Binghamton Archives - Page 11 of 13

Binghamton: Butch Skeene, and Spaulding Krullers

Spaulding krullers came in an unmistakable orange- and white-striped boxes. This was “our” doughnut because their bakery was in Binghamton.

It was like a tsunami of memories of my hometown, Binghamton, NY in a 48-hour period, and it took me quite by surprise since I usually don’t think that much about the place.

ITEM: There’s a guy named John who remembered my parents and grandmothers. He’s been following me on Facebook for the last few months. He attended the church I attended, Trinity A.M.E. Zion in the hometown, and was in the junior choir about a decade before I was, under the direction of Fred Goodall, who was there for decades.

John had a good friend named Butch Skeene, (b. 1940) also in my church junior choir before I was, who performed in the music business from 1958 to 2013 in that area and beyond. I’m sure I’d heard him perform at some point; I know one of my sisters did quite often in our Binghamton days. Anyway, he died this week of cancer, and I was oddly saddened, as though I had lost a relative.

ITEM: I’m at the dinner table, and suddenly I remember these doughnuts we used to get when my sisters and I were kids, either white powder or plain. Three rows of four, with a cellophane top so you could see inside. I remembered that the logo was blue and white, but I couldn’t remember the BRAND name.

I wrote to my sisters and the elder of them remembered. I found this article from 2009:

After doing an Internet search, I’ve discovered a whole world of upstate New York Baby Boomers all in a desperate search for Spaulding Krullers! Apparently I wasn’t the only one hooked on these wonderful doughnuts with their delicious nutmeg flavor

More informative was this piece from an Oneonta newspaper last year:

Another iconic doughnut was the Spaulding kruller. They came in an unmistakable orange- and white-striped boxes. This was “our” doughnut because their bakery was in Binghamton, their distribution center was on Market Street in Oneonta and they could be found in every mom-and-pop store in every community no matter how big or how small.

They mastered the art of making the sugar doughnut. Rather than just being a snowy dust ball that ended up flaking all over your new shirt, the Spaulding sugar kruller had a mysterious paste-like quality to it that allowed the sugar to stay (mostly) on the doughnut and not on your clothes. Spaulding eventually went out of business, being bought up by Stroehmanns and today is owned by (believe it or not) Bimbo Bakeries!

Spaulding krullers still come in the familiar orange-and-white-striped box that carries their company slogan, “famous for flavor.” It may be just me but now that they’re made by Bimbo they don’t taste anything like the ones that came out of the bakery on Exchange Street in Binghamton oh those many years ago.

How the heck did I forget that striped box? I DO recall that, unlike most powdered sugar donuts you’d eat now, the powder DID stay with the donut, as also noted in this piece and this one. Apparently, Bimbo has discontinued the brand at the end of last year, alas.

ITEM: My baby sister saw a name on Facebook and the surname reminded her of Binghamton, where she hasn’t lived since 1974. I knew of some of these folks too, but the kicker for me is that the very first girl I ever kissed, named Mary, had the same surname. It may have been a mistletoe-fueled passion, and nothing ever came from that moment, but still..

ITEM: What’s Goin’ On in Binghamton. A newish website, about six months old.

L is for Les, Leslie and Roger, the Green Family Singers

“We all have a knack for singing, and we do relatively little rehearsing… We’ve even sung songs spontaneously and they come out as if they’ve been practiced.”

My sister MARCIA found this and put it on Facebook:

It’s a promo sheet my father created for himself as a “singer of folk songs,” never as a “folk singer,” which was too limiting a term for him.

I’m particularly interested in the setlist, I’m guessing from the late 1950s. Some of the songs he was still singing a decade later, when my father, sister Leslie, and I sang together, while there are others (Twenty Souls) I don’t even recognize. I’m always fascinated to hear other people sing the songs he, or we, performed, such as Cindy (Johnny Cash and Joe Strummer), Sinnerman (some early incarnation of Three Dog Night), and Hole in the Bucket, which Leslie and I stole from Dad (Harry Belafonte).

I must say we were pretty darned good, but Dad had a natural excellence, not just in singing, but in introducing the songs, that was very appealing to audiences. From an interview from February 23, 1970, Binghamton Press: “I’ll never sing a folk song publicly without explaining the reason behind the song, whether it relates to history or folklore. And I also have to explain my feelings to an audience… [so that they can] understand the emotions behind a song.”

GreenFamilySingers2 (3) — **Leslie Green, Roger Green, Les Green**

If memory serves – it often doesn’t – I started singing one or two songs with Dad on stage, definitely including the Car Song (“Daddy, won’t you take me for a ride in the car?”)

During the summer of 1966 or, more likely, 1967, the family, Dad noted, was “camping at one of the local sites. In the evening, we were sitting around the campfire and I brought out my guitar and Leslie hers. We started strumming and singing and harmonizing. Before we knew it, other families who were camping nearby wandered over. And before we knew it, everyone was joining in. The owners of the camping site booked us for the next summer.”

