June 2022 - Page 5 of 6 - Ramblin' with Roger

Judy Garland would have been 100

“Forget your troubles, c’mon get happy”

Since Judy Garland was about to turn 100, I decided to see The Wizard Of Oz at Albany’s Spectrum Theatre in early April, and my wife accompanied me. We had never seen the film in a cinema before. There were only the two Tuesday showings, at 4 and 7 pm, so I figured it would be packed; there were less than ten of us there at the latter.

My wife said more than once afterward, “She could really act,” and I concurred. Her performance was vivid on the big screen. Of course, I had seen the movie on CBS-TV annually for several years in the 1960s, though only the last two times on a color TV. I had missed the “horse of a different color” joke.

My, those ruby slippers really sparkled when she ran. I did not know that one of the iconic dresses was missing until 2021. Nor was I aware that there was a black and white dress for the Kansas scenes and a blue and white dress for Oz. Movie magic.

It was strange, though. In the same timeframe that I’m watching the teenage Judy, I’d also see her on her eponymous show (1963-1964) or guesting on Ed Sullivan or another program. Also, I’m sure I watched the television special Judy and Liza at the Palladium (1964). Liza, of course, was her daughter Liza Minelli, about 18 at the time. (Liza’s 1972 movie Cabaret was shown at the Spectrum the week after The Wizard of Oz.)

Only two score and seven

I never paid much attention to the tabloids at the time, so I was very surprised when Judy Garland died in 1969 at the age of 47. I’ve viewed documentaries about her life since, though I never saw Judy, the 2019 biopic with Renée Zellweger.

One last thought. When I was in the play Boys In The Band in 1975, there was a specific cue for the lead character Michael to be playing the Judy Garland track Get Happy. So that song has had a soft spot in my heart ever since.

Here’s a clip of early films from when Frances Gumm was seven until Judy Garland turned 17.
Waltz With A Swing/ Americana -Every Sunday, 1936
Zing! Went The Strings Of My Heart -Listen, Darling, 1938

Somewhere Over the Rainbow – The Wizard of Oz, 1939; plus a discussion of the isolated vocal
Our Love Affair, with Mickey Rooney
The Trolley Song – Meet Me In St. Louis, 1944
Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas – Meet Me In St. Louis, 1944

Get Happy – Summer Stock, 1950
Happy Days Are Here Again/Get Happy , with Barbra Streisand, 1963?
The Judy Garland Show with Peggy Lee and Jack Carter (November 1963)
By Myself, 1964

She was accidentally slapped at the 1954 Oscars

Judy Garland would have been 100 today.

What the heck is Zoosk?

I am not a 5’5″ Gemini

Oh, dear. A message indicates my photo has been removed from Zoosk. But one question. What the heck is Zoosk? “Zoosk Inc is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Spark Networks SE, a NASDAQ MKT Company (LOV).”| Ah, it’s an online dating service.

Here’s the email I got.

Hi rogerogreen,

Your photo was removed for not following Zoosk’s photo guidelines. To help your new photo go live…

· Make sure it’s clear
· Be alone in your photo
· Don’t include nudity

Wait a minute. I didn’t send them a photograph. This person isn’t even me!

The guy in question is:

Gender: Male (true), but he’s more than a half-decade younger

Interested In: Women (well, not just ANY woman)

Sign: Gemini (not me)

Height:5’5″ (way shorter than I)

Ethnicity: White / Caucasian (nah)

Relationship History: Separated (that’d be news to my wife)

Children: Has children, not at home (singular child, still at home)

Education: Attended college (actually, I have a BA and an MLS)

Religion: Christian – Catholic (I tend toward Protestantism)

Smoking: Smokes regularly (no way in heck)

Industry: Military (not me)

Oh, and he’s in the different Northeast area. I figured this because the four women Zoosk suggested are from around there. And they’re all non-smokers.

I was going to just reply to the email and say this ain’t me. But one of my sisters suggested it could be some sort of scam, though I’m not sure how that would even work. I will say the Zoosk security kinda SUCKS.

Response

So I blocked the messages. But it was still unsettling that MY email was used in this manner, especially when I got a couple of responses.

Then I wrote to their customer service folks. “Thank you for contacting our Zoosk Customer Care Team.

“This is an automatic email to confirm that we have received your request and have forwarded it on to the appropriate department for review. Here is your ticket reference number… To add additional comments, please reply to this email.

“Once your account and request have been reviewed, you will receive a response. We will try our very best to reply to you within the next 48 hours.”

While waiting for a reply, I came across this site for dissatisfied customers.

But Zoosk did get back to me, and in less than 24 hours: “Thank you for getting in touch and alerting us to this situation.

