’t like their DJ getting summarily fired, did they. They were angry. And they were busy making it clear to the fire-ers that they wanted their fire-ee summarily reinstated. But me? I was out of the loop. I’d just gone home, watched a little TV, and then to bed. I never found out until the following afternoon when I went back in to work and got the new “lowdown” from some of my friends who popped into the garage to tell me the “great news.”

Huey Cole’s Esso, 20 years before I worked there…

What great news? The radio station had been amazingly overwhelmed with the hundreds of protests and the owners had finally caved in to the demands!

Wow. I was shocked. Now my pals (who, like me, lived thirty-five miles away from the GUY studios) had found all this out through the grapevine, second-hand. They themselves personally had nothing whatsoever to do with the outcome. Yet, by the way they were strutting around and claiming victory, you’d think they’d stormed the Bastille and chopped off Marie Antoinette’s head.

Teen-agers. You gotta love’em.

But anyway, it was all over. It had been a bloodless coup. Jack Dalton was right back on the air that evening and right back on the old payroll, like nothing whatsoever had ever happened. The proletariat had won the day over their capitalist oppressors. The world that was WGUYville was still a democracy. So. There would be Jack Dalton’s music. And all was well in the land.

And sure, I was happy for our DJ.

But… SPOILER ALERT: everything I’ve told you… you’ve gotten from the point of view of my 17 year old self. A kid’s point of view. A kid’s version of “the lowdown.” But as always, there were other points of view. More about this soon.

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The brain is a frickin’ file cabinet, isn’t it. And this one little pretty-much-forgotten event has been occupying one or more of my brain cells for almost sixty years. And in all those sixty years, I can recall only one other time that this incident conjured itself right up out of my subconscious memory. That happened ten or twelve years ago at the library where I work.

Four or five of us on the staff were, for whatever reason, chatting about some of our favorite novelty songs. Doctor Demento’s name had come up, bringing along with it such crazy titles such as Steve Martin’s “King Tut,” Tom T-Bone Stankus’ “Existential Blues,” Napoleon XIV’s “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha Ha”, and “Junk Food Junkie” by Larry Gross, to name a few. And suddenly, bing!, the “West of the Wall” thing had popped up unbidden in my mind, seemingly out of the blue since the song is not a novelty tune in and of itself.

“Do any of you remember a particular song called ‘West of the Wall?” I asked.

The question got me blank stares and the shaking of heads.

So OK, I launched into the strange saga of WGUY’s for-me–memorable episode when, suddenly, one of our library clerks, Jeannie Tabor, joyfully interrupted saying, “Oh my god! I DO remember that happening! It was so… weird, wasn’t it!”

Actual X-ray of my brain…

So there were a pair of us then! Two of us each with a brain cell that had been harboring this identical data (no doubt in the form of ones and zeros), data that had been lying dormant all these years like a little time capsule waiting to be opened! So then, excitedly, we both went on, telling the story together, as each of us remembered it. What fun!

But it didn’t take long after that for our little time capsule excitement to subside, the fun little memory curling up again in our respective brain cells and going right back to sleep. In my case, never again to be awakened from its little vampire crypt until… one month ago, it just popped back up in my head (who knows why) and got me thinking of the incident as a possible topic for this blog. And the rest, as they say, is history.

But wait, there’s more! As I began to compose this post, I remembered how ridiculously surprised I’d been when Jeannie had confirmed my little story. And I started to wonder… who else, if anyone, might also remember it.

So what did I do? I fired up my laptop and did the standard twenty-first century thing. I went to Google. I figured there must be more people out there who remember it.

Well, even with Google, finding info on such obscure little happening wasn’t easy. For half a day, I worked my butt off like a private eye. And finally… I did manage to find a few conversational traces of a thread in the Facebook archives.

The following four quotations from old Facebook messages (once posted by a few now-disembodied texters) are all I was able to dig up from the some six decades of the digital graveyard:

“Kent Taylor Smith Hi Kent. Yup, I was listening that day and heard it. It was about the same time that I went into radio. BTW: Are you still with THE WAVE?”

“On August 13, 1961, East Berlin closed its border with West Berlin and erected a wall to stem the flow of Easterners to the West. This brought to mind a song, sung my Toni Fisher, titled “West of the Wall” which was released the following year, around June ’62. Well, one thought led to another and Bangor’s dawn to dusk radio station, WGUY, came to mind. They played all the “good stuff,” including “West of the Wall.” So, now I’m thinking did they really play “West of the Wall,” continuously, one day as a kind of protest, or is this just the confused memory of a 12 year-old adolescent? I don’t recall the names of the ‘jocks’ at WGUY who might be able to answer this torturous question. Is there anyone out there to help relieve this pressure? Perhaps the guys from Bangor, Maine – Radio & TV?”

“The event happened, it was so long ago nobody remembers it other than it happened. I first started working for WGUY in 2000 at the 102.1 incarnation. Nobody involved with the station then, or since, was involved. I even asked Bob Mooney about it once and he could barely remember it.”

“Your memory is very good, John. I remember that incident. Yes, a DJ on WGUY named Jack Dalton played “West Of the Wall” continuously for several hours. I don’t recall it being a “protest”, but rather a publicity stunt to draw attention to the station. My memory is a bit fuzzy on the aftermath, but if my memory is somewhat close, he was “fired” and then “rehired.” Someone else might have a clearer memory on that part. BTW, publicity stunts were quite common at that time. A DJ would “lock themselves” in the studio and play the same song multiple times, get “fired” and get “rehired” after listeners protested the firing. Side note: studio doors don’t have locks on them.”

