Yeah. It still hurts. Losing your illusions always does

Here’s the thing. Jack Kennedy got it the way he wanted it. All at once. That’s the way to go. My grandfather, Joe Villari was really never sick a day in his life, and then dropped dead. It damn near killed the family, but it was a blessing for him. He deserved no less.

Well, JFK literally got his brains blown out in Dealey Plaza in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Apparently, I’ve read, as his Presidential limo sped off in search of a miracle, Rufus Youngblood, the Secret Service Agent who shielded Lyndon Johnson, looked at Paul Landis, another agent, and gestured thumbs down. Youngblood was a combat veteran of WWII, Army Air Corps. He had presumably seen more than his share of young men with their heads blown off. He knew a confirmed kill when he saw it. For the rest of us, it took sixty years.

Now don’t worry. I’m not gonna inflict the Zapruder film, or even worse, the photo of the back seat of Kennedy’s limousine, a photo of which I recently saw for the first time. Brains and all. Worse than I thought; so if you’re so inclined, go find it yourself. I was never in combat, so my capacity to be shocked by what a high-powered weapon can do to the human body is still there. Yeah. Still. This is really more about the slow death of a set of assumption, most naive, about politics, America, and the world. I’ll keep the gore to a minimum.

There is this “Do you Remember where you were and what you were doing when you found out?” Well, sure. I was in school, seventh grade; I think it was late morning on a Friday, a sunny Fall day in Philly. I remember a sort of flurry of activity by the classroom door late morning or early afternoon. I guess the Principal, Sister Marie Suzanne, was going around telling all the teachers. She did not, as was her wont, get on the PA and announce that Kennedy had been shot. Even she knew better than to do that. My teacher, Sister Marie Bellarmine, I think, walked to the front of the class, gestured for silence, and said something like “Boys and Girls, I need you to sit still and to pray. President Kennedy was shot in Dallas.”

Now, this was, as you can imagine, a BFD. On so many levels it is hard to think or remember how I– or most of us– processed it. We had lived through the Missile Crisis a year before. Even at that age (11), we thought the odds were pretty good were were all gonna die. Unpleasantly. Watching a big flash and a mushroom cloud before whatever the Hell was gonna happen happened. Maybe from under our school desks. I really wanted to die at home looking out my back window. I remember how relieved everyone was when the Russians backed down. If anything, Kennedy rose in a lot of our opinions. Not that we didn’t adore him anyway. There were, of course, a few asshole kids who found the news funny. It was Penn Wynne.

Ok. Nobody with an ounce of sense has any illusions about St Jack. I remember seeing a stained glass window in some Catholic parish where they had canonized him after he was killed. I can’t find it–and I suspect it’s gone. Maybe the week Dame Judith Exner confirmed that she, JFK, Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli were, well, identified as an item (not simultaneously, please), the parish called in a glazier and sent JFK packing. I don’t know. I don’t really care. This was not part of the Church’s Magisterium in 1963. Richard Cardinal Cushing never threatened Kennedy with withholding the sacraments, although I’m pretty sure he must have known all about the Kennedy men, starting with father Joe. Kennedy pere’s career in Hollywood with Gloria Swanson and Marlene Dietrich. If you haven’t seen the film True Confessions with De Niro and Duvall, I’d recommend it. Sort of clue you into the way things got done back then in the Catholic Church. While the wife’s away, the Old Man gets to play, especially if he’s paying the priest–or the Diocese (A synopsis is below for you to copy)

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/true-confessions-1981

And his infidelities were, maybe, the least of it. JFK was a very sick man, in terrible physical condition. He probably should not have been President for medical reasons. He suffered from Addison’s Disease, had undergone multiple back surgeries (some related to the treatment of Addison’s, and some to his combat injury in the Pacific when his PT boat got rammed out from under him. We didn’t know any of this. Jack Kennedy was portrayed as young, vigorous, virile, and an aficionado of some rugby-style touch football with the rest of the Kennedy Clan. He did the nautical thing with the rest of the toffs up in Newport in those damn sunglasses (the signature model is still for sale). He was glamorous, man, just like his spouse, Jacqueline Bouvier, who was too gloriously feminine for any idiot to call “hot” (not a word in those days, other than for “tramp”). Put those two up again any dowdy Republican couple (Dwight and Mamie, for God’s sake–or, gross, Nixon and Pat), and game, set and match. No wonder the Press called Kennedy’s White House “Camelot”. Hell, Jackie spoke good French and, I think, decent Spanish. He sprinkled Latin into his speeches. “Civis Romanus Sum”: Donald Trump barely speaks English. You want a sample of JFK in action? OK. Here are a few.

“My Father always told me that business men were sons of bitches.”

I don’t want to try anyone’s patience, so I’ll stop.

See, this was my JFK–our JFK, yeah, the Catholic JFK. And that latter bears emphasis, because in 1960, this was still a big deal. Not just because he’d be the first (Al Smith, you may recall, ran and lost in 1928, and he was Catholic). But because, until 1958, Pius XII had been Pope. This is strictly RC cognoscenti stuff, but Pius’ whole project was to put the world–yeah, as the whole thing, Orbis Terrarum–under Canon Law. Canon Law is, in essence, the legal code that governs the Catholic Church. You don’t need to know much other than it’s not clear whether Pius was part of the Church that as of yet recognized the independent existence of Church and State. His predecessors, like Pius X and XI, sure as Hell didn’t. So whether or not Kennedy was gonna subscribe to this doctrine (as ridiculous as it may seem today) was a live issue. And then there had been the Radio Priest in the 1930s, Father Coughlin, a virulent anti-semite, denouncing FDR and the New Deal of which JFK’s old man was a part. They had to silence Coughlin, but he was really bad news. How bad? Here

Father Coughlin, Doing his thing

So, believe me, this was the face of the Catholic Church to many people. The heyday of the Universal Church. And it was not pretty. So wonder not that JFK was putting distance between him and the Whore of Rome rather than with the whores he slept with.

So, as it were, this is where I came in–not just me, but lots of us. We were naive. We were innocent of much Catholicism other than the Baltimore Catechism (which my buddy Jim Maule can still quote beyond “Who is God?”), we were probably getting most of our politics from our families; we saw the quarters on which some wits had red nail-polished birettas on George Washington (I had one for years, to remind myself, even at Princeton) to insinuate a Popish takeover in the making. And then came (not in strict chronological order, I know), Jack Kennedy and the Houston speech. Boy, that did it for me. Now I’ll give some context after, but I urge you to at least pay some attention to this speech. It may be self-explanatory, to the extent than anything is anymore.

This is what a President used to sound like.

I really hope you listened. Same tone he took when he cut Big Steel down to size. Like, listen. I don’t give a rat’s ass what you think or who told you differently. That’s not how it works here. I don’t take orders from the Pope. He wouldn’t take orders from the steel companies. And he called the Editors of The New York Times “sons of bitches.” During the Missile Crisis, he wouldn’t let war mongers like Gen. Curtis LeMay start World War III.

Underestimating Kennedy was a mistake that a lot of his enemies made. You know. Fancy ass rich boy from Princeton/Harvard whose Old Man brought him the Presidency. An inexperienced kid. Khruschev beat him up at a Summit in Vienna in early 1961 and it may have led to Nikita’s adventurism in Cuba with missiles. Who knows? I was young and naive, and the idea of someone telling the Catholic Church or US Steel to go to Hell was no small thing–especially as a kid who was already tiring of getting worked over by the parish priest for being a normal adolescent. Within a year or two, a lot of us would begin a staged retreat from the Catholic Church using all sorts of tactics, including going to Mass at a luncheonette, or just arriving late and leaving early (the so-called Principal Parts of the Mass). The other routine sacraments–especially, aargh, Confession–just ended. Unless you were going to Vietnam, death was typically not a major concern of a suburban white boy. If we had known anything about JFK’s sex life, dear God, I can only imagine what the result would have been: “Hey, the President does it!!!” And those were about the only mortal sins on offer for adolescent males. So, no pun intended, what the Hell? I ultimately worried more about getting caught smoking cigarettes. Even I knew the odds of roasting for all eternity because of my untimely demise at 12 were pretty small.

There was also the whole cosmopolitan thing, you know? Maybe there was a bigger world to explore than your block in West Philly. Hey, maybe I could get one of those government jobs where you were always traveling somewhere? If you had never been on an airplane, the whole buzz round Kennedy was more than a little intriguing. Berlin? London? Mexico? If you thought Broad and Snyder in South Philly was a big deal, these magnificent young men and their flying machines put ideas in your head, even if you had no idea what they were. And there were the other worldly vices of which you were dimply aware, all of which seemed to exist in abundance in Washington.

And then he was gone.

That afternoon, I walked home with another guy. I think it was probably the only time we had ever had a conversation. We must have been speculating on who benefited from Kennedy’s murder. We all knew he was dead by then. “The Russians must be dancing in the streets,” was what this fellow said to me. Actually they were not, but the Cold War had shaped our outlook. Who the Hell else would have had any conceivable reason to shoot him? Well, professional politicians knew better. The apparent snap judgment was that if this was gonna happen anywhere, Texas, with its ample supply of right-wing lunatics (yes, even then) was as good a place as any. Another Texan told me years later (I have no way of verifying this), that there was applause in some Dallas schools when the news broke. The same gentleman–a Texan mind you–told me Dallas was the only genuinely fascist city in America. I sincerely hope he was not correct about the first report, and sadly mistaken about the second. Legend has it that someone in the Presidential car–was it John Connally–observed right before the shot, “Well, you can’t say that Dallas (or maybe Texas) doesn’t love you, Mr President.” He was also reputed to have said–or it may have been his wife, Nelly, once the carnage began, “They’re out to kill us all.”

For the record, it’s been a long time since I took the Warren Commission seriously. Who did this and why–well, unfortunately, motive, means and opportunity were plentifully distributed. And that’s that.

For me. And for many of us, the real drama began that Friday evening, when Air Force One, bearing Kennedy’s body and a blood-soaked Jacqueline Kennedy, plus the accidental President, Lyndon Johnson, arrived at Andrews Air Force base. My family watched in rapt silence as the casket was extracted and Mrs Kennedy looked on. I doubt anyone alive then and now will ever forget that image, black and white or not, or the expression on her face. She was clearly in shock, but refused a change of clothes (the famous pink suit, now in the National Archives) because, it was reported, she wanted people to see what “they had done to him.” There were some who thought her actions were in poor taste. I guess her trying to recover pieces of his skull as the limo sped from the scene of the butchery in Dallas was not very ladylike either. I can imagine the descendants of these people are admirers of Sarah Palin.

The weather changed on Saturday. A cold front passed through Philly because Sunday morning seemed much colder, albeit bright and sunny. The only thing that happened to me on Saturday was I went for a ride with my Dad and cried my eyes out. He was, as usual, very understanding and told me it was ok to cry. Good old Louie. Always there for me. On Sunday, Dad and a friend of his were putting in a new thermostat to our heating system (God, I thought he could do anything; when he no longer could, I knew he wasn’t well). The tv was on–as it had been since Friday afternoon–I was half watching because the Dallas cops were supposed to transfer the supposed assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. Well, as we all know. Oswald never made it, because he was shot on live tv by Jack Ruby. All I remember was a tumult and a lot of shouting. I did not actually see the shooting. I have no theory about the shooter, Jack Ruby, although everyone does. You want to solve riddles, be my guest.

