The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-On Entering North Adamsville High Redux , Circa 1960 –With Chubby Checker’s The Twist In Mind

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-On Entering North Adamsville High Redux , Circa 1960 –With Chubby Checker’s The Twist In Mind

Introduction by Allan Jackson

[Funny as larcenous as I was as a kid under the wanting habits guidance of my old friend Frankie Riley and the larcenous planning expertise of Scribe I was always a pretty good student, always liked to read. Except unlike Scribe who wore his knowledge very heavily on his shirtsleeves for the whole fucking wide world to see the son of a bitch I wish he were here right now so I could lambaste him in person I read on the low, on the quiet sneaking to the Thomas Adderley Library branch across town from the Acre so nobody would suspect what I was doing.

Along with that I never had much trouble, again like Scribe and to a certain degree Frankie as well adjusting as we entered each new school on our way to graduation. Always was kind of ho-hum about it unlike in the story below where Frank Jackman who I am sure did not want to see this sketch come to life since he would deny the whole thing on seven sealed bibles who literally sweated his ass off each time he moved up the ladder and not just in high school entry days either. Maybe it was because I had some other burdens I was carrying that seemed heavier, weighed heavier on the grand scale that I was so non-plussed every time a teacher or a corner boy expressed how hard the next step up the food chain was. We had plenty of corner boys pass through who couldn’t handle school, were not students in any sense you could call them students so they just dropped out like my brother Timmy and got lost in the shuffle. I wonder what happened to Richie, Brain, Buzz-saw (you don’t want to know on that one), and Jack Devlin. Yeah, I would like to know. Allan Jackson}             

The Twist (Yo Twist)

Song by Fat Boys, Chubby Checker

1.     Come on baby
Let's do the twist
Come on baby
Let's do the twist
Take me by my little hand
And go like this

Ee-yah twist
Baby, baby twist
Ooh yeah, just like this
Come on little miss and do the twist

My daddy is sleepin'
And mama ain't around
Yeah, daddy just sleepin'
And mama ain't around
We're gonna twisty twisty twisty
Till we tear the house down

Come on and twist
Yeah, baby twist
Oooh yeah, just like this
Come on miss and do the twist
Ee-yah

Yeah, you should see my little sis
You should see my my litlle Sis
She really knows how to rock
She knows how to twist

Come on and twist
Yeah, baby twist
Oooh yeah, just like this
Come on little miss and do the twist

Yeah, rock on now
Yeah, twist on down
Twist
('Round and 'round and 'round)

A few years ago, maybe four or five now, around the time that Frank Jackman (always Frank and not Francis since that was too much like that St Francis who was good to animals and stuff and no self-respecting corner boy wanted that tagged to his name besides the formal name sounded kind of faggy, hey that’s what we called guys before we knew better who were kind of girlish although I used queer more, when the guys talked about names one night, also not Frankie since that name was taken up in his crowd) and Frankie Riley (always Frankie and not Francis for the same reason as Frank but also Frankie because he had always been called Frankie since time immemorial to distinguish him from his father Frank, Sr.) his Jack Slack’s bowling alleys corner boy chieftain all through high school in North Adamsville had been commemorating, maybe better to say comparing notes, on their fiftieth anniversary of entry into that school in the ninth grade. Frank had written a remembrance of the first day of school freshman year. He had written it at the behest of a female fellow classmate, Dora, for a class website where she was the webmaster which she and a few others had established so that those from the Class of 1964 who wished to, those who were able to, could communicate with each other in the new dispensation of cyberspace.

That remembrance, one of a series of sketches that he eventually did, and on recent inquiry from Jimmy Jenkins another classmate and ex-corner boy comrade, Frank has stated that he stood by that “sketch” characterization, centered on the anxieties that he had on that first day about making a brand new impression on the freshman class, about changing his junior high school quasi-“beatnik” style, his two thousand fact barrage that he would lay on anybody who would listen. A style change that lots of guys and gals have gone through when faced with a new situation, although the people he was trying to impress had already been his classmates in that junior high school and were painfully aware of the previous way that he had presented himself, presented himself  under Frankie’s direction, to the world.

When Frankie at the time read what Frank had written, a thing filled with new found sobbing, weeping, and pious innocence he sent him an e-mail which brought Frank up short. Frankie threatened in no uncertain terms to write his own “sketch” refuting all the sobbing, weeping, piously innocent noise that Frank had been trying to bamboozle their fellow classmates with. The key point that Frankie threatened to bring down on a candid world, the candid world in this instance being the very curious Dora for one, and her coterie of friends who had stayed in contact with each other since high school since they all still lived in the area (except in winter, now retired winter, and most headed to Florida, mainly around Naples), to be clear about was the case of Frank Jackman and one Lydia Stevenson. Or rather the case, the love-bug case he had for her. That, and not some mumble-jumble about changing his act which he never really did since you could always depend on Frank going on and on with one of his two thousand arcane facts that he tried to impress every girl he ran across in high school with and to dress like he had just come walking in from post-beat Harvard Square, was the very real point of what was aggravating him on that long ago hot endless first Wednesday after Labor Day morning.

See Frank had gotten absolutely nowhere with Lydia, nowhere beyond the endless talking stage, and thus nowhere, in junior high but he was still carrying the torch come freshman year and fifty years later he still felt that fresh-scented breathe and that subtle perfume, or bath soap, or whatever it was she wore, breezing over him (maybe it was perfume stolen from Ma’s dresser top, he these days liked to think she had made that thief to drive him crazy, crazy with her girlish wiles). Or maybe her curse, a North Adamsville curse that he claimed at one point that Lydia cast on him since he never had then a girlfriend from school, or from North Adamsville for that matter, always from some other town. Not in high school anyway.

The currency of that fresh breeze that occupied his mind may have been pushed forward by his getting back in touch with classmates. And as fate would have it, the thrice-married Frank, never one to say never to love had as a result of getting back in touch with classmates on the website had a short fruitless affair with another classmate, Laura, who had been a close friend of Lydia’s in junior high school and told him a couple of things about what Lydia had thought about Frank. Laura confirmed that Lydia had expected Frank to ask her out in junior high school but also after the affair had run its course unconsciously confirmed by that failed affair that Lydia’s curse was still at work fifty years later. And it is that missed opportunity to fall under the sway of that Lydia scent that will drive this short sketch, hell, forget Frank and his sketch business, this short piece.                  

This is the way Frank described to me what happened after Frankie sent that fatal e-mail that might expose his long hidden thoughts: 

“Frankie, for once listened patiently as I finished my story, the one that he say was filled to the brim with sobbing, weeping, whining bull about starting anew and being anxious about what would happen, and which he threatened to go viral on, immediately after I was finished let out with a “Who are you kidding Jackman that is not the way you told me the story back then.” Then he went on. “I remember very well what you were nervous about. What that cold night sweats, that all-night toss and turn teen angst, boy version, had been about and it wasn’t first day of school jitters. It was nothing but thinking about her. That certain "she" that you had kind of sneaked around mentioning as you had been talking, talking your his head off about filling out forms, getting books, and other weird noises, just to keep the jitters down. The way you told it then, and I think you called me up right after school was out to discuss the matter, was that while on those pre-school steps you had just seen her, seen her with the other North Adamsville junior high girls on the other side of the steps, and got all panicky, got kind of red-faced about it, and so you are going to have to say a little something about that. And if you don’t I will.” 

Frankie continued along this line, stuff which seemed to be true but which made me wonder how a guy who when we met at the Sunnyville Grille over in Boston for a few drinks to discuss this and that, not the Lydia thing but our corner boy exploits, couldn’t remember where he left his car keys and we had to call AAA to come out and find them on his driver’s side seat. Jesus.  Here’s what he was getting at.

“See, I know the previous school year, late in the eighth grade at North Adamsville Junior High, toward the end of the school year you had started talking to that Lydia Stevenson in art class. Yes, that Lydia who on her mother’s side from was from some branch of the Adams family who had run the jagged old ship-building town there in North Adamsville for eons and who had employed my father and a million other fathers, and I think yours’ too if I am not mistaken, for a while anyway, around there and then just headed south, or to Greece or someplace like that, for the cheaper labor I heard later. She was one of the granddaughters or some such relation I never did get it all down. And that part was not all that important anyway because what mattered, what mattered to you, was that faint scent, that just barely perceivable scent, some nectar scent, that came from Lydia when you sat next to her in art class and you two talked, talked your heads off.

