I like to travel into the past, check around, see how things were going in another year, another era.
I do my time traveling with old movies, old records, old books, magazines...anything that will provide me with a gateway to a long ago time.
Tonight I watched a DVD of the classic movie, 42nd Street, from 1932, starring Warner Baxter, Dick Powell, Ruby Keeler and Ginger Rogers. A few days ago I watched another movie from 1932, Final Edition, with Pat O'Brien and Mae Clarke. Earlier still I watched the film Public Enemy, the 1931 starmaking vehicle for James Cagney.
When I poke my head into an era like the 1930s I like to look at the cars, clothes, hair styles, and listen to how people were talking. My brother-in-law, who also loves this old stuff, asked me once, "Did people say, 'you mugs' to other guys like they do in old gangster movies?" I don't know. I think the dialogue in movies pretty much reflects how people were talking, unless it takes place in a time long before any of us were born, and then I think it's made up.
Costuming is important, and it's wonderful to see men wearing ties, fedoras or caps everywhere they went; women in dresses and heels, and those hats! After watching Final Edition I thought nowadays we have definitely gone over the line for casual dress in this country. When you look at newsreel footage of a 1930s baseball game you see men in ties and hats! Maybe it's a bit much to wear a tie to a ballgame. What if you got mustard from your hot dog on your tie? And it's true, in those days a man or woman wasn't dressed without a hat.
I don't necessarily like the term, "old soul," but until something better comes along that's how I feel; like I really belong in the world of the American 1930s through the mid '40s. I was born in '47 but don't remember any of the 1940s. I just know I really like everything about that time.
The best part of being a 2009 guy longing for the 1930s and '40s is that I can do it with modern technology: DVD players, the Internet. Now that I've had the technology I wouldn't want to go without it, but in many ways modern technology makes me appreciate the past even more.
Tomorrow I'll wake up in 2009 but who knows where I'll visit? I'll spend as little time in tomorrow as possible, and as much time as I can poking around in the past.
After my posting of Thursday, and the stories of charges against adults for sex with underage kids, I wasn't going to write about the subject for a while, but just last night this popped up on my e-mail:
POST FALLS, Idaho (July 9) - An Idaho woman faces charges that she had sex with a 14-year-old boy that she was hired to watch in August 2007.
KXLY-TV reported Tuesday that 28-year-old Summer Nelson, of Post Falls, was charged Monday with four counts of lewd conduct with a child.
Authorities in Idaho said Summer Nelson, 28, had at least four sexual encounters with a 14-year-old boy she was hired to watch in the summer of 2007.
Court records say Nelson was a friend of the boy's mother. Police say the abuse was reported in December 2008, after the boy's mother grew suspicious of Nelson's attention toward the boy.
Investigators say Nelson told the boy's siblings that she was in love with their brother. Detectives say Nelson and the boy had at least four sexual encounters.
Nelson remains held in Kootenai County Jail on $50,000 bond. It was not immediately known whether she had a lawyer.
Then in my morning paper more stories, both of these about men involved with female teens, first the story of a Latter-day Saints Seminary principal, arrested for a two-month involvement with an underage girl.
LDS principal faces sex charges
HIGHLAND, Utah(July 10)
"Police say Michael Jay Pratt [no age given] began exchanging text messages with a 16-year-old girl on May 1. Pratt would check her out of school and take her to various locations around the Utah valley for sexual acts, according to Sgt Matt Higley with the Utah County Sex Crimes Task Force.
The locations included Provo Canyon, Alpine, Highland, Goshen and Eureka, Higley said. Pratt also took the girl into at least one unoccupied home, he said.
Higley said the encounters involved a range of different acts--"basically everthing but full intercourse." The victim told police about the alleged crimes earlier this week, Higley said."
Another story, same day:
Accused of sex with teen with teen, teacher hit with new felony rape charges By Steven Hunt
FILLMORE, Utah(July 10)
"Keith Lorraine Gillins--a Millard High School teacher and former Fillmore mayor accused of having sex with a female student--is now in even deeper trouble with the law.
Gillins, 61, was charged last month in 4th district Court with two counts of third-degree felony unlawful sexual conduct with a 16- or 17-year-old, each carrying a potential term of up to five years.
But prosecutors this week dropped those charges and filed four counts of first-degree felony rape, each count punishable for up to life in prison, and 11 counts of second-degree felony forcible sexual abuse, each punishable by up to 15 years in prison.