The story noted that Leslie and I had brought in some of the recent folk-rock songs into the repertoire. It also said that, during the interview, while Dad strummed his guitar, I pulled out a comb and a piece of paper and “began playing a blues melody,” with Leslie playing bongos.

As Dad explained: “We all have a knack for singing, and we do relatively little rehearsing… We’ve even sung songs spontaneously and they come out as if they’ve been practiced. And every time we do a song, we do it differently.”

ABC Wednesday – Round 13

I is for I

There was a lilac bush right next to the house; it didn’t look very impressive, but it smelled wonderful. Still the single smell that reminds me most of growing up.

Lacking any INSPIRATION for a topic, I defaulted to writing about me this week. It is I, during my significant birthday week. But what to write about that I haven’t addressed before?

I spent the first 18 years of my life in the same house, at 5 Gaines Street in Binghamton, NY. Gaines was a very short street between Oak Street and Front Street, with only 16 possible addresses, and actually fewer buildings than that.

At the corner of Gaines and Front was O’Leary’s convenience store. I went there and bought packs of baseball cards, but I also had to buy my father’s Winston cigarettes, which irritated me greatly.

In the yard at 1 Gaines Street was a huge gnarled tree which terrified me. It looked just one of those angry apple trees from the movie The Wizard of Oz. At some point, the family that had moved in there decided to take it down. My father told the owner that the way they were cutting the tree, it was going to crash into their house. The guy told my father to shut up and mind his own business; the tree crashed into their house, doing considerable damage to the roof.

The folks at 11 Gaines had an extra-large lot with a huge garden and chickens. When a foul ball would fall into that yard, the fence was too high, yet too wobbly to climb, and we had to wait for someone to throw the ball back.

The family at 13 Gaines was named Greene. We often got their mail, and vice versa.

There was a factory across from our house, but I never knew what was made there. It changed hands several times.

We had our tiny lot at 5 Gaines, where I played kickball with my sisters. Our house was actually green, with asbestos on the exterior. There was a lilac bush right next to the house; it didn’t look very impressive, but it smelled wonderful. Still the single smell that reminds me most of growing up.

When I was born, we lived upstairs in the two-family dwelling, but by the following year, when my first sister was born, we had moved downstairs, and my paternal grandparents had moved upstairs.

Our half of the house was quite small. When my second sister was born, my room was carved out of what was essentially a large hallway. But it was OK. My father painted the solar system on my ceiling, with the proportions from an encyclopedia entry I found.

Dad was always painting on the walls; I don’t mean painting the walls. In the living room, on one wall, were snow-peaked mountains. On another was a scene in the tradition of a busy Western European marketplace; I assume he tried to recreate an existing painting, but don’t know which one.

I’d go up and visit my grandparents often. One time, when I was about three, I fell down the steps. To this day, I have a bump just below my lower lip where I cannot grow facial hair.

Our Christmas decorations were kept upstairs, “under the house,” which is to say in the room off the kitchen where the roof slanted so that an adult could not stand.

When I was born, our church, Trinity A.M. E. Zion was downtown. But when that street was turned into a city park, the church moved to within two blocks of our house, at Oak Street and Lydia Street. (Hmm – I wonder if the naming of my daughter was affected by the street on which I spent a LOT of time.)

Enough about me for this week.

The guy in the middle is my father; the woman on the right is his mom. Not sure who the others are, though I suspect the boy is a cousin of dad’s; he has the Walker “look.”

ABC Wednesday – Round 12

Friend Karen is 60

Karen had wanted to be in the music business as long as I could remember.

Karen I’ve known since kindergarten, and we went from K through 12th grade together in Binghamton, NY. Back in seventh grade or so, she really got into astrology. I don’t mean just looking at the daily newspaper column, but doing a serious investigation. While I wasn’t a true believer, I found it eerie how accurate they could be. She was born only 46 hours after I was, so there was some overlap between hers and mine.

When we were in high school, there was this silly rule that, when you were running for student government, you could not give your own nominating speech. I gave Karen’s when she ran for secretary, a speech that everyone said was one of the best ever. She won. The following year, they changed the rules so that the candidate gave the speech; my address for myself, running for president, was not nearly as good, by my own reckoning (I won anyway).

In 1977, when I was adrift, she gave me a real (verbal) kick in the butt. In the early 1980s, she stopped drinking; while, initially, she asked why I hadn’t stopped her, she came to the (correct) conclusion that only SHE could have.

She was there in Boston when I won $17,600 on JEOPARDY! in 1998.

Karen told me that she was relieved that I had had a daughter in 2004. I think she believed, probably rightly, that I had an easier time dealing with girls than boys, going back to when we were kids.

She is a world traveler, having visited Burma, Costa Rica, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Turkey, and probably locations I’m forgetting; from the e-mails she sends each winter, I think she ought to blog about it, but she’s disinclined.

