Flick Lives

I've been a radio guy since at least when I was a teenager. Jean Shepherd was one of the influences on my radio enjoyment.

Jean Shepherd was a late-night institution on WOR-AM in the New York metropolitan area. Something like Joe Franklin on WOR-TV, but much earlier in the evening. Franklin did a talk show. Shep did a monologue. For 45 minutes minus the commercial interruptions, and his stories were magical.

Here's one of them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Spe7jrDUHBM

And another: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nR7dRFYelE

You can find a bunch of them on YouTube.

You want bliss? How about Ollie Hopnagle's Haven of Bliss?

Shepherd went off the air in 1977. So, why the reminisce? Because I discovered the website flicklives.com

It's a great place to learn things Shepherd. If you have viewed "A Christmas Story," you know about Jean Shepherd. If you haven't, you can wait until TBS does their annual marathon of showings beginning at 8 PM on Christmas Eve and playing for 24 hours glorious hours. Or you can pick up one of Shep's four books. Jean Shepherd. What memories!

The Good Guys

Earlier this afternoon I shared a link to an article from Rolling Stone magazine about the country singer Jimmy Wayne and I commented that he's "one of the good guys."  That reminded me of a New York City radio station, WMCA, which was a Top-40 station when I was growing up and is now a Christian station.

WMCA called their disc jockeys "the good guys."  I don't think it was a slap in the face to any other station, but their attempt at creating good will for their station.  I couldn't name any of their disc jockeys, but they got out of the studio and into the community to create a good vibe wherever they went.

Cousin Brucie, Bruce Morrow, was the heavyweight at WABC, the station that dominated the Top-40 market.  It wasn't a fair competition given that WABC was a 50,000 watt signal and WMCA just 5,000. WABC's reach extended far wider than WMCA's.  The WMCA signal was strong enough to reach to the Jersey shore which was evident from the radios tuned into their channel and blaring out the music.

The Good Guys run was mostly over by 1968.  It was a memorable chapter in NYC radio and one that will never be repeated.  In New York City, FM took over music formats, AM changed to talk, news, Christian, and non-English language broadcasting, and the Good Guys branding was left for reminiscences like this one.  

The Personal in the City

People who don't live in cities often talk about how impersonal they are.  So many people crammed into so little space.  People who don't know their neighbors, even in an apartment building.  People who bump and grind on the streets and subways but don't really know others very well. However, that's not how it is everywhere.

Even in New York City, communities develop in apartment buildings, work places, and through activities in buildings, parks and even in private living spaces.  A doorman becomes part of a community in the building where he is employed (there are probably some doorwoman - I just haven't met one).  They're usually remembered around the holidays with a small gift, monetary or otherwise.  Sometimes tenants do special acts of kindness for their doorman - a cup of coffee for the late night man, maybe some tickets to something (albeit to something no one else is available to see).

Even in place as large as Central Park, with as many people who stroll through there each day, week, and month, there are sports leagues and other activities that bring people together.  At the public library, there are classes and events. Behind the main library on Fifth Avenue is Bryant Park, another place of activity during the week.

People do get to know other people in cities.  When there is an emergency, there is remarkable cooperation among residents.  Every day, city life is vibrant, and not only with busy people hurrying to their next appointment. There are also people who stop, chat, and take a genuine interest in others.

Impersonal cities?  Sometimes, but if you dig deeper, you can see people connecting, people helping others, people who do know their neighbors, their doorman, the man at the paper stand, the woman at the deli, and the woman at the grocery store.  The teeming life of a great metropolis includes many friendships that go much deeper than some who've never spent much time in a city would ever imagine.

Two churches in Vestal change their names in 2013

Sometimes changing a church name means something, and other times not so much

In 2013, two churches in Vestal changed their names.  There's Bridgewater Church where the South Vestal Baptist Church used to be and there is Grace Point Church where Twin Orchards Baptist Church used to be.  One change appears cosmetic, the other, momentous.

In the case of Grace Point, the change happened in July, but while the name perhaps clarifies the mission, the change has not been accompanied by other dramatic changes. No new leadership.  No new worship style. Not really a different way of doing ministry. They likely lost a few members over the name change and will likely pick up some members in time, perhaps as a payoff for the name change, but no major changes are evident looking in from the outside.