The new charges indicate the alleged sex acts occurred without the victim's consent, and that Gillins occupied a 'position of special trust' in relation to the victim, by virtue of his role as a teacher.
. . .Gillins worked at Millard High School from 1973 to 1979, according to the Millard County School District. He left the school to sell insurance and was Fillmore's mayor from 1986 to 1997. Gillins returned in 2003 to Millard High, where he taught English and coached boys' basketball."
In both of these cases the men were in a "position of special trust", which is added to the charges now so the law can really sock it to teachers and clergymen, scout leaders and those who have a special obligation to keep kids safe.
In both of the stories the writer uses the word "victim" to describe the young female, but there seem to be be degrees of victimization there. If the 61-year-old teacher and former mayor, or the Latter-day Saint seminary principal have no history of prior sexual misconduct, and none is mentioned in either story, then exactly what precipitated their full force bellyflops into the waters of sin? Both of these men are educated, with college degrees. No families are mentioned but they probably both have them, so why are they in the predicaments they find themselves in?
But it isn't at all unusual to find men in illicit relationships with young girls, just unusual to hear of women in relationships with young boys. I should say it's getting more usual to hear these stories, and it's made me sit up and take notice.
Something else I noticed; Summer Nelson appears to have Michael Jackson's nose. A nose for young boys, perhaps, hmmm?
On a Sunday morning in June, 1966, I read a startling news article. High school graduation had been the previous Friday night, and one of my former classmates, Roger K., had died after graduating. Poor Roger. He was a pathetic character. I had graduated with my class in 1965, but Roger, who was slow, had to go another year to earn enough credits. Roger had one friend, Mike. Roger, Mike and Mike's mom celebrated the graduation. Mike's mom bought them both bottles of vodka and then the three of them got drunk.
Sometime during the night, Roger, who had never had a drink of liquor in his life before his graduation celebration, choked on his own vomit and died.
A year later I was with the U.S. Army near Nuremberg, Germany. I felt particularly stressed; I was a draftee who didn't want to be there, was having trouble finding acceptance from the guys I was with. It was a classic case of feeling like I didn't fit in.
There were a few other guys who felt the same way and so we misfits fit in with each other. It was a Friday night and we were at the PX having a couple of beers. We had a locker inspection the next morning, which meant everything had to be clean and neat, and all cleaned field gear was to be placed in precise order on our bunks. I'd been working on it before meeting the guys for a beer. I assumed I was prepared for the inspection.
One of the guys, Patrick, had been to the dispensary that day and gotten a prescription. Patrick took the Rx bottle, divided the pills into five stacks, one stack for each of us, and we took them, washing them down with beer. It was one of the dumbest things I've ever done. I still don't know what the pills were, or what they were going to do to me, especially with alcohol in my system.
We went back to the barracks about 9:00 p.m., and Patrick pulled out a bottle of vodka. Alcohol was strictly forbidden in the barracks, so Patrick said, "Help me finish this so I can get rid of the bottle before the inspection."
I took some swigs out of the bottle and that's the last I can remember until I was being screamed at and punched by fists. I was urinating, but I was standing at a locker in my room, using it as a urinal and two of my roommates were doing the screaming and hitting. It was 5:00 in the morning, and time to get up, but I was obviously still intoxicated. I realized later that the position of the lockers from my bunk was the same as my bathroom toilet from my bed at home, so I was likely dreaming.
I found a towel and helped clean up, and then the same soldier who'd screamed at me helped me get my bunk prepared for the inspection by laying out my field gear. I just stood there, stupidly watching him. When it came time for the inspection I was weaving. My eyes were blurry; I hadn't brushed my teeth and there was a rotten odor of pizza and alcohol that I could taste. My commanding officer stood in front of me and watched me sway slightly back and forth. "Are you drunk? First Sergeant, put this man on report. I believe he's drunk."
The First Sergeant answered with a snappy, "Sir!" and wrote my name on his clipboard. He also looked at my field gear. He got in my face. "You call this clean?" he hollered. "I call it clean," I answered. I never would have said that had I not been drunk.
After the inspection we were excused and I sat on my bunk feeling awful. I'd just screwed up and was facing an Article 15, company punishment, not to mention having the mother of all hangovers. It was then my roommates told me of my night. I'd staggered in about 10:00, fallen backwards, fully clothed, on my bunk. I was unconscious, but suddenly threw up all over myself, and not only that, I started to choke on my vomit. Corporal Schrage, the same man whose locker I'd peed on, who had also helped me get my field gear ready, told me the story.
