Who Was Captain Penny?

I was born in 1964. That's 50 years ago for you math challenged readers out there. It's funny how old 50 seemed when I was 21, now it doesn't seem the list bit old. Odd how that happens.

I started this blog because I was working on a book that dealt with the folks who hosted children's shows in Cleveland. Mostly those from the fifties, sixties and seventies. In large part because I got tired of being asked why I was so macabre after my last book on Cleveland Disasters, but also because I have fond memories of my childhood and a lot of these folks had something to do with that. And of all those folks my favorite was Captain Penny. I really cant tell you why, I just know there was this period from around 1968 to 1971 that Captain Penny was a real important part of my daily life.

Captain Penny, whose real name was Ron Penfound, had a run that lasted from 1955 to 1971 on WEWS-TV in Cleveland. I don't think it was ever explained why a guy dressed as a train conductor called himself a Captain, but it was a simpler age where we didn't question such things.

The Captain was one of the few Children's Shows that relied on live action more than cartoons. I'd think it would be a good guess to say my initiation to The Three Stooges and The Little Rascals came from the Captain. Again, this was before adults starting fearing watching the Stooges would turn young minds down the road to becoming murderous psychopaths. He did always tell us not to try what we just saw at home after a Stooges short. I mean the man did care that his audience wasn't picking up eye gauging from him.

I don't remember much. I know he was always trying to get me to put something called Bosco in my milk. Seems Bosco was a chocolate syrup you could mix with other things. Once again this was before parents became worried that their little darlings weren't learning about the joys of eating carrots as opposed to chocolate syrup.

I do vaguely remember the Captain hanging out at Animal Shelters and showing us Dogs and Cats we could adopt. And he had a pal named Jungle Larry, who also had an area at the Cedar Point Amusement Park, who would bring in animals a little more unique than dogs and cats. But those we weren't allowed to adopt.

He encouraged us to eat everything on our plates so we could join the Clean Plate Club. Good wholesome Midwest entertainment for Kids mixed with a little learning, that's what the Captain served up. I probably would find in unwatchable now, but at the age of five I was transfixed.

His director Earl Keyes was also a big contributor to the show, as off camera F.W. Nicklesworth and on camera as Wilbur Wiffenpoof. Later of course Keyes became a Cleveland legend himself as Mr. Jingeling.

He was all over WEWS. Hosting the Captain Penny Show around noon, Captain Penny's Fun House later in the day and Captain Penny's Fun Farm on Saturday Morning. You couldn't be five in Northeast Ohio and not know who the Captain was.

Penfound himself started out as a Sports Reporter. Although he was born in Northeast Ohio he started his career in Denver before coming back as the News and Sports Director of WEOL radio. In 1953 he was hired as a sports reporter at WEWS, a job he held til two years later when the Captain Penny show premiered in April of 1953.

After the show ended in 1971 he was the weekend weatherman on WEWS and the public address announcer for the Cleveland Indians. He left town in 1972 to restart his career as a sportscaster in New Hampshire, Unfortunately though he died in 1974 from Lung Cancer. I guess he loves his cigars, but he never let us kids see him smoke.

He used to close his show with “You can fool some of the people all of the time, all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool Mom. She's pretty nice and she's pretty smart. Do what Mom says, and you won't go far wrong. “.

Like I said, no idea why I so fondly remember this guy. I just do, and I felt like telling you about him.

Joe Franklin Was One Of A Kind

 

 

It had to be some time in the mid to late 1980s that I discovered Joe Franklin. I actually had two of his books at that point and still pick up Classic's of the Silent Screen every so often, but I really didn't know about his place on Television history. I certainly had no idea the guy still hosted a talk show until I found him late one night on WOR-TV Out of New York. At the time WOR was making a real effort to match WTBS out of Atlanta, and WGN out of Chicago, as a national independent super station.

I thought it was so odd that this sort of kooky little guy on a cracker box set got the Ramones, Spinal Tap, Oscar and Tony Winners and any number of Big Stars. And he did it while acting like he was hosting a talk show from the 1950s. So wonderfully odd.

local-talk-show-pioneer-dies-at-88.html?_r=0

Dinah Washington

Every so often I write a blog entry for a music website over in the U.K. One of those columns ran today and I figure I might as well kill two birds with one stone. So...............

Blow Top Blues	Brunswick 03847-A
Trouble In Mind	Mercury 8269 B-side
TV Is The Thing (This Year)	Mercury 70214 B-side
Teach Me Tonight	Mercury 70497
What A Diff'rence A Day Makes	What A Diff'rence A Day Makes!
Unforgettable	Unforgettable
Baby (You've Got What It Takes)	The Two Of Us
This Bitter Earth	Unforgettable
September In The Rain	September In The Rain
Trouble In The Lowlands	Complete Jazz Series 1961 Vol.2

Dinah Washington is one of those performers I ask myself exactly how history, by which I mean the general population, has managed to forget. Or at least knocked back into the third tier of performers instead of in the forefront where she belongs. Between 1944-1961 she appeared on US R&B Charts Top 10 an impressive 34 times, five of them reaching the top of the charts, with another 11 in the top 20. She also recorded 10 Top 40 singles on the regular Pop charts, including three Tops 10s.

