Drawing on the Left Side of the Television
by Bryce Martin

Jon Nagy really did want you to learn how to draw.

I knew how to draw, I just wanted to get better at it. Nagy had a television show in the late 1950s where you could draw along with him.

Literally.

You placed a transparent sheet of plastic of some sort over the TV screen and, as he suggested, you then drew over the lines he had just drawn. I did the tracing with a grease pencil. It worked fairly well, but thin lines were out of the question. I got the transparent whatever it was from a cousin who had at one time the entire set. Nagy had some kind of drawing kit you could purchase where games such as Monopoly were sold.

The artist was a beatnik, or he at least looked like a beatnik. That look, with the goatee, was in vogue in some circles. The most mainstream example was actor Bob Denver as Maynard G. Krebs on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. By the time Gilligan's Island rolled around, Denver, as Gilligan, was old hat to us TV veterans.

The method was no use to me at all. First, though it held fairly well to the screen on its own, I still had to press down on a top corner with my left hand to hold the sheet firmly in place. Second, it was way too basic. As I said, I already knew how to draw and this was a step backwards. I had learned on my own that the drawing surface, the material being used to draw on -- even different types of paper -- mattered. The drawing utensil was a huge factor. A fine, sharpened pencil, for example, delivered a different effect than a rounded, worn one.

My Nagy drawing aid quickly ended up with another sheet of TV screen plastic, in File 13 with the tri-color sheet used to simulate color television. That one had green on the lower third, then brown and then blue. You stuck it on your black and white TV screen and on some westerns you'd hit upon a scene where it actually seemed to serve its purpose. Fortunately, or not, westerns made up most of television programming then.

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The Smelter
by Bryce Martin

An acrid, metallic aroma from Hell filled the air many a day in Galena, Kan. That would change some depending on exactly where I pedaled on a long bike-ride day. The odor flaring my nostrils came from the stacks of the Eagle-Picher lead smelter in billows powerful enough in bulk to reach several miles, depending on the wind stream and other conditions.

Another odor came from East Galena. You had to be fairly close, within a few blocks, to whiff the air bouquet from the Old Rock Distillery.

Route 66 went right by the Eagle-Picher plant, exposing it to America's traffic mainstream. Hell's Half-Acre was what the area was called immediate to the plant in a radius of a mile or so in any direction, but mostly next to and across Route 66 from the smelter. The earth was polluted from the pollutants sailing and settling from the plant's emission stacks, those huge pipes pointing upwards. It illustrated blight the way a patch of mange on a dog illustrated disease.

Smelting is what goes on inside a lead smelter. Since the ore known as galena is lead sulphide (think sulfur), the ore is literally roasted to remove the sulfur. The sulfurous fumes and particulates as excess are belched into the atmosphere from the plant's infernal belly.

I was struck at a young age by the phrase "Hell's Half-Acre" as a description for the area. How could any name be more apt and more colorful at the same time?

"How long has it been called that?" I asked. That was a question posed in the early 1950s and the reply was that it had been called that for decades past.

The plant was still operating in those early 1950s, though nothing near its output in peak or even moderate years in the past. Other Eagle-Picher lead smelters existed in the region. Big ones in Miami, Okla., and in Joplin, Mo. But the one with its picture in my grade school textbook, describing it as "the world's largest lead smelter" was this one, the one that had created Hell's Half-Acre. No picture or mention of Hell's Half Acre was in the textbook.

The EP picture was significant in that the textbook was not about Galena, not about its county, Cherokee, and not even about Kansas. It was a history book. To have that one mention about Galena in an entire book filled with chapters with text, pictures and illustrations on glossy paper about so many varied places and things, I swelled with pride. I was glad they left out the Hell's Half-Acre part.

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Sacre bleu to you
by Bryce Martin

"Sacre bleu," I would say, as often as I felt it fit comfortably in whatever situation I came upon. Not that our conversations actually stayed on a line of thought. I was always experimenting with words and phrases I had either made up whole cloth or borrowed elsewhere to see if I could get them into the Galena language.

