Backward Glance

Autos I Have Known

By Roger Farley

“Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car.
- E. B. White -

You’ve noticed by now that this publication’s logo has changed from Vermont Maturity to “VM.” Since my mind works in very strange ways, I look at the big VM on the cover and see Vim & vigor, (yes my strange mind sees an “i” in the middle of VM.) Vim & vigor is what us old timers should have and which could conceivably come from drinking some V8 juice. When I see V8 in that weird mind’s eye of mine, I think of another V8, the super Ford flathead engine of my old stock car days, way back in the fifties of last century.

However, I have had speaking acquaintances with many automobiles before I started to juice them up for racing purposes. Going way back is the 1924 Model T which keeps my younger brother busy maintaining it. Probably next is the 1936 Ford my dad kept running through and beyond WWII and in which I learned to drive. I could whip that little bucket around street lamps and trees with no sweat although a couple of days before my driving test my dad purchased an upside down bathtub that the advertising people called a Nash. (No, before the Rambler.) Its low profile scraped on a high curb while turning around in a narrow street (part of the test) and caused me to fail my first attempt at reckless driving. I mastered the tub and its faucets though and got my license a few weeks later.

A high school buddy of mine and I decided that, after working summer vacation after graduation, we’d go to Florida. I don’t remember why. To do that, we purchased a 1939 Chevy, tore out the back seat, which we filled with sleeping bags, food, a Bernz-O-Matic stove, a pup tent and a few blankets. We may have brought books, but as recent grads, we thought it was time to wean ourselves from those tomes.  Pop music of the day included, “On the Boardwalk at Atlantic City,” “On Top of Old Smoky” and such. We took that route, stopping to walk the Boardwalk and actually driving to the top of Old Smoky — even after blowing a fan blade in rural North Carolina — and where we had an altercation with an army corporal, a bear and some “livermush.” But, that’s another story.

When the old Chevy refused to go further on the streets of Columbus, Georgia, we sold it quickly for a few bucks and bought some food for our rapidly dwindling bodies. We got work at a carnival and then at a company that traveled us throughout the south and then up to the coal regions of Pennsylvania.

Breaking an ankle by jumping out of a burning building in Philly brought me home after a brief stay in the horse-pistol and eventually to a 1939 Plymouth that I called “Sam.”

After that it was a 1940 Ford convertible with a leaky roof and then to a succession of Chevys and Fords when I went to work for a company that kept me employed for 33 years, they kept me supplied with new vehicles for that third of a century. Wow, just think of it, no insurance, no operating expenses, no maintenance, but just another succession of Fords, Chevys and their big brothers, Mercurys and Buicks. I finally retired, kept a company vehicle, drove it for a while, crunched it and now have driven a Buick Century, bought at the turn of the century, that has taken me from coast to coast, surviving my big foot and giving me roughly thirty miles a gallon for most of that time.

It’s been a long while since I ported and relieved a Ford V8, shaved a flywheel or torqued down both heads on some super thin gaskets for just a little higher compression. Unfortunately, those powerful engines twisted an axle or two off on the tight turns of a third mile dirt track.

But in the racing world—them’s the breaks.

Roger Farley lives in South Burlington.

More Poetry—More Music

by Roger Farley

“The divinest music has not been conceived, even by Bach.”
— Lincoln Steffens

I’ve been severely castigated for leaving out more appropriate examples of “Poetry in Music” in last month’s article.

But, it would be impossible to even list the hundreds – if not thousands – of combination melodic and lyrical examples that were composed or written in the early to mid decades of the last century. The “war years” alone (WWII variety) brought titles such as “You’d Be So Nice To Come Home To,” “We’ll Meet Again,” and “Coming in On a Wing and a Prayer.” Those were serious songs, written with hope and fear in the heart of the composer.

But, at the same time, there were novelty airs and light, but still remember-able songs.  The late, much beloved Perry Como was grand at recording these. Remember “Hot Diggety, Dog Diggety?” Some teens learned the alphabet with Buddy Kay and Fred Wise’s, “A, you’re adorable, B, you’re so beautiful, C, you’re a cutie full of charms…,” also vocalized by Perry.