So: there were some little data packets of the same ones and zeros lodged in the brains of these guys, just like they’re still lodged in Jeannie’s and my own. Cool.

I’m always finding it very fascinating to be reminded that each of us has one of these biological, state-of-the-art, digital recorders installed right behind our eye sockets and that they’re on all the time, picking up any and all of the vibrations of our five (known) senses and forever cataloging, collating, and cataloging them. I mean, jeez, who knows what all else is stored away in these things? Could be anything. Could be everything. Put’em all together and what’ve you got? Maybe only the entire history of the earth. One soul at a time.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

So now, allow me to stop here and make this little shout-out to any of you (out there) who have happened by chance to stumble onto this particular post, right now… who were living here in the WGUY World greater area back in ’64, and who also have some first-hand knowledge of this event. If so, could you, would you (please, please, please) leave a comment or two about it in the comment field at the end of the post? Like, you know, what you were doing at the time, what you remember thinking about it at the time, etc. Who knows, maybe there’s a lot of us. Maybe we could start a club. Or a support group, lol.

But no, seriously, all kidding aside, I’d really appreciate you checking in if that’s the case.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Alright, I’m going to close here by swapping my 17 year old’s hat for my 77 year old’s one, and focusing us on the last few sentences of the fourth quotation from the Facebook thread I’d unearthed with Google’s help. This is what the gentleman said:

“My memory is a bit fuzzy on the aftermath, but if my memory is somewhat close, he was “fired” and then “rehired.” Someone else might have a clearer memory on that part. BTW, publicity stunts were quite common at that time. A DJ would “lock themselves” in the studio and play the same song multiple times, get “fired” and get “rehired” after listeners protested the firing. Side note: studio doors don’t have locks on them.”

Notice the use of all the quotation marks, where he says “fired” and “rehired”? That’s not the same thing as simply saying fired or rehired, is it. He has also called it what it actually was: a “publicity stunt.” And if you were an adult back then, you would have seen it for what it was too. But on the other hand, if you were a 17 year old or younger, all full of piss and vinegar, you’d probably see it as a call to arms, as many did.

It’s like the station put on a little play. And why? To generate more interest in WGUY… that’s why To do something that would increase the numbers of their young listeners, something their sponsors would appreciate. And of course, that’s what it did. It worked. The adults back then did know. Of course they did. And it’s easy to imagine them rolling their eyes and getting quite a kick out of it. It’s easy to imagine them sighing, shaking their heads, and saying something like, “These crazy teen-agers. They’ll believe anything.”

But it’s the guy’s last sentence, his “Side note” that’s making me smile today.

“Studio doors don’t have locks on them.”

That’s right.

They don’t.

home

“If you could read my mind, love…”

—Gordon Lightfoot

My wife and I were once befriended by a retired professional hypnotist from New York City. And when I say professional, I mean really professional: he wasn’t one of those fun, on-stage-showmen hypnotists that’ll turn you into a clucking, seed-pecking “chicken” for laughs and a quick buck. No, this gentleman’s distinguished career as a clinical hypnotherapist had him working in New York City hospitals and within the NYC criminal justice system.

During a high school assembly (at a high school where I was teaching), he shared this one famous, historical anecdote that really threw a monkey wrench into all that I thought I knew about the inner workings of the human brain:

Using a small probe designed to produce the mildest of electric stimulations when applied to chosen areas of the brain, one of her surgeons gently stimulated a random spot on hers. Immediately her face looked perplexed. When asked what she was experiencing, she replied, “Why, I just suddenly tasted a ham sandwich.” Further into the operation, the doctor once again applied the probe to another random location. Suddenly the woman was beaming happily. When asked to explain, she told the surgeon, “I was suddenly just sitting in a concert hall with my mother, but it was back when I was a child. And the music? It’s wonderful!”

To me this begged a lot of questions, not the least of which is… What sensations or memories might be tapped into if you, or I, were the patient lying on that operating table? I find this so intriguing.

Now, the above example has much to do with the overall behind-the-scenes theme of this many-episodes blog that you’re reading. As I attempted to explain in my very first post, lots of random memories are suddenly reawakening (popping up) in my 77 year old consciousness seemingly all the time now. And while some are the longer “story”-memories with their pretty convoluted plot lines (like my recent Gizmo Chronicles), so many more of them are just simpler “moments”-memories, little unimportant-yet-interesting moments that have been leaving me amazed at the beyond-incredible capacity of my brain to have catalogued so much of the minute-by-trivial-minute minutiae of my relatively long life.

Check out what this cool dude had to say about this:

NOTHING IS LOST

Deep in our sub-conscious, we are told
Lie all our memories, lie all the notes
Of all the music we have ever heard
And all the phrases those we loved have spoken,
Sorrows and losses time has since consoled,
Family jokes, out-moded anecdotes
Each sentimental souvenir and token
Everything seen, experienced, each word
Addressed to us in infancy, before
We could even know or understand
The implications of our wonderland.