“But you never did anything about it, not then anyway although you said when we talked later about it you had this feeling, maybe just a feeling because you wanted things to be that way but a feeling anyway, that she had expected you to ask her out. Asking out for junior high school students then, and for freshmen in high school too because we didn’t have licenses to drive cars, being the obligatory "first date" at Jimmy Jack's Shack (no, not the one off Adamsville Boulevard, that's for the tourists and old people, the one on Hancock up toward the Square is the one I am talking about). You said you were just too shy and uncertain to do it.

“Why? Well you said it was because you came from the “wrong side of the tracks” in the old town, over by the old abandoned Old Colony tracks and she, well like I said came from a branch of the Adams family that lived over on Elm in one of those Victorian houses that the swells are crazy for now, and I guess were back then too. That is when you figured that if you studied up on a bunch of stuff, stuff that you liked to study anyway, then come freshman year you just might be able to get up the nerve to ask her to go over to Jimmy Jack's for something to eat and to listen to the jukebox after school some day like every other Tom, Dick and Harry did then.

“.... So don’t tell me suddenly, a bell rang, a real bell, students, like lemmings to the sea, were on the move, especially those junior high kids that you had nodded to before as you took those steps, two at a time. And don’t tell me it was too late then to worry about style, or anything else. Or make your place in the sun as you went along, on the fly. No, it was about who kind of brushed against you as you rushed up the stairs and who gave you one of her biggest faintly-scented smiles as you both raced up those funky granite steps. Yeah, a place in the sun, sure.”

And so there you had Frank satisfying Frankie enough with his agreement to make public on the class website the gist of his stubborn e-mail. Funny though as much time as they spent talking about it back in the day and then when they resurrected it a few years ago Frank never did get to first base Lydia in high school, although she sent him a few more of those big faintly-scented smiles which Frank didn’t figure out until too late. Within a couple of weeks of the school opening Lydia was seen hand in hand with Paul Jones, a sophomore then, the guy who would lead North Adamsville to two consecutive division football championships and who stayed hand in hand with him until she graduated. Frank had had a few girlfriends in high school, Harvard Square refugees like himself who went crazy for his two thousand facts but they were not from the town. The few times Frank did try to get dates in school or in town, get to first base, he was shot down for all kinds of reasons, a couple of times because he did not have a car and the girls had not the slightest interest in walking around on a date, a couple of times he was just flat stood up when the girls he was to date took the next best thing instead. Yeah, the Lydia hex sure did him in. And after that Laura disaster don’t say he wasn’t jinxed, just don’t say it around him.       

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-Out In Pooh’s Corner-With The Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit In Mind

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-Out In Pooh’s Corner-With The Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit In Mind

Introduction by Allan Jackson

[It is funny, and not in a gleeful way, how those wanting habits I have been thinking about lately which drove a lot of my youthful activity down at the base of society down among the poorest of the poor worked itself. Like I said not in a gleeful. I suppose everybody, at least in America from top to bottom has wanting habits of some sort but I would argue if only from anecdotal evidence that those striving are more intense down below if only because the success rate is very low when the deal goes down. Take my own family, my two brothers, one older the other younger making me the middle child which has some sociological tendencies of its own. We were always short of something, some money thing, for clothes, food, and rent but mainly extras, simple extras like a cheapjack transistor radio from now mostly gone under Radio Shack which even kids in the projects of North Adamsville where I and my brothers came of age had to listen to their rock and roll in the privacy of their rooms, shared or single. We never had enough extra money to get one.      

That situation affected my two brothers in slightly different but in the end fatal. My older brother Teddy started out very young stealing money, coins mainly at the beginning, from our mother’s pocketbook. Many a time he, and a few times we three, in my mother’s rage at Teddy were thrown out of the house for his transgressions. And that was when we were not even teenagers, a situation today which would some child social service agency on her case. Now this petty larceny if you wanted to get technical about the matter would not universally lead to a life of crime and other factors came into as well but Teddy became a career armed robber (first unarmed but then he “graduated”). He never said this to me personally but I assume he was working on premise that his targets were where the money was an idea made famous by legendary bank robber Willie Sutton. Teddy did half his life in some jail, county or state, before at some point later in life he just couldn’t keep up with the life, couldn’t do the time anymore from what he told me.  

My younger brother Kevin went a different way which did not become noticeable until his early twenties. He had started into taking drugs, early on before they were commonly used by members of generation, the generation of ’68 generically. Somehow, they had made him feel better about himself from what he told me before he lost it. Did some dealing, did some exotic synthetic drugs the net effect was that his personality changed dramatically, and he started on a long series of stays in mental institutions for serious disorder, disorders triggering anti-social criminal acts which led him eventually to state hospital for the criminally insane where he died. No pretty.

Where does all that leave me. Well I was as capable of robbing my mother’s pocketbook as Teddy was and later took a ton of drugs but the real tipping point was in high school when my clean cut, but larcenous corner boys led by Frankie Riley under plans by Scribe would burgle town rich houses. So, my own experience was a very close thing as well. But these days I am haunted by something else now that my two brothers are gone. One out of three is very poor odds for those coming out of the bottom of society and in my case a very close thing. That my friends are the pathologies of growing up desperately poor in America back in the day, now too. Allan Jackson]       

******************

A while back, maybe three years ago now, I was sitting in the Sunnyvale Grille in Boston where I was visiting my old time merry prankster friend, Frank Jackman, where we got into a hot and heavy discussion about the kind of songs that turned us on back in the 1960s when we had come of musical age. We had young kids’ stuff grown up on the classic Elvis-Jerry Lee-Chuck-Bo-Roy stuff but that was mainly copped from our older brothers and sisters, the ‘60s sounds and their attendant political connections were our real age time. I had met Jackman out in California after I had hitched out there in the mid-1960s just after I had graduated from high school up in Olde Saco, Maine. He was going under the moniker Flash Dash then , don’t laugh, for a while I was the Prince of Love, those monikers used in abundance as a way to break from our traditional-bound pasts, to break from the old neighborhood corner boy stuff, on the a way to make our own newer world. That night Frank had a couple of his recently reunited North Adamsville High old corner boys, Jimmy Jenkins and Sam Lowell, and a guy he met after he had just graduated from high school, Josh Breslin, who was from Hull about twenty miles south of North Adamsville all of whom I had previously met one time or another out in the “Garden of Eden,” which is what we called our search back then and which came up California for all of us then whatever happened later.

Now the reason that I have mentioned who was in attendance at that “meeting” (really an occasion to have a few drinks without the bother of womenfolk around for a short time and without the lately more pressing need not to drink and drive impaired since Pete was in town for a conference and had been staying at the Westin a short walk down the street) is that each and every participant was a certified member of the generation of ’68. That generation of ’68 designation meaning that all were, one way or another, veterans of the political wars back then when we tried to “turn the world upside down” and got kicked in the ass for our efforts and, more importantly here, veterans of the “hippie” drug/drop-out/ communal experiences that a good portion of our generation imbibed in, if only for a minute. And thus all were something like “experts” on the question that was pressing on Frank’s mind. That question centered on what music “turned” each guy there on. Not in the overtly sexual way in which the question asked might be taken today but while they were being “turned on.” Turned on being a euphemism plain and simple for getting “high,” “stoned,” “ripped” or whatever term was used in the locale that you frequented, for doing your drug of choice.              

See Jackman, full name Francis Xavier Jackman but nobody in his old high school corner boys crowd called him that, nor did I or do I here, had this idea that rather than the common wisdom Beatles, Stones, Doors, Motown influence that when the deal went down the Jefferson Airplane was the group that provided the best music to get “turned on” by. By the way since she will enter this story at some point the only one that I can think of who called Frank that three name combo was a girl, what we call a young woman now, whom we met, or rather he met, and then I met and took away from him, Cathy Callahan, out in La Jolla in California, who went under the moniker Butterfly Swirl back in the 1960s. She thought, clueless California sunshine ex-surfer guy girl, the three name combo was “cute” like Frank was some Brahmin scion rather than from his real working-class neighborhood roots. But that was a different story because as he said, she “curled his toes,” curled mine too, so she could call him (or me) any damn name she wanted.  

