The Voices on the Radio: Freed, Franklin, and Dee

I love radio - its immediacy and especially its intimacy... 

it is part of your life, whispering into your ear. - Malcolm Turnbull

Mine is the TV generation, or so I'm told.  The truth is more complicated, as is often the case with truth.

Perhaps it was because I achieved my teenage years around the same time that FM was developed, or because cable TV sports had not reached its current ubiquity and, thus, a more traditional medium for listening to baseball and basketball was still required, but I recall most of my best memories of growing up involved listening to the radio.  Whether it was the stately tube radio on which my grandfather and I listened to Cleveland Indians games, or the clock radio on my nightstand in our house on East 213th St. from which I cheered the Cleveland Cavaliers onto rare victories during their expansion year, or the rather nice Pioneer receiver in my college dorm, purchased with money made from a summer job, on which I heard the alternative rock music of my generation from stations like the late, lamented WNCR and the now-lamentable WMMS, it was voices on the radio rather than images on a TV screen that brought me a world that was vivid and immediate.

There was a great tradition of radio in Cleveland, especially in regards to the music that would first be labeled "rock and roll" by a metro disk jockey named Alan Freed.  In the early 1950's, Freed realized, despite what the commercial interests who underwrote the expenses of his radio station thought, that a new sound was being heard in the small clubs and road houses.  As his friend was Leo Mintz, the owner of Record Rendezvous, the most popular record store in northeastern Ohio [and even where, from 1968 until 1982, I bought every album of popular music I owned], Freed knew that young people, flush with 1950's affluence, were buying rhythm and blues songs marked by a torrid beat and incomprehensible lyrics.  As these songs were mostly performed by black artists, they were relegated to the "ethnic" stations on the low end of the dial and given their own separate listing on the Billboard charts.  Freed felt it was time they were mainstreamed.



This was met with the usual resistance, of course, as smart choices are usually the ones that require some courage, and courage is a rare word in corporations.  However, using the leverage that was enabled by Record Rendezous' support of Freed's radio show, and the guarantee of about 250,000 rabid potential listeners, he branded himself the "King of the Moondoggers" and played, late night after late night, this new form of music on "The Moondog Show".

Any sentient human being knows the rest of the story.  Rock and Roll became the standard of popular music, shoving big band, jazz, choral, and even true rhythm and blues into their own musical sidestream, and becoming the soundtrack for the remainder of The American Century.  Freed would move to New York City in the early sixties and, thus, spread the sound that originated on the shores of Lake Erie.

Although he would die a couple of years before the Summer of Love [which, in Cleveland, was the year after the Summer of Violence], and thus before I began earnestly to listen to the radio, Freed's style and passion would continue to be copied and presented through all of the popular radio markets in the United States.  As testimony to his influence, when it was time to choose a city in which to locate the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, there really were no other serious candidates.

It wasn't just in music, however, that new ideas were being presented through Cleveland radio.  In the early 1970's, a mundane local sportscaster was given his own radio show and ordered to "make it interesting".  If any of the readers are old enough to remember sports radio in the 1960's, that might seem to have been an impossible assignment.  However, Pete Franklin, armed with this commission from his bosses, began to seek on-air phone calls from particularly opinionated and abrasive listeners [no shortage of those in Northeastern Ohio], issue forth with pungent observations on the mediocrity that is, by tradition, Cleveland professional sports, openly and loudly question the intelligence and sanity of team owners, and quickly become the only sports radio show to which anyone would listen.

My favorite moment was when he would introduce the nightly report on the Cleveland Indians by playing a funeral dirge. 

Like Freed and many others who pushed the envelop of "acceptable" behavior [what a quaint notion, especially in regards to radio], Franklin would be hired and fired in a funicular of employment.  Still, his radio persona was so successful that he has been copied again and again, even into the television market through ESPN and similar cable channels so that, if you have never heard of Franklin, you've "heard" him through the heirs of his style.  Also like Freed, Franklin would take his act to New York, for better or worse.

