50 Years Ago, Seems Like Yesterday

The Happy Birthday Cake

Mike Pellecchia

When I went to college I packed everything I needed in 2 suitcases

because that was the limit on the plane

4 months later, end of freshman semester, went home for Christmas.

I planned on opening the closet in my bedroom and re-visiting all the stuff I had carefully packed and stacked in my side of the closet in the former bedroom of me and my brother. Years of MAD Magazines, baseball cards, record collection, board games, gizmos and gadgets of a kid growing up.

August had been my first time leaving home and December was my first time going back. I was hitch hiking along the interstate; a big semi-truck trailer let me out near an off-ramp in Knoxville. Couple minutes later I was in the back of a warm police car pulling into the Knoxville jail loading dock. I was waiting on a bench to be processed along with a bunch of people who had been busted, possibly for smelling bad, having long hair, or something worse. When they asked what I was in for, and I told them, they all moved away from me on the bench. Busted for thumbing a ride was not cool to anybody. With my one phone call, I reached my father who sent bail money and bus fare. Somebody from the jail knew someone at Western Union so they could go get the money dad had wired while I was still locked up. Seemed like a routine situation for the KPD.

As if that wasn't exciting, when I got home to my former bed room, my stuff was gone from my side of the closet. Pretty much my life to that point, except for the two suitcases that went to college with me.

I asked my younger brother, who was in high school, where my stuff was.

“Mom threw it out,” he said rather matter of factly and in a defeated tone. “She needed space for her clothes.”

He was right. Mom had been on a serious clothing binge since that summer when I went away to college in Texas.

Fashion had been changing, pant suits had been coming out, and she was trying out all the different colors that the new fabrics were coming in.

Christmas eve, she had visions of seeing or being the Virgin Mary, and they were not pleasant. My father and three brothers encircled her as she became increasingly unconsolable. Family Christmas, enveloped in the commercial cheer and churchgoing of the 1950s and 1960s, unraveled from that point.

My friend Joe was gonna pick me up. We’d be working Christmas Eve in his dad’s bakery, so that when his dad opened at 7 a.m. there would be plenty of donuts, cakes, cookies at Richard’s Bake Shop on Christmas Day.  On a main street in the picturesque town of Wethersfield, it felt like a Christmas movie all around. The town was populated by doctors and lawyers mostly, in their big old colonial houses, but there was also a clock-punching population working shifts at the state prison there.

While I was squirting jelly into the donuts, Joe set a cake over to the side. I iced it with the words “Happy Birthday Jesus.”

We went over to the big city up the road, Hartford, where the Christmas lighting spectacular was in Constitution Plaza. It brought people from all over the state. We brought a folding card table and offered free slices of Happy Birthday Jesus Cake.

We stood out there in the rather bitter cold for awhile doing this. Offering slices of cake to the gaily dressed families who wouldn't take it and wouldn't let their kids take it.

We could hardly believe it. No one wanted any Happy Birthday Jesus Cake.

We felt like bearers of bad news. We felt like thieves. It was just a white frosted cake, but Joe's dad Abe, back at the bakery, could have sold it, and we couldn’t give it away.

On the way back to the bakery I sat in the passenger side with the cake on my lap, some slices cut and placed in napkins, the rest of the cake frowning back at the two boys who still had a whole night of work to do.

There wasn’t much to say.

Samuel Clemens had already said all there was to say about stuff like this. His old house on Farmington Avenue was dressed to the nines this time every year, and his writings live on for their sharp humanity.

Just before he sold the aforementioned house and moved to Europe, he wrote this letter to the editor of the New York World:

“It is my heart-warm and world-embracing Christmas hope and aspiration that all of us-- the high, the low, the rich, the poor, the admired, the despised, the loved, the hated, the civilized, the savage-- may eventually be gathered together in heaven of everlasting rest and peace and bliss-- except the inventor of the telephone.”

It was  Christmas 1890 and Samuel Clemens was flat broke. He had invested all his money in the Paige Typesetter instead of the telephone. Just about a dozen years earlier, Alexander Graham Bell had offered him all the Bell Telephone stock he wanted for $500 and he turned it down. The "Happy Birthday Jesus" cake was not that, but people find something in saying no, which they often don't find in saying yes.

I rolled down the passenger window as we crossed the bridge over the Connecticut River, on the way back from Hartford to Wethersfield. A gust of cold wind made me reach for the zipper on my windbreaker but it was already pulled all the way up because we were in a Rambler American with a dodgy heater fan. I mentally gauged the space between the rails on the bridge versus how fast we were going on this icy Christmas Eve road mess in Connecticut. The snow tires were slipping on the icy bridge as I craned my head out the passenger window with the heft of a Happy Birthday Jesus cake swaddling between my elbows trying to squeeze them out the window as the wind blew across the river. I didn’t want pieces of cake to catch on the bridge and freeze. I hung out of the car and aimed it like a basketball. I wanted the whole thing to go into the river.

Richard Harris singing "MacArthur Park" was on the AM radio in the car. That big orchestration sounded great on AM radio.

When it said "I'll never have that recipe aga....a...a...ain!" I made the shot. Thought I heard it land on a chunk of ice in the river.

Formerly the Shrine To Music Museum,
Vermillion, South Dakota

A car trip across the Rust Belt drew us to four different music museums. The first one is in Vermillion South Dakota, in a former Carnegie library on the campus of the University of South Dakota. I had been here about 25 years ago, when it was called the Shrine To Music Museum. It was basically a collection of instruments owned by Arne Larson and his family. The museum has since expanded to include everything from Johnny Cash guitars to Stradivarius and Amati stringed instruments to folk instruments from around the world, as well as keyboards going back hundreds of years.