She was a star, a big one. And a star that nobody seems to pay much attention to these days, which boggles my mind as I’ve always been a big fan. And I of course consider myself a good barometer for what is good and what isn’t. I think perhaps in some ways it’s because she often got compared to Billie Holiday, of course to her detriment. Not really fair though, she should be judged on her own merit, which is considerable. There weren’t many performers who could handle blues, jazz and contemporary pop with the same ease as Dinah did.

Washington was born as Ruth Lee Jones in Alabama, but moved to Chicago when she was a small girl. She was a bit of a child prodigy, playing piano for her church choir while still in elementary school, and actually directing the choir in her teens. She was performing as a gospel singer by that point, and moved to performing in Chicago clubs by the time she was 15. By 1941 she was performing with Fats Waller and shortly thereafter found herself appearing in the upstairs room at the Garrick Stage Bar in Chicago while Billie Holiday was appearing downstairs in the main room. Those must have been some amazing nights at Garricks.

Not long after that two important things happened, Ruth Jones became Dinah Washington and Lionel Hampton hired her to be his band’s female vocalist. She stayed with Hampton until 1946 when she signed with Mercury as a solo singer and from then on acted as her own band leader.
It was a wild ride, seven husbands over less then twenty years and an early death at 39 from an overdose. But it should be the music she is remembered for.

Her ability to move seamlessly between jazz, pop and blues allowed her to become the best selling African-American female singer of the 1950s. As well as garnering her induction in the Rock and Roll, Blues, The Big Band and both recognized Jazz Hall of Fames. That’s impressive.

The first song on my list is Blow Top Blues, which she recorded as the 18 year old singer for the Lionel Hampton Septet. I prefer this version over her other recordings of the tune mostly because of Hampton, his intro with his vibes and his playing behind her really move this along for me. Her diction is already perfect, which was to become a trademark of hers.

Much like most performers of that era when a song was a hit it would appear on several albums. Which makes choosing the definitive version a bit difficult. Trouble In Mind is one of those songs. My favorite version features a sax intro by Ben Webster and some inspired piano by Wynton Kelly. It’s a slow blues number that Dinah hits just the right pace to make the song work. Lucky for her as those perennial hitmakers Amos Milburn and His Aladdin Chickenshackers also released a version of the song in 1952.

TV Is The Thing (This Year) from 1953 is a bit more uptempo, in fact I’d call it a pop song as opposed to a jazz or blues number. I’m guessing even people in midwest of the US would have understood when she is singing about how good her man is at changing channels and her TV needs fixing every night that she was not talking about her actual TV. It’s listed in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as one of the songs that shaped rock and roll.

Earlier I said it’s a shame Dinah has been slowly forgotten over the years. I may have to backtrack a little though when talking about Teach Me Tonight from 1954. It was recorded several times between 1954 and 1955. The first was by Janet Brace, who took it to No. 23 on the main Billboard chart. I honestly have no idea who Janet Brace is. The DeCastro Sisters, who I do more or less know of, had the biggest hit when it reached number two in 1955. Dinah’s version, which also reached No. 23 on the main Billboard chart and fourth on the R&B charts is the one that was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999. So someone remembers.

What A Diff’rence A Day Makes entered that same hall a year earlier in 1998 as well as winning the Grammy for Best Rhythm & Blues Recording. She slows it down a bit and does a great job of holding the notes at just the right time and projecting her emotions into the song. It doesn’t hurt to have a good band made up of a couple guys who haven’t established themselves yet, but will. Kenny Burrell and Joe Zawinul do a good job on a song that given their later reputation and catalog you wouldn’t think they’d excel on. Of course any time you have Milt Hinton in your band things are going to work out.

 Unforgettable is Dinah’s third song to be inducted in the Grammy Hall of Fame. Frankly it’s a hard song to screw up, and there have been so many great versions of it. It came from the album of the same name, which had a number of standards on it, and was certainly more pop then jazz or blues. To me it seemed an obvious attempt to land a hit on the pop charts. After placing 24 straight songs in the R&B Top 10 between
1948-1954 Dinah wasn’t quite the hitmaker she had been. Not bad mind you, she had scored seven Top 20 R&B singles between 1955-1958. But after What A Diff’rence A Day Makes had been such a huge hit on both the Pop and R&B charts her label saw a chance to get this gravy train rolling again. And they did. Unforgettable was only her second Top 20 single on the pop charts. But it wouldn’t be her last.

Shortly after those hits, in 1959, her label came up with the idea of her doing a duet album with up and coming R&B singer Brook Benton. Benton had primarily been a songwriter throughout the mid 1950s but 1959 was a banner year for him, recording seven songs that we’d consider a hit. He was on a roll when he was teamed with the slightly older star who was perhaps in need of a little bump by teaming her with the slightly younger up and coming star. Everyone associated with the project knew Dinah wasn’t happy.

Clive Otis, the first African-American Musical Director at Mercury Records, actually threw her out of the studio during the sessions for the way she was treating Benton, who everyone felt she had no respect for. Dinah was somewhat infamous for savaging performers onstage and in the studio that were not measuring up to her standards. In one of the recordings of Baby (You’ve Got What it Takes) you can hear Dinah tell Benton “You’re in my spot again honey”, and later “It’s your turn now”. Nobody felt it was good-natured ribbing.