It's difficult to characterize Gary D. Gilbert, whose radio name was Gary Dee.  When I was in high school, my father, whose office was next door, would drive me to school.  It wasn't a very long drive, but I would listen to Gary Dee on the car radio on the way, much to my father's lament, as he found Dee common, unnecessarily hostile, and too loud.  This is what made Dee perfect for older teenagers, though, as the conversation in homeroom would always be about whom Dee had verbally abused on the radio that morning and to what extent.

Contemporary "shock jocks" are ubiquitous these days, but Dee was the originator of that manner of attracting listeners.  Although he was working on what was supposedly a country music station, he would maybe play, during the course of a four hour show in morning drive time, one song by George Jones or...well, Jones is the only one I remember.  The rest of the 240 minutes not claimed by some surprisingly high-end advertisers would be spent encouraging phone calls from the rich crop of eccentrics who lived in the greater metro area.  Dee referred to them as "egg-suckin' dogs".

He was cruel to fools, abrasive to political figures, intolerant of authority, and generally representative of every exaggerated quality of the classic American crank.  Having said that, he would also frequently host the president of Cleveland's city council, a formidable figure widely recognized as the true boss of the city, and engage in such playfully hostile banter with him that both would be de-articulated with laughter.

There's something to be said about being able to attract the largest radio audience in the Midwestern United States to listen to two grown men laugh like children into a couple of microphones.  Well, in radio, it's whatever works.

Dee lived a life similar to the most dissolute of the country artists whose music he was supposed to play on his show.  He battled the demon of addiction, would sometimes be in trouble with the police, would make the daily papers with a scandalous divorce, and would also watch his Arbitron ratings soar with every occasion of negative attention.

One Saturday night, my best friend and I, coming back from a baseball game or concert or something, decided, as we knew we were driving through the "mansion section" of the city, to cruise by Dee's home along the lake shore.  As we approached his house we saw police lights, several cars parked hither and yon, and a lot of people milling about the front yard.  Thinking we were about to approach a crime scene, my friend and I were preparing for a marvelous story to be told in homeroom.

As we got closer to the house, we saw a mad party in progress with Dee standing in his front yard with his left hand around the neck of a whiskey bottle, his right arm around a zaftig, bleached blonde who really didn't look like she was from Cleveland, posing for photographs with about half of the Cleveland Police Department.  Everyone present looked like they were completely, in Dee's words, "wrapped around the axle".

My friend, who was prepping to enter pre-med at Case Western Reserve University [and is now a senior surgeon with the University Hospital system in Cleveland] said, "Maybe I should study broadcasting."

I could speak at length about Dee's influence in this particular corner of the medium, but I will simply note that the fellow who hosted the afternoon drive time show on the same station copied Dee's style.  His name was Don Imus.  Whatever happened to him, I wonder?

All of these memories were brought to mind the other day when one of my students told me that she was working on a study of the influence of radio on culture.  Since broadcast, commercial radio has mostly surrendered to satellite stations and MP3 players, it amazed her that once upon a time there was a free, open forum for the expression of opinion and art that pre-dated the Internet and social media.  "It wasn't as backwards as I thought," she noted.

No, and in many ways, it was even broader and more accepting of new ideas than is the tightly constrained and politically sensitive Internet.  While TV brought us images of the world, radio brought us a far greater range of ideas and expression in a rapid and nimble format.

Or, as a program director for whom I worked in my radio days once said, "It's amazing how much you can see with your ears."

G. K. Chesterton

America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature.

From the Preface to "Leaves of Grass"

Other states indicate themselves in their deputies . . . but the genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors . . . but always most in the common people.

Their manners, speech, dress, friendship—the freshness and candor of their physiognomy—the picturesque looseness of their carriage … their deathless attachment to freedom—their aversion to anything indecorous or soft or mean—the practical acknowledgment of the citizens of one state by the citizens of all other states—the fierceness of their roused resentment—their curiosity and welcome of novelty—their self-esteem and wonderful sympathy—their susceptibility to a slight—the air they have of persons who never knew how it felt to stand in the presence of superiors—the fluency of their speech—their delight in music, the sure symptom of manly tenderness and native elegance of soul . . .

their good temper and open handedness—the terrible significance of their elections—the President’s taking off his hat to them, not they to him—these too are unrhymed poetry. It awaits the gigantic and generous treatment worthy of it.