Most music was composed and/or written with not only the teen community in mind, but slanted also toward adults who, back in those days, controlled most of the music-purchasing money. Seems today the teeny boppers have more loot to burn than their three-job parents.

Those boppers back a half century or so ago were busy not only learning the alphabet with song, but were absorbing the proper sequence of months of the year with an amazing set of words in a song that used a unique way of rhyming. I’ll quote those words.

“In the middle of May, I met a girl named June. Took her out in July, ‘neath an August moon. All through Sept, I was kept admiring her charms and all through Oct, we were locked in each other’s arms. From November to Jan, the runaround began, February to March, I was a worried man. It wasn’t ‘til April that she said OK and we were married—in the middle of May.”  This melody was put together by Fred E. Ahlert with lyrics by Al Stillman. Gene Krupa’s band had a big hit with that one.

Unrequited love was a popular theme. “You won’t be satisfied until you break my heart, you won’t be satisfied until the teardrops start. I try to shower you with love and kisses, but all I get from you is naggin’ and braggin’, my poor heart is draggin’.”

“Accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative,” was an “up” song. Most tunes were. That one had words like, “To illustrate, my last remark, Jonah in the whale, Noah in the Ark.”

There was a tremendous variety of music, back in the dark ages before the twangy, atonal guitar was invented. Some tunes were downright ridiculous, but fun. All you have to do is hear the name Spike Jones to remember the butchering of any popular melody. But, there were also Homer and Jethro and Allan Sherman to do the same.

Novelty bits were always somewhere around, such as “Cement mixer, putti, putti” or “Mairzy doats and dozy doats and little lambsidivey.”

If you were country oriented, there were scores of, “lost my wife, my house and my dog” songs, wailed by many a cowboy with a classic guitar, banjo or mandolin. But there was great country music also, sung by smooth warblers such as Patsy Cline and Eddy Arnold. If you were a fan of yodeling, Elton Britt or Kenny Roberts kept you satisfied. How can anyone forget “I Never See Maggie Alone?”

Well, once again I’ve come to the end of another diatribe, certainly leaving out everyone’s favorites. If you wish, do some of your own recall and make your own list of love songs, country and western, or novelties, or cutesy kid songs, or poetic masterpieces, or downright silly pieces from the thirties, forties or fifties. Notice the variety and compare it to today’s so-called music, featuring “artists” with half-octave ranges, singing unintelligible words, all trying to emulate someone else along with “me too” wailing.

Or better still, refute my contentions – but with examples.

Poetry in Music

By Roger Farley

“Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.”
- Victor Hugo

Remember music? Do you recall when the radio featured smooth hum-able and whistle-able melodies, plus an understandable set of lyrics that could not only be easily understood, but usually told a story in rhyme?

The forties, during WWII, produced many of these from an extraordinary group of composer/performers such as Hoagy Carmichael, Johnny Mercer & Cole Porter. Some of this was Gershwin’s fault, with a lot of his semi-classical pieces rivaling the pop tunes of his day and lingering long after we lost him. Locally, Brian Harwood of FM-101.7 is easing Gershwin into the classical genre.

I’m sure you remember the tunes—so here are some of the lyrics:
“You must remember this, a kiss is just a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh.
The fundamental things apply, as time goes by.”

This standard was written by Herman Hupfield in 1931 for the Broadway musical, “Everybody’s Welcome.” But it was made famous in the movie “Casablanca” with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall and sung by Dooley Wilson. But did you know it was also recorded earlier by Vermonter Rudy Vallee of Island Pond?

How about Johnny Mercer’s “Dream?”

“Dream when you’re feelin’ blue, dream, that’s the thing to do.

Just watch the smoke rings rise in the air, you’ll find your share of memories there.”

Or, in 1944, Bud Green, Les Brown and Ben Homer wrote, ““Gonna take a sentimental journey, gonna set my heart at ease. Gonna make a sentimental journey, to renew old memories. Got my bags, got my reservations, spent each dime I could afford. Like a child in wild anticipation, I long to hear that “All Aboard.””