There they all are, the legendary lies
The birthday treats, the sights, the sounds, the tears
Forgotten debris of forgotten years
Waiting to be recalled, waiting to rise
Before our world dissolves before our eyes
Waiting for some small, intimate reminder,
A word, a tune, a known familiar scent
An echo from the past when, innocent
We looked upon the present with delight
And doubted not the future would be kinder
And never knew the loneliness of night.

—Noel Coward (1899 – 1973)

Fascinating, no…?

As part of the Characterization portion of my high school English Creative Writing units, I often would ask my little writers, “Can you imagine having a ballpoint-pen-sized instrument which, when you secretly positioned it right behind the ear of the kid sitting in front of you, could download and reveal all their thoughts and memories?” My point was this: the interesting and well-written character sketches in literature need to go way beyond the mere standard mugshot-stats of height, weight, color of eyes, and color of hair. The kid sitting in front of you may appear outwardly boring and uninteresting at a glance, but once you peel back their scalp and take a peek inside that brain… SURPRISE! People are usually a lot more interesting that we may be led to believe.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

OK. I’m going to tell you a little story here, a bed-time story if you will. It’s not a great story or even an important one. Nope, no little Stephen King blockbuster here (although you may find that there is just a whiff of Stephen King-ishness about it). It’s a silly story, actually. But the thing to remember is… it’s a true one. And it describes one of the little “moments” that has recently just “bubbled up” to the surface of my dark and murky subconscious memories… almost as if, say, a brain surgeon had just pressed his electronic probe on just the right spot of my brain…

WEST OF THE WALL

So it’s late June, 1964. A beautiful, blue-sky, sunny morning. I’m at work downtown. Three weeks ago, I graduated from high school and now I’m earning the Big Bucks for college— to the tune of $46 dollars a week take-home pay at Huey Cole’s Esso station. Don’t laugh. $46.00 a week is fair pay for a kid my age.

Coles’ Esso, 20 years before I started working there.

At this point in my on-the-job training life, I’velearned almost just enough about grease-monkeying to be seriously dangerous, but fortunately that won’t be an issue today. Because we’ve got the full-time crew on deck tohandle the grease jobs, oil changes, and whatever else. Me? I’m strictly the gas pump jockey. All day long. Easy street.

But he tells me they’re the customer, and the customer is always right so I’d better do it and do it with a smile!

Pugs were the standard old bags’ dogs of choice back then.

I tell him OK, I’ll do it, but it’d be one hell of a lot easier to smile if that nasty little pug of theirs in the back seat would just stop snarling and nipping at my ankles, for chrissakes!

But hey, in the downtime at the station, which there’s usually lots of (our town being a regular Gomer and Goober Pyle Mayberry, R.F.D.), I’ll be lazing much of the day away slouched in the boss’s swivel chair, feet up on the desk, manning the phone, smoking cigarettes, and listening to my favorite station, WGUY Bangor. Listening to the top 40 is just about everything to me, so thank God I’ve got a job where the radio plays all day long. Plus, I like sitting behind a big desk. I tell my buddies, yeah, I got me a desk job this summer.

Around 10:00, just as another new song is beginning to play, a Chevy wagon with a family of five pulls up at the pumps. I mash my filter-tip Kool into the ash tray and head out. It’s a little annoying because I hadn’t caught the name of the new tune. All I’d picked up on is it was something about a wall. Oh well, whatever, I’m sure I’ll be hearing it again sometime. At some point down the road.

By the time I get to step back into the office and ring up the sale, there’s a bunch of commercials going on. But anyway, I slip back into the office chair, put my feet back up, and light up another cancer stick. And as always, keep a sharp eye on the pumps, lest my dad suddenly pulls in and catches me smoking. Sure. I know. I’m seventeen going on eighteen next month. An adult, right? But for some reason I’m just not ready to have that particular fight with the old man.

So, turns out the next song up on the radio is…

Huh! Hey, wait just a minute. That’s the same song as the last one, the one they just played. Which is pretty odd. I mean, they don’t usually play a tune twice in a row, back to back like this. But OK. Cool. I’ll take it. I wanted to hear it again anyway. Now I just don’t hafta wait till tomorrow or the next day. Which is great.

Surprisingly though, good ol’ DJ, Jack Dalton, seems to have forgotten to announce the title of the song. \Which is odd. Didn’t say anything at all, in fact. The song just started playing without even a word from him. But… so what? Anybody with half a brain can guess the name of the song anyway. I mean, it’s gotta be “West of the Wall,” since that’s the phrase getting repeated over and over in the chorus.

It’s a girl’s voice doing the singing. She’s probably a real babe, like all of’em. Plus, it’s one of those melodies that gets stuck in your head right away, you know?

Hmmm. So, it’s about the Berlin Wall over in Germany. About somebody on one side of the wall being separated from somebody else on the other side. Her lover obviously. It’s kinda sad. Like a Romeo and Juliet thing. I like sad songs.

But as it draws to the end, I’m focusing right in on it because I really want the title and artist’s name spoken. I still keep my little notebook at home, under my bed next to my radio, where I keep track of new titles and artists and where they’ve currently landed in the top 100. See? But that’s me. Obsessive-compulsive.

OK, now here’s something really odd. The song just came to the end, right? But then, it just simply started re-playing all over once again. For the third time! And still, not a word from the DJ. Not a word from anybody! So… what gives?

