Handel v. Nothin’ Like a Dame

Both Roger Weichman and I had sung in the Boys Glee Club, a  mandatory freshman elective, but had not tried out for the prestigious A Capella Choir.  So when E. Arthur Hill, music director for Elgin High School, told us we sang well enough that no tryout was necessary and that he would be pleased to have us , we were quite surprised.  My exposure to music to that point had been during summers, learning camp songs in the Kiwanis Lodge with other  Scouts at Camp Big Timber: “Did you ever think when the hearse goes by…” and “Bill Grogan’s Goat ,” etc. So now I’m looking at sheet music for the first time in my life. Of course, I had no clue as to what all that stuff meant.  There were five horizontal lines, and on the lines were note thingies shaped like a “p” or a “d”, and sometimes the round part was filled in and sometimes it was hollow. And when the note had moved higher on the aforementioned horizontal lines, I was, with my adolescent, basso profundo, supposed to search for and produce a higher sound, somewhat consistent with that coming from my fellow back-row basses.  Some of these foreign symbols were explained in Latin, like that helped.  When “ppp” appeared, you practically whispered;  “fff” (reminded me of my report card) meant blast ‘em.

About 100 strong, we were divided into eight parts, eg.  first and second soprano (mostly girls), first and second bass (no shortstop, though), and we sang the latest hits from Oklahoma (“The corn is as high as an elephant’s eye”) and South Pacific (“What ain’t we got? We ain’t got dames.”)  Pretty easy stuff and fun to sing. We sang at community and high school functions, sometimes traveling out of state. We were good, often receiving a standing ovulation.  Then old E. Arthur dropped the bomb.  We were, apparently, good enough and learned fast enough to sing the Messiah. What’s that?  An oratorio written in 13 days by George Frederick Handel and considered one of the most popular works in Western choral literature.         Oh.

It wasn’t easy, but we learned it, and we sang it, and we loved it.

So, in 1981, when the music director of Fremont Presbyterian, a very large church,  sent out a notice to the Sacramento area churches of a Messiah sing to be held on the first Sunday of Advent, bring your own music, no rehearsal, downbeat at 6:00 PM.,  I was there on time.  Large placards, TENOR, ALTO, etc. were held up in four corners of the sanctuary indicating where to sit.  And when the approximately 900 singers were assembled in the pews, the director explained that there would be four conductors and four organists.  If we got lost or bogged down, the conductor would stop us and we would start again.  No rehearsal.  Amazing.

And, sure enough, at 6:00, a small, throw-together group from various local orchestras began the Overture. Now 900 singers took up a lot of room in the sanctuary, so the non-singing attendees sat in the balcony in the rear and in the actual choir loft in the front. I almost wished that I had been sitting with them to better hear the magnificence of all of those voices.   When it was time, for instance, for an alto aria, all of the altos who wanted to sing that piece moved to the center aisle and, although written for solo, sang it in unison;  the same for bass and tenor arias. We sang seven choruses and about as many arias, and concluded, of course, with the great Hallelujah Chorus with the organ at “fff”.  A fantastic experience. I never did learn to read music, but, for 11 years, on the first Sunday of Advent, I was there, belting it out, loving it.  Thank you E. Arthur Hill.

…No Place Like Home(s)

Betcha haven’t bought twelve houses.  Betcha don’t know anyone else who has.

Just out of the army, having served in Texas, Korea, New York City and other hostile places,  I headed for Denver: the Mile High City, Queen City of the Plains, Gateway to the Rockies, where I  met the love of my life and started a family and career.  The first house, in southeast Denver, is on  East Arkansas (1/12), a fine little three bedroom with basement, but no garage.  When the violent hailstorm came that summer afternoon, it ripped off sections of the roof, shredded the lawn furniture, and punched holes in the siding a quarter inch deep, leaving the paint with the appearance of chicken pox.  Insurance covered the cost to repair the damage, but, we thought, wouldn’t it be nice to have a brick house. I mean  $95/ month house payments are certainly within our budget. Let’s move on up. After all, I’m making $350 a month!

All brick, two-car attached garage, chain-link fence, wool carpet, upstairs utility room on  East Jefferson (2\12).  All right. Livin’ high now. Like George Jefferson on East Jefferson. Until…

“Dear, do you smell smoke?”

“Why yes, I believe I do.”

“Why look, dear, the garage is on fire!”

