ESP Records

 ESP Records was a big label among the hip set in the sixties. Here is my blog on the subject on my Hard Times blog. 

My most embarrassing moment in junior high school

 

Junior high school can be a time when we are easily embarrassed. We want to be liked, part of the in crowd, and not be ostracized by wearing "party socks" or suspenders or, heaven forbid, have green ears.  So this is the story about how I had to walk around the junior high school with green ears for at least two weeks. 

I was excited when I entered the 7th grade to discover that there was a journalism class that put out the school newspaper, "Junior Hi Lites". In this class I would learn to write newspaper stories, get published and even visit the Record and the offices of the esteemed newspaper, the New York Times. The first day of class we were told the newspaper had to put on a skit for the assembly program on student clubs available for the new seventh graders. The cute teacher wanted us to do a skit on Junior High Lites. 

I can't remember who came up with the idea of having Martians promote the paper. I know I wrote the jingle. Myself and Kate B. were volunteered to play in the skit. We would be Martians who liked to eat the school paper. The jingle, which I wrote, had the lyrics, "We always eat Junior Hi Lites, better by far, so everybody get Junior Hi Lites ----today. "

The cute journalism teacher judiciously applied green dye to our ears, and we did the skit in the auditorium. It was a success. The job of removing the green from our ears was left to our parents. 

I came home from school and my mother looked at me and said, "You know we need to get that green off of your ears. We retreated to the bathroom where a variety of cold cream, alcohol and soap could not discharge the green color on my ears. 

"Sorry, but I'm sure it will fade away in a few days." The few days turned into a few weeks. I had to march around the junior high school for an extended period of time with green ears. I thank my classmates who never mentioned my ears after the first day or so. They must have gotten bored with my ears and went on to more pressing matters. 

Happy birthday Wavy Gravy

 I write about Wavy Gravy in my Hard Times blog. 

the chair

 Senior year in high school I had a girlfriend, Marge. We talked about this and that and one day she started complaining about how her new apartment lacked a decent chair. She had been living in a nice house in northern Bergen County but now, after her parent's divorce, she had to move to a garden apartment in Hackensack. One thing she missed was having a decent armchair.

I was walking home from school and I spied a nice old-fashioned chair lying at the curb for refuse. I jumped to the occasion and brought the chair to Marge's garden apartment. Marge was thankful and said "I'm sure Mom will love this chair!

An hour passed and I was home doing my homework to the sound of Dan Ingram. For some reason my father was mowing the front lawn. A late model Chevrolet Nova drove in front of the house. It stopped and Marge got of the car, went to the trunk and struggled to pull the chair out. 

The next second, a comely lady got out of the car and my father rested the lawnmower. He looked surprised. They had a chat. Mother yelled, "Mr. Mustache you better get down here!". I ran to the curb just as Marge scurried to the passenger side of the car and it was off. Mother said I shouldn't give people trash from the street. 

After that my father teased my mother. "That Mrs. Golbfarb is a nice-looking woman", he'd say at dinner. 

"You better keep away from Mrs. Goldfarb" my mother would retort.

As I recount this story in my dotage, it occurs to me that Mrs. Goldfarb could have thrown that chair in her apartment bin. She didn't have to come to our house. She wanted to check out the family of that new boy.💁

Top 100 records

I remember the first time I discovered that radio stations did end of year lists featuring the top records of the year I was a passenger with my brother driving the Ford Fairlane. We were listening to WABC and were trying to guess which Beatles record would be no. 1. I guessed She Loves You because it was the no. 1 record for several weeks in March. It was quite a surprise when Louis Armstrong's Hello Dolly came out to no. 1. 

1965 was also an interesting year, I predicted Downtown by Petula Clark and much to my surprise Satisfaction was no. 1 that year. Apparently, millions of kids bought the record to hear the dirty lyric that was supposedly censored from radio play that summer. Ballad of the Green Berets was no. 1 in 1966 and Lulu's To Sir With Love got the honor in 1967.

By 1967 though, the hip kids were listening to albums and hearing album cuts on FM. The era of teenagers and AM radio was coming to an end. Woodstock killed classic AM radio. 

The town drunk

 

When I was eight years old the folks took me to a football game at Hathenrock High School. My older brother played clarinet in the band, so in the support of him and the local high school we all sat in the bleachers and watched Hathenrock play Paramus High. 

It was a fun game, highlighted by the Paramus half-back who ran the wrong way and scored a safety for our team. At the game an older man kept standing up and shouting "Rah rah Paramus" in the middle of the home team stands. I asked my mother who he was. 

"Oh, he's just the town drunk. Don't pay any attention to him",   I was informed by dear Ma ma. For the first time in my life I met up with a town drunk. I was so proud of my home town. We had a swell hospital, a swell high school band, a winning team, and our very own town drunk. 

