cincibuck
You kids stay off my lawn!
My mind is full of Christmas pasts and Christmas ghosts this morning. Before I grabbed my morning cup of coffee I began to pick out some music for the day and suddenly found myself thinking about the connection between music and this holiday. Granddad and Grandmother Brandt had a big Motorola counsel radio/phonograph, rounded walnut cabinet, and a huge circular dial that listed AM/FM/Shortwave, a row or two of buttons for pre-set stations, and a magic green eye that surged and ebbed with the pace and tone of the music. There would be a stack of 75rpm records on the spindle; always including Spike Jones' All I Want for Christmas is My Two Front Teeth and Bing Crosby warbling White Christmas.
My parents had a similar radio, but, alas, no phonograph, until the Christmas that RCA brought out the 45. Dad bought a 45 turntable, dark brown plastic and that thick 45 spindle. You plugged the wire of the turntable into the back of the radio with a jack, something I'm sure Dad had to jury rig and solder into place that allowed the radio to serve as an amp for the record player. We soon had a collection of Christmas music in 45. Again, Spike Jones and his two front teeth and the flip side, something called This is My New Year's Resolution.
My 8-years-older-than-me sister, who never, ever, got exactly what she wanted, had made a loud request for Tchaikovsky's Nut Cracker Suite, Toscanini conducting the Philidelphia. Uncle Ray, who always was "The Great Gift Giver," the one who realized that the person wasn't asking for a knock off, or a "it-looks-just-like," or "this-is-better-because-it-isn't-overpriced-like-the-one-you-wanted-was," that my parents would consistently choose... Uncle Ray had shopped all over town and found this final copy, a box set of four extended play 45s of the Nut Cracker, alas, by none other than that fine purveyor of classical music, Maestro Spike Jones. The 45's were arranged so that side 1 had side 8 on the B side, 2/7, 3/6, 4/5 so that when you flipped the records everything played in the correct order. Uncle Ray had searched but EPs had just come out and were few in number and the set she wanted was sold out. Betty Jo went into one of her all time/funk/pout/PMS can-I make-your-day-miserable-too fits. I, however, treasured the set and played it repeatedly every year.
Dad was on Delco management and always took Christmas Eve off. He, Betty Jo and I would be responsible for getting the tree out of the galvanized steel bucket, usually frozen, behind the house, trimming the bottom until we could fit the holder on it, and setting the tree up in the living room. We had to wait until after lunch, "Let the tree open up and breath a bit," before we could start to decorate it, lights first, tiny ornaments at the top, medium in the middle and the big ones on the bottom... those were the ones that always broke.
First to go on were a set of tiny heart and oval shaped ornaments, their colors and sparkle dulled from use, ornaments that had been on my mother's first tree. Last would be two or three fragile, frosted glass candle holders that had been on my father's first. Mom always wanted to hide these two sets, "They're too old and tacky looking. We should get something new to replace them." My sister and I refused and always made a point of putting those two sets of ornaments in prominent spots on the tree.
Depending on when Christmas fell we always had a weekend with the tree up and decorated and the radio would always be playing as I anxiously waited to either go visit my parent's closest friends or have the friends visit us. I'd try and busy myself with a book or Life magazine and in the background Vaughn Monroe would croon, Racing With the Moon. Don't remember anything else about his show but his theme song and can't remember who else had a Saturday show, but I suspect Bing and Bob Hope owned the best time slot.
Twas something like 8th grade, so 1955, when we got our 33/45/78 portable music maker and suddenly music was a stack of 33s that you didn't have to pull up and flip every 20 minutes. That meant Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians, Montavoni and the first of a string of "Firestone Brings You the Best of the Holiday Season" albums that featured 7 or 8 different artists covering pop and classical and segued by Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops.
This was the era of finding and keeping enough of those red plastic disks that allowed you to play 45s on the 33/78 spindle. It was also a time when I had to hide all of my favorite records, paid for with my paper route money, in my bedroom; Elvis, The Coasters, something about a flying saucer landing where a faux reporter would ask questions and the answer would be a snippet from some rock 'n' roll song, "So, Professor, exactly how was the saucer able to land?" "Well the motor cooled, down, the heat went down..."
These were all records my dad would have thrown away if he had found them and then I would have had to endure a lecture about wasting my money on such trash. Meanwhile the "family" record collection would fill up with the likes of Guy Lombardo, The Three Suns and Ray Conniff. Somehow it was OK for "family" money to go to those kinds of records, but not towards Elvis.
This is also about the time I began to become a super secretive person. What Mom and Dad didn't know about me wouldn't hurt them and would greatly liberate me.