Still, as often weirdly happens in these situations, two tracks off the album became the biggest hits of her career. In contained two of her three songs that made it onto the Top 10 of the Pop Charts while both also hitting number one on the R&B charts.

Shortly after, This Bitter Earth became her third straight R&B Number One. She was certainly entering the 1960s on a high note. The song itself is another slow blues classic, and Dinah always did well with those sort of songs. But I think it may have created a misconception at the label. After having three straight hits on the Pop Charts her career seemed to chase pop hits the last two years of her life even more than it had the previous couple years. In fact she had more songs chart on the pop charts than R&B charts during this time. And sadly, for one of the best jazz and blues singers ever, her best showing the last two years of her life was on the charts that would eventually be known as the Adult Contemporary.

September In The Rain was one of those songs, but it’s a good one and not the worst last big hit an artist can have.

Still, for me my favorite late era Dinah is Trouble In The Lowlands, as its one final slow blues classic for someone who was the self proclaimed Queen of the Blues. A claim nobody disputed.

She was recording pop albums that really didn’t suit her style for Roulette Records at the end of her life, although she had been performing with both Count Basie and Duke Ellington during that period. Her husband, the seventh, eight or ninth depending on who is telling the story, found her dead on the morning of December 14, 1963. At the time she was married to American Football great, Dick “Night Train” Lane, who is still regarded as one of the best defensive backs to have ever played the game 50 years after his career ended. So it was quite a story, major music star married to star athlete accidentally overdoses on secobarbital and amobarbital at 39.

At one time Quincy Jones, who produced a lot of her later work and whose band backed her many times, owned the film rights to her life story, In 1992 there was actually talk of a movie being made with Oprah playing the lead role. Can’t really see that.

She was a huge star whose incredible legacy of music has been unjustly forgotten.

Can the Internet be Archived?

 

 

I've been incredibly busy with family stuff the last few days, but I wanted to share this recent New Yorker article with anyone who wants to read it. It's about archiving the Internet, the many challenges to doing so and who is actually doing so.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/26/cobweb

A Good Day

 

 

Thomas and I did a fair amount of interviews in the Fall of 2013 when Cleveland Area Disasters came out. By the time we got to Dee Perry's Sound of Applause on the local NPR station I was pretty tired of being asked why did we choose to write on a topic that was so morbid.

I had decided before hand to try and spin the question into talking about all the heroes of Northeast Ohio, which in all honesty I had though a lot about while writing the book.

One of the stories I told on Sound of Applause that day concerned the East Ohio Gas Explosion. Now for those of you unfamiliar with that story, on October 20, 1944 two of the fours tanks storing liquified natural gas, located on East 61^st, exploded and leveled a neighborhood. The two blasted killed over 130 people and left another 600 homeless.

So when Dee started asking me about the explosions I started talking about how after two tanks went up, killing many of the East Ohio Gas employes, a good number of the facilities employees stayed on the job all through the night protecting the other two tanks and preventing them from exploding and making the disaster even worse. I talked about the heroism of these guys, who weren’t first responders but guys who carried lunch buckets to work and had no go reason to risk their lives for that neighborhood other than it was the right thing to do.

Later than week we work during a book signing at Visible Voice Books in Tremont, which has sadly since closed, gentleman about 75-80 came up to me at the signing and told me he wanted to thank me for the interview I had done on NPR. He said his Dad was one of those men who stayed on the job protecting that neighborhood and he had been reading stories and books about that explosion for years and I was the first person who ever talked about how his dad, along with his friend and co-workers, was a hero. He drove to the bookstore, knowing I'd be there, to thank me.

That was a good day.

I Really Want a Big Barney

 

Those of you new to Northeast Ohio, new being a relative term as I actually mean pre early 1980s, probably wonder why now and again you pass a Furnace Repair Company, Real Estate Office or Gyro Shop that looks all the world like a Barn built on a major road for no real apparent reason.

Well, because once upon a time in certain parts of the world a place called The Red Barn not only competed with McDonalds and Burger King but pretty much beat um in my mind. I know when I was a kid going out for fast food meant The Red Barn, and when I was a teenager when my friends and I wanted to hang out somewhere we hung out at the Local Red Barn just a couple block walk from our Stow, Ohio neighborhood. There were quite a few of the places in Northeast Ohio as the company was formed in Dayton, Ohio area and had it's corporate headquarters there in the early years of the chain's existence.

All the buildings that look like barns are from those early days of the restaurant. The barn design was patented in 1962 by the company that granted the franchise licenses, later though they went a little more traditional to keep from running afoul of local building codes.

At it's peak The Red Barn had 400 restaurants in 19 states, Ontario, Canada and Australia. It was a big deal. And it could have stayed a big deal except when Motel 6 bought Servomation, The Red Barn's parent company, in the late 1970s they were only interested in Servomation lucrative vending machine business and not the chain of largely franchise owned fast food joints kind of across the English speaking world.

So advertising stopped and they didn't even bother to renew franchise leases, and the Red Barn was gone by 1986. Too bad, I loved that place as a kid.

A number of the franchise owners tried to make a go of it more or less alone by calling themselves The Farm and using the same menu. In fact almost 30 years after the fact there are still two left, one in Racine, Wisconsin and another in Bradford, Pennsylvania.

