This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
When Superman Cashed His Check- Ben Affleck’s “Hollywoodland” (2006)-A Film Review
DVD Review
By Sam Lowell
Hollywoodland, starring Adrien Brody, Diane Lane, Ben Affleck, Bob Hoskins, 2006
No question Hollywood knows how to make good noir films ever since they put classics like The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, and Out Of The Past among others together back in the 1930s and 1940s. And that genre gets a modern workout here in the film under review, Hollywoodland, centered on the death of actor George Reeves who won a certain amount of fame as Superman in the hit television series in the 1950s (a series that I watched faithfully early on when I was a kid although I don’t think I took the news of his death all that personally unlike the boy in the film but that death had occurred later when I had stopped watching the series). The noir part is the intrigue that builds up over the possible ways he might have died although for the record everybody wanted the thing put down as suicide-just another guy who couldn’t hack the fact that his show had been cancelled and that he had been type-cast as a guy in tights and a muscle shirt with funny lettering, maybe gay but nobody publicly said anything about that until Rock Hudson’s AIDS time blown the lid off the whole thing. Yeah a has-been guy who had only the acting range for such kid-appropriate roles.
Let’s see where the trail leads here. George Reeve, played by Ben Affleck, committed suicide in 1959 by shooting himself in his bedroom while his fiancé (as you know that status did not preclude a little gayness in those uptight times when guys would seek marriage for cover against the “light on your feet” charges) and others were down stairs. That hard fact is part of the historical record, the police record. But there were enough contrary statements and allegations to, well, fill a book which in fact happened and allowed a fictionalized film to try to fill in the blanks-or create a nice noir story about the prizes and pitfalls of Hollywood in the 1950s.
Naturally, although a noir can survive without one, murder always spices one up. As does having a fictionalized shoulder to the wheel private detective look for leads on a dead-end trail after the “too busy” cops have thrown the case into the cold files. Enter one Louis Simo, P.I., nicely understatedly played by Adrien Brody, a been around the block once too many times down at the heels divorced father of a young son who was Superman series devotee (and a kid who took the death of the super hero pretty hard including almost burning the house down trying to get rid of his Superman costume since suicide was not a manly way to solve any problems among the young anyway). He takes the case when Reeves’ mother is unhappy with the Los Angeles Police Department’s work on what happened to her son.
Brother Simo might have been a two bit, second-rate private detective but he was tenacious, was committed to seeing what was to be seen to the end which placed him in the company of guys like Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe. Ready to take a fist or too, a slug in his body if need be, to see if there was a way to grab some rough justice in the world. See if the rumors of a “hit” doing the deed to poor George for some unknown agent or if that lovely fiancée accidently pulled the trigger. The three theories mix and match in flashbacks throughout the film, although in the end that suicide seems the mostly like answer.
But along the way there was enough confusion about motives, enough questions about who in Reeves’ life might want him out of the way to keep things moving. The prime “evidence” for the hit-man theory was the woman scorned always a good choice when murder, murder most foul is in the air. The woman scorned, an older woman scorned, Toni Mannix, played by Diane Lane, the paramour of Eddie Mannix, played by Bob Hoskins, had plenty of reason to have done the deed, or had it hired out. She had picked Reeves up one night at a party and they quickly became lovers (it was okay old Eddie had a mistress so “no foul” as they say). Including her setting up house with Reeves (she paid, or rather Eddie paid). They went along for a few years, years when Reeves became a big television hero among the younger set (me).
After the Superman show was cancelled though our George was at wits end, needed a project (interesting he accused Toni of not lifting a finger to help his career even though she was well-connected through Eddie). He headed to New York where he met his fatal mistake-his- Lenore who wound up as his fiancée as they headed back to the cesspools of Hollywood. Needless to say Toni is beside herself and it is that fact that drives the hitman theory full force. And our man Simo is living proof since as he digs deeper into the cold, cold case he is warned off about seven different ways by various private dicks and security guys who work for guess who-Eddie Mannix who whatever else he might be does not want to see Toni bothered.
In the end we are left with nothing but pure speculation just where we started about what happened the night of Reeves’ death. But you know with the gritty feel of this one, the familiar menacing background music and period piece cars and costumes made me think that Hollywood still knows how to put a noir together when it wants to. Thanks Adrien, Ben, Diane and company.
*Eveybody's Going Back Home To Their Roots- Mississippi Sheiks Move On Over- Geoff Muldaur And The Texas Sheiks Are In Town
CD Review
The Texas Sheiks, Geoff Muldaur and company, Tradition and Moderne, 2009
Recently in reviewing Maria Mulduar's latest CD, "Garden Of Joy", in which she goes back to the old Jim Kweskin and the Jug Band tradition I noted that the tide seemed to be drifting that way. And ex-husband and jug band member Geoff must have heard the siren call because this little treat that goes back to old time, old time music hits the spot. This thing is like a part recreation of the famous "Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music", including some from that series, like "Poor Boy".
Boy and girls, hear this thing if you want to know what music was like when you were left to your own devices and didn't have "MTV" or "YouTube" to make your selections from. The only question left, and one that I posed in reviewing Maria's album. Jim Kweskin is still performing. Geoff Muldaur is still performing. Maria Muldaur is still performing. Everybody's got a ton of great musicians to back them up. So I will let you guess what my next question was.
Below are some remarks that I made in reviewing some of Geoff Muldaur's earlier works. CD Review
Over the past year or so I have been asking a recurring question concerning the wherewithal of various male folk performers from the 1960’s who are still performing today in the “folk concert” world of small coffeehouses, Universalist-Unitarian church basements and the like. I have mentioned names like Jesse Winchester, Chris Smither and Tom Paxton, among others. I have not, previously mentioned the performer under review, Geoff Muldaur, who is probably best known for his work in the 1960’s, not as solo artist, but as part of the famous Jim Kweskin Jug Band and later the equally famous Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Thus, in a way, I had no reason to place him in the pantheon of the solo performers from that period. But things sure are different now.
The following is a review of Geoff Muldaur's "Password" CD, Hightone Records, 2000, by way of an introduction:
“Since my youth I have had an ear for roots music, whether I was conscious of that fact or not. The origin of that interest first centered on the blues, then early rock and roll and later, with the folk revival of the early 1960's, folk music. I have often wondered about the source of this interest. I am, and have always been a city boy, and an Eastern city boy at that. Nevertheless, over time I have come to appreciate many more forms of roots music than in my youth. The subject of the following review is an example.
