Main Street: The dowdy world goes shopping

[Postcard from the collection of Maggie Land Blanck. Used by permission.]

That's Main Street in Hackensack, New Jersey, pictured on a postcard postmarked 1971. That's Main Street as I knew it, circa 1969 and 1970, when it was my introduction to bookstores and record stores, via a short bus ride from my town of Ridgefield. I was in middle school then, not old enough to drive.

When I think about Main Street, I can reconstruct it only as isolated points of interest amid long stretches of commercial something-or-other. There was the Relic Rack, my first record store (my friend Chris Sippel, with whom I first made these bus trips, was listening to oldies). I bought my first blues records at the Relic Rack, the Columbia double-album The Story of the Blues. Across the street a little further up, there was Woolworth's, where I found Canned Heat's Living the Blues in the $1.99 section, back when every Woolworth's, Kreskge, and W.T. Grant had one or more bins of bargain LPs. Then there was Prozy's Army-Navy, where I once bought a blue web belt. Further up the street and back across was Hackensack Record King (such modesty in that name). I can remember buying John Lee Hooker and Canned Heat's Hooker 'n Heat there. Then the Hackensack Library, where I borrowed Art Tatum records and books on T.S. Eliot. And up another block or so, Womrath's, the first great bookstore I ever knew.

Imagine: a large independent bookstore on a downtown street in a modest-sized city. I remember many books from Womrath's: James Joyce's Ulysses (a Modern Library hardcover), Dashiell Hammett's novels, Jorge Luis Borges' Labyrinths, and Frederick Copleston's multi-volume History of Philosophy, small paperbacks whose bindings tended to crack when the books were opened. I can also remember standing in Womrath's and puzzling over Wisconsin Death Trip, which seemed too scary to bring home.

Near the end of the shopping territory was a corner shoe store where I bought Adidas and Converse All-Stars and Pumas. The Pumas were Clydes, named for the Knicks' Walt Frazier ("Clyde," apparently in honor of a hat like one that Warren Beatty worn in Bonnie and Clyde). Yes, that's the Walt Frazier who now does commercials for Just for Men hair coloring.

The strangest store on Main Street, so strange that I can't place it in relation to the others, was Wehman Brothers, which seemed to be partly a book warehouse and partly a used-book store. The storefront windows were always filled with tools, plumbing fixtures, and pieces of machinery. The attraction of this place for me was an enormous inventory of Dover paperbacks -- not as cheap as Dover's Thrift editions, but still modestly priced.

There were two Wehman brothers, old guys who might be described as heavy-set Collyer brothers. One smoked cigars and sat behind a counter piled with papers and books. He claimed to have known Andy Razaf, the lyricist for "Ain't Misbehavin'," "Black and Blue," and "Honeysuckle Rose." I remember the other brother once showing me a picture of a bodybuilder, minus clothing, and asking if I wanted to buy it. All I could think of saying was "No." After that, I didn't go back. Further strangeness: I have now discovered, via Google, that the Wehmans were apparently also publishers, reprinting books on Freemasonry, hypnosis, magic, sexuality, and UFOs.

My teenaged shopping habits mirrored those of the general population: though I visited Womrath's all through college (supplemented by the Gotham Book Mart and the Strand Book Store in Manhattan), I forsook the rest of Main Street as soon as I could drive to Garden State Plaza in Paramus, the home of Sam Goody's, a then-great record store. Life in malltime had begun.

I still have every record and book I've mentioned in this post. Of the stores I've mentioned, only Hackensack Record King, now simply The Record King, remains.

*

July 2021: The Record King is closing because of Main Street redevelopment. And as I now know, the “Wehman brothers” were Joe and Murray Winters. The Winters bought the Wehman business in 1936 and moved from Manhattan to Hackensack in 1953 — or was it 1962? The store closed in 1979. Two articles from the New Jersey newspaper The Record — 1, 2 — tell the story, with two dates for the move. Thanks, librarian.

