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Sounds Of Christmas Past

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Christmas music used to be something we used to hear for two or three weeks in December. We had a small collection of Christmas LPs we played on a monaural portable record player until I was in high school when we got our first stereo (bulkier, but still portable). That was long before stores and advertisers inundated us with holiday tunes and Christmas decorations in October.

When I was seven years old, I cried the first time I heard Connie Francis singing “Adeste Fideles.” I covered up by telling my mother I was sad because the record was slightly warped, making Connie sound like she had a bad case of hiccups. I have more than 150 CDs of Christmas music in several genres—classical, pop, jazz, comedy, big-band classics, new age, medieval and world music—there are a handful that remind me of Christmases Past.

 The Andy Williams Christmas Album (1963). Saying “Happy Holidays” was perfectly acceptable back then and wasn’t part of the “War on Christmas.” Andy Williams was still married to Claudine Longet; we watched their Christmas specials on TV. Good times; naïve times.

The Story of Christmas by Tennessee Ernie Ford with the Roger Wagner Chorale (1963). This combines traditional carols with songs from South Africa, Mexico and Japan, tributes to Mary’s donkey and Christmas trees, and the Christmas Gospel. It was the soundtrack to the NBC television special broadcast on December 22, 1963, without commercial interruption.

 Merry Christmas by Johnny Mathis (1958). His version of “Winter Wonderland” was a hit single in the UK and the album was on the Billboard 200 in 1959, 1960 and 1962. My mother was devastated when she found out he was gay, but she still loved his music.

W.T. Grant’s A Very Merry Christmas, Volume 3 (1966 or 1967). This compilation was only available through the now-defunct W.T. Grant department stores. I remember it for Percy Faith’s “Angels We Have Heard On High,” Mahalia Jackson’s version of “Silver Bells,” and Jim Nabors’ “Three Wise Men, Wise Men Three.” I didn’t know that Gomer Pyle could sing!

 Reader’s Digest’s Joyous Noel (1968). This was a four-record set with singers long-past (Enrico Caruso, John McCormack, Marian Anderson, Fritz Kreisler), recent-past (Kate Smith, Mario Lanza, George Beverly Shea, Spike Jones), and then-current (John Gary, Perry Como, Harry Belafonte, Lorne Greene, Vaughan Monroe) among many others. It also had the uncensored version of Glenn Miller’s “Jingle Bells,” with the verse about Mexicans sitting around all day listening to music and drinking tequila. I managed to find a copy on e-Bay a few years ago.

 Christmas With The Norman Luboff Choir (1964). I bought this after hearing “Do You Hear What I Hear?” on the Reader’s Digest album. The only time I’d seen this album in CD format was in the post exchange at the Grand Forks Air Force Base in 1991. I bought it for about nine bucks; Amazon.com was selling a new one for $255.99 at the time I wrote this.

I’d like to know if anyone else has favorite Christmas albums.

The Captain and Me – A Thanksgiving Memory

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Thanksgiving dinner was truly a feast when I was a kid because of the special menu items we rarely ate the rest of the year. Canned yams. Real dinner rolls. Big black olives we stuck on our fingers before eating them. A lime Jell-O salad made with cream cheese, pineapple and celery. Mom would stuff the remaining celery sticks with leftover cream cheese or peanut butter to munch on before dinner. And, of course, that cranberry jelly with the rings around the center.

Mom would have gotten up early Thanksgiving morning to start the turkey. She would boil the giblets to make broth for the stuffing, which was made out of old bread, since no one had invented ready-made seasoned croutons yet. Then she’d stuff the turkey, cover it with a cotton dish towel and put it into the oven, basting it several times until it was done. We didn’t have a roasting pan and this was decades before oven bags (which I used before my wife told me I was committing a mortal sin).

I’d remember one Thanksgiving for the rest of my life.

It was November 28, 1963. We’d gotten a television in January, a present from my grandmother who couldn’t believe we existed without one. Three days before we watched as a caisson carried JFK’s coffin from the White House to St. Matthew’s Cathedral and then to Arlington Cemetery. Macy’s had considered cancelling the Thanksgiving Day parade but decided to let the show go on to raise the spirits of a country in mourning.