Andre, the Frenchman in the Blackhawk comic books had already given me "Oui, oui." Andre said "Sacre bleu" in circumstances that led me to believe he was cussing at a low level. Sort of like our outbursts of "good gosh" or "gee whiz" when we were particularly vexed about something. Though, I never knew exactly what it meant, it seemed to have the stuff cuss words are made of, if you said it just the way you would a standard cuss term. And, like some such expressions, I thought it would work just as well as a term of surprise.

As a classmate and I were walking along a school sidewalk, I spied a glint and reached and picked up a quarter. "Sacre bleu," I said. No response, except, "Wow, a quarter." I reasoned that finding money probably distracted from what it was I said.

It went on that way. No matter how I tried, I couldn't get "sacre bleu" in the streets, I couldn't get anyone to pick up on it and use it in their own way.

"Que sera." All it took was one song to get that one going.

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That's Spilt Milk (addendum)
by Bryce Martin

Randolph gathered songs, poems, tales, anything he could capture regarding the culture of the people. His range was fairly narrow, primarily southeast Kansas, northeast Oklahoma, southwest Missouri and a corresponding part of Arkansas.

Big Jim Denoon. He was just Jim Denoon from Midco, Mo., being recorded by Randolph for his Ozark songs collection on such selections as "Root Hog or Die." Denoon moved to Salinas, Calif., and became Big Jim Denoon, "The Giant of Western Swing," recording for 4-Star and other record companies.

If you don't work, you don't eat. Hogs have to root to find food. In bad times, humans can find themselves in root hog or die situations.

Folklore? That is what folklore amounts to you ask. Imagine collecting some dirty jokes, some real crude ones, getting the person's name, their age and where they're from and then leaving a little explanation for each explaining what it means in a bigger, thematic context. Each entry fits into a numeric code system established by Kentucky folklorist Stith Thompson.


"What do you want to know for? Writin' a book?"
"As a matter of fact, I am."
"Then, kiss my ass and make it a love story."

Bryce Martin
Galena, Kansas
1958, overheard in a high school library

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Jimmy Jones And His Aerial Didoes
by Bryce Martin

You had to have been there when to know that no one burst onto the recording scene with more unbridled zeal than Jimmy Jones with a magic two discs back in 1959.

The first one, "Handy Man," would have been a great summer song but it came out when golden, autumn leaves were falling and was unlike anything I had heard. Jones was not only ear piercing loud, his voice didoed up and down during manic octave leaps. I knew loud. Little Richard had introduced me to loud (and raucous) with "Long Tall Sally." (Since the music business is a copycat industry, Larry Williams sought to emulate the style and ferocity of Richard's vocals with "Short Fat Fanny," with moderate and short-lived success.)

And Little Richard liked to drill his lyrical messages home. Who could ever forget "True Fine Mama," where he repeats the word "honey" twenty-five times in succession?

Jones had most of the country singing, "Come-a, come-a, come-a ..."

Little Richard, for all his vocal bluster, was monotone loud. Jones, on the other hand, varied in degrees. Richard came on like a Cape Canaveral rocket trying to free itself from gravity while Jones screamed in rising notes of stupendous layers of loud and from joyous levels one never imagined possible.

His high-note exercises were so great even falsetto-king Del Shannon recorded "Handy Man" a few years later. One had to reason, though, that Shannon recorded it not because it was such a great song but so he could imitate the falsetto styling imbued by Jones. The song itself did have merit, however, as evidenced by James Taylor's much-slowed version several years after Shannon. Who would have thought to slow down the song a la Taylor after hearing Jones ride it to such extreme heights?

The best place to hear the original, for me anyway, was from the clear and strong signal belonging to WHB radio out of Kansas City, Mo. It was AM radio at its best.

Then, just to prove that country music had no lock on dropping "g's" (the list includes darlin', drinkin', cheatin', and so on), Jones came out with an amazing followup -- "Good Timin'." After coming on like gangbusters with "Handy Man," here he was trying to outdo himself.

I was at first dazzled that Jones seemed to have pulled it off, then just as puzzled wondering if I had been duped. Was "Good Timin'" really an equal to "Handy Man"? Or was it just more of the same?

I decided it did not matter. "Handy Man" was a rare treat, and for Jones to nearly equal it on a second try was enough to validate the strident pleasure of the original, to sustain the foot-to-the-floor aerial word climbs only Jones could pilot.