Hackensack, New Jersey (Postcards from the collection of Maggie Land Blanck)

Related posts
The dowdy world goes to a party
The dowdy world on film
The dowdy world on radio
Record stores

The Duke Box

[Duke Ellington at the Hurricane Club, 1943. Photograph by Gordon Parks. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Prints and Photographs Division.]
The Duke Box: Duke Ellington in the Forties
(8 CDs, Storyville Records, 2006)

The Duke Box collects more than eight hours of live recordings of the Ellington band, 1940-49. At least some of the music has been issued before (I have about half the contents on LPs), but it's a pleasure to find it all here, under one roof in a sturdy new house.

In the 1940s, recorded music was still bound by the confines of the 78 rpm disc. So the first thing to note about The Duke Box is the simple excitement of hearing the Ellington band stretch out in performances that range well beyond three-minute mark: a six-minute-long "Black and Tan Fantasy," an almost seven-minute-long "Across the Track Blues," an eight-minute-plus arrangement of "Take the A Train." Extended Ellington performances -- "Creole Rhapsody," "Hot and Bothered," "Reminiscing in Tempo" -- were already available on disk, of course, but they were recordings in parts, split up across the sides of one or more 78s.

The second thing to note about these recordings might be the variety of their circumstances: radio broadcasts from nightclubs in Boston (the Southland Café), New York (the Hurricane, the New Zanzibar) and Los Angeles (the Hollywood Empire); studio performances for broadcast to British audiences and American military personnel; concert recordings from New York (Carnegie Hall), Washington, D.C. (the Howard Theatre), and military bases in Maryland and Virginia; and a private recording from a ballroom in Fargo, North Dakota.

The name Fargo has magical properties for an Ellington fan -- on November 7, 1940, this northern city's Crystal Ballroom was the site of a spectacular Ellington performance that happened to be recorded by two young fans, Dick Burris and Jack Towers. The 2.5 hours of music captured in Fargo are stuff of legend, music by one of Ellington's greatest bands, the so-called Blanton-Webster band, with bassist Jimmy Blanton (who permanently changed the role of the bass as a time-keeping instrument) and tenor saxophonist Ben Webster. The Fargo recording has been available for some time now -- I bought the LPs when they were first issued by the Book-of-the-Month Club in 1978. But the newly remastered music may now be heard with greater clarity, making the contrast between this live performance and the band's 1940 studio work even more dramatic. Listening to the Fargo CDs, it's as if one's ears have just popped: everything that was murky and muted has suddenly become clear. I make this analogy as someone who in fact loves the warmth of Ellington's 1940 studio recordings. But the sound of the band in Fargo is extraordinary, with an energy and excitement that the studio recordings simply do not convey. The final full-length tune from Fargo, an all-out "St. Louis Blues," stands as one of the most exciting moments in all of Ellington's music: Barney Bigard's clarinet solo, Ivie Anderson's vocal (including a call-and-response chorus with the band), Webster's tenor, Joe "Tricky Sam" Nanton's trombone (quoting "Whistle While You Work"!), and an ensemble ending that dips into "Black and Tan Fantasy" and "Rhapsody in Blue."

Nothing else here is quite as astonishing as Fargo, but every disc has many great moments and sound that is always at least adequate, and sometimes excellent. Among the highlights: a deft "Tootin' through the Roof" with Rex Stewart and Cootie Williams, Harry Carney's swampy bass clarinet and Betty Roche's cool vocal on "I Don't Know What Kind of Blues I Got," Johnny Hodges' alto on "Laura," Harold Baker's trumpet on "Star Dust," and Joe Nanton's solo on the Carnegie Hall "Black and Tan Fantasy." Nanton contributed a distinctive solo to the first recordings of "Black and Tan" in 1927, a solo which had long since become an integral element of the piece. Stepping forward to make his statement in 1943, he does not simply reproduce the now-familiar solo, as Ellingtonians so often did. Instead, he seems to be intent on producing the greatest solo of his life.

