Ramblin' with Roger

The titanic #1 hits of 1912

It’s A Wonderful Life

Among the titanic #1 hits of 1912 are tunes I have actually sung.

Before that, A Century of Pop Music by Joel Whitburn notes that in July of 1912, “Columbia stopped all production of [wax] cylinders.” This left “Edison as the only major company still producing the recording format that had ruled the industry only decade earlier.” All of these songs were on the Victor label, except the Burr/Campbell track on Columbia.

Moonlight Bay – American Quartet, 8 weeks at #1. Billy Murray, John Bieling, Steve Porter, and William F. Hooley. Those of you who own The Beatles Anthology 1 will recognize the song, performed on the British TV series Two of a Kind by the band and the show’s hosts, comedy duo Morecambe and Wise.

Down By the Old Mill Stream – Harry MacDonough, 7 weeks at #1. “Not the new, but the old.” It is so embedded in the culture, it’s been used by the Marx Brothers, the Chipmunks, and All In The Family. I feel I’ve always known the song.

Ragtime Cowboy Joe – Bob Roberts, 6 weeks at #1
Waiting For The Robert E. Lee – Heidelberg Quintet, 6 weeks at #1. Apparently, this was actually Billy Murray and the American Quartet, supplemented by countertenor Will Oakland. When I was growing up in Binghamton in the 1960s, we had this ancient songbook at the school, probably from the 1930s. That song must have been in the text because I remember the lyrics, specifically “There’s Ephraim and Sammy.”

Be My Little Baby Bumble Bee – Ada Jones and Billy Murray, 5 weeks at #1
Ragging My Baby To Sleep – Al Jolson, 5 weeks at #1, gold record

When I Was Twenty-One and You Were Sweet Sixteen – Henry Burr and Albert Campbell, 4 weeks at #1

My star turn

Love Is Mine – Enrico Caruso, 3 weeks at #1

That Haunting Melody -Al Jolson, 2 weeks at #1. I couldn’t find this on YouTube. So I used the Discography of American Historical Recordings, which I described here
I Love You Truly – Elsie Baker, 2 weeks at #1. When I was a boy soprano at Trinity AME Zion Church in Binghamton, I sang this song at weddings at least twice. The song appeared on various TV shows and movies. Notably, Bert and Ernie serenaded George and Mary Bailey on their wedding night in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). The song was recorded several times after its initial release.

Everybody Two-Step – American Quartet
Oh, You Beautiful Doll – Billy Murray and the American Quartet. I know this song quite well, and it’s not from its various usages in movies and even cartoons. Did my mom sing this around the house?

The value of writing a $497.50 check

$1.3 million

I wrote a check for $497.50 to someone I hadn’t seen in thirty years. Of course, there is a story here.

“On April 1, 1992, ALBANK Financial Corporation completed its public offering for 15,697,500 shares of common stock (the “Common Stock”) at $10.00 per share.” This was interesting to me for two related reasons.

One was that, as a customer of Albank’s previous entity, Albany Savings Bank, I was on the first tier of people who were able to actually purchase the stock. If memory serves, it was people with ASB checking or savings accounts, folks with ASB credit cards, ASB mortgage holders, and then the general public. Not sure of the middle order, but of the first and last, I’m positive.

The other thing is that, while I was going to library school, I had a job at a temp agency. And coincidentally, the work I got, for a couple of months, was to help process all of the orders for the purchases of Albank stock.

If I Were A Rich Man

As I saw all of the checks pour in, many for $1.3 million, the maximum buy, I recognized that this would be a profitable transaction to get involved with. If I could only find that kind of money. The problem is that I didn’t even have the $250 to make the minimum buy of 25 shares. But one of my co-workers gave me $100 so I could make the purchase.

I would receive small checks periodically, and more cash when Albank was sold to Charter One Bank in 1998. Having written down my partner’s name on the back of an ASB checkbook, I tried the phone number, but it was no good, and I didn’t know how to reach them.

Periodically, when the name and address resurfaced, I would search for the name of my partner, whose surname is fairly unusual. No luck. But after a recent reorganization of the home office, the information resurfaced. This time, I found the name on Google, with three different phone numbers in another state.