“Shall we call the fire department?”

“Oh, yes, we probably should.”

( I’m not sure that those were the actual words we spoke, after all it happened almost 50 years ago, and now that I think back, there may have been panic, running amok and screaming.)

The whole back wall of the garage was on fire. The phone line had already burned through, so while Ginny ran to the neighbor’s, I backed the Rambler wagon out of the garage. Now our other car was a three-tone “57 Hudson Hornet, resplendent with chrome, fins and a continental kit, a “gift” from my in-laws; and for just a moment I hesitated before deciding to save it, too.

By the time the fire trucks showed up, I had put the fire out with the garden hose, but the thick, black smoke was flowing nicely  through the door we had left open from the garage into the interior of the house.  After that claim, our insurance agent stopped sending us calendars.

Next time: New Mexico, Land of Enchantment (3/12)

Shaken…not stirred

I got a memo asking me to set up a meeting for the approximately 40 branch managers in  Area 4, which covered our offices in all of the major western cities from Denver to Honolulu,  Anchorage to San Diego. The site was to be San Francisco which was a part of my region in northern California. The meeting was set for Wednesday, October 18, 1989.

My first choice was the Marriott Courtyard, but my secretary told me –too late, already booked, World Series you know. But, finally she found a large, suitable hotel on Hwy. 101, not far from Candlestick. Everyone was scheduled to arrive the day before for two reasons: one, the meeting was to start at 8:30 a.m. the next day; and two, everyone who could would try to get over to see the third game, Tuesday afternoon, between the A’s and the Giants.

So on Tuesday, October 17, I left my office in Sacramento, drove over to San Francisco, had lunch with a couple of the guys, and grabbed a nap in my room.  Later in the day I headed for the hotel bar around 5 p.m.to watch the game with Roger from the Las Vegas branch.  We had just sat down when, unexpectedly, all the bottles and glasses along the back of the bar started to vibrate and crash to the floor. Roger wanted to know what was going on.  I started to tell him that we are just having  one of our little earthquakes when the whole place started to rock and roll and loud crashing noises could be heard up above. This was not good. Everyone rushed out of the bar through the lobby door, which, fortunately, could still be opened. The hotel consisted of two buildings of about six stories one connected to the other at the second floor by an enclosed walkway over the driveway from the street to the parking lot. Roger stopped under the walkway and looked up.  I cautioned him about the possibility of aftershocks and the certainty of gravity.

It was a beautiful, sunny afternoon, and most of the the hotel guests and employees stood around out in the parking lot listening to the news broadcasts about the 7.1 Loma Prieta Earthquake on car radios. “The Cypress freeway has collapsed trapping many motorists.”  They  weren’t trapped. They were squished. The Cypress Street Viaduct, part of I-880,  was a two-level freeway which carried south-bound traffic on the upper level and north-bound traffic on the lower. The upper collapsed onto the lower, turning cars, trucks and buses into elongated steel and vinyl containers about 24 inches high– 42 died there.

Meanwhile, over at the eight- mile- long Oakland Bay Bridge that I had driven over a few hours before, a 50 foot section of the four-lane pavement on the upper level was knocked off of its supports and unhinged like a trap door, resting at a 45 degree angle on the lower deck. There would have been no fatalities there if a city worker hadn’t directed traffic the wrong way back onto the upper level– one died.

In other parts of the city, major destruction. Almost 4000 people  injured. In the Marina district many buildings had collapsed, gas lines had ruptured and fires had started. There was no water pressure, so the fire department recruited young men to run the fire hoses through the streets clogged by the debris of collapsed buildings down to the bay where pumpers sucked up the water. No one wanted a repeat of the 1906 quake during which about 80 percent of the city burned.

One of our v.p.’s from Chicago was landing at the San Francisco airport when the pilot, just touching down and informed by the tower of the quake and possible damage to the runway, gunned it and flew off to find another, more hospitable place to set down. The v.p. returned directly to Chicago, no longer anxious to attend a meeting where the buildings and streets move around.

David Kim, one of our managers, had a brand new house just south of San Jose with a brand new garage in which he had parked his brand new Volvo, onto the hood of which his brand new hot water heater, containing 50 gallons of water, crashed.

