Episode 121, April 26, 2025 - June 1st Hiatus Announcement / Jean Shepherd Marathon, Final Part - Airchecks

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
Welcome to Airchecks. Just a little bit of a housekeeping note.
This will be the last episode of air Checks until
we are back on June first, twenty twenty five, as
we need to make some adjustments to the new radio station,
Pretty Spit Radio at Prettyspit Dorg. Here is more of
the Jane Shepherd Marathon on WR in New York City
from December thirtieth, nineteen sixty four. New Year's Dates are

(00:48):
something special. What will happen in the year two thousand
when a new century starts? Memories of the Star and
Garter Army story, New Year's even Kansas City, great descriptions
and imagery.

Speaker 2 (01:00):
Somehow it may come like just like it's coming on
Thursday this year. You know, Thursday is going to be
the last day of the year, and Friday is going
to be New Year's Day. Somehow you're one kind of
person on Thursday and you can magically be another one
on Friday. Yes, that illusion has persisted, It really has.

(01:22):
And they they do all kinds of things in the
various tribe. You they one tribe, of course, so one
tribe would decide about a month and a half before
the Old year petered out, who the rotten people were
who caused that year not to work out, because none
of the years worked out, And so they would designate,

(01:44):
they would get the medicine man would get out there
and he would get the bones going, and he would
start lighting up the incense and he'd get the fires going,
and he'd start blowing on it, and it would be
midnight he'd be sprinking the powered bats wings into the flame,
and he would finally determine out of tribe what seventeen
people were responsible for that year falling on its face,

(02:06):
and then they.

Speaker 3 (02:06):
Would get rid of them.

Speaker 2 (02:08):
They would say, well, we're not going to carry that
crowd over into the next year, and next year it's
going to work out, and they would have a gigantic
ceremonial house cleaning, and you know, that's part of the illusion.
Part of the illusion of New Year's is that, boy,
what a relief, what a rotten year.

Speaker 3 (02:29):
That we've just finished.

Speaker 2 (02:31):
That is part of the illusion that has persisted since
all time that this old one, this old rotten one
that didn't work out, is now finally tossed off into history,
and the new one that's going to be great and
beautiful and a clean slate, is full of all kinds
of new, fantastic hope, and that it's going to be
different next time. Of course, next year, by this time,

(02:53):
the same guys will be writing well. Of course, nineteen
sixty five was a year of trumples, year pressures on
all signs. It was a year of nervousness, a year
of decision. However, we feel that nineteen sixty six eterned,
and all the way back there in the jungle, somewhere
in the darkness, you can hear the sound of the

(03:15):
medicine man, that medicine man that lies deep within.

Speaker 3 (03:19):
Each one of us, going going, going, Tony, Tony, really, really,
that little medicine man that's scrunched down there on his
haunches next to your pantreyus leave. When the fires lighting
up the edge of the jungle. He's smoking out the
bats out of the can. He's got the powdered bones,
he's clacking together, and he's rattling the little brass rings

(03:41):
in his ears. Loing, knowing, going, going on and going, going, going.

Speaker 2 (03:44):
Magically, it's gonna be different, starting fring.

Speaker 3 (03:47):
Going doing the evils the next year, the coming, going, going, going, going, going, going, going.

Speaker 2 (03:59):
Oh, it's a scary time. It always is. It's a
wild moment in New Year's and there's a lot of
things connected with this. I can only say from my
own personal experience, and I'm sure that everybody who has
lived in twenty a century America. I don't speak for
the Bulgarians, I don't know, but I know that everybody

(04:21):
who has lived in twenty a century America, and our
attitude towards time, maybe that's what makes it a.

Speaker 3 (04:26):
Peculiar holiday skip.

Speaker 2 (04:28):
You know, Americans have a different attitude towards time than
most other countries.

Speaker 3 (04:33):
Although they're catching up with US.

Speaker 2 (04:36):
America is probably the most age worried country in the
face of the globe. It's so worried about being older
than five years old that it gets frantic. People at
nineteen already figured it's all over the bags under.

Speaker 3 (04:52):
My eyes look at me. Oh, I've heard them say it.
It's incredible.

Speaker 2 (04:55):
And so we live in a nation really that is
frantically trying to stop time on all fronts, and at
the same time it paradoxically and nutty enough, it's trying
to leap forward in time. We are both at one
and the same time hung on stopping time and hung
on progress. We all want to somehow leap in the

(05:15):
nineteen eighty seven immediately you saw this all over the
World's Fair if you went out there during the summer.
So it's a fantastic desire to erase the present time
and to go into the year twenty seventy eight. And
I suppose you get up there and you want to
erase that year and go into the year thirty forty nine,
you know. And so we're presented with a genuine paradox.

(05:36):
On the one hand, people want to stop time, really
deliberately want to hang onto it and push it back,
push it back, and at the same time they have
a great delight that.

Speaker 3 (05:46):
It has passed. You know.

Speaker 2 (05:49):
That's one of those curious paradoxes again about time. Do
you feel a sense of accomplishment now that nineteen sixty
four has just about petered out? Do you feel a
sense of oh, well, that one's gone, you know? And
now one other question too, that there's a I think
one of the reasons why we get scared about a

(06:12):
holiday like Christmas is that it's the only one skip
that relates directly to time. In short, it is about
time itself in a sense, celebrates the passing of time.

Speaker 3 (06:26):
No other holiday does this.

Speaker 2 (06:28):
Christmas has other ends in mind, Easter, any any yom kipper,
any holiday that you can mention, Thanksgiving, you go ahead
and mention all of them.

Speaker 3 (06:37):
They all are related.

Speaker 2 (06:38):
To something other than that specific quality time. And yet
nobody quite knows what time is. It's it's a very
This is something, of course that causes a little confusion too.
Time is not just a geographical or an astronomical thing.
You know, where where the Sun has moved in a
certain orbit and the Earth has moved this way and that,
and finding we're back at the same place when you

(06:59):
when you look at it really just astronomically, it's a
pretty simple process.

Speaker 3 (07:03):
But I actually it's.

Speaker 2 (07:05):
Something far more subtle than that, and so nobody quite
knows what to do about it.

Speaker 3 (07:09):
Do you celebrate when on New Years?

Speaker 2 (07:12):
There's a question, just a question that has to do
with I suppose a philosophical paradox. On New Years, are
you celebrating the passage or the death of a year,
or are you celebrating the fact that a new one
is starting, which is that you're celebrating. Now, That's why

(07:32):
it's a bitter sweet holiday. It is extremely bitter on
one side and extremely sweet on another. And yet I
also would like to go on record here as saying
that probably, and this is basing it again personally, as
that's the only way anything you can write, It's the
only way you create anything, is on personal observation of

(07:56):
life and the world around you. I feel that, personally,
having lived in twentieth century America so of you, that
this one holiday is one of the most cataclysmic three
days personally in all people's lives that I know around me.
In other words, more wild things happen. I don't mean

(08:17):
just a party where you fall down the stairs, or
that the night Charlie the Olds will be off the
bridge and.

Speaker 3 (08:23):
All that kind of jazz. That isn't what I'm talking about.
I'm saying that more decisions and more actual turning points
are reached in lives during the New Year's holiday than
any other holiday or any other specific point in time
in the whole calendar. In short, more people are asked

(08:48):
to be married on New Year's, more people realize that
the jig is up on New Year's.

Speaker 2 (08:55):
More people have done even worse things than that. I mean,
in a way, more people have looked suddenly back and
they say, look at that, it's suddenly nineteen XDX, and
they are reminded that they have not moved in Iota

(09:15):
for XDX years maybe backwards.

Speaker 3 (09:19):
It's the only time of the year you're really reminded
those things. Really.

Speaker 2 (09:23):
All other times, you know, you can blow out candles
on cakes, or you can walk around and trim Christmas trees,
or you can eat turkey or something else like that
keep your mind off. But people are holy big signs
up with the year name on it all, and so
it is a strange and very scary time for people,
even kids. It's the only time, really, I think that

(09:45):
kids themselves are reminded the time passes, and I think
one of the reasons why people make a frantic clunch
they either decide to get the divorse get the divorce
this week, or they decide to get married, or they
decide to jump out of a window. You know, the
police have a fantastic time over the whole Christmas holiday
New Year's Complex because of that. There are more guys

(10:07):
flying out of windows and trying to swim all the
way to Spain underwater from.

Speaker 3 (10:11):
Jones Beach or something.

Speaker 2 (10:13):
Because I believe that it is that one moment in
time when suddenly you're reminded.

Speaker 3 (10:19):
People are reminded, wow, that it is passing, and they
make a wild clutch, now's the time to do it.
Come here, Mabel, will you? Blah blah blah, And.

Speaker 2 (10:30):
Mabel goes she's looking around to and seeing she says yes,
And the next thing you know, it is Foreversville.

Speaker 3 (10:39):
It's a curious thing.

Speaker 2 (10:41):
And another thing too that I've noticed that is quite
subtle about New Year's There are a large number of
people who will have their first date with a certain
girl on New Year's Eve. Now that is a historical fact.
Now I don't know why this is so, but it
is so. I have seen it happen time and time

(11:04):
and time again. You would think, well, now this is
a very important date. I mean, most people would be,
you know, dating somebody they've always dated. But no, on
New Year's Eve, for some reason or other, a lot
of people have decided, oh, boy, well, now's the.

Speaker 3 (11:18):
Time to cut it off for good.

Speaker 2 (11:20):
I think I'll call that check down on the cost
accounting department. And by George, it happens literally happens that
way many many times. I don't know how many guys
are right now, at this very moment, listening to the
show here who are planning to have a date with
a chick for the first time tomorrow night on New
Year's for the very first time.

Speaker 3 (11:43):
Now.

Speaker 2 (11:43):
They may have gone out once in a while or
just vaguely know this girl. But be careful, because this
is more than just an ordinary date.

Speaker 3 (11:50):
New Year's Eve. Something happens. It's either a curse or
a hex or it's magic on New Year's Eve. It
could be it could really it could be a disastrous
On the other hand, it could be fabulously great. I
don't know.

Speaker 2 (12:03):
No one knows these things. But I can only say
that tomorrow night, the next day in in other words,
in about an hour and a half, we're going to
start a new.

Speaker 3 (12:10):
Day, and that could be the day. Boy, you're tog
You laugh at me, Go ahead and laugh, Go ahead
and laugh. I remember, I remember.

Speaker 2 (12:22):
A couple of years ago I said pretty much the
same thing on the air, And I'm sure a lot
of people who were unsuspecting, who think, oh, well, this
guy's just talking, it's just stuff coming on the radio,
and all the while they're thinking of calling somebody named
Susan and they're getting the phone out and they think
nothing at all.

Speaker 3 (12:38):
They're not talking about him.

Speaker 2 (12:39):
And right now they're listening to me if they can
get away from Susan long enough to get to the radio.
And it's just strange business this holiday. I think, especially
New Years. Now, I remember one New Year's. What is
the first New Year's that you can actually remember, the

(13:03):
first year that you can remember as coming in? You
know they're celebrating, say nineteen forty two or something. What
is the first year you can remember as a New
Year's celebration.

Speaker 3 (13:17):
I'll tell you.

Speaker 2 (13:18):
I'll award the brass big Lagie with Brown's oak leaf
palm to the person who can give me the earliest
one without phoning it up, the absolute earliest one. Now,
I'm sure that some guy, somebody somewhere must actually be
around who remembers nineteen hundred coming in, you know, I mean,
who's just listening right now, who really remembers the turn

(13:40):
of the century, which would be a fantastic New Year's.
Can you imagine when the year two thousand comes in?
What a wild New Year's that would be? Boy, can
you imagine yourself saying, well, we're through at that century.
Let's start, because almost every last one of us you
know around all, will ever no will be the twentieth century.

Speaker 3 (14:01):
There were twentieth century men. That's it.

Speaker 2 (14:04):
And there must be some guy out there who's who
went to bed and it's nineteen it's eighteen ninety nine,
and he says, well tomorrow, bine, I'll tell you you
have it. I'll bet the Can you imagine the wholesale
throwing out of checks? You know how they have that
little thing with says nineteen blank? Can you imagine all

(14:25):
the whole scene?

Speaker 3 (14:26):
But can you.

Speaker 2 (14:27):
Imagine how difficult it must have been to get to
write a new century? It's hard enough to learn to
write a new year, and we do that all the time.
Once every hundred years, you write a new century in
instead of can you mention starting out? Let's see what
is this? August fifteenth? Two old strange moments, But nineteen

(14:49):
sixty five is not far away. Speaking of the archaic,
this is worm and FM, New York. You're a reminder
of the archaic things On New Year's I remember one
New Year's sitting in a balcony. And I was in
this balcony with about nine guys Schwartz, Flick, Brunner, and
a whole bunch of us. And there was a tradition

(15:11):
around there. I don't know whether they do it they
do it here in New York or not, but all
the movie houses had big New Year's Eve shows, giant
New Year's Eve special shows for New Year's Eve, and
you would pay extra or something, and you would come
in about five or ten minutes to midnight, the regular
shows would stop.

Speaker 3 (15:30):
This is the movie houses, you see.

Speaker 2 (15:31):
The regular shows would stop at eleven forty five, and
all the people would file out, either that or they
would pay extra to stay.

Speaker 3 (15:38):
And at midnight would be the New.

Speaker 2 (15:40):
Year's Eve show and everyone would sit there in the balcony.
They'd all file and they'd give you horns and jazz.
Why everyone went to the movie house to celebrate this,
I don't know. But everyone got horns and streamers and
all kinds of confetti and stuff, and we all filed
in there. They were sitting there, and that was the
first New Year's Eve. The reason that it was such

(16:00):
a such a traumatic New Year's Eve. It was the
first New Year's Eve I remember spending not at home,
not in the bosom of the family, with my kid
brother asleep under the day bed, yelling and hollering in
the kitchen, and Uncle Fred out there hollering and pouring
beer down the sink, and my mother trying to calm
everybody down who's been sick and throwing up for an

(16:21):
hour and a half, you know. And there was a thing, well,
you know, that's what New Year's was about, I guess.

Speaker 3 (16:28):
And it was the first.

Speaker 2 (16:29):
Time, and you felt vaguely debaunched because the idea of
a of a midnight show somehow had sexual overtones and
connotations of debauchery. And they always had these pictures in
the paper, and it says, be sure to see the
midnight show at the Paramount, and it would show a
picture of a girl, you know, a girl with fan
and the fans or birds all over her little bubbles

(16:50):
all over her head, and she's holding a cocktail glass
that says whoope.

Speaker 3 (16:56):
And so the nine of us go to this place,
a whole.

Speaker 2 (17:00):
Bunch of us took Flick's car and Schwartz and Flicking
Brunner and everybody. We're all sitting right on the edge
of the balcony in the Paramount Theater and at exactly midnight,
the lights were on, the organ came up and there's
you know, they play all langsy and everybody cheers and hollers,

(17:22):
and the balloons fly up and everyone throws the paper
stuff out there, and within eight seconds, nine fights broke out.
It was the first time I ever saw fights. You know,
the kids don't see guys are fighting, all them go
get your hands off my girl, and they're starting to
hit from the fistfight. Guys are drinking and yelling and hollering.
All this was at the local theater where I had
grown up, sitting next to Tarzan and Jane, where you

(17:44):
know they did do this kind of stuff. And within
five minutes the place is in an uproar.

Speaker 3 (17:49):
The police are running around.

Speaker 2 (17:50):
They get it all calmed down, and it's now the
New Year and they start up with the feature. And
it was a double feature of monster movies. Why monster
movies play an important part on New Year's Eve, I
don't know. But this was a big deal in Chicago,
that whole area.

Speaker 3 (18:07):
Now, I'll tell you another thing that was a big thing.

Speaker 2 (18:09):
So skip I that I always could hear whispering about it.
I could hear my mother and father whispering about this
for about three or four days before New Year's Eve.
The whole big bit was to make reservation somewhere. The
idea was to make reservations in some big joint, someplace
where they had a big floor show, or they were
giving out souvenirs that they were giving out, horns and

(18:31):
paper hats and the whole jazz.

Speaker 3 (18:32):
And the idea was to get reservations.

Speaker 2 (18:35):
And the place where they all went and they whispered
around the kids so the kids wouldn't know what was
going on.

Speaker 3 (18:41):
And I've got the reservation. Yeah, you know, he knows
the doorman, Donna.

Speaker 2 (18:44):
Yeah, okay, And about about ten o'clock at night, they
were all getting all dressed up and there was usually
one house where all the kids were put that night.
All the kids were put at Ant Clara's house or something,
and one of the poor old aunts would have to
stay home. You know, she's pretending like she's enjoying New
Year's Eve with the kids, and all the kids is

(19:05):
that they're on a half mor falling asleep and the
radio is going and they got a couple of paper
hats and some horns, and they're gonna get them some
chocolate cake and some ice cream. They're gonna celebrate their
New Year's Eve.

Speaker 4 (19:16):
And they're all, all, he doesn't us in Helphis? And
you get the flasks out now, yeah, make sure hey
has Fred got the booze.

Speaker 3 (19:23):
Yeah, And they've got these silver flasks and the booze
and all that stuff, and they're and so whatever it was,
they were embarked on something that was that had that
fantastic sin connected with it, rottenness, terrible rottenness.

Speaker 2 (19:38):
Well, they began to talk about two days beforehand about
this scene, and of course they kids. I remember a
couple of my cousins myself, there were always one cousin
who knew all about this rottenness, this crummy stuff that
they were going to. Well, the place they went to,
and it's funny now, I don't even know whether there

(20:00):
was such a place, But was there ever such a
place to any of you know, such a place in Chicago.

Speaker 3 (20:05):
It was a It was a big deal.

Speaker 2 (20:07):
And all the all the really rotten people went there
on New Year's Eve, and the rottener people went there
during the week when it wasn't even New Years at all.

Speaker 3 (20:15):
They just went there. It was a real.

Speaker 2 (20:16):
Rotten place called the Star and Garter. Did you hear
the Star and Garter? Well, the Star and Garter. It
was the kind of place that when kids would walk
past that that joint, they would they would they would
be embarrassed. They would even have to look the other
way to pretend that building didn't even exist there.

Speaker 3 (20:32):
They'd walk and.

Speaker 2 (20:33):
They had these fantastic posters all over the front of
the Star and Garter.

Speaker 3 (20:37):
In fact, I remember.

Speaker 2 (20:39):
Receiving some of my basic sexual education just looking.

Speaker 3 (20:41):
At their signs.

Speaker 2 (20:42):
They had one chick that was over seventy four feet tall.
There was a gigantic poster that went up nineteen stories
all the way up the side, and all she had
on was three sequins, and she's looking over all of
Chicago with these great big blue eyes. The Star and Guard, well,
you know, and that's that's where they were going. They

(21:05):
don't go the Star Guard and the kids, you know,
the kids. There was a vague sense of a boy,
you know this this that, what a what a fantastic
thing that must be to go to the show. And
then about four o'clock in the morning, the kids are
already asleep.

Speaker 3 (21:21):
Now you see, I'm lying there and I still can't sleep.

Speaker 2 (21:23):
And maybe I'm waking up and I hear the doors opening,
I hear them coming in. Wait wait, well you hear
this yelling and hear these all these grown up people
are yelling and hitting each other, and they're they'd say, hey,
do you.

Speaker 3 (21:35):
Remember the one when the guy came on? He came
out and he says, hey, hey, go and he have
a big bladder. He mur and he says hey.

Speaker 2 (21:41):
And they're telling these awful stories about what these burlesque
comics were doing and the stuff.

Speaker 3 (21:46):
And I'm I'm sweating. I'm lying there under the coach.
And then like the kids are asleep, what about when
she came on?

Speaker 4 (21:55):
For why not while the kids are asleep? I wash
they making all the little jugs that big ears.

Speaker 3 (22:02):
Well, for years I had this vague feeling, it was
almost a mystical feeling, almost almost a kind of a
religious belief that if your VIDI want to celebrate New
Year's Eve, you went to a burlesque house, because that's
what these people did.

Speaker 2 (22:20):
You know, they went to a place called the Star
and Garner. Well, I'm going to tell you a time,
and this might be a warning to those of you,
those of you who might be contemplating such a move.
And I always had this feeling because of course, this's
the thing I saw the grown up still when I
was a little kid, and it seemed to have tremendous
glamour to it. And they would all get dressed up

(22:41):
and they'd wear white scarves, you know, the men.

Speaker 3 (22:43):
Were for the My father'd have a suit on. All.

Speaker 2 (22:45):
The men would be all with their black shoes and
everything could be shine.

Speaker 3 (22:48):
The ladies would be in the firs.