I watched Captain Kangaroo when I got up that morning, as I did almost every morning, waiting for the parades that would follow. NBC traditionally broadcast the entire Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade. CBS showed parts of the Gimble’s parade in Philadelphia, the J.L. Hudson parade in Detroit, and the Eaton’s Santa Claus Parade in Toronto in addition to the Macy’s parade. It would be exciting, even though I would be watching in glorious black and white on a 19-inch Admiral TV. (We actually had cable back then since there was no other way to get a TV signal from Tucson across the mountains).

A few minutes before the end of the show, Captain Kangaroo and Mr. Green Jeans silently set a small table and brought out Thanksgiving dinner while “We Gather Together” played in the background. Then they sat and bowed their heads, as millions of others would be doing later that day, pondering that for which they could be thankful in the midst of tragedy.

It didn’t mean much to me until I was well into my forties, worn down by adversity, often brought on by my own mistakes. The memory of that simple ritual helped me through some dark times. Many years later I found welcome in the arms of another family for whom Thanksgiving is sincerely a time for reflecting upon what we have and not what we’ve lost.

Burning the B

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Most people have fond memories of childhood Thanksgivings. One of mine is of a flaming hillside.

Many of the towns founded in the mountains of the American West would, after many years of existence, construct a large letter on a nearby hillside as a monument to tenacity, a symbol of civic pride, or part of an interscholastic rivalry. Arizona sports about 60 such “mountain monograms,” including competing A’s in Tucson and Tempe for the University of Arizona and Arizona State University.

My hometown, Bisbee, sits in a canyon in the Mule Mountains of southeastern Arizona. In 1927 the townspeople decided to build a B near the top of Chihuahua Hill, the rust-colored mountain overlooking the downtown area. Local businesses ponied up $300 for concrete and other construction supplies, hauled up the mountain by mule. The Phelps-Dodge mining company donated a ton and a half of lime to whitewash the giant letter. “The B,” as it became affectionately known, was finished in May, 1928 with the help of most of the high school boys.

The Drillers Club, a group of Bisbee High School upperclassmen, assumed responsibility for The B’s upkeep a few years later. Every fall they supervised a group of freshman boys that hauled cans of water and fifty-pound bags of lime up Chihuahua Hill to a spot below The B, where their loads were combined in 55 gallon drums. The boys then carried buckets of fresh whitewash farther up to The B, dumping their loads and trekking back down for more. Dan Smith, a member of the Bisbee High School Class of 1967 and a veteran whitewasher said, “As the day went on, it began to look like there was more whitewash on us freshmen than there was on the B.”

The B became a symbol of high school spirit for decades. It also was once the target of Bisbee High School’s arch enemies, the Bulldogs of Douglas High, about 24 miles to the east. Dating back to 1906, these two teams have played more than 140 games in one of the oldest high school rivalries in the country. According to alumnus Ralph Echave (BHS ’48):

“On the evening of our Lettermen’s Banquet at the Copper Queen Hotel, people from Douglas climbed the mountain and painted over the middle bar of the B turning it into a “D”. The next day, miners, former BHS students and their families, gathered… ‘sticks of Dynamite’ and full tanks of gas (and) were going to Douglas to blow up the D. Fortunately, they were stopped on the road and DHS and the City of Douglas apologized, came to Bisbee and fixed our B.”

Every Thanksgiving Eve Bisbee held a pep rally before the Bisbee-Douglas football game played on Thanksgiving Day through 1963. The students and the band marched up Main Street to the athletic field above Horace Mann School in full view of The B. The Drillers had outlined The B with rags and other waste soaked in motor oil and diesel fuel; the start of a bonfire on the field signaled the Drillers to start. I was lucky enough to see this final Thanksgiving Eve burn.

People gathered in the Phelps-Dodge Mercantile parking lot, on porches of houses that were high enough to afford a good view, or along the new Route 80 bypass cut into the southern mountain range above the town. We found a good spot just above the old post office and stood on the shoulder by our deep blue Chevy Biscayne, a car whose back end looked like a manta ray.