The only performances in The Duke Box that leave me less than sent are some of those from a 1949 radio broadcast. Here the Ellington band seems to have stepped into The Future, The World of Tomorrow, where everything is louder, faster, and dripping with chrome (or, more accurately, brass). One number is performed, as the announcer puts it, "1949-style." "With fins," I'd say, though cars didn't yet have them. Even here though the beauty of Ellington's music shines through (despite the chrome), as with "Just A-Sittin' and A-Rockin'" and "Cotton Tail."

It's increasingly difficult to get a good sampling of Duke Ellington's music from any source other than a "collector's" label. The Duke Box offers a great sampling of Ellingtonia, for $9 a disc via Amazon. Thank you, Storyville!

The Duke Box (Amazon.com)
Storyville Records
The Duke Was Here (The story of the Fargo recording, from NDSU Magazine)

A related post
Ellington for beginners (What to listen to first)

Happy Mother's Day

Your mother is your best friend after all,
She's always there to help you when you fall;
When your days are dark and dreary,
Mother does not grow weary;
Just a word and she comes quickly at your call.
You'll find lots of friends as through this world you roam,
But there's no friend like your mother dear at home;
Though her brow's all lined with care,
And there's silver in her hair,
Your mother is your best friend after all.

"Your Mother Is Your Best Friend After All"
Words and music by Charles Coleman, 1914

[Materials © The Parlor Songs Association, Inc. Used by permission of the Parlor Songs Association.]

Yes, she does look like Jonathan Winters' Maudie Frickert.

You can find more Mother's Day songs via the link:

Celebrating Mother's Day (Parlor Songs)

No pants

My daughter was amused by the unintended ambiguity of this sentence:

Few restaurants enforce a coat-and-tie dress code for men or a no-pants policy for women.

Connie Eble, "Slang." Language in the U.S.A.: Themes for the Twenty-first Century, ed. Edward Finegan and John R. Rickford (Cambridge University Press, 2004)

Just what would a no-pants policy prohibit?

(Thanks, Rachel!)

Alkalize with Alka-Seltzer

[Popular Mechanics, June 1938. Click for a larger version.]

There's so much to like in this illustration: the family all dressed up, the crowded back seat, the slightly fiendish boy with his head out the window, his more timid sister peeping out over the door, the barn and the nest-building bird in the background. Most of all, I like the "poem," the way it moves from joyous proclamation ("THE WORLD IS BORN ANEW" echoes the all-caps in William Carlos Williams' 1923 Spring and All: "THE WORLD IS NEW") to the gritty details of grandma's ailments, to the gentle euphemism of "'NIGHTS BEFORE,'" and then to the point: buy and use our product. I also like the mini-poem in the last panel, equating, for the second time, Alka-Seltzer and wisdom.

When I was a kid, I thought Alka-Seltzer the most sophisticated over-the-counter drug: the long glass tube, the fizz, the lack of sweetness. It made me wonder what mixed drinks might taste like. Little did I know that Alka-Seltzer was understood to be, as this ad makes clear, a hangover remedy. Sales have been flat (sorry) in recent years -- partly from concern about aspirin, partly from consumer reluctance to use products designed to treat multiple symptoms. (When was the last time you had a headache and an upset stomach at the same time? And, while I'm asking rhetorical questions: Can you imagine ordering an Alka-Seltzer at a soda fountain? Or listening to a barn dance?)

There's a story that goes with this copy of Popular Mechanics, which I bought at a flea market some years ago. While I was standing in a store waiting for my wife, a woman noticed my magazine and struck up a conversation. She had worked for PM in Chicago for many years and, it turned out, had known Clifford Hicks, the magazine's editor-in-chief and the author of my favorite book from boyhood, Alvin's Secret Code. I asked her if she knew anything about Mr. Hicks' then-current whereabouts, and she replied, "Oh, they're all dead." That prompted me to check online, and I was happy to discover that Clifford Hicks was (and is) living in North Carolina. I wrote him a fan letter some years ago and was thrilled to receive a response. But that's another story.