- Walt Whitman, 1855

Major Sooth

Sooth: The Coercive Corporations

The context is this: Hong Kong, a free, liberal, democratic, self-governing city was handed over to the powers that be in Beijing — a clutch of corrupt, brutal, dishonest, organ-harvesting, gulag-operating murderers — as part of an agreement with the United Kingdom, who once had sovereignty over Hong Kong as a colonial power. Beijing wants Hong Kong to be more like the rest of China, and the people of Hong Kong do not. They recently took to the streets to force the reversal of a decision that would have subjected Hong Kong residents to extradition to the so-called People’s Republic of China for certain crimes rather than be tried in Hong Kong under Hong Kong law. Because the junta in Beijing has no compunction about drumming up charges for political purposes, this would have represented a noose around the neck of every dissident in Hong Kong. Jun Takahashi tweeted his support for liberal democrats against mass-murdering national socialists. 

And Nike sided with the mass-murdering national socialists. 

Swoosh: There goes your soul.

You Should See How the “Environmental Generation” Leaves the Beaches

Glastonbury Festival attendees leave plastic bottles and trash strewn across grounds

Here, while you're at it, please read this.

Sooth

“One used to hear the harshest racial rhetoric from society’s bottom rungs. Now one hears it from academic and political elites.” - Glenn Reynolds, University of Tennessee law school.

This is Going to Get Out of Control Very Soon

All beaches in the United States are public, at least from the line of high tide.  The greed-heads are now experimenting with blocking access to them.

Half Moon Bay hotel gets $1.6M fine for blocking beach access

And, on the East Coast:

If there is one philosophy uniting the long string of communities along the Outer Banks, it is that their beaches should be open and free. And accessible.

 But the town of Duck is one of the few communities along the entire coast of North Carolina that provide no public access to the ocean shoreline. The adjacent town of Southern Shores also lacks public beach accesses, effectively cutting off a total of about 12 miles of ocean coastline on the northern Outer Banks to all but private property owners, renters and their guests. 

That might be why the recent arrest of Duck resident Bob Hovey for using what a property owner contends is a private beach access in his neighborhood has ignited a firestorm on social media about private property rights versus public rights to access the beach.

We should note that Hovey is a surfer and a surf photographer of some minor notoriety.  He also lives and owns a business in that town renting watersports equipment.  His [profane and alcohol-impaired] neighbors won't let him have access to the beach that is across the road from his house.

Personally, I would invest in a boat that was easy to beach and bring in a literal boatload of surfers, volleyball players, and, if necessary, screaming children and import wave after wave of them, legally, in order to make my point.  Of course, I almost went all "old marine" on Taylor Swift's security team in Rhode Island when they informed us that the waves were owned by Ms. Swift.  I even invited them to arrest me, assuring them that the next Sunday's sermon, in nearby Providence, would feature their Pharisaic behavior, as well as that of their employer.

Unfortunately, I was not arrested.  Also, I wasn't preaching the next Sunday.

I Try to Stay Out of Politics, but Mendacity and Hypocrisy Kinda Get on Top of Me

Former President Barack Obama’s top immigration chief in charge of removing illegal immigrants said that the “cages” Democrats have accused President Trump of housing children in were the brainchild of the Obama administration.

“I’ve been to that facility, where they talk about cages. That facility was built under President Obama under (Homeland Security) Secretary Jeh Johnson. I was there because I was there when it was built,” said Thomas Homan, who was Obama’s executive associate director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement for nearly four years.

Our incoherent immigration policy is not the fault of one, single person.  It is the product of a leadership system that doesn't know what it wants to do, or just plain doesn't know what to do at all.  Hence, they blame the other party and try to score some transient political points.

But, But, But...Plastic Straws

Just eight countries in the region are responsible for about 63 percent of total plastic waste flowing into the oceans. Little of that junk has been exported by rich economies. Instead, it’s almost solely generated by Asia’s newly minted consumer classes, the vast majority of whom lack access to garbage collection, modern landfills and incineration. Any progress in reducing ocean plastic will have to start with them.