Naturally there was some disagreement over that premise but let me tell you what the mad monk Jackman was up to. See, as a free-lance journalist of sorts, he had shortly before our recent meeting taken on an assignment from a generation of ’68-type magazine, Mellow Times. A ’68-type magazine meaning that it was filled with full-blown nostalgia stuff: New Mexico communes where kids strictly from suburban no heartache homes tried to eke, the only word possible for such exertions, an existence out of some hard clay farming; outlaw bikers who guys like gonzo writers like Hunter Thompson and Tom Wolfe made infamous, or rather more infamous; acid head freak-outs in the Fillmores of the East and West sipping weird drug concoctions out of Dixie cups and getting twisted to the high decibel music up front; merry pranksters riding shotgun to the new dispensation taking more than a few over the high side with them; the Haight-Ashbury scene from the first “all men are brothers” days of sharing on the soup kitchen lines to the gun, drug shoot-up bitter end; Golden Gate Park days when that park had more kites, more bubbles, more wha-wha than any other park in the world; psychedelics from drugs to art; retro- art deco styles like the lost children were channeling back to the “lost generation” Jazz Age jail-breakers as kindred; and, feed the people kitchens in the good days and bad, Sally or Fugs, that kind of thing from that period.
Jackman, well known to a select audience of baby-boomers for his previous work in writing about the merry prankster hitchhike road, what he had called in one series that I had read-The Search For The Blue-Pink Great American West Night- in which he had used me as a stick drug-addled figure from Podunk who didn’t know how to tie his own shoes until he came under the god-like Jackman spell, was given free rein to investigate that question under the descriptive by-line- Those Oldies But Goodies…Out In The Be-Bop ‘60s Song Night -that was to head the series of articles the magazine proposed that he work on. Here is Jackman’s proposed introduction to the series that he gave us copies of that night: 

“This is another tongue-in-cheek commentary, the back story if you like, in the occasional entries under this headline going back to the primordial youth time of the 1960s with its bags full of classic (now classic) rock songs for the ages. Now many music and social critics have done yeomen’s service giving us the meaning of various folk songs, folk protest songs in particular, from around this period. You know they have essentially beaten us over the head with stuff like the meaning of Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ In The Wind as a clarion call for now aging baby-boomers back then to rise up and smite the dragon, and a warning to those in charge (not heeded) that a new world was a-bornin’, or trying to be. Or better his The Times They Are A-Changin’ with its plaintive plea for those in charge to get hip, or stand aside.  (They did neither.) And we have been fighting about a forty year rearguard action to this very day trying to live down those experiences, and trying to get new generations to blow their own wind, change their own times, and sing their own plainsong in a similar way.”

And so we, his Jack Slack’s bowling alleys hometown corner boys, Josh, and I were the “masses” for the purpose of Frank’s work. Free labor if you like for his little nostalgia music piece. And here is his rationale, or at least part of it that he sent in an e-mail trying to drag me from Portland down to Boston to beat the thing over the head with him:

“…Like I said the critics have had a field day (and long and prosperous academic and journalistic careers as well) with that kind of stuff, fluff stuff really. The hard stuff, the really hard stuff that fell below their collective radars, was the non-folk, non-protest, non-deep meaning (so they thought) stuff, the daily fare of popular radio back in the day. A song like Out At Pooh’s Corner. A song that had every red-blooded American teen-age experimenter (and who knows maybe world teen) wondering their own wondering about the fate of the song’s narrator. About what happened that night (and the next morning) that caused him to pose the comment in that particular way. Yes, that is the hard stuff of social commentary, the stuff of popular dreams, and the stuff that is being tackled head on in this series”

And so after succumbing to his blarney we sat at that table in the bar of the Sunnyvale Grille sipping high-shelf scotch and trying to work through this knotty problem that Frank had put before us. This problem of what moved us though the squeeze that we put our brains through back then. Frank brought something up that kind of set the tone for the evening. He mentioned that coming out of North Adamsville in 1964 he, Jimmy, and Sam, if they had been prophetic, could not have possibly foreseen that they would, like about half of their generation, or so it seemed, have imbibed deeply of the counter-culture, its communal values, its new-found habits, its ethos, its drug-centeredness, or its music. He explained (and Jimmy and Sam chimed in with comments as he proceeded) that in strait-laced, mostly Irish working- class neighborhoods like where they grew up in North Adamsville anything other than working hard to get ahead, “getting ahead” being getting some kind of white-collar city civil service job and finally breaking the string of factory worker generations, since they were in some cases the first generation to finish high school and have enough knowledge to take the exam to white-collar-dom, getting married, maybe to your high school sweetheart or some such arrangement, and eventually buying a slightly bigger house than the cramped quarters provided by the house you grew up in and have children, slightly fewer children than in the house you grew up in, was considered scandalous, weird, or evil.

But as Jimmy said after Frank finished up it wasn’t so much the neighborhood ethos as the ethos of the corner boy life, the life in front of Jack Slack’s bowling alleys up on Thornton Street. That life included plenty of under-age drinking, plenty of talk, mostly talk, of sex with pretty girls  (certainly more talk than any activity that actually happened-except in bravado Monday morning before school banter with every guy lying, or half-lying about what was done, or not done,  after the weekend’s exertions), and a view of the world perhaps slightly less rigid than the parents but still scornful of people of the opposite sex living together unmarried (and in high Catholic North Adamsville even divorced people were subject to comment, and scorn), scornful of guys who didn’t want to get married, sometime, and of the opinion that those who did dope, that dope being heroin, opium, or morphine which they knew about and not so much marijuana which just seemed exotic, were fiends, evil or beatniks. Not the profile of those who would later in the decade grow their hair longer that any mother’s most outlandish nightmare dream, wear headbands to keep that hair back, grow luxurious and unkempt beards, live in communes with both sexes mixing and matching, smoke more marijuana, snort more coke, and down more bennies, acid, and peyote buttons, and play more ripping music than the teen angel, earth angel, Johnny angel music heard down at Jack Slack’s jukebox. Everybody laughed after that spiel from Jimmy.

Those old time references got me to thinking about the days when we had headed west in the mid-1960s days, Frank with various combination of corner boys including Sam, Josh and Jimmy, me, the first time solo and thereafter with Frank and others, the days when we were in search of Pooh’s Corner. Thinking along the lines of about Frank’s “theory” of the great turn on song for our generation, thinking about the search for the “garden,” the “Garden of Eden,” that we had picked up from a line in a Woody Guthrie song, Do Re Mi (meaning if you did not have it, dough, kale, cash, forget California Edens although at our coming of California age money was not a big deal, nobody had any and so we didn’t worry about it, unlike now). Of course everybody then knew the reference from the Jefferson Airplane’s song which contained those Pooh Corner references. I remember I first heard the song one night at the Fillmore, the rat’s end concert hall where everybody who had any pretensions to the new acid-etched music either played or wanted to play, and that was the Mecca for every person who wanted to think about dropping out of the rat race and try to get their heads around a different idea.

We had in any case all headed west maybe a couple of years after the big summer of love 1967 caught our attention. Frank  had already been out there for a few months having hitchhiked from Boston in the early spring, had wound up in La Jolla down by the surfer Valhalla and had run into Captain Crunch and his merry band, a band of brothers and sisters who had been influenced by Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters to drop out, drop acid and “see the world” and their legendary former yellow brick road school bus, Further In, earlier in the decade and whose adventures had been the subject of a Tom Wolfe book. That Kesey-led experience, especially noticeable on the California coastal roads was multiplied a thousand fold once the jail-break hit full speed and Captain Crunch and his companion, Mustang Sally, had followed suit. It was never clear whether the Captain actually knew Kesey but he sure as hell was knee deep in the drug trade since the reason that he and the bus load had been in La Jolla was that he and his crew were “house-sitting” a safe house used by one of the southern drug cartels while the Captain was getting ready to head north to San Francisco and find out what was happening with the scene there. Frank had “signed on” the bus (in those days a common expression was “you are on the bus, or you are off the bus,’ and you were better off on the bus) since he had wanted to head to Frisco town from Boston anyway but the vagaries of the hitchhike road, a couple of long haul truck driver pick up the first which left him in Dallas and the second San Diego had brought him farther south. (In those days as I well knew you took whatever long haul ride you could get as long as they were heading west and got you some place on the California coast. I remember telling Frank, and he agreed that, I had never realized just how long a state it was, had been  clueless, until I had my first San Diego ride when I was looking to get to Big Sur several hundred miles up the coast which took me a couple of days of rides to get to.) 