The Big Barney, my personal favorite if memory serves, was probably akin to the best Bic Mac you've ever had. And it was out years before the Big Mac. The Barnbuster was closer to the Quarter Pounder I guess, but also much better. Lots of Fried Chicken, which I always remember my folks getting. And my Dad was serious about his Fried Chicken.

I'm pretty sure the first Salad Bar I ever saw was at Red Barn. And while I had no idea what it meant at the time I knew their claim the Chicken and Fish were cooked in pure vegetable oil was a good thing.

As a really little kid I love the place because of all the give aways. Coloring books, crayons, iron-ons, free glasses, and I have memories of having a cut out farm my little sister and I played with. And Hamburger Hungry, Fried Chicken Hungry and Big Fish Hungry were so much cooler than Ronald McDonald.

I still have the memories of course, and a Red Barn ash tray I picked up at a Goodwill or something other store years ago. Unless of course I head over to Bradford, Pennsylvania sometime soon. It's only a three hour drive, which isn't far at all if a Big Barney is as good as I remember,

The Carter Family

Mark Evanier, writer and blogger, has started a fun and recognizable tradition the readers on his Blog all recognize immediately.  On Mark's Blog, which is about a zillion times more interesting than mine, he puts up the picture of a Campbell Soup Can when he is too busy with work that actually pay him to Blog.

Until I think of something like that you'll have to live with “reprints”. This one was E-Published March 30, 2014. It's a Top Ten List of Carter Family Songs.

Bury Me Under The Weeping Willow	Victor 21074 (1927)
Single Girl, Married Girl	Victor 20937 (1927)
Keep On The Sunny Side	Victor 21434 (1928)
Wildwood Flower	Victor 40000 (1928)
I'm Thinking Tonight Of My Blue Eyes	Victor 40089 (1929)
My Clinch Mountain Home	Victor 40058 (1929)
Wabash Cannonball	Victor 23731 (1929 released '32)
Worried Man Blues	Victor 40317 (1930)
Church In The Wildwood	Victor 23776 (released '33)
Can The Circle Be Unbroken	Columbia 20268 (1935)

What actually happened in Bristol, Tennessee in the late summer of 1927 is lost to history. Probably for the good so the now accepted and almost to good to be true versions can be seen as the truth. But really, was it possible that the world of music got that lucky? What we do know is a record producer named Ralph Peer was touring the south for the Victor Talking Machine Company looking for performers and songs to release on 78 rpm albums. The recording industry was a new field and they were making up the rules as they went along. Peer especially changed the rules as he had negotiated a deal with the label where he got paid royalties. Unheard of at the time.

What we do know as fact is that in late July/early August of 1927, Peel had 17 artists record for his label, paying them $50 a song plus royalties. What made it so impressive is two of those artists were Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family. In many ways if American Country Music wasn’t born that day, it at least took its first steps toward being something other than a regional form of music. The week of the Bristol Sessions has come to be known as the Big Bang of Country Music.

A.P. Carter, his wife Sara Carter and sister-in-law (and Sara’s cousin) Maybelle Carter arrived late the night of August 1st and recorded a handful of songs, and the next morning Peel had them come back to perform a few more. Well, Maybelle and Sara returned; A.P. was busy out trying to buy a tire to put on the car they had borrowed to drive to Maces Spring, Virginia, so they could get home that night.

Carter Family lore has them returning home and treating it as a fun lark until they started receiving royalty checks in early 1928. They sold 300,000 records by the end of 1930. A.P. learned quickly and started collecting songs from throughout the region, arranging them to fit their sound and copyrighting them. Using this system, they recorded a number of other sides during the next dozen or so years, all 78 rpm as this was of course before the LP. A.P. and Sara’s marriage had fallen apart by 1936, in large part as A.P. was always on the road looking for new songs for them to record. From 1938-1943, the Carter Family, sometimes as a trio and often with their kids, became stars of the radio. Starting out on Border Radio, a term that referred to stations just on the Mexico side of the Texas/Mexico border who could ignore U.S. Federal laws and broadcast at what was unheard of power at the time, and finishing up on WBT in Charlotte, North Carolina in the fall of 1943. Shortly after, the group disbanded when Sara left for good as she had married A.P.’s cousin and moved to California.

A.P. recorded a few albums with his kids in the 1950s, Maybelle of course played with her daughters well until the late 1970s, with her daughters carrying on until 1996. Sara and Maybelle even recorded an album at one point. Recently, Maybelle’s grandson John Carter Cash and A.P.’s grandson Dale Jett have been performing as the Carter Family. The Carter Fold has had weekly concerts for over 30 years.
But this is A.P., Maybelle and Sara’s story.

My favorite song from that first day of recording was Bury Me Under The Weeping Willow. A.P. Carter is listed as the songwriter, but as there is a copy of the song archived at the University of Missouri from 1906, well … Supposedly, A.P. would travel the south collecting songs and bring them home where the three of them would arrange them, often changing lyrics and creating music for them. Now that seems a bit unethical, but without A.P. these songs probably never would have been saved for us. The song is real, the authenticity flows off the three of them and you can see why Peer chose them as one of the few acts to record. You can hear the awakening of Maybelle’s distinctive playing known as the Carter Scratch already. Hardly fully developed, she would use her thumb to play melody on the bass and middle strings and her index finger to fill out the rhythm. She apparently picked this up from A.P.’s close friend African-American guitarist Lesley Riddle who traveled with A.P. for almost a decade collecting songs. It’s a whole other story but many feel Riddle has never got the credit he deserved in the Carter Family story.