This is Why There is Commandment #9

Inventing Victimhood: Universities too often serve as “hate-crime hoax” mills.

D.A. Levy and the Cleveland Beats

“If you want a revolution
grow a new mind
and do it quietly if you can”

I taught poetry in schools and colleges for nineteen years, here and there.  Sometimes as a full-time faculty member, sometimes as an adjunct, sometimes as a visiting lecturer.  I've come to realize that there are two things about poetry I've always appreciated.  The first, and the most obvious, is that it elevates all elements of a language to art.  Not only through simple rhyming verse, but through tone, the pattern of the syllables, and the manner in which the very pronunciation of the words can create a kind of music without instrumentation.  Poetry delicately enlivens the mind and creates a synaptic theme for appreciating reality anew. [Wow, that last sentence is pure academic gibberish, isn't it?  Or is it poetry?!]

The second reason is more complicated and visceral as it appeals to another portion of my character, I suppose; that which appreciates art that is less...tactile.  For example, in my days as an indifferent and failed New Wave musician, it was "the scene" rather than the music that drew me.  The energy, the raw, undiluted emotion of primal music, the massive expectations and the sheer, wild puissance of the crowd and the band and the immediacy of shared experience. 

The people drawn to music, both musicians and fans, tended towards the fringes of society, either due to their youth or liminal habits or peculiar view of the world.  To be involved in the next, and decidedly non-corporate, development of popular music was intoxicating, especially when it had not even been noticed by the professional sentinels of the media.

Similarly, poetry, too, highlights "the scene".  While I can recognize the stirring themes of Tennyson, absurd world-view of Eliot, the vividity of Shakespeare, or the lyrical wonder of Wordsworth, I can also appreciate what has been offered by poets of, in my opinion, lesser efforts.  While they may have come and gone, or only heard on amateur nights at the corner bar/coffeehouse or at a "slam poetry" experience at a college, they were willing to extend their artistic sense into a verbal medium.

This means there isn't that much of a difference between a musician and a poet.  There are those who prefer to offer the classics, or at least the classical themes, and those who are more experimental. Some become recognized artists whose work is collected and presented to subsequent generations, others offer a more transitional effort that also plays a role in the greater corpus of art.  Both poets and musicians experiment, shove at limits that are artificially imposed, weave new themes and styles into expression, and attract followers who are eager to share in the poet/musician's art.  The life of David Bowie and the life of Lord Byron are not as separated as one might think.  Both, whether consciously or not, make their lives into an art form.

One of those poets of lesser effort but important influence was D.A. Levy, who established a forum and style for a school of verse that became known as The Cleveland Beats [which was also the name of the one of the bands in which I played].  I'm not a big fan of Levy's poetry, but I appreciate what he did and how he pushed the raw experience of localized poetry into a new, much less cautious and deliberate, dimension.  A testimony to his power was that, when I was a first-year English teacher in a Cleveland high school, I was advised not to teach Levy's works in my classroom.  Being banned from formal educational curricula is generally, in my experience, an indication that the subject may actually be valuable.

Levy was born David Allen but, with a young man's enthusiasm and as an homage to e.e. cummings, eventually shortened his name and rendered it in lower case so that, by the mid-60's, he was listed on posters and poetry collections as d.a. levy.  His family were members of the sizable Jewish population that emigrated from Europe during the 1930's and found jobs in the enormous and powerful manufacturing sector of Cleveland.  He was born in 1942, lived throughout the Cleveland area, and unlike other Cleveland poets such as Hart Crane or Langston Hughes, never left.  His overriding desire was to write the great Cleveland poem, much as had been done for Chicago by Carl Sandburg.

He was slight, quiet, and unimposing with an unremarkable voice; often seen in the centers of counter-culture life with those originally labeled "beatniks" and later "hippies".  His first poem to be read by a respectable audience, "Cleveland Undergrounds", sought to capture the dualism of his city.  It is an immature work, and derivative of many of the beat poets of the period, but shows an energy that many found compelling.