The bicycle rack was good

 Here's an anecdote from my other blog which is about my time as a Junior Leader in the 6th grade. 

I missed Woodstock

https://hardtimesmrmustache.blogspot.com/2019/08/i-missed-woodstock.html

Mr. Leech

On rare occasions as a high school student my father would invite me to go the museum where he worked. Perhaps my mother wanted to get rid of me during my school vacation or perhaps my father wanted to instill in me the joys of being an adult in the working world.

I did get a walk around the place and got to see an expert art restorer, Mr. Leech, at work. He had a painting and he was working with a cleanser and seemed to make the colors much brighter.

On snowy days when the buses weren't running I remember him calling the house. He lived in the Garden State like us and he was probably calling to ask dear old dad for a ride. He must have been in his eighties and I could hear his raspy German accent. Like all people who answer the phone and realize it is an unwanted call I had a distinct joy in my voice as I said, "Dad, it's Mr. Leech!"

Mr. Leech had a special cake he gave us every year. It was called a "poor man's cake" and apparently it was a vestige from the war when butter and eggs were not available. We ate it every Christmas.

I asked the old man why he gave us this treat every year. "It's because I always give him his check the day before pay day". The advantages of being an accountant.

Editor's note: Now available is my first Kindle book.

Snow days

Here is a post about being a kid and getting a snow day.

The man who knew Huncke

This is a blog I wrote for my Hard Times blog but I thought some of you might find entertaining, although it is definitely 1970s. It is an embellished version of how I moved to Denver.

the Eclipse of July 1963

As a kid, I always listened to what I was told, especially on the radio and TV. I remember I heeded all the warnings and hid in the basement one Saturday in July of 1963. The story was if you so much as glimpsed at the sun during that fateful afternoon you would be blinded for life.

My father and older brother somehow missed the advice. They were working on a trellis in the front yard when they noticed the sun looking weird.

"Look up at the sky!" my brother yelled. My father looked up. Several of the neighbors looked up.

"Doesn't the sun look weird!" my father said. They came and told me after the eclipse was over. I hate to admit it but I was a little disappointed that I wasn't the only sighted one in the family after that. Rather, things went on normally.

Editor's note: Don't look up at the sky on the 21st without the right eye ware. Prudence is the better part of valor.

Memorial day parade

Here is a post that describes Memorial Day in Hackensack.

Muhammad Ali vs. Brian London

Last week I heard about the Maryweather- Pacquiao fight after it was over, just like I discovered who Nirvana the band was after Kurt Curbain died. I'm not always up on major cultural events. I did, as a youth, follow heavyweight fights, and as a listener of Howard Cosel's radio minute, "Speaking of Sports" I was even a bit knowledgeable about the fighting world.

I first heard about Cassius Clay when he recited poetry on the Jack Paar Friday night show. Then I listened to the first Clay Liston fight on the radio with my father and brother. By that time most sports events were on tv but this was a throw-back to an earlier time because it was only on the radio unless you wanted to spend money at a theatre.

The 1967 Ali Brian London fight brought me a moment of glory in gym class. Probably the only moment of glory I ever had in that institution, as I sucked at all the activities (except maybe Jumping Jacks) that one partook of in such a place.

It was my knowledge of radio and dxing that brought me that moment of glory. It was the locker room after the showers and the young men were complaining about not being able to watch the fight the night before. I piped up, "I heard the fight on the radio!"

"It wasn't on the radio!" interjected Brave-heart.
"Yes it was, I picked it up from a station in Canada."
"Really?" Suddenly Willie Bassett, Buba Davis, and  Leroy Williams all looked at me and were impressed. My one moment of glory in gym class.

the Von Steuben House

New Jersey has plenty of places where George Washington slept and when I was in the Cub Scouts I had the priviledge of going to the Von Steuben House and seeing one of his haunts. Cub Scouts was a good introduction to the world of clubs that would occupy us baby boomers as we descended through life. I was part of Pack 19, affiliated with the Church on the Heights in Hackensack. My pack was led by Mrs. Fontanella. My mother had been a Pack mother earlier and she was tired of kids tearing up her house. It was better anyway, for me, to have a non relative as my leader.

Cub Scouts was okay. I can remember making lanyards. I was also cajoled into doing my Kennedy impersonation at one of the monthly pack meetings. I remember my one joke. "I lost my marbles. But I lost them with vim and vigor".

At any rate a group of maybe six of us made it to the Von Steuben House north of town. I remember there was an older woman who promised us that if we were good boys she would take us to the dungeon. I guess we were good because I remember we saw the jail and rack where they tortured prisoners. A colonial version of Fifty Shades of Grey.