Single Girl, Married Girl is about the differences in the lives of two women. Sara and Maybelle did not want to sing it, and A.P. was out looking for a tire, but Peer loved the song. They re-recorded it in early 1935 during the end of Sara and A.P.’s marriage. It’s much slower and Sara sings at a lower pitch but I think I prefer the original. It’s primal and not at all what you’d hear a woman singing in 1927.

Keep On The Sunny Side was recorded in Camden, New Jersey in 1928. It’s largely remembered now from being the theme of their radio program. And while a copy of a gold record for this song is embedded on A.P.’s tombstone it was published as a song almost thirty years earlier. It was based on a phrase a nephew of the songwriter always used. The nephew, who was confined to a wheelchair, always wanted to be pushed down the sunny side of the street.

A second song from 1928, Wildwood Flower, is a good example of how the Carters collected songs and made them their own. A song published in 1860 known as I’ll Twine Mid The Ringlets went, “I’ll twine ’mid the ringlets/ Of my raven black hair,/ The lilies so pale/ And the roses so fair,/ The myrtle so bright/ With an emerald hue,/ And the pale aronatus/ With eyes of bright blue.” In 1928, the Carter Family’s version went, “Oh, I’ll twine with my mingles and waving black hair,/ With the roses so red and the lilies so fair,/ And the myrtle so bright with the emerald dew,/ The pale and the leader and eyes look like blue.”

I’m Thinking Tonight Of My Blue Eyes signaled a point where almost everything from then on song wise was credited to A.P.. It’s a good song but it also has serious historical significance in the history of the group. In the early 1930s while he was on the road, A.P. asked his cousin to come by and help Sara so she wasn’t alone with the kids. Well, that ended up just as you’d expect it to. And even though they divorced so as to prevent scandal, Sara’s guy moved out west. In the late 1930s while on Border Radio, Sara would sing this song, according to family lore to her lost love, Coy Bayes. After a while Bayes figured the heck with this and came to Texas to get her. It was their moving back out west to California in 1943 that ended the group.

My Clinch Mountain Home is a bit of an oddity among the group’s recording. A.P. takes a large part of the vocal leads, Sara tries to yodel – probably because of the popularity of Jimmie Rodgers, and it’s a song credited to all three of the members of the group. A.P. has been criticized as a singer over the years, probably because of how good Sara and Maybelle were, but honestly I think he did fine as a lead vocalist. Much better than he has been given credit for.

Wabash Cannonball was first published in 1882, although it was titled The Great Rock Island Route at that point. The song the Carters recorded in 1929, but didn’t release until 1932, was a bit different and again copyrighted by A.P. It was about this time Maybelle stopped playing her Stella guitar and switched to the Gibson L-5 F-hole that really took their music to another level. Now, that distinctive Carter Scratch was all over the songs.

There is something about the line “It Takes a Worried Man to Sing a Worried Song” that always struck me. Worried Man Blues was recorded in 1930 and, like all the other songs I’ve mentioned, has been covered more times than I can count. Although the version by Devo is unique! The Carters had only been recording three years by this point and were huge stars. I can’t even imagine what the three of them must have thought about the direction their lives had taken.

Church In The Wildwood is the only gospel song I have included on the list; if I was writing about Maybelle and her daughters version of the Carter Family it would have been different, but the Original Carter Family as they’ve come to be known didn’t record as much gospel as later versions. It’s a beautiful slow ballad, unlike some of their earlier primal work.

Supposedly, the Carters had recorded Can The Circle Be Unbroken as early as 1933 but didn’t get around to releasing it until a version they recorded a few years later. Like so many other of their songs it was a variation of an older tune that A.P. took credit for. It’s odd that so many of the later versions reverted to the original title, Will The Circle Be Unbroken, and also reverted to the straight 4/4 meter throughout instead of the alternating 4/4 and ¾ the Carters used.

I would guess A.P. and Sara’s marriage difficulties limited what they accomplished around this time. While there are a couple of collections, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the nine CD Rounder Records of the Complete Victor Recordings took eight CDs to cover 1927-1934 and one CD to cover 1934-1941.
Regardless, it’s an amazing achievement by three people who simply drove to Bristol, Tennessee one day because they heard there was going to be a man there who would make a copy of them singing.

Where Did Roller Coasters Come From Dad?

It would be a stretch to say they came from Lamarcus A. Thompson, but not a huge one. He was born in Licking County, Ohio in 1848 and became a very successful businessman early in life through his inventions, mainly a device to manufacture seamless hosiery.

The history of the roller coaster probably started in the 17^th century when John G. Taylor obtained a patent for the Inclined Railway. Thompson however racked up almost 30 patents dealing with roller coasters during his life. And not for boring stuff, but for cool stuff like something called a Gravity Switch-Back Railway in December of 1885.