Who can forget Doris Day’s great version, with composer/performer Les Brown and his orchestra?
Again, a common thread of these familiar songs was the combination of a catchy melody that was almost instantly remembered and words that could be readily understood and bereft of the four-letter variety. Lyrics also usually told a little story, rhymed—sometimes very artfully—and made use of multi-syllable words, such as previously mentioned “fundamental, sentimental and anticipation.”

Hoagy Carmichael was a master at this. Remember “Stardust?” When the super-familiar melody impacted your ear drums, your grey matter produced the lyrics, “Sometimes I wonder how I spent the lonely hours, dreaming of a song. The melody haunts my reverie and I am once again with you, when our love was new and each kiss an inspiration. But that was long ago and now my consolation is in the stardust of a song.”

Less familiar is the lead-in verse. Listen in your mind and remember the melody.

“And now the purple dusk of twilight time steals across the meadows of my heart. High up in the sky the little stars climb, always reminding me that we’re apart.”

It goes on to mention nightingales and paradise—more multi-syllabic expressions.

Was that a manipulation of the English language or not? Hoagy is generally credited with the whole composition, but he had a little lyrical help from Mitchell Parish. Stardust goes back to the twenties, but is still with us. That’s going on a century!

Burlington area radio 1230—WJOY—features a Saturday morning big band show featuring a lot of the “oldies.” If you have DirecTV, tune to channel 801 and reverie.

Remember a TV program, based on a previous radio show in 1952, called, “Name That Tune?” It featured a pair of contestants that vied for quick recognition of played music. Familiar names hosted the show, including such as Bill Cullen, Dennis James and Johnny Olson.

Contestants, hearing a few notes, rang a bell and yelled “I can name that tune!”

It would still work today, but only if the contestants were selected from a cadre of old timers such as us.

So, “It’s still the same old story, a fight for love and glory, a case of do or die.

The world will always welcome lovers, as time goes by.”

Roger Farley is a local columnist living in Sourth Burlington.

Baseball Acronyms

By Roger Farley

“The Outlook Wasn’t Brilliant For the Mudville Nine That Day.”
­— Ernest Lawrence Thayer

I get annoyed at times by the use of acronyms, abbreviations and truncations. But then I find I’ve been using those most of my life. I was schooled back in the forties by a very strict language teacher and now have trouble with English “shortcuts.” And these “buzzwords” are getting tougher to keep track of. If you don’t know your acronyms, you’re in tough shape.

But, as a life-long baseball fan, I’ve never had trouble with substituting RBI for Runs Batted In, LOB for Left On Base, or MLB for Major League Baseball, which leads me to the subject of this article.

MLB is now becoming a very common acronym. I’ve watched MLB on TV (Television) now for years, paying extra for a subscription on DTV, (DirectTV). This MLB “Extra Innings” allows me to see most every game, at its game time, for the whole baseball season. I routinely check out MLB.com, (commercial) where both contemporary and historic rosters and box scores are available almost instantly.

Now there’s MLB.TV (baseball everywhere, live or on demand,) and there’s MLB.net on TV, instituted just about a year ago, where you can watch some kind of baseball 24 hours a day all year long. This whole MLB thing is evolving, still confusing, but great!

Nostalgia is a powerful force in our lives, becoming more intense as one grows older. A goodly portion of these memories involve where you were when great events occurred. For instance, I remember being at the Motor Vehicle Bureau (MVB) when the Challenger disaster happened and in a small elementary school in upstate New York when Kennedy was assassinated down in Dallas.

Baseball, though, is my life’s love, so I remember where I was when Bobby Thompson hit an explosive home run off Ralph Branca in 1951 — when the then NY Giants beat Brooklyn in the playoffs –  in a drugstore in Columbus, Georgia. Another home run tweaks my memory, one by Pittsburgh’s Bill Mazerowski off New York’s Ralph Terry, to clobber the Yankees in the 1960 World Series. This time I was in a factory in Minneapolis. I had a sentimental attachment to Pittsburgh, since the Pirates were the mother club of the Albany, NY (New York) Senators AA ball team. I grew up taking the bus most Sundays to Hawkins Stadium in Menands, NY, to watch a colorful doubleheader.