"We grabbed you and threw you in the shower."
"With my clothes on?"
"Yeah, when you stopped puking we pulled your clothes off and threw them in your laundry bag. Luckily you got most of the puke on you and not your bunk."
Corporal Schrage and my other roommates, whose names I've forgotten, had kept me from becoming a casualty like Roger. I thanked them. I didn't get that drunk again the rest of my time in Germany. The First Sergeant never did discipline me for showing up hung over at the inspection, probably because he never had a morning he wasn't hung over. Corporal Schrage was transferred to the States shortly after.
That was 42 years ago. I've thought about that incident occasionally over the years. Before my assignment to Germany my mother and father were worried I'd be sent to Vietnam and killed. How would that have been to get notified that their 20-year-old son had died, not from enemy bullets, but from choking on his own vomit?
I had a close call and through the quick actions of others my life was spared. I wish poor slow-witted Roger had also had someone looking out for him.
Sally and I watched the Capitol Fourth program on PBS Saturday night. We were both startled to see Aretha Franklin. She has never been slim but it looks like she's shockingly overweight, and that morbid obesity can't be good for her health. The red dress probably didn't help the over all visual effect, either.
I guess we're not giving her much R-E-S-P-E-C-T, are we?
Anyway, despite dissing her for her Saturday night ensemble, I remember Aretha with a lot of fondness. Some of her songs can't be topped and no one has ever been able to successfully cover them. Dionne Warwick did "I Say A Little Prayer"*, but how many people remember her version, even thought it was also a hit record?
Here are some great videos of early Aretha. I think "I Never Loved A Man" might be one of the all time greatest soul songs. I don't know how you feel about it, but to me it is a song that never fails to move me.
*Warwick and songwriter Burt Bacharach were linked with a string of 1960's hits. It's too bad that Aretha came along and stole her thunder, but then, Aretha created thunder.
Have you seen this story about the Arizona mom who had some boys, including her 12 and 14-year-old sons, out committing robberies so she could pay her bills? This female Fagin was coaching them how to do it, and was their getaway driver.
The thought occurred to me, I think I saw this story as an episode of the old TV show, Dragnet.
Any time a mom is involved in crime it conjures up stories of Ma Barker and the notorious Barker-Karpis gang of the 1930s. In the stories Ma is the ringleader of the gang, teaching her sons how to shoot, rob banks, break out of prison, even kidnap a rich man for ransom.
According to Bryan Burrough, who wrote the book Public Enemies, on which the current movie, Dillinger, is based, much of what we know about Ma Barker was a fiction concocted by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Ma had been killed in a shootout with her son, Fred, and while the FBI could justify shooting a criminal like Fred Barker, shooting to death an old woman wasn't so easily justified, hence Hoover's embellishment of the facts.
As Burrough put it, "History is written by the victors, they say, and there was no one alive who would come forward to dispute Hoover's fabricated story. Never mind that there was no indication whatsoever in Bureau files that Ma Barker had ever fired a gun, robbed a bank, or done anything more criminal than live off her sons' ill-gotten gains. According to Hoover, Ma Barker was 'a criminal mastermind.'" Reporters ran with it.
The Arizona mom isn't Ma Barker, even the fabricated J. Edgar Hoover version of Ma Barker, but the Arizona mom still has plenty to answer for.
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Because of Governor Mark Sanford connection to Argentina, i.e., having a mistress who lives there, several people have come forward to remind us of Congressman Wilbur Mills and "The Argentine Firecracker," Fanne Fox (also spelled Foxe). In 1974 Mills was a powerful congressman who was having an affair with a stripper. There were a couple of embarrassing incidents and Mills' career was over by the next election, 1976.
Mills was a Democrat, but Republican or Democrat, it doesn't matter. If a guy has an affair he usually isn't thinking of party affiliation and how this will look to anyone else. John Edwards can tell you that; Bill Clinton can tell you that.
Mark Sanford is just another from a long, long list of powerful men put into the hot, bright beam of the public spotlight. It isn't like a percentage of the rest of the population isn't doing the same thing, it's that when people are in positions of public trust there seems to be more hypocrisy in their actions.