On top of the unbelievable event, there was a scarcely slightly less implausible one. The NFL, foreshadowing its role in the necessity and centrality of violence to American life, did not cancel its schedule. Nope. They played. I really don’t remember what humbug the-then Commissioner put out about honoring the Fallen Martyr’s Memory, or some typical bullshit. Irony of ironies. The Commish was right. The Birds played to a full house at Franklin Field. Not even an atrociously bad Eagles team losing to the Redskins (get over it, that’s what they were called) on top of the assassination of President Kennedy could keep some people away from the Iggles. Amazing, right? Hey, it was and is Philly. First things first. Even I was disgusted– I, a kid who bled Green. This was all part of growing up that weekend. Business was business, national tragedy or no. Hey, the NFL played through the attack on Pearl Harbor on Sunday Dec. 7, 1941. For God’s sake, the Eagles played the Redskins in Washington that afternoon. Check me.

What follows is, admittedly, a little unclear. I don’t know if the funeral cortege I remember occurred before Kennedy was allowed to lie in state in the Rotunda of the Capitol, or as part of getting him to Arlington National Cemetery, where he was to be buried. It was, yes, a long time ago. Some of the pageantry is still sharp in my mind, especially the muffled cadence of the drums, or the riderless stallion that seemed destined to bolt with the symbolic boots reversed in the stirrup. And, for the life of me, a lot of the rest is sort of dimly veiled, much like Jackie Kennedy’s old-fashioned black veil, the sort Catholic widows wore to church. Where did John-John salute the President? A stricken and ashen-faced Jackie must have gotten the folded flag from the bier at Arlington, terrible in her beautiful grief. Somehow, I lost the thread over the weekend, almost as if time ran off its usual rails. And that doesn’t tend to happen to little kids. Now, at 72, I expect it, even in the course of a day. But then, when Catholic kids said the Prayer of the Hour in school (“Let us recall the Holy Presence of God, Let us recall His Divine Majesty”), you had your stuff together. After all, the clock determined your freedom then, so it paid to know. As in, hurry up, it’s time, as a poet said.

The following weeks the speculation and the initial hagiography began. What I recall most is the torrent of ephemera commemorating JFK, some of it in good taste, some of it not. A lot of was Sunday-supplement type stuff. Of course, you’d have to know what a Sunday newspaper was then, so I guess that doesn’t mean much. But I mean pull out photos, souvenirs of idyllic family life, records of achievement, and then the inevitable stamps, coins, God seemingly endless. Who didn’t end up with a JFK stamp First Day of Issue Cover? I was nearly obsessed with Kennedy stamps from other countries and at one time, had an ample collection, now lost to one of my adult moves here and there.

I didn’t know much about LBJ and Texas–I already knew more than I wanted by Friday night–but it seemed as if Johnson was going to get anything he wanted from Congress as a kind of debt of blood. That was fine. Especially the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which some people have cast as an “almost living memorial” to JFK. This little NPR piece (click below) is worth listening to, for a variety of reasons, not the least for its insights by John Lewis. It may not be exactly what you expected. Like Lewis said–and I agree wholeheartedly with this–when JFK died, a little bit of all of us died. Even a kid. Especially a kid. With me, it was illusions about America. It’s been a slow process, and it isn’t over yet. But that was the day it all started. So much so I thought the song “American Pie” was about JFK. I know it wasn’t but, for me, that was the day the music died, his widowed bride and all. And nothing is gonna make me change my mind. Especially now.

Do You Remember Pete Liske? Do You Remember Jack Kennedy? They’re Gone, But I’m Still Here

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the early 1960s. Not in any morbid way, you know. But just as the realization hits that I witnessed a lot of people and events that are now consigned to history. If I make a casual reference to some thing–and believe me, we are not talking obscure skirmishes in the US Civil War–I risk losing an entire audience. Or what I have of one. This especially happens with a a species of creature known as an “editor”, and it is, excuse me, a pain in the ass. These guys (guyx, if that makes some of you feel better) are now late 20 or 30 somethings, and they don’t know what they don’t know. Most of us don’t, but some of us were taught to shut up and listen occasionally. It even worked for me.

But, as I reflect, this is merely one of the hazards of surviving past the allotted three score and ten. Oh, yeah, that’s Psalm 90:10, but since America is lousy with Christians, I don’t suppose you need a clue. Sorry. As you were.

This also happens with jazz writing, at which I am a devoted, but admittedly amateur. I have no illusions. There are plenty of people who know so much more than me–but about music in general and this music in particular–that it takes a nerve to venture what is essentially just another opinion. Now that never stopped Eric Hobsbawm, but, son, you are no Eric Hobsbawm (aka Frankie Newton, jazz critic) (Cue Lloyd Bentsen and Danny Quayle–you may have to look it up). Well, wait. That was like, back in da 1900s. So I’ll spot you this one.

I basically stalled for a couple weeks before daring to write anything about Sonny Rollins because, for God’s sake, he’s Sonny Rollins. I don’t think I ever even heard Sonny live, although I have heard a number of legendary sax players. Well, so what do you do? Guess? You spend a lot of time listening to Sonny’s work and going back and reading the jazz press, and then try not to make an ass of yourself. The piece got some nice feedback, so I guess it was ok. I tried to do Sonny in the 1950s justice. It’s not like I can travel in time. You know a better way than being there? Well, I wasn’t there. So I either spend my entire life talking only about what I have immediately experienced, or say nothing. How many stories about West and South Philly could you read? Or about altar boys who were sinning in their hearts while doing a communion gig at a convent school. Enough is enough, right?

My memories extend back to about age 3, but not before. That puts me back far enough to have seen and heard some heavy stuff, things that I will carry to my last moments on planet Earth. And it’s funny some of the stuff that has stuck with me. Well, yeah, the usual you might expect that I can’t or won’t talk about. I suspect others have done it better–in more ways than one. So for now, I’ll stick with some awfully mundane stuff. To make a point.

Take Pete Liske and Penn State.

The first college football game that I can remember listening through on the radio. That would be September 21, 1963, a Saturday evening. It wasn’t the first Penn State game I had watched, for sure. That would have been the 1961 Gator Bowl, which I remember because I had a bad case of gastroenteritis which, for some reason, elicited no real sympathy at home. But hey, listening to a game meant you were a real fan, because it got played out in your mind’s eye. You were there. Because if you didn’t know what a T-formation was (I’m really old) or a power I (yes old), you couldn’t see it, so you had to study the game some.

This particular Saturday night was memorable for a lot of reasons. I listened to the game on the radio of my Dad’s car, which was a Gray Buick LeSabre. I sat in the driveway of my Dad’s old homestead, on North 65th Street, because his sister, my Aunt Mary, was have her annual family get-together. In her back yard, which dead ended into a cinder block building that could double as a wall-ball court when I was there. The Salvuccis were a pretty big group, and they were all still going strong, except for my Dad’s Mom, who had passed in 1960. She was hip. She had a tattoo, was Sicilian, and used to give me a shot of Old Grand Dad or Old Crow on Sunday mornings after Mass at Saint Donato’s (all the boys got one, and I was, well, one of the boys…..shudder if you must at the evident child abuse…….) Anyway, Mary would corral all the brothers and sisters (there were, I think 10 in all) and their kids and assorted cousins from various collateral branches and put out food and coffee and beer and soda and turn on the radio and we looked like a scene from the movie Picnic (one of my older girl cousins was to die for, a bonus at that transitional age of 12). I don’t remember what we talked about. Hell, that night I was down in the driveway, doing cool stuff. But Mary threw this party and for as long as I wasn’t too sophisticated to go, I went. Now that the entire bunch, save a handful are gone, I’d like to go back once more.

We normally started school on September 8, give or take a day, so this was pretty early in the year. I remember the evening as coolish, and it was around 50 degrees at 9 PM according to the record, so I trust my memory. The legendary Rip Engle was still head coach at PSU (Joe Pa came later) and that team featured an also-ran player named Jerry Sandusky. Remember him? Thank God, he was not the star. Their QB, who later played in the NFL (and even late career, for the Iggles, in 1971, when they were ) was a guy named Pete Liske, who is no longer with us. Liske was a middling QB with a good arm, but what did I know? I wanted to be like Pete Liske, just like any Philly kid wanted to be like Sonny Jergensen, who was far from middling, and not very well behaved either. Sonny supposedly get exiled to Washington for one party too many. When we played touch, the dude up the street who was really good got to be Sonny. I was stuck with Pete Liske, so I made the best of it. So did Pete, apparently, since he was well travelled in various leagues. Anyway, that was the start of seventh grade at Prisontation, and while I was never really a problem, I never much cared for it.

Besides, October was usually a good month. We got our steam heat back on October 15 every year, and believe me, you usually needed it. There was nothing quite so invigorating as that early autumn cold snap that could bite; it reminded you, with the turning of the leaves, that Summer was gone. Speaking of leaves, we had a big Norway maple on our front lawn (my Mother hated it because it made a mess), and it marked time by shedding its leaves as they turned yellow. Of course, I got to rake them into large piles for which there was no apparent destination. From time immemorial, until the EPA caught up with us, we got ride of leaves by burning them. I know, air pollution, CO, and all that, but when you lived in a suburban neighborhood where everyone was doing the Saturday afternoon scape, there was nothing quite so delightful as the aroma of burning leaves, tart and eye-watering, but it made for a cocktail of pleasant sensations with a chilly wind. In my mind’s nose, if there is such a thing, I can still smell it, and it was to October what barbecue and hot dogs was to July. Nothing would get me back there faster–music excepted–than that smell, but it isn’t coming back, alas. Especially these days. You’d be liable to burn your neighborhood down with nonexistent climate change.

Since I was at an age where I could be impressed by the derring-do of slightly older alpha males, I also distinctly remember another story from that October, and I remember it because it roughly coincided with my realization that the Iggles might well be on their way to football oblivion (they were, with Pete Liske at the helm), but they could still beat the Dallas Cowboys, an expansion team, with Eddie LeBaron at QB. I actually ended up at a game at Franklin Field down at Penn where they played. How I had a ticket I simply can’t remember, although it must have been one of my uncles, who had a season pass. I guess he had a Communion Breakfast to hit that Sunday, so he must have persuaded his bunch to take me along, which was amazing. I’ve only been to two NFL games in my life, and the Birds, as my memory serves, actually won that one.

But more impressively, there was a story–all over the news that week–that some 15 year old kid had robbed a bank. He was from some nearby suburb, maybe Brookline, and had taken a Red Arrow bus to 69th Street (the big terminal in those days). If memory serves, kid had a toy gun (no red plastic thingy shouting “fake” in those days). Walked into a bank branch (pre-ATM!!!), handed a teller a note that said, more or less like something out of Naked City, “Give me all your money or you’re gonna eat lead.” 15 years old!!!!! I think the teller was so stunned that he or she (probably she) handed over a good bit of cash and the kid made an escape. Man was I impressed. Oh, yeah, his Mother turned him in. I could identify with that. “Now, Richard, I told you not to rob that bank. You need to study for the spelling test.”

At that age, the difference between 12 and 15 or 16 was a lifetime, so you sort of looked up to (or hated) older kids. I didn’t know this one, but I thought, “Heck, if he can, why not me?” I do remember some discussion over our kitchen table about the heist. My Dad, God love him, just looked at me and, as was his wont, said nothing. I don’t exactly remember what Mom said, but I’m certain it was “They’ll put you in reform school.” I probably said I was in Presentation BVM, which was already a reform school. Yes, brilliant. I can’t remember how any of it went over, but I do recall thinking every time I went into the branch bank of Fidelity on City Line Avenue with my Dad, this is how I would do it, although the branch manager, Mr Treston, a neighbor, would probably ID me immediately. So, I refrained. Some years later, a classmate of mine–whose older sister was ironically married to a member of the Philadelphia Eagles, did in fact stick up a bank–several– on City Avenue down in Bala Cynwyd and elsewhere So I guess I wasn’t the only kid who was impressed by the deal. But I had better impulse control. At least when it came to banks.