Radio Shack

It's official. Radio Shack is now gone. All those swell Radio Shacks we grew up with are now history. If you want to be nostalgic, here is a 1961 catalog you can browse through. I remember as a kid buying a transistor radio there. They were also a good place to find cables and I remember buying RCA to transistor plug converter cables there, which I still have.

Mostly I remember going to the Radio Shack in Paramus with my big brother to help him test tubes. My brother was the electrician of the family and I remember going with him with all the tubes from the radios and the television set in the house in a brown paper bag. At Radio Shack we would test the  tubes, occasionally finding a bad one that needed replacing. I never remember them being out of any tube we needed.

Radio Shacks were inviting to a male teenager in a way most other stores weren't. The fluorescent lights were bright and the mostly young male crowd seemed intent and knowledgeable about radio, tape decks, ham decks and that sort of thing.  Hobbyists now buy most of their gear online, but it will never be quite the same.

Editor's note: I also remember going to Leonard Radio on Route 4.

Clams

The other night I dreamt about clams. My father and a few of the men were in the basement of the Mills house gorging themselves on raw clams. Outside in the backyard the more refined people were eating steamed clams. Clams must have been lots cheaper in 1962 than they are today. I seem to remember my father and Mr. Mills going to a seafood place in Maywood and buying twenty gallons of clams.

The occasion for all this clam ingestion was the annual Labor Day party, peopled mostly by members of the local Democratic club. I remember there were lots of kids. We played horseshoes, played on the swings, and ate clams. The adults talked politics and drank beer, whiskey, Martini's and ate clams. Perhaps the clam thing was tied to the Kennedy's and their Hyannis Port vacations where they presumably ate shellfish. 

My father actually invented a clam knife with a wooden holder where the unfortunate live clam was placed before being shucked. He never patented it but it came in quite handy. Hot sauce went along with the clams on a half shell. 

The family's first stereo

As a tot I remember playing a record player in the basement. I bought mainly singles but occasionally an album got played.Then suddenly my father decided to get a real stereo. I don't know if my father got a raise, my big brother got a scholarship, or the old man was ashamed when he realized his friends and neighbors had real stereos and color tv's. He went for quality too.  He had me go through the Consumer Reports and we picked out a Dual turntable, a Fisher amplifier and speakers. He bought them all in New York at a discount stereo store he had discovered. For the first six months the turntable was in the living room. Then it was moved to the basement. Apparently Mother did not want me sitting on her good furniture playing records.

The old man strung wires throughout the house, connecting the living room (the amplifier-tuner), a speaker in the kitchen, and the phonograph in the basement. He bought a second set of speakers for the basement (of lower quality than the ones in the living room), but not bad. When I wanted to play records I had to turn on the Fisher in the living room and then go dowstairs to the basement. If Mother was cooking in the kitchen she could flip off her switch so she didn't hear my rock and roll records. Later when I was finished, the radio went on (usually on WPAT-FM) and the switch in the kitchen was pulled.

In other words, my father was okay with buying one amplifier but wasn't about to spring for two. I guess he was an early progenitor of what is called networking.

One of the things about surviving your relatives is that stuff from your childhood comes back into your life. The turntable has returned to my life and will sit next to that ugly green tree lamp in my living room. It is of pretty good quality and you can fine tune the speed and play 78's. After a few beers the lamp sways to the music, just like when I was visiting home from school.

Editor's note: The turntable played singles and monophonic records well but after awhile I noticed the mixing on stereo recordings was off. I think it needs a new cartridge, since the plugs are lose. I also noticed that it skipped every time I walked by. Sad to say, the Technics is now back where it was and the Dual is now disconnected, another project I'll get to one day. Sometimes it's better to leave well enough alone.

the Monkees

Davy Jones has died and now we are getting all the programs commemorating the Monkees  music and television show. It was one of the moss successful attempts  at cross platform marketing to the teen market. There was the hit tv show plus the albums. 

I grew up in a different age when the parents controlled the tv set and what activities a young person participated in. I never saw the Monkees show until well into the seventies when they were in re runs. Monday night I went to Monday School, or the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine. When I was home on Monday nights Mother dictated that we would watch CBS not NBC.  It wasn't until this week that I realized that I missed out on one of the essential elements of growing up in the sixties. The phenomenon of the Monkees. I missed the whole thing. 

Editor's note: A follower of this blog may wonder why I was able to watch Shindig and not the Monkees. It was because Wednesday nights my parents went to Democrat meetings, leaving their son alone in the house with the tv. Cuando el gato esta,  los ratanos hacen una fiesta.

Jean Luc Goddard

This tale stretches into the seventies but you might enjoy it too.