Speaker 2 (22:49):
And they'd smell like the cold, you know, when they'd
come in from outside, after they were all through with it,
and they'd smell like that peculiar sweet smell, and you
could see where a couple had been sick, and all
was wild, and I had the sense, and they'd be
covered with with old confetti and little strips of colored
paper and all that jazz. And I did see this
year after year after year after year. They would go

(23:12):
to the Star and Garteren they went to a place called, oh,
it was that big place in Chicago, the Shaye Parie.

Speaker 3 (23:19):
That was another one. Can you imagine the place.

Speaker 2 (23:21):
With a with a more completely uh nightclubby name than
the Shae Parie. And they had a spell it that
way in Chicago, because everyone would call it the Chez
Paris in Chicago. If so, they had it spelled Shay Parrie,
and if the Shae Parie. There was always somebody named
Gypsy rose Lee was performing there.

Speaker 3 (23:42):
And there were.

Speaker 2 (23:42):
People called, oh you know, great names that Candy Bar
and Purple.

Speaker 3 (23:46):
Flame were always there.

Speaker 2 (23:48):
And all these all these guys, my uncle Elm, uncle
Carl and my father. They they're always going down to
see somebody. And and these they actually had big files
in Chicago, these women, these these strip tease chicks, and
they had followings like here in New York City, actors
have followings and actresses, you know, like Geraldine Page or

(24:10):
Ann Bancroft. There were great uh Ada Leonard. There was
somebody named Ada Leonard. Did you ever hear that name?
There were there were great battles in the in the kitchen,
I hear them yelling and hollering. There would be one
chrowdicizer ad.

Speaker 3 (24:23):
A le ad let that old bag, Oh wow wow.

Speaker 2 (24:29):
There would be an anti Ada Leonard crowd, and there
would be a pro Ada Leonard crowd. There would be
an anti Gypsy rose Lee crowd, and there would be
a gipsy.

Speaker 3 (24:37):
Oh she's forty feet talk. Come on, you can't be serious.
What a slob? Back and forth, this stuff went, peace
is browning? Oh, come on, you kidd one, you call
her a dancer, she comes out there, won't mean that
old fat brought and they yelled and hollered. Well, well

(24:57):
that was the kind of a uh that was.

Speaker 2 (24:59):
That's what passed for for uh, for dramatic criticism in
the house where I grew up at. Oh, they had
they had tremendous arguments. And I'll never forget uh. When
television first came in and on TV was this guy
doing this, this kid show. And he was doing the

(25:19):
most innocent kind of kid show. He just didn't want
to crumb the little kid show. You know, it'd come
on every afternoon. Had a tremendous following. What I remember
about him is associated with the first night that I
ever really did it. I'm gonna tell you what happened.
You want you want to know the scene. All right,
I guess I'm I'm I'm in the army.

Speaker 3 (25:41):
See and uh and.

Speaker 2 (25:43):
I go in the army, I'm just a kid. I'm
in the army And now I see And this was
one of the very first. Oh, this was one of
the first New Year's Eves that I really spent where
I thought I was an adult. I was a big
grown up man, big time grown up type guy.

Speaker 3 (25:58):
And I had a three day pass. And there were
about nine of us.

Speaker 2 (26:00):
Was Gasser, Sinsmeister, a whole bunch of corporal types, a
couple of pfc's, and we're all real tough guys, roughly
pushing the cool side of eighteen. And you know, we're
all walking around drinking the beer down at the prch. Hey,
what are you saying, We're going to take in a
burly que show on New Year's Eve?

Speaker 3 (26:18):
Eh?

Speaker 2 (26:18):
Now, let's go gang, let's go on. So that's exactly
what we did. And we are stationed way out there
in the Midwest. In fact, we're in this in this camp,
deep in the heart of the Ozarks, and it is
New Year's Eve, and we all have a three day pass.

Speaker 3 (26:35):
And so the nearest place skip was Kansas City.

Speaker 2 (26:38):
I don't know whether you've ever seen Kansas City out
of New Year's.

Speaker 3 (26:41):
Eve, but let me tell you.

Speaker 2 (26:43):
And so so all of us, all of us get
our passion. Oh boy, we'll rubbing our handskin hair are eighteen.
My idea of a really big evening up to this
point want was to go over to Esther Jane Alberry's
house and got to go out of the drug store
and have a coke, you know, maybe go all the
way and have a coffee malt something like that, and
a cheeseburger, and then perhaps we might stop for a

(27:04):
couple of minutes and sit there and hold hands on
a park bench in the Hesfield Park on our way
home and make it just in time for the ten
o'clock news back home, you know that kind of thing.
And here I am, I'm eighteen, a whole bunch of
guys of Corporal's yardbirds, and.

Speaker 3 (27:18):
I'm out there and the home is a million miles
away in.

Speaker 2 (27:22):
A whole seat, and well, of course, what do I
automatically think of as the real way to celebrate New Years?

Speaker 3 (27:29):
That's right? And so here we are in Kansas City.
We get off the bus and the place is loaded
millions and millions of soldiers as far as the eye
can see, millions of soldiers, and the place is rocking.
It is wartime Kansas City.

Speaker 2 (27:44):
There are defense workers in and everybody's got money to spend,
and the soldiers are out yelling and hollering.

Speaker 3 (27:50):
The chicks are on the street.

Speaker 2 (27:52):
And so we arrived down at the Greyhounds station and
the three or four of us get out of the
bus and we've got our little bags with us, are
dop kits, oh man lo year see fire. Here we
are swinging. Each one of us had a cool fifteen
bucks in his pocket, a three day pass, and we're
ready to go. And so the first thing we do
right away we go to the information place where they

(28:12):
for the soldiers there uso information. We walk up and
here's this kind of little old lady, little old lady
you know, with the white hair, you know, the kind
that you always see at the information booth for the boys.

Speaker 3 (28:23):
And we go up and saying, hey, uh you do
ask her Carl Quinn.

Speaker 2 (28:27):
Karl looked older than anybody else, he said, ask her, Carl, madam.
We're we're looking for a place to celebrate New Years.

Speaker 3 (28:37):
And celebrate New years, you know. Two? Yes, of course.
Well down at the why don't you see a they're
having a sight ers social and I'm sure.

Speaker 2 (28:47):
You you know somebody's nuts, how bad sighters?

Speaker 3 (28:52):
So why do we see a wow?

Speaker 5 (28:53):
Oh boy?

Speaker 3 (28:55):
Yes? And at the y m c A. They're having
a not roast, and I think, oh, I think you'll
like this one. Over at the Hotel Clayburn, they're having
a special fashion show, a midnight fashion show and it's
free to serviceman and I have one. Here.

Speaker 2 (29:14):
Here's an invitation from the nag Breadth. Now there and
so the you know, we're all standing roy baby. You know, well,
I thank you very much. Give us the tickets, and
so she gave us three or four tickets. We saw
boy on a split and so we out we go
and we turned the corner and they're standing in the
In the doorway is this little man with a big
gray camp and.

Speaker 4 (29:34):
I say, hey you guys, say hey, hey, hey.

Speaker 3 (29:36):
You guys. He's waiting outside the bus station, say hey
you guys. Yeah for New Years? I said, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Right away we could see the real thing, saying, you
guys have for New Years? Yeah yeah, listen, how'd you
like to see a show?

Speaker 2 (29:51):
And there's a moment of silence since master says show
what kind of show? Don't ask a show man?

Speaker 3 (29:59):
It's no year? Yeah? Okay?

Speaker 2 (30:02):
Where he says here he says, I've gone how many
guys buy a coincidence. Five tickets. These are the last five.
It's only eight dollars and fifty cents each. And so
boom boom, boom, pow pow, we're shelling out and we
got the pace for it. We are home Scott Freight.

(30:23):
And now all we got to do is wait till midnight.
So we're walking around from one joint to the next.
And there's bars and this place is called the Bamboo In,
and there's places called the Flamingo Bar, and all you know,
all those great the Bluebird buy. This place is called
Uncle Ned's. I remember all these terrible joints in Kansas City.
And you know, Kansas City is probably one of the
great swinging towns of all.

Speaker 3 (30:45):
This is a great gangster town.

Speaker 2 (30:47):
And you would walk down the street in Kansas City,
especially at that time, it's kind of vaguely dark, and
all the all these places are all live. They don't
have big lights in the streets like we have, you know,
big fluorescent lights.

Speaker 3 (31:00):
But you see one after the other.

Speaker 2 (31:02):
There's eighteen million bars, millions of them, and all of
them you hear this rotten honky tonk.

Speaker 3 (31:07):
Music coming out. You hear just for miles a right
there quite an exciting place for a next kid. Oh Man,
fit by a night of watcher and sid right up
off and we're seeing a turn a street there, right up.
We cut our hats on sideways, and we have checked

(31:28):
our top hits of the line. We've got a cool
seven dollars left each one of us. We each have
two water drinks under our belt. Now our light balls
are spinning, our jeeper sweating, our ears are getting in
our knees or looks. We're ready to cold. We're in
Kansas City. You don't want to hear the rest of

(31:54):
the story, do you? You really do? Well? A couple
of hours ago by and some wild things happened, none
of which I will sully your innocent shell like ears with.
What a night. There's no I've never told this. You've
never heard me mention any of this, have you? Well?
It was really something. It was just fantastic.

Speaker 2 (32:15):
I received more education in that one night in Kansas
City than all of my years, all of my days combined.
Everything conceivable happened, Almost everything conceivable. I can conceive of
some things now, but at that time everything I couldn't
conceive of.

Speaker 3 (32:32):
Half of it.

Speaker 2 (32:32):
There was I can remember running up alleys. I remember,
I remember sirens, I remember MPs. I can remember guys hollering.
I remember people getting hit. I remember somebody throwing a
bottle through a window. These are just little brief moments,
and all I remember saying, hey, you guys doing I'm
reading and don't like, oh, come on, crash somebody has.

(32:55):
And then I remember I remember doing things myself. I'm
just saying, hey, what's this? And I'm pushing a jukebox over.
I remember doing that. I don't know why I did it.
I pushed a jukebox over and it was one of
these big red ones with the juice in it, you know,
the juice that goes up and down the side.

Speaker 3 (33:09):
And pour it out. It was oh wow.

Speaker 2 (33:13):
I remember, for some reason or other, being in a kitchen.
Now I don't quite know how I got in this kitchen,
but there were three of us in a kitchen with
somebody and we were slicing lettuce. Now I don't know
why we were doing that.

Speaker 3 (33:25):
I remember being in a kitchen with lettuce, And the
next scene I remember, vaguely, not quite clearly, was being
in this smelly place where everybody is standing up and
they had taken our tickets away. We are now in
the show, and we're all standing up and there's a
stage up there, little stage with lights, and there is

(33:46):
an elderly lady wearing red plumes up there, and she
is throwing gold sequence into the audience, and they are
playing music, and there is a tenor standing over by
the side and he's singing, Hey, pretty girl, and it's
not coming out that aunts you old night and day.
And then she got off the stage, and a.

Speaker 2 (34:06):
Guy went ran through the audience saying, all right, I
have here a genuine collection of wonderful aren't poses. These
aren't poses the kind of which all of you men
have dreamed them out. And I also have here a
genuine next to worl entertaining within its folds, perhaps, if
you are lucky, a special set of photograph from Gaye
Perrie herself fifty five sense.

Speaker 3 (34:27):
Then we have taffy.

Speaker 2 (34:29):
And I'm standing there and I remember zim Smeister being
sick on my neck and he was taller than me,
and he stood behind and I'm ah.

Speaker 3 (34:36):
And then suddenly she goes and a large lady, a
big fat lady wearing purple phones came on and the Penacy,
A ready girl is Walker Mellow d d aunts you
own night and they and then suddenly there is this
little short guy wearing a round hat and a chicken
suit out there, and he is jumping up and down

(34:58):
on the piano player's plague and he tell like thirty jokes.
He is hollers, hey, guys, and then he sports water
at the audience and I'm standing there watching and my
stomach is turning over.

Speaker 2 (35:11):
And the next thing I saw that little guy, he
is doing kids shows on TV.

Speaker 3 (35:19):
Well, you want to hear the rest of the night,
I'll tell you if you want. You really shouldn't hear
before before I tell you the rest of the night.
Terrible night. Just these are the times that try men's souls,
I'll tell you. And they're there are the times when men's.

Speaker 2 (35:38):
Souls are dipped in the crucible of steel that makes
them what they are, hard fitting, square jaw.

Speaker 3 (35:44):
And I will tell you.

Speaker 2 (35:45):
About the rest of the night immediately after a word
about our old friends. The electronic workshop, see where he's
one of kids. The electronic workshop that wakes you up,
doesn't it?

Speaker 3 (35:59):
At twenty six? What's in here?

Speaker 2 (36:01):
Yeah, I'm saying I don't know how this thing sounds
on that high fi equipment down at the workshop.

Speaker 3 (36:49):
Today.

Speaker 2 (36:57):
You want to hear the rest of that, well we
have with us tonight the Electronic Workshop.

Speaker 3 (37:03):
They are at twenty six.

Speaker 2 (37:04):
West A Street, and I'd like to have known how
that sounded on one of those FM tuners. And yeah,
pretty good, I guess I can overtones and rattling of
the thing here. And they are at twenty six West
A Street. And if you have trouble with all that
high fi junk, which you should have bought in the
first place from the Electronic Workshop that you got for Christmas,

(37:24):
I would suggest you call Grammercy three one four.

Speaker 3 (37:28):
Oh.

Speaker 2 (37:28):
This is the Electronic Workshop. They are at twenty six
West A Street in the village, and they are really
a genuine high five specialty organization.

Speaker 3 (37:38):
They mean business. Oh, by the way, my painting is
still down there in that main window, I presume, and
I'm getting all kinds of peculiar mail about it. And
if you would like to.

Speaker 2 (37:50):
See a painting that I slaved and labored over, it's
like well, I mean, after all, every lady likes to
show off her embroidery and her hymn stitching or crochet work.

Speaker 3 (38:01):
I like to show off my little crochet work.

Speaker 2 (38:04):
It's down there in the window and it's a twenty
sixth west A Street, the Electronic Workshop.

Speaker 3 (38:11):
Well, let me tell you I really shouldn't. Hey. Listen,
we're going to be down at the Limelight, aren't we
this Saturday night again?

Speaker 2 (38:19):
Yeah, the night right after New Year's And it's going
to be a full two hour show this night.

Speaker 3 (38:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (38:24):
For those of you who have been noticing that we've
been snipped off there a little bit by the Knicks
basketball games. I don't know when the Knicks are playing
next week.

Speaker 3 (38:33):
Huh God, that's very good.

Speaker 2 (38:35):
We will be on at our regular time, which is
five minutes past ten this coming Saturday night down at
the Limelight in the village, and that should be a
wild night down there the night after New Year's with
everybody from college and everything in. And if you want
to make a reservation down there, give them a call.
And if, by the way, they are booked up, which

(38:56):
they quite often are at this time of the week,
I would suggest that you take chance anyway, because almost
everybody who comes down there gets in eventually. Wouldn't you
say that, Lee, that it's worth taking a chance. So
if you're in town and you're around in the village
and you're swinging, I would suggest you make the limelight scene.
We'll be there from ten until midnight this coming Saturday night.

(39:16):
And be careful. I'm wiry, So don't come down with
any smart ideas. Won't do any gun and that true scip.
They get fooled.

Speaker 3 (39:25):
Now.

Speaker 2 (39:26):
Oh yeah, another thing, you know, one thing I must
say that I've noticed lately a lot of people seem
to think this is a radio show I do down there.
In other words, they get the idea that I'm down
there with some kind of a booth, or I sit
at a table, or I have earphones on my head,
you know, I sit in the corner and do this.

Speaker 3 (39:45):
Just no, not at all. This is a real nightclub
type show that is done down there.

Speaker 2 (39:50):
It's up on stage and well, yeah, sort of, I
mean on this chick's table.

Speaker 3 (39:56):
I run around. It's well, I mean, after all, don't
be smart.

Speaker 2 (40:01):
I mean, I don't be snotty all the time. And
I'm down there with the lights on and everything. And
it is it is a nightclub type show, not really
a nightclub. It's hard to describe. It is a nightclub
type show. But it's not a nightclub.

Speaker 3 (40:14):
You know.

Speaker 2 (40:14):
That's another thing that confuses people. What is the limelight?
I keep getting letters and they don't know themselves. Down there,
there's a great Yeah, there's a great amount of disparity
among the various versions that the guys who run it
have about it. But it isn't what they say it is.
It's not exactly a bar, although they have a bar.
It's not a saloon. It's not a restaurant, although they

(40:38):
have great food down there. It's sort of a I
don't know, it's a place. It's hard to define. It's
as difficult to define. I will tell you this, it's
as difficult to define as my work is difficult to define.

Speaker 3 (40:53):
Now, now I'm serious. You know.

Speaker 2 (40:54):
One of my big problems professionally over the years has
been that.

Speaker 3 (40:58):
Nobody seems to be able to put it tag on you.
And when they can't put a tag on you, where
do you fit? So if you can't say comic, well
am I am?

Speaker 2 (41:09):
I not?

Speaker 3 (41:09):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (41:10):
Humorists, I don't know, but we'll Oh you want to
hear what happened? Oh, well, I'll tell you what happened. Finally,
it was a very interesting moment. I am down there
in this crowd. For those of you who might be
contemplating a rash evening tomorrow night, be careful. I am
down in this crowd with Zimsmeister, with Gasser, with about
four other gis, Rosenblatt, and a whole bunch of the

(41:33):
guys from the company Company Kate. We're down there yelling
and hollowing. We're screaming. I'm having a great time. Zinsmeister
has been sick twice now down my neck, and they're
selling the candy kisses. And the guys are buying all
the pictures, and I think some of them still have
to pick There are autograph pictures, by the way. When
all of a sudden, the lights went up and the
entire crowd were marched into a patty wagon.

Speaker 3 (41:56):
Including me. I'm going to tell you this.

Speaker 2 (41:58):
If you can find somewhere yeah that blodder in Kansas City,
you will find the name of Corporal JP.

Speaker 3 (42:04):
Shepherd one six nine eight ninety four six Company K
eight hundred and seventeenth Single Training Battalion, Camp Crown. The
whole crowd of us were in there and booked for
observing a licentious and lude performance, and I remember sitting

(42:25):
in the room with a whole bunch of guys in
the bullpen, the guys being in Perth, and they can
bring it. Chorus curls hid and the cops can bring
in jazz musicians out. We're trying to call their nose
with their hair, and they can bring in this whole
CD it. And the next morning they let all the
tis boats. And that night I'm at the USO is
Sunday and I'm trying to wait my mother about one.

(42:46):
I did thee Wow. I went to the y w
c A and they had a sight of the festival
and I had a very good time. Crowd sits light says, oh,
I have a big shiners next to the haven. They
know you.

Speaker 1 (43:07):
From January thirteenth, nineteen sixty five, a Banko prize, an
incense burner in the shape of Buddha. A suggestion for
a course and remedial Shepherd for those who only tuned
in after nineteen sixty one, the Disease of the Month
Grandpa Henry in the eight hour haw good storytelling. Part
of the opening theme has been deleted.

Speaker 6 (43:26):
That's it, That's it for music now. Jeane Shepherd from
this month in history nineteen sixty five. I don't know,
really must have gone on vacation the second week of January,
because I couldn't find any shows from his stuff for
the week that this is well, actually thirteenth, it's not

(43:48):
that far off from January thirteenth, nineteen sixty five. It's
been called great storytelling, This one a dot in the
eye of Buddha. Gene Shepherd Ainuary thirteenth, nineteen sixty five.
Here on mass Backwards WBI, New York.

Speaker 3 (44:53):
And once again, Sergeant X forty two secret operative, lurking
under ground, creeping through the it hedges of excessance, looking
for the most significant blue of all, the glue, the
answer to it all. If he sneaks up his eyes.

Speaker 2 (45:08):
Mirror Swiss is beautifully lined, red soil, take flesh, you.

Speaker 3 (45:12):
Have the sunlight. X forty seven is on the drop. George, George.

Speaker 2 (45:17):
We're gonna get to it yet, We're gonna find out
what it's all about. If it takes me ten thousand years,
I will burrow my way down to the very court
of it all.

Speaker 3 (45:28):
So speakth the soul of man, So speak it, that eternal, fluttery,
drifting gray silk transparent, smoke like image that lurks down
just to the left of our pancrease. I'll get to it.
I'll discover what it is. I'll find out one day.

(45:49):
And one day when I find.