I was able to talk dad into letting me take the player to school for the 8th Grade Christmas party in Miss Ulrich's room and to which I could bring my Elvis and Coaster records. (I hid the records in my notebook so I could sneak them out of the house.) The party was going swimmingly until I started to applejack with Judy Gray. Hard to believe that something as innocent as the applejack raised hackles back then. "...Why can't they dance like we did? What's wrong with Sammy Kay? What's the problem with kids today?..." Anyway, ol' Miss Ulrich clapped her hands, "Now you'll have to turn that music off! If you can't dance properly, then we'll just have sit down at our desks and listen to music quietly." Maybe it was Judy, who had begun to develop in 7th Grade and was fond of tight sweaters, short skirts, pointy Fredrick's of Hollywood type bras, an other-side-of-the-tracks-hair-do and knew how to shimmy. It certainly couldn't have been me in my coke bottle glasses, plaid shirt with plastic pocket protector, khakis and "good, sound, practical black shoes" ... no penny loafers...They don't have any support for your arch. You'll be flatfooted..."
Three years later my own record collection was growing. Because of our dance band business I always had some spending money to go over to the back side of Town and Country Shopping Center and peruse the record shop. Glenn Miller, Stan Kenton, The Dorseys, Frank Sinatra... I'd begun to ignore most rock 'n' roll... and comedy albums, Shelly Berman, Stan Freberg and the Smothers Brothers. This is also about the time I began to add classical music to my collection and you would have thought Dad would have been pleased to know that his son had an ear for the finer things in life. Not so. "What's with the stuffed shirt music? How can you sit still long enough for them to get over with it?" To which Mom added, "...saw, saw, saw, saw, saw... they just go sawing away forever on those violins." These were the very same folks who paid for my music lessons!
But then would come Christmas Eve and I'd join all my buddies, Ed Rupert, Phil Brown, Gary and Greg Etter, Wally Schere, Kenny Wilson, Jerry and Arnold Edwards, Kenny Hambrick, Barb Kormas, Marilyn Mulvaney, Beth Silcox, Sibyl Harris and Ceci Cobb, at the candle light service at Greenmont - Oak Park Community Church. The lights would be dimmed, the single light on the alter fighting the pitch black space, Ray Hilty's warm and gentle voice would remind us that Christ brought light to a dark and dreary world, candles would be passed and the light would spread, chasing the darkness from the room. We would sing carol after carol and I would feel something that often eludes me, a kinship with family and friends and a knowledge of how lucky I was to be there.
Much as I love the ritual of the Catholic Mass, it is the warmth and simplicity of the candlelight service and the memory of all those friends who formed my community that makes this time of year such a melancholy experience.
Merry Christmas to all of you,
Forrest, aka Cincibuck
My parents had a similar radio, but, alas, no phonograph, until the Christmas that RCA brought out the 45. Dad bought a 45 turntable, dark brown plastic and that thick 45 spindle. You plugged the wire of the turntable into the back of the radio with a jack, something I'm sure Dad had to jury rig and solder into place that allowed the radio to serve as an amp for the record player. We soon had a collection of Christmas music in 45. Again, Spike Jones and his two front teeth and the flip side, something called This is My New Year's Resolution.
My 8-years-older-than-me sister, who never, ever, got exactly what she wanted, had made a loud request for Tchaikovsky's Nut Cracker Suite, Toscanini conducting the Philidelphia. Uncle Ray, who always was "The Great Gift Giver," the one who realized that the person wasn't asking for a knock off, or a "it-looks-just-like," or "this-is-better-because-it-isn't-overpriced-like-the-one-you-wanted-was," that my parents would consistently choose... Uncle Ray had shopped all over town and found this final copy, a box set of four extended play 45s of the Nut Cracker, alas, by none other than that fine purveyor of classical music, Maestro Spike Jones. The 45's were arranged so that side 1 had side 8 on the B side, 2/7, 3/6, 4/5 so that when you flipped the records everything played in the correct order. Uncle Ray had searched but EPs had just come out and were few in number and the set she wanted was sold out. Betty Jo went into one of her all time/funk/pout/PMS can-I make-your-day-miserable-too fits. I, however, treasured the set and played it repeatedly every year.
Dad was on Delco management and always took Christmas Eve off. He, Betty Jo and I would be responsible for getting the tree out of the galvanized steel bucket, usually frozen, behind the house, trimming the bottom until we could fit the holder on it, and setting the tree up in the living room. We had to wait until after lunch, "Let the tree open up and breath a bit," before we could start to decorate it, lights first, tiny ornaments at the top, medium in the middle and the big ones on the bottom... those were the ones that always broke.