Around 9 p.m., the fire department declared our hotel, now about five degrees off the vertical with noticeable separation of joints and seams, safe to spend the night!  So, by candlelight and flashlight (no power of course) guests were led by hotel staff up the stairs through the fallen plaster to our rooms.  What, we’re supposed to sleep?

The next day the power is restored and the meeting is held. As I am reviewing the charges at the front desk, the clerk comments that he is surprised that we held our meeting.  All of the other meetings scheduled for that day were cancelled.  Hardy folk, we.

(The Marriott Courtyard, my first choice you may recall, was badly damaged and didn’t open again for a year and a half.)

Requiem for the Scone

Well, now she’s gone and done it. She’s closed the Cookie Tin. Who’s gonna make my scones? My sugary, blueberry and raspberry, still warm, heavenly-textured scones from the tidy, tiny, little weekend bakery. No more OPEN flag fluttering on the front porch. No more outwitting the Nazi parking meters in front. No more opportunities for my brilliant witticisms: leave no scone unturned; let he who is without sin cast the first scone. No more Romancing the Scone. No more adding a scoop of vanilla to make an ice cream scone. Groan. It’s over, finished, done. How sad. Scone cold dead.

A Snow Day

So there we were, President’s Day weekend, me and the Mrs., on our way up to Tahoe-Donner in the Sierra Nevadas. We’re headed to the  private ski lodge provided for clients of  the attorneys my company retained in northern California.  I mean this was a new,  two-story, five bedroom, everything-furnished, luxury house backed up on the golf course. Our good friends, Kathe and Bill, would be meeting us up there, so we stopped by and gave them a set of keys. Not that it would do them any good.  The ski lodge door had two locks, and we had been provided with two keys to each lock.  We gave them one set and kept the other. Only later did we realize that Kathe and Bill had both keys to one lock; we had both keys to the other. Duh.

Of course, being February, snow was predicted.  But not to worry because I had brought along a new set of cable chains in case they were needed. We headed up I-80 from near sea-level in Sacramento toward Donner Summit at 7,000 feet, 100 miles away, an easy two hour trip.  Unless it snows. Which it did almost immediately, wet and heavy, but melting on the pavement.  Halfway up we began seeing the CALTRANS electronic signs- CHAINS REQUIRED BEYOND SODA SPRINGS.  No problem.  We’ve got a set in the trunk. And when the snow began to stick to the road, and it seemed to make sense, I stopped to put the chains on.  Directions on the box.  20 minutes later, clothes dripping wet, having exhausted my supply of profane words, the chains were on, and we headed toward the highway patrol checkpoint

“What do you mean no chains?”

“Well, not on this side,” the officer said.

Yes, indeed, the chains on the left side were gone, lost– right side, still there. And so, the kindly officer just directed us over to the westbound lanes, and we headed back down the mountain. About 40 miles back was the little town of Baxter where chains could be rented.  But as we descended the temperature increased, and I stopped to lay down once again in the slushy wet snow to take off the remaining chains from the right rear wheel.

There were probably ten people ahead of me in the line to rent chains when we reach Baxter. Finally, my turn. I tell the guy my tire size, and he tells me that it’s $25.00 rental plus $25.00 deposit, so it’s $50.00 on the old MasterCard for this free weekend at the luxury lodge. Not to mention the cost of the new chains, one of which was laying in the snow somewhere up on the mountain.  But, young and undaunted, we head back toward the summit, figuring that Kathe and Bill are already up there and knowing now that they can’t unlock the door. Of course, this was before cell phones.

Now it’s really, really snowing and hundreds of cars from San Francisco, San Jose, and Sacramento are headed up to the ski areas for the long weekend, all on I- 80, all traveling at 15 mph because the cars in front  are traveling at 15 mph. So, an hour later we’re about 15 miles further along. (Think I- 95 at rush hour, only on a steep slope in a snowstorm.) Now it’s getting dark. And slippery. Time to have the chain monkeys put on the rental chains.

Chain monkeys are licensed by the California Dept. of Transportation to put snow chains on vehicles.  During a storm, chain monkeys, just guys (not monkeys) living in small towns along the interstate looking to make an extra buck, don bright yellow all-weather gear and come out to stand along the freeway when the chain requirement is in effect. In the last 30 miles to the summit, one could round a curve and there would be a chain monkey appearing like a yellow ghost on the shoulder of the interstate in the blowing snow, willing to lay under the dripping car for $15.