Jones did not make a third attempt. If he did, it failed to find many radio turntables. I never heard from him again.

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KOAM-TV EARLY DAYS IN PITTSBURG, KANSAS
by Bryce Martin

Programs didn’t necessarily conform to 30-minute and one-hour formats. That was obvious when KOAM sometimes used various shorts and clips to fill in airtime, much the same as the way newspapers fitted small fillers to eliminate white space on a page. A common method was to insert “visual records.” These were short pieces showcasing singers warbling ballads or folk or novelty songs. They were originally produced by the film world in Hollywood and later utilized as television cameos. An entertaining one was “You Get No Bread with (One Meat Ball).” It was performed by a dark-haired man who looked Italian and possessed a fat and expressive face. He was convincing as he sang about a down-on-his-luck oaf who enters a restaurant and after looking at the menu realizes he has just enough money for one meatball. That’s bad enough he groans but he really emotes when he finds that you get, well, no bread with one meatball.
Another was “The Little White Duck.” The singer was a younger Burl Ives. I recognized Ives from seeing him occasionally on live television. It was obvious this segment was done a few years back. It was a little corny: “there’s a little white duck sittin’ on the water/a little white duck doin’ what he oughter.” Then there was the obnoxious song, “The Cat Came Back.” The words -- about dumping off a cat and having it return “the very next day” – were not so bad. It was the creepy and deliberate way the guy sang the song that was grating. *

(*Between 1941 and 1947, more than 2000 “soundies” were produced by the Mills Novelty Company for coin-operated machines, mostly jazz and ballad shorts. Early TV stations later used them to fill airtime. In addition, between 1950 and 1952, some 700 similar film shorts were produced in the Hollywood studios of Louis Snader. The three mentioned above likely were done by Snader.)
...

Summer sounds 1959
by Bryce Martin

It was a bloody sixteenth summer in 1959. Mildly gory, I should say. Each time I raised myself from the sides of the pool at Schifferdecker Park, the rough concrete scraped off enough chest and stomach skin to produce bleeding. There was no getting around it, no other way to get out. I tried time after time to pull off a kind of pull-up and while in midair flip myself out of the pool to ground level. It was pointless. For one thing, my wet trunks weighted me down too much for that and for another it would have to be a move of perfection. That was why I kept giving it an occasional try anyway.

“Sugaree” played over and over on the pool turntable and its thump-thump bass lines drifted tinnily from some large speakers hung on tall poles. Light summer winds caused the sounds to fade in and out like waves at the shore. The speakers were painted a military green, were squarish and had uvula-like stems protruding from the centers.

Sugaree, sugaree
...I miss you in the daytime
But I miss you more at night

It wasn’t a dirty song as sung by Rusty York, but it sounded like it was.
...

Inspiration hard earned
by Bryce Martin

My grandfather composed a tribute to his and my grandmother’s son, my father, who died in the service of his country.

A beautiful sympathy card from Mrs. J. P. Gilbert, Route 1, Box 98, Galena, Kans., was sent to my grandparents November 14, 1944.

Some of the words in the message inspired my grandfather to write a poem, which he later turned into a song he would sometimes sing. The lines that triggered the composition were: “Do not think that you have lost him/For that could never be….” (Italics mine).

Overseas
By Noah Martin

Oh, my darling, come put your arms around me,
For they say you are going away,
Going away they say, far across the sea.

Little did I think when a baby in my arms,
You would be taken from me and sent across the sea.

Darling, when you are far away,
Just pray and think of me,
A broken hearted mother far back across the sea.

Just a kind word, I pass it on to you,
I am a broken hearted father,
His son he longs to see, but that can never be,
For he was sent far across the sea.

Be not hasty in what you say to your darling boy,
For he too may be sent across the deep blue sea.

They say as time passes on, memory grows dim,
But with me that will never be,
For he was sent across the deep blue sea.

The glory of old newspapers
by Bryce Martin

Three columns wide and four inches deep, our team picture was at the bottom of the fold on the front page of the September 9, 1955, issue of the weekly Galena Record newspaper. The headline above the photo: “Elks Dodgers, Galena Little League City Champions”

A short piece accompanying the picture is without a byline. The writer, though, is likely the man who would know the story better than most anyone else, the manager of the Elks Dodgers, and the publisher of the Galena Record, Frank Bruce.