Geoff Muldaur took almost two decades off from the hurly-burly of traveling the old folk circuit. When I saw him at a coffeehouse upon his return to the scene I asked him what the folk revival of the 1960's was all about. He said it was about being able to play three chords to get the girls to hang around you. Fair enough. I KNOW I took my dates at the time to coffeehouses for somewhat the same reason. I guess it always comes down to that. Kudos to Freud.
Seriously though, Geoff Muldaur was and is about lots more than three chords. He has developed a style that reflects the maturation of his voice and of his interests. And beside that he has always, even in the crazy days of the 1960's, taken a serious attitude to the way that he interprets a song. And furthermore has a very deep knowledge of all sorts of music. Every time I think I know most of the artists in the blues genre he, at a concert, will throw out one more name that I have 'missed'. Example, "At The Christmas Ball" is an old Bessie Smith novelty tune. Geoff gives it his own twist. He likewise does that on "Drop Down Mama" the old Sleepy John Estes version of the tune (I think) and on fellow old time folkie Eric Von Schmidt's "Light Rain". Enough said. Listen.”
The above review was written sometime in 2006 several years after he had begun touring again and I had begun to attend his concerts again (Yes, in those small coffeehouses and church basements mentioned above). Recently I picked up at one of his concerts this following historically interesting CD, “Geoff Muldaur, Rare And Unissued-Collectors’ Items 1963-2008 (self-produced for a Japanese CD market of jug music aficionados)”. In this CD one gets all the sense of musical history, guitar virtuosity and wry humor that was mentioned in the above quoted review. There are many cuts from the Kweskin days like "Borneo" and Ukulele Lady", some later Butterfield work (especially a long cover of the blues classic “Boogie Chillin’”) and some dud stuff from the early 1980’s. A few others defy categorization like "Sweet Sue" and "Guabi Guabi". All in all well was worth the purchase.
The Night Captain Crunch Cashed His Check-With Jeanbon Kerouac In Mind
By Bradley Fox
It was a dark, drizzly night the night in October, 2015 when Bart Webber and Sam Lowell heard from their old on the road friend from up in Maine Josh Breslin that Captain Crunch had cashed his check (for those not in the know that was an old-time 1950s and 1960s expression among hipsters, be-boppers, beats and along the edges of hippie-dom to say that somebody had passed on to the great beyond just like among the hobos, tramps and bums out in the great railroad “jungles” of the West the expression that some compadre had “caught the freight train West” meant the same thing). That night, or whenever the old gang still left heard about his demise, there must have been consideration gnashing of teeth among guys, gals too, in places like Sam and Bart’s Carver, Josh’s Olde Saco, North Adamsville, Riverdale, Steubenville, Ohio, Omaha, Saint Louie, and a thousand other places where those who knew the Captain in his prime and their primes wound up. Maybe wept a tear for their lost youth when everything was possible and knowing the Captain made you believe that hard fact even in the face of contrary evidence as the decade of the 1960s moved along. Yeah, that’s it, maybe wept a tear for their lost youth.
See Captain Crunch, real name Jonathan Fuller, Yale Class of 1957, but always Captain Crunch to all who knew him in that time when everybody and the uncles and aunts were shedding their real names and reinventing, or trying to reinvent themselves, in many cases that was a close thing, had caught the fever caused by the stir of Jeanbon Kerouac’s classic 1950s road novel On The Road (although the events in that book had actually occurred in the late 1940s the vagaries of the publishing industry and Jack’s hubris combined to delay the news of the new dispensation much to his chagrin). That novel had come out the year the Captain had graduated from Yale and having been foot loose and fancy free coming from an old moneyed family and thus unlike many others who graduated that year not in need of a job to set himself up the world headed out to San Francisco to check out the scene there. Took the train out if anybody was wondering if he followed Jack’s hitchhike trail to breathe deeply of the American night.
The scene that was happening in that town, its doings, and its characters would eventually be widely called the “beat generation.” (The genesis of that term “beat” has a checkered history since both John Holmes who used it in an article in the later 1940s and Jack who personified “beat” claimed fatherhood to the idea but in any case Jack made the term more widely known and more interesting.) The Captain had landed in Frisco in late 1957 and headed straight to the City Lights bookstore over on Columbus run by the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and a couple of other associates to see what was what. One day a few months thereafter he had met Kerouac who had just come off one of his famous, or infamous, three day drunk-doped up-sexed up binges and looked like hell but who answered his questions about his take on the scene. Jack had told him all the media stuff was all bullshit, all bullshit now not when the events depicted in the novel occurred and that the so-called hipster beatnik clowns (his term according to the Captain) running around with beards, berets, and bennies were all fakers and punks although the girls, especially those all dressed in black including their lingerie and wearing black eyeliner, who were willing to go down for him, or on him, just because he was famous now was okay as long as they didn’t expect anything of him except to get laid. The Captain (who had not taken on that persona then that would come later when he drew his own acolytes around him like Bart and Sam) hung around that scene, the edges of that Frisco beat scene for a few years until it kind of petered out of its own inertia.
The Captain had said later when a new generation familiar with On The Road and not much else began to ask questions about what happened then that he had learned a lot from the beat poets, artists and performers no question. Knew many of them who were already famous or who would become famous in the folklore of the town Ginsberg, Kerouac, Corso, Snyder, and Cassady or have a local fame like Jake Arbus, Dixie Davis, and Guy Daniels. But as that that movement drifted into dust he had become more interested in expanding his self-consciousness, his karmic being, when he fit in the universe and so he slowly drifted south to La Honda where Ken Kesey was putting together a new dispensation around Jack’s on the road idea and the serious use of drugs to create a new consciousness (or as Kesey would say with some candor before he himself got famous just to get through the fucking horrible day).