Thompson's Gravity Pleasure Switchback Railway, often called the worlds first roller coaster, debuted at Coney Island in 1884 and traveled at a staggering 6 miles per hour and cost an ungodly 5 cents a ride. He built several across the country, and in Europe before his death in 1919.

Why is it important to us you might ask? Because the first roller coaster most Clevelanders had ever seen was the Euclid Beach Switchback Railway in the late 1890s. In operated until 1903 and stood 35 feet tall and ran for 350 feet. Almost comical now it must have been a terrifying state of the art roller coaster in 1900.  You can guess who designed it.

The oldest steel roller coaster still operating in its original location is in Parma, Ohio by the way. The Little Dipper is still running on the Memphis Road Kiddie Park, although some of the cars have been switch out. Seventy-two years and counting at this point.

Who Am I

I'm this guy.

http://www.newsnet5.com/news/local-news/cleveland-metro/west-117th-street-on-cleveland-lakewood-border-was-upended-by-mile-long-explosion-60-years-ago

 Tales of Burton, Ohio

Burton, Ohio is an unique and somewhat odd place that once upon a time I co-created a website and co-wrote a book about. Not Twin Peaks odd, but different than most of us are use to.

Several years back I was called by their local library and historical society to come out for an interview for a project after a long time resident of the town had passed away and left a nice chunk of money to be used to further saving the history of Burton. Or at least the wording was somewhat close to that.

It's an interesting place if you feel like stepping back a couple decades into the past as I'm pretty sure there wasn’t a building in their downtown that had been built before the 1940s. My kind of place really, except I cant remember seeing a single tavern.

A week or so after the interview I got a call from their town librarian offering me the job but expressing her concern I couldn't provide the amount of hours they needed on the project. Which I couldn't as it wasn't the only project I had going on. She asked me how I would feel if I hired a second person to work with me. When they mentioned the name of the only other interviewee they had considered hiring I realized I had met the guy briefly in the past and liked him. It was pretty lucky really as I now work with him daily and have co-authored two books with him.

I remember our tour of the town as if it was yesterday-really, not a cliche as it was that much fun. The tour was essentially walking around the town square for an hour being shown the “points of interest”. The highpoint for me was when our tour guide tried to give us some advice on where we could go for lunch. The three or four American Diners on the square were pointed out to us, and we were told if we wanted something “exotic” there was a Chinese restaurant about a mile out of town. Don't know what they would have done if someone tried to open a Thai restaurant in town.

At first I was also really thrown by Century Village. Billed as an authentic representation of a Western Reserve Village from 1798 to the end of the 19^th century, it at first seemed to me as an odd mashup of houses from 1798 and 1892 right next to each other as if that's where they were built, when they so clearly weren't. And if they didn't have a blacksmith shop then they built something to look like an old blacksmith shop. Over time I began to see the historical value of the village, but at first......

It all turned out well as I think Thomas and I did a great job on the website and book, but that's a post for another day.

 The Michael Stanley Band

Been a little busy today so I thought I'd throw up another column I did for a music website over in England. This one is from June 12, 2014 and is about local music legends the Michael Stanley Band. I tried to write a balanced piece that both treated their status in our region with a little tongue in cheek while also making clear they were a pretty good band. Not sure if I got the balance right. You decide.

The idea behind the website is the top 10 songs by an artist

Strike Up The Band	Ladies'’ Choice
Rosewood Bitters	Stagepass
Let's Get The Show On The Road	Stagepass
Why Should Love Be This Way	Cabin Fever
He Can't Love You	Heartland
Lover	Heartland
In The Heartland	Heartland
Falling In Love Again	North Coast
Someone Like You	You Can't Fight Fashion
My Town	You Can't Fight Fashion

Once upon a time I was lucky enough to live in a place where I could see the biggest band in the world, at their creative and commercial peak mind you, as often as I wanted. They were huge, nobody could touch their sales numbers. I remember the old Coliseum at Richfield, the Concert Hall of my youth where although I missed Frank Sinatra opening the arena in 1974 I did see Roger Daltrey close the place in 1994. They set the one night attendance record for that venerable institution in 1979 with a paid attendence of 20,320. I remember in 1982, right after I graduated High School, when the band headlined four nights in a row at the Blossom Music Center Outdoor Amphitheater and sold a still record 74,404 tickets. And then headlined the Coliseum on December 30th and 31st that same year and set a two day record of 40,529.

Yes, I was there to see the biggest band in the world – with their list of all-star producers and guest stars. Who didn’t want to be in the Legendary Michael Stanley Band, at least in a five county area of North East Ohio? Outside of their home turf they were a club act that charted twice, peaking at 33 and 38, during their eleven year career but on the Northcoast they were legends.

This is a story of a band, who if you stood in Downtown Cleveland on the shores of Lake Erie and drove for say two and half hours East/West/South they were the Beatles, Elvis and the Boss rolled into one and were a band that people asked, “didn’t they sing that song about …” anywhere else.

This is a story of the Legendary Michael Stanley Band.

Yet no good story can be told without an introduction of sorts. That started when not yet legendary, but soon to be, music producer Bill Szymczyk was fishing around Cleveland, Ohio in the very late 1960s for some talent to sign. He found the James Gang, led by Joe Walsh, and Silk, led by Michael (not yet Stanley) Gee. In 1969, Silk released an album and shockingly it didn’t sell.