I know because I am one of those in the photograph.

This issue marks the thirteenth week for the Galena Record, a tabloid-sized, five-column width newspaper. It is in competition with the longstanding and more traditional format Galena Sentinel-Times, also a weekly.

I'm informed in a nice preview regarding the upcoming season that Coach J.W. Brewington has 51 out for football at the high school. They’ve already had one practice under the lights. The schedule for the Bulldogs, a member of the Neosho Valley League, kicks off with a non-league tilt at Mineral on Sept. 23.

Inside the newspaper, the full weekly television schedule starting Friday for KSWM (Joplin) and KOAM (Pittsburg) is printed and advertising outdoes copy about 80 percent to 20 percent after getting beyond the front page. Since revenue comes from advertising, the newspaper appears healthy in that respect.

As it so often happens with start-up publications, local politics and issues affecting community living are the reasons cited for new publishers in bringing in another “voice.”

In the favored left-hand column at the top of the page, Bruce gives his views in his personal opinion column titled “Frankly Speaking.” Much of the entire front page is devoted to pictures and stories of the progress with the work on the new community baseball diamond and the financial situation with the just-concluded Little League baseball season.

In Bruce’s editorial, he tells how he’d like to see Democrats and Republicans stop throwing dirt on each other and instead toss it as a source of pride as a top cover for the ball field under construction adjacent to Liberty school.

“So we maintain that when the main source of irritation in Galena is removed, harmony will be everywhere, and we can all work together for a better Galena and for the good of all concerned.”

He concludes that “if by now you don’t know this ‘source of irritation’ then you haven’t been reading the Galena Record regularly.”

In reading it I find that the new diamond will require 300 truckloads from the Shoal Creek bottoms for the dirt-topping. Each load amounts to about three yards of dirt. The area just south of the park bridge is where the dirt is coming from. The field will be ready by next spring when the high school team is first to put it to use. The junior league players from ages 13 through 15 will began summer play after that, along with the town team.

As noted by the Record, the city has a fine Little League facility on East Eighth Street.

In a separate story regarding the financial status of the Galena Little League, it “has $300.02 with which to start league operations next season.”

Data such as that will keep oiled the “Frankly Speaking” machinery of opinion.
…

Freddy Fudd a celebrity in my family
by Bryce Martin

Other than having two baby cousins in California playing uncredited roles in an old Spencer Tracy movie, the closest I came to having a celebrity in the family growing up was a bowtie-wearing relative-in-law who was a popular entertainer in cow country.

Hellwoh Wascals…

Henry Harvey was Freddy Fudd, Elmer Fudd’s nephew, after three o’clock as he and Deputy Dusty and Major Astro took turns entertaining the youngsters on live television in Wichita.

Henry as Santa Claus was probably more popular in Wichita with the kids during Christmas than with his Fudd creation.

Henry co-starred in an obscure 1965 film called “The Beast from the Beginning of Time.”

I met Henry just once, as a youngster when he visited us at our home in the Spring Grove region of Galena, Kans. I sent out an inquiry to see if anyone remembered Henry, and a kind Bill Shaffer responded with his recollections:

"I grew up in Hutchinson, Kansas, in the 1950s and saw Henry Harvey playing Freddy Fudd while I was growing up. He normally worked out of a tree house at KAKE-TV/Channel 10 in Wichita. He ran cartoons of the Looney Tunes, Merry Melodies, Warner Brothers variety and kept most of us kids in stitches with his own antics.

"At Christmas time, he became Santa Claus for a series of visits to the North Pole, also done at the station. I have footage from the KAKE-TV 10th Anniversary show as well as some clips of Henry as Santa Claus. He was so well known and loved as Santa Claus that he often did the 'live'
routine at area stores in Wichita.

"A friend of mine who worked at KAKE told me that Henry had set up a special signal arrangement whereby a child visiting Santa would give an helper elf his name and other details and that would be relayed to Santa (Henry), who would then automatically know all about the child before he sat on Santa's lap. This was of course amazing to all the children who came to see him.