Speaker 2 (45:50):
Out, yes, those words keep echoing and re echoing. I
don't know whether I should give a sermon tonight, whether
I should play my kazuo, or whether I should describe
the time I got vested in the Irish male race.

Speaker 3 (46:09):
I don't know whether I should tell you that time
or the time that I got involved in the Great
Tennis Shoe Caper. I could describe that to you tonight,
or maybe perhaps we should just continue to beat the
drums and hoping that somehow, if we beat the drums hard.

Speaker 2 (46:24):
Enough, we clamp our hands loud enough, and if we
sprinkle enough powder into the little fire we've got going here,
watch carefully, just keep your.

Speaker 3 (46:32):
Eye on those embers. Just watch those flames. You see
how they dance, You see how they cast those beautiful
shadows on the cave wall with a big Oh, that's mine.
I'm sorry. Sometimes you can't tell your own shadow from

(46:53):
all the rest of the drifting shadows. Sometimes you can't
tell you just gotta keep hoping that it's gonna work out.
Bring it up all together. I'm slack. Oh man, that's
very good.

Speaker 2 (47:05):
After you've gone, baby, and left me crying.

Speaker 3 (47:09):
After you've gone, there's no denying.

Speaker 7 (47:13):
You'll feel blue, baa, You'll feel sad.

Speaker 3 (47:17):
Bah bah bah. You've missed the greatest man that maybe
you ever had.

Speaker 7 (47:23):
One of these days, women stands and don't forget it.

Speaker 3 (47:27):
One of these days you'll regret it.

Speaker 8 (47:32):
Something someday when you are a lonely blah blah blah,
you'll look.

Speaker 3 (47:37):
Around, baby, You'll look around and see that you want
me oldly. After you've gone, bah bah bah bah.

Speaker 2 (47:44):
After you've gone away, sometimes you get worried about what's
going out here in the cave.

Speaker 3 (47:50):
And you can't tell the shadows for the people. After
you've gone, let me cry a baby. After you've gone,
there's no denying. You'll feel blue.

Speaker 7 (48:02):
You'll feel so sad, sad said st you'll miss the
greatest man that you ever had, My fa, Why not
these days on the stays ain't gonna be a long, baby,
don't you forget it.

Speaker 3 (48:14):
One of these days you'll regret that. You'll look back
on your shoulder you'll see the sister figure going off
into the distance of another chicken. You're gonna be sad
and lonely. You're gonna look around and you're gonna see
that the whole guess whom you want only baby, And
it's gonna be too long time, too late, she waits,
I'm gonna be cut outs. But after you're gone, after

(48:35):
you're gone, after you've gone, after you'll come on by
f f f f f f f f f f
f f f f f f f ftigating this the

(49:00):
type of crap and all the game out at the
full room visit traces Almacan. After you af there you go.

(49:21):
It's very dark and in this cave sometimes I just
don't know where it is, you know that. I just
read recently in one of the UH one of the
issues of a big medical magazine that comes out every month,
the British Medical Magazine, and they said that there is
a new thing on the market in Britain and it's.

Speaker 2 (49:41):
The UH Disease of the Month LP. Yeah, it's for hypochondriacs.

Speaker 3 (49:46):
Really, it's the disease of the month and it has
all the various symptoms and it has syndromes. The result
from it, and it has treatment. I'm not I'm not
putting it out. I'm just telling you. This was announced
in one of the British Medical men magazines that now
the whole business of the hypochondriac is now formalized. And
whereas guys used to just pick up, you know, the.

Speaker 2 (50:09):
Disease of the month, whatever it was, they said, oh,
what is it all I've got? Oh, it's the glomtse
this month he read, you know, somewhere along the line.
He's reading a paper and he reads about some guy
that came down in northern Rhodesia with a fantastic case
of the glunts and his feet got seventeen feet long,
you know, and all that stuff. And the next morning
he's putting his socks on and he figured, you know,
the socks have been shrimols the gluns before afternoon, before

(50:33):
before two o'clock, my feet will be seven people on.

Speaker 3 (50:36):
Oh, oh, well, this is the this is the hypochondriac.
I'm not kidding you. Sure, a real good operating hypochondriac
is a sight to be whole. He is busier than
you know what on a ten roof, I'll tell you,
and I can I can match eighteen different things. And

(50:56):
I'm not even talking about a cat. I'm talking about carpenters.
I'm talking about all kinds of people that are busy.
In that particular phrase, if.

Speaker 2 (51:04):
You've ever seen a really good hype, you don't know
how busy carpenters can be. Don't you know about how
busy one armed carpenters are when they're doing certain things?

Speaker 3 (51:12):
Oh you do know?

Speaker 2 (51:14):
Well, then I don't have to tell you, George, right, George,
you roney. It's amazing what comes out of the mouth
of the young is. It's terrible what's lying down there
in those brains. But I speak of lying down there
in the brains. I'll never forget the time I was
in the dime store. I'm a kid, you say, I'm
a great dime store fan. Even to this day, it's
very embarrassing.

Speaker 3 (51:34):
Everybody's heading for Tiffany's and Sacks and all that, And
I find myself like a magnet, like a piece of
iron filing drawn to a giant electromagnet. I am drawn
to the basement of Woolworth's.

Speaker 2 (51:45):
Now, of course I wear my rubber mask, you know,
the one that looks like Kruse Shaw when I'm down there,
people look at me kind of funny, but at.

Speaker 3 (51:51):
Least they're looking at Kruse shop and they're looking at me,
you know. And I'm down there in the basement of
the dime store, sniffing around all that stuff. You just
can't get enough of that sweet stuff.

Speaker 2 (52:00):
Once you've got the taste for dime stores, once you
had the taste for the rich effluvia of the underbelly
of the artistic life, you cannot stay away from the
place where they're selling all those plaster statues of you know, saints,
and all kinds of strange little chickens and roosters and dogs.

Speaker 3 (52:17):
And stuff like that. You've seen that stuff they've got
in the basement there.

Speaker 2 (52:20):
It's just great stuff. Well, I, as a kid, I
became addicted to this scene. And how I became addictive
is God's another story. You don't want to hear about
how a guy gets a monkey on his back. What
you want to hear is how he tries to get
rid of it. Well, for years, I try to get
rid of It's no use. I would like to I
would like to form some kind of a group called
dime Stores Anonymous DA and dssays, because I know so

(52:46):
many guys that not only squander away, they're good, harder
in time. Do you know that I know a famous
writer who is And don't think I'm name.

Speaker 3 (52:54):
Dropping, it's just as you know, they come in and
out of radio station. You get to know these guys.

Speaker 2 (52:57):
And there's a famous writer who gets about one hundred
and seventy billion dollars are worre ol this guy.

Speaker 3 (53:02):
If he stayed home and just wrote his name down
over and over all afternoon, he could retire at the
end of the month just from doing that. He's that
kind of a writer. You know, it's fantastic.

Speaker 2 (53:10):
He never can find enough time to finish his great
novels and plays and all that. And where do you
think he spends most of his afternoons.

Speaker 3 (53:17):
That's right, pulling around the tool section the dime store,
and I think enough prumming flyers and looking at that
wire that they've got.

Speaker 2 (53:25):
For sale, looking at goldfish, walking around in the cheap
perfume department. That whole scene cannot get enough of that stuff.

Speaker 3 (53:33):
And if you come out of a certain millieu.

Speaker 2 (53:35):
If you'll excuse the expression, if that means the back
porch where the screen door slams.

Speaker 3 (53:39):
It's we used to call it the millieu. If you
come out of a certain that throat, if you come
out of a certain millieu. The dime store is your world,
a question about it. It is, in a sense a
total universe. It You can you know that in the
dime stores. I would like to report to you right now,
first time I saw it. You can buy electric guitars
in the dime stores. Now, yeah, transistorized, and you have

(54:02):
your choice to have it signed, signed or unsigned by
the Beatles. Now whole scene. You can get the amplifier,
you get the whole business.

Speaker 2 (54:11):
I suppose if you work hard enough and look around,
you can pick up an agent in the dime store.
These dime stores down here on forty second Street, I'm
sure you know if you stand around long enough in
the cheap candy department, they come along there. Oh, by
the way, I know a very exotic recipe that involves
dime store.

Speaker 3 (54:29):
These little you know, these little malted milk balls. They
sell them the dimestars.

Speaker 2 (54:33):
I know a fantastic recipe that involves the use of
dime store malted milk balls and bourbon.

Speaker 3 (54:40):
And if you would like to find out about that.
I will send it to you. Oh, I know a
lot of things that come out of that deep, rich
American Midwestern heritage. You know. I'm so tired of hearing
these guys talking all.

Speaker 2 (54:49):
The time about European cooking. Yeah, they get down there
all the time. I hear Al McCann trying to talk
about French cooking, and I hear I hear doctor carpl
Frederick's talking about this stuff that they put black strapping lines.

Speaker 3 (55:01):
That's not that's not really basic American, you know. And
they're talking about French cooking, Italian cooking.

Speaker 2 (55:07):
Nobody talks about really American jazz, the kind of stuff
that comes out of the heartland of America. And if
you're interested in a few of those recipes, I have one,
as I say, that involves molded milk balls and bourbon. Now,
it's no you bake it.

Speaker 3 (55:24):
It is not what you think. You don't mix it.

Speaker 2 (55:26):
It's a it's a it's a it's an actual fun
dessert for those of you who are looking for something different,
and I have.

Speaker 3 (55:31):
Yeah, as it really is. Don't laugh, you guys have
laughed too often out of the wrong side of your mouth.
You know, I'm serious. You know, if you went down
to the four season, you play four hundred dollars for
one little tiny globut of this and I can turn
it out down here in the nineteenth floor if you
want at any time. And you have to use dime
store molded.

Speaker 2 (55:48):
Milk balls because they have a certain resinous gumminess quality
to them that that is very important.

Speaker 3 (55:55):
You get that, you get the good ones. You don't
get quite this, you know, quite the feel. But there
I am.

Speaker 2 (56:00):
I'm fooling around the dime stores. At about the age.

Speaker 3 (56:03):
Of four or five. My mother in fact, furnished her
entire life from Woolworths. That's right.

Speaker 2 (56:11):
She would save up for months to buy something that
was in the dollar department down there. I remember for
a long time we went down and looked at a
smoking stand they had in the dime store.

Speaker 3 (56:21):
And this smoking stand was made out of tinfoil.

Speaker 2 (56:23):
It was tinfoil and this kind of black plastic stuff
that what they used to call modern.

Speaker 3 (56:29):
I remember they had.

Speaker 2 (56:29):
Madern stuff was kind of like a neo debauched world
fare modern kind of stuff. And we waited around there
for months, and then one day we got this thing
and she brought it home. It was all excitement, and
it came taking apart, and.

Speaker 3 (56:44):
It came in a box, and she took it all
down and held it cost just a giant trom in
our house. So my old man says, I'll put it together,
and he rushes.

Speaker 2 (56:54):
Down the basement, gets his his giant screwdriver he had
with the red handle, you know, the wooden handle type thing.
He comes up there and he starts to put this
thing together. It had three legs. It was a tripod
kind of a fair and he puts the first bunch
of legs together. See, they had two little shelves. There
was a top shelf of kind of silver like metal,
in the bottom shelf of black like metal. And on

(57:14):
the top round circular shelf there was this terrible ash tray,
which by the way, Maucle Carlo got his hand caught
into for about three hours one after hi when we
had to call doctor Slicker in this dime store ashtray.
But nevertheless, the old man is trying to put this
thing together. It's terrible when you discovered that your father.

Speaker 3 (57:33):
Is just isn't good. You know, he's got eighteen thumbs
on one hand because they never admitted he had vises
down to the basement of the chisels and hammers and
of coaurse. He was always cutting himself and stuff.

Speaker 2 (57:44):
But he had all this down there, and there were
strict rules, never ever touch any of this stuff, because
if we did, we'd hurt ourselves.

Speaker 3 (57:52):
There was a rule in our house never pick up
a chisel, and I have stayed away from chisels and
chiselers of all kinds since the early training can be
completely transcended.

Speaker 2 (58:02):
And the old man is down there putting this thing together.
Actually he's in the sun parlor putting it together. My
mother's standing there proudly, and he's putting it together. He
gets the first two legs together out you know this
awful feeling. It has these countersunk self tapping screws. Now,
he's got the first two together, it's fine. He's got
the bottom screw on, the third leg on. He is

(58:24):
not putting the last screw on.

Speaker 3 (58:26):
He's tightening it up. He said, I want to make
sure it's very tight. On's got everything tight. He just
kept turning, kept.

Speaker 2 (58:32):
Turning, and you could see his ears are getting a
little red because you see men since when they have
loused up. He has stripped the threads and he sensed it. See,
and he doesn't want to admit it. He says, what's
the matter with this?

Speaker 3 (58:44):
It won't tighten, sheep junk won't tighten. My mother is
standing Backum, shoot, what did you do? Nothing? This thing
won't tighten.

Speaker 2 (58:53):
Just a minute, I'll get it tight and he starts
to push real hard.

Speaker 3 (58:56):
He pushed. That goes right through. He screwed this thing
right through. Oh boyd. The leg flies off. She says,
you stripped it. Now, this is something that women shouldn't
know about.

Speaker 2 (59:06):
They shouldn't know phrases like you stripped it, or you
busted the starter's spring. I'll never forget the time my
mother told my old man that he flooded it. Oh jeez,
we're sitting in the front seattes.

Speaker 3 (59:16):
I think you flooded it. Oh. The top of his
head flew off and flew around the oldsmobile about fifteen minutes.
Because you see what had happened. He had flooded. The
gas was all coming out of the bottom.

Speaker 2 (59:28):
Women shouldn't know that kind of stuff, you know, She says,
you stripped it. Well, the old man took it down
in the basement and he decided to drill it out,
and he was going to drill it out, and he
was going to put a boat through it instead. So
he's drilling it out. You ever seen anybody who does
not know anything about tools try to drill a tube.

Speaker 3 (59:49):
This is a tubular leg.

Speaker 2 (59:51):
And he's trying to tell this tou with this lousy
ten cents store drill that he had that had the
rubber bits, you know how, you know that kind of.

Speaker 3 (59:58):
The rubber bits. He keeps digging him under the chin
to keep stripping itself, and his bits would come apart
in little powder on the bottom. And I'm standing down
there watching. Pin says, you go on up and help
your mother with something.

Speaker 2 (01:00:09):
And it was that day that I realized that we
are not alone, all of us who are bested by
things around us. Now I got hooked on before we
go any further, speaking of dime stores, this is.

Speaker 3 (01:00:21):
Wor Am and Ff, New York, and I got hooked
on the dime store because of one specific counter, one
specific counter that even to this day brings back very peculiar, shifting.

Speaker 2 (01:00:38):
Dark, strange, kind of exotic memories. There was a lady
who lived in our neighborhood who had parties, and she
had card parties.

Speaker 3 (01:00:48):
And that kind of jazz. And my mother would go
to the card party and they'd sit around to play play.

Speaker 2 (01:00:52):
Something called bunko. Have you ever heard of bunko? And
so I don't think they play that here. In fact,
I think they invented that game.

Speaker 3 (01:00:59):
In my neighbor. They played a game called Bunco, not bingo, bunko,
and it was played with about eighty seven dice. They had, Yeah,
they had a whole bunch of red dice, you know,
with the white dots on them, that kind of dice.
And they had a bell and this bell would be
placed on the table and I can oh, I'm just
terribly boring afternoons as a kid, when the eighteen ladies

(01:01:21):
would be in the front room eating bridge mix. And
nothing is worse than about eighteen.

Speaker 2 (01:01:25):
Ladies all bridge mixed up, you know, sopping down the
bridge mix and yelling and hollering and drinking drug store
sherry and playing bunko.

Speaker 3 (01:01:33):
Well, this was high life and Hammond, Indiana, And so
every thirty seconds or so, some lady would holler bunko.
Playing she'd hit this bell. And when you holler bunco,
and you hit the bell. I think all the ladies
jump up and throw bridge mix at one another, and
the one that gets the most cashew nuts in the eye,
I think, is it for the next hand. I don't

(01:01:53):
know exactly how the game is played, but that's what
it seemed like to me. I hear the girdles creaking
and yelling at Theresa would be out there crying, and
this is the kind of game they played. Well. Well,
they have prizes now.

Speaker 2 (01:02:05):
Now there are certain things that are given for Bunco
prizes or Bridge Party or Lady Peanuncle Party prizes, and
they include such things as embroidered handkerchiefs. They include things
like jigsaw puzzles. I remember my mother bringing home a
jigsaw puzzle that had a reprint of a Dutch Master thing.

(01:02:26):
We did that for over have you Can you remember
the kind of boredom that you had when you were
a kid, when you were doing the same jigsaw puzzle
for the eighth time, and you.

Speaker 3 (01:02:38):
Just try to pretend like you don't know how to
do it to yourself, and you still you really do
know how to do it, and you keep doing the
same and you try to struggle your way through the
Chinese nail puzzle and all that stuff. Again, well, she.

Speaker 2 (01:02:51):
Won on one one giant occasion because it caused so
much powering.

Speaker 3 (01:02:56):
Later on she won an incense burner.

Speaker 2 (01:03:00):
Now, now this is This was a Buddha incense burner,
and it looked like Buddha. Now, we did not have
many Buddhas in our neighborhood. Uncle Tom looked a little
like a Buddha. But we did not know much about
Zen Buddhism. We didn't even know anything about much isms,
except that this.

Speaker 3 (01:03:19):
Was an incense burner. And she not only got an
incense burner, but.

Speaker 2 (01:03:23):
She got what seemed to be a lifetime supply of
jasmine incense, about a four pound box, and it came
with these little cones.

Speaker 3 (01:03:31):
If you've seen incense, you've never even seen incense in
the raw. Oh well, my kid brother once ate three
of them because they smelled so good.

Speaker 2 (01:03:39):
He figured if you ate them, they'd even be better.
And believe me, he made burping sounds for months. It
even came out of his eyes and his ears. A
peculiar when you start to digest incense. But we got
this jasmine incense burner and had a little tray on
the bottom, and the tray was to put the incense in. Now,
the incense looked like you know these things that you

(01:04:00):
had when you were a kid, and in the fourth
of July, and you'd light it and a snake would
come out and make a long snake like a It
was like a conical sort of like a conical debauched.

Speaker 3 (01:04:10):
Looking aspirin, really was what it was like. And it
was kind of dark, lean colored.

Speaker 2 (01:04:15):
And I remember the day when my mother brought this
thing home, and it was red and green and had
gilt painted all over it, and it was booted.

Speaker 3 (01:04:21):
It was big. It wasn't a little one. It was
about oh maybe seven or eight inches high. It was
a great, big son of a gun. And she put
it right next to the ferns now.

Speaker 2 (01:04:30):
We also had an ivory elephant that had sapphires for eyes.
This was another one of the chief art objects in
our home and was much admired in our neighborhood. Ladies
would come and look at it. It was a it
was a celluloid elephant, actually, and part of the trunk
had been burned off because my uncle tried it once
with a cigar and it just shomeed like that and
my mother yelled and hollered, and it had sapphires for eyes.

(01:04:54):
And this was always kept on display next to our
book ends. Now, we did not have any books to
put in our book INDs, but Aunt Glenn had given
us a set of wrought iron book INDs. Now, the
wrought iron book ends showed a harlequin harlequin on one
end and a tragic figure on the other.

Speaker 3 (01:05:12):
And my mother didn't know what to do with them except.

Speaker 2 (01:05:13):
To push them together, and they made kind of a
bookend display. And these were also part of our great
heritage of art. In addition, incidentally to our Starved Rock
Indian Library table runner, which was magnificent, we received as
a as a genuine bona fide, absolutely guaranteed souvenir of

(01:05:35):
Starved Rock State Park.

Speaker 3 (01:05:37):
Illinois, which was by a river there and there were
a lot of well, they had a.

Speaker 2 (01:05:41):
Lot of starved rocks and stuff around, and people would
go there and eat sandwiches and their fights and drink beer.
And it was where some Indians once had jumped off.
I remember this very well. You want to hear about
the heritage of the great historical Midwest that the Indians
had been starved on the top of this rock, and
finally they heroically leaped into the Chicago drainage Canal which

(01:06:01):
was at.

Speaker 3 (01:06:01):
The bottom of it.

Speaker 2 (01:06:03):
Well, it wasn't called the Chicago drainage canal when they
were there. I don't know what it was called, but
it was the Chicago drainage Canal. And the Indians jumped
into that drainage canal. And Aunt Clara one time visited
that place. And you know how when a family has.

Speaker 3 (01:06:17):
An aunt that does big things like that, like goes
to Starve Rock, they all say bring something back.