The first number was no good, the second just rang, and the third did nothing at all. Later that day, I rang the second number and found my compatriot of thirty years ago. Their last parent had died, and they’d moved within the same city, so the address I had found was incorrect. I let them know I was sending them a check for $497.50. We had a nice chat and discovered they’re looking for work, so I gather the cash would come in handy.

It was good to get that obligation off my plate.

Black History in Nazi Germany

“Rhineland bastards”

Blacks in Nazi Germany — Afro-German Hans J. Massaquoi tried to join the Nazi youth, per https://www.dw.com/en/the-fate-of-blacks-in-nazi-germany/a-5065360-1

There’s a guy named John Hightower who posted a story on his Facebook page called Black History in Nazi Germany, a story. John is about a decade older than I. We attended the same church, Trinity AME Zion, and the same high school, Binghamton Central, plus I know or knew a number of his relatives.

I wanted to find the location of the piece he shared. Initially, I found it on the Facebook page of Great Plains Black History Museum in Omaha, NE. It has a lot of interesting artifacts. Its Mission Statement: “To preserve, educate, and exhibit the contributions and achievements of African Americans with an emphasis on the Great Plains region. To provide a space to learn, explore, reflect, and remind us of our history.”

AAREG

But that’s not the original source. Finally, the librarian found it on AAREG, the African American Registry. Here’s just a segment.

“On this date (Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27) from 1933, the Registry looks into the Black history of Nazi Germany. The Nazis seized power on January 30, of that year with Adolph Hitler’s appointment as chancellor…

“Hitler had a white vision of a Master Race of Aryans that would control Europe. He used powerful propaganda techniques to convince not only the German people but countless others, that if they eliminated the people who stood in their way and the degenerates and racially inferior, they, ‘the great Germans’, would prosper. This included mandatory Sterilization for Black Youth.

“Before World War I, there were very few dark-skinned people of African descent in Germany. But, during World War I, the French brought in Black African soldiers during the Allied occupation. Most of the Germans, who were very race-conscious, despised the dark-skinned ‘invasion’.”

You should read the whole thing.

USHMM

Related, check out the bibliography from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in a section called Blacks.

Part of the introduction: “Though Hitler’s racial policies toward Jews, Sinti, and Roma, have been well documented, researchers have given less attention to actions against Blacks…

“Individuals of African descent living in Germany were socially and economically ostracized. They could not attend university; they lost their jobs; they sometimes lost their citizenship. Mixed race marriages were forbidden, and doctors illegally and secretly sterilized between 385 and 500 biracial children, most of them offspring of French Black soldiers and German women, children derisively referred to as the ‘Rhineland bastards.’

“Blacks, including African Americans, were also imprisoned or sent to internment or concentration camps. There, they were often treated more harshly and subjected to medical experiments or extreme brutality. The SS and Gestapo commonly mistreated Black prisoners of war, working them to death in concentration camps or killing them immediately rather than imprisoning them.”

Most of these references direct the reader to their local library, as well it should.

Finally, check out the AAIHS article, The Erasure of People of African Descent in Nazi Germany, the source of the picture.

Mom died on Groundhog’s Day 2011

It was a Wednesday

My mom died on Groundhog’s Day. It was 11 years ago, in 2011. Now, it’s 2022. A lot of repeating numbers. It was a Wednesday. Today is Wednesday.

On one hand, of course, her passing is a singular event. Looking back at my blog posts from February 2011, specifically 2, 3, 6, 9, 16, and 27, and subsequently, I had the need to write more about that time than possibly any other. The death of my dad in 2000, before the start of this blog, has been discussed, but retrospectively.

The day before, I had arrived in Charlotte, NC. Leslie was already there and Marcia lived there. They said that mom was doing better than she had been since she entered the hospital the previous Friday. I had heard that people often seem to rally a bit before they die, but I saw no reason to mention that to my sisters.

I slept in a chair, or maybe two, in my mother’s room. About an hour after she had awakened, she sounded as though she were suffocating. So I buzzed the nurse and this army of folks descended on the room. Someone noted to me in a scolding tone that she had a DNR, Do Not Resuscitate. Yes, I knew that.