We got here "just in time," so to speak. The museum is about to close for two years to allow for a $9 million expansion of its facility. It's a pleasantly overwhelming display which shows a lot of attention to curatorial detail.

It's basically on two floors currently. One highlight was the re-creation of a shop where guitars are made; another was the vast display of harmonicas, more than one could almost ever imagine. The craft of instrument making is highlighted throughout this museum, as well as the histories of various eras of society which called for mass production and marketing of instruments.

Downriver from the National Music Museum was a "museum" of extremely modest proportions, dedicated to one performer of historical note and largely seeming to be an outgrowth of a personal collection. This facility is in a downtown building near the Davenport, Iowa waterfront. It looks to be a typical arrangement where someone renovating a building is hosting the collection until a paying renter comes along. In the case of this town, that could be awhile, but you never know.

As per below, I was excited to see Pee Wee Russell's last set of clarinets, which appeared to be Buffet R-13s. Of particular note was the "made in France" mouthpiece with the number "5" on it. Couldn't get too close, but I am assuming that was the facing number, which would make it quite open. It never would have occurred to me that a clarinetist with such a distinctive vibrato would be using an orchestral clarinet!

With its one major subject, this collection was diligent and vivid in telling the story of a hometown boy who went on fame with Paul Whiteman and Jean Goldkette with his best buddy Frankie Trumbauer. Parts of the display were very moving in an emotional way, such a letter from Louis Armstrong, who knew Bix, and the piano from the apartment he took in New York, months before he died in his late twenties.

Eastbound from there we found ourselves at the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame, on the shores of Lake Erie in Cleveland.

 

 

One tends to hear about this Hall of Fame mostly via the media, through the choices made to add someone or not. It's unabashedly over the top, with instruments, videos, displays that, before a couple of hours were done, had my stomach churning and tear ducts flowing with emotion. Like the Top 40 radio which started it all, this place is in a constant state of re-creation to accommodate the next generation coming up. I was blown away to see Louis Jordan's sax and his set list (40's-50's), and equally knocked out to see the awning from a club I used to go to in the 70's. It's a major kick to watch the Beatles first Ed Sullivan appearance with the screen set up right next to the Rickenbacker John Lennon was playing that night. Ditto for the Animals' drum set, logo on the bass and all, exactly the same one you see in their first Ed Sullivan appearance. This "Hall of Fame" really covers the waterfront, so to speak. It was a little nutty to see only 2 saxophones in the whole place, considering they had dozens of guitars from so many groups. The other saxophone which made me choke up a bit was Jerome "Doc" Pomus'. And I had to take a deep breath while reading the scribbles this polio victim made on the invitation to his wedding day. They were the draft lyrics to one of his many, many hit songs, "Save The Last Dance for Me."

The 4th museum on this tour was The National Cleveland-Style Polka Hall of Fame. One may assume that this facility does not exactly pick up the overflow crowds from the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame, though it's not far from there. It shares a former city hall building with the Softball Hall of Fame. You're probably wondering what is Cleveland-Style polka. The answer is simple: it was made by Slovenian immigrants to Cleveland. When you think of polka popularity, the first name which comes to mind is Lawrence Welk.

Welk's parents were German immigrants from Alsace-Lorraine. You learn something new every day, and on this day I learned the origins of perhaps the second most popular polka star of the 1950s-60s, Frankie Yankovic. As an aside, my wife and I have been merchants of used vinyl records for many years, and some records you see so much at garage sales they make your head spin. Well, Columbia Recording Artist Frankie Yankovic's was one of those. Little did we know he is the exemplar of Slovenian polka in the Cleveland style. You may ask, what is a Hall of Fame with only one superstar? Well, this might not be an appropriate question for someone of Slovenian ancestry, for there are more Cleveland-style accordion families in this Hall of Fame than you could shake a bell stick at.

The revelation here, as at the Bix museum, was that with good signage and a decent number of artifacts, history can be amplified and exemplified any way the assemblers might choose. By focusing on the Slovenian community of Cleveland, this interesting Hall of Fame provides a backdrop to the American myth of the "melting pot."

In closing, I'm reminded of a museum I visited which no longer exists in its present form. The "Bob Wills Museum" (the current one is in Wills' home town of Turkey, Texas) opened during "Pioneer Days" in Fort Worth in September 1985. Upon its opening at 2404 North Main, personal tours were given by Wills' widow, Betty Anderson Wills. There was a closed, lighted room containing the desk where Betty Wills did the bookkeeping for the Texas Playboys from 1950 to 1969. On the wall were several needlepoint violins fashioned by Mrs. Wills. The desk also held a Bible. A plaque on the viewing window read, "Bob always carried a Bible."

Quite a bit of miscellaneous stuff was on display. One of Bob's fiddles from the original Wills museum in Turkey, Texas. A Steinberg upright piano, bought by Texas Playboy Al Stricklin's father in 1910 for $85.

Several videos showed Wills' on film and TV. Before the days of Youtube they re-lived the excitement of Wills' personality, and his estimable contributions to Western Swing music, including the genre's decline during the 1960s.

The Fort Worth Stockyards, with its nostalgia for the days of meat packing and trail riding, was a good location, and one of the initial backers, David Stallings, had provided the impetus for the Wills family to rent a space there. The Bob Wills Museum in Fort Worth is long gone but that hasn't affected the popularity of Bob Wills and Western Swing music. The classic sounds, derived from the confluence of big band and country fiddle music in the 1930s,survive in many musical groups today, and in the hearts of the myriad former Texas Playboys who came and went from the band, many now in their 90's, who are still performing as I write this.