August 2012 - Page 5 of 7 - Ramblin' with Roger

Summer song: Summer, by War

Vocalist and founding member of War Howard Scott said that they were “cranking out gold records when” the Beastie Boys “were still in diapers.”

War was a long-running funk-rock band from southern California, who was commercially viable, at least into the 1990s. Eric Burdon, formerly of The Animals, was the lead vocalist on their first hit, Spill the Wine, back in 1970, but others took the reins shortly after that.

On the Billboard 100, the very peaceful tune called Summer, which was appropriately released on June 21, 1976, debuted on the chart on July 10 and spent 16 weeks there, eventually getting to #7. On the soul charts, it also started moving on July 10, and spent 14 weeks, reaching #4. It was declared a gold record, selling over 500,000 units.

Here is Summer, by War. The band “is not happy about being slighted for a spot in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The band was nominated but lost out… War is most annoyed about losing a spot to The Beastie Boys.

“Vocalist and founding member of War Howard Scott told TMZ, ‘We were cranking out gold records when they were still in diapers. How could the Beastie Boys get in before us when they sampled War’s music on their first album?! I’ll eat their platinum records!’ and added, ‘Felt like I was kicked in the back of my britches.'”
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Sad to read about the death, at the age of 68, of composer Marvin Hamlisch. Writer Mark Evanier said: “I can’t recall ever hearing a bad word about Marvin Hamlisch, not even from Theater People… He was the guy who wrote the tunes for A Chorus Line, after all. And so many other fine works. The first time I saw him or heard his name was when he was Groucho’s pianist for those sad one-Marx shows near the end of the comedian’s career.” To paraphrase a song of his: Nobody did it better.

I Hired A Genealogist

It’s difficult to start a conversation about things you aren’t supposed to know.

Did you ever have so many leads to a puzzle that you don’t know which way to proceed? That’s how I’m feeling after getting some info from a genealogist. I have so many possible avenues to check about my father’s birth that I have no idea which one to pursue.

There was something called the Susquehanna Valley Home for Orphans and Industrial School for Indigent Children in Binghamton, NY. Then again, as late as 1938, 50% of births in the US were home births according to Wikipedia.

If my grandmother Agatha was sent away from home for the birth of my father, she might have gone back to Wilkes-Barre, Luzerne County, PA where she was born and where she lived until she was about 11 years old.

Specifically, she may have gone to the home of her uncle: Aaron J. Morris. In the 1900 census, Samuel E and his wife Mary Eugene, my great-grandparents, were living in Wilkes-Barre, PA with Aaron J. Morris.

Samuel E Walker lived in Wilkes-Barre, Luzerne County, PA from 1900 through 1913. He and his family moved to Binghamton probably around 1914. By 1915 Samuel E Walker is found in Binghamton at 3 Emerson Place.

Aaron J. Morris in 1900 lived at 162 N Main, Wilkes Barre Ward 4, Luzerne, PA and was a butler. By 1910 he had moved to 113 Hickory St., Wilkes-Barre, Ward 13, Luzerne, Pennsylvania and he remained there at least through 1930.
He was evidently connected to Mount Zion Baptist Church in Wilkes Barre, according to a genealogy website Genealogy of Patience, Mccloe, Tillman Family by LeRoy C Patience. That website was last updated in 2007.

Mount Zion Baptist Church in 1925 was located at 191 South Welles St. That is about 0.7 miles away from Aaron Morris’s house at 113 Hickory. Today Mount Zion Baptist Church is located at 105 Hill Street; Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania 18702. According to the 1925 Wilkes-Barre directory, the pastor there at the time was Rev. R. E. Thomas.

I have a request in with the vital records folks for the state of Pennsylvania, but they aren’t finding anything.

According to the Binghamton city directory, Agatha is listed next to McKinley, indicating that they were married already by 1932, yet living separately through at least 1940.

And there is WAY more than this.

Someone suggested that I should have asked my father, now deceased 12 years today, about his history. It’s difficult to start a conversation about things you aren’t supposed to know. His surviving cousins, who are younger than he in any case, are concerned that “digging up dirt” about our father is somehow dishonoring him. Obviously, I don’t believe that to be the case.