This is the time when Frank met Cathy Callahan, Butterfly Swirl, from Carlsbad up the road a few miles from La Jolla and who was then “slumming” in La Jolla after breaking up with her perfect wave surfer boyfriend and looking for, well, I don’t know what she was looking for in the end and neither did Frank, maybe just kicks, momentary kicks to see what she might be missing because after she got through with us she went back to that perfect wave surfer boyfriend. Go figure. But then people like Butterfly Swirl, ex-surfer boy girls, working-class guys like me from Podunk, Maine, ex-soldiers unable or unwilling to adjust to the “real world” after Vietnam, hairy-assed bikers who had taken some dope and mellowed out on their rage trip, college professors who saw what they were teaching as a joke , governmental bureaucrats who knew what they were doing was a joke, or worse, con men getting all worked up seeing all the naïve kids from nowhere who wanted to be hip and were easy marks for bad dope and bad karma , corner boys trying to break out of their corners looking for easy girls, the derelict doing what the derelict always do except not being castigated for it by those seeking the newer world, hot-rod junkies tired of their midnight runs and death, and the like were all taking that jail-break minute to see if they fit into the new dispensation so maybe it was just that. Most of them went back to whatever they were doing previously once the ebb began to catch up with us, once the bad guys put on a full-court press.

So Frank and Butterfly Swirl met, met at a party Captain Crunch was throwing at that safe house, a mansion from what Frank had told me.  This Butterfly Swirl was all legs, thin, blonde a then typical California surfer girl waiting on dry land for her surfer guy to get that  perfect wave and then go ball the night away before he/they got up the next day to look, he, for the next perfect wave. Definitely in the normal course of events not a Frank-type of young woman, his running to sad- sack Harvard Square intellectual types who broke your heart a different way when they were done with you, or mine either, French-Canadian or Irish girls, all virginal and pious for public consumption any way, also heart-breakers, but chalk it up to the times. So they met, got turned on to some great grass (marijuana, for the squares) and hit one of the upstairs bedrooms where she “curled his toes.”  And they were an item as the Captain and crew ambled north for the next few months until they hit a park on Russian Hill where they parked the bus for a few weeks.

And that is where I had met Frank, and eventually Butterfly Swirl. I had stopped off at the park because somebody I met, a guy who had been on the Haight-Ashbury scene for a while, on Mission Street said that I could score dope, some food, and a place to sleep if I asked around up on the hill where the scene was not as frantic as around downtown and in Golden Gate Park. There was the bus, painted in the obligatory twenty-seven day-glo colors, just sitting there when I walked up and asked about a place to sleep. Frank, looking like some Old Testament prophet long unkempt hair and scraggly beard, army jacket against the chilled Bay winds, bell-bottomed trousers as was the unisex fashion then, beat-up moccasins, and looking like he had hit the magic bong pipe a few times too many, said “you can get on the bus, if you want.” But mainly I remembered those slightly blood-shot fierce blue eyes that spoke of seeing hard times in his life and spoke as well that maybe seeking that newer world he was seeking would work out after all, he no longer has that fierce look that “spoke” to me that first time. That introduction started our now lifetime off and on comradely relationship. I think for both of us the New England connection is what drew us together although he was a few years older than me, had seen and done things that I was just getting a handle on. And strangely I think that being older helped when I “stole” young Butterfly Swirl away from him one night at the Fillmore where the Airplane were playing their high acid rock he was mad, mad as hell, when he did find out about us but he did get over it (and I, in my turn, got over it when she about a year later she went back to Carlsbad and her surfer boy).

The “strange” part mentioned above came about because Butterfly Swirl and Frank had been “married,” at the time, no, not in the old-fashioned bourgeois sense but having been on the bus together for a while one night Captain Crunch in his capacity as the head of the band of sisters and brothers “officiated” at a mock wedding held under his authority as “captain” of the adventure ship. While this “marriage” ceremony carried no legal weight it did carry weight on the bus for it meant that the pair were to be left alone in the various couplings and un-couplings that drove the sex escapades of all bus dwellers. Moreover Captain Crunch, a rather strange but upfront guy who was all for couplings and un-couplings at will, oh yeah, except when it came to his own barnyard and he would rant and rave at Mustang Sally, his longtime companion who as a free spirit in her own right made a specialty of picking up young guys who played in one of the burgeoning rock bands of the times, “curled their toes” and made connections to get them gigs too and stuff like that. The Captain was fit to be tied when Sally got her young guy wanting habits on. But what could he do, if he wanted her on the bus.

In any case the Captain who was not only mysteriously connected with the drug world, but knew the mad max daddy of acid, Owsley, himself as well as the hermanos down south who trusted him as much as they could trust any gringo, but also had connections with the rising number of rock promoters on the West Coast decided to spring for a “honeymoon” for Frank (who was still going by the moniker Flash Dash at the time) and the Swirl. The honeymoon was to be a party before and during the Airplane’s next gig in San Francisco where he had copped twenty tickets from the promoter for some service rendered, maybe a brick of grass who knows. But here is where things got freaky, this was also to be something of an old time Ken Kesey “electric kool-aid acid test,” particularly for Swirl who never had done LSD before, had never done acid, and was very curious.
So the night of the concert a couple of hours before it was to start Captain gathered all around the bus then headquartered in Pacifica about twenty miles south of the city at another cartel safe house and offered whoever wanted to indulge some blotter. Flash and Swirl led things off, she trembling a little in fear, and excitement.  Then one and all, including me, took off in the bus to amble the Airplane show. An amble which included picking up about six people on the Pacific Coast Highway road up, offering them blotter as well, and on the in-bus jerry-rigged sound the complete (then) Stones’ playlist which had people, including me, dancing in the back of the bus.

That was a very strange night as well because that was the night, the “honeymoon” night when Swirl freaked out on the acid trip. Good freaking out after she got over the initial fear that everybody has about losing control and about the very definite change in physical perspective that are bound to throw you off if you are not used to that pull at the back of your head, or you think is pulling at the back of your head, after seeing gorgeous colors which she described in great detail, feeling all kinds strange outer body feelings as well. See she and I got together as I helped bring her down after Dash Flash took off with some woman. Well just some woman at the time, although he eventually married her (and divorced her), Joyell, Joyell of the brown-eyed world. He had met Joyell initially in Boston but he had been seeing her quite a bit since she had come to Frisco, come to get her Master’s degree at Berkeley, and whom he had run into at the concert. Yeah the times were like that, a guy or gal could be “married,” or married and then have a million affairs, although usually not on their “honeymoon” but that was Frank, Frank to a tee, and nobody thought anything of it, usually, or if they did they kept it to themselves. We tried about six million ways to try to deal with breaking from our narrow pasts and I think we saw what would be scandalous behavior back in the neighborhoods as a way to do so, although in the end all Frank (and I) got was about three divorces, a bunch of love affairs and many, too many, flings. Here’s the laugher though the thing that brought Swirl back to earth that night was her “grooving” (yeah, we had our own vocabulary as well and you can check Wikipedia for most of the meanings) on the Airplane’s music, on Grace Slick’s going crazy on White Rabbit and assorted other great music from After Bathing At Baxter’s. (Swirl said she felt like Alice-In-Wonderland that night.) So in a way I have to agree with Frank about the effect that band had on us but I will be damned if fifty years later I am going to side with him after he left his “bride” standing at the altar. Even if I was the guy who caught her fall. Yeah such was life out in Pooh’s Corner, and I wish it were still going on, wish it a lot.                                                               

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-The Smells, Ah, The Smells Of Childhood- Ida's Bakery Redux-With The Doors’ The End In Mind

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-The Smells, Ah, The Smells Of Childhood- Ida's Bakery Redux-With The Doors’ The End In Mind

Introduction by Allan Jackson

[I have gotten away a little from the way that the music of our generation, the generation of ’68 which came of age in the 1950s in the classic age of rock and roll to look at what some would call the sociology of poverty that also played an important part in the way we viewed the world. I keep referring back to that key corner boy high school experience bonded us together for a lifetime witness Sam Lowell, Frank Jackman, Si Lannon and Bart Webber who are all veterans of Tonio’s Pizza Parlor hang-out and who write occasionally in this publication. Not all of us were as full-formed, fully-engulfed as Peter Paul Markin, Scribe as we always called him in whatever poverty, by what I have called here the eternal wanting habits which is the fate of those down in the mud, down in the bottom of the social pecking order but we were nevertheless etched by the experience some way.