My favorite National League baseball team in those days was the Brooklyn Dodgers. The team had many nemeses, a chief one being the NY Yankees. Finally, in 1955, my Dodgers led by Gil Hodges and a local pitcher named Johnny Podres, finally beat the dreaded Yankees in the big one, the World Series. I listened to it in Whitney’s department store in Albany, where I was a salesman in the sporting goods department. Sadly, the next year the Bombers got their revenge when Don Larsen zeroed the Dodgers with a perfect game in the ’56 World Series. I still listened at Whitney’s.

When my Dodgers left for the west coast, I adopted the NY Mets, a bumbling new team led by Casey Stengel and featuring legends such as Marvelous Marv Throneberry and Harry Chiti. But, they grew up and punished the Orioles in the ’69 Series, with personalities such as Al Weiss and Duffy Dyer. I was sitting in a parking lot of UVM (University of Vermont) listening to that historical fifth game. Notice that I listened to all these games on the radio, letting my imagination color the action.

Now, though, on MLB.net, I can see all those wonderful happenings and despite the grainy pictures, the baggy uniforms and the varying shades of black, white and grey, I can marvel how tight and concise baseball was during those monumental times.

I’ve seen the Al Gionfriddo catch off Joe Dimaggio in the 1947 World Series and Willie May’s catch off Vic Wertz in the 1954 fall classic. True baseball fans will know why these stick in one’s memory.

Where were you?

How Did Boomers Survive the ’70′s?

By Roger Farley

“We would like to live as we once lived, but history will not permit it.”
— John F. Kennedy

Last month’s column featured an excursion through the sixties with today’s baby boomers. Let’s move up a decade.

Somewhere in the seventies, the Baby Boomers turned ancient! That is to say they attained the ripe old age of thirty. Too old now for attempting sports—those aching legs just won’t take it anymore. Bones are becoming brittle. It’s time now to stay at home, watch TV and talk to the wife and kids.
But, there’s something missing. You never had time for that marriage bit. Are you too old to have children? Procreate now and by the time they grew you’d be well over fifty, too decrepit to have a spirited game of catch or help with moving the newlyweds into their new mobile home. You could even be a grand parent!

Wise up, Lord and Lady Boomer. It’s time to get your life going. Marry up! Have kids! Take your daily vitamins and maybe you’ll still have the energy to play with the little (or big) tykes. Shave that revolutionary beard, comb out the burdocks and bird nests. Cut your hair, it tickles your shoulders anyway. Scrape the mud from your rock concert boots. Put away your placards and quit protesting everything the “Man” does. Find an empty drawer and put your pet rock away for a nap.

Oh, you did that! It’s now the 21st century and you’re retiring from a big company, with a nice pension and a generous benefit plan.    Congratulations! But, how did you survive the Vietnam War protests, the resigning of a President, the Kent State Massacre? Trends of that time were a growing disillusion of Government, the women’s movement, a growing concern for the environment, increased space exploration and advances in civil rights, including mandatory busing to force school integration. Sound familiar, or did it all pass in one ear and out the other? Were you so involved with your mood ring or watching your lava lamp that you didn’t realize what was going on?

How did you overcome all those distractions? By trying to solve your Rubik’s Cube?

There were other things to think about also. What to wear? Should you don bell-bottom trousers or go with the leisure suit? Do you wear platform shoes with your hot pants or hip huggers? Smiley face stickers probably appeared on them and seemed to be everywhere. An Arab oil embargo caused a major gas and fuel oil crisis, with big increases in prices. Some gas stations closed from a scarcity of supply. Sometimes, you could only fill up every other day, depending on the last number of your license plate—if you could find an open station. There were cries of increasing oil exploration here at home. Sound familiar again?

We went from big cars to small cars, to save fuel, and then found that our interstates were designed for large cars, so driving on them was now dangerous. Computers became all the rage, especially with the introduction of that magnificent new device—the floppy disc and its associated drives. Advancing technology also brought us MRIs, jumbo jets and DNA. Video games and VCRs changed our entertainment radically. Genetic engineering brought the first test tube baby, Louise Brown, (now 31 and a mother.) We were introduced to retail bar code scanners and recorded data on reams of paper with laser printers. Our Presidents were Nixon, Ford and Carter. What a decade!