As soon as I write that I’m not watching the Olympics…

Here’s a question for you all: how much of a home team fan should a member of the media be?

My niece (wife’s brother’s daughter) has been staying at our house for much of the last three weeks. She is really into horses; she even owns one. So when she wanted to watch TV, and they had show horses jumping over barriers, we ended up viewing that. Which led to watching some other activities. Sunday morning, live, I got to watch Andy Murray of the UK beat Roger Federer of Switzerland, one of the greatest tennis players in the world, in straight sets, four weeks to the day after Federer beat Murray at Wimbledon, at the same venue. I was fist-pumping so much that my daughter demanded that I stop.

Then Sunday, Monday and Tuesday night, we were up until 10 or 11 pm, watching various events. This was partially a function of being on vacation, with no chance to record the programs. (And no real desire to; one cannot watch old sports events.)

Jaquandor asked a series of Olympic-related questions, and I started answering them at his blog, when, suddenly, I realized it was going on too long for his reply box, but was just the right length for a blog post. Thanks, guy.

What are your favorite events?

Tennis, volleyball. Although I watched a lot of track (dashes and hurdles) and got into them.

What events do you just not get?

I still find synchronized swimming exceedingly funny. I GET it, but there is a move afoot in the competition to get rid of the excessive makeup, which currently makes it seem more like theater and less like athletics, when it clearly is more the latter.

What events would you include or exclude?

Include baseball and/or softball. I’m disinclined to exclude anything, even if I personally don’t care about it.

Granting that providing tape-delayed coverage is a necessary evil given the distances in time zones…

I don’t grant that. In an Internet world, I found out way too much. Even NBC reported on a couple stories, including Michael Phelps’ record-breaking medal, aware that everyone knew anyway. Lots of people in the US were finding ways to watch it on the BBC.

I think there needs to be tape delays in 2014 (Russia) and 2018 (South Korea) but there should be only enough so that American audiences don’t have to watch the Games at 4 a.m. Eastern. For the 2016 games in Rio, the time zone is only one hour off US Eastern time, and this should allow for more live coverage.

What could NBC be doing better with its coverage?

Obviously, the coverage of the individual sports tend to be all over the place, quality-wise. There are ALWAYS sports announcers who make observations about how much an athlete “wants it,” or otherwise read his or her mind.

Mary Carillo did a series of quite interesting series of stories about the UK, including, of all things, the institution of Greenwich Mean Time.

But the infotainment folks of the TODAY show irritate me. Al and Matt wrestling; new anchor Savannah being a gal pal in the Olympic village; Al playing cricket; anything involving Ryan Seacrest and Jenna Bush. (Read Ken Levine’s satiric take on how Seacrest got his NBC contract.) One Saturday morning, two people were telling us the Facebook or Twitter conversation about the Olympics was heavy in Maryland and Virginia, opining that this was the case because an athlete is from one of those states; I had to shut it off.

Here’s a question for you all: how much of home team fans should the media be? On the TODAY show, US hurdler Lolo Jones tearfully complained about a New York Times article critical of her two days before her finals, where she finished a close fourth.

How weird is it watching Olympics without Jim McKay on the teevee?

I loved Jim McKay. But Bob Costas is fine.

Do professional athletes in sports like basketball make for better, or lesser, competition?

Who is an amateur athlete anymore? Many college basketball players in the US, are 1-and-done, attending college for a year, maybe two, then make themselves eligible for the NBA draft. Track stars get stipends or appearance fees, or something that allows them to travel over the country.

And the pros in tennis start as teenagers. The pool of amateurs would be exceedingly small. Moreover, the Williams sisters, and the Bryan twins seemed to love representing the US, as did many of the other athletes, especially from the smaller nations.

How big a problem IS doping, and what’s the future of the very notion of ‘performance-enhancing’ medicine?

I really felt sorry for that young female swimmer from China who, a number of people suggested, had cheated because of her incredible time, though she was cleared a day later. To the question, there will always be athletes looking to get an edge and folks who have to keep their ears to the ground to try to stop it.

