Tag Archives: radio

WWOZ’s Shrove Tuesday

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Woke up this morning and for a few moments thought it was Thursday. Went downstairs (my commute), fired up the laptop (odd phrasing, when you think about it) and soon realized it was Wednesday. Fridays are still the best workdays, naturally, but Thursdays aren’t bad either. You still have Friday to look forward to. So I must have wanted it to be Thursday.

Still, that’s odd, since I was fully aware of it being Shrove Tuesday the day before. As time allowed during the day, I listened online to WWOZ, nonprofit radio out of New Orleans that broadcasts New Orleans and Louisiana music. I’m sure it’s a local treasure. It should be a national treasure. It was one of the first online radio stations I ever encountered, by happy chance back in the early 2000s, when maintaining a connection consistently was no sure thing, especially if you used an iMac. I don’t listen to it enough.

But I did on Tuesday, for obvious reasons, and the celebration was on all day. The guys behind the mike got especially giddy as the evening wore on, maybe even rowdy, though I didn’t hear anything breaking. Just the kind of happy DJs – and those with some personality on display – that radio consolidation and rote programming have mostly banished from the airwaves.

Except maybe for morons in the morning? You know, drivetime voices, often a man and a woman, who yuk it up between songs and commercials and news snips, without regard to good sense or good taste. Is that still a thing? My commute, as you’d think, doesn’t involve radio.

Such duos were so much a part of radio programming 20 years ago that another of first radio stations I heard online, one from Sydney, as in Australia, was being hosted by a man and a woman – who yukked it up without regard to sense or taste. But with such fun Australian accents that I didn’t mind listening a while.

Now I seem to have further evidence that the algorithms are getting better. Better at drawing conclusions from their spying. Today those opaque entities suggested a version of “St. James Infirmary Blues” that I didn’t know.

Wow, that’s good. Tom Jones and the talented Rhiannon Giddens, once of the Carolina Chocolate Drops.

The song is associated with New Orleans jazzmen, of course, especially Louie Armstrong, and I spent a lot of yesterday with Carnival in the background. So was that the connection the machine made? Or is it that I’ve listened to many other versions of the song, or a clip from the same show, or all that other jazz (and I mean that literally and figuratively)? The bots ain’t telling.

Kentucky Flea Market Finds

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Many of my postcard agglomeration are blank, of course. Couldn’t say a percentage, but it would be substantial. I add to it regularly, so I expect the agglomeration will outlast me, if only by a little.

One of the places we went on our last full day in Louisville recently was a flea market. Not just any flea market, but the Kentucky Flea Market New Year’s Spectacular at the Kentucky Expo Center. A sea of tables in a vast structure and – wait, there’s another sea of tables in another, connected vast structure. Safe to say it was big.

One of the first tables we encountered offered postcards for sale, which didn’t turn out to be that common at the Spectacular. I spotted what turned out to be promotional cards for a radio show called Breakfast in Hollywood, hosted by one Tom Breneman. I wasn’t familiar with it.

The man at the table made me feel a youthful spring in my step by comparison: gnarled, he was, as they used to call old men. Full head of white hair and a shaggy white beard and wrinkles that often come from a lifetime of hard work just to get by.

“Do you know that show?” I asked.

“No, it was a long time ago.”

The old man was right – a long time ago, longer even than his lifetime, or possibly he was a small child when the show was on, and it was nothing a child would listen to. Fifty cents each, that’s not bad. Not particularly rare or valuable as a collectible, as far as I can tell. I bought a handful.

Breneman pictured with the famous.

And the less famous. They weren’t even in the same room, these two.

Uncle Corny, huh? I’d look further into him, but for now I’d rather wonder about him. A character brought to the show by its actor from years of honing in vaudeville?

Breakfast in Hollywood was a chat show, with host Breneman an experienced radio hand by the time he started the show in 1941. In the waning days of World War II he opened a restaurant in Hollywood from which to broadcast. The show had a large and loyal following among listeners, but in 1948 Breneman died suddenly.

Or, as a headline at the time put it, Tom Breneman, Famous Radio Star, Drops Dead

Later I read about the show, its high fame long evaporated. Got me into a mild counterfactual frame of mind. Breneman wasn’t that old when he dropped, only 46. Wife and youngish children. Television wasn’t far off – would he have made the transition successfully (many did), hosted a show or run of shows into the ’60s or even a little later, and be remembered among my cohort for some last semi-retirement gig like a regular square in the Peter Marshall Hollywood Squares?

It wasn’t to be. Sure, that isn’t one of the ponderous issues that counterfactuals usually spend their time with: What if Lincoln had lived longer, what if Germany won the Great War, what if Ronald Reagan had played Rick Blaine, that sort of thing. So what?