But, you made it, Mr. and Mrs. Boomer. Once again, congratulations. Others survived the decade also. People with names like Jesse Jackson, Benjamin Spock, Patty Hearst and George Wallace, although the latter, running for the Presidency, was shot and paralyzed. You danced, though, to Disco. The breakup of the Beatles dealt contemporary music a big blow and when we lost Elvis, music fragmented into soft, hard, punk, country, folk and shock rock. It’s still fragmenting.

But you, the Boomers, have gotten it all together. Kudos!

Roger Farley is a local columnist living in South Burlington.

Boomers and Beatlemania

by Roger Farley

“Nothing so dates a man as to decry the younger generation.”
— Adlai Stevenson

Looking back, the sixties were, if not always pleasant, very entertaining. So, I’ve been excoriated to writing toward those formerly young, but now ancient baby-boomers. Those Boomers are generally considered to be those born immediately after WWII, when Johnny came marching home, eager to procreate and replace the many thousands of fine youngsters lost in the war to save our country from the feared Japanese, Germans and Italians, all buddies of ours now. We were helped in that conflict by the Russians and Chinese, both contentious now, of course.

Let’s do a little reflecting to bring back what was happening in the early sixties when most Boomers were of the impressionistic age, being thirteen to sixteen and plus.

Beatlemania had taken over the world, causing much distress by those who were used to the poetry and symmetry of the beautiful music featured in the forties and fifties. We went from “Stardust” and “I’ll Walk Alone” to “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Woe, Woe, Woe and Baby, Baby, Baby” and other (in my opinion) abominations of so-called music. To be sure, some outfits, even the Beatles, produced some melody. So did Bill Haley and the Comets and their ilk, but pretty music was generally left to Sinatra, Como, Peg Lee and their like.

Pudginess, at least from the female point of view, was already becoming anathema. The Bikini (less cloth for more bucks)had settled solidly in. Clothing designers and manufacturers found that miniskirts could follow the same trend and statuesque legs became firmly in fashion.

In the sports world, expansion was taking place. Pro football came out of hiding and supplanted, in popularity, those big college events, such as the Army-Navy game. The sixties saw pro teams expand from 12 to 26. In baseball, hurried expansion allowed even the lowly new New York Mets to become World Champions. More sports and more teams meant bigger and better — but expensive — stadiums, with food staples such as the hot dog becoming luxury items.

The absence of good music forced radio to switch to talk shows, which began to proliferate in those sixties. By the sixties, Old Hollywood had died, but as usual helped to color people’s lives. Due to accidents and “accidental overdoses,” we lost Marilyn Monroe, Robert Walker, Jayne Mansfield and Montgomery Clift. We can’t forget the Manson murders of Sharon Tate and company. Big blockbusters, such as Lawrence of Arabia, however, lent somewhat of a positive note.

The topics of sex and drugs became, if not common, talked about more often. Woodstock happened in the New York Catskills, (where I spent a lot of time, but not at Woodstock).

Those goings-on reverberated around the world and are now remembered fondly and celebrated somewhere yearly — I suppose. That accepted behavior of do-your-own-thing, when and where you want, without taking others into consideration, quite possibly led to the awful assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King.

Not helping in that respect was a character named Timothy Leary, a Harvard professor, who advocated, “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” He was a big supporter of and urged the ingestion of, psychedelic drugs, in particular LSD. In his later life, I read that he was trying every form of happy juice available.

Automobiles were generally becoming colorful and fast and furious. Ford’s Thunderbird and GM’s Corvette led the way to a sporty car frame of mind. Air-conditioning was forcing the remake of the rag-top (convertible) into a vehicle that would not disturb the significant lady’s bee-hive (B52) hairdo.

I remember having a lot of fun and a lot of children in the sixties.

Did you? Both?

Roger Farley is a local columnist living in South Burlington.