So Michael headed back to Cleveland and laid low for a few years before, in 1972, Szymczyk produced his first solo album. Of course he brought along friends Joe Walsh, Todd Rundgren, Rick Derringer, Joe Vitale and Patti Austin to guest star on the album, Rosewood Bitters does appear on MSB’s first Greatest Hits album (yes, a band of this magnitude deserves two Greatest Hits albums) but it wasn’t really a MSB Song, so we aren’t going to count it.

A second solo album was produced by Szymczyk in 1973. This one guest starring Joe Walsh, Paul Harris, Joe Vitale, Joe Halal, David Sanborn, Richie Furay and Dan Folgelberg. And while I really want to include the classic Let’s Get The Show On The Road, again it isn’t really MSB yet.


In retrospect, Stanley was at his best when he had a partner, and in the early years of the MSB Legend it was Jonah. They added Glass Harp bassist Daniel Pecchio and drummer Tommy Dobeck, who supposedly never officially joined the band but just kept showing up at the practice for the next thirteen years. Szymczyk produced the first MSB album, You Break It … You Bought It!. But it didn’t have that classic MSB sound we all know and love yet.

The second MSB album, Ladies’ Choice, which featured guest Sanborn on sax and J Geils Band organist Seth Justman on organ, does offer their first big hit with Strike Up The Band. A fun little rocker about well, being in a band on Saturday Night. It was a Koslen song and their closer for years.

I sort of fibbed earlier. I said I couldn’t include some of Stanley’s classic songs because they weren’t really MSB songs. Wellllllllll, then came Stagepass, the live album that proclaimed “MSB will make believers of you all”. So I can now sneak in Rosewood Bitters and Let’s Get The Show On The Road. The Michael Stanley Band went some through some big changes at this point, with Szymczyk producing for the last time, Koslen quitting the group and bassist Pecchio only having one more album in him.

But a group of this magnitude drew talent, so Mutt Lange stepped up to the boards to take over producing duties and the soon to be legendary Kevin Raleigh joined on keyboards and vocals, thereby replacing Koslen as the other guy who sang in MSB.

The Mutt Lange produced Cabin Fever produced the first great make out song of the MSB era, Why Should Love Be This Way, which asked the immortal question why should love be this way.

For Greatest Hints (see what they did there, replacing the word Hit with Hints) Harry Maslin, fresh off producing Bowie’s Young Americans, took a crack at producing the MSB juggernaut.

That year, MSB set an attendance record of 20,320 at the Coliseum of Richfield that was never broken, and then Arista dropped them for the incredible claim of bad sales.

But then came Heartland, the album that saw Clarence Clemons joining the band on sax, at least for this one album,

Raleigh’s first lead vocals, He Can’t Love You (Like I Love You), is a recognized classic of course. Although oddly enough, Billboard claimed the song peaked at #33, being the band’s biggest hit in “their” records, we in the Heartland new better. And then, when they said Stanley’s Lover peaked at #68 we knew the fix was in. Come on, who can’t sing “well the glow from the bars and a thousand stars/Light the cold Ohio night/and the turnpike’s slick, the snow’s as thick as thieves.” Stanley’s In The Heartland made this album a bona fide classic.

(Whoever You Are I’m) Falling in Love Again leapt off North Coast, the band’s next album, with the cover of all the guys in their leather jackets and seriously cool 1980s hair. This is a great ballad, but also a sentimental favorite as my group of friends at the time considered it the lead singer of our band’s theme song. Not because he sang it well, but because he usually fell in love Friday night, and by Monday morning was sad and dejected playing The Eagles’ Desperado over and over again. Admittedly, we might have used the song to harass him a bit. But then he made us listen to Desperado forty times in a row once.
1982 saw the release of MSB with a four night stand in front of over 74,000 in August, and closing out the year back at the Coliseum with a two night show to over 40,000. Suspiciously, Billboard claims the album peaked at #136 and the two singles at #78 and #81.

1983’s You Can’t Fight Fashion, produced by Bob Clearmountain, offered not only the strong Raleigh cut Someone Like You but a song that became a Cleveland Anthem and a one of their biggest hits nationally, which Billboard “claims” only reached #38. Of course I’m talking about the utterly infectious My Town.
After appearing on a couple national TV Shows, including Dick Clark’s American Bandstand, their label EMI actually had the gall to offer them only a six month extension on their contract. Stanley, ever the astute businessman, called their bluff and turned it down, which caused EMI to promptly drop the band. Which meant they released their final two albums on their own label. Which in retrospect might not have been the best idea. The band broke up in 1987, sort of.

In 1993, the band Ghost Poets released their one and only album with Stanley and Dobeck, the only two guys to play on every MSB album, joined by Koslen (guitarist and vocalist 1974-1977) and Bob Pelander (keyboardist 1976-1987 and frequent Stanley songwriter partner). They probably didn’t want to perform as MSB because they knew they couldn’t live up to the hype.

There exists a Facebook page demanding an MSB reunion. Which is kind of funny, as the Resonators, which constitute most of Stanley’s twelve post-MSB albums (many with Szymczyk involvement) are a band that contains Stanley, Dobeck, Pelander, and Danny Powers (MSB lead guitarist 1983-1987). They just don’t play under the name MSB, even though they clearly kind of are. Stanley has also been the Drive Time DJ on the local Classic Rock Station since 1990.