A kind of wild idea pops into my head. Maybe the DJ is the only one at the studio. For some reason, who knows why, he’s gotten stuck working alone today. And… guess what: he’s had himself a little emergency. As in… nature calls. Stuck in the bathroom! Maybe… probably, with a real bad case of the runs, or something. If so, man, wouldn’t I hate to be him! I mean, how awful would that be!? Not to mention embarrassing! You know, you’ve got this job to do. And your boss… not to mention all your listeners out there in radio land… are counting on you to continue their hit parade, but there you are, stuck behind a bathroom door and glued onto the porcelain throne, sweating like a pig, and praying desperately you’ll somehow be able to get back out there to that goddamn microphone. To crawl back if you have to! Anyway, can’t wait to hear his excuse when he finally does come back on the air. I mean, jeez, what would I say in a situation like that? Sorry, ladies and gentlemen, but… see, there was this uhmmm… really insistent payola thug at the door practically threatening to kneecap me if I refused to play his client’s demo? Or… man, I was having this vicious nicotine fit, so I just stepped outside for a couple of drags when… all of a sudden… the wind just slammed the door shutbehind me! And it locked!

Yeah. Poor guy, stuck in the john right now and be going through a dozen possible alibis.

Ah! Here it comes… the song is ending.

Silence.

And then… the song just starts right up again! WHAT the…? Something’s going on… but…

Of course a car rolls up to the pumps. Followed by another. Damn it.

And of course the song is still playing when I return to the cash register. My God, a few more plays and I’ll have all the damn lyrics memorized, right down pat.

But wait a minute! What if this is something a lot more serious? Like, oh I dunno, did he have a heart attack or something? Yeah, and what if he’s just lying there on the floor unconscious? Or even DEAD? Holy crap! And what if this guy is obese? And what if, say… his three hundred and fifty pound body is lying there accidentally barricading the door like a human doorstop, so nobody can get in to help him?

Oh, for cryin’ out loud, would you listen to yourself. I mean, I really know the odds are that nothing that exotic, nothing that serious, is gonna turn out being responsible for the simple, never-ending replaying of “West of the Wall,” if that’s what the song actually is called.

Probably the poor soul really is suffering a bathroom emergency.

Still though, the song goes on. And on. For three hours, which includes my lunch break.

Meanwhile, I’ve been sharing what’s been going on with this phantom broadcast with my co-workers and even some of our customers who’ve stepped into the office. Got’em all scratching their heads for a minute or two. But they’re too busy to care, really. Their attitude? Yeah? So what?

So… I must bear this burden alone.

But for me, at this stage of the game, whatever it is going on here, it’s created kind of an electric, festive atmosphere. Spooky. I’ve kinda feeling this creepy 1938 War of the World’s broadcast feeling. Something right out of The Twilight Zone. You know, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” kinda vibe.

And by now, after all this time, I really do hafta be thinking, OK, there’s really gotta be at least a… somewhat unusual explanation for this. For something as bizarre as this.

Time ticks itself away…

Then…

Sometime in the late afternoon, close to the end of my shift, the music…

stops! Stops dead!

And suddenly… nothing but radio silence.

Frozen stock-still, I’m now gawking at the little radio on the shelf as if it were a TV screen.

Something’s happened! And it’s about time! But OK… what?!

I wait…

And WHOA! Suddenly the radio silence is broken by a crisp announcer’s jarring voice, loudly clearing his throat in a no-nonsense, this-is-serious kind of way. As if whatever it is he’s about to say will be a very grave news bulletin! Oh. My. God. I can’t help it! This is big! I’m all lik… have the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor again? Have the Russians invaded us? Has another President been shot? Have the monsters blasted Maple Street right off the frickin’ map? WHAT!?

At long last, a man who is not the DJ launches right into it. And all of us,meaning the vast, entire WGUY radio listening audience everywhere, is finallygoing to clue us in. He says, “I’m sorry to report…

He’s giving us the lowdown. And the lowdown is… kind of incredible.

END OF STORY

Thanks for reading. Please keep a vigilant eye out for the rest of this TRUE STORY, “West of the Wall; The Epilogue,” due to appear on your favorite device’s screen at any moment now…

One of many TIME CAPSULE MOMENTS in my brain.

“If you could read my mind, Love…”—

A woman lay on a hospital operating table. Although her brain was surgically exposed to the open air, she remained in no pain, wide awake, aware, and perfectly capable of conversing with her surgeons during the procedure. Using a small probe designed to produce the mildest of electric stimulations when applied to chosen areas of the brain, one of her surgeons gently stimulated a random spot on hers. Immediately her face looked perplexed. When asked what she was experiencing, she replied, “Why, I just suddenly tasted a ham sandwich.” Further into the operation, the doctor once again applied the probe to another random location. Suddenly the woman was beaming happily. When asked to explain, she told the surgeon, “I was suddenly just sitting in a concert hall with my mother, but it was back when I was a child. And the music? It’s wonderful!”

Check out what this cool dude had to say about this:

NOTHING IS LOST

—Noel Coward (1899 – 1973)

Fascinating, no…?

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

WEST OF THE WALL

At this point in my on-the-job training life, I’ve learned almost just enough about grease-monkeying to be seriously dangerous, but fortunately that won’t be an issue today. Because we’ve got the full-time crew on deck tohandle the grease jobs, oil changes, and whatever else. Me? I’m strictly the gas pump jockey. All day long. Easy street.

