No Parties Please

A gay friend speaks of being "mixed up and unable to mix."  You don't have to be gay to relate to that in a big  way. I found some interesting web sites about public figures and performers who are introverts. Robert Young, remembered by most of us as the father who always knew best and as kindly Dr. Marcus Welby, was troubled by alcoholism, depression and who knows what other demons.  He said he was an introvert in an extrovert profession.

Take away my microphone,  keyboard, spotlight, stage, TV camera and an adoring audience and I just want to be alone and quiet. There is none of the party animal in me.  My sole involvment in a New Year's Eve Party was when I was playing in a band. That memory does not warm my heart or anythng else.  We rode to the job in a VW bus.   If you have experienced one of those refrigerators-on-wheels  in  a Michigan winter, you know whereof  I speak.

I am in good company.  Fellow introverts are  Clint Eastwood,  Harrison Ford, Grace Kelly,  Steve Martin, Gwyneth Paltrow, Michele Pfeiffer, and Charles Schulz, creator of Peanuts cartoons.  I suggest that Garrison Keillor also fits in with those who don't fit in. 


Steve Martin, that wild and crazy guy, an introvert?  So says Dr. Marti Olsen Laney in her book, The  introvert  Advantage; How to Thrive in an Extrovert World.  She has another one, gleaned from her own "mixed marriage," a union of an innie and an outie, The introvert and extrovert in love.  Now there is a challenge.  Read about her here.

Introverts of the world, unite! Maybe we are Ok and don't need to be  fixed.

Hey Culligan Person

One of the advertising industry's greatest, most memorable campaigns has fallen victim to politcal correctness.  Who can forget the voice of Jean Hughes Williams calling Hey Culligan Man!  for decades.  She died in 1985 and I think they used other voices to keep it going.  The latest Culligan TV commerical has gone gender neutral.  Or gender absent. It just says ""Hey Culligan." 
I don't give a rodent's rear whether a man or woman installs my water softener.  But aren't there some institutions  that just shouldn't be messed with?

Charlie McCarthy's Sister

Whaterver happened to Candice Bergen? Those supposedly in the know report that she did not have a stroke a while back, but an episode of high blood pressure. Ms. Bergen's voice and speech manerisms
fascinate me. I liked her on  "Murphy Brown" and even more on the wonderfully quirky "Boston Legal." Dan Quail's still famous speech about Murphy being with child without marriage does not cool my fascination with the former fashion model. Her voice, her looks, what a package.  One web site called her eternatly cool and classy. I wish I had said that.

I know,  I use "fascinate"  too freely.  I should look up some good synonyms. Alright,  so maybe I'm too easily fascinated.  Can't help it. All sorts of things grab me and won't let me go.  That's fascination..  Maybe it's some form of nuttiness.  Is there a room in the nut ward for the chronically over-fascinated?

Charlie and Edgar

Harry's Charlie McCarthy sketch put me in my"spend too much time searching for useless information" mode. Just to see what might happen, I entered "World's greatest ventriloquist."  Paul Winchell's name popped up, along with several that I never heard of.  There's Ronn Lucas.  I watched some videos.  He's very good, but too contemporary, too Las Vegas style for me.  Edgar Bergen was credited as the performer who paved the way for later ventriloquists   said to be "better" at it than he was. Some historians claim that Bergen and Charlie became an institution mostly because radio was their medium and we couldn't see Bergen's lips move. That makes steam and smoke come fom my orfices. Edgar Bergen was an absolute master of being two very different, totally contrasting characters at the same time, instantly switching from the bewildered father figure to the bratty kid. No one has done it better, or made a wooden alter ego more real and believable than Charlie was.  It still works when we see him them.  I just watched the 1938 "Goldwyn Follies" on TCM.  Edgar and  Charlie had several appearances.  I  don't know how much Bergen's lips moved. I was too busy looking at Charlie and wondering what he might say next that would make Edgar nervous.

A Face in the Mirror

A Face In the Crowd,  the 1957 film that made Andy Griffith a star, left me  fascinated and nervous.  It was in the '50s  that televsion was replacing radio as the major home entertaimment medium. The story came too close to home for many of us in the broadcasting industry.  That was a time when many highly successful network radio artists failed to make it into televsion, while some small town radio performers went on to become huge TV stars. One of them was Johnny Carson.  I do not recommend  screen writer  Bud Schulberg's tale to anyone who likes to think of  Andy Griffith as the sheriff of Mayberry or Lawyer Ben Matlock. It's nothing like that.