Grace Point is about marketing, specifically rebranding.  The change hasn't fully been implemented - on their website is still a dropdown menu titled "About TOBC."

Bridgewater, on the other hand, is a name change that signifies big change.  South Vestal Baptist Church had aged and dwindled to a very small, elderly congregation.  It was a change or die moment for the twenty or so in the South Vestal church when Bridgewater Baptist Church of Montrose, Pennsylvania agreed to adopt them.  South Vestal became the third site for Bridgewater, which also has a congregation in Hallstead.

Bridgewater South Vestal launched in September.  51 members of Bridgewater Montrose committed to become part of Bridgewater in Vestal, so the church more than tripled before they launched.  Today, the church packs the parking lot every Sunday for a building that can hold 80 in worship.  The building and grounds need work, but Bridgewater in Vestal has made a great start.

In both places in Vestal, the Baptist identification was removed from the name.  In South Vestal, there has been growth.  Grace Point was a strong church when they changed their name.  For Grace Point, the results will likely take time to discover.

Buses, Trains, and Automobiles

Growing up, trains were something special.  Trains took you to special places like New York City.  Buses, on the other hand, were commonplace.  We learned this early on with the school bus.  Our family lived in a new community and the school district seemed not to know what to do with us.

For two years, we were bused to Schirra Elementary School.  At the time, NASA was cool, and honoring astronauts was in vogue.  I found out later in life that Wally Schirra was from New Jersey, a little over an hour from home.  After Schirra, it was a year of bus travel to Madison Park School.  There was nothing too cool about Madison Park.  Most of the people were great, but I had my Little League team catcher’s mitt stolen at that school.  My mother had to buy the team a new one.

The next year, we were all in a brand new Middle School, and yes, we took the bus there too.  Then on to high school and another bus.  College was another time for buses – around campus, to town, and another bus home on breaks.  Buses were basic transportation to summer jobs.

The train was a commuter line.  In South Amboy or some place around there, the train would stop to switch locomotives.  The switch from diesel to electric could take minutes, but sometimes more time.  My dad said that the liquor store near the tracks did an incredible amount of business from the trains.

The auto was everyday travel and mom was the pilot.  There was nothing exotic about the car, but it sure beat any bus I had ever been on.

How many hours do we spend getting from one place to another?  I don’t think any of us could add up the hours, but one thing I do know – I’d rather take a train.  How about you?

A reflection on an art form called circus

An internationally renowned circus historian and former Associate Artistic Director of the Big Apple Circus, Dominique Jando serves as curator and editor-in-chief of circopedia.org, an online circus history resource.

Jando has a great appreciation for the circus as an an honest, tangible art form. In this excerpt from an interview shot for the CIRCUS series, he explains that the circus showcases ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

Dominique Jando writes:

A friend of mine once asked, “What’s the point of juggling ten balls, or doing a triple somersault?” What’s the point indeed? But not everybody can do that, and this is why it is so fascinating to most of us; to see fellow humans for a moment flying in the air or dancing on a tight wire is, after all, an amazing image. If it is done with ease and grace, as if it were just a beautiful thing to do, this image becomes even more powerful.

Actually, before sports and gymnastics became fashionable again at the end of the nineteenth century (leading to the creation of the modern Olympics), juggling, dancing on a rope, and performing acrobatic jumps were considered funny. In the early circuses of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, equestrians and trick riders were the stars of the show. Juggling, rope dancing, and tumbling acts were, by and large, performed by clowns. Audiences thought they were silly things to do (and, if we think of it, indeed they are)—a sort of eccentric behavior that was amusing to watch. In the mid-nineteenth century, it is a clown, Little Wheal, who performed the first recorded double somersault on the ground.

Today, Little Wheal wouldn’t need to wear a clown outfit to “sell” this amazing trick! But his audiences were awed, nonetheless. Circus, when well done, is a metaphor. It reminds us of the boundless potential of our human nature. It shows us, by the way of an artistic, living image that we can overcome our limitations—and, in some cases, that we can survive apparently life-threatening situations. Circus is really what remains of our primal rituals of survival, codified into an artistic form (like many other old rituals) for modern consumption. We needed them then as we need them now.