Other poems would be printed from 1962 to 1968.  These would not result in any form of mainstream recognition, but Levy would gradually become a legend in the Cleveland sub-culture that found its epicenter in the University Circle/Coventry Road area of the city and in a popular performance space located at the Episcopal cathedral.

[It's interesting that when I think back to my youth, much of the counter-cultural arts scene was introduced through the basement of Trinity Cathedral.  In those days, the Episcopal Church really was on the cutting edge of society, rather than simply believing itself to be.]

He would suffer a different type of recognition, unfortunately.  Disturbed by the movement that was consuming youth culture and creating friction with the political class, Levy and the other "hippies" would come under the aggressive scrutiny of the police, especially as their drug use and promiscuity became known.  Since Levy wrote candidly of the counter-culture experience, used sparing profanity in his art, and was recognized as a spokesman for the artists of his generation, he was targeted by local authorities and twice arrested for obscenity.  As the charges were somewhat vague and clearly designed to harass, nothing much came of them, legally.  However, they did contribute to what many of Levy's friends recognized as a growing mental disturbance.  In 1968, shortly after completing what is considered his most elaborate work, “Suburban Monastery Death Poem,” Levy took his own life.  As he was only 26-years-old, one cannot help but wonder if he would have continued to grow as an artist.

Beyond his poetry, however, Levy made another, and lasting, gift to the Cleveland literary scene. Using an old mimeograph machine, purchased from some school or church, Levy and some of this friends created the primary underground publication of its era, The Buddhist Third Class Junkmail Oracle. Beginning in the summer of 1967, its crude, blue print pages presented a collection of local poets who could not find a publisher willing to print the lyrics of hippies.  These poets, The Cleveland Beats, found local notoriety and earned an appreciation that continues to this day.  Without Levy, they would have never been known.

It wasn't simply a forum for poetry, either.  As noted in a magazine profile of Levy from a few years ago:

Paging through issues of the Junkmail Oracle, which levy first published in June 1967, is like paging through levy’s radical, rambling mind. Articles on Buddhism by Allen Ginsberg and Zen author Alan Watts, levy’s own poems and some by Charles Bukowski ran along with his wild collages, which mixed images of Buddha and Hindu gods with cutouts from newspapers, movie ads and skin magazines...When police shut down the bars and cafes at Euclid and East 115th, and fires struck the buildings, levy accused the cops and the University Circle development corporation of destroying the area to create a wall between blacks and whites. (Two parking lots and a McDonald’s sit at the corner today.) Levy also wrote about books, movies and music, even interviewing the Velvet Underground, the legendary art-rockers....

In retrospect, Levy was exactly right about the motivation behind the University Circle development, as it did create a barrier between the cultures that lasts until this day.  The development also, very gradually, destroyed the counter-cultural community through re-zoning, absurd rents, and the harassment from law enforcement.  From the late 1960's through the late 1970's, the clubs where we would play our eccentric music, the coffee houses where we could hear poetry recited, the theater company that produced experimental plays, the small bookstores, even the delicatessen that provided cheap, wholesome food on ample platters, would all evaporate.

However, there is an historic marker acknowledging the existence of the sub-culture and its artists, as if from some exotic, extinct tribe that surrendered to inevitable progress.  So there's that, I suppose.

There is also, like a brooding ghost, an image of Levy that can be spotted to this day on university bulletin boards, dormitory doors, some remaining independent bookstores, and the music clubs that have gradually moved further east and west.  His visage serves as a reminder that, behind the perpetual attempts of the city to be something other than it is, it remains the Jerusalem of the under-appreciated. And that's okay.

A video of Levy reading one of his poems may be found at the Cleveland Memory Project, which is still the most complete depository of his works.  As he was sloppy about seeking copyright protection and tended to release his poems far and wide, all of them are in the public domain.  In fact, most may be found for free on the Internet.