I keep thinking about Red Riley (no relation to Frankie who led our corner by acclamation Riley was a very common name in the Irish Catholic-etched Acre neighborhood where we grew up). Red was older, a few years older, and he and his corner boys, corner toughs really, who hung out at Harry Variety Store and raised seven kinds of hell to strangers and committed more than one celebrated  robbery none of which at the time drew him any jail time. I have mentioned before that Red was the roughest, meanest guy I ever ran across and that included the tough guys in the Army of which there were plenty. I know I was in awe of Red and his confederates, maybe six or seven guys with some turnover due to jail time. Like I said Red drew no jail time then but would later. Red Riley never got out of being a corner boy, never wanted to unless the Tonio corner boys who were really just glued together to survive and draw succor from each other. At fourteen I was in thrall of him though, dreamed of being in his corner since at that time I was no threat to him and so I was able to go into Harry’s without problems. Red was a pin ball wizard that may have something to do with since he would give me some free games when he had to go elsewhere or was getting ready for a caper. Later I don’t know what happened to Red although I had heard he did various sentences for armed robbery when his luck began to change. A while back when I had to go to the old neighborhood for something I asked somebody about Red’s fate. He had wound up a junkie of some sort and had died in a hail of bullets down in North Carolina while trying to rob a White Hen store for whatever reason he had. I was saddened no question when I had heard that Red had cashed his check.  

And that brings up my real point in this introduction. I came from that same place as Red (and the Scribe as well), that wanting habits place and was ready when young to do whatever was necessary to take that hurt away. I got caught up in one of Scribe’s well-planned but in this case not well executed burglaries when it turned out that Scribe had not factored in that the neighbors were watching the house for their neighbors and had called the coppers. The coppers looked for us for hours as we sidled home. Somebody said they had guns drawn at one point. So see it was a very close thing, a very close thing indeed about which way I would have fallen on this good green earth. Allan Jackman]    

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In memory of Peter Paul Markin, 1946-1976 (?), North Adamsville High School Class of 1964:

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This is the way the late Peter Paul Markin, although he never stood on ceremony and everybody in the corner boy night at Jack Slack’s bowling alleys down near Adamsville Beach called him plain old ordinary vanilla Markin, would have wanted to put his response to the question of what smell most distinctly came to his mind from the old neighborhoods if he were still around. Many a night, a late night around midnight usually, in the days and weeks after we got out of high school but before we went on to other stuff, maybe some of those nights having had trouble with some girl, either one of us, since we both came from all boy families and didn’t understand girls, or maybe were afraid of them, unlike guys who had sisters, who maybe didn’t understand them either but were around them enough to have figured a few things out about them we would stand holding up the wall in front of Jack Slack’s and talk our talk, talk truth as we saw it although we never really dignified the jive with the word truth.

Or maybe dateless some nights like happened a lot more than either of us, hell, any of us if it came right down to it, would admit to (I won’t even discuss the shroud we placed over the truth when talking, big talking, about “making it” when we were lucky to get a freaking kiss on the cheek from a girl half the time) we would talk. Sometimes with several guys around but mainly Markin and me, since we were the closest of the half dozen or ten guys who considered themselves Frankie Riley-led Jack Slack’s corner boys we would talk about lots of things.

Goofy stuff when you think about it but one night I don’t know if it was me or him that came up with the question about what smell did we remember from the old days, the old days being when we were in school, from around the neighborhood but I do remember we both automatically and with just a couple of minutes thought came up with our common choice- Ida’s Bakery. Ida’s over on Sagamore Street, just up the street from the old ball field and adjacent to the Parks and Recreations sheds where the stuff for the summer programs, you know, archery equipment, paints, sports equipment, craft-making stuff, how-to magazines and all were kept during the summer and after that, between seasons. Since both Markin and I when we went to Josiah Adams Elementary up the next block (named after some guy related to guys who ran the town way back when) would each summer participate in the program and as we grew older (and presumably more reliable) were put in charge of the daily storage of those materials during the summer and so got a preternatural whiff of whatever Ida was baking for sale for the next day. So yeah, we knew the smell of Ida’s place. And so too I can “speak” for old Markin just like if he was here today some fifty years later telling you his story himself.        

Unfortunately Markin laid down his head in a dusty back alley, arroyo, or cul-de-sac we never did really find out which with two slugs in his heart and nobody, not even his family, certainly not me and I loved the guy, wanted to go there to claim the body, worse, to start an investigation into what happened that day back in 1976 down Sonora way, that is in Mexico, for fear of being murdered in some back alley, arroyo, or cul-de-sac ourselves. See Markin had huge corner boy, “from hunger,” wanting habits back then, going back in the Jack Slack days. Hell I came up with him and had them too. But he also had a nose for drugs, had been among the first in our town as far as I know although I won’t swear to that now since some kids up the Point, some biker guys who always were on the cutting edge of some new kicks may have been doing smoke well before him to do, publicly do right out on Adamsville Common in broad daylight with some old beat cop sitting about two benches away, marijuana in the mid-1960s. That at a time, despite what we had heard was going on in the Boston Common and over in high Harvard Square,  when the rest of us were still getting our underage highs from illicit liquor (Southern Comfort, cheap gin, cheaper wine, Ripple, more than a few times, Thunderbird, when we were short on dough, nobody, including  our hobo knight in shining armor who “bought” for us as long as he got a bottle for his work, wanted to bother lugging cases of cheapjack beer, say Knickerbocker or Narragansett, out of a liquor store and pass it on to in obviously under-aged kids  so we all developed a taste for some kind of hard liquor or wine). Markin did too, liked his white wine. But he was always heading over to Harvard Square, early on sometimes with me but I didn’t really “get” the scene that he was so hopped up about and kind of dropped away when he wanted to go over, so later he would go alone late at night taking the all-night Redline subway over, late at night after things had exploded around his house with his mother, or occasionally, his three brother (and very, very rarely his father since he had to work like seven bandits to make ends meet for the grim reaper bill collectors, which they, the ends never did meet as far as I could tell and from what I knew about such activity from my own house, so he was left out of it except to back up Ma).

One night, one night some guy, Markin said some folk singer, Eric somebody, who made a name for himself around the Square, made a name around his “headquarters,” the Hayes-Bickford just a jump up from the subway entrance where all the night owl wanna-be hipsters, dead ass junkies, stoned-out winos, wizened con men and budding poets and songwriters hung out, turned him on to a joint, and he liked it, liked the feeling of how it settled him down he said (after that first hit, as he was trying to look cool, look like he had been doing joints since he was a baby, almost blew him away with the coughing that erupted from inhaling the harsh which he could never figure out (nor could I when my mary jane coughing spurt came) since he, like all of us, was a serious cigarette smoker, practically chain-smoking to while away the dead time and, oh yeah, to look cool to any passing chicks while we were hanging out in front of Jack Slack’s.

Of course that first few puffs stuff meant nothing really, was strictly for smooth-end kicks, and before long he had turned me, Frankie Riley, our corner boy leader, and Sam Lowell, another good guy, on and it was no big deal. And when the time came for us to do our “youth nation,” hippie, Jack Kerouac On The Road treks west the five of us, at one time or another, had grabbed all kinds of different dope, grabbed each new drug in turn like they were the flavor of the month, which they usually were. And nobody worried much about any consequences either since we all had studiously avoided acid in our drug cocktail mix.  Until Markin got stuck on cocaine, you know, snow, girl, cousin any of those names you might know that drug by where you live. No, that is not right, exactly right anyway. It wasn’t so much that Markin got stuck on cocaine as that his nose candy problem heightened his real needs, his huge wanting habits, needs that he had been grasping at since his ‘po boy childhood. And so to make some serious dough, and still have something left to “taste” the product as he used to call it when he offered some to me with the obligatory dollar bill as sniffing tool he began some low-level dealing,  to friends and acquaintances mainly and then to their friends and acquaintances and on and on.