Whatever happened to him? He went to Vietnam and got wounded. He was a mess before that and the last time I saw him, he was on the back of a landscaping truck at a Burger King in Devon, PA. Grinning like a loon. That was about 1978. He was the scion of a wealthy Republican family, for what it’s worth. Good times.

Does this story have a point? Well, yes, but that’s for next time. Because we’re coming up on 60 years–hard to believe–that President Kennedy got his brains smeared all over Dealey Plaza in Dallas. November 22, 1963. No joke. What they say about remembering exactly where you were and what you were doing. It’s all true. But that’s for next time, maybe in a few weeks. I will tell you that the first time I saw the Texas Book Depository in person, I cried. Spontaneously. There are witnesses, so you’ll have to believe what I tell you. But, in retrospect, that November weekend marked me, marked us, marked America. I had watched JFK get nominated in LA. I watched him get elected via Cook County on the morning following Election Day. I watched him do press conferences, suitably dazzled. I watched with him during the Missile Crisis. And prayed. And I watched him get buried. And prayed some more.

We were just getting rolling. The 1960s were some ride. Even for an ordinary kid from Catholic school and West Philly. If it messed me up, imagine what it did to my peers with somewhat broader horizons. Like the dude who become a bank robber and a landscaper. There, but for the grace of the Piarist Fathers, and Augustin and Aquinas, go I.

The Politics of Cruelty: Greg Abbott

This is not intended to amuse. It is no joke. You may not like what I have to say. Too bad. If you don’t, start your own blog. Nothing’s stopping you.

I suppose it’s no secret that I and a lot of other people don’t approve of what is going on at the Texas-Mexico border. Now, exactly what is going on is not entirely clear. I suppose you might say, “Hey, go down and see for yourself. Then start yelling.” That’s fair enough, but I’m afraid it isn’t going to happen. It’s been running around 106 to 107 degrees Fahrenheit in Laredo, and honestly, I’m not looking to die this week. Which is part of the issue, by the way. I don’t give a rat’s backside whether you take climate change seriously or not. The heat in the Southwest is killing people; we know that. And migrants are people too. Repeat that, slowly, to yourself. These are human beings. These are human beings.

I say that because sometimes I get the impression from some of my oldest acquaintances–friends they’re not, that they don’t quite believe that. You know, if you spent your life up in the Northeast, especially in the more affluent burbs of Philly, Texas is a long, long way from home. If you grew up in Delaware County or Upper Merion or some equally enlightened place, you probably can’t reflexively find El Paso on a map, much less Piedras Negras, or, God forbid, Falfurrias. Did you know there was a Pasadena, TX? I didn’t think so. You never been in one of these sunlit climes. And you got no real intention of coming, do you, unless it’s to bask on the cool waters of the Riverwalk in San Antonio like the C of C wants you to do, and go home raving about the food, the vaguely exotic population, and the margaritas. Have a few brews, maybe sin a bit, and then go back to the land of the picket fence. Bless yore heart.

I, however, live here. Here being South Texas, a scant 3 hours from the border. You know, grin, some of my best friends are Mexicans. Real live ones. Both in country and in exile. Speaking whatever language they speak–some of them better English than you when they don’t choose to spare your feelings. Yeah. On the level. Some of them even can read and cipher. Imagine that.

I bet Greg Abbott can’t.

Greg Abbott, you may know, is the Governor of Texas. He has a politically incorrect nickname among some native Texans because of his disability. I’ll spare you. I don’t know why. He wouldn’t return the favor. Besides, the toy is cute.

Legend has it that Mr Abbott is very smart. I mean he is a graduate of The University (in Texas, there is only one that matters, Trinity, Rice and A&M notwithstanding) and Vanderbilt Law. I have no idea about his intellectual capacities. I really don’t care. I only see him as an evil man. Yup. It’s personal. He’s not the only one. There are a passel of Texas Republicans I regard in more or less the same light. You know, Paxton, Cruz, Dan Patrick. Not all of them are native Texans. But Greg Abbott is. Check out his cloven hoof. No wonder he can’t walk.

When we were suffering under the reign of Rick Perry the Idiot, I figured stuff couldn’t get much worse. He was corrupt as Hell, maybe a few other interesting things too, but then he went off to DC where rumor has it he had some supervisory capacity over our nuclear weapons. No. I ain’t shitting you. Gov Whoops certainly did. https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2016/12/rick-perry-manager-of-nukes-000260/ Scary, huh? Trump at the wheel and Rick Perry riding shotgun. But Rick is off doing something else these days. It’s isn’t rotting in Hell, so I really don’t care.

Now I’ve always hard a hard time with Texas Democrats. I have always sort of blamed them for Jack Kennedy getting his head blown off in Dallas, a place I truly despise for its legacy of assassination, the Dallas Cowboys, and that miserable DFW airport. I’ll spare you the Yarborough-Connolly stuff that got JFK here to begin with. Anyway, that’s just brains under the overpass, like water under the bridge. Yup. They do love their guns in Texas, as JFK found out. But if anything, the latest iterations of the Texas dems have grown increasingly useless. For me, the low point was when Phil Gramm got elected over Victor “Pickup Truck” Morales in 1996. Morales didn’t have a campaign headquarters, didn’t particularly like raising money and was the darling of the Left. He got 43 percent of the vote against Gramm. Some idiot columnist in San Antonio said “It’s ok. Victor had his principles.” I was so incensed I wrote the guy a letter and said I’m sick of Democrats with principles. I want to vote for one who wins. Phil of course went on to give us the financial deregulation known as Gramm-Leach-Bliley that came to fruition in the near wipeout of 2007, the catastrophe that Phil called “a mental recession.” Imbecile, even for an economist from A&M who apparently could not read a balance sheet. But his bs sold well here, and I had to fight off an effort to keep the guy from getting ensconced my department after he retired from his life of public service. I won.

Still, it was illustrative of the nebulous zone of quasi-reality in which a lot of Texans (especially Republicans) seem to live. After all, Trump’s bs had its own shock troops here, so go figure, if you can keep your lunch down. Ole Greg presided over the catastrophic freeze of February 2021 in which over 200 Texans died. We went through the best part of the week with no heat and no power, surviving mostly by periodic trips to our car to warm up or to recharge phones. Greg let the energy “market” in Texas known as ERCOT fix that by allowing electricity prices to rise from $30 to $1200 to balance excess demand with a collapsing supply. That worked real good (a rising relative price will not, in the short run, remove a hard supply constraint, like lines freezing or windmills freezing up. You’re basically telling people to pay, pray and freeze. The “magic” of the market. Higher prices don’t magically unfreeze a grid), Greg. You should’ve run off to Cancun with Rafa Cruz. But, hey, it didn’t matter did it? You killed people and still got reelected, and they were Texans. Hell if they are Messicans or some kind of other furriners coming across the Rio Grande to be greeted by razor wire, no drinking water, and a shove back into the river, it ain’t like they vote? So you go, boy.

Abbott, like Dubyah (George W Bush, hijo) is what they call here a “good ole boy.” You know, you go screw up an entire country, but then get taxied to a navy carrier and strut around (slightly green at the gills) in a flight suit while “Mission Accomplished” signs decorate your presence. Good ole boy. Kept them grapefruit in the Valley safe from Commies during Veet Nam. You gotta understand, this preference for political nonsense goes way back, to 1836, and the Alamo, where a bunch of slave-owning Rebels against the authority of the Mexican government (which had abolished Black slavery) decided that they were gonna preserve freedom by keeping their Blacks enslaved and defying Mexico. Texas. Born in slavery! Got it? That was the Alamo. Now them nasty Mexicans put Davy and Travis and the rest to the sword–as if shooting rebels is anything unusual (well, there is the case of Trump and January 6, but that one baffles me even more). You know, we hang together, as the said in the American Revolution. Or we hang separately. Yup. That’s the way it works. Except in Texas. Then you get a high school named after you. Maybe a missile base.

Which brings us to why Texans just HATE government and taxes. You know: government is tyranny. Except when we benefit from it.

https://comptroller.texas.gov/economy/fiscal-notes/2022/sep/military.php

Damn. Military spending contributes 67 billion dollars to gross output in Texas. That’s billion, with a “b.” Even the Comptroller of the Lone Star state admits it (click the link for facts, as opposed to baloney).

And man, if we hate government in Texas, we really hate taxes. That’s Texas, Not Taxes. Cute. Except it’s nonsense. The average tax burden in Texas is about 8 percent, which is actually higher than Pennsylvania. 50 percent of it is excise and sales, which means it is–can you spell regressive?– it is paid by those with the lowest capacity to pay. What is low is tax on personal income, since Texas has no personal income tax, where Texas really shines. Otherwise, Texas is about average, actually 10 percent below the national average.

So what’s with Taxes? Texas is, by some standards, awful. The second most regressive in the country. But what the Hell, that simply means the poor pay, and if you have a high income, Texas wants You!!!! Yeah, you’ll love it here, if the heat or the cold doesn’t kill your first. You want facts. CLICK. THE. LINK. Taxman not gonna bother you that much. Great!

Heaven for the rich. Hell for the poor. Just as God in HIS wisdom (and it is HIS) intended, right? Why should anyone give a damn about the poor?

http://text=Washington%20State%20is%20the%20most,most%20regressive%20state%20tax%20systems.

Now, if you haven’t heard of Jesus, believe me, come to Texas and you will. Honestly. I see His name on billboards here. I could swear I saw an official Texas license plate with three crucifixes on it, although the heat may have gotten to me. No. I wasn’t dreaming. It exists. Here’s the proof. Now, if I recall my catechism and Bible study classes correctly (maybe not, I am Catholic, not Baptist), Luke 6: 20-21 said

Then he looked up at his disciples and said: ‘Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh

Ohhhh, shit. I mean, in Texas, even the Jews are Christians. So if you are a Christian, Jesus, the dude on the license plate there, said the Kingdom of God belongs to the poor.

Really?

I thought in Texas it was blessed are the poor, for we shall tax them. It’s taxes, not Texas.

So, when you come right down to it, his Lowness, King Abbott, is really just a reflection of the state he governs. A monument to hypocrisy, greed, and ethnic hatred. Sort of like the Alamo, but bigger. Abbott does what he does because it gets him elected. And what gets him elected is what Texans hold dear. You don’t like it? Tough.

And people vote for Abbott because they like what he stands for. Cruelty. Philistinism. Anti-intellectualism. Racism. He is like the Tastykake of Governors. All the good things wrapped up in one, as we used to say in Philly.

Well, if Texas is, as they say, minority-majority, why not just vote the rascals out?

Hey, Abbott and his buddies have worked on that one too. It’s hard to vote in Texas, believe me. Almost as difficult as it is anywhere in the USA. Don’t believe me? Click the link.

https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/elj.2022.0041

I have personally filed four complaints in one election about things I saw at the polls. Fat lot of difference it made. I know people who have been disqualified for no apparent reason at all–except maybe they ain’t Republicans.

I am going to stop, because you have probably heard enough.

Yesterday, I talked to someone in a car with California plates. I told them to think hard about what they were doing. Because big mistakes are not easy to undo. Dude laughed. You make a choice, you live with it. I

I guess my neighbors don’t particularly mind. What the Hell. Texas. Not Texas.