Thursday's Place: Coventry Road

There is one in every city, although by the time we notice them they are on the verge of becoming tourist traps.  The stages are familiar:

1.  A middle class neighborhood is established.
2.  The established middle-class leaves for the suburbs, a new immigrant class enters.
3.  It becomes a lively, if poor, immigrant neighborhood.
4.  The old immigrants are assimilated into the mainstream culture and leave the neighborhood.
5.  Increasingly, shabby homes and businesses begin to develop as subsequent residents are transient.
6.  Discovery of the neighborhood by students and artists looking for cheap digs; the shabbiness becomes chic.
7.  Full integration of the younger, counter-culture population.
8.  Increasing desirability of the area based on inexpensive housing, opportunities for start-up businesses, and a cultural cache based on the neighborhood's recognized hip-ness.
9.  Invasion of the gentrifiers; rents rise precipitously and local businesses offer increasingly expensive, exclusive goods.
10.  Full tourist appeal with tour bus stops and photo opportunities; so much so that the absence of cultural viability goes unnoticed.

So, North Beach and Haight-Asbury in San Francisco; Venice Beach and Silver Lake in Los Angeles; Greenwich Village, East Village, Williamsburg, etc. in New York, Squirrel Hill and Shadyside in Pittsburgh; Adams Morgan in D.C.; Dinkytown in Minneapolis; Ocean Beach in San Diego...well, the list goes on.  As I noted, there's at least one in every city.

In Cleveland, Ohio, it was Coventry Road.  Well, it's now known as the Coventry Village and it's not, technically, in Cleveland, but in Cleveland Heights.  No one really cares much about that distinction, except maybe the Cleveland Heights Chamber of Commerce.  It's a short drive, or mid-length walk, from Severance Hall, home of the Cleveland Orchestra, the Cleveland Museum of Art, Case Western Reserve University, the University Hospital system, the Botanical Gardens, and many other sites.  It includes the most interesting cemetery in the metro area.

So, let's follow the process, shall we?  I'll make some stops along the way for the sake of cultural or personal commentary.

The area was farmland that was converted to a neighborhood in the late 19th century for the burgeoning middle to upper-middle class community.  At first, large houses were constructed.

Well, imagine it in 1900 and without the self-consciously "hip" paint job.

The working class, who cannot afford grand homes, begin to move into a collection of stately and handsome apartment buildings.  This growth was aided by conveniently placed streetcar lines.

Above is what was my building.  I was always saving for one of those apartments with the wrought-iron terrace that overlooked the courtyard.  Mine was on the first floor with only two windows and no cross breeze.

By the 1930's, the established middle-class had begun to move further away from the city, as public transportation improved and as cars became more available, and an incoming ethnic population replaced them.  In the case of Coventry Road, the original demographic of the new neighborhood was made up of displaced European Jews.

As the immigrant population of the metro area became assimilated, they, too, began to move away from a neighborhood that was now regarded as too close to the city to offer a comfortable life.  The number of empty houses increased and the apartments began to host an increasingly transient population, which caused the neighborhood's decline as there were fewer long-term residents with strong community roots.

Students, mostly from nearby CWRU and Cleveland State University, then began to discover the formerly gracious apartments, with remarkably reasonable rents, and move in.  Along with them came artists, actors, writers, musicians, criminals, and less-talented hangers-on to populate the area.  As it is now the mid-sixties, and the full cultural revolution is occurring, Coventry Road becomes the locus for the beats, then hippies, in this portion of the Midwest.

As a nod to times gone by, even the contemporary street signs need to be groovy.

By the mid-1970's, the hippies have faded away but those with some smarts have opened bookstores, record shops, clothing emporia, and bars with live music.  The last business from the pre-counter-culture days, a corner deli, remains and serves as the spindle for neighborhood life.  Also, as the unofficial headquarters for the Cleveland chapter of the Hell's Angels.

By the time of my residency, it was known as Irv's Deli, and was a place notorious for stale bagels and criminal activity.  It was great, in other words.

Across the street was a dive that was known by various names through the years, although I always think of it by the name it carried in the 1970's, The Saloon.  I regard it fondly as it was the first place in which I was paid to play in a band.

An unprepossessing street presence, matched by its clientele

My earliest audience, back when smoking in bars was not only allowed, but normal.  