Personally, I think the public really needs to get over its fascination with bedroom politics. It's titillating, but human beings are deeply flawed when it comes to sex; we like sex, but we're also voyeurs, and we just like to see other people caught in flagrante delicto. The best thing about the Sanford affair is that it drove Jon and Kate off the front pages. Like the Octomom, their 15 minutes of fame is just about over, and good riddance.
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I'm not usually a big fan of the Sunday magazine, Parade, but the cartoons they ran July 5 were great. The "big-intestined" joke caught me by surprise and I think it's brilliant. Guys with big bellies should use that excuse.
Granite High School in South Salt Lake, Utah, is like a person who has attained great age. You respect them for living so long, but know they probably won't make it much longer. So when the Granite School District Board of Education finally voted to close the 103-year-old school, there were a lot of tears, but everyone knew there'd be a helluva wake.
Sally and I went to the school on Friday, July 3, 2009, for an open house to allow us all to say goodbye. I never attended the school, but Sally was there when it included a junior high school, and my son graduated from Granite in 1995. I went into the school every day as part of my job and learned, like many who cross that threshold, that Granite was more than just a school; it was a place in peoples' hearts. I've only been retired for six months but already felt pangs of nostalgia.
Click on the pictures for full-size images.
I was surprised, considering it was the day before a federal holiday and a three (or four) day weekend for many, that I saw as many people there as I did. But then, there is a very strong bond between the school and its alumni.
Granite H.S. students were called Granite Farmers. At the time the school was built in 1906 it was at the end of Salt Lake City's limits, and the area was mostly agricultural. Salt Lake has expanded so much Granite is now practically in the middle of town, but for a long time it represented the south end of Salt Lake. The students who went there over its century-long history were working class kids, not just agricultural, but kids whose dads worked in machine shops, were carpenters and meatcutters, all very blue collar. I worked with many Granite H.S. grads over the years and they all described a similar upbringing.
When the school was finally closed it had just under 300 students, most of them immigrants. A few years ago the sports program was closed because it cost too much money. If kids were jocks they went to other schools, so it left the kids who were there for reasons other than sports.
The teachers and administrators I worked with who had been at Granite High and then moved to other schools all had wonderful things to say about their Granite High experience.
There was a saying, "Granite High School is the District's best kept secret."
My son, David, who was in line to go to another high school, was introduced to Granite and opted to go there instead. He thrived and I believe his high school years were good ones for him. I will always have Granite High School to thank for that.
While we were in the school several people talked to us, complete strangers, who heard me talking to staff members about my 32 years working around the place. One man asked me what the District would do with the school after it was closed. I assumed it would be torn down. It would cost millions to retrofit for earthquake proofing, for instance.
This picture shows the foot of the stairs to the gym bleachers. You just don't see that sort of thing in a modern building. It's classic and classy.
There was a tradition I always observed. The seal, laid into the floor in the main building, was donated by the Class of 1925, and dedicated in 1926. It was protected from being walked on, although you can barely see the theater ropes in my photo.
No one was allowed to walk on the seal, and on those days I walked into the school and the ropes weren't there, even if I was the only person in the hallway, even if no one was looking, I would not have dared put a foot on that insignia. If the rest of the building goes the way of the wrecking ball, I'm pretty sure someone will save this 84-year-old seal.
There was a lot of tradition in that school; thousands of students had walked the halls, sat in the classrooms, gotten their diplomas, and moved on into the world. The graduating classes will still be planning reunions (the Class of '89 has theirs coming up soon), and whether or not there is an actual building on the corner of 3300 South and 500 East in South Salt Lake, Utah, there will always be something of Granite High School in each and every one of those people who were lucky enough to go there.
Sky Saxon is gone. He died on the same day as Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson, and obviously sank to the bottom of the news pile. He wasn't a major cultural icon, but a rocker who made a splash in the mid-'60s with the garage/psychedelic rock band the Seeds. The ultra-fickle music world passed him by. Sky Sunlight Saxon, as he became known, had a loyal following, and was much appreciated by his fans.
YouTube has videos by Sky and the Seeds. That's him with his great Brian Jones hairdo, singing lead. Here are two of his greatest hits. I guess you could say he was a two-hit wonder, but then, that's two more hits than 99.99% of us have had.
People sure can make a mess when it comes to love. Case in point is the South Carolina governor, Mark Sanford, who has a wife in town and a mistress in Argentina.
I give the man credit at least for finding a place to tryst without worrying about the wife walking in on him.