Mañana, Ahorita, and Fuhgeddaboudit

As I gaze out over the wreck of our once-great (small “g,” this is not political) society, it occurs to me that some modification of American English may be necessary to accommodate our changing notions of time horizons and rates of discount. This is Econ-talk for whether we think doing something now (like right now) is more important than waiting a bit and doing it, well, “tomorrow.” You’re gonna like this suggestion, because it is identity-friendly, and recognizes that our friends from Mexico have more to offer than bueno cuisine and various grades of skilled labor. Here is a way out of one our most pressing current dilemmas (we have a variety from which to choose), what we picturesquely call “kicking the can down the road.” We been kicking the damned can down the road on the economy, the environment–Hell, whether or not we want a genuine democracy, for long time. So we need to have a more adequate way of expressing exactly what it is that we are doing. So we don’t all look like a bunch of delusional hypocrites.

Here is Peggy Lee and some cats getting in the spirit of what I recommend. Listen up!

My education in Castillian was, courtesy of Devon Prep, of the peninsular sort, which is to Mexican Spanish as Church Latin is to the revived classical pronunciation in Latin. Sort of. So when I got to Mexico, I had to learn (and unlearn) a whole bunch of stuff, including “mañana.” I thought, naturally enough, that mañana meant “tomorrow,” as in the day after today. Everyone knows that, right? Well, no. It does mean that, but a whole lot more. Maybe, “yeah, as soon as I get to it. If I get to it. But don’t hit the afterburners while you go after it.” At least in my mind, mañana in Mexico implies no definite commitment, although the speaker by no means rules out performing whatever it is that interests you. It’s not “no.” It’s not “yes” It’s not “maybe.” It’s mañana. And that’s got to be good enough. Sort of like Anita O’Day, “I told ya, I love ya, now get out.” Oh, she was a good singer, by the way. Everything is left rather vague. Maybe tomorrow, maybe next week, maybe in a few years. By the way, you won’t get this in the Diccionario Espanol de Mexico. I checked. Today.

Ms Anita O’Day

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could handle our difficult national dialogues with a simple word, mañana? When will we have national health care? Mañana. When are we really going to get serious about climate change? Mañana. When are we going to impose real ethical standards on SCOTUS? Mañana. Racial justice? Mañana. Gun control….. Well, unless you’re beyond dense, you get the picture.

By the way, it may be that “Italian” (Tuscan) has a similar take on “domani” which means, well, mañana. I do recall Perry Como recording a tune called “Let’s forget about domani.” I need tosk my relatives in Italy if domani works like mañana. After Mexicans, Italians are typically the most ticked-off people I know. You know, nothing works the way it should. Italy reminds me of Mexico too. Only more so. Of course, the Italian song is about affairs of the heart. This is Italy, after all. They couldn’t get rid of Berlusconi in a day, bunga bunga or no. Or maybe because of.

Signore Como

Lest you think there is no way in Mexico to represent momentary commitment, slightly deferred gratification, as it were, let me introduce “ahorita.” Who? Well, “ahorita.” Ahora means “now”, therefore, ahorita is a dimunitive form. Hmm. As in “a little now”? Well, no, that makes no sense. “Just a moment.” Perhaps. Or “I’ll be right with you.” Perhaps. There is also, trust me, ahoritita, a dimunitive of a diminutive. This is sometimes accompanied by a hand gesture that looks sort of like “a pinch of salt,” or, at least, I have seen it so employed. But unlike mañana, ahorita means that something is going to get done. And within the foreseeable future. Not maybe sometime in the unforeseaable future, if the river don’t rise. When someone in Mexico in a shop tells you “ahorita,” it means something will be done presently. Not maybe. It may take a few minutes, but it will get done. You may have to cool your jets a bit, but you know that something’s gonna happen. If I said to you ahorita Congress is going to address evident corruption in the Secret Service, it wouldn’t mean “Like Hell it will.” It means it’s gonna happen with some plausible frame of time, even if not immediately. Mañana of course would mean “good luck with that.” Ahorita means indictments are on the way. Like ahorita Trump is gonna be wearing orange overalls. I ache to hear that said, for it would both hold out hope but tell me to expect some plausible delay. Not. Yeah. Would be nice. Never happen. Mañana they’ll indict the bastard and jail him. Right. More like it.

I do think we need some sort of national conversation on the use of these terms in a more formal sense in English. Because it would be an easier way to signal delayed consent versus absolute refusal disguised as a promised, albeit passive aggressive, agreement. Y’all follow? I hope so. Because I am heartily sick of kicking the can down the road in this damn country. The can must be sick of it too, because it’s been going on for forty years. Meanwhile, nobody has any faith in public discourse anyway. Wouldn’t it be better to stop pretending? Like, there’s still time to remedy climate change. Right. or better yet, fuhgeddaoudit.

Now, what about fuhgeddaboudit? Here I can claim no special expertise, because I see this as a New Yawkism (maybe New Jerseyism) with vaguely sinister connections to the Sopranos. Besides, I also understand the term to mean “yes I agree”, “no I do not” or just, well, forget about it. You know, I’ve heard guys say in appraising female beauty, “Fuhgeddaboudit!” which means “I’ll say and then some.” But I have also heard the phrase used in the precisely opposite sense, meaning, “Absolutely not.” As in, is this the Mets’ year? Fuhgeddaboudit! Which means their third baseman should be looking for life insurance in Venezuela. But, I also sense the word means “It isn’t worth thinking about one way or another,” which is neither positive or negative. Well that’s not too helpful, You know, sort of a robust way of kicking the damned can down the road once more. Which is the last thing this country needs: another way for politicians to talk out of both sides of their mouths, at least.

Know what? Fuhgeddaboudit.

Frank Sinatra, Yock, and the Corner

At first I didn’t think I’d have to spend much time in explaining Frank Sinatra. I have, however, thought the better of it. I write for a jazz site with some frequency, and a copy editor told me I had to identify “Bird” (i.e., Charlie Parker, the alto saxophonist, sort of synonymous with the invention of bop music.) Well, for what it’s worth, I here post photos of Bird and Frank. A discussion of Frank follows. There will be a quiz. Bird is on the left.

Bird (Afro American)
Sinatra (Italian American)

One of these days, we should talk about Bird. But not today. Today we need to talk about Frank. And he was simply known in my youth as “Frank.” Especially in the Italo-American community. You didn’t call Franklin Roosevelt “Frank.” He was FDR. You didn’t call Philly nightclub owner Frank Palumbo “Frank” (at least civilians didn’t). You called him Mr Palumbo. Maybe Frank called Mr Palumbo “Frank”, or vice versa. They had a lot in common, including The Outfit (ok, The Mafia) and they were friends. They dined together. God only knows what else they did together. You shouldn’t ask. Anyway. You don’t need a photo of FDR, right?

Frank Palumbo and Frank Sinatra. Mangiano la pasta insieme.

From the very beginning of his career with the big bands–and that would have been with Harry James–Sinatra had a special cachet, but nowhere was that truer than in the Italian- American community. I knew that as a kid growing up in West and South Philly, and it wasn’t like anyone had to really tell me. When Frank sang “I’ll Never Smile Again” with Tommy Dorsey and the Pied Pipers, Jo Stafford could sing, true enough, but Frank was the only one who really mattered. It’s too bad this clip from 1941 is ruined by some idiotic dialog, but at the beginning and the end, there you have him: Frank the Hoboken Hearthrob. I can’t go through his ups and downs, many women, all that Godfather kind of crap (See Johnny Fontaine in the movie, who is, face it, Frank). At one point, at the end of the big band era, Frank was written off for dead. But he came roaring back. As comedian Joe Piscopo used to put it: “WWII. Japs.” Maggio in From Here to Eternity (1953), “tough monkey,” as his fellow paisan and jailer, the sadistic Ernest Borgnine called him.

It’s hard to find many good things to say about a war that killed 43 million people, but for Italian-Americans (previously, known as greaseballs, wops and dagos), WWII was one of those ironic turning points in American history. You see, it’s not as if we were, ahhh, not to put too fine a point on it, genuine White Americans before the War. And that’s not just my hypersensitive opinion. I survived grad school at Princeton and a job interview at Wesleyan, sigh. Believe me, It was the 1980s and I was still under no illusions about what some people thought of Italian Catholics.

Now I’m gonna go easy on this stuff because it will offend some people. Not that I care, but educating ignorant Americans is not my primary purpose in writing this, and if I start ranting about “white privilege” and Italian-Americans, it’s going to sound like special pleading. And it is. I like to say we got ours at Normandy, but that still rubs a lot of folks the wrong way, so we’ll let it go. But I do give you a bit of evidence. No, not Sacco and Vanzetti. It’s been done to death, no pun intended, and one of them was probably guilty anyway. But check this out.

The page below comes from a payroll book from 1906 for mostly common labor–the kind my immigrant ancestors did. Notice that with the suspicious sounding name of a foreman, Ponzello, the rest of the names are WASP, maybe a few Irish. The common labor are labelled “Italian” or “Colored.” Now, a charitable explanation is that no one bothered with the surnames of any common laborer,, so the implied equivalence doesn’t mean much. The uncharitable explanation is that “Italian”=”Colored.” Since they lynched Sicilians in New Orleans, I lean to the latter explanation. Bluntly, Italians weren’t white in 1906, just like some of my Latin students would yell “I’m white” when some university baptized them “Hispanic.” But I digress.

The deal is, WWII was a mixed blessing for Italian-Americans. Yeah, quite a few got killed. But others came home, well, if not heros, then at least, grudgingly in some cases, “white.” And guess who hit a home run, Norman Mailer or PT 109 notwithstanding. You guessed it. Frank. People will tell you Frank was in the throes of a career meltdown in the late 1940s, and maybe even finished with throat problems. Aaaah, but you saw the Godfather, right? Johnny Fontaine the singer and the story of the headless thoroughbred? “Your signature or your brains on the contract.” “That’s my family Kay, not me.” Right. Well, first Frank became a spokesman for American egalitarianism in a 1945 short that was ostensibly about antisemitism. Dis is America, pal. We don’t discriminate. Right. Dat is de American Way. Michael Corleone went off to be a war hero, much over his family’s objections. The rest is leave the cannoli, take the role in “Here to Eternity.”

Tough Monkey Defending Sis’ Honor Again Fatso Borgnine (who in real life was an Itai too)

And World War II may have been tough on Italians and Italian-Americans, but in the 1950s, Frank made a series of blockbuster movies, two of which were explicitly designed to show (well, one at least) how Frank (who never went into the service because he was 4F) and the rest of us brought honor to our people. “From Here to Eternity” was really the one, with Frank as Maggio, who defends his sister’s virtue (natch) and ends up getting killed for his troubles. There was another, lesser known film, “Kings Go Forth,”(1958) in which Frank plays a lieutenant to Tony Curtis’ bigoted playboy-phony sergeant who thinks jilting Natalie Wood, a mulatto, but raised as white in France, is a racial kick (this is oversimplified, I know). Wood had been Frank’s hearthrob, stolen by Curtis, who plays trumpet like Pete Candoli, literally. Frank is triple pissed at the racism and everything else. Curtis gets killed in the end. Frank loses an arm and Wood, but there is still honor. You might also check out “Man With a Golden Arm,”(1956) in which Frank plays a drug addict drummer by the name of Frankie Machine (sounds kind of Italian, no?). The music is great, by the way, and I think Sinatra won an Academy or one of those gongs. Frank does vulnerable very well here, and if that doesn’t grab you, there’s always Kim Novak as eye candy. It’s not as if she could act.