The biggest thing that the Captain picked up though as the 1950s drifted forlornly into the 1960s since the drugs could only take him so far was the idea of the road, the road constantly travelled, in the end the idea of being “on the bus” that he grabbed straight off from Kesey and his Merry Pranksters about 1964, 65. Kesey’s bus, a converted real live yellow brick road school bus, the Further On was a combination floating commune for the aimless homeless young who could not deal with the nine to five world, a moving concert hall complete with state of the art sound system that could handle the explosive new music coming out of the Bay area (the uprisings of the Doors, the Dead, Jefferson Airplane and a million other acts which the impresario Bill Graham put on at the Fillmore West and other locales), a dope-infested caravan with every kind of dope from LSD to horse to grass to bennies and back, and a free-lance free sex sex parlor. That idea or series of ideas attracted the Captain and after a short stay on Kesey’s bus he broke out on his own like a lot of people were starting to do and put together his own bus. Whereas say in 1965 Kesey’s bus would have been subject to talk by hipsters and gawks by the tinny tourists by the time the Captain put his bus together named Jade Karma there were many roaming up and down the Coast highway looking, well looking for something. That was the time, after he picked a few acolytes, a few fellow-travelers if you like, grabbed a girlfriend, Mustang Sally (Susan Stein, Bryn Mawr Class of 1960, who gave him all the trouble of heart and mind he ever needed since she was truly a free spirit and free with her love, Jonathan Fuller one night, one laced LSD night, transformed himself into Captain Crunch.
This is where Bart and Sam (and later others from Carver, Josh from Olde Saco, the late Pete Markin from North Adamsville and many others) enter the story. They like half their freaking generation were restless, bored with what was ahead for them in the nine to five world, worried about draft status and the social situation and decided mostly from what they read in Kerouac, mostly On The Road and Big Surand what they heard was happening on the West Coast to hitchhike out. Sam and Bart had gone out together after Frankie Riley also from Carver and a friend of theirs had gone out and had met up with the Captain and the bus in Golden Gate Park one summer day in 1967. So they had gone out, hitched themselves to the bandwagon and travelled with the Captain up and down the coast.
During that Frisco time they had met Josh up on Russian Hill when he came by after hitchhiking from Maine and asked for a joint. Somebody gave him one and that was that. Later Pete Markin came and for a while Bart (known as the Lonesome Cowboy), Sam (Mister Moonbeam), Pete (known as the Scribe), and Josh known as the Prince Of Love) showed up and for a while formed a core of guys who kept things somewhat stable as a ton of other people from all over who would get “on or off the bus” at various points. Of course they all imbibed in the “drugs, sex, rock and roll,” consciousness and some the political stuff although that tended to be discouraged on the bus-the idea being that the nine to five world was there and politics should be left at that door and the denizens of the bus were here so they were on two different universes.
Bart had not stayed on the bus long, just the summer since he realized after few months of travelling and all the other things that went with it was not for him (he had a girl, Betsy Binstock back in Carver who he eventually married), that while he was not a nine to five guy (then) still he was not built for the road. Some others would follow that same path and eventually all but a remnant would be left to carry on as the 1960s drifted into the ebb tide of the 1970sand the road back to “normalcy.” Sam had stayed longer, a couple of years, had a slew of girlfriends, the longest one an ex-surfer girl Butterfly Swirl that every guy took a shot at, and lovers, did his fair share of dope, learned about lots of things, mind things, dug the music but eventually he saw something coming that looked like a drag, looked like the end of the brave new world experiment they were trying to work out. He would go back East, go to law school and prosper. Josh had stayed even longer about four years since along the way he had realized that he had a writing talent that he could exploit while on the road, got several of his pieces published by the explosion of small and alternative presses created out of the need for their “people of the light” to know something other than the mainstream media pabulum put out daily. Eventually he too saw the writing on the wall and that as the 1970s started drying up everything worthwhile from the 1960s the audience he was trying to reach was disappearing, was going back to whatever they had fled. He would continue to write for small journals and other publications and survive pretty well.
In a lot of ways though the case of Pete Markin kind of wrapped up the ebb tide of the 1960s with a big bow, kind of put a bummer edge on everything since he had stayed on the road the longest, had the most invested in seeing the great generational experiment succeed. He had been bitten hard, had had the Captain’s confidence, had stayed with him for lots of reasons some personal some to have a place to stay against the storms of his life but in the end he too got off the bus. Got off the bus but that is where his childhood growing up wanting habits that had been held in check fell apart. He had been writing but the market for his stuff dried up quicker than Josh’s and he had no backup. No back-up except to get involved in the international drug trade, got involved with the evolving cartels raising their ugly heads down south of the border. Had been blown away by some nasty gunman down in Sonora after some misdirected drug deal went awry. Had as far as anybody got the story right tried to rip the cartel off, go independent. Got a couple of slugs and a potter’s grave in Sonora for his efforts. Josh said he did not know about the others stories, about what happened later to many of those on the bus for a longer or shorter periods of time, how they turned out but probably not much different that the stories he knew, the stories of the ups and downs, the promises and failures of his generation.
As for the Captain, well until the news came that he had cashed his check he had kind of fallen under the radar, had gotten lost in the mist of time for the Sam, Bart, and Josh. When they had a memorial service for the Captain down at Pfeiffer Beach at Big Sur where he had more or less stayed the last several years of his life and later when some whizzbang kid did a documentary about the Captain it turned out that he had stayed on the road the longest, never really got “off the bus.”Could be seen driving up and down the Pacific Coast Highway with his increasingly bizarre-looking and funky bus with a couple of graying acolytes and his old-time girlfriend Mustang Sally periodically looking, looking for something. Some of the young who were clueless about what the bus experience meant would come by when they were parked at some campsite and ask batteries of questions about what had happened and sat in awe as the Captain patiently gave them some answers. Yeah, wasn’t that a time though, wasn’t that a time. Captain Crunch, RIP.
Memories Of Rick-With Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman’s “Casablanca” In Mind
By Seth Garth
[Before he passed away in the late 1980s the long time French police officer, Commandant Louis Renault (everybody, everybody but the bad guys who crossed his path and there were plenty and not all of them Germans, called him “Louie” for his mild-mannered easy style when he was not in hot pursuit of some nefarious types)who had worked both in colonial Algeria and French Morocco before heading back home to work with the National Police in his hometown of Lyon, liked to sit in the Café Algiers there and reminisce about all his adventures as a cop. When asked about the most memorable person, friend or foe, he had been up against in his times he would without much hesitation blurt out the name of Rick Blaine.
Rick of Rick’s Café in Casablanca when Louie had worked in French Morocco early in World War II after the fall of the French Republic and the rise of the Vichy government which controlled that colony then. He as a police officer noted the changing of the guard and went about his business as usual-regimes come and go he had always said but the cops are forever. After investigation of Rick’s past, most of the early part as a tough guy out of Hell’s Kitchen in New York City a place where Rick would make people laugh when he said even the mighty Germans would think twice about occupying and had included some troubling adventurous activity for the “wrong” side in Ethiopia and Spain during the 1930s, he, after having had his palm “greased” issued the liquor and nightclub license for Rick to keep his Cafe Americian open under his prefecture.