The Chinese link many of the traditional acts of their acrobatic theater (what we call the Chinese circus) to old rituals performed after a good harvest, for instance. The peasants who performed in these rituals gradually improved their skills until they eventually became so proficient that they turned them into a show—giving them an attractive, artistic form. This led to the birth of the Chinese acrobatic theater and the Chinese opera. The same evolution happened in the West, developing first in Egypt and continuing from Greece, to Rome, and to the rest of the European continent.

In Europe, where the one-ring circus has always been the norm, audiences are used to focusing their attention on single acts—and they have learned in time to see, understand, and appreciate the subtleties of an artist’s craft. But generations of Americans have been exposed to the three-ring extravaganzas created by P.T. Barnum and his associates in the 1880s, and further developed by his followers. Thus, artistry became diluted into a spectacle where the human cannonball was more likely to catch the audience’s attention than the intricacies of a refined hand-balancing act. And there was the menagerie, the sideshow and the midway, which were added to the mix, transforming the original circus Philip Astley had created in England in 1770 into a vastly different experience.

Things have changed in the United States since the emergence, in the 1970s, of the Pickle Family Circus in San Francisco, the Big Apple Circus in New York—and later, the Cirque du Soleil in Canada—which all shifted the focus back to the performer’s artistry. During its last American tours of the early 1990s, the Russian circus also showed to which heights the artistry of a circus act can go—think, for instance, of the magnificence of the Flying Cranes, who, for ten years, were saluted with standing ovations at each of their performances.

Actually, we don’t say “circus art;” we say “circus arts,” since circus is a composite performing art, with a great diversity of disciplines, often very dissimilar in style and content, and each of which is appreciated in a different way. But there is still a common thread: whether an acrobat turns a somersault on a galloping horse, a juggler maintain nine clubs moving simultaneously in the air, an aerialist swings on her trapeze hanging by a single heel, all of them are doing something extraordinary, all of them show us that, yes, we can overcome what seemed to be our limitations.
And, as John Steinbeck put it, “Every man, woman and child comes from the circus refreshed and renewed and ready to survive.”

Source: pbs.org

I-376 and John Cigna

Traveling into Pittsburgh from the east on I-376, at one point the city skyline comes into view and it is a beautiful site, as you can see above.  But, a picture really doesn't do it justice.  I was in Pittsburgh this week, and I saw the 376 view of the city one more time.

One summer, I had this view through the windshield five days a week, but I don’t recall really reveling in it.  I was doing a portion of my seminary education at the hospital in Greensburg, and I would travel west to Greensburg in the morning and back to Ambridge, just west of Pittsburgh, each evening.  Fortunately, I was generally traveling in the opposite direction of the heavy traffic each day.

I remember listening to KDKA-AM with John Cigna each morning while commuting.  Cigna was the morning drive guy for KDKA from 1983 to 2001.  The morning show was mostly a news/weather/traffic program, but Cigna brought his personality to the show.  There was a little music, but not very much. 

Cigna was a Brooklyn kid who brought that NYC-brashness to his work.  He died at age 75 in 2011.  A bit about his on-air chutzpah:

"Several of his April Fools' pranks are the stuff of radio lore. Once, he reported that a flying saucer had landed in North Park. Many believed it. "My general manager didn't even know it was a joke."

On another April 1, he claimed there was an alligator roaming the sewer system and urged listeners to collectively flush their toilets to get the critter out. People bought that one, too. "People were calling up at 11 o'clock in the morning, saying, 'Should we continue to flush?' It was crazy.'"

A classic Cigna quote: "The greatest accomplishments are done in defiance of management."

“Your Wildest Dreams” by the Moody Blues was popular the summer of my 376 commute, and Cigna played it at the same time many mornings.  The song would usually come on as I was approaching the Squirrel Hill Tunnel, and I would race through the tunnel to hear the end of the song.  The song reminds me of a friend in college, and it’s my favorite Moody’s song.

I-376 is one of those weird interstate highways like the ones around Chicago.  378 is labeled east-west while most of the road runs north-south; a few of the interstates around Chicago have similar confusing directional designations.  

The traffic tends to slow down on the Fort Pitt Bridge, and right before the two tunnels east of the city.  The traffic around the bridge is the worst as different roads converge and drivers cut across lanes to head in the right direction.  

The traffic around the tunnels isn’t so bad, especially if you’re listening to a favorite song.  And if you're traveling west toward Pittsburgh on 376, don't miss the skyline view.