Of the many things to be experienced on Coventry, it was the one place to find avant-garde books, records [it was where I bought my first "grown-up" music: the Sgt. Pepper album], and even films that were not available anywhere else in the city in those days before Internet commerce.  Coventry Books, with its unadorned sign, sold a lot of European experimental literature, including the full catalog of Grove Press; Record Revolution carried recordings [on vinyl] of all of the groups that, while rarely played even on FM radio, were well-known to the 20-somethings of the era.  A proper coffee house could be, and still can be, found on the corner.

And the local cinema, the Heights Art Theater, would show a representative collection of European films, even in the days when those films were considered "obscene".  In fact, their viewing of Louis Malle's "The Lovers" in 1959 resulted in a police raid, several arrests, and eventually an appearance before the Supreme Court, an event which occasioned a justice famously to state that while he couldn't define pornography, he knew it when he saw it.  The Theater would win the case.  As it was a five minute walk from my apartment, I would often enjoy Lina Wertmuller films and the Friday night showings of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show".

Coventry Road was also the home of of D.A. Levy, Jau Billera, and Harvey Pekar, three members of a loose confederation known as The Cleveland Beats and credited with serving as sentinels for the New Bohemian era in American letters.  There was certainly a proliferation of small periodicals dedicated to verbal expression that could be found in the neighborhood, most of them published for free on "borrowed" mimeograph machines.  One of those crudely printed quarterlies, Harpoon! [God help me, that was the name] would hire me as editor, a job that became, during the two years of its existence, one of my favorite experiences.

I don't think it was because of my editorial ability so much as it was because I taught at a high school and had access to a mimeograph machine.

Well, you get the idea.  A lot happened in that small area that, while a minor echo in the greater cultural history of the United States, provided those of us of that generation and inclination a place of freedom.  Now that my parents are deceased and my friends and remaining family disseminated throughout the rest of the world, my occasions to return home are few and far between.  However, when there, I still stay at a nearby hotel just so I can roam those streets again, lament that it is a shadow of its once vibrant and creative self, and marvel how it is now firmly locked in step #10 as a tourist region where people gawk rather than groove.

And that's okay, as that kind of feast is in perpetual motion.

Since I'm cleaning nostalgia out of both my head and my computer files, here are some more photos.

A quiet morning on Coventry Road.

The area in front of the former Heights Theater and Tommy's.

A ghost sign from one of the ancient businesses.

A blending of old and new buildings.

It was a good store.  It's now a new and used paperback bookstore by another name.

The humble record store where I spent many, never wasted, hours.

Well, It's Not Frisco 2019, That's for Sure

FRISCO 1956: THE BEST OF TIMES?

As for "Frisco" today, go here, if you dare.  The fact they've been able to hold onto that counter-culture cache for over sixty years is something, especially when one considers that Pittsburgh, for example, is more vibrant and creative in the contemporary scene.  Also, navigating Pittsburgh doesn't require a...ah...map.

More Reading, More Surf Noir

Two books featuring private eye Boone Daniels, who would much rather be surfing than getting involved in the darkness found in contemporary San Diego.

Even Jesus Warned of Such

I spent a very long time the other day listening to gas about this guy from some of his followers. JMJ, Christianity isn’t alone in having grifters attach themselves to the faith, is it?

Additional Summer Reading

Another surf noir novel from Kem Nunn.  It, too, is filled with murder, betrayal, revenge, and surfing.  It ain't James Patterson.

Not to Be Self-Serving, But Regular Religious Participation Would Reverse This

School has Robbed Young People of Their “Why”

Writing, as Opposed to Ideological Posturing

Great Writing by Women 

Some you may know, others not.  Certainly, one cannot say enough about the quality of Martha Gellhorn's war reporting.

[Although, I always disliked Gellhorn's cynical view of her marriage to Ernest Hemingway, she being his third wife.  She was willing to use his considerable connections in publishing to her advantage, even getting her rather dull fiction into print, but didn't want his name mentioned in any of her biographies.]

Alfred Pierce Reck

"I didn't say get the story.  I said get the kid his peaches."

In the 1970's, in part of my mad scramble to pay my tuition for college, I worked as a part-time beer truck driver, disk jockey, clay mixer for the school's art department, bus driver for a halfway house, Marine Corps officer trainee, and cab driver.  My most lasting impressions from those days, though, was when I worked as a stringer for a news agency.