For most of the time he knew Rick in Casablanca they had had a good working relationship. Rick would let him “win” at the roulette wheel as his pay-off for letting illegal gambling go on in full sight, “comp” him for drinks and dope, mostly hashish, and let him have his women “rejects” on the rebound. Then she came in, came in as Rick said one drunken night when she had her claws in him bad again “of all the gin joints in all the world she had to show up at his door.” From then on things got interesting, very interesting. The following is a translation by Jean Marais of what Louie had to say when he was asked by a National Police archivist for details of his relationship with one Rick Blaine (1920-1982)-SG]
“That Rick Blaine was a piece of work, one of the last of the pre-war, pre-World War II if anybody is asking which war we are talking about, romantics tilting his lance at the windmills in the name of love-or the thrill of adventure, maybe even the thrill of tweaking somebody’s nose just for the hell of it, Louie Renault was reminiscing out loud to those who were attending his retirement party. Retirement from the National Police, [the French coppers although they are not national cops like the FBI in America but just like city and town cops there run through the central government], the guys who keep order in places like Paris and Lyon (since it was a governmental pension he was about to receive after much haggling his service during Vichy times first in Algiers and then in French-controlled Morocco, in Casablanca, was included as well as his Lyon assignments). He had been asked a question by one of the younger policer officers about what was his most memorable episode in a long and illustrious career. Of course Louie had to go back to those early war days when he ran the operation for Vichy in godforsaken Casablanca to find some events, some characters who could qualify for what that young officer was asking about. Had to go back to Rick Blaine without question.
“Yes, Rick was the real thing, I wasn’t kidding when I mentioned his name,” Louie blurted out when the officer did not comprehend why a guy whom he had on other occasions called nothing but a saloon keeper, a guy out for himself whatever checkered past he might have had rated so high. “Let me fill you and see if I am not right about this whole matter.” He would say out of earshot that even De Gaulle would gladly take a back seat after hearing this story since he was safely in London being a pain in the ass to the British and American while “little guys” like Rick and a guy who looked pretty big even by De Gaulle standards Victor Lazlo were mercilessly tweaking the German’s tail.
“Once the Germans marched into Paris they controlled the whole political situation but since they couldn’t handle a total occupation of France and wreak havoc on the rest of Europe at the same time they left part of the country to the French military, to General Petain who worked out of Vichy, the place where the specialized water comes from. Yeah, collaborators, liked they used to try to hang on me before Rick came to Casablanca, Lazlo too, and got everybody well. I had been in Algiers during that time but once the new political reality hit I was assigned to run the police operations in bloody Casablanca-a backwater where every odd-ball thing could and did happen as well as plenty of illegal stuff from dope to women to smuggling. Just my cup of tea. I figured that I could make more graft there in the Casbah than staying in Algiers once the British and Americans got serious about dislodging the Germans from Northern Africa.
“No sooner had I landed in Casablanca then I spied Rick’s place, Rick’s Café Americian he called it, a place where there was plenty of booze, women, gambling, dope and whatever else you wanted. Or wanted done-life was cheap there-dirt cheap. The bloody Arabs could barely keep themselves busy except when some silly “blood honor” thing came up and we had to pick up the mess after the killings. Some he said, the other guy said stuff and then bang-bang. Had to arrest about fifteen people, family members from both sides and show them a little baton to the head just to let them know we meant business. Nobody ever faulted me on that score. I walked in and introduced myself to Rick without saying anything further. He looked at me with a twinkle in his eye he said later after all the smoke had cleared and we could be honest with each other, sized me up and down and knowing that I would do “business” after that appraisal said would the previous arrangement with the Prefect I was replacing be okay- a cut of the profits, a slice of the gambling [paid out by his “winning at roulette” with lucky red 22], my pick of women, free liquor and dope, and deep discounts on anything else I needed. Also told me of his dealings, his working relationships for dope, booze and Moslem women which it seemed some of the Europeans were crazy for although I was strictly for the low-rent French tarts who found Casablanca easy on their virtue, with Sydney Greenstreet, an émigré merchant of sorts from England over in the Casbah. I immediately issued the necessary licenses that each new Prefect was entitled to issue as was my prerogative. Done.
“This Rick was a hard guy to figure though the more I ran into him on the street or more regularly in his place either to grab some young woman, to grab my cut, to “win” at roulette, or just to have some high shelf bonded whiskey that I became very fond of. Somebody said, I think it was Frenchie the main bartender, that Rick had had some kind of an adventurous past, had run some guns to Ethiopia when they were trying to hold off the Italians when Mussolini was flexing his muscles and later fought with the International Brigades, with the Communists in Spain when Franco was working up to flexing his muscles. I had already known that past from the files the previous Prefect had left and from a couple of snitches I had run through Rick’s place but the “grease” from Rick’s deal said otherwise in my eyes. When I first met him he was all business like I said, if you said green he said okay what shade, that kind of thing.
“Somebody said, maybe it was Frenchie again since I sat at the bar of the joint many a night to “enforce” the no gambling regulation and to drink a few high shelf scotches, that Rick had been unlucky in love and that was why when he, Rick, had his choice of any girl he wanted, two if he was feeling frisky, would take them up to his office and apartment upstairs from the club, do whatever it was that they did, some wild stuff I heard from a couple of them that I caught on the “rebound” especially from one who took him “around the world” which she would later do with me and the next night would not know them. Tell them to sell their wares in the Casbah, a low thing to say to a European woman if you knew anything at all about what went on in the Casbah. I never went there personally but would sent for this Greenstreet to deliver me my graft and whatever dope I was looking for at the time. Like I said mainly hashish from the pipe. In the end it would be that lost love that had been bothering Rick once she came to town but early on you couldn’t tell what was eating at him. Just knew that he had a chip on his shoulder which would not fall off.