"Henry also had a small part in a TV movie produced and directed by a children's show rival of his, Tom Leahy (Major Astro) and that film was called "The Beast from the Beginning of Time." I talked with Tom about this, and he told me that he and Henry were old friends and he wanted him to have the part of the stuffy old professor in the film. It was a very quick TV movie that barely got shown on KARD-TV in Wichita, which financed the movie. It's considered today to be pretty awful, but it's sort of campy in its own way.

"Henry continued his Freddy Fudd character and showing cartoons into the mid-1970s, I believe. He switched TV stations and the cartoons changed and it was never quite the same again. He still played Santa Claus up until he died, I think. I did get the chance to see him perform on stage at the Hutchinson Fox Theatre (my father was the manager there) and I
got to meet him afterwards and he was just a great guy. "
...

The pull of the woods
by Bryce Martin

Behind the house at Cave Springs and beyond it was all woods, except for the old man who lived in the really small shack with the dirt floor, the one who boiled fragrant sumac as a tea. My grandfather pronounced it shoe-make. In the autumn the erect clusters of the sumac produced small, fuzzy, brilliant scarlet berries. The clusters have an earthy, unforgettable and not unpleasant aroma. Another common woodsy plant was buckbrush. Brambles took over whole areas. Wild blackberries and strawberries were plentiful. I routinely ran through the bushes, branches and briars as fast as I could go, in unfamiliar territory taking my chances and challenging the woods and all it held. There were thorns, too. I often lost my jousts with the woods. Thorns would catch and hold me running at full speed and I would fly backward or at some odd angle and fall into a head-high thicket or bounce off a hickory tree. My clothes might be ripped and torn nearly off. Once, some large thorns as hard as metal went up my nose, broke off and lodged inside, nearly protruding through the skin. I ran home quickly and Grandma removed them as delicately as possible. She had me lie down and hold a handkerchief over my nose to stem the bleeding. In a few minutes, I had slammed the screen door on my way out and was headed back into the woods. The woods had a combined fragrance of all the things it held, and its wanton perfume lured me back time and time again.
...

Auctions and Frozen Brick Chili
by Bryce Martin

Uncle Noah loved an auction, especially when it involved livestock. He enjoyed judging the quality of a good animal, knowing its worth and usefulness on the farm, and what price it should bring on the local market. It was a form of “horse trading” from bygone days, where you tried to steal a bargain if you could.
 
I tagged along at one auction and found it exciting; the farm animals paraded to the forefront under bright lights and scrubbed-up farmers in their cleanest duds and – best of all – the auctioneer.
 
I had seen movies where someone not familiar with auction protocol had rubbed their ear or made some innocent gesture and the auctioneer took it as a bid. I didn’t want that to happen to me, so, not knowing the rules, I sat on my hands and avoided any sudden eye or head movements.
 
Noah confided he had developed a certain strategy over the years.
 
“Bid strong from the go. You’ll have everyone afraid of you after that when something comes up you really want.”
 
Noah worked most of his later years as a laborer for Freeto Construction, a general construction outfit that built roads, bridges and buildings in the four-state region.
 
During a stretch when he was doing some road work at Range Line in Joplin, he stopped in regularly at Fred and Red’s Café on South Main.
 
“Those regulars come in and all you hear is, ‘Gimme a bowl of red.’ All they got to do is say the word ‘red’ and the waitress has a bowl of chili in front of them in nothin’ flat.”
 
The place specialized in incredibly great chili. A treat was to take home a frozen brick of the stuff to heat up and serve on just the right chilly evening. 
...

BELLE STARR, A HOMEGROWN OUTLAW
by Bryce Martin

My great-grandmother on my father’s mother’s side, Marsha Blackburn, was born in 1849 and died the year I was born in 1943. Marsha often regaled her wide-eyed young daughter Edna May with fact-based accounts of the methods “wild Indians” employed to torture captured white people and how she earned extra money by taking in laundry, including that of Belle Starr, known as “the Bandit Queen” in myth and legend.

My grandmother, Edna May, told me many of the stories her mother told her. Some I have checked on myself for more details, such as the life of Belle Starr.

