Listening to Music

People today hear music just about everywhere they go.  Our local grocery store has a country-music radio station tuned on a radio placed above the fresh meats.  You'd think with some of the corny music playing, the radio would be in the produce department, but, no, Kenny Chesney, probably clad in his cowboy hat and wife-beater shirt, yells out the words to No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problems directly over the chitlins and sousemeats.   With that picture in mind, I wonder why a multimillionaire, as Chesney certainly must be by now, still appears on stage in a wife-beater.  It isn’t like he can’t afford better clothing and wife-beaters certainly aren’t costume clothing, except perhaps for Stan Kowalski or Terry Malloy.  While I'm wondering, I also wonder why Chesney, a product of Knoxville, Tennessee, feels it necessary to wear a western style hat, seemingly all the time.  It's not as if he learned to play guitar and sing while herding cattle on the western prairies.  Knoxville is an eastern city and Chesney is a college graduate with a degree in advertising - must be a lesson there somewhere.

I grew up attending a country church that was real big on tradition.  The pipe organ signaled the beginning of service and then was played for every song.  The congregation would sing together, somewhat in harmony except when Dad was in full voice, reading the words from hymnals  and seeing which direction the tune went by the notes above the words.  At a local church we attended a while ago, a band played, substantially louder than the Estey Pipe Organ ever sounded in Meriden, and, in the absence of hymnals, the words to the song were projected on a large screen behind the band, sort of in the style of a PowerPoint presentation, but without the staffs, clefs, and all those whole, half, and quarter notes and more.  I'm not complaining, mind you, but rather commenting on the differences in which I see and hear the way we are exposed to music in the 21st Century.

For many, many years, music has been piped into elevators as if the close confines of an elevator cab made you want to listen to pap.  Lately I've noticed a trend away from it though, as if it would now be appropriate to say hello or good morning to the strangers riding with you.  Do you suppose it is?

When I was young, not every car had a radio.  Those that did didn't have very good reception, so often a ride in a car meant there was an opportunity to talk.  With the advent of rock and roll music in the early 1950's, more and more cars had AM radios so one could listen to Haley and Holly on a drive to church or the grocery store.  Of course, if you lived somewhere in the country, chances are you'd have to change stations every few miles because they'd fade out pretty quickly.   In the northeast where I grew up, there were little, low powered stations every 20 miles or so but more often than not, Dad would drive with the radio off.    As I reached the age where I’d be allowed to take the car by myself, I’d fiddle with those knobs a lot, and when my favorite tunes would be played, I’d crank the volume up as if the song wouldn’t be good at lower levels.

The songs that were my favorites in the 1950’s all had a beat for dancing, some for fast dancing, some for slow dancing.  In the summer-time on Thursday nights, the nearest larger town would set up barricades on the street at one end of the park and a van from the local radio station would play rock and roll music.  Teenagers would all congregate, some as couples, more as singles looking to become couples, at least for the next song.  Girls often wore skirts that would flare out when they danced and a lot of the boys slicked back their hair in a DA (also known as a duck tail) and unbuckled the little belt at the rear of their b-b-b-b-black slacks. 

Our music was a rite of passage of a sort.  We all knew that in a few years, we’d grow up and stop listening to songs about love letters in the sand, falling asleep at the drive-in, or party dolls and teddy bears.  I, for one, realized that there was far better music than rock and roll, and still today have some of the first LP’s I bought looking for better music.  Oh, I continued buying rock and roll 45’s and even a few LP’s (there were also EP’s, that were like 45’s, but had several songs instead of just two), but in the late 1950's, I discovered Ahmad Jamal, Miles Davis, Ferde Grofé, Adolf Adam and Leo Delibes, among others who still delight me.

An older Frenchman I worked with in my teens on a summer job tried to help in my quest for better music, and to this day, I think of him when certain pieces play.  Roger Barrett wasn’t the sort of fellow you’d see at the opera or at a symphony, but he appreciated better music, beer in a glass, and oddly, coffee with cream and sugar in a juice glass.  About the time he was coaching me in music appreciation, Ray Charles was a hit with "Georgia on My Mind," a song that Roger didn't appreciate.  Shows how much he knew.

When I started writing this, I really had no idea in which direction it would take me.   I wanted to say that when I was first introduced to music, rock and roll was the choice of my friends, but while my pal David had the first Bill Haley records I ever heard, he also had records by Mario Lanza,  and my friend Raymond knew all the words to Hank Williams’ songs. 