Well, easy except for the fact that we’re a full-service gas station, meaning that on top of pumping the gas, I also get to wash the windshields, check the customers’ oil, check the air pressure in all four tires, and make sure the distilled water in the batteries is properly topped off. And that’s OK, but… there’s a couple of old ladies (old bags) who roll in here once a week and (if you can believe this) actually make me climb right inside their smelly old car and wash all of their inside windows! On top of all the other stuff! I mean, cripes, have they got a lot of nerve, or what!? It’s crazy, and believe me I’ve complained to the boss about it! But he tells me they’re the customer, and the customer is always right so I’d better do it and do it with a smile! I tell him OK, I’ll do it, but it’d be one hell of a lot easier to smile if that nasty little pug of theirs in the back seat would just stop snarling and nipping at my ankles, for chrissakes! (In case you don’t know this, little pugs were always the standard little old ladies’ dog of choice back then.)

So, turns out the next song up on the radio is…

It’s a girl’s voice doing the singing. She sounds cool. I like her voice. She’s probably a real babe, like all of’em. Plus, I like the melody. It’s one of those that gets stuck in your head right away, you know?

Hmmm. It’s this story about the Berlin Wall over in Germany. About somebody on one side of the wall being separated from somebody else on the other side. Her lover obviously. It’s kinda sad. Like a Romeo and Juliet thing. I like sad songs. But as it draws to the end, I’m focusing right in on it because I really want the title and artist’s name spoken. I still keep my little notebook at home, under my bed next to my radio, where I keep track of new titles and artists and where they’ve currently landed in the top 100. See? But that’s me. Obsessive-compulsive.

Anyway, can’t wait to hear his excuse when he finally does come back on the air. I mean, jeez, what would I say in a situation like that? Sorry, ladies and gentlemen, but… see, there was this uhmmm… really insistent payola thug at the door practically threatening to kneecap me if I refused to play his client’s demo? Or… man, I was having this vicious nicotine fit, so I just stepped outside for a couple of drags when… all of a sudden… the wind just slammed the door shutbehind me! And it locked!

Yeah. Poor guy, stuck in the john right now and be going through a dozen possible alibis.

Ah! Here it comes… the song is ending.

Silence.

And then… What? The song just starts right up again! WHAT the…? Something’s going on… but…

Of course a car rolls up to the pumps. Followed by another. Damn it.

Somehow the song is still playing when I return to the cash register. My God, a few more plays and I’ll have all the damn lyrics memorized, right down pat.

But wait a minute! What if this is something a lot more serious?Like, I dunno, did he have a heart attack or something? Yeah, what if he’s just lying there unconscious? Or even DEAD? Holy crap! I dunno how big the guy is or anything but what if, say… his three hundred and fifty pound body is lying there accidentally barricading the door so nobody can get in to help him?

Oh, for cryin’ out loud, would you listen to me. I honestly know how stupid I’m being. I do sometimes enjoy framing all the boredom going onall around me as some tense movie plot. It’s crazy. But I know, I mean I really know the odds are… nothing that exotic, nothing that serious, is gonna turn out being responsible for the never-ending replaying of “West of the Wall,” if that’s what the song actually is called.

Probably the poor soul really is suffering a bathroom emergency.

Still though, the song goes on. And on. For an hour. Through my lunch break. For three hours. Meanwhile, I’ve shared what’s been going on with this phantom broadcast with my co-workers and even some of our customers who’ve stepped into the office. Got’em all scratching their heads for a minute or two. But they’re too busy to care, really. So… I must bear the burden alone.

But for me, whatever it is going on here, it’s created kind of an electric, festive atmosphere. And by now, after all this time, I’m thinking, OK, there really must be at least a… somewhat unusual explanation. For something as bizarre as this. For me, it’s generated this creepy 1938 War of the World’s broadcast feeling. Or like something right out of The Twilight Zone. I mean, I can’t stop going back to that one Twilight Zone episode, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.”

However, all good things must come to an end.

Sometime in the late afternoon, close to the end of my shift, the music… stops!

Stops dead!

Suddenly… nothing but radio silence.

Frozen stock-still, I’m left gawking at the little Zenith radio on the shelf as if it were a TV screen.

Something’s happened! And it’s about time! But OK… what?!

I wait…

And WHOA! Suddenly the radio silence is broken by a crisp announcer’s jarring voice, loudly clearing his throat in a no-nonsense, this-is-serious way. As if whatever it is he’s about to say will be a very grave news bulletin! Oh. My. God. It’s gonna be bad news, I know it. This is big. I’m all like, have the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor again? Have the Russians invaded us? Has another President been shot? Have the monsters blasted Maple Street right off the frickin’ map? WHAT!?

At long last, he launches right into it. And all of us, the vast, entire WGUY radio listening audience everywhere, is finally given the lowdown.

And the lowdown is… kind of incredible.

END OF STORY

Thanks for reading. Please keep a vigilant eye out for the rest of this TRUE STORY, “West of the Wall; The Epilogue,” due to appear on your favorite device’s screen at any moment now…

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LITTLE BOY SAD

THE GIFT

As a child, I was so spoiled at Christmas time it was embarrassing. See, Mom had grown up in the abject poverty of The Depression. She hadn’t gotten doodly-squat at Christmas when she was a little girl. One of her personal legends was the Christmas when the lone present she received was a coat hanger personally decorated by her older sister. And damn… she’d loved it. Yes, I know. It kind of makes you want to cry, doesn’t it. And it sounds made up, like something right out of the musical, Annie. It wasn’t though, according to my dad who eventually rescued her with a wedding ring. Now, how’s that for a family legend? And he hadn’t had any picnic himself when he’d been a kid, either, but he’d fared a whole lot better than she had.