[Addendum: My reference to WCW was facetious. But I didn't realize that the ad is almost certainly referencing James Russell Lowell: "Each day the world is born anew / For him who takes it rightly."]

Alka-Seltzer (Wikipedia)
The Wacky World of Alvin Fernald (Clifford Hicks' fiction)

Related posts
"MONEY MAKING FORMULAS" (A PM ad)
A mystery EXchange name (Another PM ad)
Out of the past (On reading Clifford Hicks in adulthood)
"Radios, it is" (And another PM ad)

Brian Wilson at the movies

From an interview with the Asbury Park Press:

Q. Have you seen any good movies lately?

A. Well, I've only seen one in the last couple of years. It's called Norbit by Eddie Murphy.

Q. How did you like it?

A. Fantastic movie. Very funny.

Q. What's your favorite movie?

A. Norbit.

Don't Worry Baby (Asbury Park Press via SmileySmile.net)

Of guitars and zippers

From "Struts and Frets," by Burkhard Bilger, on luthier Ken Parker and guitar design:

One afternoon this winter, I watched a man named Tom Murphy systematically beat up a brand-new Les Paul. Murphy, who is fifty-six, works for GIbson's custom, art, and historic division. He has thick forearms and ruddy features and a boyish devotion to the guitar heroes of his youth. Every week or two, the company sends ten or twenty guitars to Murphy's workshop, in Marion, Illinois, and he sends them back looking as if they'd been played for fifty years. When I visited, he began by etching some lines into the lacquer with a razor blade, to mimic the crackle of an old finish. He shaved the edges off the fingerboard, so that they looked worn by countless earsplitting solos. Then he took a bunch of keys and shook them over the surface, like a spider skittering over glass. To imitate years of belt wear, he held an old buckle against the back and whacked it a few times with a hammer. Then he flipped the guitar upside down and slowly ground the headstock into the concrete floor.

A "Murphyized" Gibson sells for twice the cost of a regular Les Paul, and Murphy's signed Jimmy Pge replicas (complete with cigarette burns) have gone for as much as eighty thousand dollars. Fender's aged guitars have been equally successful. Customers can choose from various degrees of wear, from Closet Classic ("played maybe a few times per year and then carefully put away") to Heavy Relic ("played vigorously on a nightly basis") to the Rory Gallagher Tribute Stratocaster ("worn to the wood"). When I asked Matt Umanov, whose guitar store has been a fixture in Greenwich Village for forty years, why people buy these instruments, he made an impatient noise. "Ninety per cent of this business is male-oriented," he said. "In my opinion, most purchases are governed by four words: the zipper is down."

"Struts and Frets" (good title!) is available in the May 14 issue of the New Yorker (print only).

Remedial civility

William Pannapacker, who writes a column for the Chronicle of Higher Education under the pen name Thomas H. Benton, teaches English at Hope College, a small, private liberal-arts college in Michigan. His most recent column, "Remedial Civility Training," should be required reading for everyone in academic life. Here's an excerpt:

This is not about the simple rules governing which fork one should use but about norms of behavior about which nearly everyone used to agree and which seem to have vanished from student culture.

There are the students who refuse to address us appropriately; who make border-line insulting remarks in class when called upon (enough to irritate but not enough to require immediate action); who arrive late and slam the door behind them; who yawn continually and never cover their mouths; who neglect to bring books, paper, or even something with which to write; who send demanding e-mail messages without a respectful salutation; who make appointments and never show up (after you just drove 20 miles and put your kids in daycare to make the meeting).

I don't understand students who are so self-absorbed that they don't think their professors' opinion of them (and, hence, their grades) will be affected by those kinds of behaviors, or by remarks like, "I'm only taking this class because I am required to." One would think that the dimmest of them would at least be bright enough to pretend to be a good student.