Markin when he lived the West Coast, I think when he was in Oakland with Moon-Glow (don’t laugh we all had names, aliases, monikers like that back then to bury our crazy pasts, mine was Flash Dash for a while, and also don’t laugh because she had been my girlfriend before I headed back east to go to school after the high tide of the 1960s ebbed out around 1971 or so. And also don’t laugh because Moon-Glow liked to “curl my toes,” Markin’s too, and she did, did just fine), stepped up a notch, started “muling” product back and forth from Mexico for one of the early cartels. He didn’t say much about it, and I didn’t want to know much but for a while he was sending plane tickets for me to come visit him out there. Quite a step up from our hitchhike in all weathers heading west days. And of course join him in imbibing some product testing. That went on for a while, a couple of years, the last year or so I didn’t see him, didn’t go west because I was starting a job. Then one day I got a letter in the mail from him all Markin-y about his future plans, about how he was going to finally make a “big score,” with a case full of product that he had brought up Norte, he always said Norte like he was some hermano or something rather than just paid labor, cheap paid labor probably, and was too much the gringo to ever get far in the cartel when the deal went down. Maybe he sensed that and that ate at him with so much dough to be made, so much easy dough. Yeah, easy dough with those two slugs that Spanish Johnny, a guy who knew Markin in the Oakland days, had heard about when he was muling and passed on the information to us. RIP-Markin          

No RIP though for the old days, the old smells that I started telling you about before I got waylaid in my head about the fate of my missed old corner boy comrade poor old Markin. Here’s how he, we, no he, let’s let him take a bow on this one, figured it out one night when the world was new, when our dreams were still fresh:

“There are many smells, sounds, tastes, sights and touches stirred up on the memory’s eye trail in search of the old days in North Adamsville. Tonight though I am in thrall to smells, if one can be in thrall to smells and when I get a chance I will ask one of the guys about whether that is possible. The why of this thralldom is simply put. I had, a short while before, passed a neighborhood bakery on St. Brendan Street in a Boston neighborhood, a Boston Irish neighborhood to be clear, that reeked of the smell of sour-dough bread being baked on the premises. The bakery itself, designated as such by a plainly painted sign-Mrs. Kenney’s Bakery- was a simple extension of someone’s house like a lot of such operations by single old maid, widowed, divorced or abandoned women left for whatever reason to their own devises trying to make a living baking, sewing, tailoring, maybe running a beauty parlor, small change but enough to keep the wolves from the door, with living quarters above, and that brought me back to the hunger streets of the old home town and Ida’s holy-of-holies bakery over on Sagamore Street.

Of course one could not dismiss, or could dismiss at one’s peril just ask Frank, that invigorating smell of the salt-crusted air blowing in from North Adamsville Bay when the wind was up hitting us in front of Jack Slack’s bowling lanes and making us long to walk that few blocks to the beach with some honey who would help us pass the night. A wind too once you took girls out of the picture, although you did that at your peril as well, that spoke of high-seas adventures, of escape, of jail break-out from landlocked spiritual destitutes, of, well, on some days just having been blown in from somewhere else for those who sought that great eastern other shoreline. Or how could one forget the still nostril-filling pungent fragrant almost sickening smell emanating from the Proctor &Gamble soap factory across the channel down in the old Adamsville Housing Authority project that defined many a muggy childhood summer night air instead of sweet dreams and puffy clouds. Or that never to be forgotten slightly oily, sulfuric smell at low- tide down at the far end of North Adamsville Beach, near the fetid swamps and mephitic marshes in the time of the clam diggers and their accomplices trying to eke a living or a feeding out of that slimy mass. [Sorry I put those smelly adjectives in, Markin would have cringed.] Or evade the funky smell [A Markin word.] of marsh weeds steaming up from the disfavored Squaw Rock end of the beach, the adult haunts with their broods of children in tow. Disfavored, disfavored when it counted in the high teenage dudgeon be-bop 1960s night, post-school dance or drive-in movie love slugfest, for those who took their “submarine races” dead of night viewing seriously and the space between the yacht clubs was the only “cool” place to hang with some honey. And I do not, or will not spell the significance of that teen lingo “submarine race” expression even for those who did their teenage “parking” in the throes of the wild high plains Kansas night. You can figure that out yourselves.

Or the smell sound of the ocean floor at twilight (or dawn, if you got lucky) on those days when the usually tepid waves aimlessly splashed against the shoreline stones, broken clam shells, and other fauna and flora or turned around and became a real roaring ocean, acting out Mother Nature’s high life and death drama, and in the process acted to calm a man’s (or a man-child’s) nerves in the frustrating struggle to understand a world not of one’s own making. Moreover, I know I do not have to stop very long to tell you guys, the crowd that will know what I am talking about, to speak about the smell taste of that then just locally famous HoJo’s ice cream back in the days. Jimmied up and frosted to take one’s breath away. Or those char-broiled hot dogs and hamburgers sizzling on your back-yard barbecue pit or, better, from one of the public pits down at the beach. But the smell that I am ghost-smelling today is closer to home as a result of a fellow classmate’s bringing this to my attention awhile back (although, strangely, if the truth be known I was already on the verge of “exploring" this very subject). Today, after passing that home front bakery, as if a portent, I bow down in humble submission to the smells from Ida’s Bakery.”

That’s good enough for the Markin part, the close up memory part. Here I am for the distant memory part: 

You, if you are of a certain age, at or close to AARP-eligible age, and neighborhood, Irish (or some other ethnic-clinging enclave) filled with those who maybe did not just get off the boat but maybe their parents did, remember Ida’s, right? Even if you have never set one foot in old North Adamsville, or even know where the place is. If you lived within a hair’s breathe of any Irish neighborhood and if you had grown up probably any time in the first half of the 20th century you “know” Ida’s. My Ida ran a bakery out of her living room, or maybe it was the downstairs and she lived upstairs, in the 1950s and early 1960s (before or beyond that period I do not know). An older grandmotherly woman when I knew her who had lost her husband, lost him to drink, or, as was rumored, persistently rumored although to a kid it was only so much adult air talk, to another woman. Probably it was the drink as was usual in our neighborhoods with the always full hang-out Dublin Grille just a couple of blocks up the street. She had, heroically in retrospect, raised a parcel of kids on the basis of her little bakery including some grandchildren that I played ball with over at Welcome Young Field also just up the street, and also adjacent to my grandparents’ house on Kendrick Street.

Now I do not remember all the particulars about her beyond the grandmotherly appearance I have just described, except that she still carried that hint of a brogue that told you she was from the “old sod” but that did not mean a thing in that neighborhood because at any given time when the brogues got wagging you could have been in Limerick just as easily as in North Adamsville. Also she always, veil of tears hiding maybe, had a smile for one and all coming through her door, and not just a commercial smile either. Nor do I know much about how she ran her operation, except that you could always tell when she was baking something in back because she had a door bell tinkle that alerted her when someone came in and she would come out from behind a curtained entrance, shaking flour from her hands, maybe, or from her apron-ed dress ready to take your two- cent order-with a smile, and not a commercial smile either but I already told you that.

Nor, just now, do I remember all of what she made or how she made it but I do just now, rekindled by Markin’s reference to that sour-dough yeasty smell, remember the smells of fresh oatmeal bread that filtered up to the playing fields just up the street from her store on Fridays when she made that delicacy. Fridays meant oatmeal bread, and, as good practicing Catholics like my family going back to the “famine ships,” and probably before, were obliged to not eat red meat on that sacred day, but fish, really tuna fish had that on Ida’s oatmeal bread. But, and perhaps this is where I started my climb to quarrelsome heathen-dom I balked at such a tuna fish desecration of holy bread. See, grandma would spring for a fresh loaf, a fresh right from the oven loaf, cut by a machine that automatically sliced the bread (the first time I had seen such a useful gadget). And I would get to have slathered peanut butter (Skippy, of course) and jelly (Welch’s Grape, also of course) on oatmeal and a glass of milk. Ah, heaven.

And just now I memory smell those white-flour dough, deeply- browned Lenten hot-cross buns white frosting dashed that signified that hellish deprived high holy catholic Lent was over, almost. Beyond that I have drawn blanks. Know this those. All that sweet sainted goddess (or should be) Ida created from flour, eggs, yeast, milk and whatever other secret devil’s ingredients she used to create her other simple baked goods may be unnamed-able now but they put my mother, my grandmother, your mother, your grandmother in the shade. And that is at least half the point. You went over to Ida’s to get high on those calorie-loaded goodies. And in those days with youth at your back, and some gnawing hunger that never quite got satisfied, back then that was okay. Believe me it was okay. I swear I will never forget those glass-enclosed delights that stared out at me in my sugar hunger. I may not remember much about the woman, her life, where she was from, or any of that. This I do know- in this time of frenzied interest in all things culinary Ida's simple recipes and her kid-maddening bakery smells still hold a place of honor. And with a tear in my eye as I say it fifty some years later my boy Markin did too.