Frank preaches tolerance
Soldier Boy tells WASP Chick the Facts of Hood Life

By 1958, Frank had his own weekly television series, and if you think he was getting big again, you ain’t seen nothing. By the time I was at Devon Prep, Frank had been transmogrified into the Real Mr Las Vegas, friend to Jack Kennedy, sundry mobsters, oh my God, even “Strangers in the Night.” He had run through any number of Hollywood dolls and was getting ready to create Ronan Farrow, but that came much later. You want to keep Frank in 1958, Hero to ordinary Italian-Americans, cause, finally, that’s where this story finally gets rolling.

Faithful readers know I split my young youth between West and South Philly, so we will skip over that (you can check: I’m in no mood to provide links today). Yeah, I grew up in part at 66th and Haverford, Bill Barrett was my Congressman (1945-1947, 1949-76) (i.e., forever), Ragni’s was the corner market (until maybe 1958) (pronounced rag-knee, youse guys), and Yock was the neighborhood purveyor of deli and pinball. Yock? What the Hell kind of name is that? Well, it’s a name that fit the neighborhood; the facing corner is shown below. This was 1949, and I couldn’t swear that Yock was on the adjacent corner yet cause I was born in 1951. But if you think it don’t exactly look like Pound Ridge or something, well, privilege is where you find it. Besides, on the SW corner there was a butcher shop called Danny’s Meats. Leading up to Easter, Danny had a pen full of live sheep for your convenience. Ho boy. A crash course in Christian symbolism if there ever was one. I never was too crazy about lamb as a result. Think about it.

In any event, Yock was a full service deli. There was a counter and a grill. An ice cream freezer that usually had a supply of Breyer’s ice cream and what we called Dixie cups. There was also a cooler with glass bottles of Coca Cola (yeah, glass) and some chocolate concoction called YooHoo. Plus a selection of Franks’ sodas. No, not that Frank, but a Philly institution nonetheless. “Is It Franks? Thanks.” Yeah. We were big on Frank. Check it (her) out.

https://youtu.be/dq_9h7F4xN8
Philly Soda. Girl not included.

Especially in 1958. Yock also had pinball on which illegal wagers were placed, especially by a guy named Johnny, who used the glass surface as a cigarette holder too. Oh, yeah. There were cigarettes for sale. 35 cents a pack. No. I didn’t smoke at seven, but my Dad did, and he thought nothing of sending me out to the corner to buy cigs. Imagine that. Not very Montessori, was he?

You could say that Yock’s was kind of the neighborhood hang out, for want of a better term. Yock was this Italian American, almost a stereotype. Slicked-back black hair. Probably mid-30s. A wolfish face on the dark complected side. Lousy teeth. Skinny, medium stature. Horn-rimmed glasses. Usually in some greasy polo shirt or Ban-Lon wannabee. Definitely not a cool guy, even by the modest standards of 66th Street. His given name was Albert Proetto. Hey. If you were named Albert Proetto, would you want to be called Albert Proetto? Yock is an improvement, capisci?

But Yock had something. Aside from the deli. Yock was an entrepreneur. Hell, he probably didn’t graduate from high school, but in those days, you didn’t go to some fancy-ass college to get a degree in “Entrepreneurship, Vision, and Accountancy” (whatever that is). You wanted to start a business, you started a business. It came naturally to us Italians, as you may have noticed. Nothing was personal. Everything was business. Didn’t need no Joe College type degree. Besides, we had lotsa models, you know. Everybody knew someone who was in a business. Numbers. Cigarette smuggling. Five-finger discount. You didn’t have to be a murderer. Just…..connected.

Anyway, Yock was an entrepreneur. And he was in a neighborhood in which the general level of education was, admittedly, not terribly high (high school, if you were lucky. The Army, if you were not.) People believed in stuff. You know, rumors. Gossip. Italian voodoo. Like giving someone the horns–cornuto–which could mean anything from “sod off” to “your wife is making the 82d Airborne happy”. You didn’t do it lightly, huh? There were folk remedies, some of which actually worked pretty well. There were bleeding Madonnas (not at St Donato’s (Hail to the Blue and Gold) but hey, she couldn’t be pulling Fatima stunts everywhere). Man, there was a lot of gossip, although not so much in my immediate family. There was a lot of folklore about, you guessed it, sex and conception. I’ll save that for another time. And about, well, I’ll stop. I never heard most of it anyway…….

So, Yock, being resourceful, must’ve been casting about for a way he could drum up business without breaking too many laws (we had Skippy for that). And, whaddya know? In 1958, when Frank was really in the ascendant, Yock met Frank. And was gonna bring him to West Philly. To 66th and Haverford. To…….Yock’s!!!!

I know what you’re thinking. Right? Why the Hell would Frank Sinatra visit Yock’s? Hell, aside from Frank Palumbo’s, why would he even come to Philadelphia, let alone my neck of the woods? He grew up in Hoboken, the son of an abortionist-midwife. It’s not like he needed more of it. Well, truth be told, there was no reason on Earth for Frank to come to Yock’s on a Friday night in September 1958. But Yock said he was coming. Ho boy, did he ever say Frank was coming. Yock took out a radio spot on one of the South Jersey AM stations, probably some low wattage operation, telling everyone within the sound of his voice that Frank was coming to Yock’s. On Friday night. September 26, 1958. Hell, it was in all the papers. At least the one that Yock had posted in window. You know,, “Frank Sinatra to Appear at Yock’s Friday Night.” I saw it with my own eyes. Hell, I was THERE!.

In those days, if you went down to the Steel Pier in Atlantic City, you could get a fake newspaper front page made, above the fold in bold letters, if you wanted. I always wanted one that said that I was joining a big band, but my Dad took a dim view of it. Yock, on the other hand, had more expansive horizons. He actually had the damn thing printed up and posted on various windows in the neighborhood. Especially his. And so the fun began.

I can’t swear I remember much discussion of the putative visit of Ole’ Blue Eyes in the week preceding the appointed evening, but there must have been some. What I can tell you is that a sizeable crowd had gathered at 66th and Haverford, basically milling around. I don’t remember the traffic jam, there apparently was one on both 66th Street and Haverford Avenue, and that the Philly cops were none too pleased. Was my Dad with me–I don’t remember, although in those days no one would have thought too long about letting a seven-year old hang on a crowded corner at 7 or 8 o’clock at night. Any event, what I do remember was the natives getting restless, as in “Where’s Frank?” Finally, some idiot wearing sunglasses, a Frank fedora, and a white raincoat showed up. Was it? There was a momentary flutter. The flutter turned into an angry grumble when everyone realized that this was not Frank. I’m surprised, honestly, that someone didn’t try to clock the guy and there was some pushing and shoving. But pseudo-Frank disappeared into Yock’s, or the night, or somewhere. I guess I went home. If I was disappointed, I don’t remember.

There was a write up in the Philly newspapers the next day. When someone pressed Yock about Sinatra not showing, his sage reply was “I never said which Frank Sinatra was coming.” Cute. You could tell that Yock was a nobody because he didn’t get hurt, or busted, or even particularly hassled. At least Skippy the Bookie would get his picture in the paper. Or his wife did.

So, yeah, what did it prove? Well, a bunch of working class Italian-Americans would fall for a transparent hoax. Really? Think of what else they fell for. The biggest hoax of all: The American Dream. They fell for Vietnam, remember, and they bought that in a big way. I talked to a kid at the local beer distributor on Haverford Avenue about five doors down from Yock’s once. He was on leave from the Au Shau Valley in Vietnam around 1970. He was in uniform and proud of it. A marine. I often wonder if he made it home alive. We fell for all that Land of the Free and Home of the Brave stuff. Hell, the Frank myth was a good myth. In 1958, the children of immigrant families were heavy into good myths. You too could be a WASP. Get a place in Delmar Village or some tacky suburb. Start today! Easy payments. Frank was part of the myth we all shared. And, sorry, we made America too. People like.Joe Villari and Stan the Man And then came Viet Nam. Some of the innocence started to wear off. By the time Ronnie Ray-Guns came along, a lot of my paysans were only too ready to listen to his bullshit. They were now “white” and aspiring gentry too.

The joke was on us. Yock was smarter than he looked. Ahead of his time even. He knew we were gullible. So did Uncle Sam. So did Frank. We were the idiots, and he provided the background music for our let’s-pretend “classless” society. As he crooned, sort of, “We’ll get along.” Yup. Frank never showed. Only in the movies. That was real life. And in the end, even Frank got screwed.

Holy ! Week !

Holy Week. It does it every time.

I realize that if you are not a Roman Catholic of a certain age (partially pre-Vatican II), you are liable to find a lot of what follows of little interest. I certainly don’t want to reduce my legion of loyal followers (maybe two dozen at last count) any further, but, like Miles Davis said about his changing styles in jazz, writing these things is like a curse. Somehow, I have to do it. But you don’t have to read it. So, go in peace if you must.

On the other hand, I want to give it to you straight. Once upon a time, I was a real Roman Catholic. And that entailed real sins, real repentance, the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, real Latin, and real ritual. For some of you, this is some atavistic superstitious itch that needs to be scratched. Maybe it is. But it–writing about Holy Week in the old days–is something I got to do. Because, in part, I need to get this off my conscience and off my chest. In part because childhood memory, rituals of the sacred, and the dogmas and doctrines–even the sacramentals or material accoutrements of the faith–are powerful, even talismanic things. Today is Palm Sunday, and even though I watched the Dominican service streamed from Oxford (yeah, I am a Mass snob too), I got no palm frond to wave, no braided cross to take to the cemetery, no feeling that I have somehow tried to make my peace with two thousand or so years of co-conspirators, aka, the Church Militant, Penitent, and Triumphant. If you know what I’m talking about, you’re in select company. And if not, you could spend a few minutes doing something much worse.

Ok, not too many confessions, because you’re not bound by the seal of confession (you can blab), and honestly, my current sins are awfully boring, truth be told. But I will make one confession. Last Friday, I did the Stations of the Cross. And I mean the old version, the one that goes back to Alphonse Liguori. Really? You mean they still exist outside of some benighted clack of fanatics? No, silly. On line. It isn’t just for pornography and cat videos, or AI, whatever the Hell that is. I can get a reasonable facsimile of the One, True Church online. You know the nulla salus extra ecclesiam version? Yup. You pagans didn’t know that did you? (I had to check the gender of salus, I fear). Well, you can.

The Stations, of course, are a Lenten devotion, and not confined to Holy Week. “Stations” literally recapitulates the words of the accompanying hymn, Stabat Mater (from the Latin sto, stare, status sum: to stand and await), as in “At the Cross Her Station keeping, Stood the Mournful Mother weeping.” The devotion is a commemoration of the via crucis, or what I think of as the great existential story of Christianity: choose the right path and get nailed to a cross for your trouble. My reasons for the practice are entirely personal, but my memories of the days in which I was an altar boy (sorry, no girls allowed then) are of a piece with the rest of my life: vaguely nutty and faintly amusing. If I recall, it took three altar boys and a priest to do the Stations: two dudes holding candles, one guy hauling a Cross on a pole, and the Celebrant, who read the text of the 14 (yes, fourteen) stations and then exposed the Blessed Sacrament in Benediction afterward. Meanwhile, the parish kids howled an out of tune version of Stabat, led by an energetic nun and a technique-challenged organist. You had to be there, especially on a Friday afternoon when the inmates were all ready to make a break for it. Talk about Eternity.

The guy I remembered drawing at Prisontation was a dour type named Fr. Cassady. He was also in charge of the altar boys and didn’t fool around. He spoke with this kind of throaty drawl when he was bawling us out, which was frequent, and usually resulted in written assignments he called “lines.” Lines as in lines on a lined page of loose leaf. Man, one day, he snapped out on this eighth grader named Jimmy Ward for some reason, and it went like this:

Ward, 100 lines…….But Father!