We waited patiently as dusk turned into night. Suddenly, two small flickers appeared in the corners of The B’s interior circles. Another torch lit the lower edge of The B’s perimeter. Slowly, the fire started to burn, then rage, crawling around like a fire-breathing dragon on the prowl. The conflagration grew until the entire B was completely outlined in an inferno, prompting cheers and whistles from the crowd below. We watched as the fire burned itself out and drove home.

Burning B

The Burning B – 1959

The next day The B looked charred and battle worn, like a boxer peering through a black eye. The appearance shocked me; maybe because one morning I’d watched a house just across from Lincoln school burn just before class started. I didn’t realize that in time the Drillers would gather a fresh batch of freshman boys to restore The B to its former glory.

But some traditions fade. Solar-powered lighting, capable of changing colors, now illuminates The B instead of fire. Freshman boys no longer trudge up Chihuahua Hill to whitewash The B. I left Bisbee in 1966, but that memory has never left me.

Special thanks to the Bisbee Memories Group: Ralph Echave, ’48; Ed Swierc, ’53; Jay Lane ’57; Robert Tanner ’61;Jim Sharp ’62; Dan Smith ’67; Jane Decker ’72; JA Jance; and the Copper Chronicle.

 

 

The Hallowed Eve

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Halloween is a great time for any kid, but it was really special for me. Candy was a rare treat the rest of the year. I might get a five-cent Milky Way at the movie theater, or leftover candy from Mom’s bridge parties. An evening devoted to harvesting free chocolate and sugar from strangers was a Bacchanalian orgy.

I knew Halloween was coming when the local grocery store started selling wax whistles—bright orange, completely edible and irritating as wax whistlehell to adults. I’d blow it like a harmonica for hours until the temptation to devour it took over. Then I’d break off a note at a time, savoring the taste and consistency, until it was gone. That was it until the following year: no replacements allowed.

Big, red, edible wax liwax lipsps, another favorite, gave me an excuse to “kiss” a girl with no risk of shame or teasing. However, it didn’t take long to bite completely through the middle support, rendering them fairly useless for kissing. And they didn’t taste as good as the whistles.

My grade school hosted party in the auditorium/lunch room the week before Halloween. Being in the school building after hours was strange and exciting, like being granted a backstage tour of Disneyland. I’ve forgotten all the activities save one: The Gypsy Fortuneteller. She knew my name and several things about me, as if she could read my mind! Later, however, I found out it was Curtis Morgan’s mother, ruining the mystery.

When I was younger and money was tight, we made costumes out of anything available. Cutting holes in the bottom and sides of a paper grocery bag turned it into a robot body. A bath towel became a superhero cape. One year my mother tried to use white liquid shoe polish to paint a clown face on me until I started screaming because it burned my skin. I think we settled for lipstick circles on my cheeks.

In later years we bought costumes from the dime store. They were made of flammable polyester until 1973 when Uncle Sam mandated fire retardant after reports of kids inadvertently being turned into Johnny the Human Torch. The eyeholes in the accompanying mask usually cut into my lower lids and made seeing almost impossible. The nose holes were too small to be useful and I remember sticking my tongue through the small opening for the mouth until it was sore.

Finally, the big day (or night) was upon us.

Evening shadows arrive in mid-afternoon when you live in a canyon in southeastern Arizona, creating an odd mix of clear blue sky with no visible sun, compelling you to turn on the house lights to cook dinner or do homework. But it’s a great time for Trick or Treating when you’re a kid—dark enough to provide ambiance but light enough to scare away the monsters.

I don’t ever remember mothers shadowing kids while they plundered the neighborhood for booty. If the porch light was on, the house was fair game. If it wasn’t, kids knew not to bother them. My sister and I would knock on the door, yell “Trick or treat” and open our pillowcases. We’d feel the soft thud of candy hitting the bottom and run on to the next house, never stopping to see what we’d gotten.

We’d go home and empty our haul onto the bed after we’d hit all the houses we could. There were full-sized candy bars—not those “fun-sized” ones you can buy today—and other goodies like popcorn balls, suckers in cellophane wrappers, Pixie Sticks and Kraft Caramels (I saved the more valuable chocolate ones for later).