Speaker 2 (01:06:22):
Well, Aunt Clara brought back for us a genuine library
table runner that had an inscribed and beautifully covered Paisley runner.

Speaker 3 (01:06:30):
Actually it was it at eight thousand colors you've.

Speaker 2 (01:06:32):
Seen Paisley runners, had long fringe which my kid brother
practiced scout knots on. It had long fringe that hung
down from the library table. In the middle of it
was an Indian and it said souvenir of Starve Rock
State Park, Illinois.

Speaker 3 (01:06:46):
And that was the centerpiece of our art display at home.
This is how I got so hooked on Woolworth art.
To me, it is still the great art. There's no
question about it, And I remember that elephant there with
the sapphire eyes looking out at us.

Speaker 2 (01:07:03):
We also had one other thing that I should describe
to you before I go any further. It was also
one of the chief o jay dark in our home
because it had such great meaning.

Speaker 3 (01:07:13):
We had three little monkeys.

Speaker 2 (01:07:16):
One of them had his hands over his eyes, the
other one had his hands over his ears, and the
other one's feet were broken off. That was the three
monkeys see no evil, hear no evil, and kick.

Speaker 3 (01:07:26):
No evil apparently, and these three sat there and they
were next to the elephant. You want to hear more
about our art, I don't know why people listen. If
you think that's bad, I've been up to the bronx,
so don't give me that jazz. I walked up along
Fordham Road there not more than three hours ago, and
you should see some of the Chinese modern up there.
Holy smokes, we didn't go that far, but we were

(01:07:47):
the first touch of the truly exotic. Outside of the
elephant with the sapphire eyes was the.

Speaker 2 (01:07:54):
Entrance into our house of the Buddha incense burner. Now
this was consider somehow it was also connected with sex.
I don't know exactly how that worked.

Speaker 3 (01:08:05):
I suspect my mother still was under some influence of
a lady named Theda Barra, whom she occasionally referred.

Speaker 2 (01:08:11):
To once in a while when she was yelling at
my father. She was always hollering, I remember you ain't
married at as Theta Barra.

Speaker 3 (01:08:16):
I remember that. And I didn't know at the age
of three or four who a Theda Barrow was.

Speaker 2 (01:08:21):
I thought it was one of those ladies who lived
at the end of the street that where they had
the funny lampshades in the windows, and all the o
kids get funny ideas about this, and.

Speaker 3 (01:08:27):
The men would go after work and stuff and so well.
I know there were a lot of things in the neighborhood.

Speaker 2 (01:08:33):
I'll tell you about the lady the ones had the
seance in that neighborhood on the front porch with the
trumpets blowing, and she had a red light out there
and we all went to watch. We hid in the
hydrangea bushes and the snowball bushes and watched mister and
mister Schlichter they had a seance, and uh yeah, they
had a man there who had a who had with

(01:08:53):
a towel.

Speaker 3 (01:08:53):
Around his head. He was a swami and he was
in charge of the seance, and everybody sat in a
circle on the front door around the swing or something
was up by the swing.

Speaker 2 (01:09:02):
Yeah, and a trumpet came down out of the ceiling
and the kids flipped. I'll tell you, they were just
they were gas. They had a red light and all
that stuff. And so we were entering very gradually in
our family. We were entering the world of well, I
suppose you might say the international.

Speaker 3 (01:09:16):
World that we know today. My first my first, uh,
my first.

Speaker 2 (01:09:20):
Meeting of the Great Orient of course, outside of full
manche who came later. No, I think I think full
Mancheu and full Matt. There's bet a little lifit between
full Mancheu and Mousi Tongue.

Speaker 3 (01:09:30):
Actually he was skinnier. They both had the same idea.

Speaker 2 (01:09:35):
If any of you know anything about full Mancheu, you
know what his what his general scheme was.

Speaker 3 (01:09:39):
And of course he had lot of trap doors. I
know what he was always doing in Limehouse. That's not
a very good.

Speaker 2 (01:09:43):
Place from which to jump off if you want to
run the world. Limehouse is kind of a backwater, been
there out nothing. It's just it's a real drag. It's
a remind you a little McDougall street.

Speaker 3 (01:09:54):
Actually a lot of tourists and people yelling around Josh
shops and all that stuff. Well, anyway, the day that
the once a Josh.

Speaker 2 (01:10:01):
Jump, I can't explain all these contexts spell Joss. That
will be your homework looking up tonight. It will appear
on the exam next week. We don't have time to
give you a reference notes. Here kid wrote it and
he says, you know, he said, the trouble with your program, Shepherd.
You have to hear the first ones, and the second ones,
the middle ones, and you have to hear some of
the later ones. He said, you should give a review
of course for those who have tuned in later the

(01:10:24):
nineteen sixty one, and he said a lot of us
have a tendency to backslide. He said, you ought to
have a course called remedial Shepherd.

Speaker 3 (01:10:31):
He said, and then you know, give him a little
kazoo playing and things like that to keep the troops happy.

Speaker 2 (01:10:36):
So bring up a little kazoo music on the fire
turntable if you will, l I think that'll be good.

Speaker 3 (01:10:42):
Very good. Oh that's the bass. It was a soul.

Speaker 2 (01:11:04):
That's enough that's to keep the little ladies from getting
the itch in a place difficult to scratch.

Speaker 3 (01:11:11):
And we'll do it. Don't worry. I've got it. I've
got it all into control. And before Oh yes, I
think that's why I say all before we do that. Uh,
there is a friend of mine in case you're interested
in the disease of the month.

Speaker 2 (01:11:24):
And of course I think that's more of a British thing.
They really enjoy diseases. Oh yeah, much more so than
we do. The British.

Speaker 3 (01:11:34):
Yes they have.

Speaker 2 (01:11:35):
I have a positive i'd say, a positive enjoyment, a
savoring of crime. Oh you read a crime story in
a British newspaper and you just see where Ian Fleming
got all of this stuff. Today, I left England here
just a few weeks ago, a giant case had just broken,
the mysterious case of the slain taxi driver, and everybody

(01:11:56):
was talking about it.

Speaker 3 (01:11:57):
Of course, that.

Speaker 2 (01:11:58):
Superseded the mysterious case of the slain meat butcher, which
had happened two weeks before that, which superseded the case
of the mysterious slang of the candlestick maker. And it
goes all the way back to the mysterious beheading of
the arthritic vicar, which happened the day after I got there.
So if you're interested in any of these mysterious cases,

(01:12:19):
we'll have that a little bit later on, while the
women and children are preparing for bed, and while those
of you out there are preparing to go to bed
and pull up your socks.

Speaker 3 (01:12:28):
Bringing on there. L are very good, They're reach good.
I'm going to read good. Be careful. This is a Miller,
a commercial propress popping poor can.

Speaker 8 (01:12:39):
Distinctive Miller of highlight and popping poor can.

Speaker 3 (01:12:42):
Right sit there and just popcns.

Speaker 8 (01:12:44):
Oh my god, just popping, poor Miller of highlight, the
champaign of model beer, the opener need of and inside
every can enjoyed the hardy and give this a Miller highlight,
the rude from a century old recipe lonely in Milwaukee.

Speaker 3 (01:12:58):
These guys are the Rutt Midler of my life always gives.

Speaker 8 (01:13:03):
You that perfect tasted beer every time, always a bright,
clear taste, very unequal, unquestioned, unchanging, sir. Now you can
enjoy refreshing Miller of my life.

Speaker 3 (01:13:13):
In nothing, poor can you can translate refreshing to mean
anything you want?

Speaker 8 (01:13:17):
Up and form Miller of my life, always sparkling, flavorful beer.

Speaker 3 (01:13:21):
Doesn't want now inping poor cans out of the.

Speaker 2 (01:13:29):
Getting that little brew moved. Yeah, we're sitting around in
the in the house. My mother came home. She came
home that afternoon.

Speaker 3 (01:13:42):
With this thing.

Speaker 2 (01:13:43):
It was Buddha, and Buddha, by the way, well, in
this instance had no eyeballs.

Speaker 3 (01:13:48):
Out of the places where his eyes were supposed to
have been, you know, those sinister or those.

Speaker 2 (01:13:53):
Strangely benign and enigmatic eyes of Buddha would come the
wispy fragrance, the soft grayish purplish smoke, heavily scented with jasmine.
That was to turn our red cabbage home into an
oriental den of Bacchanaya.

Speaker 3 (01:14:11):
Well, so of course we did have We had our.

Speaker 2 (01:14:15):
House because it was just a you know, the house
was a standard neighborhood time house. Our house was wallpapered
in various aromas. There were aromas in our house that
I guess even to this day, since the house is
still there, I presume and people are still wondering where
those funny smells come from. Well, it was impregnated into

(01:14:35):
the walls a thick, rich pattern, a deep, thick mulligatoni,
stew of boiled cabbage and fried hamburgers, boiled hot dogs
and spilled mustard. You know all the things that is,
and porn, tomato soup, kids throwing to meta soup up
in the ceiling, that kind of stuff, and the slowly
soups in And eventually your walls are maybe a foot

(01:14:57):
and a half thick, like they are an old English cast.
It's it's old coagulated life, guts blood of American life.
You could see the squishings of Mary Jane, bits of
candy on the wall. You could see some tobacco jewish
from old old Grandpa Henry who came home, came once
in a while, Old Grandpa Henry who was who was
Brunner's grandpa. He was the only grandpa ever knew that

(01:15:20):
chewed tobacco. He was the only guy in the whole
neighborhood that chewed tobacco. And once in a while when
they let him in the house, they did not allow
him in the house.

Speaker 3 (01:15:27):
Often he stayed out.

Speaker 2 (01:15:28):
In the yard all the time because of you don't
know anything about these old guys. And it was reputed
that the reason he chewed tobacco was because he was
gassed in the war. In those days, they always talked
about guys, you know, they always say he was gassed,
you know, he got gassed.

Speaker 3 (01:15:43):
Well, of course, it's sad fact that it was.

Speaker 2 (01:15:45):
Old Grandpa Henry was never in the war, but he
was plenty of gassed a lot. And he claimed that
he got gassed the first time in nineteen sixteen and
apparently during the war when he heard that he wasn't
going or something, and so he'd been gassed. Ever since, no,
Old Grandpa Henry would wander out among the clothes poles
out there spitting, and he would take an entire an

(01:16:06):
entire package of eight hour cut plug.

Speaker 3 (01:16:09):
Now eight hour cut plug is a big package. It's
much bigger.

Speaker 2 (01:16:14):
It's this is a much more basic tobacco than say
something like male pouch, which was for the very rich types.

Speaker 3 (01:16:21):
There was one called eight hour day. There was one
called mule plug.

Speaker 2 (01:16:25):
There was another one called apple honey plug, which always
sounded great. There was one called licorice plug, and there
were several others, and an old There was one called
navy cut too.

Speaker 3 (01:16:34):
I remember a navy cut.

Speaker 2 (01:16:36):
It smelled like old well, it was navy cut, and
that was a great one of the black glutinous mass.
And old Grandpa Henry I remember him well because Brunner
and I would go out about every third day and
buy his supply of chewing tobacco.

Speaker 3 (01:16:52):
And we would go down to Mattingley's and we'd buy
this great big pile of the stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:16:56):
It must have cost about a six cents a piece
of something because he always bought a great big stack
on them.

Speaker 3 (01:17:00):
And Grandpa Henry would just take one of me.

Speaker 2 (01:17:03):
Rip the top off, and before he would rip it off.

Speaker 3 (01:17:05):
He goes like that. He rip the top off, and
he'd hold this open sack in his hand full of
full of chewing tobacco. And it was a big sack.
There was a really big sage.

Speaker 2 (01:17:14):
It was about well, it was about eight inches high,
about four inches across and about an inch and a
half thick.

Speaker 3 (01:17:19):
It was called eight hour plug cut plug. Now. The
reason they called it eight hour was because it was
supposed to last eight hours of real chewing. One chew
would say, sucking, chewing and just sticking around in your
mouth and slurping and all that whatever you do with
chewing tobacco. And old Grandpa Henry, I remember he teared
this off because he see he he was like, you know,
you know what is it? A chain smoker. He was

(01:17:41):
a chain chore and it was terrible. Some of nights,
at three o'clock in.

Speaker 2 (01:17:45):
The morning, you would hear Grandpa Henry out there next
to the garage where he slept.

Speaker 3 (01:17:50):
He'd sleep out there with the dog.

Speaker 2 (01:17:52):
They had a dog named Spot, and he'd sleep out
there and you'd hear once in a while in his
sleep he's been refighting an old bat or something.

Speaker 3 (01:17:58):
His his his chaw would go down and it would hear, and.

Speaker 2 (01:18:04):
Then old mister Bruner would go out there if he
wasn't drunk, if he was, if he was, tank Missus
Bruner would go out and you'd.

Speaker 3 (01:18:09):
Hear them hitting him on the back. They yeah, they
used they used the rug beater, and they'd hit him
on the back.

Speaker 2 (01:18:17):
And then all of a sudden and it would come
flying out. You'd hear Atlanta the driveway, her boom. This
thing would roll like a big football down the driveway
and he would jump up and run down and get it.
Because he never believed, apparently in opening a fresh thing
of chewing tobacco in the middle of the night, he
always figured it would last till morning, and so he
would tear the top of this thing off.

Speaker 3 (01:18:36):
I just remember ripping the top off, and he would
till his head back. Of course, we're all watching, the
kids are getting this is a big moment for us
because we're all watching him do this. And he would
till his head back and then he would go. His
stomach would get real skinny.

Speaker 2 (01:18:54):
He had a real big, fat stomach, and it would
get real, real skinny in his chest to get real big,
and he would let go with his original cheu, the
one that he'd had since yesterday, and that son of
gun would take off.

Speaker 3 (01:19:12):
I'll tell you he would always aim. I remember he
would he would aim. He would aim for the geranium bed.
He said it was good for the geraniums. But it
was like a flamethrower. Actually, it was a great big
shot right through the middle of all the dead geraniums.
And he always claimed that spot did it. But actually
what it was, you know, oh, let it go like that?

Speaker 2 (01:19:29):
Well, well then he would he would. He would wait
there for a second, say, and his eyes.

Speaker 3 (01:19:34):
Would stop watering for a second because of the fantastic effort.
He would just start standing there in his eyes with water,
and then with great deliberation, he.

Speaker 2 (01:19:41):
Would reach down with his right hand like a claw,
you know, the kind of claw they have on those
machines where you put in a nickel and it reaches
down among all the candy and you try to get
a plastic ring or something. So his hand would go
down the klon he could with this tobacco. He'd start
and you'd smell it the minute he would rip this
thing off. It smelled like old tire, vulcan and stuff
at a tremendously strong smell, great smell, and he'd oh yeah.

(01:20:05):
When you you could stand about three or four feet
away from Grandpa Henry when he's ripping off the top
of one of his eight hour cut plug packages and
your eyes with water really you fee your skin breaking up.
That was really strong stuff out turn litmus paper purple, you.

Speaker 3 (01:20:18):
Know, and he rips this stuff off. I don't know what.
There was a rumor and Bruner always used to say,
he says, you know what.

Speaker 2 (01:20:23):
They cured that in see at the bottom it would
say special cured, and young Ralph Bruner would whisper, you.

Speaker 3 (01:20:29):
Know what they do and I'd say, what, you know
what it is? What he'd said, well, you know they
do it over at the stables. I said, really, it's yeah,
of course, oh man Bruner. He loved to seeing you.
You would believe it too. The way this stuff was,
it was it was a fantastic, humorous peat bog.

Speaker 2 (01:20:45):
He'd open up, he ripped this thing off the top,
sho smellless, and this purple cloud would drift around the neighborhood,
and then he would start stuffing it in. If you've
ever seen a real chewing specialness stuff it into his gut,
right down into his mall, and it was mug.

Speaker 3 (01:21:01):
You've never seen anything like it. You would not believe.
Have you ever seen pelicans?

Speaker 2 (01:21:06):
You know, you always see pictures of how much a
pelican can stick in his trap. Where you ought to
see what the human mug can hold when it really
is under duress.

Speaker 3 (01:21:15):
When you're ready try he packs it in. He first
he goes on the right side, then he reel back.
You all you can see is his elbow sticking out
of his mouth. Seeing he's packing it down around his tonsils,
and then he starts working up near the front.

Speaker 2 (01:21:32):
Say, he goes to the place where his teeth used
to be. This stuff apparently rots your teeth and your
jaw bonn. And apparently he was hollow too, because they
say it rots you all the way down to your ankles,
and he would pack it down on his knees.

Speaker 3 (01:21:42):
Never the.

Speaker 2 (01:21:45):
Then he goes on the other side. There's another great,
big mythful. Now he's got the other half of the package.
And then it would begin to swell. See, the first
ten minutes of a new show is actually the crucial time.
It's life and death. Many a guy is completely choked
by his chew and so old Man Brunner would hang

(01:22:08):
on to the porch railing and wait, and everybody in
the house would wait too, because they you know, they
don't know whether they have to get the stomach pump
or hit him with the hit him with the fly
swatter or something.

Speaker 3 (01:22:16):
You're gonna to chew it up. And he stands there
and waits for the settle.

Speaker 2 (01:22:19):
See, because as soon as the saliva goes and it
starts to expand, and then immediately it starts to fan out,
you know, like the red Chinese hordes coming into Manchuria
is like whoo goes And he waits for a minute,
and of course there is a natural glandular reaction immediately,
fantastic mud chew. He would wait and he would start
filling up, and you could hear all of his juice

(01:22:39):
is going, you could hear all of his glands.

Speaker 3 (01:22:42):
Here the pump's going, and this great look of incredible,
just just unbelievable passionate ecstasy would come in his eyes.
You know, it's just like you know, like like like
a good sneeze is coming up at and you know it,
you're enjoying it, and finally it comes right to the
top and you pooh, oh, what a great feeling, terrific feeling.

(01:23:02):
And so old Grandpay Henry. You could see him.

Speaker 2 (01:23:06):
He's bringing this stuff up and you can hear it
coming up through the pipes and through all the sump
pumps and everything else. He's gotten the system there, and
finally he gets it and.

Speaker 3 (01:23:14):
He just goes one big. Well, we all were hiding
at that point, you'd immediately duck down behind the hedges
and he would let it go towards the.

Speaker 2 (01:23:24):
Alley just you know, this was just a warm up,
and then he was ready and then he would start
to chewing them.

Speaker 3 (01:23:33):
Well.

Speaker 2 (01:23:33):
I remember after the moons when old Grandpa Henry would
be allowed in the house and they would put a
wash basin next to him, and he's great. Afternoon's going.
Grandpa Henry would come out. He would he had a
special thing about about snowball bushes. Now, I don't know
whether you ever see snowball bushes around here, but he
used to call his shots.

Speaker 3 (01:23:54):
He'd say, you see the one hanging on the second
bile there down from the bottom over there and near
the edge, and you see those petals fly, and the
old dufferd smile and everyone said, wow, you know he
was gassed. And he was too, But that was another story.

Speaker 2 (01:24:09):
Now, the day that Grandpa Henry saw I'll never forget
the day that Grandpa Henry saw our Buddha inaction. The
first time that my mother had this Buddha set up
in the dining room and she had it set up
there next to the elephant.

Speaker 3 (01:24:25):
With the sapphire eyes, and she was going to have
a current party.

Speaker 2 (01:24:29):
And Grandpa Henry and mister Bruner and everybody came in
and they were helping her put the leaves on the tables.

Speaker 3 (01:24:34):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:24:34):
They we had the big thing with the leaves back
and forth and banging. It was always somebody got his
hand caught in her yelling and hollering. Well, Grandpa Henry,
my mother has this thing all set up. She's gonna
play real big because the ladies are coming over.

Speaker 3 (01:24:46):
And you can smell that oh so fantastic sweet smell
of the jasmine mingling with the red cabbage and the
gravy of all last year's meat loaves and all the
old Campbell's tomato soup and all that. You know that
Jasmina's flow. Looking up there, Well, Grandpa.

Speaker 2 (01:25:01):
Henry is down there trying to get this table together,
and he suddenly looks up and you could see him galvanized.
He sees Buddha over there, and Buddha is smoking. He
could see smoke coming out of Buddha's eyes.

Speaker 3 (01:25:15):
Well, a quick thinker, here's an XGI. Here's a man
who's been in many a war, who's been in many
a battle without even so much as a hesitation. Grandpa
Henry just talk about spitting in the eye of God.

Speaker 2 (01:25:31):
I'll tell you talk about blasphemy. Well, he let go
of that thing, and my mother, you know, I'm telling
you the truth. He doused the flame there in an instant,
and of course he expected everybody to cheer him because
he put out the fire in the dining room there,
the fire in that funny statue. That was the smoke
was coming out of his eyes.