The sad thing is, she’d gotten somewhat psychologically bent by all that poverty. And as a result, beginning on New Year’s Day (if not earlier) when January had already begun chugging slowly toward the following December, she was once again the volunteer soldier in the lifelong war against poverty-stricken Christmases. Not only for us, her kids, but for all of her nieces and nephews, regardless of what faraway states they lived in, all of whom were living in some degree of poverty themselves. Meanwhile, at home, our Christmas trees were alwaysburied alive in bright holiday-wrapped presents, large and tiny.

So I was lucky, right? Honestly, in retrospect, a little bit too lucky. The bounty of our Christmases wasn’t all that great for my character development, if you must know. Not that I needed any help in that department with the bad genes I’d somehow inherited. I just became more and more all about the getting, getting, getting despite the fact that I was already getting,getting, getting. And I’d get such great gifts. We all did.

For instance, I got a beautiful Lionel train set. I’ll never forget that. It was a dream come true. You’d set it all up on the living room floor and then… you were the engineer. But, and here’s the rub, there were only enough tracks to for a tiny little oval. The beautiful engine and the realistic box cars would go whizzing round and round, over and over. Round and round. Over and over. And you know what? That gets old in a hurry. And why weren’t there more tracks, is what I wanted to know. I wanted a figure-eight railroad. (OK, I probably wanted enough tracks to lay down rails going from room to room all throughout the ground floor of our house.) And then, you had to keep taking it all apart and putting the pieces back in the box again, ‘cause you couldn’t just leave it on the living room floor forever, right? It was a small living room. So that quickly got old as well.

I suppose I should tell you about the cool Lone Ranger ring I got. It was silver and featured a small embossed rendering of the Lone Ranger astride the rearing stallion, Silver. Yes, the very ring under which I brainlessly jammed a pebble between it and my ring finger just above the knuckle, where it got stuck, causing my finger to swell all up. All I can remember now is the horrendous emergency car ride to some old guy’s house, a guy who had some kind of a power saw.

Most Christmas gifts were basically toys and clothing. They didn’t have Amazon gift cards back then. Clothes were just clothes. The toys were appreciated of course, if only for a little while. Why? Because they’re just…things, aren’t they. Days or months later you haul them out of the closet and look them over and you discover they’re the exact same old objects you tired of a long while back. Things. Things that you’d gotten oh so used to, ho-hum. And maybe you’d play with them one more time but…you’d find yourself just going through the motions somewhat.

And yes, I do realize now what a petulant, ungrateful little jerk I was.

As far as gifts go though, I hit the jackpot in 1956 on my tenth birthday. What I got wasn’t a thing. Well, of course it was a thing. It’s just that it was so much more than a thing. A gift that could, and did, keep on giving. Day after day, year after year. It was nothing expensive at all. Small, plain little box— perhaps 10 by 4 by 4 inches. A metallic blue. But I swear, it changed my life. Bent my life like a glass of water bends a ray of light passing through it. And I’m so gratified that it did. Even today.

I got a radio for Christmas that year.

Now when you hear the word radio, you have to keep these things in mind because this was the mid-1950s.

So first of all, to turn it on you first had to plug it into a wall-socket. It wasn’t portable.

Secondly, the broadcast voices and music received were amplified by 3, maybe 4, glass vacuum tubes. So when you turned your radio on, the vacuum tubes would first begin to glow, getting warm and then warmer, till they were radiating an orange glow (which you could never actually see without taking the back of the radio off). The innards of radios were like little ovens back then. Due to the fact that the tubes had to really get red hot in order to amplify the stations’ signals, you always had to wait almost a full minute before the thing would actually start working , unlike today where everything is instantaneous due to the invention of transistors.

Thirdly, almost all radios ran on AM back then, and mine was no exception. With FM, you can listen to your music clearly regardless of the weather; but with AM, any thunder storm 25 miles or so away would be breaking up your programs with unwanted static crashes that could drive you nuts.

And fourthly, with FM you could only pick up stations within about a 30-mile radius, all depending on the height of the stations’ antennae. With AM, especially at night, you can pick up stations thousands of miles away, but with one problem: stations with relatively weak signals would tend to fade in and out, which could also drive you nuts if you were trying to listen to a faraway baseball game.

We had a table-top radio in our kitchen. Mom usually kept that on throughout the day while doing her housework, and I listened too. WABI out of Bangor was always playing the top-40 hits of Johnny Cash, Ricky Nelson, Peggy Lee, The Big Bopper, Elvis Presley, and Buddy Holly. And man, didn’t I just think WABI’s top DJ, Jim Winters, was real-deal cool! He had such a deep voice and he knew everything about the artists. I was gonna grow up and be a DJ myself sometime, for sure. Along with a number of other things.