A man calling himself Korla Pandit (d. 1998) appeared regularly on Breakfast in Hollywood. If this article is even half accurate, he was one of the hardest working men in U.S. show business in the mid-century and later, and a lot else surprising besides. He’s had a documentary made about him. You can listen to his organ recordings, right now. There’s a biopic about this guy just waiting to be made.

Turtle Creek Parkway, Tanks and White Line Frankenstein

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Tooling along one of southern Wisconsin’s two-lane highways a week ago Friday, the radio station I happened to be tuned into – I’m not giving up terrestrial radio on road trips – introduced a new song by Alice Cooper, with a few words from the artist himself. That got my attention. Alice Cooper, shock rocker of my adolescence, is still making records?

He is, at the fine old age of 75. I never was a big fan of his, except of course for “School’s Out,” but I was glad to hear that all the same. Keep on keeping on, old guy.

For my part, I kept on driving, passing the greens and golds of high corn and the utilitarian buildings that support farming, intersections with gravel roads, hand-painted signs and, now and then, another vehicle. It was an obscenely pleasant July day, clear and warm and not nearly as hot as much of the rest of the country.

The new song came on. Title, “White Line Frankenstein.” Remarkable how consistent Alice Cooper has been through the years. What does he sound like, now that he’s a senior shock rocker? Sounds a lot like young Alice Cooper. A good showman finds something that works and sticks with it, and there’s no arguing his showman abilities.

About half way through the song I was inspired to pull off to the side of the road near where a rail line crossed the road, and take pictures.rural Wisconsin rural Wisconsin rural Wisconsin

Missed the last half of the song, but oh well.

Near Beloit, Wisconsin – close to the town of Shopiere, but not in any town, is a spot called Turtle Creek Parkway, a Rock County park. At four acres, it’s the rural equivalent of a pocket park, with its star attraction across a field next to Turtle Creek: the Tiffany Bridge, or the Tiffany Stone Bridge, vintage 1869, which as far as I know is still a working railroad bridge. (Tiffany is another nearby town.)Tiffany Bridge, Shopiere Tiffany Bridge, Shopiere

More than 20 years ago, I visited the bridge, accompanied by small child and pregnant wife. It wasn’t a park then, just a wide place in the road to stop. Enough people must have stopped there for the county to get a hint, I guess, and acquire and develop the land by adding a boat launch on Turtle Creek, a small rental event building, and a small parking lot.

Regardless, it’s hard to take a bad up-close picture of the structure.Tiffany Bridge, Shopiere Tiffany Bridge, Shopiere Tiffany Bridge, Shopiere

Just a hunch: the arches are too sturdy to destroy in a cost-effective way, so it abides.

Rather than return to the Interstate right away, I headed out from Shopiere onto the small roads where I eventually heard about Alice Cooper. Not long before that encounter, I spotted a tank in the hamlet of Turtle, Wisconsin.Turtle, Wisconsin

Another former Wisconsin National Guard tank, an M60A3.Turtle, Wisconsin Turtle, Wisconsin

It’s part of a plaza honoring veterans of the area. Interesting to run into another tank in southern Wisconsin so soon after the last one. I decided to keep an eye out for tanks on the rest of the drive, and sure enough I spotted more as the drive progressed.

Music Machine Extravaganza

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Earlier this month, Yuriko and I toured a suburban Chicago mansion stocked to the gills with antique mechanical devices, all asserted to be in working order (and I believe it). The collection emphasizes machines that play music, such as orchestrions, Victrolas and other phonographs, music boxes, and a theater pipe organ of massive proportions, but the place also sports an equally impressive carousel, a large number of penny- and quarter-arcade machines, a steam engine collection, slot machines, coin pianos, and a 24-foot bar.

I learned that the heyday of music machines was the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the art of precision machining was well developed, but before radio and standardized phonograph records dampened demand for such machines.

Our affable and knowledgeable tour guide requested those on the tour, about 40 of us, not post any pictures to social media. I took that to mean Facebook and Instagram and the like, not a standalone obscurity like BTST.

Even so, in the spirit of the request, I won’t post of the name of where we went or tag the photos, making it harder for search engines to find them. Of course, it would take only a modest amount of Googling to find out where we were, considering the description I’m going to offer. But I won’t post the information here.

The property dates from the 1970s, with later additions, on a piece of land that’s large enough that you can forget there’s a city or even suburbs not too far away. The family that owns it made their fortune selling a common foodstuff, and its packaging, in a big way. The place is not a museum, but still occupied by members of the family. Even so, they offer tours and other events periodically.