Speaker 3 (01:25:51):
You know, Grandpa Henry was definitely a primitive type man. Well,
it hung there for a second, and my mother let
out a bellow. It was her last piece of jasmine.
That's the only thing that got her with the last
piece of jasmine. And an hour later, I am down
at Woolwoods for the first time in my life shopping

(01:26:11):
for incense. They have orange blossom, they have burnt tangerine,
They have jasmine. Oh, these are all the majestic. They
have cinnamon. They have one cam essence of Samarcan. I
think that one could do a lot for Brooklyn. They
have all kinds of strange essences and oils. They have

(01:26:34):
elusive fragrances, of the musky.

Speaker 2 (01:26:37):
Orient of the strange Tom tom beating darkest continents.

Speaker 3 (01:26:43):
And I'm down there for the.

Speaker 2 (01:26:44):
First time buying myself essence of Samarkan.

Speaker 3 (01:26:53):
And that was Gene Shephard.

Speaker 6 (01:26:55):
January thirteenth, nineteen sixty five, two and six hours Max meet,
You're a one man radio station here the overnighter next week,
I'm sure my excgeant will be back, and maybe Tony
Short will come in tomorrow.

Speaker 3 (01:27:12):
Tomorrow at the same time. Well, we'll get to that
in a moment.

Speaker 6 (01:27:16):
Sunday Night, Golden Age of Radio seven to nine, and
right back here for all I know, all night again
next week. Well it's been a thrill. I hope you'll
found some portion of the show that you enjoyed. And
remember friends tomorrow at this same hour three thirty to
six am.

Speaker 1 (01:27:32):
VIC the Bruiser from February eighth, nineteen sixty five. Our
animal is capable of love, of courage, chameleons, sweeten your personality,
learning to laugh.

Speaker 3 (01:27:44):
Hello, Oh, what a fantastic day. That's a kill it,
chill it, kill it, kill it there. Oh, we don't
have enough time. Life is going by. What a fantastic day. Now,
oh eight, before you go back there, watch carefully now
skip you just watch Old Daddy here. I'll u yep,
the first one that I gave you.

Speaker 2 (01:28:01):
That's what we want on a fantastic day. Oh boy,
was like summer, you know. It broke all the records
and all that stuff sends the old blood a coursing
through the veins, brings out all those little those little things,
you know.

Speaker 3 (01:28:16):
The little green shoots.

Speaker 2 (01:28:18):
Do you mind if I read a poem to celebrate
this fantastic day? Would you please give me fantastic day music.

Speaker 3 (01:28:27):
To bring it up?

Speaker 1 (01:28:28):
There?

Speaker 3 (01:28:28):
Come on, Oh, just envelop us in this.

Speaker 2 (01:28:36):
As I awoke this morning, when all sweet things are born,
a robin perched upon my sill to signal the coming dawn.
The bird was joyful, young and gay, and so sweetly
did he sing the thought.

Speaker 3 (01:28:54):
Of happiness and joy into live art? Did it bring?
I smiled?

Speaker 2 (01:29:07):
I smiled softly at the cheery song, And then as
it paused in moment low, I gently closed the window
down and crushed his stupid skull.

Speaker 3 (01:29:28):
Oh what a now, I just just had to read
that to you. You know it scarcely? You know what
out of you? I'll tell you.

Speaker 2 (01:29:39):
Every every month I get periodicals from all over the country,
all kinds of magazines look like whoopy zip trick wow,
all the top magazines of our time, and among other things,
I get at least three or four prison newspapers, and

(01:30:01):
I read them avidly. This is a prison newspaper printed
by the inhabitants, And of course it's like any other
trade journals. It's all about the trade. I mean, that's
all I write about is the jug, various jug news
for various other jugs. They write about speeches that penelogists

(01:30:21):
give in different places. They reported in full. They report
about what the prison bowling team does. And of course
there's a lot of little social notes, you know, the
little things that are set in the mess hall, and
various comments that come out of the black hole, or
some guys on bread and water, that kind of thing.

Speaker 3 (01:30:39):
And this was in their poetry department.

Speaker 2 (01:30:42):
This was a bit of poetry submitted by a prisoner
for the prison newspaper.

Speaker 3 (01:30:49):
Would you like to hear it again? Friends? You wouldn't
like to hear it again?

Speaker 1 (01:30:53):
You know?

Speaker 3 (01:30:55):
It looks funny how how almost every every prison movie
these days, TV.

Speaker 2 (01:31:04):
Show, whatever it might be, you watch the unfolding of
the life and the prison, and you watch the people,
and you watch the stories it's being told, and almost
invariably they give you to imply, they give you to
feel that somehow these are just basically nice people.

Speaker 3 (01:31:23):
And they're basically nice people who didn't get the love
of a mother, or their father didn't love them, or
they ran it to some bad company. Although I don't
know who the bad company is.

Speaker 2 (01:31:34):
When you think about it, the bad company also involves unloved,
no mothers, and no fathers, so it goes all the
way back to the original. I suppose the original kid
that was in bad Company was the original son of
Adam and Eve.

Speaker 3 (01:31:48):
I presume they started write out in the wrong foot.

Speaker 2 (01:31:51):
But you would never think, judging from the attitude of
so many people today writing about prison life, that a
prisoner could simply be.

Speaker 3 (01:32:01):
Bad guy. It's to ply a bad guy.

Speaker 2 (01:32:05):
I gently closed the window down and crushed his stupid skull.

Speaker 3 (01:32:13):
That's what we call in the trade. That andi social attitudes,
at least Andy Robin attitudes.

Speaker 2 (01:32:28):
Lovely, isn't it. That's gee, it's Monday, isn't it just
suddenly occurred to me. It's scary. Everybody's walking on eggs,
you know, the feeling that the weekend, the weekend, the
weekend still holds good.

Speaker 3 (01:32:44):
There's just a little taste of it, a little touch
of it in the air. In fact, I went the
cab driver the other night.

Speaker 2 (01:32:50):
He's giving me his entire philosophy of the week, and
it's like on a Tuesday night seeing I get in
the cabin and there's nothing stirring, and I say, boys,
quiet tonight, isn't it. We ride along a little bit
for a while, and he's thinking about that. He says, yeah,
it's Tuesday. I said, yeah, that's true. It's Tuesday. Nothing happening.

Speaker 3 (01:33:14):
Got a wait on tomorrow. So Wednesday, tomorrow, you know
they'll start, they'll start scratching. I said. So they start
scratching on Wednesday, Yeah, but nothing like Thursday. Oh boy.
And then they start really calling Thursday, and.

Speaker 2 (01:33:29):
Then by Friday on the phone, the whole scene starts yelling.

Speaker 3 (01:33:32):
Fighting, hollering around.

Speaker 2 (01:33:33):
Oh boy, Monday they just sit Tuesday, they figured it's
no use. But Wednesday they start scratching. And then yeah,
it is Monday, isn't it.

Speaker 3 (01:33:45):
We haven't started to scratch yet, but of course there
are a lot of ways to scratch in.

Speaker 2 (01:33:50):
This great hen yard that we live in. How's your
pecking order doing? Let me, friends, have you read much
lately about the pecking order? Have you felt that there
might be some inequities or iniquities in it? Back the
other night, I'm sitting around and somebody's talking about well,

(01:34:10):
of course, in this society, in this society, we should
have some kind of way to take.

Speaker 3 (01:34:18):
Care of guys that get in trouble and guys that
get met. And so I think in this society, it's
always called in this society when animals themselves have pecking
orders of unbelievable rigidity. You put seventeen hens in a henyard,
and within five minutes you got a boss hen. You
got a number two hen, You got a number three hen,

(01:34:40):
and way down at the bottom is number seventeen. Just scratch.
How do you stand in the pecking order frame?

Speaker 2 (01:34:47):
Well, of course we've come pretty much a long trail.
We don't have much worries about that because we've learned
how to engineer ourselves, something that none of the other
animals have done. Few bears walking around out in the
woods pretending they're giraffes. Very few giraffes walking around trying
to pretend they're Kelso.

Speaker 3 (01:35:10):
I wonder whether a horse knows he's a horse, you know.
I just often thought about that.

Speaker 2 (01:35:14):
When a horse is running around a track and he
sees all those cluts is yelling, I wonder whether.

Speaker 3 (01:35:20):
He whether he asks any what he thinks about this.
I wonder what a horse thinks about it?

Speaker 2 (01:35:26):
When a big fat lady gets up on top of it, says,
giddy app just you know, just a little passing observation.
And often wondered about that. When a dog is walking
along the street and this lady's got a hold of
the little silver chain, you know, dogs running around under
the wheels of the cars, doing what dogs do under
the wheels of cars. You know, I wonder, I wonder

(01:35:48):
what the dog thinks's back up, And there's the lady's
stand there, casually looking in the other direction, like she
pretends like she's not seeing what's happening.

Speaker 3 (01:35:57):
She stands there.

Speaker 2 (01:35:57):
That's always an embarrassing moment for very prissy ladies, when
you know, when dogs are dogs, and I'm wondering about
what animals think about people, Chris, we like to assume
they think the same things about us that we think
about them. You see this running through all kinds of
radio shows and television shows. Lassie somehow is also building

(01:36:19):
the super Highway. I saw a Lassie chapter when I
couldn't believe it. You know, it was like the engineers
kept consolting with Lassie and whether or not they should
have twenty Yeah, they were always building this road.

Speaker 3 (01:36:30):
You know, and they'd cut the Lassie all the time.
You see the guy saying, all right, Charlie, get them
bulldozers over here. Now we're gonna start on his shoulders here.
All right, let's go, here's the blueprints. We got a
seventy foot the bulldozers going.

Speaker 2 (01:36:44):
Then we cut the Lassie, and Lassie's nodding approvingly, and
they were crying out loud. I mean, I wonder if
Lassie has got the has got the Howard Johnson concession
that they're about to put.

Speaker 3 (01:36:56):
On on this super highway. No, there is this feeling
people say, oh, well, you know old Charlie, my dog,
Charlie likes to ride in the car. Does Charlie know
Charlie's riding in the car? Oh? Yeah, yeah, you think
he does. Charlie knows about cars? Huh? Well, I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:37:12):
It took us eighteen million years to come to the
point where we understood what a car was a lot
of people still don't, you know, But Charlie knows the
old dog huh? Or does he think the scenery's going
past him? This is quite conceivable, you know, is he
aware that he is in a vehicle that's moving or

(01:37:34):
does he just think there's something unreeling. Does he even
recognize it as the scenery or does it just seem
to be some big blur moving thing out there and
anything that's moving fascinates him. You know, of course, many
animals are fascinated by just a plane movement, you know,
any kind of a.

Speaker 3 (01:37:50):
Movement a dog, you move fast, the dog will be
interested in it.

Speaker 2 (01:37:54):
Now is he interested in riding because he sees a
lot of movement out there?

Speaker 3 (01:37:59):
Is that what it is?

Speaker 2 (01:38:01):
On the other hand, a horse, you know, I heard
I heard a jackie saying, yeah, well, of course, old
big friend. Big Friend's got plenty of hot. You know,
big Friend's got courage, courage, I think.

Speaker 3 (01:38:13):
Isn't this a Is this a a trait that an
animal can have? You think so, well, I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:38:23):
You have to judge it by animal standards, and I
think it would be more courageous for a horse not
to run than to run, because everybody wants it to run.
They're out there, they're hitting it and yelling, and they
sit on the top and say giddy app.

Speaker 3 (01:38:36):
Well, maybe they're talking about obedience.

Speaker 2 (01:38:41):
No, you think it's courage, Well, I suppose you also
then have the idea that that horses and dogs and turtles.

Speaker 3 (01:38:50):
Are capable of romantic love. You don't think so?

Speaker 2 (01:38:55):
Oh well, ninety seven point nine percent of the cantle
ration users believe that.

Speaker 3 (01:39:01):
I'm sure they do. Well. If a dog is not
capable of love, then how can it be capable of courage?
Because courage is a form of love. Yeah, it really is.

Speaker 2 (01:39:11):
When you think very carefully and long and hard and
philosophically about it, courage and love are very closely alied.
And you say that they're capable of courage but not love. Now,
be careful, be careful.

Speaker 1 (01:39:26):
Now?

Speaker 3 (01:39:26):
Is a horse or an animal of any kind capable
of them? Let us say? Coward is Oh you think
they are? You mean because they run away? Is that cowardice?

Speaker 1 (01:39:37):
No?

Speaker 2 (01:39:39):
Yeah, you mean because they don't run fast when the
others are running past. That that's cowardice. Maybe he doesn't
see the sense in running. Could it be that he
just sees the basic ridiculousness of trying to make life
better for the two dollars, the two dollars cheapies.

Speaker 3 (01:39:54):
Something understands there. Do you think a horse has a
concept at all of winning? Of beating the other horses?
To the you know, around there, to the other thing there.
You really do you think that that's curious? I don't
know about that. That's something that I don't think is

(01:40:14):
ever as satisfactorily been argued out. Now is the cat.

Speaker 2 (01:40:20):
A lot of people think, you know, a cat is
too intelligent to be obedient. I've heard that said many times. All, well,
cats are just so fantastic. They that's the reason why
cats you can never house break them or anything else,
is because they're just too intelligent.

Speaker 3 (01:40:37):
They're just too intelligent, you know. They're not like dogs.
You know, dogs are sickophants.

Speaker 2 (01:40:43):
They why many times you come into the house, the
dog jumps up and puts his arms around your knees
and hangs out to you and what's all over.

Speaker 3 (01:40:50):
Your shoes and squeaks and yells and you know, all
these smokes. No cat ever does that. Oh no, And
they'll say, well that shows that cats are better. Maybe
just shows a cat's or dumber. You know, cats just
can't learn to tell her owner from anybody. You know,
they could very quite possibly be I did you see
that wild scene on television the other day had showed

(01:41:13):
some lady that was being interviewed at the cat show,
and she had this cat and she was holding the
cat up and she talked to the cat throughout the
entire interview, did not talk to the TV interviewer, who
was maybe Gabe Pressman or somebody never once saw him,
and says, oh, little boy, here, aren't you. He says, well,

(01:41:34):
how much does your cat get for modeling?

Speaker 2 (01:41:37):
And she says, well, Dickey Boy used to only get
fifty dollars an hour, but then it just well, he
just decided to raise his rates. He now gets one
hundred dollars an hour, don't you Dicky boy?

Speaker 3 (01:41:51):
Oh? He puts. He and Dickie Boy just sort of
stared up there, two fangs hanging down on the claws
sticking out all of her. He said, oh, puts he puts,
he put to and he says, well, who gets all
the money? What does he spend it on? Well, you
know how he is.

Speaker 2 (01:42:07):
He's got girlfriends. You know, he spends it on girlfriend
He's got this whole myth going oh wow, oh it's
so sad, you.

Speaker 3 (01:42:17):
Know, speaking of myths. This is w O r AMNFM,
New York. And did you see the wildly said.

Speaker 2 (01:42:28):
I put this in my vast file of trivia, because
I think this little piece should be put into some
big book.

Speaker 3 (01:42:35):
On how it was in our time.

Speaker 2 (01:42:38):
It was a wand ad and it said five hundred
dollars reward for the return of this French poodle, this
French poodle which was lost from the corner of sixtieth
and Madison Avenue out of a white, brand new thunderbird.

Speaker 3 (01:42:53):
It says, please return this poodle. It is the only
thing I have in this whole world. Holy smokes, hotly smokes.

Speaker 2 (01:43:05):
The significance of it, of course, is the neighborhood from
which the dog was lost. It jumped out of a
white thunderbird. And the abject quality of the entire piece
at the belief, of course that the person, of course
had lost another person, was very quite evident.

Speaker 3 (01:43:26):
This has always intrigued me, this concept.

Speaker 2 (01:43:30):
Of course, we ourselves are animals, and it's very hard
for us to separate. I guess we're the only animal
that gets hung up on other animals.

Speaker 3 (01:43:42):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:43:43):
I know that a horse will stand in the barn
and we'll love to have a dog with it, But
I don't know of any horses that go out and
collect dogs. I have never yet run across a chipmunk
that has a turtle for a pet. I don't know
any groundhogs that have ever gone out to buy a
let's say, a goldfish.

Speaker 3 (01:44:04):
But man, of course, is another story entirely.

Speaker 2 (01:44:09):
Being an animal, though we have the dark stige in
fears were like a chameleon. I think the one thing
that man has that he shares with other animals is
protective coloration. He assumes the color of the atmosphere that
he lives in, the whole, the whole round thing, the

(01:44:34):
culture that he lives in. He begins to assume it
very quickly. Have you ever had a Have you ever
had a chameleon? You know, that was a big deal
when I was a kid, And whenever the carnival came
to town or the circus, there was always some guy
in a straw hat standing around and he had this
big velvet card, great big placard, and on it were

(01:44:56):
maybe one hundred or two hundred beautiful little jade green
comeedions with a tiny gold chain on their neck with
a pin, and they sold for I don't know, a
quarter a half dollars something like that, and he would.

Speaker 3 (01:45:10):
Say, here they are the chameleon hair.

Speaker 2 (01:45:12):
They are the beautiful little comedians will assume any color,
any color.

Speaker 3 (01:45:16):
They're beautiful pets. They take care of the flies in
your house.

Speaker 2 (01:45:19):
And then he would take the comedian and he would
put it on a piece of red cloth, and instantly
the comedian would begin to get this sort of a
dusty rose red color.

Speaker 3 (01:45:31):
Have you ever seen him do it? They really do,
you know.

Speaker 2 (01:45:33):
And then he would take the same comedian and he'd say,
now watch this, and he would drop the comedian on
a yellow cloth, and then the comedian would look around,
he look around, his little beady eyes, his tongue, you know,
little things sticking out there, and then he would slowly
begin to change from dusky rose red, he would become
a kind of tale yellow, and then after a couple

(01:45:54):
of seconds, he would just sort of fade right off,
just just melod.

Speaker 3 (01:45:58):
Right into the cloth. Boy. Wow, Well, about every couple
of years I would get a.

Speaker 2 (01:46:03):
Comedian, which would make my mother go completely ape. If
there's anything she would yell about, it's a comedian. And
we would bring them home. And the whole idea of
a comedian was he fed himself. You know, you didn't
have to feed comedians at least in Indiana because we
had plenty of flies. Indiana is covered by a thick
coating of flies. And we would just come home and

(01:46:26):
take the comedian and hook it on, hook it out
of your sweaters. So he would climb around. And they
had these diamond shape, you know, these diamond almost.

Speaker 3 (01:46:34):
Like our guyles sweaters. There were this diamond the.

Speaker 2 (01:46:36):
Pattern, and the portal comedian would climb around, red and
green and yellow diamonds and he's looking arose. He's many
a squizo had flipped. A comedian would result from those sweaters,
and so we would we would hook them on at
pin them and the comedian would of course we'd use
it to scare chicks and.

Speaker 3 (01:46:52):
The whole scene.

Speaker 2 (01:46:54):
But when the comedian was really going, you would put
him on the curtains, just pin him on the curve,
and the comedian would hang there, just hang there, day
after day, not saying a thing, just quietly hanging there.
And every time a fly came within ten feet of
the comedian, he would begin to exude some kind of
a sweet something he attracted. They would attract flies and

(01:47:18):
the fly would go and for some reason or the
flies were insanely attracted by these deadly creatures. They were
deadly for flies, it was like you being attracted.

Speaker 3 (01:47:28):
I think we're general generally.

Speaker 2 (01:47:30):
Most of us are attracted by things like snakes, dangerous things.

Speaker 3 (01:47:35):
Men are attracted by wars, which of course are dangerous.
They're attracted by them. Though.

Speaker 2 (01:47:41):
Men are attracted by racers racing two hundred miles an hour.
These are killers, and yet you stand next to it
and somehow it attracts you.

Speaker 3 (01:47:50):
Right skip.

Speaker 2 (01:47:51):
You're attracted by things like if I came in here
and I laid it on the desk here, just put
it down there, and I have gigantic Roscoe. If I
had a forty five automatic and big Roscoe boom, within
five minutes, everybody'd be standing here kind of looking at it.

Speaker 3 (01:48:09):
I know that it's a sense of attraction by danger.

Speaker 2 (01:48:14):
Well, the flies were hung on coming around, these chameleons,
and you'd see them.

Speaker 3 (01:48:19):
We'd watch them.

Speaker 2 (01:48:20):
I'd sit on the couchman kid, brother'd sit down on
the floor, and you see these flies coming.

Speaker 1 (01:48:25):
Ye.