Andy Griffith was a natural for the role of Lonesome Larry Rhodes, a folksy, down home country boy with a gift of gab that people loved .  As “Deacon Andy Griffith,” he had recorded his big selling comedy monologue, "What it was football” four years before the film's release. That recording still gets laughs today. As one who understands nothing about football, I love it when Andy wonders why those fellows on that cow pasture are fighting over the punkin' and trying to see how much they can kick it without bustin’ it or steppin’ in somethin’.

 Lonesome Rhodes is a drifter, discovered in the rural Arkansas town jail by a woman who works at the local radio station. She sees possibilities in him, puts him on the air and he catches fire. Listeners love him and his home grown stories. He kids one of his sponsors who cancels the account but is forced to take him back when the sales soar.  I wondered if  Bud Schulberg was thinking of Arthur Godfrey when he wrote that. Godfrey was one of the broadcasting industry's most powerful radio and TV performers. He was a master  of the folksy style, famous for mercilessly kidding his sponsors.  At the height of his popularity he was responsible for more than a quarter of the CBS Network’s advertising revenue.

Lonesome Rhodes moves from Podunk radio to bigger stations, to regional TV and all the way to the top on National Network TV. Schulberg's  script has several refrences to Will Rogers, the  legendary performer and folk philosopher of the  early twentieth century.   The inference seems to be that Lonesome Rhodes is destined to become the next Will Rogers.

A scene that hit me between the eyes and just about knocked me off my chair was the "Lonesome Rhodes Cracker-Barrel show" on TV.  As an adjective, cracker-barrel means excessively folksy, corny, down home style or content. Near the end of my less than spectacular radio career, the boss complained that my style was too cracker-barrel. When I tried doing news, the news director ordered me to quit the folksy introductions and just read the srories. I might have been imitating my idol, Arthur Godfrey. Folksiness didn't work anymore and it was near the end of the line for Corny old Clif. I still have an old letter from a listener who was sent right up the wall when I played with words and pronunciations as Arthur did.
At least I didn't go as far down as Godfrey did. A 1975 book about the CBS Network called him the forgotten giant. He died a bitter old man in 1983 after  failed comeback attempts following  a long recovery from serious surgery.   Times had changed and folksiness didn't work for him, either.

Lonesome Rhodes couldn't handle the  power. He went nuts, aliented fans and friends. Judging a cheerleader contest, he chose a  blonde who gave him the eye,  played by 22 year old Lee Remick. Rhodes dumps the good woman who had discovered him and been his mentor through his rise to fame and marries the girl. He displays his young trophy wife with her baton twirling act on his TV show.

 I  spent some broadcasting time in the Great Northwest  at Havre, Montana. I suppose I was a local star. As master of ceremonies for the Miss Havre Scholarship pageant, I had a favorite and she knew it. Most fortunately, I had no power to influence the judges. She did not win. I don't recall what her talent was, but I remember her red dress. I remember the winner, too. She had green eyes. Should there be a female person reading this and thinking, "You men are all alike," what can I say. Show business, with its fame and power,  is a slippery, tempting slope.

It was the early '60's when I was in Montana. I went to work there after getting  the pink slip from W-DOG
in Marine City, Michigan. It was 1957 when I moved to W-DOG, the same year that A Face In the Crowd
hit the theaters.  I didn't make that up.  There really was a W-DOG. We even had a Miss W-DOG. That was my idea. Marine City is on the St. Clair River, across from Sombra, Ontario, Canada. We had a young guest who looked across the river and asked, "Is that England over there?

A nearby community is Muttonville, hardly the most euphonious name for a town. That village became infamous when W-DOG's popular country singer and deejay was murdered in his Muttonville home, shot in the head by a jealous husband. Lonnie Barron is said to have come from a one room cabin in Louisiana, the son of a cotton farm sharecropper. After some years of driting, he joined the service and was stationed at Selfridge Air Base near Marine City. He had a show on W-DOG, which I believe was still WSDC when he started there. He became very popular, worked on a country show on WJR, a 50,000 Watt station in Detroit,  made  records and was on his way to big time country music fame. He was about to be signed by Columbia Records when he was cut down at Muttonville. During the shooter's trial, his wife admitted an affair with Barron. Her husband said he went to Barron's home to get letters his wife had written and that Barron taunted him. More than three thousand fans viewed Barron's body, dressed in a white gabardine cowboy suit. 