Ward, 500 lines…….But Father!

Ward, 1000 lines…. I didn’t do anything!

Ward, 5000 lines…. Ward incoherently proclaiming his innocence

Ward left the corps d’altar boys soon after. I have no idea what he did.

Cassady did a mean benediction. He insisted on Latin from beginning to end and growled at us when we screwed up. He also really dug incense, and made the acolyte prepare him a double in the censer. Pretty soon, the altar would look like the aftermath of a four-alarm fire, and one guy, who had asthma, practically had to be rushed to Lankenau Hospital for respiratory therapy. And woe betide the kid (me) who cracked up as we processed around the nave of the church, usually because some other kid, buried deeply in a pew, was making obscene gestures. Or because some girl was grinning at me. I mean, sacred purposes notwithstanding, Stations always turned into some kind of train wreck, as did all our efforts at pageantry.

But things didn’t really get rolling until the Triduum, the old-fashioned name for Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Saturday. Good Friday was the real killer. I remembering it going on for well over two and a half hours, or just long enough to get Jesus crucified and dead. Palm Sunday was nothing by comparison, and unless you were unlucky enough to draw foot washing duty on Holy Thursday (gross, I never did), Thursday was ok. But Friday, dude, we let it all hang out. And back in those days, everyone joined in the fun.

One year, it was, you should pardon the expression, hotter than Hell on Good Friday, probably early to mid 1960s. So, we had to do that stuff in cassocks and surplices, and possibly, if it was toward 1965, dolled up in little monsignor outfits with a zucchetto on our heads (cute, right). And, of course, this stuff was choreographed all around the altar, with censers, and wooden knockers instead of bells (one of the other idiot altar boys brought the thing down on his finger and yelled a most inappropriate oath at a moment of great solemnity) and covers over the statues that we could gawk at. And then the litanies, Ora Pro Nobis, which went on for half an hour and nailed every saint in Heaven. We also prayed for the perfidious Jews, which a couple of my public-school friends learned of and spilled to their parents. Sheesh, you’d a thought we were the antisemites rather than Rome. And we did a lot of Three Stooges collisions, none of which entertained Fr Cassady, who was ready to throttle a few of us. It didn’t help that one of the younger priests thought we were entertaining and kept looking away laughing. I think he left the priesthood for a blonde. So, we didn’t know what to do. And do I recall correctly, or did we read The Passion on Good Friday, with multiple actors? Man, that went into extra innings too. It didn’t help that I burst into laughter when Cassady began to chant Ecce Lignum Crucis, Pependit. He sounded like a goat in heat.

In the debriefing we usually got (i.e., the chewing out), Cassady informed me “Salvucci, you were chosen for this assignment for your ability to organize and retain information. Not be a clown.” Ouch. Yes, Father. Did I think I would ever be chosen again. No, Father. It sort of helped that I was on the verge of graduating anyway, not that I reminded the Old Tyrant of that. We still had to do the Easter Vigil, and that was an even bigger deal, with Paschal Candles, priests blowing on the baptismal water (clean it up, ok?), and lots of flowers around so that the place smelled like the Gangemi Funerals on South Broad when they were running a full house with maybe a made dude or two requiring extra flowers, like extra onions on a cheese steak. You know, special.

Predictably, there was another disaster. I have always had allergies and sinus problems. While I deeply love flowers (some of you endure my FB posts), they don’t deeply love me back. Standing up on an altar surrounded by lots of white flowers made my nose itchy, and there were a few sneezing fits that night. So, while Fr Doherty was inexpertly carving the Paschal Candle with an only passable Alpha and Omega and infusing the baptismal waters with the Holy Spirit–his–I was either sneezing or stifling a yawn because it was after Midnight. And we did it right back then, usually not wrapping up until 1AM or so. I didn’t have much to do, thank God, and it wasn’t like it occurred to me to actually try prayer. Who went to Mass to pray, after all? I do remember coming home one year and having a sandwich, which adolescent metabolism permitted. I didn’t fall down the altar steps like one kid did, but my ecclesiastical career was clearly going nowhere.

It’s funny, after all these years, memory traces can still summon up the Hound of Heaven thing. So, all that stuff, including the keeping silent from 12 to 3 on Good Friday that we did in the 1950s before any of this stuff happened, had some lasting effect. The more loused up the secular world seems, the more I’m willing to contemplate retreating to a spiritual one. Some cynic can say that approaching mortality has that effect on people, and looking for certainty has always motivated a religious impulse. It did with Cardinal Newman, so I’m damned if I’ll make an apology for it. Besides, I asked a priest to do Dies Irae at my Mom’s funeral, and he said he couldn’t. Somebody has to remember “I am A Catholic. In case of Accident, Call A Priest.” Today, you’d have to find one first.

Good luck with that.

Over Manoa Road

His name was Ernie Pellegrino. He was always dressed in white. If he had a sense of humor, you could’ve fooled me. He presided over “Ernie’s,” the barber shop at Manoa Road Shopping Center. He was a glowering presence, the yin to the yang and sunny disposition of the guy who owned the hardware store at Manoa and Rock Glen, Tommy Freed. Together they were joined by Roy J Eby, an appliance dealer who used to advertise on Gunnar Back’s newscast on WFIL-TV (Channel 6), a sort of nondescript guy whose mildness belied any of the bragging rights that fame had bestowed on him. And there was Mertz’s, a Mom and Pop market of the kind that dotted America in the 1950s, different in kind only by its Presbyterian ownership from Ragni’s, at 66th and Haverford, a similar emporium. There was a sort of deli, a dive deli in truth, owned by a guy universally called Rino (that’s Ree-no), not Republican-in-name-only, who made great lunch hoagies and stuff. There were ultimately not one, but two drug stores (no no, that’s not what it meant in 1965), the Penn Wynne Pharmacy and the Havaline pharmacy. (More on this anon). Then there was some kind of business called a Manufacturer’s Representative. None of us knew what the Hell that was. And a little further down, a realtor, d/b/a Vogel and Mullholand when we hit Penn Wynne. It did change names and owners later when the father of a classmate of Prisontation must have bought the guys out, at which point it became Bernard Drueding, realtors. and Notary Public. Didn’t know what the Hell that was either. For the better part of a decade, the 1960s, that was where I hung my hat in the mean streets of Penn Wynne. And like the gay lawyer portrayed by Tom Hanks in “Philadelphia,” said, those streets in Lower Merion were mean.

Ho boy. Where to begin? Actually, I should start with the Volunteer Fire Company that was adjacent to it, about which I have previously held forth. That was a piece of what we generically called “Manoa Road.” Now, Manoa Road actually ran quite a ways, out to West Chest Pike or State Route 3 in…..you got it….Manoa. Why in God’s name some farmer named his place Manoa in the 1800s is beyond me, unless he had just come back from Hawaii. In any event, Manoa Road was a surface road of considerable extension traversing both Montgomery and Delaware counties. But to the kids in Penn Wynne, none of that really mattered. Manoa Road was only a block long, functionally. And really, apart from Tommy Freed’s hardware, Rino, and the two pharmacies (and Mertz’s, as long as it was there), nobody cared. Mertz’s had a sad history, when Mr Mertz, who looked like a Mr Mertz, committed suicide. He was never very talkative; his wife did most of the human interaction. But they were nice. Mr Mertz was the first suicide I ever met. It took a long time for the ownership of that spot to stabilize.

I think Infinity Hair Designs was Ernie Barbershop 50 years ago. Reincarnation of a Sort.

Right afterward, somebody had the bright idea to put in something called Parke-Mills General Store. I couldn’t tell you what they sold, bubble gum aside, because no one ever went there. So they didn’t last. Not, however, before providing suitably adolescent entertainment to a bunch of young males (I only observed). One of the hormonally crazed Prisontation kids got put up to a prank, which was to go in and ask the young lady behind the counter, some teeny bopper, if they sold Trojans. Ok. As most of my readers know, a Trojan was synonymous with a prophylactic–the brand persists in these less reticent times, from what I can see. They are on plain view in Target or in Walmart. Very naughty in those days, and never discussed in polite company. Like we were polite? In any event, the young lady was clueless (or pretended to be) and went back in the store to ask the owner if they sold Trojans? Fun ensued.

Next thing you know, some swarthy Mediterranean type comes running out to the front of the store screaming at, let’s call him Jimmy, “What the Hell kind of store you think I got here, miserable kid? Get outta here before I call the cops.” These words were all suitably accented, and as the hirsute one gave chase to Jimmy, we dissolved in laughter on the pavement (payment, in Philly-speak) in front of the store. Well, it was funny to a bunch of 12 and 13 year old boys. Parke Mills closed soon thereafter. Ironically, in the late 1960s, I think a bridal boutique moved in(!), and today (I won’t swear) there is a personal trainer kind of deal there. Oh well. Sic transit gloria……

Now the beating heart of Manoa Road was divided into Tommy Freed’s (not visible) and the Penn Wynne Pharmacy (today some kind of fitness outfit in the photo). The Havaline Pharmacy came later, and was never as much fun because there was no…..SODA FOUNTAIN. Boring, they only filled prescriptions and sold the occasional girlie magazine that whoever was employed as the delivery boy got to thumb through as a fringe benefit. The pharmacists were nice guys, and basically said they weren’t in competition with Penn Wynne because each shop had its own customers. I believe it. We got our prescriptions from Havaline (and I later, cigarettes). But to hang, there was the Penn Wynne Pharmacy.

With a soda fountain, fountain drinks (especially a mean cherry coke), and a sweet guy who was the soda jerk, a Black guy named Randy. Everyone called him Randy. He was so well known that there was a newspaper article written about him when he retired, probably in the Main Line Times. His name was Randolph Lord, but the newspaper called him “Jones.” I guess because every Black dude then was named Jones. I’m surprised they didn’t call him Tyrone.

Ok, I gotta try to explain the racial dynamics of a nearly urban suburb in Philly in the 1960s in what was not an integrated suburb (until, maybe 1970). You gotta bear with me. This is race as it was constructed for me, at least in Penn Wynne. In Haddington or South Philly, it was very different. And if you don’t understand that, well, you might as well just skip this part. And if you are gonna start with “But he was unthreatening and subservient.” I might as well ask if you really expected Eldridge Cleaver behind the counter at Penn Wynne Pharmacy? Dude. On the couple of occasions that I got the chance to talk to Randy in more than “The Phillies blew another one” I got a glimpse of how Randy operated. He knew the White world didn’t really want him, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. So he handled himself with dignity. Frankly, if anyone (and we didn’t use the term “disrespect” then) disrespected him, they would have gotten hurt. It didn’t happen. In or out of earshot, unless you were dealing with a cynic from out of town. God knows, Penn Wynne was not one big happy family, as I have repeatedly said, and I’m sure it was racist as Hell. But Randy got a pass, thank God.

The other thing about the pharmacy was its lending library and supply of Sunday New York Times. Look, I didn’t even know what the Hell the NYT was then, and I often wondered what this monstrous stack of papers on Sunday–with people’s names on them, cause they were mostly reserved (no, the Salvuccis were not subscribers) was. When we went into the Dominican Republic in 1965, I read about it in the Inquirer which was sort of a newspaper then (not exactly the polar opposite of what it is now, but reliably Walter Annenberg Republican (such no longer exist). I didn’t really get into the Times until college and the Pentagon Papers. So I got my South/West Philly horizons suitably broadened in the pharmacy. Not to mention, the “library,” which was a carousel of paperback book on offer, such classics as The Harrad Experiment or The Carpetbaggers. The pharmacist on duty would always yell at the guys thumbing through the paperbacks, and The Carpetbaggers took such a beating that I think they had to replace it. Always seemed as if the thing fell open around page 200 or so; you didn’t have to work too hard. But, when we had a career day at Prisontation, the guy we nicknamed Hornet told the good sister that when he grew up he wanted to be Jonas Cord (you will have to look at the novel). Naturally, the usual suspects fell out laughing as Hornet tried to explain what this meant. The nun was not amused. They never were.