But my larger concern here is not just that students behave disrespectfully toward their professors. It is that they are increasingly disrespectful to one another, to the point that a serious student has more trouble coping with the behavior of his or her fellow students than learning the material.

In classrooms where the professor is not secure in his or her authority, all around the serious students are others treating the place like a cafeteria: eating and crinkling wrappers (and even belching audibly, convinced that is funny). Some students put their feet up on the chairs and desks, as if they were lounging in a dorm room, even as muddy slush dislodges from their boots. Others come to class dressed in a slovenly or indiscreet manner. They wear hats to conceal that they have not washed that day. In larger lectures, you might see students playing video games or checking e-mail on their laptop computers, or sending messages on cell phones.

Professor Pannapacker's column jibes with recent conversations I've had with students who've told me how difficult it's become to be a good student and how fed up they are with their classmates' surly attitudes.¹ Reading this column makes me glad that I added a "decorum" paragraph to my course syllabi some years ago. It's grown more detailed over time:

The atmosphere in our class should be serious -- not somber or pretentious,‭ ‬but genuinely intellectual.‭ ‬No eating,‭ ‬talking,‭ ‬sleeping,‭ ‬wearing headphones,‭ ‬doing work for other classes,‭ ‬or other private business.‭ ‬Cell phones‭ ‬should be turned off and‭ ‬kept‭ ‬out of sight in our classroom.

That paragraph seems to cover everything -- for now.

¹ These accounts are about classmates in other classes, not in classes that I've taught.

"Teaching Remedial Civility" is available to readers without a Chronicle subscription:

Teaching Remedial Civility (Chronicle of Higher Education)

Alas, the Chronicle has placed this immensely useful essay behind its firewall. [September 10, 2009.] The essay is out from behind the firewall: Remedial Civility Training. Thanks, Chronicle.

It’s back behind the firewall again.

Related post
Homeric blindness in "colledge"

Movie recommendation: Être et avoir

Être et avoir [To Be and To Have] (2002)
directed by Nicolas Philibert
French with English subtitles
104 minutes


[Jojo and M. Lopez]

Fictional films about education, at least the ones I know, tend toward corny predictability: a young, idealistic teacher; alienated, potentially lethal students (who for some reason have not yet dropped out); a moment of breakthrough (the Jack and the Beanstalk cartoon in The Blackboard Jungle, the Silas Marner trial in Up the Down Staircase); and the teacher's resolution to forsake easier and better-paying options and continue where he or she is needed.

Nicolas Philibert's documentary, focusing on a classroom in a French village, is a welcome contrast. The teacher, Georges Lopez, is near the end of his career (after thirty-five years teaching, twenty at this school). The thirteen children in this classroom (what an American would call a "one-room schoolhouse"), ranging in age from four to twelve, are endearing. And there is no breakthrough, only small moments of humor, sorrow, and effort. Which is to say: the film moves in the way that school moves, slowly. It's appropriate that one of the first scenes we see is of two turtles making their way around the floor of the empty classroom. The film's slow pace is a reminder that the work of learning is a matter of many small steps -- writing the numeral 7, understanding the difference between ami and amie, mastering the conjugations of être and avoir.

What's most striking when I watch this film is how calm this classroom is. M. Lopez never raises his voice, and he speaks to his students without false, cartoonish praise for their efforts. The students are, of course, children, and there are cheeky attitudes and small fights. But M. Lopez seems to trust that appealing to his students' dignity and capacity for reason will sooner or later lead them to do the right thing. Thus he waits patiently for Jojo (a feisty boy who gets a lot of time on camera) to add a necessary Monsieur to his oui and reminds him of a promise to finish a picture before lunch. With Julien and Olivier, two boys with a history of fighting, M. Lopez points out the pointlessness of their battles and reminds them that they will need to stick together when they go off to middle school. What we come to see in the course of the film is a group of students whose regard for one another and for their teacher is genuine. And in M. Lopez we see a teacher with the deepest love for his students. Pay close attention when the students say goodbye.