“Jesus, in those days there were all kinds of people as you can imagine trying to get out of Europe for one reason or another and once France and the countries around it fell to the Germans that was doubled up. Homeless, stateless Jews, who we all knew were being savaged by the Germans and by Vichy too, International Brigaders who couldn’t go back to their occupied homelands, local Communists who didn’t get or who couldn’t get underground, anybody out of the ordinary, we even had a couple of kids, rich kids who had left Hamburg once Hitler said that jazz was a Negro-Jew conspiracy and banned the music. If you looked at a map of Europe in say 1941 you would notice that there was not much wiggle room to work with in order to get out of some occupied spot. The road out though however they got there led to Casablanca no matter what the individual reason for leaving Europe was. The link. The air flights to Lisbon and from there anyplace but the old canard Europe.
“So you know that there was plenty of money to be made by those daring enough to act as smugglers to get these desperate people out one way or another. I could have made plenty if I had decided to use my position to get real greedy but I didn’t want to deal with a bunch of desperate people bothering me about why they weren’t getting out fast enough. Rick and the Casbah made me plenty-for a while. All the action either went through that guy Sidney Greenstreet who ran his operation out of the Casbah where he mainly handled small fry, people of no account but with money, or at Rick’s for the higher class clientele. Mostly the wealthier Jews and previously high placed officials of democratic governments who the Germans were desperate to find and make an example out off for their compatriots under occupation. Some seriously shady characters, art forgers, crazed jazz aficionados, con artists, three card monte hustlers, independent dope dealers-mainly heroin out of the Afghan fields working their way West to the cities, jack-rollers, rapists and assorted slugs, characters who even we had to keep an eye on to keep any kind of order plopped themselves there.
“Things though were going fine until some horse’s asses, as it turned out guys we had on our radar but couldn’t quite nab, decided they would murder a couple of German couriers and grab a couple of letters of transit they were travelling with. Now these letters of transit were like gold-would make their possessor a pot of gold. Maybe two pots if they worked it right. These were no questions asked documents which only had to have names filled in order to catch a flight to Lisbon and from there wherever else they wanted to go. This weasel, well known to us from a couple of rip-off jobs he did on unsuspecting travelers, a guy named Peter Lorre was part of the gang who took the couriers down. One night he showed up at Rick’s the natural place to start looking for high-end buyers and we nailed him-took him in “custody” but he didn’t have the letters of transit on him. He hanged himself in his cell before we could get much more out of him. Rick had been as cool as a cucumber when this weasel, this sweaty little nobody showed his ugly face there. This Lorre begged Rick to hide him. Rick just blew him off, told him to get lost. A couple of customers made noises when we grabbed and manhandled Lorre saying they wouldn’t patronize Rick’s again because of his attitude in the matter. Rick told them something that impressed me at the time-he wasn’t sticking his neck out for anybody. Those customers by the way were back the next night when I let Rick reopen the place and he sent them over a couple of drinks. They were his best buddies then.
“That courier murder business though would lay us all low. See the Germans had sent over this hard-ass major, Major Veidt (sic) I think his name was if I remember the name correctly, to look into the matter. I was trying to impress him so he would put in a good word for me with Vichy. That was the whole idea behind making a big deal out of the Lorre arrest (and I was happy when he hung himself because he would have not stood up well under German methods and he might have spilled who knows what about what was going on in Casablanca at the time). That made Rick’s gesture at the time this guy Lorre begged him to save him from my men even more important. Rick just looked the other way and Lorre was a goner. We never did get the other guys in with Lorre when we rounded up, our what did we call them, oh yes, “usual suspects”, Communists and con men and a few whores who we regularly rounded up to fill the jails full and make it look like we were doing our jobs. Some wound up out in a desert graveyard once we were done with them.
“Like I said in those days all kinds of people were coming through town. One of them a guy I mentioned before and said I would speak of again named Victor Lazlo had escaped from a German concentration camp and somehow he had worked his way through whatever network he had in Europe to Casablanca. This Lazlo was well-known as a leader of the resistance to the German occupations of half of Europe so a guy whom the Germans, especially this Major Veidt, were foaming at the mouth to get their hands on. But as long as he didn’t do anything illegal I had no reason to arrest him. I had half-figured when I heard he was in town to see who the highest bidder, strictly cash, was for his hide and take my cut that way.
“But here is where things got interesting. This Lazlo, a good-looking guy with good manners and a good tipper according to Frenchie, was not travelling alone. He had this beautiful woman with him, one of the most beautiful I have ever seen then or now, Ilsa something, I am not sure we ever knew her last name and it didn’t matter with a beauty like that. When she showed up our Rick went crazy, went crazy like a loon. See he had come to Casablanca just ahead of the German armies advancing on Paris with this black guy who was an entertainer, a singer and piano player named Sam and a sour look on his face. He had “known” Ilsa in Paris, had been her fancy man from what I could tell. They were supposed to blow town together and meet at the train station one evening on the last train out of Paris before the Germans stopped the trains. She was a “no show.” She was in living color the reason that Rick had been so indifferent to everything. Why he turned over perfectly good women to me without batting an eyelash.
“Of course the minute she showed up the old flames were re-kindled-for both of them. She had spied Sam at the piano through the heavily smoke-filled room, had forced him to play “their” song, If I Didn’t Care I think and when Rick heard that he went ballistic, was ready to come to blows with Sam since Sam had been ordered never to play the song. Then he spotted her across the piano and he melted down like an ice cube. It seems that in Paris she had assumed her husband, this Lazlo was dead, had been killed by the Germans. False report. That last day in Paris she found out through some underground source that Lazlo was still alive and she had gone to him. Leaving Rick standing in the rain at the fucking train station. Naturally all of this stuff I learned later but that “left standing in the rain” is what drove Rick to get up on his high horse and create nothing but trouble for me and my men once she came into view.
“That long gone Lorre had given Rick the letters of transit to keep for him the night Rick looked the other way when we grabbed the weasel and made him squeal or whatever weasels do when they are caught. When with Rick’s help he fell down, wound up at the end of his checkered tie, Rick figured that he would use the letters to get himself out of hellhole Casablanca. He said that even Hell’s Kitchen in New York where he had grown up (and had “advised” the Germans to think twice about trying to occupy if you recall) was less dangerous than Casablanca so you get an idea how bad things were-how cheap life was on in the desert. Worse than the bloody wogs the British were always moaning about in the Raj, in India. He wasn’t going alone though. She, Ilsa, was going with him. She had snuck up into his apartment one night when Lazlo was out doing his organizing of the local resistance. As a result of that outlawed meeting I had Lazlo picked up when he surfaced, you couldn’t have such meetings and I knew that German major would be happy to hear that I had the great Victor Lazlo locked up like a caged animal.