We have all heard the story of how he disappeared for five days, claimed he was hiking the Appalachian Trail, when he was actually in Argentina with his lover. He got caught and was all over the news until the death of Michael Jackson. He's still in the news, which shows his story has legs, as the media love to say.
My wife and I have been married 40 years (here's the story of how we eloped.) There have been trouble spots along the way but we stuck it out and now I think I am qualified to talk about marriage.
In an Associated Press story from July 1, the reporter said, "Sanford said he is trying to fall back in love with his wife, Jenny, even as he grapples with his deep feelings for [Maria] Chapur." But also in the article Sanford said he would die "knowing that I had met my soul mate."
Attention, Governor, attention. This old married man would make the point that in one breath claiming to try to fall back in love with your wife and then publicly humiliate her by calling your mistress your soul mate, is really a big mistake. You won't win her back with that sort of talk. In this case, telling the truth is not what you want to do. Do you talk about state matters like you talk about the deepest and most intimate details of your private life? You probably don't, so shut up already with the soul mate talk.
My suggestion would be to never speak of it again, and then do the right thing: resign your job as governor because no one will take you seriously ever again. You have mortally offended your constituents, especially married women. Give your wife a divorce, let her move on with her life. Move to Argentina, make it a permanent move, marry your mistress. You'll be far away from the damage you've caused with your lies and worse, your truths.
More pictures of my attempt to bring back the old term, "hubba-hubba," now disappeared, but once a cornerstone of a fresh guy's vocabulary. A masher couldn't mash without it, and I miss it, so I'm handing out the hubba-hubbas to bring it back.
Hubba-hubba to Audrey, of whom there cannot be enough beautiful pictures.
Hubba-hubba to the Bettie Pageboy-hairdo girls who are sex-bait for the racket boys.
Hubba-hubba to those photogenic and leggy lovelies the camera caresses.
Hubba-hubba to the beauties on the beach.
Hubba-hubba to the girl who shows that a beret is more than okay. (Another pic swiped from Starlet Showcase, the great hubba-hubba blog on the web.)
Hubba-hubba to the babe who proves the old saying, "More than a handful is wasted," is just not true.
This Sports Illustrated issue is nearly 30 years old, but a big hubba-hubba to model Christie Brinkley, who still looks great.
Hubba-hubba to artist Margaret Brundage's daughter. Mom used her as a model for her painted covers of Weird Tales. This one is from 1932.
Finally, hubba-hubba to the fightin' femmes! Hope you don't run your nylons, girls.
I picked up a copy of the June, 1957 Argosy magazine at an antique store. I was immediately taken by a great article on an historic event I hadn't heard of. I'm sure you're a lot like me; there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy, and there are innumerable historic events I have vague or no knowledge of. A disastrous 1863 trip in a hot air balloon, which influenced Jules Verne, was new to me, and told in a very entertaining way by Vincent Starrett.
Starrett was a newspaperman, essayist, critic, novelist, weird stories writer, famous member of The Baker Street Irregulars, the Sherlock Holmes society, and all around renaissance man of belle lettres. He was born in 1886 and died in 1974.
The article is copyright 1957 by Popular Publications, Inc.
While we're on the subject of writers, here's the back cover of the magazine, featuring Jack London getting loaded on Old Crow with his buddy.
I read once that a person's earliest memories are usually from about three years of age. I'm sure there are people who remember events from earlier in their life, but for me, events during my third year are the earliest I remember.
I was three-and-a-half when my brother Rob was born in October, 1950. I remember Dad taking me to a diner (yes, a real old-fashioned sidecar diner with barstools and greasy burgers) for dinner a couple of times because Mom was in the hospital. I remember standing outside the hospital, because children under 12 weren't allowed in except as patients, waving to her in a second floor window.
Grandpa and Grandma took us in Grandpa's 1947 Cadillac to pick up Mom and Rob. When we got home I wanted to hold him and Mom said no but Grandma overruled her and it was the first time in my life I saw my brother, who I also just saw a couple of weeks ago, over 58 years later, and the first time I ever held a baby.
There was an earlier incident that has stuck in my memory. A friend and I were in the next block over from the suburban Salt Lake City street where we lived. We were cutting through someone's property to get home, climbing through the slats of a white fence. A young girl, dressed from head-to-toe as a cowgirl from a Western movie, was sitting on the fence and asked us how old we were. I held up three fingers.