First to go on were a set of tiny heart and oval shaped ornaments, their colors and sparkle dulled from use, ornaments that had been on my mother's first tree. Last would be two or three fragile, frosted glass candle holders that had been on my father's first. Mom always wanted to hide these two sets, "They're too old and tacky looking. We should get something new to replace them." My sister and I refused and always made a point of putting those two sets of ornaments in prominent spots on the tree.
Depending on when Christmas fell we always had a weekend with the tree up and decorated and the radio would always be playing as I anxiously waited to either go visit my parent's closest friends or have the friends visit us. I'd try and busy myself with a book or Life magazine and in the background Vaughn Monroe would croon, Racing With the Moon. Don't remember anything else about his show but his theme song and can't remember who else had a Saturday show, but I suspect Bing and Bob Hope owned the best time slot.
Twas something like 8th grade, so 1955, when we got our 33/45/78 portable music maker and suddenly music was a stack of 33s that you didn't have to pull up and flip every 20 minutes. That meant Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians, Montavoni and the first of a string of "Firestone Brings You the Best of the Holiday Season" albums that featured 7 or 8 different artists covering pop and classical and segued by Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops.
This was the era of finding and keeping enough of those red plastic disks that allowed you to play 45s on the 33/78 spindle. It was also a time when I had to hide all of my favorite records, paid for with my paper route money, in my bedroom; Elvis, The Coasters, something about a flying saucer landing where a faux reporter would ask questions and the answer would be a snippet from some rock 'n' roll song, "So, Professor, exactly how was the saucer able to land?" "Well the motor cooled, down, the heat went down..."
These were all records my dad would have thrown away if he had found them and then I would have had to endure a lecture about wasting my money on such trash. Meanwhile the "family" record collection would fill up with the likes of Guy Lombardo, The Three Suns and Ray Conniff. Somehow it was OK for "family" money to go to those kinds of records, but not towards Elvis.
This is also about the time I began to become a super secretive person. What Mom and Dad didn't know about me wouldn't hurt them and would greatly liberate me.
I was able to talk dad into letting me take the player to school for the 8th Grade Christmas party in Miss Ulrich's room and to which I could bring my Elvis and Coaster records. (I hid the records in my notebook so I could sneak them out of the house.) The party was going swimmingly until I started to applejack with Judy Gray. Hard to believe that something as innocent as the applejack raised hackles back then. "...Why can't they dance like we did? What's wrong with Sammy Kay? What's the problem with kids today?..." Anyway, ol' Miss Ulrich clapped her hands, "Now you'll have to turn that music off! If you can't dance properly, then we'll just have sit down at our desks and listen to music quietly." Maybe it was Judy, who had begun to develop in 7th Grade and was fond of tight sweaters, short skirts, pointy Fredrick's of Hollywood type bras, an other-side-of-the-tracks-hair-do and knew how to shimmy. It certainly couldn't have been me in my coke bottle glasses, plaid shirt with plastic pocket protector, khakis and "good, sound, practical black shoes" ... no penny loafers...They don't have any support for your arch. You'll be flatfooted..."
Three years later my own record collection was growing. Because of our dance band business I always had some spending money to go over to the back side of Town and Country Shopping Center and peruse the record shop. Glenn Miller, Stan Kenton, The Dorseys, Frank Sinatra... I'd begun to ignore most rock 'n' roll... and comedy albums, Shelly Berman, Stan Freberg and the Smothers Brothers. This is also about the time I began to add classical music to my collection and you would have thought Dad would have been pleased to know that his son had an ear for the finer things in life. Not so. "What's with the stuffed shirt music? How can you sit still long enough for them to get over with it?" To which Mom added, "...saw, saw, saw, saw, saw... they just go sawing away forever on those violins." These were the very same folks who paid for my music lessons!
But then would come Christmas Eve and I'd join all my buddies, Ed Rupert, Phil Brown, Gary and Greg Etter, Wally Schere, Kenny Wilson, Jerry and Arnold Edwards, Kenny Hambrick, Barb Kormas, Marilyn Mulvaney, Beth Silcox, Sibyl Harris and Ceci Cobb, at the candle light service at Greenmont - Oak Park Community Church. The lights would be dimmed, the single light on the alter fighting the pitch black space, Ray Hilty's warm and gentle voice would remind us that Christ brought light to a dark and dreary world, candles would be passed and the light would spread, chasing the darkness from the room. We would sing carol after carol and I would feel something that often eludes me, a kinship with family and friends and a knowledge of how lucky I was to be there.
Much as I love the ritual of the Catholic Mass, it is the warmth and simplicity of the candlelight service and the memory of all those friends who formed my community that makes this time of year such a melancholy experience.
Merry Christmas to all of you,
Forrest, aka Cincibuck
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