The other beehive of activity was Ernie Pellegrino’s barber shop. This was seriously old school, with maybe 6 barbers (pre-1965), all decked out in white outfits. Ernie, who was a horse-lover, had a salon whose primary reading material was the Racing Form as well as the usual “men’s magazines” that the kids were strictly forbidden to touch, on pain of getting growled at by Ernie, who was quite good at it. I thought Ernie hated everyone. I never saw him smile or laugh. When hair styling for men became a thing, he apparently forbade his barbers–with names like Don and Sol–from even thinking about updating their equipment (to razors), let alone their repertoire. So everyone came of the place looking like some character from a bad 1950s noir film. Ernie had a certain kind of clientele, and as age took its toll, changing fashion did the rest. I guess Ernie died or retired, not that anyone cared. The Scowling Barber of Penn Wynne. You thought your usual operator of a tonsorial parlor was personable and had the gift of gab–for business sake. Not this guy. As soon as my folks could no longer compel me to patronize the SOB, I defected to Lou English’s Style Lounge down in Overbrook Park. The staff there was permitted the use of a razor, and charged accordingly. That was like a rite of passage. One of the younger barbers tried to take Ernie’s place over and make a run with it, but I guess it failed, and by that point, I no longer got haircuts. The 1970s were rough on Italian barber dudes. I did, however, succeed in getting an autograph from an NBA player at Ernie’s. It was Dolph Schayes, who ambled in soon after the Syracuse Nats moved to Philly to replace the Warriors. Schayes didn’t care, but Ernie nearly threw me out of the place for even asking, and glowered at me every time I came in thereafter. I was glad to shake the hair clippings off my feet when I moved on. He was, as the Sicilians say, a tidadoof.

Nothing cool ever happened at Rino’s. It smelled of onions, garlic and Rino’s aversion to showers. One thing, though. On occasion, the lay teachers at Prisontation would send a pair of eighth grade boys down to Manoa Road to buy them lunch at Rino’s. You know, that was some kind of honor, like being Chief altar boy or Head of the Safety Patrol. There were 3 or 4 of them (i.e., lay teachers), and they laid some bread on you with an order. You got to escape well before lunch and take the air and “chat” with Rino. But the payoff was bringing the stuff back to school. Then you got to enter the teacher’s lunchroom and that was a trip. Wall to wall cigarette smoke, since I guess that’s how they fueled up for the afternoon with the inmates. It was sort of cool, seeing one of the younger teachers with a cigarette dangling from her lips, shameless hussy, thereby encouraging some of us in our later experiments with tobacco delinquency. It was a 30 second glimpse into the flesh-and-blood life a school teacher: too bad the example didn’t take with some of us. What a gig that must have been.

I’ve left the hardware store for last, known as Tommy’s, or Tommy Freed’s, in honor of the proprietor, who was a good guy. He never complained about having kids in the store, which was just what you would imagine, an old-fashioned a little of everything place presided over by Mr Freed and an employee. For a while, it was my cousin Tony, who lived over there on Rock Glen Road. No, I got no discount. He was a Salvucci, and we barely made eye contact. The Salvucci were not the toasty warm part of the extended kin group. Anyway, Tommy was from New York, a graduate of DeWitt Clinton High (God, he was probably a classmate of my teacher, Stanley Stein’s), and obviously a lot brighter than the average citizen of Penn Wynne. God knows how he ended up there, but I never saw him angry. Tommy was the soul of geniality, and he did a nice business. I guess being the corner store didn’t hurt, and Tommy’s was like Alice’s Restaurant, you know. You could get most anything you wanted there–‘cepting Tommy, in whom I had no interest anyway.

Tommy was Head of the Civic Association for a bit, and some kind of Republican row office holder too, so he took the civic duty stuff seriously. In a way, he was what was good about Penn Wynne. Cordial, enlightened, responsible, patient, a good employer, decent. Whenever I get back, I go past that storefront and still expect it to be Freed’s Hardware. I wish it were. I still remember the hardware store smell.

No great lessons to be drawn here, other than the two people I mostly admired from our little commercial district were a Black Man and a Jew. You’ll forgive me if I find considerable irony in that. The Pellegrino, I could have done without. There is a synagogue now across from the old shopping center, where the old rectory of Presentation BVM Church and School more or less stood. I’ll let you think about that until next time.

But What About Ordinary People? The Super Bowl Ain’t For You, Friend (or For Me. For That Matter)

Since they are whining again, I reprint with the addition that the NFL will send the Birds to Brazil. That’s near Ukraine, right? C’mon, the average Philly dawg has no clue. Jerry Jones probably has no clue. But what the Hell, let the NFL teach Americans geography, like wars used to do

I guess it was last year the Philadelphia Inquirer, which I regard as hopelessly “woke” (sorry), ran an idiotic story about the price of Super Bowl tickets. The gist, of course, was that you had to be pretty damn affluent to afford the thrill. No kidding. This is America. Money talks. If you haven’t noticed, you’re asleep and need to be awakened. Or woke. Whatever. Nobody is entitled to attend the Super Bowl, ya know. It ain’t health care.

I was getting ready to do the research and create a Super Bowl ticket price index, and a later version may incorporate it. But for now, my research skills (I charge plenty) turned this little gem up.

https://www.gobankingrates.com/saving-money/entertainment/cost-super-bowl-tickets-year-you-were-born/

Yeah, click on the link, as they say, or copy and paste it into your favor browser-thingie. Anyway. I caution you about a few technicalities. I got no idea about how the inflation-adjusted prices were calculated, other than assuming the base year must have been around 2021. And then there are lots of other index-number problems, but this is close enough for a blog. If you don’t like it, go and do likewise.

Let’s take a first cut at this. If you wanted to use nothing more than the consumer price index, well, $1 in 1967 would be about $8 in 2021 (you wanna play around with this stuff in a more sophisticated way–why would you do that when some professional historians don’t?–go to https://www.measuringworth.com/ (same deal, copy and paste). Now, technically, you gotta be comparing the same good, and oh my God, right there you have a problem. In 1967, Super Bowl I (I watched the game on TV in black and white, and, yes, it was “Sper Bowl” even then), I don’t remember any half-time extravaganza. The game itself is very different, so, I guess you can say you’d need a different sort of index (called a hedonic price index) to really get an accurate feel for how much improvement you’re actually paying for in “the experience.”

But forget all that. Let’s keep this simple (think ENRON accounting, where they just made it up). Figure a “typical” ticket (don’t ask) in 1967 would cost you about $80 in 2021 dollars. Yup. The list on 2021 tickets (El Cheapo, to keep the Inquirer happy) was $7,200. Let that sink in. $7200/$80=90, right? So, the “relative price” (relative to the price level in 1967) of Super Bowl tickets, on a much, much, simplified, heroic assumption basis, has increased 90 times, or 9000 percent? (Am I doing this right? So many damn zeros). My Dad’s home cost about $10,000 in 1960. When I sold it after my Mom passed 8 years ago, it brought about $190,000, or 19 times what it had cost back in the Sixties. For God’s sake, First Class postage has gone up about 15 times since them days. So, class, yes or no? Has the relative price of an NFL Super Bowl ticket increased? You bet your sweet life it has. By a lot. Y’all want to hazard a guess why?

Let’s try supply and demand, just for a start. Nothing fancy. No graphs, unless you want one. Just words. But we’ll simplify. Think (Supply) Cost and (Demand) Benefit. OK. Now, I warn you, I’m not going to get into the weeds on this. Just a few observations. Because no matter how complicated the real world is, the econ carry these little heuristics in their heads, at least as a way of sorting the basics

Ok. Supply is cost. If the price of a ticket depends on the cost (this is arguable) of providing a professional football game, you want to think of what goes into cost. Again, let’s keep this simple. When you look at pro football, the largest item in a team’s cost is its payroll–players’ salaries. I know, stadium fees and all the rest, but believe me, I’m sure if we’re looking at the Eagles’ books (wouldn’t that be fun?), it would be players’ salaries that would comprise the bulk of operating cost. Being in Texas, I looked this up for the Cowboys, and it comes out to about 62 percent. I have no reason to think that isn’t typical of most NFL franchises, give or take a few percentage points, so we’re talking around two-thirds of the cost. Hey, that’s enough. If supply is cost, then players’ salaries are cost. So what has happened to players’ salaries since 1967. Guess? They’ve gone up. By how much? A lot.

This is complicated, and I’m not about to kid you. In the 1950s, the average player made (wait for it), less than $6,000 per year. Ok. Some guys made a lot more, but I can recall the days of players having off-season gigs. The patron saint of this blog, Chuck Bednarik, was nicknamed Concrete Charlie. Because he hit so hard he almost killed Frank Gifford in 1960, right? Wrong. No, he actually was a salesman for Warner Concrete in Philly for 18 years. And Warner was God’s concrete, you know, a selling point for houses built in the `1930s and 1940s. I don’t know what Chuck made, but when I was in high school, he was doing the Communion Breakfast circuit to bring in cash, and I doubt he was getting big money. These days, the average is about $2.7 million, and the minimum NFL compensation is in the neighborhood of 400,000. So the average has gone up 450 times!!! You read that right. Even if you used the minimum today, you be talking an increase by a factor of 60. 6000 percent. Why???? Grin, back to S and D.

In 1960, there were 13 clubs. Today there are 32. That’s about 2.5 times as many. Do you really think the elite college talent pool has expanded by that much? I mean, USC, Michigan, Alabama, etc? Of course not. So for one thing, there’s a lot more competition for pro-level players today, and that itself would pull up their salaries. But wait: there’s more! There wasn’t any Player’s Association in 1960. No Collective Bargaining Agreement. There had never been a strike. No Free Agency, albeit restricted. Dude. This is modern America. Teams no longer have property rights in their players (aka, slavery). The market rules!!! And see what it’s done? So whatever else you think, costs since the 1960s have soared in the NFL. What? Profits too. Well, that’s another blog post. There’s more, since a lot of these guys could play another pro sport too, but enough is enough. Oddly enough, all these increases in cost are considered a decrease in supply.

Now, demand. 100 million people gonna watch the Birds and KC, worldwide. In 1967, it was NBC and CBS (I guess one for the NFL and one for the AFL?). Super Bowl. Who knew? A lot more eyes. And, by the way, a lot more money around, especially at the top end of the scale, right? So higher incomes, more people want to see. That’s called an increase in demand. Here’s another way of visualizing the increase of interest in the Super Bowl: an N Gram of the phrase “Super Bowl.” Ok. Convinced? No? What do you want?

So you got a decrease in supply and an increase demand. Voila. The relative price of a Super Bowl ticket rises.

According to some data that I could dig up–and who knows how accurate–at one of the recent games, 55 percent of the attendees came from households with $60,000 per year and up, Up means who knows, and, honestly, that figure struck (for household income) struck me as too low. But even so, it would mean 45 percent came from households less than that? Really? While it’s true you don’t have to sit at the 50 yard line, stay at a luxury hotel, and hit the “Meet, Greet, and Eat” with Big NFL names of the past (like Jerry Rice) if you do, exclusive of transportation (your private jet?), you’re going to have to lay out $42,000. Yeah, you read that right. Of course, Super Bowl festivities began on the 7th of Feb, so this is not a one day thing, but that amount was about yearly median per capita income per US worker in the 2020 census. Somehow, I doubt that Billy and Bonnie Six Pack are living high this weekend out there in Arizona. Where the Hell would they get it?