Though the tour wasn’t about the house, the building does have some nice features, such as the main entrance skylight and chandelier.
Mainly, you go to see the collection of antique machines, which are a fascination of the family patriarch and his children. It’s an extraordinary array of devices, housed in a succession of rooms.

The displays start at the main entrance where, among a number of other machines, is a JM Hof & Mukle roll organ at the top of the grand staircase.
The three-story Music Room includes a large number of machines.
I liked this charming Frati Barrel Organ, made in Germany ca. 1905.
A much larger Weber Otereo Orchestrion, also made in Germany, ca. 1910.
According to its sign, “… between 1905-1910, animated scenes were very popular in some models of German orchestrions. This early Weber Otereo features a scene depicting the train station in Gelsenkirchen, Germany, complete with back-lighted silhouettes of an animated train, zeppelin, and other items. Everything in the Otereo operates on air pressure…”

The guide demonstrated this machine, and we listened to it play but also watched the animated scene.

The centerpiece of the Music Room was the organ console.
Stepping back a bit.
And then turning around. This is view from the console, to give a little context.
The room counts as a small auditorium, and we listened to the theater organ from the balcony. Quite a wall of sound. It’s worth quoting the mansion’s web site at some length on this machine.

“The nucleus of the theatre organ, which was previously installed in the old music room (Wurlitzer opus #1571, built in 1927 for the Riviera Theatre in Omaha) has been expanded to 80 ranks of pipes. The overall result is the most versatile orchestral theatre pipe organ ever built.

“Behind the scrim are five chambers containing pipes, percussions, wind regulators and controls in a four-story-tall area. The console is patterned after the original from Chicago’s Paradise Theatre; it is mounted on the original Peter Clark lift from the Granada Theatre, which raises it from the lower level cage enclosure up to concert playing position.

“Mounted on the wall to the left are the 32′ Diaphone pipes, and to the right are the 32′ Bombarde pipes. A 32-note set of Deagan Tower Bells, the largest of which weighs 426 lb., hang on each side of the room… To the rear of the room, the ‘Ethereal’ pipe chamber in the attic echoes softly from the skylight area, while the brass ‘Trumpet Imperial’ and copper ‘Bugle Battaglia’ speak with great authority from the back wall.”

The American Orchestrion Room, elsewhere in the mansion, features art glass-front orchestrions, along with Tiffany and other art glass lamps and a large collection of Victorian chandeliers. This is only one end of the room, which is fairly long.
The room includes a violin-playing machine, the likes of which I’d never seen.
And a hand-cranked mechanical bird in a cage, with a mechanism inside covered with actual bird feathers. As might have amused the raja of one of the princely states about 100 years ago.

From there, stairs led to the lower level of the mansion, and a display of machines similar to music-making devices in some ways, but all together different in others. More about that tomorrow.

More on Fibber

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After mentioning Fibber McGee yesterday, I found an episode of Fibber McGee & Molly online and listened to it in segments, between everything else that I had to do. It’s been a while, but I’ve heard the show before on WDCB’s old-time radio program. The particular episode I just heard, dating from early 1941, deals with Fibber erroneously believing he’s been drafted. It didn’t include his closet.

Most of the comedy stems from the disbelief of various characters to Fibber’s news. He had been, after all, “in the last war.” (Something about working in a kitchen the whole time; no one called it the Great War, but there was a mention of Gen. Pershing)  The show holds up better than some (much) radio comedy from the era. The oddest thing to modern ears is the way one of the characters lapses into talking about the sponsor, Johnson Wax.

And when did linoleum become so important as a flooring? The late 19th century, come to find out, so that few listeners in 1941 would have remembered a time without it. To hear Johnson Wax tell it, of course, keeping your linoleum floors clean and shiny is a top priority.

Fibber McGee’s Garage

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Winter warm through most of Friday and Saturday – in the 50s at times – and then freezing rain came on Saturday night, followed by normal January temps again plus ice. Not major ice, just enough to leave thin sheets underfoot here and there, which I coated with sand. Why isn’t sand more popular for dealing with icy patches? It doesn’t melt the ice, but it neutralizes the slip danger, which is what matters.

But I couldn’t deal with the ice sheet on the Sienna with sand. Lilly wanted to practice some driving on Sunday, so I made her chip parts of the ice off the windows with me. If you’re going to have a car in the North, and a two-car garage organized by Fibber McGee so that only one car goes in there, you’ll have to de-ice your car windows sometimes.

I wonder how long Fibber McGee’s closet will be a widely understood reference. Or has it already passed into obscurity, and I didn’t get the memo? It’s easy to ignore that kind of change. I do it all the time. Then again, you can’t ever know what’s going to die out in the age of YouTube. (This is cheating, since it isn’t the radio show, but it’s still worth a link.)