I wasn’t trying to get her rescued, just to make she wasn’t uncomfortable. To myself, but not to the medical personnel, I muttered, “Sorry, I am not savvy on the stages just before death. This is my first one.”

Passing

And, in fact, when she did pass away, I was unaware until someone told me. My sisters were en route, so there was no point in calling them. When they arrived about ten minutes later, one noted that she looked peaceful and comfortable. I got to break the news. I signed some paperwork, as I did for dad. Then there seemed to be this rush for us to identify a funeral home to send her body to. This made me cranky too.

I can recall my emotions to the response to my February 2 post. I had written about four days earlier that I was going to Take The Train To Charlotte after my mother’s stroke. So the early comments were of the “I hope your mom gets better” variety. But after I told Denise Nesbitt via email that Mom had passed, she clearly circulated the news. If I want to cry Right Now, I can just read the later comments.

Now, I feel like an Orphaned Adult but that happened and is now just IS. Life post-parents have allowed my siblings and me to have more honest conversations about the ‘rents.

So when Mom died on Groundhog’s Day, it was a long time ago. And it was last week. One of those funeral parlor quotes, which I suppose I’d normally find overly sentimentalized, I somehow like right now. “There is a link death cannot sever. Love and remembrance last forever.”

February 1972: sectioning; draft number

Gene Hackman

Some notes from my diaries.

Monday, Jan 31 – My father drove me to the bus station. I took the 9:45 a.m. bus from Binghamton back to Poughkeepsie. (For reasons unclear, I actually taped the Shortline bus ticket to my diary page.) To my surprise, the brother of my high school girlfriend was onboard, visiting his sister in part to borrow money for a motorcycle. I must admit that I took some small pleasure over the fact that he doesn’t like her new beau.

It’s a slow trip, changing buses in Monticello, and then stopping in Newburgh. My bus was supposed to arrive at about 1 p.m. but was two hours late. My girlfriend (the Okie) wasn’t at the station to pick me up. So my ex kindly dropped me off at New Paltz. [BTW, she remembers this; I did not.] It turns out the Okie’s car was inoperable. I didn’t see her until late the following day.

Tuesday, Feb 1 – While waiting for the Okie, Uthaclena, our friend/Okie’s roommate Alice and I turned off the lights and listened to a weird record of Uthaclena’s about the zodiac. Bruce, the resident advisor, came in, thinking we were up to something.

Groundhog Day

Wednesday, Feb 2 – I had to register for classes, in a process they called sectioning. I got into Intro to Black Studies, Basic Economics 2, and European Politics and Government easily enough. But the freshmen always get what hasn’t been closed out by the upperclassfolk. So Intro to Sociology was my third choice. I also got closed out of one General Anthropology course, and Intro to Philosophy, and had to take an 8 a.m. General Anthro class. The process took about 80 minutes, 20 minutes longer than the previous semester.

[As I recall, there were boxes with IBM punch cards, and when the number of cards designated was depleted, you knew you were out of luck.]

My friend Uthaclena and I were sitting in the dorm lounge when Fred came with the draft numbers. Uthaclena and some others had high draft numbers [which meant they were highly unlikely to be drafted]. But Fred got 23, and I got 2! Lengthy conversations about the implication and the options ensued.

[In an odd quirk, March 6 was 1, and March 7 was 2. My friend Karen wrote to me days later indicating that if I were going to get a low number, why not #1?!]

Six of us went in my roommate Ron’s car to see The French Connection in Poughkeepsie at the Juliet Theatre [which I know because I have the ticket stub – the admission was $2]. I had been worried about the violence, based on previews, but it wasn’t as bad as I feared. We then stopped at the Plaza Diner.

The songs on WABC were particularly resonating with me:
Get Together – The Youngbloods, one of the very few singles I ever purchased. I still have it.
Dedicated To The One I Love – The Mamas and The Papas
Without You – Nilsson

Eventually, I went to sleep listening to Chicago [II], side three.

Not incidentally, there’s a LOT more detail that I shan’t be sharing.