She was born Myra Maybelle (or Maebelle) Shirley on February 5, 1848, near Carthage, in Jasper County, Mo., to John Shirley and Elizabeth “Eliza” Hatfield Pennington. Eliza was John’s third wife.

Carthage has a rich history and is a beautiful, small town. It predates Joplin, the other major Jasper County city, by 30 years. Where Route 66 and 71 meet at Carthage is known worldwide as “the Crossroads of American.” That distinction may not hold much longer since bypasses around towns and cities in the path of 66 are going in left and right.

John Shirley prospered and owned several businesses in Carthage. One was the Carthage Hotel, still standing during visits there with my grandfather in the mid-1950s. It stood on the north side of the courthouse square.

Myra Belle grew up lacking little to nothing. She attended the Carthage Female Academy, learning manners and the three “R’s” and taking music lessons as well.

The arrival of the Civil War, and wholesale outlawry in the name of Kansas-Missouri border wars changed things.

People chose sides and no side was safe. The Shirley family aided and abetted the vicious bushwhacking gang led by William Clarke Quantrill and Bloody Bill Anderson, as did such natives and Frank and Jesse James and Cole Younger, a childhood friend of Belle’s.

When the going got too rough, the Shirleys fled to Texas.

Belle married Jim Reed in Texas, a no-count she knew from Missouri. The pair had trouble with the law and traveled to California before coming back to Texas. She lived too in “the Nations,” Indian country near Fort Smith, Ark., and often returned to the southwest Missouri region, usually to the Reed home place. When Reed was killed, she married Sam Starr. Rumors that she married Cole Younger in Galena, Kansas, were denied in later years by Younger himself. Some said she married Cole’s uncle, Bruce Younger, in Chetopa, Kansas.

Sam Starr was killed in a gunfight at a friend’s Christmas party in 1886.

In early February, 1889, Belle was ambushed and murdered by double blasts from a shotgun as she rode alone near her cabin outside Fort Smith. No one was ever charged with the crime.
…

IT IS IN THE CARDS
by Bryce Martin


In southeast Kansas, during snowy, cold winters, baseball cards were a multi-sourced form of entertainment.

Take a particular year and arrange them in numerical order. Or, sort the players by teams, by their last names in alphabetical order, by position -- and at whim as your imagination roamed.

I looked carefully at my duplicates (I called them "doubles" even though I might have a jillion of one player, and was not aware of any card collecting terminology until much later in life) and kept for myself the cards with the clearest reproduction, the ones nearest to perfect. The stack of rejects I ended up with were my trading cards.

A wealth of information was on the backsides of the cards. Some sets had full names of the players ("Theodore Bernard Kluszewski"), some had cartoons with little known information about the player. Others had full minor league and major league stats for each year. Others had major league information, and no minor league details.

With thousands of cards, I always looked at "place of birth," mainly to see if anyone was local. A pitcher named Morrie Martin drew my interest. I was from Galena, Kans., just across the line from Joplin, Mo. He was born in Dixon, Mo. A relative? A quick check indicated he was not. To this day, I know the birth places of star players and the obscure alike.

I noticed everything about the cards. Once, when I was nine-years-old, I opened a pack of 1952 Topps at recess and showed one of the cards to a classmate. He looked at the card of Frank Smith, finally saying, "So?" "He has the same initials as yours," I said. "Oh," my friend said, smiling. His name was Frank Sturgis.

Okay, maybe I noticed too much.

I liked odd names, foreign names, long and impossible names, any names. Since the region was mostly made up of Cardinals fans, Al "Red" Schoendienst was popular. I doubt if I will ever forget that he was born in Germantown, Ill., no matter that it serves no purpose to know. We remember much in life that seems to have little if any use. If I ever drive through or near Payette, Idaho, I will know that is the birth spot of Harmon Killebrew.

I wasn't scared off or perplexed by the names since I was a good speller. Before my tenth birthday, I was familiar with Betelguese and with Chamaltenango. Betelgeuse my teacher pronounced "Batel-gooze," and said it was our brightest star. Chamaltenango was "Che-mal-tenango" and other than it being in Guatemala, I don't know if we discussed its significance.