LONNIE BARRON

In the final scenes of A Face in the Crowd, Lonesome Rhodes has totally lost it and become a screaming maniac, threatening to jump off of a building. So now you know why I became more than a bit uncomfortable watching that film. As did other broadcasters that  I know. If I had made it to the top,  could I have handled the pressures and temptations?  How far down that slope might I have slid? I don't like to think about that.

Deviates Anonymous

My septum is not the only thing that is deviated. Some of my deviations from normalcy are best not described here but I have it on the authority of a man of God that my idea of what is funny is more than a bit off base. On a silly local yokel TV show that I was involved in, I told this wonderful true tale about a Catholic Cat. He was left on the doorstep of the St. Felix Nunnery in Chicago, found his way across Lake Michigan as only a cat could do and became my yellow and white feline, "Sunshine." Inspired by that great polka song, "Who stole the Kishka," Sunny was spotted going down the road with a purloined Polish Sausage in his mouth, pulling the tire we tied him to. He got caught, repented and went to St. Michael's where he confessed to Father Hack. Sunny chose St. Mike's because they have a large Polish membership, even an annual Polka Mass. I thought this was all pretty funny. The good father's comment was, "You have a devious sense of humor."

Men Don't Get It

It must be frustrating to be a woman. We men are real dumb about the women who love us. We just don't get it. We don't even get what it is that we don't get.

Oops, this was supposed to go in my "Farting Around" blog. Canary Feathers is dedicated to media and communication. Oh well, communicating is one more thing we don't get so I will leave it here.

Who is that voice?

The woman who waited on me in the store recognized my voice and knew my name. That happens a lot even though I have not been on radio since the '90s. If I were to let my ego run wild, I might say that's a tribute to my magnificent set of pipes.

Actually there's only one pipe. One of the old vocal cords got killed when my esophagus went away. It is quite amazing how many body parts we can get along without. I expect to keep on keeping on as more parts are removed, quit working or fall off. But I digress. I wander. I meander.

If recognition of my voice is a tribute to anything, it is to the powerful and intimate role that radio once played in our lives. We who lived through radio's golden age still hear favorite voices in our heads. When I hear them on a recording it's old home week. I have found a long lost friend. Maybe recognizing my voice does something like that for the old folks in my town. I hope so.

Face to Face with Facebook

I find Facebook unsatisfying. That's probably due to my age. I am more than 4 times the age of that Social Network's youngest users and 2 and 3 times older than those in the fastest growing demographic. That puts me in a very different place in life from those who are caught up in today's breakneck pace of living. I fully understand that there is no time for more than a quick stop to see what their friends have posted. I'm disappointed to hear that Social Networking is replacing e-mail, the last vestige of traditional letter writing. Remember pen pals? Then there was "taperespondence." First we did it with little 3 inch reels, then cassettes came along. Talking letters. What fun that was. Things are moving too fast for this old man.

A Face In The Crowd

Thanks to Turner Classics, I have finally seen A Face in the Crowd.
There's a powerful personal and emotional impact in it for broadcasters who were in the business in the '50s. It was a lot like that. I need to sort out my memories before I can say more. Stay tuned.

Melody Malady

I saw my shrink today. She is an unlikely but fascinating combination of Mother Angelica,beloved foundress of the Eternal Word Televion Network and Dr. Ruth Westheimer. (Foundress? Is that what you call a female founder these days?)
Anyway, this shrink lady's cat, Henry, sleeps on her desk. Therapy consists of asking, "How do you feel about that" to whatever I say and asking Henry what he thinks about it. She says I not only have Associative Thinking Disorder in which everything reminds me of something else, but there is a new aberration on the books that fits me perfectly. It's Melody Malady. I get obsessed with certain songs until they make me crazy.

Comcast Ain't All Bad

The Comcast digital box is a nice warm place for Amy the evil queen to snooze.
The Comcast people have taken their lumps. Literally. One of their offices got trashed and smashed by a hammer wielding old lady who was not happy with their service or lack thereof. Maybe that's why their commercials now tell us how much they love and value their customers.
I am now prepared to heap richest blessings upon Comcast and Ted Turner for his Classic Movie Channel. I can catch up with the great old films that I never saw or forgot if I did.

Toselli Trauma

He did it again. Harry jabbed my ATD (Associative Thinking Disorder) button by reminding me that The Golbergs radio theme music was Toselli's Serenade. All kinds of references and reminders of that haunting melody are coming at me with such force that I am obsessed, possessed and distressed. I'm way off the deep end, on the verge of getting all weepy. All due to the main claim to fame of the hot blooded Italian pianist and composer, Enrico Toselli. Get out of my head, Signore Toselli.