For those who are unfamiliar with the term, a stringer is a reporter hired on a temporary basis to cover large, complex stories that develop quickly; things like natural disasters, acts of war, political scandal or tragedy, and the like.  A stringer may be called upon for extra on-the-scene coverage, running down multiple sources, digging through a newspaper's "morgue" for old stories about a related subject, running to the library for extra research, and a lot of time on a telephone.  At least, that's what it was like in the days before the Internet and online search engines.

Stringers also tended to be hired in the summers and during holidays when the regular staff members were on vacation.  If there was a particularly dull or onerous regular assignment, a stringer was usually dispatched to handle it.  Hence my regular gig as the reporter at the monthly meetings of the local sewer board.

Stringers had no job security and received no benefits.  If a stringer wrote a story, whether an obituary or the caption to a photograph, we would expect to be paid 5 cents a word.  This was why my sewer board reports tended to run about 5000 words; reports that the editor would cut down to about 200. Still, it was a heady and fun experience.  I don't know what it's like these days, but there was something about walking into a large room filled with mad chaos, the clatter of typewriters, reporters hollering for copy boys and girls to rush to their desks to deliver their initial reports to the editors' scrum, and phones ringing and ringing, that was intoxicating.

Reigning over all of this was the city editor or editor-in-chief, a figure of unquestioned authority, power, and respect within the organization.  What he [and, in those days, it was always a "he"] said was law, and even the publisher, if he or she were smart, would bow to the editor's wisdom.  Such editors tended to be gruff, terse, critical, shirt-sleeved, heavy-drinking, connected, and absolutely dedicated to ensuring that the facts were presented cleanly and clearly to the readers.  They almost always smoked too much and, when they did, it was either a cigar or equally pungent and very cheap cigarette.  As with all strong characters, there is an archetype.  In the good, old days of typewriters and telephones, that was Alfred Pierce Reck.

I could collate information about Reck and present it through my own questionable editing process, but I'd rather simply link to two stories written by proteges of his.  The first is a portion from Reck's obit as it appeared in The Oakland Tribune, the newspaper he served as city editor for 22 years, upon his death in 1967:

The men and women who learned their craft from Mr. Reck, a restless soul, recognized him as a professional. He was a product of an era when newspapers expressed the American conscience and journalism was a brawling art. He began his career as a reporter in 1919 in his native Piqua, Ohio, after an Army tour in World War I that read like an adventure novel. Commissioned before he was 21, he was wounded, left for dead in the field for three days, captured by the Germans, escaped, recaptured and finally released on Christmas morning of 1918.

He returned to Piqua something of a local hero, with a reputation that helped land him his job on the weekly Call. His ability to recognize and write the news soon became apparent, and in less than a year he moved from the 4.000-circulation Call to the 40,000-per-day Dayton Journal.  It wasn't long before he moved again, this time to Washington as a congressman's secretary, a post he held long enough to nail down  some of the news sources that were to serve him well for the rest of his life. 

Finally, in 1924, after interrupting  his Washington sojourn long enough to work for a while as a free-lance foreign correspondent in South Africa,  Mr. Reck, by his own admission, couldn't hold still. It wasn't because he was a drifter. It was just that his urgent sense of history-in-the-making demanded action. He pursued the breaking news wherever it seemed to be breaking the fastest, from the Tampa Tribune, to the Washington News, to the old United Press, to the Deseret News in Salt Lake City and finally to the Oakland Tribune.

However, the best of the Reck stories was this reminiscence that captures the rough-and-tumble world of 20th century journalism along with its common-sense and compassion.  Please read the whole thing:

He understood not only what we did but what we were supposed to do.

As we live in an era where news readers and their organizations "exaggerate" stories for personal and professional effect, or are satisfied to have smug comedians deliver the news, or turn the simple exercise of reportage into ideological advocacy, it's worth remembering that there actually was a time when it was the facts, rather than the narrative, that were important.  It was also a time when the people who served as the subjects of their stories were as, or more, important to the media organizations as were the advertisers.