“Whatever Rick and Ilsa did and from what Frenchie said Oscar the head waiter told him they had definitely gone under the sheets from his disheveled look and the blush on her face when Rick told Oscar to escort her home they were blowing town together. When Oscar told me that story a few days later I wondered about what had happened. What had made sour Rick decide to blow a good thing in Casablanca (my good thing too don’t forget). No question Ilsa was a beauty, an exceptional beauty but after the way she had left him high and dry in Paris I figured maybe a quick roll in the hay and then off alone. But you never know about beautiful women, sometimes they can be just as kinky as any whore or any low-rent tart. She didn’t look that way but maybe with a few drinks and an agenda of her own-like getting Lazlo out- alone- she took him around the world like that ex-flame Lisette had.
“Somehow and I never could get him to tell me exactly what happened he had had an epiphany after that night some kind of turnaround. All he would say back then was the way the world was just then the troubles of three people, him, Ilsa and Lazlo weren’t worth a hill of beans compared what was going on. But whatever the source from then on he was on fire, was maybe thinking back to that old fight in Spain, thought about some payback for lost comrades, maybe what would happen if the Germans won, maybe he just didn’t like that Major Veidt and his arrogant ways closing up his café when the high rollers were coming in for their weekend beatings.
“So he gave Ilsa one story about how they should meet at the airport and blow town. She was all over that idea and had dropped any mention of Lazlo. He told me another. Talked me into a deal that when I thought about it later I should have figured was bullshit from minute number one. Confessed to me that he had the letters. Was blowing town with Ilsa and that was that. He said -let’s do this though. Let Lazlo out, let him get to the airport with the letters and grab him as an accessory for the courier murders. A feather in my cap was all I could think of. Would get that fucking Major Veidt off my back about picking up Lazlo and showing him the desert sights. When the deal went down though Rick was faking the whole thing. Maybe not about wanting to flee with Ilsa but about his attitude toward Lazlo. He had convinced me of his plan but when the deal went down I was the fall guy, well, one of the fall guys. That German major took the big fall when he tried to stop the plane to Lisbon as Lazlo and Ilsa got on the plane. Rick took him down without a murmur in one clean shot making me wonder how the Loyalists lost in Spain with a guy like that working with them.
“Needless to say when I was caught in a bind I stepped away from danger by refusing to arrest Rick. I went into the usual dodge-round up the usual suspects, double it up this time since a goddam German major was under the ground. I resolved the bind I was in pretty simply. I figured my days in Morocco were finished and so I saw the writing on the wall. I walked away with Rick (an action that I was successfully able to use in order to have my service time there count toward my retirement which I had many hassles over before I won). We made our way to Brazzaville with the dough Rick grabbed from Greenstreet when Rick sold him his interest in the café. I stayed there grabbing my graft until the end of the war and had worked various grifts with Rick until he went back to Europe a few months later where he joined up with the French resistance, worked with Samuel Beckett the exiled Irish playwright who was deeply into the organization from what I heard later. I heard from him a few times over the years before he passed away a few years ago. I guess Casablanca was in his blood because after the war he ran the Café Casablanca in New York City for some thirty years before he gave it up to retire. But what a guy that Rick was, giving up that luscious piece for unsung glory underground in France. Making that big gesture for love. Yeah, the last of the pre-war romantics.
On The 80th Anniversary-The Travails Of Single Motherhood-Barbara Stanwyck’s “Stella Dallas” (1937)-A Film Review
DVD Review
By Leslie Dumont
(This is another film that was in the pipeline in 2017 but got pushed back due to the internal in-fighting on this site so 80th anniversary is appropriate. Greg Green)
Stella Dallas, starring Barbara Stanwyck, John Boles, Anne Shirley, directed by the legendary King Vidor, 1937
In a recent film review of Katharine Hepburn and Ginger Roger’s Stage Door I mentioned, apparently out of turn, that I was grateful to the new site manager Greg Green for taking me on as a regular writer in this space. That part was okay according to him. The part that was not okay was when I mentioned that I had known the previous site manager Allan Jackson for many years beginning with an initial connection with my then companion Josh Breslin in the 1980s who had met Allan out in San Francisco during the Summer of Love, 1967. Allan had refused to give me a regular by-line then at the hard copy version of this site, although he hired me as a stringer, freelance-writer for a while until I got a regular by-line at The Eye. Allan’s reason back then was that hiring me would be an act of nepotism, would look like he was stockpiling the place with his friends their friends and cronies. Strange because in the end he would as he got older and more nostalgic surround himself with a mother lode of just such people. Gave them titles and all everything that they abhorred back in their mainly 1960s youth.
Thinking about the matter recently I am more inclined to go with my feelings at the time of rejection that he really did not like women
working alongside him in his various publishing efforts. A look at the archives has pretty much confirmed that. The surprising part is that in person, and the politics he and the blog stood for, stand for, he, if not actually a feminist, none of the guys at this site, including Josh, could be classified that way then he was far forward on what he called “the women question” than most of the men that I worked in the industry with later. And I have made that statement on a number of occasions including that previously mentioned review. That is what got me in hot water with Greg. He told me that he was trying to get rid of Allan’s still very strong “presence” here despite his physical distance in, I think, Utah. I am not sure what to make of the statement but others have told me they have received the same “warning.” In short, except as a passing reference to some negative aspect of Allan’s regime, don’t write about him during the course of a review. Since this film review was already in the pipeline Greg has told me he will not “red-pencil” any such references here.
That brings us to the film under review Barbara Stanwyck’s Stella Dallas which deals with some women’s issues that could not get addressed in Stage Door although that was a very strong women’s film as well. (I hope that I am wrong, and I probably am, but I would be very unhappy if I was the token women here and hence will be given all the so-called “chick-flicks,” all the women-oriented films since that would both be a serious step back from what this site is supposed to stand for and drive me crazy as well since my attitude toward most women’s films, especially of late is that they should never have been produced for lots of reasons which I will get into sometime when I get another such assignment).
It is only recently, maybe the last few years, the combination of sex and class have begun to get a serious work-out in the body politic and its reflection in film. So it is rather surprising to see such issues, intentionally or not and maybe not is closer to the grain, in a 1930s Hollywood film, a melodrama, a tear-jerker to boot. Stella Dallas (nee Martin) is from minute one of the film all about getting out from under her banal mill-town working class upbringing. She wants the American rags to riches dream but via her sexual charms and feminine wiles to grab an eligible rich man and not through
her own education and acumen. Well once she put her claws out she hooks an up and coming guy, not rich but with prospects, Steve Dallas, played by 1930s rich and handsome leading man character John Boles, who on the rebound marries her quickly, too quickly for either party in the end.