Speaker 2 (01:48:27):
That comedian's just sitting there silently, doesn't move, kind of
raised up.

Speaker 3 (01:48:32):
You know. They have these little claws and these kind
of raises.

Speaker 2 (01:48:35):
They're beautiful or like a little jewel, beautiful green jewel,
and then a fly would come down and start to
buzz him, you know, God, just like that. You couldn't
even he was so fast you couldn't see him do it,
just like something flicked, flick of an eyebrow or something,

(01:48:58):
and then to be silence, and then you'd hear another
one is coming in.

Speaker 3 (01:49:03):
Now he's another guy. He's gone.

Speaker 2 (01:49:11):
Well, I got to be a comedian, fant Little did
I know, Yeah, little did I know that I was
looking at a foretaste of life to be that we're
living in a world of comedians who are not only
very quick with the with the fly catching scene, but
are also at depth at changing colors.

Speaker 3 (01:49:29):
Uh. This is what's known as conformity.

Speaker 2 (01:49:31):
People say conformity, Well, wherever you go in any given society,
you go down to fourteenth Street, you hang around, down
to the village, and if you're wearing uptown clothes, you
begin to feel like you're totally conspicuous.

Speaker 3 (01:49:45):
You're out of the whole, you're how you're out of it.

Speaker 2 (01:49:48):
Gradually, if you go downtown enough, you will assume the
coloration of down there. On the other hand, if a
guy lives in the world I have a friend who
has a whole set of different outfits. Yes, he's got
a whole closet full of uptown outfits, west side outfits. Yeah,
he's got a west Side suit.

Speaker 3 (01:50:06):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:50:06):
It's got big wide lapels and sharp jazzy chains hanging
all over. He's got a west Side suit. And he's
got an east Side suit. It's a little skinny black
charcoal black Italian silk suit, you know, skinny one with
little skinny ties, a little skinny shirt, little skinny shoes.

Speaker 3 (01:50:21):
That's his east Side suit.

Speaker 2 (01:50:23):
And then of course he's got his downtown hippie suit,
and that's a Mexican serape with stirrups, and it has
a the whole seat, you know. And he's got he's
got Yeah, he's got these h he's got these shoes,
sandals made out of tires, big straps that come around
and hang out of his kneecaps, and he walks around.
He's got a little folding guitar. And that's his downtown suit.

(01:50:44):
I'm not putting it on, he really is.

Speaker 3 (01:50:45):
And one time on time, what time I'm walking he
gets in midtown.

Speaker 2 (01:50:51):
You see, he's got a little confusion there and We're
walking along and I said, how about what's going for lunch?
And he said where do you want to go? And
I named someplace to be on the east side. He says, oh, well,
I got to go home and change clothes. And I said,
what do you mean change clothes? Yeah, he says I can,
and sure enough, fifteen minutes later he joined me and
he's got his east side Suda right. It's the protective coloration. Now,

(01:51:13):
a lot of people find that they can't do it
very well. And that's therein lies the nub and the
crux and the hub and the axle of a tremendous
publishing world.

Speaker 3 (01:51:27):
There are thousands of books out today which say, in.

Speaker 2 (01:51:30):
Seven minutes, just seven minutes a day, in one week,
I can convert you into a dynamic, hard hitting, fantastic dictator.
Realize your potentials become rotten, Step on the busted shoulder
blades of your friends, go all the way to the pinnacle.

Speaker 3 (01:51:47):
Yes, somebody's gonna do it, why not you? Now?

Speaker 2 (01:51:50):
These are the protective coloration books on how to assume
a position that is not yours. Now, the question arises,
what color is a comedian? What is the comedian's color?
What is the comedian's color? What is a person's identity?

Speaker 3 (01:52:10):
Today? It's very hard for him to know.

Speaker 2 (01:52:12):
You know, they're writing novel after novel after novel called
the search for identity?

Speaker 3 (01:52:18):
What is this guy?

Speaker 2 (01:52:20):
A man who works all day long in an office
where he never sees the work they do. You know,
there are thousands of guys who work here at wr
who never listen to the radio. Many of them don't
even know we're in the radio business. As far as
they're concerned. We're in the office business. You know, we're
just we're here to make the papers go back and forth,
and to get the checks, to make the phone calls,
and have lunch and all that stuff. And once in

(01:52:42):
a great while, you'll see one of these confused guys
will drift up from the twenty third floor, skip confused guy, and.

Speaker 3 (01:52:48):
He says, what is this? You know, he says, as
the feeding's.

Speaker 2 (01:52:51):
He'll drift up into the studio area here and he
sees these microphones and these these newsmen running around, and
Shepherd and the whole crowd here, and you can see
immediately he feels alien. He's in an alien atmosphere. And
he drifts down back to the twenty third floor of
the twentieth floor where he's safe.

Speaker 3 (01:53:10):
Now, what is this guy's identity? You know? Is he
what does he do? Does he does he weave? Does
he spin? What is this? What is this? What is
his function?

Speaker 2 (01:53:19):
On the other hand, he's going with a girl who's
nine feet tall, big tall, tough chick who's singing in
a Broadway musical, and she's got this he's got this function.

Speaker 3 (01:53:30):
So what what happens? Well, you know the idea of
protective coloration? Skip, were you with me here? Now?

Speaker 2 (01:53:35):
Man, I'm going to have to have some romantic music
here because many magazines today are issuing almost hourly bulletins
on how to assume another color another Intermetso is what
I want? How to assume another color, or how to
assume another a comedian color? I'm talking about here, how

(01:53:58):
to assume another thing? And you got it up there, scamp.

Speaker 3 (01:54:02):
Hey, hey with me there.

Speaker 2 (01:54:04):
You don't have a yet, well, then give me the
first one. Then that's okay. I can't wait for you.
Just give me the first one we use. Just give
me the first one. I think that's good enough because
it tells the story. Now Oh no, not yet, no, no, never,
give it to me time I give you the cue. No, no,
no no, don't just whip it in there, all set
up in there now, all right now, now the question

(01:54:28):
is here before the house. I'm going to put this
away in my vast file of trivia, so they know
how we became what we are. You are aware, aren't you.
Then as you go into a cocktail party and all
those beautiful people are around there, those people who know
how to say things, somehow they fit.

Speaker 3 (01:54:49):
You go to an opening.

Speaker 2 (01:54:50):
Night at Lincoln Center, there's a certain kind of fitness
of the way certain people are.

Speaker 3 (01:54:56):
You go to an art gallery and they're are people
who seem to fit. You go to a chic East
Side art type movie house, you know, and you're down
there drinking that Colombian coffee or whatever they give you
down there, that ink you're sitting down there, there are
certain people who seem to fit. They're there, They're really there,

(01:55:17):
and you feel like an interloper.

Speaker 2 (01:55:19):
Well, has it ever occurred to you these people study
that you can take courses in that actually, here from
a major magazine which is sent all over the country,
is an example of how to make the scene big
and look.

Speaker 3 (01:55:32):
Fellas this is for men. This is directed This whole
article is directed towards women. I wonder how many times
have you sat across the table from a chick and
she's got a funny, glazed look in the eye, like
she isn't really with you. Have you had that feeling?
And you talk to her and she sort of drifts

(01:55:54):
away and then comes back with what appears to be.

Speaker 2 (01:55:57):
The perfect attitude. Carefully, this is for women, and it's
illustrated beautifully. This might answer little music that please.

Speaker 3 (01:56:07):
The question. The title of the article is sweeten.

Speaker 2 (01:56:12):
Your personality, get the most out of what you are,
and add just a little bit more.

Speaker 3 (01:56:20):
Now, the first question is can you make a dramatic entrance?

Speaker 2 (01:56:28):
It is wise to dramatize an entrance if you arrive
at a party that's already in full swing. Pause as
you enter, have a humorous anecdote ready to explain your lateness,
which you have contrived to achieve, and the assuing merriment
will alert other guests as to your spectacular, dramatic entrance.

Speaker 3 (01:56:52):
And here she comes in the room. Blanche is making
your entrance. She is working at it hard.

Speaker 2 (01:57:00):
Thoughtful guest will not steal the scene from the hostess,
but will instead direct attention toward here.

Speaker 3 (01:57:07):
Here.

Speaker 2 (01:57:07):
In our illustration, a late arriving guest offers her hostess
a huge Mexican paper rose a momentou of tourist friends
whose unexpected stopover on their way home had caused the
guests the late appearance at the party.

Speaker 3 (01:57:24):
Had she cleverly thought to bring it a law? Yes?

Speaker 2 (01:57:30):
Now, the next statement they make is this, each of
us now and then needs to take stock of her
special feminine attributes and make sure that she's including enough
sugar and spice and everything nice.

Speaker 3 (01:57:46):
In my work.

Speaker 2 (01:57:47):
This is requoting the author here, sweetening and flavoring the personality,
get very careful attention. And so I have to ask
all of you girl type listeners out there, are properly
using the sugar that all little girls are made on?

Speaker 3 (01:58:06):
Are you using the spice that we all know little
girls are made of?

Speaker 2 (01:58:11):
Well, now here's another suggestion from the world of SHOWPI
is how to convert yourself into a total phoness blown
us in seventeen minutes of hard work every day. Have
you explored this is a great question. Have you explored
the sweet use of pet names? Yes, a pet name

(01:58:35):
makes another person feel that he or she has a
special place in your life and thoughts. So think up
large numbers of extra clever pet names. Those students I
like best I term my petty pies. And each member
of the Petty Pie League sooner or later gets his

(01:58:57):
or her own special pet name a pet name.

Speaker 3 (01:59:01):
And this goes for the general Ones such as Pani
and Darling should be spoken only with sweetness and good feeling.

Speaker 2 (01:59:11):
And when you are out of patience with one that
you love and can't keep the snap out of your boys,
call him by his proper name. Yes, work on a
good list of pet names, friends, pick and choose them

(01:59:34):
well carefully.

Speaker 3 (01:59:35):
Now here's another thing perhaps you haven't been doing lately. Friends.
Do you smooth your way with magic words?

Speaker 2 (01:59:47):
Magic words? Are you using magic words friend in your life?
Maybe that's what's wrong. Please thank you, I'm sorry you
have been most helpful. Such magic words sweeten every encounter.

(02:00:09):
Be sure that you use them well and judiciously, and
have a good stock.

Speaker 3 (02:00:14):
Please please, please, please, thank you, thank you. And here
is a question that perhaps might answer a lot of problems.

Speaker 2 (02:00:32):
A little hang ups maybe some of you chicks have had.
Maybe you have been thinking seriously about this. When should
you be utterly helpless? Well, I mean think about this.
I mean, you know, a lot of people are helpless
at the wrong times, and a lot of people are
not helpless when they should be.

Speaker 3 (02:00:52):
This is a bad scene. So the question is when
should you be utterly helpless? Well, here's the answer.

Speaker 2 (02:01:02):
When it would be awkward to be anything else, that's
the time to be utterly helpless a broken shoestrap or
heel while sightseeing, look frantic and let others find a solution.
Offer to bring the car around, for example, Let others do.

Speaker 3 (02:01:24):
These things, or to seat you somewhere while you are
playing utterly helpless. And the point is this chick, No,
she's about as helpless, believe me, as a stainless steel turtle.
She has to play utterly helpless. How many times have

(02:01:45):
you You know? That is one of the most frustrating
things I think of in modern life, in this urban
situation that we all find ourselves that men constantly have
to face. You know, men are in a strange way.

Speaker 2 (02:02:03):
Skip Men are still bound by the ancient laws of
politeness and chivalry, whereas women aren't, and so they have
a peculiar inbuilt advantage.

Speaker 3 (02:02:15):
It's like a weight advantage. It's like a jockey, it's
like a lorus.

Speaker 2 (02:02:19):
You know, how many times have you gone out to
get a cab and you see somebody right down the street.
You know they've been out there for ten minutes, and
you feel funny about going out in front of them.
In other words, short stopping them, they call it in
the army. On a cab, men constantly have this feeling.
I've seen men all the time will walk down and

(02:02:40):
sort of you know, you whiz, there's a guy out there.
Woman let me tell you, she goes hey, cab and
it stops. It slews up right. There's just no question
about it. It's a peculiar kind of I suppose you
might say barberism in a way found.

Speaker 3 (02:03:02):
By those little subtle laws of chivalry.

Speaker 2 (02:03:05):
And so a man is constantly at a disadvantage when
he's with somebody a check for example, and has to
get a cab, you know, rush hour, And so he
goes out there and he plays the game, you know,
he whistles and the girl says, watch up, let me
get one cab. Cab, She runs out and hurls herself
in front of the cab. Grabs, a whole of the grabs,
a whole of the grill. Well, I'll tell you I

(02:03:30):
saw one of the most humiliating things I've seen in
years the other day. I saw a family on a
street corner, a father, a mother, and two girls. And
one girl was about ten and I'd say the other
girl was about twelve something like that. And they were
both these little, short, round, tank like girls. You could

(02:03:52):
just see that the entire East Side had been lavished
on them. I'm sure they take fencing lessons, dancing lessons,
tank driving lessons, bull whip lessons. They take Croatian Greek lessons.
They take lessons and lessons, they take lessons in acting, singing, dancing,
bubble blowing, they take, you know, lessons, the whole scene,

(02:04:13):
the whole wordless lessons, whatever the whatever the family does,
it's for them. You could see this, And they came
out and I happened to be right there buying a
buying a paper or something, and they came out of
this apartment house and daddy was a kind of vaguely defeated,
gray haired looking man. He had a Hamburg hat on,
and he sort of ventured out on the.

Speaker 3 (02:04:34):
Street and he's waiting, you know. It goes like that cab, cab,
you know, hey, cab, cab.

Speaker 2 (02:04:43):
And this went on for about oh maybe thirty seconds.
And I was talking to the to the guy at
the at the newsstand, so I happen to hang around cab.
He's going, well, you could see restiveness beginning to settle
in on these two, these two girls, one twelve, and
all of a sudden, like a shot out of a cannon.

Speaker 3 (02:05:01):
It was like like rice crispies being shot out of
a cannon, and you know, boom, this little chick.

Speaker 2 (02:05:06):
With the mustache, the little twelve year old girl with
the high black boots, she says, out of.

Speaker 3 (02:05:11):
The wait, daddy, I'll get a cab. Tap tap at
eight cabs slew through a halt. She says, all right,
come on, let's go, let's go.

Speaker 2 (02:05:23):
And daddy says, he pulls his coat down, you know,
and they all four of them get in the backseat
of this cab and you can see this little chick
holding the door open.

Speaker 3 (02:05:32):
Finally she climbs in. Boom, she says, eighty fifty mad
walk away. The cab goes, oh man, you know, and
I thought, holy smokes, that utterly helpless bit?

Speaker 2 (02:05:48):
And I can see this little girl reading this piece
on when to be utterly helpless? She's about as helpless
as a cobra in heat. Let's see what we got here? Oh,
here's here, I think is kind of a nice one.
I mean a lot of people are.

Speaker 3 (02:06:03):
Very sloppy in what might be called natural emotions, very sloppy.
For example, how are you at crying? When you cry?
What do you do? Do you go? Ah?

Speaker 2 (02:06:15):
I mean, in other words, do you screw your face
all up and become terribly ugly and just look rotten
when you cry? Well, why don't you work on crying?
What do't you spend a little time working on it?
Stand in front of the mirror and cry a little
bit and see whether or.

Speaker 3 (02:06:29):
Not you're a good crier. And if you're not a
good crier, throw crying out of your lexicon. Just don't
use it. Some got it, some ain't. Now how are you?

Speaker 2 (02:06:40):
How are you at smiling? Do you have a sinister's
sneaky leer? And you've never known that it is a
sinister sneaky? In other words, you'd eat you know?

Speaker 3 (02:06:48):
Do you grin? Like like Peter Laurie about to close in. Eh,
maybe this is where you've been lousing up. Got to
spend a.

Speaker 2 (02:06:56):
Little time standing in front of the mirror practicing smiling.
Work on a kind of guys crooked William Holden smile.

Speaker 3 (02:07:03):
That's a good smile. Maybe you're not the William hold
the time.

Speaker 2 (02:07:07):
Well then why don't you work on a kind of tart, mysterious,
vaguely audrey hepburnish smile, as though withholding a lot more
than you're offering. Try that one now now here in
the article. I think is a very good suggestion. I
really think this should be thought of seriously. The caption reads,

(02:07:28):
do you laugh often? And do you laugh freely?

Speaker 3 (02:07:34):
Do you.

Speaker 2 (02:07:36):
Laughter like other musical accomplishments improves I never thought of
laughing in the same breath with playing the banjo.

Speaker 3 (02:07:47):
That's a new concept. I just ran across that. I
didn't say laughter like other musical accomplishments, improves with practice.

Speaker 2 (02:07:58):
Laughter is catching, and your distinctive laugh puts its stamp
upon your personality. And now let's get down the brass tacks.

Speaker 3 (02:08:06):
To laugh freely, tilt your head back, keep your shoulders down,
avoid putting your hands up to your face, keep the
balls at your feet, right down on that carpet and
let it go. Be very careful though, about the shape
of the mouth, and do not roll your eyes in
opposite directions that sweet Oh, maybe going out with a

(02:08:31):
chick who's been practicing laughing, and you know, you can
always tell that if you notice the unconscionable laugher. You know,
you say something that's mildly nutty and she goes, Charlie,
you know what.

Speaker 2 (02:08:48):
They all vaguely sound like the cant laughter that you
see behind these rotten TV shows. Have you ever noticed
that the TV shows the cant laughter. It's something nothing happened, know,
like somebody picks up the ashtream puts it down to.

Speaker 3 (02:09:02):
Your Then that stops real quick. Wow. And then Danny
Thomas or whoever it this, this is wa wow wow
wow waw cut And then the girl goes and then
Daddy goes, what woa.

Speaker 2 (02:09:27):
Well, Now I think that we're living in a society
that's governing itself pretty much that way. Be very careful
about your applause. You know, a man will suddenly find
himself applauding at the wrong moments. Can be very embarrassing
to find yourself crying at the wrong things at a
Broadway play things you should, for example, be laughing at

(02:09:49):
that's terrible, like like some of the current comedies, like
Billy Wilder's comedies. I find at the saddest things I've
ever seen in my life. I sat through the apartment
and I thought, oh wow. I sat through an entire
fourteen reel showing of Irma Ladus and didn't laugh once,

(02:10:10):
you know, And I wondered, I figured, wouchieve Maybe it's me.
And I think you can lose a lot of friends
that way. I really do, because their conditioned. They laugh
at the right things.

Speaker 3 (02:10:21):
They can tell. They can tell when Joey Bishop is
saying to you, I've just been funny. Now you laugh.

Speaker 2 (02:10:29):
You know, they could tell, and they laugh at the
right things. Wouldn't you like to be able to laugh
at soupy sales?

Speaker 3 (02:10:34):
Really?

Speaker 2 (02:10:35):
Wouldn't you Just think how you'd be loved by all
of your friends. Just think, wouldn't it be great to
be able to find, say, George Axelrod funny. Wouldn't it
be just lovely if you could find gertrue Berg funny?

Speaker 3 (02:10:51):
Would it be funny? Let it'd be great? Oh? Sure
it would nice, and you know that be comforting somehow
to be cradled and that soft, warm eider down of
your civilization. Be a comedian.

Speaker 2 (02:11:04):
Friends, learn how to change your collies, learn how and
when to lab learn.

Speaker 3 (02:11:09):
When to cry.

Speaker 2 (02:11:10):
That's very important. And also you've got to learn when
to be concerned. Did you read about this play?

Speaker 3 (02:11:16):
Right? We just wrote a play.

Speaker 2 (02:11:18):
It was all on the front page of the Times
Drama section this week about this great tragedy about how
he was going to be drafted for six months at
four dicks, And the whole play was about how they
were cutting off his freedom.

Speaker 3 (02:11:32):
Sea. I wish I could get sorry about that. I
really wish I could worry about that, you know, but
it just seems well. I got a bad knee, and
so many other things.

Speaker 1 (02:11:49):
From February twenty sixth, nineteen sixty five. Music to Go
Over the Cliff, Buy Free Horseman. You're pulling a Roscoe Heffington, Kentucky,
a robbery at the diner. The theme music is upcut, It's.

Speaker 3 (02:12:01):
Going to happen. I'm telling you, you don't quit fool around,
It's gonna catch up with you if you don't put
pushing your luck. He's gonna reach around on the private
hedges and grab your you know what, you don't stop
pushing your luck, just gonna reach out and grab you.