The Joplin Miners ceased being in 1954 as a St. Louis Cardinals minor league team, ending pro baseball in Joplin forever. The year before they had been associated with the New York Yankees. At one game, I worked my way to the bleachers and the end of the home dugout. I talked to one of the players, a long-armed pitcher away from the mound today. He told me his name, and I found it in the scorebook, Bob Muesenfechter. Of course, I have never forgotten it. Nor the rhythmic name of another Miner, John Zeleznock.

In the mid-80s, I had a book listing everyone who had ever played in the major leagues, even for one pitch as a pitcher or one at-bat as a position player. I lived in Bakersfield, Calif., so I looked through the entire book, small print and all, and found and old man who was born there by the name of W.H. "Buckshot" May. The book was a little old and it did not list a date of death for May. I found him in the phone book and interviewed him the next day for an article I had published. I searched the book in its entirety for anyone from Galena, Kans. I found George Grantham, whom I was familiar with, and Bill Windle, whom I was not. Few people would go to that much effort. Old habits die hard.
...

A-ROOTIE TOOT TOOT
by Bryce Martin

As slang for the affirmative “all right,” I wasn’t inclined to say something along the lines of “aw right,” “ah right,” and definitely not “all righty.” A certain show did persuade me to use a silly alternative, “ahrootie.” I still say it today. Then there was “gosharootie.”

Rootie Kazootie was a great marionette show on television. I didn’t get to see many of the episodes before it went off the air, sometime in 1954. The comic books were good too. Rootie was freckle-faced and wore a baseball cap back on his head. Polka Dottie was his girlfriend and a sidekick was a mouse named El Squeako. The villain was Poison Zoomack. I thought that clever but a bit of a stretch. I knew what poison sumac was but what about the kids who didn’t, who lived in the city or places it didn’t grow. Anyway, the bad guy with his tacky mustache and top hat and tails was always trying to steal Rootie’s magic Kazootie, a kazoo. I obtained a kazoo for myself and after several attempts finally got a sound out of it. By then the show had disappeared and soon did my kazoo.

Chuck Berry, the brilliant songwriter and performer, may have been familiar with the show. A good thing maybe since it is a rare word that resonates well with “tutti frutti.”

Tutti frutti, awrootie/I gotta gal named Sue/She knows just what to do…

...

When Headaches Are Not A Laughing Matter
by Bryce Martin


I have never had a headache in my life, except from my own doing, and from a rare head cold.

From my own doing would include the time I cracked helmets with an opposing football player in a high school game. That one did not last long. The two of us repeated the exercise on the next play and my headache went away.

I do not know why I have never had a headache. Since I do not have them, I do not think about them much, not until someone else brings up the subject. Moreover, someone does quite often; often enough that the misfortune of having your head ache seems quite common, except for those like me.

My cousin Jimmy and I share a common bond. We are the same age. That carries more weight than one might think. It means we experienced the same songs, the same movies, the same fads and flops. We can talk about things and share interests and understanding that someone just a year younger or older might be out of step with. There are, of course, some my age who are mostly clueless. You tend to gravitate to your own kind.

Jimmy is up on some music I scarcely know, and vice versa. That is because radio stations might play some songs heavily in certain areas and little or not at all in others. You could love it in Trona and never hear it in Galena. By the same token, he had never heard “China Town” by Max Brown, “Darlin’, Darlin’, Darlin’” by Jimmy Thurman, or “Ain’t Love Grand’ by Ron and Joe and the Crew. That is because they were regional hits by locals in my area and never reached the West Coast.

Jimmy raved over“Buzz, Buzz, Buzz” by the Hollywood Flames. It is an older song that I heard maybe two or three times. He also likes “Oh, Julie” by the Crescendos. I barely remember. I had never heard either one played enough to gain a familiarity.

We mostly played records in his room in 1958 when I visited. We both liked Jan and Arnie’s “Jennie Lee,” the Monotones’ “Book of Love,” and all by Little Richard.

I suspect Little Richard you would not want to listen to if you had just a smidgen of a headache.

Here we were years later digging out the old vinyl. I was working fulltime and Jimmy was working the summer while attending college in Sacramento.

I do not know about Jimmy but by now, I had been drunk on several occasions. I often felt bad physically and emotionally the next day from the drinking -- still, though, no headache.