There’s a bigger problem, though. The weird thing about the Olympics is that the rules are largely determined by the governing body of that particular sports. No sport should be so designed that throwing a match should be advantageous to that team, as was happening in badminton.

Deconstruction, in a good way

I have tried to make it clear that I’m not especially good at building things, or putting things together. But I felt really good about taking something apart recently.

We bought a new, much larger shed back in the spring because the old one, which came with the house we bought in 2000, was falling apart, even rotting in places. Still, it was built sturdily enough that I couldn’t just pull it apart. Fortunately, I called my friend Norman, who brought me implements of destruction: a crowbar, a sledgehammer, and a hacksaw. (He brought his son Sam, who I’ve known since he was a couple of months old; he now has a beard, which is a bit disconcerting.)

The Daughter actually used a screwdriver to remove the doors. Then I used mostly the crowbar and took off the front, sides, and top. I thought the back would be tricky, it being so close to the fence, but I was then able to tip the shed over without having it crush me. Once the back was removed, the frame pretty much collapsed. I thought I might have to use the sledgehammer more often, but I picked it up only a couple times, to separate one section from another. This took about three hours over two days; there is still disposal to deal with, with the 2 by 4s going to my in-laws. Still, it gave me a real sense of accomplishment, something I achieve mentally all the time.

I often forget that I love doing physical labor. It doesn’t happen at my current job very often. At my position at FantaCo back in the 1980s, I would haul in the new comic books or our publications. I’d wander around the store helping customers or work in the back room stocking inventory. But just doing exercise is boring to me; can’t watch video workouts. Riding the bike is good because it’s functional. The now-rare opportunity to play racquetball is fun. Using the stationary bike is OK because I can do something else (read, watch TV).

It’s this need that explains why I helped our choir director move last month. I LIKE moving other people; it’s good physical exercise but lacks the emotional angst of moving oneself. It was only the loading side. I had trouble with loading the truck, so I hired a top professional mover Las Vegas to help me, and the three volunteers and I had to just unload the truck. As moves go, a piece of cake.

Picture from Treehugger

D is for Duplication; D is for Duplication

To this day, I have copies of correspondence from the 1970s and 1980s, back in the day when I used to write something called “letters.”

From here: “The stencil duplicator or mimeograph machine (often abbreviated to mimeo) is a low-cost printing press that works by forcing ink through a stencil onto paper. Mimeographs…were a common technology in printing small quantities, as in office work, classroom materials, and church bulletins. Early fanzines were printed in this technology because it was widespread and cheap. In the late 1960s, mimeographs… were gradually displaced by photocopying and offset printing.”

This is just one of many technologies I was not particularly good at. But my father, who usually did the bulletin even into the early 1970s at our church, Trinity AME Zion in Binghamton, NY, was excellent at typing the stencil, then wrapping it “around the ink-filled drum of the rotary machine.” When I attempted to do this, the stencil was always wrinkled, and the subsequent output of copies not particularly attractive.

A YouTube video of the Gestetner 180. My wife still remembers mimeos in her small rural school district as recently as the early 1980s.

Here’s something I did not know: “The word ‘mimeograph’ was first used by Albert Blake Dick when he licensed [Thomas] Edison’s patents in 1887.” The A.B. Dick Company of Chicago once owned the trademarked name, but “over time, the term became generic and is now an example of a genericized trademark.”

But what if you were going to write something, and you wanted to have one or two copies of it? From The Exciting History of Carbon Paper! “Carbon paper is thin paper coated with a mixture of wax and pigment, that is used between two sheets of ordinary paper to make one or more copies of an original document.”

To this day, I have copies of correspondence from the 1970s and 1980s, back in the day when I used to write something called “letters.”

Of course, the limitation of carbon paper was that it “could only produce copies of out-going correspondence…; if copies were needed of incoming documents, they still had to be copied by hand. This problem was not solved until the middle of the twentieth century when xerography became commercially available in the form of the photocopier… The invention of the photocopier began the decline in demand for carbon paper that has continued to the present day.”

Still, the terminology of making a “carbon copy”, or cc, has survived, in e-mails. One can even make a bcc, or blind carbon copy, with no wax and pigment required.

ABC Wednesday – Round 11