“We have blocked the profile connected to [my email]. This means that it has been removed from our website. It does not appear in Search, and it can no longer be logged into or used. Moreover, it is not possible to create another profile with this same email address in the future.” Thank you for that.

But right afterward, I got unsolicited ads from Match.com and SilverSingles. Meh.

International Business Machines

company town

Those of you of a certain age KNOW that International Business Machines, or IBM, was not just a large corporation, but, if you could get in there, a career. This article specifically addresses the import and outsized significance of IBM to the Triple Cities of Binghamton, Johnson City, and Endicott.

“The company was founded in 1911 as the Computer Tabulating Recording Company (CTR) and took up residency in Endicott, where the three companies that merged to form CTR had been based.” The buildings of the company dominated Endicott, taking up 150 acres of real estate. “At its height, IBM Endicott employed 19,000 people in the region and the majority of the population of the city.”

While there were undoubtedly many places that were “company towns”, Endicott, and the surrounding Broome County, were the first and foremost.

Les at IBM

When my father needed a job in the early 1960s, he was considered lucky to get into IBM Endicott. I had guesstimated that he had worked there for six years, but now I am uncertain. In the 1963 Binghamton City Directory, he was listed as working at the Interracial Center at 45 Carroll Street, but in ’64, at IBM. It’s probable that he was working at IBM in ’63. Could he have been working at both in ’62, since the IBM job was at night? IDK.

I DO know that he hated the job. It was mind-numbing boring for him, I’m guessing, moving materials around on forklifts from one area of the massive campus to another. He had been a trucker in his past, so I imagine that he was good at it.

It was only in retrospect that I realized how much I missed him. He did try to compensate by cooking waffles on Saturday mornings, and spaghetti Saturday nights, since we didn’t see him that much during the week. As I learned from him, the secret to a great spaghetti sauce is cooking it for hours.

Perks

Occasionally, we all went to the IBM Country Club. I have this vague recollection of seeing an exhibition game between the New York Knicks and the Boston Celtics there. I could be misremembering the venue, but getting tickets was somehow a perk of him working there.

In this blog, I have told at least a half dozen times, how my 9th-grade homeroom and biology teacher, Mr. Joseph told me straight out that my father was “CRAZY” for leaving his job at IBM. This was “especially for a position with Opportunities for Broome, an OEO government job (where he thought he was making a difference). Government jobs come and go, but once you’re in the IBM family, you were set for life.”

Eventually, that became less true. In 1978, IBM moved 1,000 families from upstate New York to the Charlotte area, where, coincidentally, my parents and baby sister had moved four years earlier. That was the first big influx. (Charlotte pizza, before the Northerners came, was AWFUL.)

Me at IBM, first time

I graduated from Binghamton Central High School in January 1971. After looking for a few weeks, I got a job, of course, at IBM Endicott. I wrote about it here.

“My job was to do these three processes. The first was to put this laminated coating over these circuit boards. The second (and the most difficult) was to bake them in these ovens, making sure not to bend the pins or have the coating get on the pins. The third task was to bake this plastic holder onto the circuit boards.

“Irritatingly, the first shift did a lot of the first task, leaving the second task to me. And I really had to do it, because the coating would start riding up the pins if they weren’t baked within 10 or 12 hours. They didn’t like me because I would do the first task so fast that the company raised the rate for that job, something from 60 to 80 boards per hour. That WAS a tactical error on my part.

I was on the second shift, which ostensibly was 5:12 p.m. to 2 a.m ., with a 48-minute lunch. But I hardly ever worked that. It was usually 5:12 p.m. to 4 a.m., and then from 12 noon to 6 p.m. on Saturday…I saved a lot of money for college because of the 16 hours of overtime per week… Because I was generally too tired to go out – I managed to lose 30 pounds because I was too tired to eat…”

Give blood

“First time I ever gave blood was while I worked there because I could get paid at work while taking of the hour to donate.” When I left, my manager was disappointed, but I needed to go to college.

I made $3,371 in a little less than six months working at IBM before I went to college. “This would be the most money I would make until 1978. I made enough to pay for my college expenses and to lend my parents $1500 for the down payment on a house. Tuition was cheap, and I had a Regents scholarship to SUNY New Paltz.”

Kottke.org – a “quality hyperlink product”

The Message, created by Eugene H. Peterson

Somehow I’ve managed to have largely missed the website Kottke.org, the Home of Quality Hypertext Products. This is understandable since it’s only been around since 1998. I found it, as is often the case while looking for something else.