He produced and album and said, “You’ve got to listen to this.”

It was Inside Shelley Berman. The selection was the one where he is talking aloud, the morning after with a hangover. The part Jimmy repeated, after he raised the recording arm and placed it on its stand, was where Berman drops an Alka-Seltzer in a glass of water and says, “Oh, my God – don’t fizz.”

I recalled the skit, even remembered seeing Berman perform it on television, but I never thought it was funny. I guess you had to have experienced a headache to appreciate the humor in it.

Wanda Jackson, Kansas 1963
by Bryce Martin


I drove in the direction of the small town of Arma, nine miles north of Pittsburg, to see the greatest singer on the planet perform. You paid at the door. Wanda Jackson, I had trouble believing, was on stage at the Blue Moon ballroom. She wore a strapless cocktail dress and looked stunning. Her voice was impossible to describe, accented with trills and lilts, smooth and clear when need be, growly, mean, impudent, and nimbly naughty at intervals. She was wild and raw, her lyrics often wonderfully bizarre and delivered in a frenetic rhapsody of rock and roll the equal of any man. Then she would deliver a soothing country ballad, in as soft and artful a voice as you would imagine from an angel.

There was a closed-off wraparound balcony that some of the boys had sneaked up the stairs to find. They wanted to peer down and get a better view of Wanda’s cleavage.

I walked outside when the show bid finale and stood in the gravel driveway. Wanda, with dark hair and eyes, came out and entered a waiting Cadillac. A man assisted her entry and closed her door for her. Someone whispered that it was her husband. She smiled politely, and rather sadly, I thought, acknowledging those nearest her who waved and shouted with a delicate raised hand as a goodbye gesture.

The Cadillac soon disappeared in the dark and the distance and produced a final crunch of gravel before smoothing out on the asphalt. Wanda Jackson. Here. In this place. In my universe. Tonight.

Wow. She was 25-years-old, too, a grown-up prom queen.

Before the summer ended, I came this way again. Another ballroom, the Trianon, sat off the highway in Croweburg, two miles east of Arma. A local band played some decent rock ‘n’ roll. I went once and once was plenty. I don’t pay a cover charge for just anything.

…

Wrestling 1959
by Bryce Martin


With only two television channels to chose from, I sometimes dug in on the couch to view the lesser of two evils. Wrestling was not my idea of entertainment. Late in the year in 1959, a regular wrestling show from Chicago was a weekly filmed feature. Individual matches were the norm, and contests included tag team, women, and midget wrestling. I had read in the Globe that KMAC-TV out of Kansas City, Mo., telecast live wrestling, attesting to its surge of popularity. The wrestlers from the Chicago Amphitheatre were the same ones who occasionally came to Joplin to perform. I did like the theatrics involved, their non de plumes, and their chief gimmicks. The Great Bolo wore a full head mask. That helped draw attention away from his soft-body and minimal physique. He head-butted regularly. His opponent would hold his forehead in pain and excitedly demand that the referee remove his mask to see what kind of foreign object hidden there was doing the damage. Fat chance. Haystack Calhoun was a mammoth hick in overalls. Danny Hodge was a clean-cut college wrestling champion from Oklahoma. Wild Red Berry was a veteran from Pittsburg in nearby Crawford County who looked too old. Lou Thesz was old. He somehow exuded class in this classless excuse for a sport. Antonio Rocca had thighs like beer barrels. If he got his man in a leg scissors it was all over. Others were Mighty Atlas, Sandor Szabo, Oni Wiki Wiki, and Gorgeous George. The latter was on the Johnny Holmes sports segment in Joplin promoting a match for that night. "I've noticed the women since I've been here," he told Holmes. "They all look like they came out of a book... a bad book." He likely received the intended response that night, a crowd of irate women yelling for his hide.

The title for the wrestling tapes from Chicago locally was, The Wrestling Show. It was a title that did not go unnoticed by some of my classmates. We often discussed something we had watched recently on television. Odds were, if you watched television at all you witnessed what everyone else did. We discussed how phony the whole thing was. "Did you notice it is called The Wrestling Show?" Someone asked, emphasizing the word Show.