The result of this union is a young daughter, Laurel, played by Anne Shirley as she ages, as she gets to be a good-looking young woman. But well before that the well-mannered Dallas-rough and tumble Martin class differences portent a marriage not made in heaven. Before long the paths separated with Stella in charge of the daughter on a set allowance from Stephen who was off to New York to make a ton of money. That situation goes on for years with Laurel periodically off with father and very different kind of lifestyle among the upper crust whom her father is associating with as he again rises in society.
Such a situation could not go on forever especially as Laurel is attracted to that high society life, although finally made aware that her ill at ease mother can’t keep up with that crowd, no way. In the best interest of the child though Stella finally agrees to divorce Stephen, an extremely hard thing to have to do in that time, and let Laurel go and soak up the lifestyle of the rich and famous. Stella’s sacrifice, although it turned out she couldn’t quite make that class jump herself, paid off when Laurel married some scion of the Mayfair swells as Josh always liked to call them. Sex, class, single motherhood, sacrifice a better than average melodrama from that period. Except Josh will also squash things a bit when he reads this review and start yelling about Ms. Stanwyck’s role as the femme fatale in the film adaptation of James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity la and the hell with the frumpy housewife she plays in this film.
I Hear The Voice Of My Arky Angel-Once Again-With Angel Iris Dement In Mind
By Fritz Taylor
SWEET FORGIVENESS (Iris DeMent)
(c) 1992 Songs of Iris/Forerunner Music, Inc. ASCAP
Sweet forgiveness, that's what you give to me
when you hold me close and you say "That's all over"
You don't go looking back,
you don't hold the cards to stack,
you mean what you say.
Sweet forgiveness, you help me see
I'm not near as bad as I sometimes appear to be
When you hold me close and say
"That's all over, and I still love you"
There's no way that I could make up for those angry words I said
Sometimes it gets to hurting and the pain goes to my head
Sweet forgiveness, dear God above
I say we all deserve a taste of this kind of love
Someone who'll hold our hand,
and whisper "I understand, and I still love you"
AFTER YOU'RE GONE (Iris DeMent)
(c) 1992 Songs of Iris/Forerunner Music, Inc. ASCAP
There'll be laughter even after you're gone
I'll find reasons to face that empty dawn
'cause I've memorized each line in your face
and not even death can ever erase the story they tell to me
I'll miss you, oh how I'll miss you
I'll dream of you and I'll cry a million tears
but the sorrow will pass and the one thing that will last
is the love that you've given to me
There'll be laughter even after you're gone
I'll find reason and I'll face that empty dawn
'cause I've memorized each line in your face
and not even death could ever erase the story they tell to me
Every once in a while I have to tussle, go one on one with the angels, or a single angel is maybe a better way to put it. No, not the heavenly ones or the ones who burden your shoulders when you have a troubled heart but every once in a while I need a shot of my Arky angel, Iris Dement. Every once in a while when I am blue, not a Billie Holiday blue but maybe just a passing blue I need to hear a voice that if there was an angel heaven voice she would be the one I would want to hear.
I first heard Iris DeMent doing a cover of a Greg Brown tribute to Jimmy Rodgers, the old time Texas yodeller, on Brown's tribute album, Driftless. I then looked for her solo albums and for the most part was blown away by the power of Iris’ voice, her piano accompaniment and her lyrics (which are contained in the liner notes of her various albums, read them, please). It is hard to type her style. Is it folk? Is it Country Pop? Is it semi-torch songstress? Well, whatever it may be that Arky angel is a listening treat, especially if you are in a sentimental mood.
Naturally when I find some talent that “speaks” to me I grab everything they sing, write, paint, or act I can find. In Iris’ case there is not a lot of recorded work, with the recent addition of Sing The Delta just four albums although she had done many back-ups or harmonies with other artists most notably John Prine. Still what has been recorded blew me away (and will blow you away), especially as an old Vietnam War era veteran her There is a Wall in Washington about the guys who found themselves on the Vietnam Memorial probably one of the best anti-war songs you will ever hear. That memorial containing names very close to me, to my heart and I shed a tear each time I even go near the memorial when I am in D.C. It is fairly easy to write a Give Peace a Chance or Where Have All the Flowers Gone? type of anti-war song. It is another to capture the pathos of what happened to too many families when we were unable to stop that war. The streets of my old-time growing up neighborhood are filled with memories of guys I knew, guys who didn’t make it back, guys who couldn’t adjust coming back to the “real world,” or could not get over no going into the service to experience the decisive event of our generation.
Other songs that have drawn my attention like When My Morning Comes hit home with all the baggage working class kids have about their inferiority when they screw up in this world. Walking Home Alone evokes all the humor, bathos, pathos and sheer exhilaration of saying one was able to survive, and not badly, after growing up poor, Arky poor amid the riches of America. (That may be the “connection” as I grew up through my father coal country Hazard, Kentucky poor.)
Frankly, and I admit this publicly in this space, I love Ms. Iris Dement. Not personally, of course, but through her voice, her lyrics and her musical presence. This “confession” may seem rather startling coming from a guy who in this space is as likely here to go on and on about Bolsheviks, ‘Che’, Leon Trotsky, high communist theory and the like. Especially, as well given Iris’ seemingly simple quasi- religious themes and commitment to paying homage to her rural background in song. All such discrepancies though go out the window here. Why?
Well, for one, this old radical got a lump in his throat the first time he heard her voice. Okay, that happens sometimes-once- but why did he have the same reaction on the fifth and twelfth hearings? Explain that. I can easily enough. If, on the very, very remotest chance, there is a heaven then I know one of the choir members. Enough said. By the way give a listen to Out Of The Fire and Mornin’ Glory. Then you too will be in love with Ms. Iris Dement.
Iris, here is my proposal, once again. If you get tired of fishing the U.P., or wherever, with Mr. Greg Brown, get bored with his endless twaddle about old Iowa farms or going on and on about Grandma's fruit cellar just whistle. Better yet just yodel like you did on Jimmie Rodgers Going Home on that Driftless CD.