I've outgrown most of the music of my youth, just as I supposed I would.  That’s not to say I still don’t start tapping my toes when I hear a Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley tune from my high school days, but I rarely listen to that music.  I lived in North Dakota for a few years in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s where local radio only played two kinds of music – Country and Western – so I can sing along with Conway Twitty and Charley Pride, but I avoid the radio stations that play that sort of music, as hard as it might be in Georgia. 

So now, when I’m asked, I say my favorite music is classical and cash, as in serious music and Johnny.  I guess I didn’t grow up too much if the Man in Black is still a favorite.  

Telephone Yesterday and Today *

Wherever I am, I have a telephone close at hand, usually in my pocket, or occasionally, like right now, it's sitting on the desk next to my keyboard.  Its a little thing, measuring 1¾" by 4" by ½" and slides apart to make a call, preventing what some describe as "Butt Dialing."   I don't use it a lot, I really don't like talking on the telephone very much.  I spent much of my working life on a telephone explaining things, buying things, selling things, managing things, or occasionally talking to sweet things.   Now that I'm retired and living with my sweet thing, I have little use for one.  Our house isn't huge like those McMansions developers are hoping Americans will continue buying, but whether I'm in my my shop or my home office, my wife and I will occasionally communicate by phone, just to prevent having to look throughout the entire house and yard.

I didn't always have as phone in my pocket.   When I was but four years old, my parents bought a home nestled in the woods in mountainous rural New Hampshire.   It was in a clearing on top of a small hill in the middle of a wide valley and had a well, a septic tank, three bedrooms, one bathroom, a living room, dining room and kitchen, and a telephone.   The telephone was an oak box, rectangular in shape, with a mouthpiece that stood out from the face of the box, two round, metal cup-shaped bell with a clanger between them, an earpiece that hung in a cradle on the left side, and a hand crank on the right side.   Below the mouthpiece was a small desk that could hold pads of note paper.

The telephone was mounted on the wall in the entry hall at just the right height for an adult to use easily.  Kids didn't use phones back then, but we knew how.  To make a call, you'd first lift the earpiece and check to see that nobody else on the party line was using it.  Then you'd hang up, give that hand crank a sharp twist, and then pick the earpiece back up.  In a moment or so, the operator would say, "Number, Please"

You'd tell her what number you wanted to call and after some rather mysterious clicking sounds, someone at the home you were calling would answer.

To answer a call, you'd first listen to the ring pattern to make sure it was your number, because on party lines, the phone would ring whenever anyone on the line got a call.  We were fortunate in that there was only one other family on our line and their two daughters were not allowed to have calls.  That wasn't unusual in small towns in the the 1950's.  If you wanted to talk to someone, you went to their house.

Our telephone number was 20-3, pronounced "two oh ring three" and the Douglass' number was 20-2.   Their ring was two short rings and ours was one long and one short.  When the phone would ring, you'd listen to the pattern to see if you needed to answer.  In today's world of constant communication, can you imagine the cacophonous confusion that would cause?

You could place a call anywhere in the village for no charge (other than the monthly bill), but there was a long distance charge to call the next towns, such as Cornish, 3 miles away and Lebanon, 8 miles away.

The family owned telephone business of my old home town is fairly well known in the annals of rural communications.  In 1897, just 21 years after Al Bell made that famous first telephone call, Harold Chellis installed a telephone wire from his home to that of his cousin, Alvah Chellis, several miles away.  In the next seven years, the telephone system grew to twenty-five subscribers, all run from the Chellis home.  Eventually a switchboard had to be installed in the Chellis dining room and remained there until it was moved to a separate room off the kitchen.  Harold's wife, Mary, was the chief switchboard operator, and remained so until she was quite old.  Other ladies of the village were hired to operate the switchboard, but until an automated system was installed in 1973, it was run from that little room off the Chellis kitchen.

In the those days, the Chellis family would celebrate holidays in their home with the whole family, so if you made a call at meal time, the operator would often be one of the family rather than Mrs Chellis or one of the standard operators.   After all, there'd be no need to pay an operator when everyone in the family knew how to operate the switchboard.