Max out your their credit cards–if they’re not already there? Put a reverse on your home. Well, I can say I actually knew somebody who did that and then gambled with the proceeds (I knew the person, the story is hearsay), so working class people are capable of doing very crazy things. “Hey, Yo. It’s once in a friggin’ lifetime! Ya can’t take it with you. This the greatest Birds team ever.” Check. Persuasive “reasoning” like that did make Agent Orange our President for a few bright, shining, plague-ridden years. No one thinks (or I don’t, at least), that half of Americans have a clue as to what is going on around them. So why should the willingness to go into hock to watch a historic meeting (aren’t they all, according to the shills of the NFL) not come into play? This is trickle down at its finest.

So don’t complain about the ticket prices, like the Inquirer, further covering itself in the economics of social justice. After all, people need Super Bowl tickets, just like they need everything else. Problem is, in America, other than common sense, we can’t seem to find anything we need less of. But I sound like some economist. Yes, 100 million will watch the Super Bowl. Our food banks might not be doing too well, but hey, BP and Exxon and cleaning up, and I bet some of their CFOs will be at the game. Isn’t that all that really matters. That our role models are millionaire jocks and crooked executives, plus some lamebrain from Georgia who shouts at Brandon at the SOTU soiree?

Color me disgusted?

Go Iggles. I’ll be watching from my Texas. Home of the Dallas Cowboys. Grin……..

Lou, Zenith and WJBR

For some people, music has an odd effect. You hear something, maybe even a few bars, and all of a sudden, you’re in another world. Usually, that world has a few miles on it, as do you. But for a few seconds, or a few minutes, you’re there. Sights, sounds, nous, cultural milieu, things otherwise irretrievable perhaps until those legendary last moments when we make our exit (or so it is said) from this world. Hey, cheer up. Would you rather listen to “Louie, Louie” or drop dead? For me, no contest.

I had one of those moments today, one of unaccustomed clarity and an almost magical transport. And, you say, what produced this moment of penny mysticism, oh Wise One. Well, to tell the truth, it was a fragment of a tune by Antonio Carlos Jobim, something he wrote called “Wave.” You probably know it, even if you don’t know the name. It’s that kind of cultural signpost. And it flashes “1960s” like few others for me. I’ll tell you why, since I’m sure you’re dying to know. And if not, learn something.

Now, it is remotely possible that “Wave” might have been used as an identifier for a station called WDVR (Delaware Valley Radio), which was also a “beautiful music” station,” but let’s not get hung up on trivial details. Tom Jobim never set out to write “beautiful music,” but it’s no surprise that it ended up attached to one of the call signs. It was pretty, no?

Wave: Still in Print, By the Way

Can’t you just picture yourself (or some impossibly young version of me) stretched out on Early American style sofa, and sort of nice and secure with our clanging steam heat making the thin winter light of a Northeast day in late December seem the epitome of a cozy middle class home. Hell, I thought so. I didn’t know we were lower middle class because no one ever bothered to tell me until I got to graduate school. We were part of 1960s Affluent America. Don’t knock it. We never had it so good, before or since. Literally. And if the Dutch pane windows were rimmed with frost, so much the better. We might have been sitting 15 miles away from a nuclear bullseye, but the separation seemed complete. It was cold outside, but not in the living room. Besides, we had WJBR on.

Early 1970s. Close enough

My Dad, Lou Salvucci, was a former tenor sax player, and a different kind of guy. He dug music of all kinds (well, like Buddy Rich, not C&W, and he had no time for most rock either), read a lot, was curious about the world, and most of all, loved Swing Music from the 1930s, when he had been in high school–although he was hip to Bird, Tatum and a lot of other stuff you wouldn’t have expected of a white kid from West Philly. He apparently had a massive collection of 78 records (I vaguely remember seeing them in my Grandmother’s Haddington basement), but, alas, he got rid of them, in part because I think he was aware that 33 records, Hi-Fi, LP, all that 1950s stuff, was the future. I remember listening to a reissue of Tommy Dorsey around 1956 in LP form called, I believe, “Yes, Indeed.” Man, that was my introduction to jazz, and it came on an old turntable/speaker/vacuum tube contraption that played 45s too. The sound was, I guess, ok, but for Dad, it was super, and when Glen Gray starting issuing his Sounds of the Great Bands series in HiFi (and then…..STEREO), well, we were happy campers. I say we because I damn near memorized most of those arrangements, Goodman, Shaw, the Dorseys, Basie, Ellington. I loved the stuff.

When my folks moved to Penn Wynne, our sound system remained pretty modest. Dad had gotten another turntable and he had somehow rigged up a speaker system (he was self-taught in electronics; doesn’t ask, cause I have no idea), but it was ok. I mostly used the old record player to death in my room. And then, it happened. It being, our FM radio. Big deal, right. Yeah, you know it. A big freaking deal on Harro(w)gate Road.

Now don’t be asking me questions about AM, FM, line-of-sight, all that stuff. I never really wanted to know. I just wanted to listen, and technology was never a thing with me. From the layout of this blog, you probably are saying “It still isn’t.” Ha, ha. But check the date of the ad (1961). That was about a year after we moved from West Philly to further West Philly, or Penn Wynne. There were like eight FM stations in Philly then, and my Dad was definitely interested in listening to one of them, which, it happened, was WJBR during the day, and WHAT on Friday nights. By the mid 1960s there was also a WPBS (Philadelphia Bulletin Station) (98.9 ) which tended to be on on Saturday nights, because that was when the great Jack Pyle did the Big Bandwagon, a show he had taken over from Ed Meehan, who was the station manager (I think). Don’t get frustrated, this is all going somewhere, eventually.

One day, Dad came home from his favorite store, Midway Appliances, at 7690 Haverford Avenue in Overbrook Park (colloquially known as Tel Aviv in those more innocent times, in honor of its mostly Jewish population, and just a few steps from Greenberg’s Bakery, that I grew up with, along with Reale’s and Orlando’s. ) (safe in those days, and remained so into the 1980s). These guys discounted in spite of fair trade laws (price maintenance laws, you know, before economists “improved” public policy in the US) and got away with it. What Dad brought home was a spanking new Zenith table model radio, and boy, did it make a big difference in our cozy cottage. Yup. As unimpressive as it is 63 years later, this was a device that made our home a home and helped wire my memories for sound in an, well, unusual way. It is so Old School it even had vacuum tubes. And it kept on playing. When we moved to Wayne PA in 1978, my Dad “lent” it to us, and, set on AM, it became the go to for KYW, WCAU, and on FM, WRTI. We left in 1980, and it went back into my Dad’s garage. After he passed away, I went down to the garage, fooled with his weight set, and turned the damn thing on. Dad passed in 2002, so were talking a forty year old vacuum tube powered dinosaur whose only fault was a 60 cycle hum (bearable). When’s the last time you bought something made in the USA (ha) that lasted 40 years?

My Dad went over the moon at this little radio. He’d sit by it on the sofa and say “Clear as a bell!” Lou Larkins wasn’t spoiled like we are. Little things meant a lot to him. And this FM radio sure as Hell did. It was really how he spent Friday and Saturday nights, listening to Sid Mark with Sinatra on WHAT-FM and The Big Bandwagon on WPBS-FM on Saturday nights. And until I started disappearing in my later high school years, so did I.

But I also had my favorites, and they were Sid Mark and Joel Dorn on WHAT-FM. I can still feel that late summer languor at 4 PM when Sid came on with “Maynard Ferguson,” the feature piece that Kenton wrote for Maynard. It would be a still August afternoon until Maynard cut through the tranquility, and you might be able to smell the heat, but it all went away. In some ways, Joel Dorn was just as important. He had different tastes from Sid–he loved a lot of brothers like Sonny Stitt and Fathead Newman, so I learned to love them too. Dorn’s theme was “Hard Times,” and I learned to play the head on the trumpet. A neighbor used to say it sounded as if I were crying when I played it, so you could guess it was a blues. Well, here. Just in case. 1958, and as fresh now as it was in 1961.

Even better in person with Cedar Walton

Yeah. How could you beat that? And that little Zenith belted it out as I pressed my head up against the speaker to catch every nuance. Now, I don’t think my Dad was into Fathead, but he didn’t object either. Of course, Dorn came out at Noon, I believe, so if I were home, or it were Summer or something, I (or my Mom) would be doing noonish things. The living room looked different at noon than at 4PM–more morning, less day is done sort of stuff, less breeze, especially in the summer, when a storm hadn’t blown up yet. Yeats later, in 1976, I blew someone away in Mexico City by scatting every bar of the tune when it was on UNAM radio. That’s how much it got into my head. No. I couldn’t do Nat Adderly’s cornet solo.

I can’t tell you what my Dad thought about when the FM was on. But I can tell you what he talked about. It was Big Bands I and II, mostly from his high school years (1932-1937), with a lot of Goodman and Shaw. I was probably the only 14 year old within 50 miles who knew who was in Benny’s 1935 trumpet section (and, I’m sure, the only one who cared). The few times–and they were later–when we disagreed about something, like whether or not Sinatra was a thug, he’d basically tell me “Look, you don’t understand what he meant to people then.” And Louie was right, as usual. I say the same thing to my son about Bobby Kennedy now, knowing full well he will be as unconvinced as I was. But Dad was in Sinatra’s world too on Friday nights, just where he wanted to be.

But the real kick is when I think of the ritual snow days of the mid to late 1960s, when we actually had a few rough winters in Philly. Now, why would a radio conjure up a blizzard. Blame Ray Conniff. Yup. Blame Ray Conniff. Specifically, “You’re An Old Smoothie.” You’re kidding, right. Who? What? Elevator music for back-office refugees from Decker Square.

I’m guessing this was early December 1960, and the storm was a doozy. In our house, you could watch it come down from my bedroom window or the dining room bay window outlined again the brown linseed oil-stained shingles of the houses are us. And it was coming down, leaden gray sky, shrubs around the house gradually turning into big soft-edged snow stones. In the course of an afternoon, the whole neighborhood looked, felt and sounded different–muffled you know, only a few cars braving “hilly” Penn Wynne. And in the background, The Ray Conniff Singers yammering on about being an old softie. I am right there right now, over sixty years ago, down to the braided hook rugs my Mom preferred with her Early American style furniture. Hey, it was not plastic seat covers and French provincial yuck in every Italian American home. Some of us had aspirations……..

I could compile a whole list of these associations, because, certainly, they didn’t stop in the 1960s, and I could go well into the 1980s (leaving Philly, revealingly, killed a lot of it off for a while). But you’d get bored–so would I–and there would be nothing to add.

You know, for some of us, music isn’t just music. It’s part of our wiring and the way we process the world. And we’re better off with an earworm or two, even if it’s “Baby I Need Your Loving” or “Devil With a Blue Dress.” Because it’s not the song. It’s everything, including sights, sounds, moods, meaning, sentiments, and even family members long gone who come to life again, palpably. Even a cheap FM radio was capable of doing that for me as a child. So you’ll have to forgive my sentiment that it’s just as important for a kid to learn about music as it is about coding or “entrepreneurship.” One is a part of our humanity. The rest, as Alex Ross famously wrote, is noise. Or worse.

Again, forgive the typos. They have a way of sneaking by my aging eyes and brain. And short is probably better.