Happy 200th Birthday Karl Marx-From The Archives- The Living Thoughts of Karl Marx

Happy 200th Birthday Karl Marx-From The Archives- The Living Thoughts of Karl Marx

Workers Vanguard No. 1134	18 May 2018

TROTSKY

LENIN

The Living Thoughts of Karl Marx

(Quote of the Week)

May 5 marked the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth. The excerpts below are taken from the beginning and conclusion of the Communist Manifesto, a seminal work that Marx co-wrote with his lifelong comrade, Friedrich Engels.

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes....

The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.

Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat....

The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers....

The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.

WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!

—Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)

From The Marxist Archives- Labor and Capital Have No Common Interests

From The Marxist Archives- Labor and Capital Have No Common Interests Workers Vanguard No. 1133	4 May 2018

TROTSKY

LENIN

Labor and Capital Have No Common Interests

(Quote of the Week)

The trade unions are the mass defensive organizations of the working class. The trade-union bureaucracy undermines the power of the unions by its allegiance to the U.S. capitalist order, particularly expressed through support to the Democratic Party. In a 1942 lecture, James P. Cannon emphasized that the Trotskyists who led the successful 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters strikes fought against illusions in the politicians and government agencies of the capitalist class enemy. The understanding that the interests of the workers and bosses are counterposed is vital to reviving the unions as battalions of class struggle and to the fight to forge a new leadership of labor.

All modern strikes require political direction. The strikes of that period brought the government, its agencies and its institutions into the very center of every situation. A strike leader without some conception of a political line was very much out of date already by 1934. The old fashioned trade union movement, which used to deal with the bosses without governmental interference, belongs in the museum. The modern labor movement must be politically directed because it is confronted by the government at every turn. Our people were prepared for that since they were political people, inspired by political conceptions. The policy of the class struggle guided our comrades; they couldn’t be deceived and outmaneuvered, as so many strike leaders of that period were, by this mechanism of sabotage and destruction known as the National Labor Board and all its auxiliary setups. They put no reliance whatever in Roosevelt’s Labor Board; they weren’t fooled by any idea that Roosevelt, the liberal “friend of labor” president, was going to help the truck drivers in Minneapolis win a few cents more an hour. They weren’t deluded even by the fact that there was at that time in Minnesota a Farmer-Labor Governor, presumed to be on the side of the workers.

Our people didn’t believe in anybody or anything but the policy of the class struggle and the ability of the workers to prevail by their mass strength and solidarity. Consequently, they expected from the start that the union would have to fight for its right to exist; that the bosses would not yield any recognition to the union, would not yield any increase of wages or reduction of the scandalous hours without some pressure being brought to bear. Therefore they prepared everything from the point of view of class war. They knew that power, not diplomacy, would decide the issue. Bluffs don’t work in fundamental things, only in incidental ones. In such things as the conflict of class interests one must be prepared to fight.

—James P. Cannon, The History of American Trotskyism (1944)

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-The Time Of Frankie’s Carnival Time-With The Silhouettes’ Get A Job In Mind

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-The Time Of Frankie’s Carnival Time-With The Silhouettes’ Get A Job In Mind  

Introduction by Allan Jackson

[Maybe the worse thing about growing up poor, poorer than church mice as my Grandma would have it with a slight sneer since she was referring to my poor father’s inability to adequately provide for his family of four boys and a wife since he was an uneducated man and she thought my mother had married beneath her station, for a kid was always wanting things that couldn’t be bought. Of course a kid doesn’t know, doesn’t want to know, would have not have given a fuck to put it starkly that it was a struggle to just keep a roof over the head and food on the table and only saw and heard that he or she could not have what some other Johnnie or Janie had on the consumer dream television. Of course a kid will still even if he or she becomes aware of the situation later doesn’t want to hear about all the thin air talk about how this or that was not affordable.

That conflict between those freaking wanting habits and the empty envelope come payday reality in the end determined my youthful fate (my mother like many mothers in the neighborhood had weekly envelopes which were usually short on each bill due but enough to keep the wolves from the door. When that was not enough I was send to say the landlord to give the pittance and some story so yes things were close, very close indeed especially in father unemployed times). When it came time to hang with guys, with corner boys I came up with a bunch of guys like the eternally mentioned Scribe and Frankie Riley the acknowledged leader of our crew mainly because he was tight with Tonio the guy who ran the pizza place where we hung out who treated him like a son. That “headquarters,” known or unknown  to good guy Tonio who had immigrated from Italy and had a great beauty of an Italian girlfriend whom despite her age we googled, was where Scribe would hatch some weird but workable plan to grab dough from the rich houses in town near the beach at Squaw Rock. After we almost got catch when Scribe led his one and only expedition when Frankie was out of town we swore that he would never lead another no matter how good the plan.

All of this to say the simple truth that living down in nowhere land at the base of society is not conductive to bringing out the better angels of our natures and those wanting habits twisted plenty of ordinary guys for a long time. So running away with the glamorous circus, carnival, sideshow was not some aberration or some far-fetched thing not when the con men, grifters and hustlers were showing all kinds of exciting tricks to kids who were ready to grab dough with every hand. Can you blame them. Allan Jackson]       

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An old man walked, walked haltingly down a North Adamsville street, maybe Hancock Street, or maybe a street just off of it, maybe a long street like West Main Street, he has forgotten which exactly in the time between his walking and his telling me his story. A street near the high school anyway, North Adamsville High School, where he had graduated from back in the mist of time, the 1960s mist of time. A time when he was known, far and wide, as the king, the king hell king, if the truth be known, of the schoolboy be-bop night. And headquartered himself, properly headquartered himself as generations of schoolboy king hell kings had done previously, at Salducci’s Pizza Parlor as was his due as the reigning schoolboy king of the night. But that schoolboy corner boy king thing is an old story, an old story strictly for cutting up old touches, according to the old man, Frankie, yes, Francis Xavier Riley, as if back from the dead, and not fit, not fit by a long shot for what he had to tell me about his recent “discovery,” and its meaning.

Apparently as Frankie, let us skip the formalities and just call him Frankie, walked down that nameless, maybe unnamable street he was stricken by sight of a sign on a vagrant telephone pole announcing that Jim Byrd’s Carnival and Traveling Show was coming to town and setting up tent at the Veteran’s Stadium in the first week in June, this past June, for the whole week. And seeing this sign, this vagrant sign on this vagrant telephone pole, set off a stream of memories from when the king hell king of the schoolboy corner boy night was so enthralled with the idea of the “carny” life, of this very Jim Byrd’s Carnival and Traveling Show carnival life, that he had plans, serious plans, to run away, run away with it when it left town.

Under this condition, and of course there was always a condition: if Ma Riley, or Pa Riley if it came to it, although Pa was usually comfortably ensconced in the Dublin Pub over on Sagamore Street and was not a big factor in Frankie’s life when it came time for him to make his mark as king hell king, just bothered him one more time, bothered about what was never specified at least to me. Of course they never did, or Frankie never let on that they did, bother him enough to force the issue, and therefore never forced him on the road. But by then he was into being the corner boy king so that dream must have faded, like a lot of twelve- year old dreams.

In any case rather than running away with the carnival Frankie served his high school corner boy term as king hell king, went to college and then to law school, ran a successful mid-sized law practice, raised plenty of kids and political hell and never looked back. And not until he saw that old-time memory sign did he think of regrets for not having done what he said that “he was born for.” And rather than have the reader left with another in the endless line of cautionary tales, or of two roads, one not taken tales, or any of that, Frankie, Frankie in his own words, wants to expand on his carnival vision reincarnation and so we will let him speak :

“Who knows when a kid first gets the carnival bug, maybe it was down in cradle times hearing the firecrackers in the heated, muggy Fourth Of July night when in old, old time North Adamsville a group of guys, a group of guys called the “Associates,” mainly Dublin Pub guys, and at one time including my father, Joe Riley, Senior, grabbed some money from around the neighborhood. And from the local merchants like Doc over at Doc’s Drug Store, Mario over at Estrella’s Grocery Store, Mac, owner of the Dublin Pub, and always, always, Tonio, owner of Salducci’s Pizza Parlor. What they did with this money was to hire a small time, usually very small time, carnival outfit, something with a name like Joe’s Carny, or the like, maybe with a merry-go-round, some bumping cars, a whip thing, a few one-trick ponies, and ten or twelve win-a-doll-for-your-lady tents. On the side maybe a few fried dough, pizza, sausage and onions kind of eateries, with cotton candy to top it off. And in a center tent acts, clown acts, trapeze acts with pretty girls dangling every which way, jugglers, and the like. Nothing fancy, no three-ring circus, or monster theme amusement park to flip a kid’s head stuff. Like I say small time, but not small time enough to not enflame the imagination of every kid, mainly every boy kid, but a few girls too if I remember right, with visions of setting up their own show.