“It’s written and produced by Jason Kottke and covers the essential people, inventions, performances, and ideas that increase the collective adjacent possible of humanity. Frequent topics of interest among the 26,000+ posts include art, technology, science, visual culture, design, music, cities, food, architecture, sports, endless nonsense, and carefully curated current events, all of it lightly contextualized. Basically, it’s the world’s complete knowledge, relentlessly filtered through my particular worldview, with all the advantages and disadvantages that entails.”

Some recent posts:
Measles Makes Your Immune System Forget Its Protections Against Past Illness
AI Creates Photorealistic Portraits of Cartoon Characters
The Unsuccessful Treatment of Writer’s Block
Star Trek Warp Jumps Through the Years

If you really want to fall into a rabbit hole, search the archives. I tried these words, pretty much based on books on my bookshelf.

Star Wars: Carl Sagan in 1978: Star Wars Is Too White
Language: Lydia Davis on Translation and Learning Languages. Lydia Davis was one of the FFAPL Literary Legends in 2021.

Music: Music for Empty Malls
Bible. The Bible’s book of Revelation explained [spoiler: it’s not the stuff from Left Behind]

You can also follow along with the Quick Links on Twitter and in kottke.org’s main RSS feed.

Taking a sabbatical

On May 9, Jason Kottke wrote: “I’m going to be taking an extended break from kottke.org, starting today. I’ve been writing here for more than 24 years, nearly half my life — I need a breather. This is something I have been thinking about and planning for years and I’d like to share why I’m doing it, how it’s going to work, what I hope to accomplish, and how you can help.”

He says it’ll be for a few months. And there will be plenty of things to check out in the meantime.

Bible Gateway

I believe I had previously mentioned Bible Gateway. It provides dozens of versions of the Bible, about sixty in English. The favored one of my friend Lee and my late friend Keith is a relatively contemporary iteration called The Message, created by Eugene H. Peterson.

Peterson writes: “Language changes. New words are formed. Old words take on new meanings. There is a need in every generation to keep the language of the gospel message current, fresh, and understandable—the way it was for its very first readers.”

Bible Gateway also includes versions in Spanish, Arabic, Bulgarian, Cebuano, Cherokee, Chinese, Danish, German, French, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Thai, Vietnamese, and other languages.

The first railroad in New York sign

Steam!

Here’s a picture of the sign designating the first railroad chartered in the US. As you can see, the sign had been there since 1940.

“The Mohawk and Hudson Railroad was the first railroad built in the state of New York and one of the first railroads in the United States. It was so-named because it linked the Mohawk River at Schenectady with the Hudson River at Albany. It was conceived as a means of allowing Erie Canal passengers to quickly bypass the circuitous Cohoes Falls via steam-powered trains.

“The railroad was incorporated on April 17, 1826, as the Mohawk and Hudson Company and opened for public service on August 9, 1831. On April 19, 1847, the company name was changed to the Albany and Schenectady Railroad. The railroad was consolidated into the New York Central Railroad on May 17, 1853.”

This sign was located along historic Route 20 in Albany on Madison Avenue near Allen Street, just two blocks from my house.

That’s not the same sign!

I would not have mentioned this except for one thing. The sign has been replaced, apparently in 2021, though I never noticed until mid-May 2022.

Notice the more definitive wording. Not “near here,” but here. Yet it’s narrowed the scope of the accomplishment.

The other noteworthy element is who paid for the sign. “The William G. Pomeroy Foundation is committed to supporting the celebration and preservation of community history, and working to improve the probability of finding appropriate donor matches or other life-saving treatments for blood cancer patients.”

Here’s the description of this sign.

“In August of 1831 the first steam-powered passenger train in New York State, powered by the locomotive DeWitt Clinton, traveled between this place (junction of Railroad and Great Western Turnpike, now Western Avenue in Albany) on the Mohawk and Hudson Railroad line and Schenectady.”

“From the August 2, 1831 edition of Morrisville’s Republican Monitor:

We learn that the company have decided on using steam power only; and there is probably no road in this country or Europe more admirably calculated for locomotive engines…The Mohawk and Hudson rail-road has an important advantage over other roads, in being perfectly straight, and consequently less liable to lateral pressure; and the engines placed upon it will not be retarded by any intervening inclined plane, as they will be employed upon the level between the hills at Albany and Schenectady.“

History

The Pomeroy Foundation, which began in 2005, “is interested in opportunities to partner with 501(c)(3) organizations, nonprofit educational institutions, and local, state, and federal government entities that have identified a unique and historically significant project that could incorporate physically placed roadside markers.”

I’m fascinated by this in part because something that I had taken for granted, sitting by the nearby bus stop for decades, had changed, and I missed it until now. Also, I’m interested in entities that will provide signage designating historical places to not-for-profit entities, but also to the governments.