“I’m sorry, sir, these chains are not the right size for your tires,” said the young man with the steamed up glasses and drippy nose who had been struggling for 15 minutes under the car. The day was not going well.

I explained that I had chains for one tire and could he put those on, thinking it would be better than nothing.  He explained that he had found a set for one tire and if they fit, he would give them to me. They did and he did, and off we went into the dark and stormy night. The highway patrol waved us through the check point, and we made it over the summit and down into Truckee where the 24 hour snowfall has been known to exceed five feet (1982). Our two hour trip had taken just over nine hours.

We found our friends at a restaurant in town, waded through knee-deep snow to the front door of the house, found the snow-blower and were finally able to get the cars into the garage. As I checked the chains before going in to collapse, I couldn’t help wondering, upon close inspection, how it was possible that both tires now had identical cable chains, down to brand name etched into the metal, one set lost around 2 pm, and an exact match found by a chain monkey, selected by chance along a 100 mile stretch of interstate being traveled by thousands of cars in a snowstorm.

No hard-to-believe incidents were experienced during the remainder of the weekend.

July 11, 2009

I promised to write about my personal Sierra Nevada-Donner winter ordeal, but heck, it’s summer, which comes with heat.  You think it gets hot in Hampshire County? While we were living in Sacramento, we had the dubious privilege to experience some record setting weather: the most successive  days over 90 degrees, the most successive days over 100 degrees, and the most successive  days over 110 degrees.  Mind you, Sacramento is only 100 miles northeast of  San Francisco where the temperature rarely gets over 75 and few people have air-conditioning.  Inland from the ocean, one learns to cope.

For example, let’s say it’s a beautiful, sunny, July afternoon in Sacramento – outside temperature: 106 degrees. Your car  has been in the Medical Arts parking lot for two hours while you’ve been experiencing a root canal. The asphalt is radiating heat like a Bessemer blast furnace.  Foolishly, you bought a black car.  You approach your car,  remove your baseball cap and use it to grasp the handle and open the door. Careful not to touch the roof of the car, you lean in over the seat, insert the key, start the car,  switch on the air-conditioner to super-max and close the door after lowering the windows and inch or two with the power switch.  You  then retreat to the shade of the trees near the sidewalk for ten minutes to contemplate the cost of your root canal and wait for the a/c to lower the car’s interior temperature to broil.

Now back to the car.  Open the door with the hat.  Grab the bath towel from the back and place it on the driver’s seat which has been pre-heated.  Sit down and remove the reflective sun screen panel from the windshield.  Try not to notice the oozy mass on the passenger side floor labeled Hershey. And off you go. Like, cool.

June 9, 2009 California Tales, Part One

Having hung out in California for 20 years, I became fascinated with the Donner Party, a group of about 80 unfortunate souls who, in 1846, were traveling west for a better way of life a little before the Gold Rush made the state so popular, and populous. None of what I will relate is particularly accurate, but true, mostly.

One thing that sticks in my memory from books about the Donner group (one I remember is Ordeal by Hunger) is that as they were passing across Utah’s Wasatch Range of the Rocky Mountains, they, like, ran out of trail. Sturdy folk, they just cut down the hundreds of trees blocking their path, disassembled their 20 wagons and lowered the parts, the oxen which did the pulling and all of their possessions, by ropes, down the cliff face to a flatter place where they reassembled the wagons and moved on. Until they had to do it again, repeating the process until they reached the Great Salt Lake Desert. Then things got tough.

Today, one notices, as one travels the 500 miles from Salt Lake City, Utah to Reno, Nevada, mostly desert and salt flats, with no Starbuck’s, on I-80 in one’s air-conditioned car, the signs that say, for instance, “No Service Next 111 miles.” That means if one runs out of gas in the 120 degree heat of August, one is guilty of extremely, and possibly deadly, poor planning. And so it was with the Donners. Unable to find forage and water for their 100 plus animals, they had to abandon many of their personal possessions and double up on the wagons as the oxen began to die of thirst. After about a month of this, they reached the Sierra Nevada Mountains where they found grass in the meadows and cool, snow-fed, mountain steams. So, they rested. Too long. Then things got tough.