(02:12:22):
About ten minutes ago, I'm walking through Times Square under
that fantastic sign that says the Bible in the CinemaScope widescreen,
ultroscope erotic color. It's spread out all across the sky there,
and the lights are lighting up. And in the middle
of it all, there's a guy walking right down the
sidewalk there with sixteen thousand people. And of course you

(02:12:44):
know what Times Square is like, you.

Speaker 2 (02:12:45):
Know, was walking up and down anyway, He's walking down
Times Square and he's got a big sign holding it up.
It's about fifteen stories high.

Speaker 3 (02:12:55):
It looks like it's got a big high pole, and
on the top of the sign simply says in now
pay later. Which ship kind of thing puts it in
sort of a nutshell. You know, that's not a bad idea.
I wonder where it is. There must be some place
where you can put it all on credit sign for

(02:13:16):
the whole, the whole shebang, you know, as we go,
as we go marching towards the edge of the cliff.
If you were to select music to go over the
cliff by music to go into the abyss with alongside
the whole crowd. You know, entire mankind is with you

(02:13:37):
fruing it up there up, terrible singer. But one thing
about that, it's all style, and you don't speaking. I

(02:14:02):
don't know what the meaning of this is here.

Speaker 2 (02:14:06):
I'm a great reader about a town newspapers, and sometimes
when you read out of town newspapers, you can tell
what's happening out there in the world, that is, aside
from what's happening.

Speaker 3 (02:14:15):
Right here in New York, which is not exactly the world.

Speaker 2 (02:14:18):
Here's one from Hunterton County Democrat, which is in New Jersey, Flemington,
New Jersey.

Speaker 3 (02:14:25):
It's a one ad. It said, free horse manure.

Speaker 2 (02:14:29):
Basket or truck rich from registered Arabian horses.

Speaker 3 (02:14:35):
I guess that's the best kind. I don't know. I
just it's funny that it's free, though, so I guess
you can't complain, because that's the way life is. A
lot of that is free anyways, carried around the basket.
But then I got, on the other hand, speak to
that in the New Yorker here in February thirteenth. Right here,
there's an ad that shows this angry looking lady and

(02:14:55):
she's looking at her cat. And under the picture of this.

Speaker 2 (02:15:00):
Angry looking lady, you see this caption that says, for
women can't make shirts, not blouses.

Speaker 3 (02:15:08):
I said, lace it out there.

Speaker 2 (02:15:10):
It's funny, how how surprisingly realistic a lot of the
stuff gets.

Speaker 3 (02:15:14):
And before we go money further, would you please hit
the money button in there, George Place. Miller Highlight the
right clear taste in beer.

Speaker 8 (02:15:26):
Miller Highlight the champagne of bottle beer. There's only one
champagne of bottle beer. Sparkling, flavorful, distinctive.

Speaker 3 (02:15:37):
Miller Highlight. Brewed only in Millwalk from a century old recipe.
Miller Highlight has a rich heritage in tradition.

Speaker 8 (02:15:49):
A bright, clear taste, unequal on questioned, unchanging, available on tap,
in cans, and in the familiar crystal clear bottle. Miller
Highlight is always sparkling. It's flavorful, distinctive. Enjoy Miller highlfe yourself.

Speaker 5 (02:16:12):
Miller Highlight the champagne a bottle beer.

Speaker 8 (02:16:17):
Yes, Miller Highlight the champagne of bottle beer.

Speaker 2 (02:16:22):
Yes, somebody sent me this three color ad here. It's
kind of a nice one too. It's very pretty. It's
in soft pastel shades, and it's called a grenade lighter,
and it chose a hand. You're holding it, you see,
it's a real grenade to you. Looks some of these
looks and feels like a real hand grenade. But pull

(02:16:43):
the ring or push the button and you get an
immediate light. They go on to say, realistic reproduction of
a grenade assures this lighter of long hard use for it.
It's a real conversation piece and a unique gift. Now,
the key word in this, of course is long hard use.

(02:17:04):
It's the kind of thing you just don't get tired of. Obviously, Obviously,
grenades have had a deep fascination for people since time began.
And I can see a lot of different This is
a new idea in conversation piece is actually grenade here, Charlie.

Speaker 3 (02:17:22):
Watch here.

Speaker 2 (02:17:22):
Cash that it caused a little excitement. I could see
a whole new area of deckcore breaking.

Speaker 3 (02:17:30):
Out like this.

Speaker 2 (02:17:30):
For example, you can have a bazooka shell and that's
an interesting looking they've ever seen a Bazuka shell. Man
very attractive, it's very functional looking, very streamlined looks.

Speaker 3 (02:17:41):
That's very interesting. A bazukashell that actually is an electric
can opener. You just hook at it. There's a lot
of conversation. Watch that over there, myrtle. It's a well
nothing watch and it cost Then there's other things too.
I kind of think an eighty millimeter mortar show would
make a kind.

Speaker 2 (02:17:58):
Of a nice ray keep things moving in your house.
Although I remember I did have an uncle. You know,
it's a strange thing. I had an uncle who was
in World War One, and this uncle had his house.
He had all kinds of stuff like that sitting around
the house. For example, he had as an umbrella stand,

(02:18:18):
he had a gigantic shell. It was one of these
big Bertha kinds and a big bronze shell was about
three and a half feet tall.

Speaker 3 (02:18:25):
It had been shot off at somebody. He just had
the cartridge on, or it was.

Speaker 2 (02:18:29):
And he had his canes and umbrellas and fishing rods
and stuff. And that was the first thing you saw
when you came in the house. And then after you
got closer into the house, you know the different things
he had. For example, he had won all five shells
cut off for ashtrays, a little one o five shells
and as paper weights, he had things like thirty oh

(02:18:50):
six cartridges at the paper weights. And he was my
nice uncle. And actually he was not a warlike uncle.
He just was something very basic about this thing. Now,
if James Bond did not carry guns, I suspect James
Bond would not be nearly as attractive to people. I mean,
he carries big Roscoes. He really he shows up with

(02:19:13):
the Roscoe. I'll tell you, Uh, you never heard that expression.
Isn't that an Is that not an expression used here
in the East?

Speaker 3 (02:19:20):
Roscoe?

Speaker 2 (02:19:23):
Well, I remember as a kid one of the first
times I ever heard it said was the time that
my father was working in this office and a guy
came in and held up the office where he was working.
And there was a lot of excitement of people calling
home and know they're calling calling to my mother, and.

Speaker 3 (02:19:40):
That my father was the cashier in this place. And
of course he was held up in a big exceptent
years of newspapers were in and my father, my father
came into the house and my mother said what happened?

Speaker 2 (02:19:51):
And my father the first thing he says, my father said, well,
this guy came in. He was wearing a mask and
he pulled the biggest Roscoe out of his pocket.

Speaker 3 (02:19:58):
You ever saw in your life. He pulled this Rusco out,
pointed it right in my face. Is that all right?
Hand it over? And I'm sitting there. I'm a little kid,
you know.

Speaker 2 (02:20:07):
And the idea of a guy pulling a big Rosco
out of his pocket and pointing it at somebody's face,
my old man's face and saying, hand it over. And
the old man wasn't particularly scared. He was kind of
amazed that somebody would pull a Roscoe. By the way,
there's a cartoon like that in the New Yorkers, an
odd little cartoon this week. It shows a very distinguished
looking guy, looks a little bit like oh, sort of

(02:20:31):
a cross between Eugene Palette maybe Dean Rusk, with a
little touch of Bernard Baruque. And he's standing there talking
to a friendly little old lady in the bank. And
the little old lady is in the let's see what
department is she paying and receiving? She's friended the little lady,
you know, with a little lace collar. And he's standing

(02:20:51):
there with his Chesterfield coat with the he's got the
velvet collar around there in his little striped tie, and
he's holding an umbrella, a bumber shoot, and he has
a very pleasant look on his face, and he says,
it may come as.

Speaker 3 (02:21:04):
Something of a surprise to you, but this is a
stick up. And that's exactly the way. Have you ever
been around when somebody got held up? You ever been
around when something happened like that. It's never believed me,
So help me. It's never the way you think it's
going to be. The Only time I was ever anywhere

(02:21:26):
near a.

Speaker 2 (02:21:27):
Real newspaper story of that kind, you know, the sudden
crime breaks out, I could not believe it. I was
sitting in a diner in Covington, Kentucky. Diner you know
there we are still a clive. Well, that's already we got.

Speaker 3 (02:21:42):
Something going everybody. What the hell were you're doing in Covington, Kentucky.
That's another story. Well that's a whole can of piez.
We won't even open up. Now. We might as well
hit the money button before we get into this stick around.
I'll tell you what happened to the diner. Hit it.

Speaker 9 (02:21:59):
Hello, Hello, is this Klopman's grocery is ma'am? It doesn't
sound like Klapman.

Speaker 5 (02:22:04):
Well, mister Kaupman's waiting on a customer.

Speaker 3 (02:22:06):
Are you not a customer? Oh yes, ma'am. He'll be
right here. Who has time to wait for? Klopman? You
write down my order? I want two pounds of sausage.

Speaker 5 (02:22:15):
At two pounds of Parks Famous Flavors sausage.

Speaker 3 (02:22:18):
Okay, what Parks? I didn't say Parks. Well, do you
want the best?

Speaker 5 (02:22:22):
I wait for klop Parks Famous Flavor sausage has such
an extravagant blend of spices and seasoning, such quality.

Speaker 3 (02:22:30):
Listen, bring homeless sausage, Pia. He wrote, Yes, bring homeless sausage.
P ArKade sausage to sausage.

Speaker 5 (02:22:43):
That's braver up from Virginia Park's famous flavor.

Speaker 3 (02:22:48):
For bringing home more Parks sausages.

Speaker 9 (02:22:51):
Mom, listen, you got such a great product. Why are
you standing in a little corner grocery store singing on
the telephone to a middle aged housewife?

Speaker 2 (02:22:59):
We love you, oh man, let's see speaking middle aged housewives.
This is w or Am at FM New York and.

Speaker 3 (02:23:12):
Here for a while. We don't have any more of those,
do we? Oh? Yes, indeed we do. We have American
heritage here.

Speaker 2 (02:23:20):
You know, I'm going to tell you something that's I
suppose kind of embarrassing.

Speaker 3 (02:23:24):
I shouldn't tell it to you that I.

Speaker 2 (02:23:27):
Have American heritage going back to its first issue when
it was a thin, very thin, little magazine that as
a matter of fact, was not hardcover, and nobody knew
anything about it. And how I got it, you now,
I got it as a very that in itself is
an embarrassing thing. A friend of mine was taken by
a well, you know, these people are coming around and

(02:23:48):
knock on your door and they say they're working their
way through medical school and if they can only get
four more subscriptions, they will go over the top and
they will become and to become a neurosurgeon or something
like that, you know, and they come around. Well, he
was taken, and he, you know, he felt sorry for
this guy. So he bought about nine different magazines, and

(02:24:11):
he decided what he was going to do was to
give him his gifts.

Speaker 3 (02:24:13):
Instead of getting him. So he doesn't read, you know,
he's in a literate and all that.

Speaker 2 (02:24:16):
So he just racked out with the seventy five dollars
and by George, all of a sudden, I started to
get this peculiar magazine and it was the number one issue,
number one copy. The very first time that American Heritage
came out was totally unknown.

Speaker 3 (02:24:33):
And for a long time I was reading this thing
and digging it. You know, I kind of kind of
a joy that.

Speaker 2 (02:24:37):
You know, It's funny how many people the other night
we did this this show about George Washington.

Speaker 3 (02:24:42):
All these people wrote me books about how I could.
I could read a book and it says, you read
this book and it'll tell you how Washington was, and
you read this book and it'll tell you how Jefferson was.

Speaker 2 (02:24:52):
And I say, bourgeois. Bourgeois I have never known. I
have known many a person that has been written about.
I have known a lot of people in my life
who've been written up in the paper, who have been
written up in contemporary accounts. In fact, it's funny, I
knew Malcolm X. I might as well tell you that
I knew Malcolm X. But he does not come out

(02:25:15):
in any of the interviews or the paper accounts that
I have read about him. He just isn't the way
he's described the way the newspapers describe him, and that
is in person, when you're sitting down having a cup
of coffee with Malcolm X, I have known other people
who have been written up in newspapers, and they never
are and in even in the very serious books. In short,

(02:25:39):
I don't believe the written account of a person can
ever quite capture that person. And so I still wonder
how George Washington really was.

Speaker 3 (02:25:50):
When he's putting his teeth in in the morning, you know,
putting on his socks, he's got to go off to
another high day in the revolution. He's sitting in his tent,
in a lot of art tags and the revolution. He's
sitting in his tent, you know.

Speaker 2 (02:26:04):
It's about the second or third year of the revolution.
The snow is up to the roof and he's sitting
in his tent, and they've been chased all over New Jersey,
you know, and it looks like things are going for
bad to worse, and now they're going even from worse
to worser. And he's sitting in his tent and he's
pulling on his socks, and the wind is blowing in
underneath the cot, and he hears a couple of guys
griping out there and another guy fistfights breaking out there

(02:26:26):
among the riflemen, and he puts his head in his hands,
and he just sort of rubs his temples from Itage
before he puts his wig on.

Speaker 3 (02:26:33):
So, what a can apiece we've opened up here? What
a can apiece? Oh man?

Speaker 2 (02:26:42):
And these things I never brought out in the contemporary
accounts of well. Anyway, getting back to American Heritage, if
you'd like to find out about it, sends your name
and address with a buck to American Heritage, box seven
to eleven.

Speaker 3 (02:26:54):
This is a big hardcover magazine. Now, it's very important.

Speaker 2 (02:26:57):
It costs three dollars and ninety five cents per issue,
and it is highly entertaining. And if you'd like to
try it, send your name and address with a buck
to American Heritage, Box seven eleven, Great Neck, New York, Okay,
and they'll send you a representative copy. Now, oh, before
we go any further, you want to hear more about
Covington boy.

Speaker 3 (02:27:19):
Talk about opening canopies.

Speaker 2 (02:27:20):
Holy smokes, I don't even know whether they use that
expression here in New York.

Speaker 3 (02:27:25):
Open up a canopiez? You don't use that? What a canopiez?

Speaker 2 (02:27:31):
Before we go any further, Tomorrow night, we are at
the limelight for the benefit of people who are constantly
calling up here we are here tomorrow night, and it's
a full length show. Matt, you're going to be down there,
you better get ready for it. We come on at
five minutes past ten. You're not going tomorrow night. Oh
it's going to be full length. Oh yeah, Oh it isn't.

(02:27:53):
Well anyway, I don't know. I can't keep up with
these memos. They keep coming back and forth. We follow
the basketball game then, and so it could be a
full length show, it could not, depending on how the ballgame.
But nevertheless, immediately following the game, we'll be on untill midnight.
And if you're scouting around you're looking for a place
to go, give them a call. Now, a lot of

(02:28:14):
people have said, well, look, you haven't told us. I
always tell you that you need reservations down there. However,
I will say this that quite often a lot of
people in the flush of Monday morning, in the excitement
of Tuesday, make a reservation which they.

Speaker 3 (02:28:30):
Do not keep on Friday or Saturday. And almost everybody
who's ever come down there that I know of, has
gotten in in one way or another in spite of
not having a reservation.

Speaker 2 (02:28:41):
But if you'd like to find out about having a
reservation for this weekend. Give them a call. It's the
Limelight in the village Sheridan Square. You come right down
seventh Avenue South and boom we go on immediately following
the ball Well, by the way, the show actually in
the Limelight starts long before that. If you have yeah,
that's right, if you have a reservation, you better.

Speaker 3 (02:29:02):
Get down there by no later than oh quarter to ten,
No later than I'd say nine thirty is about the
best time to get down there.

Speaker 2 (02:29:10):
Any later than that they start, you know, they say,
forget it, dad, They start letting them in. But it's
a great place to sit around and have a coffee
and just to you know, shmooch, and we start immediately
following the ball game until oh.

Speaker 3 (02:29:22):
Yeah, it's one of the very few places I know of.

Speaker 2 (02:29:24):
You'll agree with me, Matt in New York City where
almost anybody could feel at home and kids, big type people,
people with minx everything, fistfights, the whole scene. Anybody a
peculiar homogeneous joint. Speaking of peculiar homogeneous joints, that reminds me.

Speaker 3 (02:29:41):
Of Covington, Kentucky at the diner. They had a diner there.
Now now, I spent part of my checkered career, one
long hot summer. You know, whenever I see that title
the long hot summer, I am reminded of my own
personal long hot summer. I was going to college and

(02:30:04):
I got myself a summer job working in this radio
station in Cincinnati, and directly across the river was this
festering town. Boy. You always hear of Chicago, Chicago, that
something something town, Chicago, Chicago that now I forget that

(02:30:25):
goes that something something down that great town. Now that's
swinging town. No, that what I can't read you guys
in here, just to.

Speaker 2 (02:30:34):
Forget it anyway, at Chicago Chicago, that's something something town. Well,
every time I think of of Covington and Newport, Kentucky,
these are festering towns, boy, I'll tell you.

Speaker 3 (02:30:47):
And the heat lays down on the Ohio Valley right
in that area.

Speaker 2 (02:30:53):
The Ohio River's right there, saying, if you don't know
your geography, Cincinnati lies in the very so the most
end of Ohio, way down at the end, and it's
kind of like a country by itself.

Speaker 3 (02:31:07):
For those of you who.

Speaker 2 (02:31:08):
Don't know Cincinnati, I can only say that that John Gunther,
in his book Inside America.

Speaker 3 (02:31:15):
He listed, he said, he said, what would be the ten?

Speaker 2 (02:31:19):
He said, If people would ask me what were the
ten most cosmopolitan towns in the United States, I would
have to list one New York, believe it or not.
Two San Francisco, Three Cincinnati. A curious city. Now he
means cosmopolitan. He does not mean European. He means cosmopolitan.

(02:31:42):
It is a strangely European city because it was it
was called it was largely settled by Germans back around
the turn of the century, and in fact, the entire
area down there is called the Rhineland. It's called the
Rhineland at the Queen City of the West, and it's
a strange isolated the town well directly across from Cincinnati.

Speaker 3 (02:32:03):
The river there must be a mile and a half wide.
It's a giant river. Oh yeah, it's much wider than
any of our rivers here.

Speaker 2 (02:32:12):
It would be as if you took the Hudson, the Harlem,
and the East River all together and put them side
by side. The Ohio River is a good mile across
at that point, and across that river there are two
or three suspension bridges that lay from Cincinnati across to
that dark lowering shore, but the gray towering hills that

(02:32:36):
go higher and higher and sort of roll off to
the west.

Speaker 3 (02:32:40):
That is k Y Kentucky.

Speaker 2 (02:32:44):
And that's a kind of mysterious land to even the
people who live in Cincinnati. It's just a very different world,
you know how The Jersey Heights are very different to
people who live in New York.

Speaker 3 (02:32:55):
Somehow, living in Jersey as a whole new mystique will
multiply that by five hundred. And you have the difference
between Cincinnati and Kentucky. The accent is different, everything all seen.
And the heat, oh boy, the heat lays there. That
heat just sort of lays down in that river. And
about August you can smell the river and it does. Now.

(02:33:17):
It isn't the smell. It doesn't the smell of decay
or anything. It's just the river. It's kind of a.

Speaker 2 (02:33:24):
Green watery catfish heat, cat tail, sort of soil mud
life smell. It's a strange smell, and it permeates the
whole atmosphere all around and across the river in Covington
and a New Part. These two towns lay there and

(02:33:45):
there they're famous heard a lot of things.

Speaker 3 (02:33:47):
Let me tell you, these towns.

Speaker 2 (02:33:49):
Really, really go and at two or three o'clock in
the morning on Madison Avenue in Kentucky. Out across in Newport,
the towns are wide open. Word just not the kind
of wide open like Times Square, but a different kind.

Speaker 3 (02:34:04):
They have juke joints.

Speaker 2 (02:34:06):
This is a Kentucky version of the discotheque at very
different A great, big, red and green juke box over
in the corner there, and it's playing Elvis Presley Records.

Speaker 3 (02:34:18):
Hound Dog. You know you're hound Dog. You run run,
no run, no run, no hound Dog.

Speaker 2 (02:34:24):
It comes out night after night and the sound of
twanging guitars lay out there across that across that brick road,
just like snow drifting down out of the sky.

Speaker 3 (02:34:34):
You can hear it.