Will The Circle Be Unbroken-The Music Of The Carter Family (First Generation)
By Sam Lowell
I am not enjoying my so-called retirement from the day to day operation of the film review section of this site. For many years I was at first film critic, small letters, and later when the then site manager Allan Jackson brought in some younger writers Senior Film Critic, capital letters, in the days when he got the bright notion that we needed a heriarchy here between the older writers and the younger writers and such designations did the trick. Well Allan found out to his later regret that such silly formal divisions and as well only permitting the younger writers to essentially have our leavings, leaving which included and oversized amount of material reflecting on the growing up times of the older writers, the 1960s, that frankly the younger writers could give a f- - k, pardon my English, about was part of his undoing. Brought a full-scale rebellion which eventually led to his downfall.
There are persistant rumors that Allan did not retire as is the formal reason given for his no longer running the show here but that he was purged, was unceremoniously driven into exile in Utah where he is hustling the Mormons for a by-line in some third-rate newspaper hard as that is to believe of guy who mocked the hell out of Mitt Romney when he was running for President in 2012 what with his five wives great-grardfather and white underwear. As a long time friend of Allan’s I had thought the former reason, that retirement stuff, rather suspicous since no way would Allan have retired on his own volition. This place was his baby. Of course as the one older writer who sided with what are now around the office called the “Young Turks” I am concerned that these victorious writers are not going to leave well enough alone and are ready according to another strong rumor to purge the lot of older writers.
I have no regrets, except the probable loss of a friend of fifty years standing if it proves that he is not out in hell-hole Utah but holed up somewhere near-by licking his wounds, about casting that decisive vote agaisnt him since the site really was turning into a lonely-hearts club for nostagic generation of ’68 veterans. Especially last year when Allan went crazy early on about the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love, 1967 which formed a number of us from the old growing up neighborhood’s baptism of fire into that newer world we thought we were getting caught up in.
Allan got in such a frenzy about the matter that say you wanted to submit an article about the 1940s classic private detective Dashiell Hammett novel-inspired movie The Maltese Falcon you had to connect the dots somehow so that that San Francisco era of the film somehow linked up to the Summer of Love which was also centered in Frisco town. He had a big red-pencil out eagle-eyed looking for anything which he could “edit” toward that goal. (By the way to give a graphic example of how tilted Allan’s mind had become about linkage none of the younegr writers who gave it a try could make a conenction between the two, none. It took wily Phil Larkin to do the deed. The link? Miles Archer, one of the detective on the case, was killed, was murdered on Post Street and that street is located not far from the Fillimore where plenty of ‘acid rock” was performed and also near the epicenter of the whole thing, the Haight-Ashbury section of town. He went on to speculate about whether Sam Spade would have gotten caught in the Summer of Love or would he have hired himself out to search for missing kids for their distraught parents. Allan was delighted.)
The younger writers could have given a f - - k about that distant time but he made it a litmus test. I assumed that the frenzy would only get worse as the various 50th anniversaries, good and bad, for 1968 in 2018 came up. He had to go.
It did not help personally, although I have kept pretty quiet about it and did not let it get used for ammunition in the fierce internal fight which raged throughout most of the latter part of 2017, that due to my persistant nagging about the erroneous direction the site was taking that I was “forced” to retire from the day to day operations once he brought Sandy Salmon over from the American Film Gazette (as he did with current site manager Greg Green later in the year). He gave me so-called emertitus status and told me that I could now write whatever I wanted and submit whenever I wanted. And then crabbed every time I wanted to write about something not Summer of Love-related or not film related. So the short reminscence piece below is something that I had done a draft on, got red-penciled to death by Allan and threw in a desk drawer until recently I asked Greg Green about resurrecting the damn thing. In a flick he sure go to it. Yeah, although I am worried about purge talk both for Allan’s sake and the rest of us older writers, the old bastard had to go.
**********
You know it took a long time for me to figure out why I was drawn, seemingly out of nowhere, to the mountain music most famously brought to public, Northern public, attention by the likes of the Carter Family, Jimmy Rodgers, and the folklorists the Seegers and the Lomaxes who brought a ton of this stuff to the waiting arms of 1960s kids who were looking for “roots” whatever that might mean to any particular kid. Kids who would pay serious college cheap date money to see some of the survivors like Buell Ezell or Hobart Smith go through their paces.
As a kid I could not abide it but later on I figured that was because I was so embroiled in the uprising jail-break music of my generation, rock and roll, that anything else faded, faded badly by comparison. Later in high school and after that in college when I too joined the cheap date night crowd in the days when I hung around Harvard Square and would pursue girls, young women, only if they were willing to but into my cheap date routine I would let something like Gold Watch And Chain register a bit, registering a bit. That then meaning that I would find myself occasionally idly humming such a tune. But again more urban, more protest-oriented folk music was what caught my attention more when the folk minute was at high tide in the early 1960s.
Then one day not all that many years ago as part of a final reconciliation with my family, going back to my own roots, making peace with my old growing up neighborhood, I started asking many questions of family, old school mates and old friends like Phil Larkin and Bart Webber who have written in this space as well about how things turned so sour back when I was young. More importantly asking questions that had stirred in my mind for a long time and formed part of the reason that I went for reconciliation. To find out what my roots were while somebody was around to explain the days before I could rightly remember the early days. And in that process I finally, finally figured out why the Carter Family and others began to “speak” to me.
The thing was simplicity itself. See my father hailed from Kentucky, Hazard, Kentucky long noted in song and legend as hard coal country. (The L&M Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, Going Back To Harlan)When World War II came along he left to join the Marines to get the hell out of there. During his tour of duty he was stationed for a short while at the Portsmouth Naval Base and during that stay attended a USO dance held in Portland where he met my mother. Needless to say he stayed in the North, for better or worse, working the mills in Olde Saco until they closed or headed south for cheaper labor and then worked at whatever jobs he could find. All during my childhood though along with that popular music that got many mothers and fathers through the war mountain music, although I would not have called it that then filtered in the background on the family living room record player.
But here is the real “discovery,” a discovery that could only be disclosed by my parents. Early on in their marriage they had tried to go back to Hazard to see if they could make a go of it there. This was after my older brother Prescott was born and while my mother was carrying me. Apparently they stayed for several months before they left to go back to Olde Saco before I was born since I was born in Portland General Hospital. So see that damn mountain was in my DNA, was just harking to me when I got the bug. Funny, isn’t it.