Rod Serling: Big in Binghampton

Too bad I did not pay more attention to The Twilight Zone 50 years ago. On its golden anniversary, Rod Serling's creation is hailed as one of the greatest things to happen to TV. School kids in Serling's home town, Binghampton, New York, have a course about the show and what it teaches about morality. J. J. Abrams, creator of Fringe and Lost, says Serling's show had a major impact on him. He made up excuses to stay home from school so he could watch it.

Wonderful Town

Yet another story about Flint, Michigan, the town that made Michael Moore and me famous. OK, so he is a lot famouser than I am. But I was a pretty big hot shot deejay back there. Anyway, the Flint Musical Tent was actually closer to Clio, hometown of the bedazzled fan who decided to marry me. I don't know how Clio got its name, maybe from some god or goddess of something, I forgot what. Maybe from Clio, Alabama. I know the best commercials get a Clio award. It's pronounced with a long "I," not Cleo.
So the Musical tent show of "Wonderful Town" about the sisters who leave Ohio to make it in the big city, has a great song near the end when they decide to go back home. "Why oh why oh why oh did we ever leave Ohio. Maybe we'd better go
O H I O ... maybe we'd better go home. That lent itself to a grandly fortuitous parody for the Flint/Clio show: "Why oh why oh why oh did we ever come to Clio. Maybe we'd better go O H I O ... maybe we'd better go home. That one will never be forgot by anyone who was there. It brought the house ... I mean the tent... down.

Social Nutwork

No, that title doesn't contain a typo. I am now on Facebook, one of the social network places. That one's not as nutty and juvenile as some of the others. I joined mostly for the amusement of my grandsons who think it's cool that an octogenarin grandpappy still has enough working brain cells to turn on a computer and type something that makes sense most of the time. I still like blogging better. I do that alone and I am not all that social. I just keep on grinning like a cheshire cat, greatly amused by what I grind out, burping up those canary feathers.
---------
-----------
Other blogs:
goofy church stuff
farting around

New TV season makes me barf

Pardon me for being an old fuddy-duddy, but the gratuitous violence and gore on the crime and forensics shows is getting disgusting. One of them opened with a scene of a bunch of cats chomping on a long-dead and seriously decomposed human body. To lighten it up, one of the detectives cleverly remarks about the dead guy becoming kitty kibble. What bugs me about it is the networks wouldn't be doing it if it didn't get ratings. If they must do something sensational to boost the ratings, let 'em give me hot sex. That wouldn't fly because the same viewers who love the explosions, shootings and autopsies would complain. Is there something wrong here? Is there any chance of re-defining obscenity? There. I feel better now.
-----------
Other blogs:
goofy church stuff
farting around

A Whale of a Wales Tale

Two Winters ago, or was it three, I went totally crazy nuts over a 30 second TV commercial for the Jeep Grand Cherokee. The vehicle plowed merrily through deep snow in the mountains, accompanied by a grandly appealing 1940s style big band boy singer. I can still hear him in my head as I type the words.

The snow may fall but I don't mind at all
Because you keep me Winter warm.
It's cold and wet but I don't get upset...
With you I'm always Winter warm.

I put the You Tube of that commercial in my favorite places so I could go to it whenever I needed a fix, which was several times a day, playing it over and over. Somehow, after hours of searching, I found the entire song, only 30 seconds of it used in the commercial. I don't know if i-tunes has the entire song. That's not where I got it. I put it on an audio tape and drove the family nuts with it. I was not alone in my obsession. People were calling their Jeep dealers and joining online groups, trying to learn the identity of that singer. Some said he reminded them of Vic Damone. I was closer to those who thought he sounded like Eddie Fisher. It wasn't hard to find the agency that produced the commercial but they had no interest in supplying the name of the performer.

My hearing is pretty well shot but I still have a good ear for accents and I was convinced that the fellow was from someplace in the United Kingdom. How right I was. A day or so ago I decided to google "Jeep Winter Warm commercial" and this website popped up. It does include a You Tube of the commercial. Jeff Hooper is his name. He's from Wales, apparently a big cabaret star. You know he's some kind of a Brit, as his website calls the video an advert. They don't call 'em commercials over there. It looks like he performs the Jeep song at his concerts.