Or maybe it was when this very same Jim Byrd, a dark-haired, dark-skinned (no, not black, not in 1950s North Adamsville, christ no, but maybe a gypsy or half-gypsy, if that is possible), a friendly guy, slightly wiry, a slightly side-of-his-mouth-talking guy just like a lawyer, who actually showed me some interesting magic tricks when I informed him, aged eight, that I wanted to go “on the road” with him first brought his show to town. Brought it to Veteran’s Stadium then too. That’s when I knew that that old time Associates thing, that frumpy Fourth of July set-up-in-a-minute-thing-and-then-gone was strictly amateur stuff. See Jim’s Carny had a Ferris wheel, Jim had a Mini-Roller Coaster, and he had about twenty-five or thirty win-a-doll, cigarettes, teddy bears, or candy tents. But also shooting galleries, gypsy fortune-telling ladies with daughters with black hair and laughing eyes selling roses, or the idea of roses. And looking very foxy, the daughters that is, although I did not know what foxy was then. Oh yah, sure Jim had the ubiquitous fried dough, sausage and onion, cardboard pizza stuff too. Come on now this was a carnival, big time carnival, big time to an eight-year old carnival. Of course he had that heartburn food. But what set Jim’s operation off was that central tent. Sure, yawn, he had the clowns, tramp clowns, Clarabelle clowns, what have you, and the jugglers, juggling everything but mainly a lot of whatever it was they were juggling , and even the acrobats, bouncing over each other like rubber balls. The big deal, the eight- year old big deal though, was the animals, the real live tigers and lions that performed in a cage in center stage with some blonde safari-weary tamer doing the most incredible tricks with them. Like, well, like having them jump through hoops, and flipping over each other and the trainer too. Wow.

But now that I think about it seriously the real deal of the carny life was neither the Associates or Jim Byrd’s, although after I tell you about this Jim’s would enter into my plans because that was the carnival, the only carnival I knew, to run away with. See what really got me going was down in Huntsville, a town on the hard ocean about twenty miles from North Adamsville, there was what would now be called nothing but an old-time amusement park, a park like you still might see if you went to Seaside Heights down on the Jersey shore. This park, this Wild Willie’s Amusement Park, was the aces although as you will see not a place to run away to since everything stayed there, summer open or winter closed. I was maybe nine or ten when I first went there but the story really hinges on when I was just turning twelve, you know, just getting ready to make my mark on the world, the world being girls. Yes, that kind of turning twelve.

But nine or twelve this Wild Willie’s put even Jim Byrd’s show to shame. Huge roller-coasters (yes, the plural is right, three altogether), a wild mouse, whips, dips, flips and very other kind of ride, covered and uncovered, maybe fifteen or twenty, all based on the idea of trying to make you scared, and want to go on again, and again to“ conquer” that scared thing. And countless win things (yah, cigarettes, dolls, teddy bears, candy, and so on in case you might have forgotten). I won’t even mention that hazardous to your health but merciful, fried dough, cardboard pizza (in about twenty flavors), sausage and onions, cotton candy and salt water taffy because, frankly I am tired of mentioning it and even a flea circus or a flea market today would feel compelled to offer such treats so I will move on.

What it had that really got me going, at first anyway, was about six pavilions worth of pinball machines, all kinds of pinball machines just like today there are a zillion video games at such places. But what these pinball machines had (beside alluring come-hither and spend some slot machine dough on me pictures of busty young women on the faces of the machines) were guys, over sixteen year old teenage guys, mainly, some older, some a lot older at night, who could play those machines like wizards, racking up free games until the cows came home. I was impressed, impressed to high heaven. And watching them, watching them closely were over sixteen- year old girls, some older, some a lot older at night, who I wondered, wondered at when I was nine but not at twelve, might not be interfering with their pinball magic. Little did I know then that the pinball wizardry was for those sixteen year old, some older, some a lot older, girls.

But see, if you didn’t already know, nine or twelve-year old kids were not allowed to play those machines. You had to be sixteen (although I cadged a few free games left on machines as I got a little older, and I think the statute of limitations has run out on this crime so I can say I was not sixteen years or older). So I gravitated toward the skee ball games located in one of those pinball pavilions, games that anybody six to sixty or more could play. You don’t know skees. Hey where have you been? Skee, come on now. Go over to Seaside Heights on the Jersey shore, or Old Orchard up on the Maine coast and you will have all the skees you want, or need. And if you can’t waggle your way to those hallowed spots then I will give a little run-down. It’s kind of like bowling, candle-pin bowling (small bowling balls for you non-New Englanders) with a small ball and it’s kind of like archery or darts because you have to get the balls, usually ten or twelve to a game, into tilted holes.

The idea is to get as high a score as possible, and in amusement park land after your game is over you get coupons depending on how many points you totaled. And if you get enough points you can win, well, a good luck rabbit’s foot, like I won for Karen stick-girl one time (a stick girl was a girl who didn’t yet have a shape, a womanly shape, and maybe that word still is used, okay), one turning twelve-year old time, who thought I was the king of the night because I gave her one from my “winnings,” and maybe still does. Still does think I am king of the hill. But a guy, an old corner boy guy that I knew back then, a kind of screwy guy who hung onto my tail at Salducci’s like I was King Solomon, a guy named Markin who hung around me from middle school on, already wrote that story once.

Although he got one part wrong, the part about how I didn’t know right from left about girls and gave this Karen stick girl the air when, after showering her with that rabbit’s foot, she wanted me to go with her and sit on the old seawall down at Huntsville Beach and according to Markin I said no-go. I went, believe me I went, and we both practically had lockjaw for two weeks after we got done. But you know how stories get twisted when third parties who were not there, had no hope of being there, and had questionable left from right girl knowledge themselves start their slanderous campaigns on you. Yes, you know that scene, I am sure.

So you see, Karen stick and lockjaw aside, I had some skill at skees, and the way skees and the carny life came together was when, well let me call her Gypsy Love, because like the name of that North Adamsville vagrant telephone pole street where I saw the Byrd’s carnival in town sign that I could not remember the name of I swear I can’t, or won’t remember hers. All I remember is that jet-black long hair, shiny dark-skinned glean (no, no again, she was not black, christ, no way, not in 1950s Wild Willie’s, what are you kidding me?), that thirteen-year old winsome smile, half innocent, half-half I don’t know what, that fast-forming girlish womanly shape and those laughing, Spanish gypsy black eyes that would haunt a man’s sleep, or a boy’s. And that is all I need to remember, and you too if you have any imagination. See Gypsy Love was the daughter of Madame La Rue, the fortune-teller in Jim Byrd’s carnival. I met her in turning twelve time when she tried to sell me a rose, a rose for my girlfriend, my non-existent just then girlfriend. Needless to say I was immediately taken with her and told her that although I had no girlfriend I would buy her a rose.

And that, off and on, over the next year is where we bounced around in our “relationship.” One day I was down at Wild Willie’s and I spotted her and asked her why she wasn’t on the road with Jim Byrd’s show. Apparently Madame LaRue had had a falling out with Jim, quit the traveling show and landed a spot at Wild Willie’s. And naturally Gypsy Love followed mother, selling flowers to the rubes at Wild Willie’s. So naturally, naturally to me, I told Gypsy Love to follow me over to the skees and I would win her a proper prize. And I did, I went crazy that day. A big old lamp for her room. And Gypsy Love asked me, asked me very nicely thank you, if I wanted to go down by the seawall and sit for a while. And let’s get this straight, no third party who wasn’t there, no wannabe there talk, please, I followed her, followed her like a lemming to the sea. We had lockjaw for a month afterward to prove it. And you say, you dare to say I was not born for that life, that carnival life. Ha.