Funny thing about Jim Winters. He’d host the sock hops over at The Crystal Ballroom, the old renovated church out on South Street. The Crystal was off limits to me because “that’s where the high school crowd hung out.” So who knew what tings might be going on over there? Not me. I didn’t. Not my mom either, but… she could just imagine. But I’d watched a dozen high school rock and roll flicks at Center Theatre, and they were siren songs to me. So one Saturday night, my rug rat buddies and I pedaled our bikes over there and slipped in while Buddy Holly’s “Peggy Sue” was blaring from the loud speakers. So exciting! So forbidden fruit! I know my heart was pounding.

Well, the first thing I noticed was, wow, the great big crystal ball slowly revolving from the ceiling, lighting up the darkness with twirling fireflies of red, green, and blue swimming about the hall. I’d never seen anything like it!

The second thing that hit me was… oh my God, was that him? Yes it was! There he was himself! Jim, the DJ, Winters! But wait, it couldn’t be. What, this was the DJ I’d been putting up on a pedestal all this time?? Holy cow! He looked like some… creepy car salesman. And his head was way too big for his little shoulders. And partly bald? I was aghast.

Thirdly, something stated happening that made me nearly faint from a combination of forbidden-fruit ecstasy and fear. Winters was suddenly announcing over the loudspeaker, “At this time, all the young ladies who’ve signed up for “the Golden Garter Beauty Contest” should now approach the stage.” WHAT? WHAT WAS THAT? And before you could say Sodom and Gomorrah, a line of high school beauties had formed up there amid a raucous roar of hoots and catcalls and wolf-whistles. And holy-moly, didn’t my knees tremble as my eyes followed Young Lady #1 as she marched coyly up to the waiting chair, took a seat, hiked up the hemline of her skirt, and displayed for God and everybody to see… some frilly little lacy elastic encircling her thigh maybe 3 inches or more above her knee! I mean, What would her mother ever think!? And then I thought, Jeez, what would my mother ever think if she knew where I am and what was going on?! Here, a timid little Sunday school voice from my one of my shoulders gasped, “Tommy! You must run home now! This instant!” while the carnival barker voice that lived on my darker shoulder reasoned, “Oh come on, kid. What your mom doesn’t know won’t hurt her… right? No, Stick around. We’ll skedaddle soon, I promise.” Now, I’d heard the word “garter” before, but I had no clue what one actually was until that dizzy night at the Crystal Ballroom!

But I digress. We’re talking about, what… oh yeah, the radio I got as a gift. OK, back to that.

So I imagine you’re probably thinking, OK, you got yourself a radio. What’s the big deal? Because, like, getting a radio today is nothing. But hey, I’m here to tell you that for a ten-year-old in 1956, it was a very big deal. Especially since I was I was transitioning right then from the age of late prepubescence to the age of near puberty. And the songs I was getting interested in were about that mysterious world of guys and girls and… garters and stuff? And sure, we had the kitchen radio. I just couldn’t hear it so well from my bedroom for one thing.

So I plugged my new radio into the wall socket and tucked it away on the floor, right under the head of my bed in easy reach. That way I could just be lying there, reach down, and fiddle with the station dial to my heart’s delight, bringing in the music from the out-of-reach, nearby city stations. But when it got really dark, like when I was supposed to be sound asleep, I found myself reeling in DJs in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and amazingly sometimes as far away as California. I’d never realized what a small-town redneck Jim Winters really was.

But… regardless of all that, I now had… a night life.

When Paul Anka was singing, “I’m Just a Lonely Boy,” then I was that lonely boy. When Elvis was “All Shook Up,” so was I. When the Everly Brothers were frantically trying to “Wake Up, Little Susie,” I was feeling frantic about what I was gonna hafta tell her old man, waiting on us at her front door. And I was getting hip to the ways in which “Love Is a Many Splendid Thing.” But itching to find out what was going on behind “The Green Door,” though I suspected it was probably more of the same (or worse) as what I’d witnessed going on over there at the Crystal Ballroom. And yes, I knew what it was like to be “The Great Pretender,” even though when I listened to Peggy Lee, there was no pretending that I was coming down with “Fever.” Face it, I was in the onset of going batshit girl crazy. But… “what a lovely way to burn…”

Of course the sad thing was, I didn’t have a girlfriend, nor did I have any real clue as to how to get one. I was the shortest kid in my class, after all. And I was deadly shy around girls. One girl I had a crush on stood a foot and a half taller than me. An amazon. So I was doomed. Doomed to be a listener. Just a dime a dozen listener of love songs. And in that capacity, what I did do is get myself a little notebook. Kept it under the bed right next to the radio. Then night after night after night, crawling slowly up and down the dial from 55 to 160 khz, I sampled all radios stations I could find, searching for just the right ones, finding any and all songs that would try to have their way with my bleeding, lonely heart. I’d enter the call signs of the best stations into my log, along with the frequency points on the dial so I could easily find them again, plus each DJ’s name, a listing of the song titles I’d heard and fancied, and the artists’ names. I was becoming quite the bookkeeper. My all-time favorite stations and DJs were WMEX (AM) in Boston with Arnie “Woo Woo” Ginsberg at the helm, and “Cousin Brucie” of WINS (AM) New York.

I had a few cronies very much like myself in this regard, and we’d swap our gleaned info next day on the playground. I had it bad. We had it bad. And then, afternoons after school, my notebook and I would stroll down to the neighborhood convenience market where I’d stand in front of the magazine rack, surreptitiously (lest the proprietor catch me) lift one from the display, and hurriedly scrawl as much of the desired song lyrics as I could manage from the two or three pop song magazines that would publish them. I couldn’t afford to buy one on my allowance.