I remember thinking of her as some sort of vision and doggone it if seeing cowgirls haven't always given me sort of a buzz ever since.
The cowgirl in this picture is Yvonne DeCarlo, lifted from Starlet Showcase. Isn't she pretty in that outfit? Makes me wanna holler "Yeeeee-haw!" Yvonne later went on to another sort of outfit--the one that immortalized her to us Baby Boomers--as Lily Munster. But all thoughts of Lily were erased when I saw her perched on this white fence. The memory of that longago day in 1950 and "my" cowgirl, my earliest memory, came rushing back to me.
I saw the movie Westworld on its first run, and thought I'd watch it again to see if it was anything like what I remembered. I'd forgotten a few details but as it turned out it had impressed me enough the first time that my memories were mostly intact.
The movie, whose advertising tagline is, "Where nothing can possibly go worng" (sic) is a great example of Murphy's Law: "If anything can possibly go wrong, it will." As much as human beings strive for zero defects, occasionally something will go horribly out of kilter.
In the case of Westworld, this is why Peter, played by Richard Benjamin, is in such a jam. A robot, programmed as a gunslinger, is stalking him. Robots in the resort are normally programmed to never harm humans (the Isaac Asimov "Three Laws of Robotics"), but something has gotten screwed up. Benjamin has already shot and "killed" the gunslinger twice, and now it's the robot's turn.
Besides that, the other underlying theme behind the movie is the pleasure principle. In a futuristic amusement park full of robots built to respond to human needs and worst tendencies, you can do what you want. At Westworld, as well as its sisters within the $1000-a-day Delos park, Romanworld and Medievalworld, people are allowed to interact sexually with the robots. Peter is able to have sex with a Western-style prostitute, and it's plain that women and men go to Romanworld to take part in the orgies (inferred, not shown). In the late 1960s and during the 1970s there was a sexual revolution which meant that people felt free to go nuts. It had a lot to do with the times, but nowadays Las Vegas is catering to that crowd with its slogan, "What goes on in Vegas stays in Vegas." Uh huh. Go to Vegas, get a hooker or have an affair, take drugs...and when you go home it was all part of your Vegas vacation and you are absolved of any sins or wrongdoing. Whoever thought up that slogan should be given a prize of some sort of pointing out the obvious, that Vegas is a town where people are encouraged to do things they might not otherwise do.
Westworld, written and directed by the late Michael Crichton, was a huge success at the box office in 1973, and it could be this message of sin that struck the audience of the time. Maybe a lot of conservative people who saw it thought people out getting laid deserved what happened to them, so having the hedonistic pleasure-seekers pay for their sins with their lives was appealing.
The casting is strange in parts. I thought Yul Brynner was an odd choice to play the robot gunslinger, until I read the robot was modeled after Brynner's character in The Magnificent Seven, even to wearing the same clothes. Brynner was shorter than the other lead actors, and he had a protruding belly. Luckily he didn't have much to say, other than act like a robot. Brynner always struck me as a silent movie actor in a sound movie era. He didn't seem to have a natural stance, but appeared to be posing all the time, and no matter the part, like Ahnold Schwarzenegger, he had his accented voice (in Westworld his dialogue was so sparse, maybe less than a page worth, that he mostly lost his accent), with which he delivered his lines in a melodramatic style. Richard Benjamin and James Brolin, as the other leads, were very good.
Westworld panders to a fantasy people have, that you can have sex without any kind of commitment (after all, they're only robots), and/or that you can kill without fear of punishment (after all, again only robots). If someone were to actually provide such a service there would be a lot of horny wannabe serial killers out there breaking down the gates to get in. The other message is that if you play you pay, sometimes with your life.
Listening to all the news about Michael Jackson's death reminded me that somewhere in my (shudder) basement was an old Michael Jackson doll. Luckily, it wasn't buried under mountains of clutter, and I found it quickly.
I estimate it is from 1983 or '84, when Michael Jackson still looked African-American. It's missing the glove. Sally remembers our son playing with it and like a lot of things, it got misplaced. David is forgiven; he was about nine-years-old at the time and kids lose things.
I notice that Michael's fly is open. Tsk tsk.
I read this morning that Michael Jackson CDs are racing off shelves. It's amazing to me how someone can be looked down on when they're alive and idolized when they're dead. Since his death Michael Jackson has taken over the evening news spots, with constant regurgitations of what is known, and endless speculations on what caused his death.