It was the end of October when the snow started and didn’t stop. In a few days the snow was up to the back of a mule. It reached sufficient depth to bury the oxen which had died because they couldn’t eat snow. The hungry pioneers used long poles to poke into the drifts in hopes of striking the corpses of scattered dead oxen because now food was running low. It was only 30 miles to the summit and from there a comparatively easier 100 mile down-slope to Ft. Sutter in what is now Sacramento. But, they, that is, the survivors, didn’t make it until April of the next year. Normal annual, snow-fall for that part of the Sierras is 200 inches. That winter it reached accumulations of 15 feet.

The following spring, on a bright sunny day, one rescue party saw smoke coming out of a large, circular hole in the snow. Some of the starving pioneers had scavenged, or broken off large, dead branches, dragged them to a central point and arranged them in large circle with their ends meeting, not unlike the shape of a wagon wheel. The hub in the center was set afire and as these burned, more of the branch was dragged into the center, thus eliminating the need for an axe. Of course, after a few days the area melted by the fire and trampled by the people had sunken in to a considerable depth, forming the circle into which the rescuers, just in time for lunch, stared. At the bottom, were gathered a few living skeletons, roasting parts of recently deceased relatives with additional cuts laid out, perhaps for dinner.

So, if you ever get the chance to visit the beautiful Lake Tahoe (depth: 1645 feet) area or drive over nearby 8600 ft. Donner Pass on I-80, take the time to visit Donner Memorial State Park at Donner Lake where there is still a large tree, dead but standing, with a large, char-blackened area about 10 feet up from the ground. This tree had supported and anchored some boards and canvas used as a shelter by one family in the Donner party. The charred area is where the occupants had built a fire at the then level of the snow. And next time our schools shut down because of frost on Hwy. 50 (which goes to Sacramento, by the way), think about how it is when things get really tough.

My next blog will describe a personal, Donner Summit ordeal.

West Virginia has some similarities to Illinois, my native state. Both have coal mines in the southern area, both have extensive rural areas.  However,  Illinois grows mostly corn. West Virginia has many more trees. The main difference is that Illinois is as flat as your kitchen table.  So when my mom told me I would be walking to school, I had no worries about going uphill, both ways.

We had moved into our new, little house in Keeneyville, IL. (Pop. 204) on December 6, 1941, the day before the day that would “live in infamy.” Our relatives in Chicago couldn’t understand why we had moved to the “sticks.”  The following year, as time neared to start first grade, I told my mom I couldn’t go to school because I didn’t know how to read.  She made me go anyhow. So there I was, a poor, defenseless, six year old walking alone (no sissy school bus available back then) one mile, past all the cornfields, to the wooden country schoolhouse at the corner of US 20 and Gary Rd. (Picture Cary Grant waiting for the bus in North by Northwest.).

Mrs. Iva C. Ashby, the principal, taught first, second, third and fourth grade in the “little” room (little for small children), all at the same time. Her room contained the coal stove, a monstrous cylindrical chamber which heated the “whole school,” and upon which we would place our wet mittens to dry. Mrs. Dennis taught fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth grade, all at the same.  Her room had no stove, but contained the bathrooms, one for boys, one for girls, as is traditional. The boy’s bathroom (I never was in the girl’s bathroom) was rather long and narrow, had a window and a toilet: a regular, white porcelain toilet.  Only, it didn’t flush.  Whatever went into it just dropped straight down into a pit. In the “big” room, we kept the bathroom doors tightly shut. We had running water from an outside source. It was outside and ran when you vigorously raised and lowered the handle, pumping until water came out of the spout.

That was it, a sparse (Spartan), two room school (Pop. 47). Playground equipment consisted of a merry-go-round: a circular wooden platform, painted orange, about 12 feet in diameter centered on a vertical axle with hooped, iron bars to grab onto about every two feet around the perimeter.  A couple of  kids would grab the bars and run, pushing the merry-go-round along its circular path faster and faster, and then hop on to experience the thrill of the ride. If, however, one was prone to fail at hopping on, one had a good chance of falling under the heavy wood and iron mauler and being severely mangled.  Also, one learned that one should never put one’s tongue on the iron bars in the winter like David Pipkin did when the temperature was about minus 15.

Four flat places were scraped out as bases behind the school for playing baseball, but most of the time we played pum-pum-pullaway and red-rover. That was it. No basketball , no football, no school nurse, no band or chorus. Just learnin’.

This is the first in a series of 37 blogs describing my pre-high school education adventures. (Just kidding)

Remember: Where there’s a will…there’s a won’t.

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