One old woman usually gave us a more practical “treat”—a new pencil. I was grateful for whatever I got and the pencil was a curiosity, not a disappointment. But the perspective that comes with age recently provided some insight. She had lived through the depression when everything was scarce, so a new pencil was probably far more valuable than any bit of candy.

One year Halloween was cancelled because a murderer had escaped from the county jail, accosting a woman in her home for a meal before moving on. Or maybe that was a schoolyard rumor started to spook us. Like many memories, the truth doesn’t matter as much; it’s the story that counts.

But I got older and the annual ritual lost its appeal. Trick-or-Treating became something the little kids did. Having a surly adult glare at you and say, “Ain’t you a little old for this?” accelerated the process. I wouldn’t prowl neighborhoods again until I had kids of my own.

Halloween is one of the few childhood experiences that doesn’t bring baggage into adulthood. We accept Halloween’s passing without regret. It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown doesn’t affect me in the same way as A Charlie Brown Christmas. There is no Polar Express moment, bursting into tears on the first reading, mourning the irrevocable loss of innocence and wonder.

It was a good run while it lasted. I celebrate Halloween now by sending obnoxious noise-making Halloween cards to other people’s kids. It’s good to be the big person.

Photo credit (C) Can Stock Photos

Equinox

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Spring in the Midwest often doesn’t arrive until summer, when rain and gloom abruptly change to searing heat. School lets out and the Devil acquires an abundance of idle hands to tempt. Fuses get shorter as the mercury rises, making some people downright mean, doing and saying things they would normally consider inexcusable. Even the sun is belligerent, a festering, crimson boil when setting behind air so saturated it suffocates rather than nurtures.

September is a seasonal sigh of relief; the interlude between the contentious summer and the brutal winter. The Canadian highs that we’ll be cursing in January sweep out the humidity, bringing sharp blue skies and a nocturnal nip to the evening air we call “good sleeping weather.” The rising and setting sun is once again warm and welcoming instead of withering.

The kids go back to school, having traded T-shirts and shorts for T-shirts and jeans. It’s not like the old days when we dressed in new school clothes of fall colors—red, yellow, brown and orange. The Devil heads to the other hemisphere and waits for their idle hands to reappear. Summer gear goes back into the garage. The anal among us start thinking about Christmas shopping.

Autumn implies decay and decline for many but paradoxically, for me at least, it is a time of realignment and renewal. It is, after all, the season during which we celebrate the uniquely American ritual of Homecoming and the conflicting emotions it brings. We live vicariously through our offspring while reflecting upon own lives: the victories and defeats; opportunities taken or lost.

But that Home is often mythical, having eluded some of us during our early years. Decades later, Aaron Copland’s Two Pieces for String Orchestra granted me safe passage to a place in which I never lived but have known forever:

 It’s late in the afternoon, just before dinnertime. Evening comes sooner these days but the sun is still a comforting disc in the sky, bathing the green leaves with a golden tint, a preview of the more spectacular and permanent change to come. Sometimes the setting sun highlights the dark grey clouds of a past storm on the east horizon. What’s done is done.

Windows and front doors are open and anyone on the sidewalk can hear the muffled voices coming from the black and white TVs in the living rooms: Moms are in kitchens, frying chicken, whipping potatoes or baking biscuits, wrapped in a floral apron nothing like Mrs. Cleaver’s cocktail dress and pearls. Dads are sitting in living rooms, smoking Luckies, listening to Chet and David or Walter, their somber voices relating the news; warning us rather than entertaining us. You won’t know about the Cuban Missile Crisis for another year or two, and the war in Southeast Asia that will take some of your friends is another five in the future.

This is a good time, when you found comfort nestling in Mother’s bosom.

In the coming weeks darkness will arrive earlier and earlier. The furnace will kick on for the first time, filling the house with that familiar, slightly musty scent, resurrecting memories of time long past. It will be a time to be alone with your thoughts and your soul; a time to be grateful for what you have and not mourn what you’ve lost. There is peace in autumn, the calm before the storms, before the bleak midwinter.

More songs of home by Aaron Copland:

Our Town

Quiet City

Fanfare for the Common Man