Last night Keith Olbermann had an eye-opening interview with Jackson's friend, Deepak Chopra, who told that at some time in the past Jackson had asked him to write him a prescription for painkillers, Demerol or OxyContin. According to some sources Jackson had been injected with Demerol within an hour of his death. Even though we're waiting for the tox report, I wouldn't be surprised at all if he died from an overdose. It's true that special people have enablers who make it easy to get anything they want. Elvis had a doctor writing his Rx's; John Belushi had people shoving drugs at him, and according to reports Jackson may have had a live-in doctor getting him drugs.
The other thing that is coming out is how much in debt Jackson was, and how much his estate will make from his death. As they said about Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and others who died prematurely, dying is a great career move.
Jackson was bizarre, and some of the pictures I've seen of him lately make his face look like a kabuki mask, but 50 is far from old, and there will always be those videos that show him at various stages of his life, from childhood on, which will solidify his image in the public mind.
Here's a story I heard:
As a young man Michael Jackson thought he'd die by 40, but he actually died at 21. He went to heaven. He met God and said, "I have a good career going! Why did I die! It wasn't my time!"
God looked in his big book and said, "You're right, Michael. There's been a mistake. You're supposed to have many more years, and die a very old man. I'm sending you back."
When Michael was revived and returned to the world of the living he thought, "Gee, if I'm not going to die when I'm 40 I'd better make the most of it."
That's when the plastic surgery started, one procedure after another, until he didn't look anything like he did at age 21. So after he died at age 50 he went back to heaven and stormed into God's presence. "You lied to me! You told me I'd die an old man. I died too early!"
God looked him up and down for several minutes, then said, "Michael Jackson. I didn't recognize you."
In 1956 artist Norman Mingo, recently retired at age 60, answered an ad for an illustrator. It was for Mad Magazine, which wanted to go with painted covers showing some sophistication. They also wanted to spotlight their mascot, Alfred E. Neuman. There's a story behind that.
Alfred E. Neuman had been pictured, in one form or another, since the 19th Century on calendars, in ads for painless dentistry, as someone lacking in iodine, etc. Mad creator, Harvey Kurtzman, used him on the magazine, but called him Melvin Cowsnowski. When the name Alfred E. Neuman was settled on history was made. To go along with the name, Kurtzman's successor on Mad, Albert B. Feldstein, wanted a three dimensional look to Alfred, and Mingo supplied it.
For years you could send Mad 25¢ and get a lithograph like this, with Mingo's name removed.
When Mad used Mingo's Alfred as an advertising icon or on products his name was erased. That's probably so he couldn't sue them and say it was "his" kid they were using.
Mad publisher, William M. Gaines, who died in 1992, was an old-fashioned publisher who owned all the artwork, and used it over and over again. Here's a painting by artist Jack Rickard, showing Alfred morphing into Gaines.
This is a scan of the original art for Mingo's original cover, Mad #30, which first featured Alfred, done during the time of the 1956 Presidential election. It sold at auction last year for $230,000, which is probably more than Mingo earned his entire career painting Alfred.
This is a scan of issue #32, with a clever use of Alfred. It was one of the first issues of Mad I saw, and I remember it vividly. I'd never seen anything like it.
Gaines was sued a couple of times by people claiming they had the copyright to the kid, but every time they produced what they claimed as their picture of the kid, the Mad research people turned up an even earlier version.
So while the kid wasn't copyright and Mad could adopt him as a mascot, don't use Alfred as Mad uses Alfred, because now he's copyright. Mad's lawyers stamp out anyone trying to use the Mad version of the kid, although you'd be safe using the antique images, like I'm showing here.
Mingo did many covers when he was in his seventies, and his Mad work, produced during the time the magazine reached a circulation of millions, got him more recognition than his years as an advertising artist. I guess it was a good thing he answered that classified ad in 1956!
Mingo died in 1980.
Lately Mad is using the Obama image effectively; this cover by Mark Fredrickson cleverly morphs Alfred's face onto Obama's. The poster on the bottom is a satire on the famous Obama poster.
Tonight I watched a DVD of the classic movie, 42nd Street, from 1932, starring Warner Baxter, Dick Powell, Ruby Keeler and Ginger Rogers. A few days ago I watched another movie from 1932, Final Edition, with Pat O'Brien and Mae Clarke. Earlier still I watched the film Public Enemy, the 1931 starmaking vehicle for James Cagney.