As outdated as it sounds, the system featured call forwarding long before it became available in other type of telephone systems.  One Christmas when I was living in a barracks on a North Dakota USAF radar base, I put in a "collect" call to my folks.  For the younger readers, a "collect" call was one in which the person being called paid for the long distance call, not the caller.  By the time of this anecdote, most telephone systems around the country had been modernized, so I had to tell the operator at my end of the line how to go about making the call.  I told her I wanted to make a collect call to Meriden, NH for anyone at two oh ring three and that it was a "ring down" through White River Junction, VT.  After a few moments and several clicking noises, I heard an operator say, "White River."  My operator told her that she had a collect call for two oh ring three in Meriden NH and the White River operator responded with, "One moment, please."  There were some more of those clicking sounds, and then a familiar female voice said, "Meriden."  My operator said her spiel again and that familiar voice responded, "Jimmy, they're not at home.  They've gone up to your grandfather's.  I'll put it through there.  Merry Christmas."  Call fowarding with a personal touch.

Growing Up My Way

The world was introduced to me in late June 1942, but the news didn't make much of a dent in all that other news. Besides my birth, the news of that day included the loss of an RAF P-40 in the Egyptian Sahara (that wouldn't be found for decades) and the German Wehrmacht initiated Operation Braunschweig, code named Fall Blau. Hardly noticeable to anyone but close family knew that Basil and Dot had a new son. Even my Grandfather, John F. McNamara only noted in his diary that James Elmer McNamara had been born. No hurrahs, no fanfare, not even a toast was offered. There was a war on, after all, and despite the recent victory over the Japanese fleet at Midway, Rommel still controlled North Africa, Hitler was hell bent on ruling all of Europe and Americans knew they were in for a prolonged, extremely bloody fight.

My father had gone to enlist that winter, despite my ensuing birth, because it was the right thing to do, but he was declared 4-F and sent home. He found a good job in the war industry, but housing was hard to find, so Mom, heavy with me, lived with her parents and Dad would drive up over the weekends if he could find enough gas tokens. Eventually, they found an apartment near his work.

After the war was over and the war industry jobs dried up, we all moved back to their hometown, a village of perhaps 400 souls, where I lived until I left home at age 19.

It is those interim years that I am remembering in this essay.

We went to church and Sunday school and learned about our maker, his son, and a ghost. We went to a two-room school where we learned arithmetic, reading, writing, history, geography, the Pledge to the Flag, flowers and trees, baseball, football, king of the mountain on snow banks, sugar on snow, marbles with a hole gouged in the school's dirt driveway buy turning your heel and pushing down, mumbletypeg with our jack knives, and how to ride on a St Bernard. We said the Lord's Prayer, debtors instead of trespassers, in class every morning, but we weren't taught it in school because every single one of us already knew it,  

Eight grades in a two-room school provided both opportunities and challenges, the latter more for those two teachers who each taught four grades.  The opportunities provided the pupils were boundless.  While each grade had its own curriculum, the lower grades were privy to the subject matter offered the upper grades.  As first graders, we were seated in a row along side blackboards.  A bit of a dreamer, I envied the fourth graders who sat next to the windows.  I truly cherished my seat as a fourth grader when I could look out at the woods and day dream, apparently not recognizing that the following year would find me in the 'big' room, seated along the blackboards again.

Playing baseball in a small field behind a two-room, eight grade school required some cooperation. Boys in the first few grades weren't invited, but usually by the time they were 8 or 9, they'd be included. In the spring, every recess and lunch hour would find the boys choosing up sides to play ball. Two of the bigger kids (eighth graders, you know) would toss a bat to determine who would choose the first player for his team, then they alternate choosing until all the boys had been selected. Naturally the better players would be chosen early and the younger ones last, but everyone played. We could usually get in a couple of innings before it was time to go back to class, but the teams remained the same for the day, through lunch and afternoon recess. It never was terribly important who won.

In the fall, football was the game of choice and we chose up sides pretty much the same way, except we wouldn't have a bat to toss. We played tackle football and the big kids were smart enough to avoid tackling too roughly, but we'd occasionally go home with our shirts torn and nearly always dirty.

When it rained, we'd stay inside at recess, but when it snowed, we'd be out at every break. The plowed snowbanks would often be three or four feet high and would serve as a hill to climb and push others down in King of the Hill. We lived about half a mile from the school and there were times I'd ski, cross-country style, on top of the snowbanks along side the highway, across the loose plank iron bridge and down the lane to the school building. After school, we'd go over to Potato Patch to use the rope tow that was powered by an old Pierce Arrow automobile. The car was jacked up inside a small shed with the rope wound around one of the rear wheels.