I can remember in third grade the excitement of opening a note written by my teacher and learning that her name was Roslyn (she sent me on these messaging jaunts to her colleagues until my parents asked her to cut it out). I can remember the far greater excitement of being invited to my fourth-grade teacher's wedding. Which is to say: teachers used to be mysterious figures. I never had any idea where my teachers lived or what their families were like. So it seems appropriate to me that this film lets M. Lopez remain something of a cipher. All we learn of him, in one short scene of speaking to the camera, is that he comes from a farming family, that he wanted to be a teacher from childhood, that his mother lives in France, and that his father (no longer living) came to France from Spain. When the movie was made, M. Lopez was evidently living in the large school building. Is he married? He wears no ring. Does he have children? We don't know. I wonder for some reason whether he might be a former priest or monk. It's curious that though M. Lopez is described again and again as having become a "celebrity" in the aftermath of this film's release, I can find no further background online.

Être at avoir has, alas, a bitter and bewildering coda: when the film became a surprise hit, Georges Lopez sued for a share of the profits (and lost).

Être at avoir (The film site)
Defeat for teacher who sued over film profits (The Guardian)

The National Dean's List again

[For a previous post that explains what prompted me to look into the National Dean's List, click here.]

I just followed a link at College Confidential to Form 10-K, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission by the American Achievement Group Holding Corp., AAC Group Holding Corp., and American Achievement Corporation, the companies behind the National Dean's List.

I was surprised to learn how big this business is: for fiscal 2005, the American Achievement Group's "achievement publications" (Who's Who Among American High School Students, Who's Who Among American High School Students -- Sports Edition, The National Dean's List, Who's Who Among America’s Teachers, and The Chancellor's List) accounted for sales of $20.1 million.

And I was surprised to see a relatively frank acknowledgement of what it means to be "nominated":

We obtain nominations for our achievement publications from a wide variety of commercial and non-commercial sources, which we continuously update. One company that supplies a significant number of nominees to us for inclusion in our Who’s Who Among American High School Students publication has received an inquiry from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, or FTC, relating to its supplying names and other personal information of high school students to commercial marketers. We have received a request from the FTC for information relating to this matter and are complying with this request.

Also of interest: the letters that "Leddy Fine" and I received state that "Only 1/2 of 1% of our nation's college students" are named to the National Dean's List. Form 10-K states that

The most recent 29th published edition [of The National Dean's List] honors almost 158,000 high-achieving students, representing in excess of 2,800 colleges and universities throughout the country.

That number would call for a population of 31.6 million college students. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, enrollment in degree-granting institutions in 2004 totalled 17.3 million.

Something is rotten in Texas (home of the American Achievement Group).

Update, November 9, 2007: A reader has informed me that the National Dean's List is no more. From the company website:

Educational Communications, Inc. has ceased all operations, including discontinuation of its publications for Who's Who Among American High School Students, Who's Who Among America's Teachers, and The National Dean's List, as well as the Educational Communications Scholarship Foundation.

The Internet Archive shows that Educational Communications, Inc. — or at least its website — was still functioning as of August 2007. Some quick Google searching turns up no details on the company's demise.

I feel sorry for the clerical workers, printers, and bindery workers whose lives will be altered by the demise of Educational Communications, Inc. But I'll still say good riddance to this company. It's mail from outfits such as EC, Inc. that can lead a student to mistake, say, a letter of invitation from Phi Beta Kappa for yet another sham honor. And it's the Internet that allows anyone with an online connection to look around and ask questions. (Type "national dean's list" into Google and see what happens.)

Related reading
Phi Beta What? (Wall Street Journal)

Related posts
Is this honor society legitimate?
The National Dean's List
The National Dean's List is dead