Karen had wanted to be in the music business as long as I could remember, nagging her older siblings to buy her the new single by the Kinks or the Rolling Stones, or, of course, the Beatles. In sixth grade, we had a class newspaper, and she wrote a (fictional, alas!) story about meeting the Fab Four.

She did, in fact, go into the music industry. From working in a record store on Main Street in neighboring Johnson City, NY, to getting involved in promoting musicians and their albums, trying to get them on radio, sometimes going to their gigs. Early on, she turned me on to The Band. Later, she introduced me to a whole range of artists too numerous to mention, but including the 1990s iteration of Johnny Cash.

She told great stories, which I cannot do justice to. I remember when she was trying to promote Robbie Robertson’s first solo album in the mid-1980s and had to deal with some 24-year-old station manager. He didn’t know who Robbie was, didn’t know who The Band was or that they had backed Bob Dylan, and had never heard of The Last Waltz, the award-winning movie about their final concerts.

Of course, the music business hasn’t gotten any easier of late, but she’s still at it, trying to develop and promote new artists.

I’ve been fortunate that I’ve been able to see her at least once a year for the past few years; unfortunately, the last time was at her mom’s funeral, but it was still a joy to see her.

Happy birthday, Sara Lee! (Inside joke.)

T is for the Trip Through Time, and Teachers

Nine of us went from K-9 together: Carol, Lois, Karen, Diane, Irene, Bill, Bernie, David, and me.

I grew up in Binghamton, NY, and when it was time for me to go to kindergarten, I was supposed to go to Oak Street Elementary School, based on where I lived. But both of my parents worked outside the home, and there would be no one home at lunchtime.

It was determined that we would instead go to Daniel S. Dickinson School so that we could go to my maternal grandmother’s house at lunchtime. She was only a half dozen blocks from my home. Incidentally, I don’t think Oak Street was any closer to MY house than Dickinson. The school was named for a 19th Century US Senator, as well as the first president of the city of Binghamton in 1834.

One of the peculiar things about schools in Binghamton at the time was that they would start in September AND February. Those of us born in December to March, maybe a month earlier or later, began school in February. The February class was always far smaller than the September class. One’s first semester was the B semester, the second the A semester. So when I went to school in February, I’d be in kindergarten B, e.g.

Dickinson was a K-9 (kindergarten through 9th grade) school, located on Starr Avenue at the west end of Dickinson Street, appropriately. The K-6 kids entered on the south side of the building, and the 7-9 children on the north side. It had clocks with Roman numerals, including the 4 shown as IIII, rather than IV.

Kindergarten: my teacher was Miss Cady. She was my mother’s teacher as well, which should indicate her vintage. I remember taking naps on a yellow rug; on one occasion, I actually fell asleep, and woke up to an empty room!

First through fourth grade: I don’t remember this stretch as well, because every single teacher we had in the B semester was gone by the A semester in September. I don’t know if they moved away or what, though at least one had gone on maternity leave, since she came back and taught my sister Leslie.

Fifth grade: Miss Marie Oberlik. She was of a certain age. She lived only three short blocks from the school and I walked by it almost every day. She taught us to count to 10 in Russian, which I can still do. I got 100 in the spelling final.

Sixth grade: Mr. Paul Peca. I’ve written about him. By that year, we had only 16 students in that class.

Additionally, we had:

Music: Mrs. Joseph from grades 3-9. We had these ancient blue books, which I was quite fond of. I loved them so much, in fact, that I found a book with a similar roster of songs a couple of years ago called America Sings, and bought copies for Leslie and me. Her husband was our 9th-grade biology teacher.

Gym: Mr. Lewis from grades 3-8. Every semester we had to do marching around the gym until it met his high expectations. (Column left march!) Then we could do something fun like softball or volleyball. Later on, perhaps as a result of a presidential fitness initiative, we were supposed to do certain activities, such as climbing ropes, which I was particularly bad at.

In 7th grade, kids from Oak Street, and from the Catholic school next door, entered our school. Mr. John Frenchko was the English teacher in 7B, 7A, and 9B; he was also the school’s assistant principal. Miss Gertrude Kane, who has the same first name as my mother, taught English 8B, 8A, and 9A. She had blue hair. She liked doing accents, and I foolishly let her know that I didn’t think she was particularly good at it. In the three marking periods, my grade went from A to B (after I made my comment) to C. I got a 90 on the final, yet got a C as a final grade.

By the end of 9th grade, we somehow had, again, only 16 students in the class. Nine of us went from K-9 together: Carol, Lois, Karen, Diane, Irene, Bill, Bernie, David, and me; if I had gone to Oak Street, obviously that would be untrue. Indeed, all of us except David, who stayed an extra semester so he could play basketball, graduated from high school together. They’ll all be turning 60 soon, and I’m likely to mention two or three of them in the coming months.

The school song:

Hail, Daniel Dickinson
Pride of our fair Binghamton
May we ‘ere our praises sing
With loyal hearts and true
May all our words and deeds
‘ere uphold thy glory
Guide us our whole lives through
Hail, Daniel Dickinson.

ABC Wednesday – Round 11