So yeah, I’d become a bookkeeper, a miserable scribe, a lonely hearts chronicler of heartfelt doo wop. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step and, sure enough, I was on my way to becoming the hopeless, lifelong romantic I am to this day.

I can clearly remember one particular night of listening when my ears particularly perked right up. The DJ du jour (no, make that DJ de nuit) announced that he was about to play a brand new song, that this would be the song’s exclusive debut, to be performed by a brand new, up and coming group calling themselves The Elegants! Desperately I clawed my little log out and pencil out from among the dust bunnies under the bed. I mean, it was well past midnight and the whole town I languished in was probably sound asleep, so it was like being Superman’s sidekick, Jimmy Olsen, getting a scoop for The Daily Globe! The song title was titled “Little Star,” and opened with the forlorn line, “Where are you, little star…?” It was such a sad song. Another song by some sad and lonely soul like myself. Where was my little star? Next day on the playground, all puffed up with self-importance, I (numero uno, the self-appointed president of our Lonely Hearts Club) altruistically enlightened my sad disciples with the new found data. As it turned out, “Little Star” did reach #1 on the Billboard Charts, stayed there for one week, and spent 19 weeks in the Hot 100. Unfortunately it was doomed to become just a one-hit wonder for The Elegants.

As it is with most people on the planet, I don’t believe I could feel whole without music. Music has become such a major part of my life. It soundtracks me every step of the way. A sad example: when I was a sophomore in high school, my steady girlfriend (yes, it took me that long to finally acquire one of those) gave me my ring back and just flat out and out dumped me. She’d found somebody else, alas. I was devastated. So what did I do? Sat in my room all day pitying myself for a whole month, that’s what. All the while wallowing in my Johnny Cash 45 rpm record collection. There were so many songs to choose from. “Guess Things Happen That way.” “Home of the Blues.” “Cry, Cry, Cry.” “I Still Miss Someone.” “Thanks a Lot” “Walking the Blues.” I mean, oh what an epic pity party that was! But… Johnny helped me pull through, didn’t he. Yes, he did.

Now it’s odd, but in what I call my jukebox brain today, random lyrics get automatically triggered by almost anything anyone says. I don’t know if it’s a blessing or a curse, but I find it entertaining, personally. Often during conversation among friends, I find myself just coming right out singing a couple of triggered song lines. However I’ve had to learn over time that it’s usually a lot more polite to try to stuff these little outbursts down inside because, understandably, some people can find this Tourette’s-like and, well, just a tad annoying. Just ask my wife.

Now I made the claim earlier that the little radio gift I received bent my life, changed it, and in such a good way. Oh sure, I realize if I hadn’t received my little blue box right then, the music would still have found me, would still be a big part of my life. But it came at a good time. It was something I hadn’t known known I needed, but as soon as it arrived it immediately became an integral part of my emotional life. It definitely filled some gaps.

See, my bedroom was my little fort. Just as the bedrooms of teens today are their fortresses of privacy, their domains. But one of the biggest differences is that my fort didn’t have a smart phone in it. (Hell, it didn’t even a have a phone of any kind in it.) And before 1953 our family didn’t even have a television in the house, let alone one in my bedroom. So I didn’t have some screen to stare down into during every minute of my free time. Those distractions were totally non-existent. Our 1950s “social media” was a physical hang-out, the lunch counter at Lanpher’s Drug Store, right after school got out every afternoon. It was comprised of real face-to-face kids, nothing digital or virtual about it. And for a half hour to forty-five minutes, you’d load up on all the school drama gossip and then head home. Where maybe you had some chores to do first, after which maybe you’d hang out on the family phone for a bit…but you weren’t allowed to live on it. You’d have dinner, maybe do some homework (maybe not, as was often the case with me), but eventually you’d retire to your room.

My bedroom was a quiet, peaceful sanctuary after 9:00 pm or so. I could be alone with my thoughts. Maybe I’d had a rough day and my thinking might’ve gotten hung up on dwelling on what’d happened, so I’d spend some time licking my emotional wounds. Maybe I’d spied some new girl in school that had caught my eye, and I could sorta daydream what she might be like, and what maybe she liked, and OK, wonder if I might ever be one of the things that she could possibly like as well (probably not.) Maybe I’d work on building my model airplanes, or dabble in trying to write out my feelings in a poem or two. But it was my time, me time. We kids had a lot of me time back in the fifties. It was built right in.

And then my radio showed up. AM. Mono, not stereo (stereo wouldn’t be available for a few years, so I didn’t know what I was missing). A plain, homely little thing. But it was a conduit. A conduit to worlds I hadn’t discovered yet. Emotional worlds. It was like a little ride on of the amusements at the carnival, me being the only kid there. I could just strap myself in, and ride any old time. It was a new adventure, one I would never tire of. Rock and roll. Then rock and roll turned to folk songs, which in turn became protest songs, and I was on my way. All because of a little inexpensive AM radio my parents had given me as a gift.

Today, I have Sirius XM. It’s great, it really is. I can stream songs from just about any genre and any time period. So I’ve got it all now. But you know what? It’s great, yes, but it all seems so easy. Too easy. The truth? All these modern-day streaming abilities feel too convenient. It’s a convenience that, I dunno, sucks the serendipity right out of it.

Oh well…

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