My Dad always had a garden with sweet corn, green peas, beets, radishes, leaf lettuce, tomatoes, potatoes, carrots, and string beans. Mom had a large, shallow metal pan that she'd carry out to the garden before supper to pick the veggies we'd have for supper. Sandwiches, with mayonnaise spread thickly on white bread with a big thick slab of tomato didn't need bacon or lettuce, just a liberal sprinkling of salt. Another favorite was a lettuce sandwich. Just white bread with mayonnaise, several freshly washing and still damp leaves of leaf lettuce with a sprinkling of sugar.

My wife, a native Georgian, often comments when we pass a house with a garden, saying that they have a good looking crop of turnip greens. Northerners would say it was a good looking turnip crop. I don't particularly care for either part of the plant, but my spouse will put a mess of the greens in as pot with water and possibly something else, stinking up the house. Some of our neighbors back home would do the same with beet greens and dandelion greens, but in my family, we just ate the beets and threw the greens on the pile behind the shed.

My cousin Fred lived about a half mile from us and we'd play together often. One summer day, he told his mother he was going to Jimmy's house and I told mine I was going to Freddie's house. We met in the middle and played in a shallow pool we'd made earlier by stacking stones in the form of a dam across a small brook. The water was at most about three feet deep and while we didn't know how to swim, we knew how to hold our breath and crawl across the bottom of that little pool. We'd gotten away with our little deception several times, but on that day, Mom needed to go somewhere and I was to go along with her, so she called Fred's mother to tell me to come home. Oops. Our mothers decided to go find us so each set off walking towards the other just as Fred and I had done. The game was up. We got caught.

That summer I got sent off to 4-H camp so I could learn to swim. Our county was allotted two weeks at the state run facility, but the $8.00 for one week was about all my Dad felt he could afford. I wanted the pleasure to last longer, so I withdrew $8.00 from my savings account at the Mascoma Bank and spent two weeks at camp. I came back home able to swim the width of the brook, knowing how to peen a small piece of tin into a crude ashtray, and wearing a lanyard around my neck that I'd woven together using flat, plastic coated string.

Many summer afternoons would find a group of boys gathering on the local prep school's baseball diamond for a pickup game. Just like across the highway at school, we'd choose up sides, but now the players might be as old as 17 and as young as 9 or 10. Our bats were usually taped with black friction tape to keep the cracks from spreading and quite often, the baseball would be wrapped with friction tape as well, it's cowhide long ago worn and torn. There is a particular aroma from a baseball with no cover, and I'd recognize it anywhere. Not every kid had his own glove, so they were swapped when the other side took the field. The prep school always left home plate in the ground, but we had to draw squares in the dirt to mark first, second and third base.

Other afternoons, we'd bike over the hill and down to the covered bridge for a plunge in the pool below. New Hampshire brook water comes from mountain springs, refreshingly cold, so cold in fact, that I never could just wade in. There was a cliff above the pool, perhaps 12 or 15 feet high. I'd go out to the tip of that cliff, stand there for what seemed like hours trying to get the courage to dive, then with a spring from my young legs, perform my version of a swan dive, leaping far enough out to clear the ledge that went out in the water a few inches below the surface. That first exhilarating plunge into water that just a few months earlier had been solid ice was all it took. I'd scramble back up to the ledge and do it all over, but waiting only until other swimmers were out of the way.

The summer of 1960 was a turning point in many of our lives. We'd graduated from high school, many of us had been accepted by colleges of our first, second or third choice, and this was to be my last summer of total freedom before entering a different world in a different city.

I still go back home now and again. My mother and father have passed on, but Mom's only sister, age 97, and Dad's younger brother, age 87, still live there. I've taken my Georgia Peach up numerous times to let her get a feeling for what it might have been like. A couple of years ago, we tried to go up in the winter so Sara could really experience a New Hampshire winter, but winter bypassed them, so all she saw was an anemic 4" snowfall that had all melted away by noon. Early that morning, we stopped in a shopping center and a local couple noticed out Georgia license plates, asked us what we thought of New Hampshire. They laughed when we told them we'd been hoping for a real snowfall, and then I admitted to having grown up just a few miles away.