So the mystery is solved and Jeff Hooper is now even more internationally famous than the website says he is. If internationally fanmous Welsh blogger Harry Heuser will put me up at his new old Victorian home in Aberystwyth, I'm on my way to Wales. Dont ask me how to pronounce it.
______________
Other blogs:
Farting Around
Gooofy Church Stuff

Radio Child

Should I become so enamored of my own timeless prose that I decide to further clutter the internet with a fourth blog, I will steal my title from Brent McKee. He's a Canadian. He lives in Saskatoon. What a grand name for a city. I wonder if Canadian comedy writers have used city names as effectively as Jack Benny's writers did with Anaheim, Azusa and especially the town with a wacky sounding name, Cucamonga. While searching for the correct spelling of Cucamonga I found this song about those three towns made famous by Benny's writers. When I was in Havre, Montana I listened to Canadian radio weather reports for Flin Flon, Moose Jaw and Saskatoon. There are lots of songs about Saskatoon. I'll bet Brent knows my favourite. (I put the "U" in there for my vast Canadian readership.)

What a de-light when I think of the night that I met you on, in
Sas-ka-toon, SAS-KATCH-E-WAN;
Oh, what a thrill was the spill down the hill I upset you on, in
SAS-KATCH-E-WAN;
Swift as the breeze was the race on the skiis I would bet you on - in
Sas-ka-toon, SAS-KATCH-E-WAN;
I'd walk a-head while you rode on the sled that I'd fetch you on, in
SAS-KATCH-E-WAN

Heavenly days, what wonderful rhymes. And all dreamed up by three American songsmiths, Irving Ceasar, Gerald Marks and Sammy Lerner.

Oops, I got all caught up in that and forgot where I was going with this. Brent's blog is "I am a child of television." I recommend it. It's here.

My blog number four will be "I am a child of radio." Of course. What else?
I read almost no fiction and I know next to nothing of the great classics that everyone should be acquainted with. I love Harry Heuser's highly literate blog. Broadcastellan. I don't always know what he's talking about but I sure love the way he says it.

I don't read fiction becauase I have little patience with the stuff without which it wouldn't be fiction.. I skip right past the description, characterization, scene setting, situations and all that adds up to the author's style. Give me dialogue. I want to hear voices. Give me a Hammond Organ barking and biting transitions and scene settings as only a tone-wheel Hammond can do. I don't want somebody drawing word pictures for me. I am quite capable of doing that for myself in my head, thank you. William Conrad's voice gives me a perfect mental picture of a marshal in the old west. John Todd, no more Indian than I am, was the ideal "Tonto" to the Lone Ranger on radio.

So I'm ignorant of stuff I should know about. I was raised on radio. It's radio's fault.

Mae West In My Ear

What a way to wake up. Mae West in my ear, inviting me to "Come up and see me sometime when I don't have anything on but the radio." No, it was no dream of a senile old coot. Nor was Mizz West literally in my ear. She wouldn't fit. Too big in all the right places. Her voice, however, was quite literally, audibly purring in my left ear at 5:30 AM.

How could this happen, you ask? Do you really want to know? I have a hearing aid that has a thing in it called a t-coil. In my Bettie Page corner, repository of thrift store electronics, home of the vintage Hammond Organ and Zenith Radio is a little black box hooked to wires running all over the house. These wires
"broadcast" whatever sound source is plugged into the box right into my ear.
Unfortunately much better known in Europe than here, the "induction loop system" is a great help to the hearing impaired. Many public buildings are looped and the wearer of a t-coil equipped hearing aid just pushes a button and what's being said is brought clearly and up close right into his or her ear. Someday, when the rockers have all lost their hearing, loops will become standard in public places as well as homes where they are a great help for talking on the phone and TV listening.

When I go to bed, I go to the Yesterday USA site, which runs old radio shows 24/7, plug it into the loop amplifier box and go to sleep listening to Jack Benny, Phil Harris, Gunsmoke, Amos 'n' Andy or whatever they are running. And that's how Mae West got into my ear. I don't know if it was that infamous Edgar Bergen show where she invited Charlie McCarthy to come over and play in her woodpile. I think it was an interview with Rudy Vallee, reminiscing about shows he did. Anyway, there she was, giving me quite a start. Quite a thing for an old guy to wake up to.

By the way, most antique radios, my big old Zenith included, are worth lots less than you think if you are planning to retire by selling grandad's old Philco. I might get 50 bucks or so for it if I could find somebody that wanted it. The exception is the rare, unusual models like the Zenith table model seen on the "Walton's" TV show or the Emerson radio from the 30s, known to collectors as the "Mae West" radio. They go for several thousand. Why do they call it the Mae West model? Use your imagination.