Speaker 2 (02:34:35):
You can hear those guitars and those banjos of twanging,
and you can hear those those strange nasal voices, and
they wander around the streets at two or three o'clock
in the morning. And the one sound that you hear
at maybe three o'clock in the morning is the sound
of guys roaring up and down the streets that have
come up from Hazard, Kentucky and Rabbit Hash, Kentucky. Yeah,

(02:34:55):
there's a town called rabbit Hash, Kentucky, and they roar
up and down the streets in their hot rods. They're
really not hot rods. There are forty seven mercuries. There
are fifty three Fords that have been channeled, cut down,
a painted purple you know that kind of thing. And you're, yeah, wow,

(02:35:21):
well that's life among the Aborigines.

Speaker 3 (02:35:23):
It's really something it's a while saying. And so I'm
living in this sea.

Speaker 2 (02:35:29):
I've got a pad above a jewelry store right in
the heart of the Swinging Belt and Covington.

Speaker 3 (02:35:36):
It would be like having literally, it would be like
having an.

Speaker 2 (02:35:39):
Apartment over over a juice joint, the place where they
sell orange juice, right at forty six and Broadway. And
I kind of And so my apartment was never dark man, never.
It was lit from the outside by red neon lights.
No matter what happened, I pull of shades that it
comes through souks. It soaks him through the walls, and
you can feel the jukebox heath. Oh boy, oh boy,

(02:36:02):
it's it's like one hundred and seventy degrees all the
time in there. And I could smell the catfish. I
could smell the catfish in the river, and I could
smell the water going past. You could just you can
literally smell it and feel it. And once in a
while out on the river the river boat would go by.

Speaker 3 (02:36:20):
I don't know whether any of you have ever heard
the sound of a stern wheeler going past a block
and a half from your house with the calliope going.
It is a wild sound. And yeah, you can hear
it drifting at two o'clock in the morning. You hear
boo boo boo boo boo boo boo boo boo boo boom.

Speaker 2 (02:36:39):
That would be when it was on its trip out.
And then when it's coming back, the calliope is turned off,
and all your hear is that's the way a paddle
wheeler sounds from a block away and she drifts into

(02:37:02):
the landing down there and then boo boo, and that's it.

Speaker 3 (02:37:08):
Silence.

Speaker 2 (02:37:09):
Well, about half a block down the street from me
was the wheel in Diner.

Speaker 3 (02:37:16):
How about that for a name. The wheel in Dialing,
And it had a great big neon.

Speaker 2 (02:37:22):
Wheel that reached up about seventy five feet in the air,
you know, like a truck wheel, and it was one
of those that spun around and.

Speaker 3 (02:37:31):
Wheel and wheeling. It would say in green wheeling, wheeland,
you a big red wheel.

Speaker 2 (02:37:36):
And then it would be a big arrow that cut
right across it said eat eat, eat, and all.

Speaker 3 (02:37:41):
The time it's point and wheeling wheel it.

Speaker 2 (02:37:44):
Well, every night, about about two o'clock three o'clock in
the morning, I couldn't sleep in this this this sweat
box I lived in.

Speaker 3 (02:37:52):
And I could hear the juke boxes going. And there
was a guy who lived directly behind me, right across
the court. The court was about seven feet square, and.

Speaker 2 (02:38:01):
This guy lived in the rear apartment who was a
cab driver, and he would drive in at exactly two
o'clock in the morning and beat up his wife.

Speaker 3 (02:38:09):
He would drive in and she loved it. He would
drive in.

Speaker 2 (02:38:13):
I'd hear that Ford, that Ford cab came in, and
I would hear it pull up behind behind my apartment,
under the window, and I knew I'd be lying there
in my sack. Ran his sleapsey, Well, it's hot, And
I could hear way off in the distance the Calliope,
and I could hear the juke boxes going.

Speaker 3 (02:38:28):
I'd hear the knife fights breaking off down at the laneies.
That all was old.

Speaker 2 (02:38:32):
They had fight something down the street constantly, and i'd
hear the roar of the hot run. Whoa, they're always
making with the brakes, you know. And then I would
hear those those Kentucky boys.

Speaker 3 (02:38:43):
Yeah my way, who are you talking to? You like it? Well?
That was life. That was life on Madison Avenue.

Speaker 2 (02:38:50):
That was a very different believe or not, it's called
Madison Avenue, very different Madison Avenue. Whenever I see the
name Madison Avenue, I have two images, double images, you know.

Speaker 3 (02:38:59):
I could smell the catfish and I'm lying there, and
I hear that guy's forward with the bad tapits come
in trouble.

Speaker 2 (02:39:06):
It stops silence, boom, and he's mad. Boom, he has
lost forty dollars.

Speaker 3 (02:39:12):
On the ponies, you know. Boom slams the door. And
then I I'm lying there here, it comes silence, and
then I would hear the first boomp, her head hitting
the wall. I won't kill you when they clim I
want to kill you. Oh yeah, boom. Come on.

Speaker 2 (02:39:36):
When I first moved in there, I used to holler
out at him, you know, And then it turned out
that I was making the wife mad.

Speaker 3 (02:39:42):
So I gave that up.

Speaker 2 (02:39:44):
So that was the way it was, all right, Now
you got the picture. Well, every night when I found
I couldn't sleep, which was every night about two two thirty,
I would get up and remember I had I had
a radio program at five a m.

Speaker 3 (02:39:57):
So I would get up and I would walk down.

Speaker 2 (02:40:00):
Onto that brick road and I would see the I
would see the purple Fords going past, and hear the
yelling and the hollering and the guitars crunching over other
guy's heads, and I could hear the knives going to
the ribs. And I would walk down to the middle
of the next block to the wheel End diner.

Speaker 3 (02:40:16):
It was brightly lit, you know how.

Speaker 2 (02:40:17):
Diners are, with the with the with the big white
lights all over the place, and the chrome and the
stainless steel and everything. It was very antiseptic. And always
back of the pack of the counter is Clem, big
fat guy. He's back there, and always say hi boy.
I'd come in and I didn't know, well, high boy,
that was that's Kentucky eyebought. And there would there was

(02:40:39):
a woman there named Emily who worked behind the counter,
big fat blonde who had rings all over her and
she had big earrings that hung down to her knees
and all that kind of stuff, and she's working back
there with a white costume. I'd come in, I'd sit
down in the middle. There had two or three guys.
Truck drivers would be down at the other end. A
couple of truck drivers would be at the other end,
and then there would be two or three people on

(02:40:59):
date what euphemistically were called.

Speaker 3 (02:41:02):
Dates in Kentucky.

Speaker 2 (02:41:03):
Uh oh wow, you never saw more adnoids in your life.
And I'm sitting there, know it's really it's really a
little surprising, you know, to see a pair of adnoids
come in with feet literally you know what I had
on top. And they'd sit down there at the other
and I hear this voice, his twang, and the juke
box starts roaring out. Ernest tub record is booming out,

(02:41:26):
or maybe the Delmore Twins or racking it out, or
Grandpa Jones starts singing, I.

Speaker 3 (02:41:33):
Wanna come back to you, Babby, paw, I want to
come back to you now, poo, I want to come back.
I want to come back. I'm going don't go. Oh boy.

Speaker 2 (02:41:49):
So I'm leaning back there, drinking my I always would
come in and get myself a vanilla mult It was
the only thing that was cold, and it was cold,
and I didn't the cokes were sweet, and I'd something
drink vanilla malt and eat a hamburger and sort of
kill time. That's all the neon signs are flashing. And
this is really American life, you know, this is pure

(02:42:10):
distilled American life.

Speaker 3 (02:42:12):
Well, one night I'm sitting there, it must have been
about two thirty three o'clock in the morning.

Speaker 2 (02:42:16):
Just sitting there, clamb his back of the cash register,
one of these big chrome jobs, you know, sitting there
picking his teeth, reading the reading the police gazette at
the big old waitresses.

Speaker 3 (02:42:29):
Putting some more pies into the case. Everything is going normal.

Speaker 2 (02:42:32):
A couple of clots are sitting up there in the
front there with their jackets on, and they're jazzy little
you know, the little hats with the white bills, their
motorcycle type things. That the world is going along. When
suddenly the door opens. They had these sliding doors, and
it was in air conditioned place. That's really why I
came there. And they had these little sliding doors. Aw,
the door slides open and in steps a chick, a

(02:42:56):
chick a real chick. She was about eighteen years old,
you know, and she was sort of dark haired and
looked very, very civilized.

Speaker 3 (02:43:04):
And I said, well, George. And the chick comes in
and sits down at the end booth, had the little
tiny boots in there.

Speaker 2 (02:43:12):
She sits at the end booth. Clem starts to get up.
He's gonna walk over and see what she wants. And
he's got a couple of menus in his hand, and
Clam walks over towards her, and in then came her
little brother. Her little brother looked like he was about
i'd say ten twelve, something like that.

Speaker 3 (02:43:27):
This kid comes in and he's.

Speaker 2 (02:43:28):
Wearing a sweater, you know, a little sleeveless type sweater
with a pair of chinos. And he sits down there
with her, and Cleam goes and say, well, why do
you want, folks, And the girl takes the menu and
she looks at it.

Speaker 3 (02:43:39):
I'm eyeing the chick, SAMs.

Speaker 2 (02:43:45):
The things have picking up here, and so I turned,
you see, and I'm watching her now in the mirror.

Speaker 3 (02:43:49):
They had a mirror right back.

Speaker 2 (02:43:50):
At the bar, and see, and I'm sitting there watching
her and drinking my mouth and knocking down the cheeseburger,
and I'm trying to play it cool.

Speaker 3 (02:43:57):
I'm sitting there saying, she's got to see this profile. Eventually,
she's got to see It's saying, I'm watching the thing, man, I'm.

Speaker 2 (02:44:03):
Giving her the eye, and she is paying no attention.
And she's sitting there with her kid brother. And Clam
goes back around the counter and now he gets a
pair of a couple of pieces of pumpkin pie or something.
He comes out with a pie and he's got the
coke and a candy or whatever it is. And he
goes back and he puts it down in his little
chip chat and he comes back and sits down then
back at the back of the cash.

Speaker 3 (02:44:24):
Register, and I'm watching that. I'm slapping up that vanilla milk,
and outside Kentucky is going out. Wow, you know wow, Wow.
I want my son shine, my sunshine, You want my
son shine. It's going on out there.

Speaker 2 (02:44:46):
Oh, if you have never lived until you have heard
somebody singing through one nostril at five o'clock in the morning,
you are my sunshine. Mow me sunshine, you make.

Speaker 3 (02:44:58):
My life all the way.

Speaker 2 (02:45:02):
Beat you down, now, Well that's the way they sound
they go in and out, you know, night, And I'm
sitting there and the life is just rich and full.

Speaker 3 (02:45:09):
No Ernie Tubb is roaring out of the jukebox, and.

Speaker 2 (02:45:13):
I am watching the chick and I'm really I'm really
on the makes looking at the scene over and I'm
knocking down the malton and Clem is looking at me.
See Clem realizes that old sheep is going to go
into high gear here any second, that saying, he's looking
at me. He's kind of got that, you know how
fat men grin. He's got that fat man grin. You know,
he started just half grin. There's a little unshaven, and

(02:45:35):
I'm watching the chick and she's looking at her parents,
and I see she's going through person.

Speaker 3 (02:45:41):
I figured out she's going to get out there the compact.
She's going to do a little nose dusting. I've always had,
you know, this is a this is the thing that.

Speaker 2 (02:45:47):
Men know, you know, whenever they get the attention to
the chick, somehow they get a little flusters, you know,
and they start lighting cigarettes or something.

Speaker 3 (02:45:53):
So she's I said, I'm going to make the scene here.
I'm scoring a little bit. She's looking in her purse
and she reaches down in her press and she pulls
something out. That is the first time I have ever
seen a blue steel compact. Look again, I can't believe it.
She has got a.

Speaker 2 (02:46:13):
Roscoe matt that must have weighed four and a quarter pounds.
This thing was at least a one oh five howitzer.

Speaker 3 (02:46:21):
I never saw anything like it.

Speaker 2 (02:46:22):
I started scunched back without saying a word. This chick
gets up and walks over to clem, holds this thing
up and said, in a nice, clearly modulated voice, with
just the touch of a Southern eggsent this is a
stick up.

Speaker 3 (02:46:41):
There was a silence that you could have cut with
a butter knife.

Speaker 2 (02:46:45):
In spite of the jukebox roaring, in spite of the
of the forty seven mercuries that were surrounding us. For
all miles on end, we just sat at the truck
drivers said, this is a stick up.

Speaker 3 (02:47:00):
Clam said what. She just holds the gun, doesn't say anything,
just points it.

Speaker 2 (02:47:05):
Right at his head. He said, oh, I see. He
gets up there and he's a fat man. He starts
to hitch up his pants. He said, pull up your hands.
Oh I see, And she walks back of the counter
and hits the nose sail thing fine with that. This
little kid gets up and he's got a knife in

(02:47:27):
his mitt and a bag. He comes over and he's
shoveling the money in.

Speaker 3 (02:47:32):
And there she stands with the roscoe on all of us.
Holy smokes, what are you doing now? Man?

Speaker 2 (02:47:41):
Well she comes out from behind the counter and claim
is standing there with his mouth hanging.

Speaker 3 (02:47:47):
Just say, he ain't moving, he's sweating. The air conditioning
is going, the temperature is thirty four degrees in this joint,
and he's sweating. He just stand there.

Speaker 2 (02:47:54):
He ain't moving an eyeball. He isn't gonna move. And
she comes back from her out of counter, and she
walks up to each.

Speaker 3 (02:48:00):
One of them.

Speaker 2 (02:48:00):
She says, give me a wallet, Come on, come on,
put on the count of there, and each one of
us reaches in his pocket and lays it out sitting there.

Speaker 3 (02:48:08):
Boom boom. It's the only time of my life I
ever got robbed at gunpoint. Boom boom.

Speaker 2 (02:48:15):
There is five wallets laid out along that for Micah County.
Boom boom boom, with the ice water boom boom boom
between the cheese burgers, and they ate a muscle being moved,
and she just walks along and picks each one up.
As she goes, boom plunk in the bag. The kid's
following her and she's got the rascal. Turns around, she says,
I want.

Speaker 3 (02:48:34):
To thank all.

Speaker 2 (02:48:35):
He backs out of the joint and then stops by
the door. She just stay away from the phone.

Speaker 3 (02:48:42):
Count ten and then you can call anyone you want.
She slides the door open, and they're out in the night.

Speaker 2 (02:48:50):
And we sat there for a second, and then out
in the parking lot you heard boom boom.

Speaker 3 (02:48:55):
Wow woom off in the distance. I tell you, crime,
don't look the way it should look.

Speaker 2 (02:49:08):
It just don't look the way it looks on Route
sixty six, Matt, Crime, don't look that way.

Speaker 3 (02:49:14):
I'll tell you that, it just don't. And we're sitting there,
all of us, whole crowd of us, and something that
kind of kind of with that sweaty feeling inside. And
finally Clem said, I guess, uh, I guess we better
call the police. And somebody's sitting down at the other
end of the counter says, what you talk about, Clem,

(02:49:36):
That won't do you know, damn be the good.

Speaker 2 (02:49:38):
And Clem said we'll better call him anyway. The guy
at the other guy said, okay, Clem, he said, use
your dive.

Speaker 3 (02:49:45):
You got a dime left.

Speaker 2 (02:49:47):
And so we start looking for dimes we got we're
working clean, you know, No, we got no driver's license.

Speaker 3 (02:49:52):
The whole scene is gone. I've lost I've lost my
nineteen dollars, the whole bit, you know. And so we
start looking for dimes and finding. Somebody comes up with.

Speaker 2 (02:49:59):
A dime and goes around, you know, puts it in
the water there that all back up to the thing,
and the slot makes the call.

Speaker 3 (02:50:06):
And we sat there and we sat and waited.

Speaker 2 (02:50:11):
Fifteen minutes go by, twenty minutes, and finally that big
old car with that flashing red light shows up out
in front, and a couple of these real big Covington,
Kentucky policemen get out.

Speaker 3 (02:50:22):
Oh man, they get out. They come walking in.

Speaker 2 (02:50:25):
You know, they got the they got the big black
belts around their waist, you know, a couple of roscoes
hanging on each side, and they come walking in.

Speaker 3 (02:50:34):
Whats going on in here? And Clem says, we've been
held up. Yeah, well, all right, let's have a description.
All of you sit down here, give me a description.
It's ll He gets out his gets out his notebook
and clems as well. It was a girl. The girl
kind of kind of a dark pretty girl come in here.

Speaker 2 (02:50:53):
He said, Oh no, that's Claire. Yeah, okay, that's Clara.
That's Clara. Yeah, ask Claire. You've been knocking over joints
all rochet. Just come up from my belief. She come up, Louis, Yeah, okay,
what times she in here? Let's see what time is
it now? It's seventeen minutes past three. You say, what
time have you figured about? Ten minutes three?

Speaker 3 (02:51:14):
She come in here? Okay, two fifty one she accompanied,
and yeah, yes, she came with a little kid. Yeah
that's Howard. Okay, Howard came in here. We're sitting there.
It's just don't look like we're sixty six, you know,
it's say the way it should be. One of the

(02:51:38):
guys at the end says, I think you'll get them,
Think you'll get them, sheriff. It's not no sheriff. But
I don't think so. No. I figure we'll get him
about spring. Maybe we got the next spring, so then, man,
we'll get them. I don't worry about it.

Speaker 2 (02:51:52):
And so he says, what about my driver's license? And
you just gotta go down the city hall tomorrow. Tell
him that Claire was around it, so maybe they'll find
it in the river. Hot they go, and I hear
the sound off goes to fuddz.

Speaker 5 (02:52:11):
Well.

Speaker 3 (02:52:11):
I sat there for a minute with my straw in
my mouth.

Speaker 2 (02:52:19):
Clem sits down at the other end, and I'm reaching
my pocket to pay clemsons in the.

Speaker 3 (02:52:24):
House tonight, we're all bustling. I go up. I go
out to the darkness. Now.

Speaker 2 (02:52:33):
It's now about a quarter to four, and the heat
is laying down on me. A couple of mercuries go by,
and I can hear the juke boxes roaring out of
the next juke joint, and I can hear Ernest tubble
way in the darkness out there, and somewhere off in
the distance to the old paddle wheeler is getting ready
to make its first morning trip.

Speaker 3 (02:52:54):
Chop choo, shoot.

Speaker 7 (02:52:58):
Oh.

Speaker 3 (02:52:58):
Life is rich, Life is real. Life is life. The
sheep a sheet araby and your love baby beat longs
to me. Some night, when you're as sleep to your tent,
I'll create creature, created creature. The stars above bring it

(02:53:23):
up their last pull what that that. Sometimes that's about

(02:54:05):
all you can do.

Speaker 2 (02:54:06):
Sit here and pick your teeth, whistle a shake of arabye,
watch the moon go by, and figure it all workout
in the end.

Speaker 3 (02:54:15):
Sometime all work out. Keep your knees loose, be ready
to jump in any direction.

Speaker 2 (02:54:21):
And by the way, be careful of chicks that carry
blue steel compacts. That's an entirely different breed, just an
entirely different world, entirely. How'd you like to go jucing
tonight with old ship?

Speaker 3 (02:54:36):
Huh?

Speaker 2 (02:54:37):
How'd you like to get out of Big Jack's tonight? Eh,
We're going to have ourselves a lemon coke whistle. I
pick up a little gilt, little galler two hat. You
want to get down there and go little juke in that?
Put a couple of quarters in a jukeboxing here, old
or any tub sing about.

Speaker 3 (02:54:52):
You are my sunshine, my only sunshine? Do you make
my life? Hey? You want? Did I do that? Why
don'd you like to go down and maybe just sit
around the blue bird have a couple of beers? But
do that?

Speaker 2 (02:55:06):
Tennessee Williams country life is earnest.

Speaker 10 (02:55:12):
See you tomorrow night game after a big old basketball game.
You'll just hang around a corner, knocked out coming Joe
Burgers see how the birds fall.

Speaker 1 (02:55:38):
Well, that's the last of the Jeane Shepherd Marathon in
the last episode of air Checks at least until June first,
twenty twenty five. Again, this is so we can retool
and concentrating on broadcasting the show. You will still be
able to download the three hour podcast every Saturday, as
well as listen to us on the new community radio
station for the Gig Harbor and Keith Peninsula area, Pretty
Spit Radio at prettyspit dot org, or on your favorite

(02:56:00):
streaming app at seven pm starting June first, twenty twenty five.
See you at the same time and same channel if
it is a podcast, and different channels starting June first,
twenty twenty five at pretty Spit Radio at prettyspit dot org.

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Episode 121, April 26, 2025 - June 1st Hiatus Announcement / Jean Shepherd Marathon, Final Part

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Episode 121, April 26, 2025 - June 1st Hiatus Announcement / Jean Shepherd Marathon, Final Part