Koslen and Raleigh have both tried solo careers, without much luck but are still out there somewhere rocking away.

All joking aside, this was a band that probably deserved more than two hits that barely cracked the top 40. And they were also a band that in no way should have sold 74,000 tickets during a four night stand in the summer of 1982.

Bad business deals? Awful contracts? Bad timing? Who knows. If you were in MSB for any length of time you did fairly well financially, probably better than bands that had quite a few more hits. Of course it didn’t hurt that at any time the band had 3-4 songwriters, so royalties were plentiful. But facts are facts, for a solid ten years in a five county area where I grew up Bruce couldn’t outdraw them, Journey couldn’t outdraw them, Dylan couldn’t outdraw them. They were MSB, the biggest band in the world. At least in NE Ohio.

Jim Tully

 

Today I want to talk a little about a book written by someone other than me. And frankly it's a better book then I've ever written. Jim Tully: American Writer, Irish Rover, Hollywood Brawler, was admittedly co-written by someone I've considered a friend for 25+ years, but that isn't why I'd recommend it.

Paul Bauer owned and operated Archer's Used and Rare Books in Kent, Ohio from the mid 1980s til 2001 when he moved online, where you can still find Archers. His co-writer Mark Dawidziak also wrote another fine book I own, The Columbo Phile: A Casebook. What can I say, I really love Columbo.

Anyway, Jim Tully published more than a dozen books between 1922-1943. What makes fair game as a topic here is he was first published, as a poet, while living in Kent, Ohio. In fact he spent several years living there during the first and second decades of the 20^th Century. And while its stretching the idea of local he was also born, and somewhat raised, in St. Marys, Ohio which is about 3 hours southwest of Cleveland. So in that sense he is local history of a sort,

Paul mentioned working on Tully's biography to me over dinner at Rays in Kent five or six years back, I told him I looked forward to reading it when it was published. Which it was in the spring of 2011, and foolishly  I waited about three years before finally reading it. Too bad for me, as it's really, really good.

I've always wondered why someone who is so well know for their work during their own time can be so completely forgotten in really just a handful of decades. And Jim Tully is pretty much forgotten. I only knew the name because the 1928 film Beggar's For Life is based on one of his earlier novels. It's Paramount first feature film with dialogue and stars Wallace Beery and Louise Brooks. Brooks is up there with Columbo among things I love, and I've always considered it by far her best American film.

It's the best biography your ever going to read about someone you've probably never heard of, and when you're done I'm certain you'll want to read a couple of his books. It's an amazing story. He led the life of an orphan, a road kid, professional boxer and tree surgeon until finally becoming a celebrated writer.

Hemingway wrote tough guys in sort of a overwrought idealistic sort of way, Tully wrote tough guys as they really were. Because Tully really was a tough guy. It's a great book and one I suggest you pick up.

A little aside though. Its March 1^st, 1993. I had planned the night before taking a number of books over to Paul's bookstore and see what I could get in trade. Books I've read out, books I hadn't read in.

One of the books I threw in a box was a Lillian Gish signed autobiography. It seemed I had two at the time. Sadly Lillian Gish died February 27^th, which had crossed my mind as I drove to Paul's store the next morning. I still remember standing there as Paul, head down, sifted through what I had brought in for trade. He reached the Gish book, looked up at me and said “You Ghouuul”.

That still makes me laugh.

So What's The Deal About

Captain Penny

During the publicity for last book my sometimes writing partner Thomas Kubat and I wrote we were asked over and over and over again why were so morbid. Every interview, whether it was Television, Radio or Print, it was the same. The thing is when Thomas and I wrote the book we were thinking more of the history, the great stories that came out of these events. We weren’t slowing down to see if anyone died in the car crash we were really interested in these events as part of the greater history of Cleveland . 
 

So after the promotion was more or less finished for that book I decided to try and write something a bit more fun, something that might make people smile instead of grimace. A few years back Thomas and I wrote a book on Burton, Ohio. And while researching the book we found a local man name Ture Johnson had been an occasional guest on the Woodrow the Woodsman television show as sort of a nature expert. Which in large part he was. So the idea of how rich and colorful television for kids on a local level had been during my childhood had been rolling around my head for awhile. 
 

Romper Room, Franz the Toymaker, Woodrow the Woodsman, Barnaby of course, and Captain Penny. Even as a kid I couldn't quite understand why a guy who dressed like a train engineer called himself Captain. But the he'd roll out a Three Stooges short and I lost interest in that question. Truthfully I barely remember him, but I do remember when I was four I thought he was the coolest guy in the world with the exception of my dad.                                                                      

So I entered into conversation with a publisher that thought the idea had some merit. And I decided to run with it. I want to interview a whole lot of people for this book though and hear their memories. I don't particularly want to write a history of these television hosts as much as tell the story about how they affected us, the kids who grew up in Northeast Ohio watching them. So far I've done a couple of great interviews, The one that really was fun was Barnaby's daughter, she was so gracious with her time.
                                                                                                              

So now I'm in the process of writing a new book about these folks, and I'd really love to hear from people and here their stories.