GARTH BROOKS -- WHEN SCHLOCK COMES JINGLING IN
by Bryce Martin


Fortunate am I that my era had Bobby Darin. I feel bad for you if this is your era and you have Garth Brooks.

I heard for the first time Brooks’ “Call Me Claus,” with its pumped-up big-band sound. It is every singer who wants a Christmas standard, a recording so Christmas-y it vies for radio airplay each and every season, which, in turn, translates into album sales every year, such as Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree,” Bobby Helms’ “Jingle Bell Rock,” or Nat King Cole’s “The Christmas Song.” Even if it is just once a year, it is enough to keep a singer’s name in the forefront.

Brooks came close with his previous “Santa Looks a Lot Like Daddy” (an oldie by Buck Owens that did not even make it as a Christmas staple for him). The anti-Hank and Top Hat of all the hat acts must have felt something along the lines of a classic rendition would do the trick.

“Call Me Claus” from Brooks comes across as too contrived and forced to merit any genuine sentiment. When Bobby Darin was a young whelp and in his heyday, and even with such gems as “Mack the Knife” and “Beyond the Sea,” he gave the impression of being a poor imitation to the real kings of swing and style. To such elders as Frank Sinatra he paled in comparison. For sheer gaucheness, Brooks (Mr. Obvious) stands alone.

WHEN THE RED, RED ROBIN...
by Bryce Martin


A grasshopper sat on a railroad track,
He looked at me and I looked back.
I picked up a brickbat and hit him in the shin,
He said, "Oh, Lord a'mercy, don't do that again."

Grandma quoted snippets of English nursery rhymes and songs while working the treadle on her sewing machine or baking a wild blackberry cobbler in the wood cook stove.

"My father was Johnny Bull," she said. "I get it from him, but I leave out the 'Bloody this' and the 'Bloody that' he was so fond of."

Johnny Bull is a name meant to represent England or an English person. Her father was born in England.

Grandma's most common phrase was "Lord a'mercy."

Her most vocalized non-gospel song was "Sing a Song of Sixpence."

Sing a song of sixpence
A pocket full of rye;
Four and twenty blackbirds
Baked in a pie

Blackbird pie was common in her household while growing up. She remembered the traps set in the yards for the birds by her mother and the meat pies that followed. That particular song, however, was as much a riddle as anything else. She said she no longer remembered what it all meant.

"I'm not much for remembering anything anymore," she would say. "Time takes its toll on the mind and body, and it has taken its toll on mine."

I have always been a stickler for detail, even at a young age. Grandma loved birds and flowers, and the four seasons. One of the first signs of spring was the robin. When you saw robins with their swelled chests darting across the lawn or flying in one of those haphazard group formations they deploy, you knew spring was here.

The problem I had with detail came about when Grandma would recite one of the many British poems or songs concerning their national bird, the robin redbreast. That is what I had a problem with: Robins have an orange, not a red breast. I did not understand songs that had lines such as: "When the red, red robin comes bob, bob, bobbin' along."

Much later, I discovered that American Robins do have orange breasts -- and British robins have a red breast. Most all of the songs and poems about the robin were Old World works; hence, they all mention a red breast. Therefore, the answer to my problem was the fact that people in America, including my grandmother, were essentially making mention of British robins when the specimens at hand were American robins.

One legend has it that a robin tried to pull the thorns from Christ's crown, and drops of blood fell on the Robin's light-colored chest. There is also the Christmas story about the night Christ was born and about the little brown bird that shared the stable with the Holy Family. A fire Joseph built to keep the family warm burned out during the night. The bird quickly flew down from its nest and fanned the embers with its wings. The heat from the fire turned the bird's feathers red. The breast of the robin was red from then on to remind us of its love for the baby Jesus.

Doris Day had a hit with the song about the "red robin bobbin' along" in 1953 when I was 10 years old. That was in America, of course. The songwriter, if American, was not observant or was using artistic license to its fullest. On the other hand, maybe the songwriter was aware that nothing rhymes with orange.

THE BROTHERS GLIB
by Bryce Martin


Scanning channels, I stopped for a while on Nashville Public Television to watch a Bee Gees show, one done in their latter years. Most of the camera work was on the main singer in the group, Robin Gibb. He was slender like a snake, mostly bald, and made me think of the word slimy. He was hardly the person you would conjure up in your mind when reveling in the imagery of the group�s many sexy, if shallow, love songs. It struck me as out of place for Robin (even his name is too cutesy for his looks), the least likely guy in school to have a date on prom night, breathing out those sultry lyrics for all the beautiful people to swoon over and feel a part of. His twin, Maurice Gibb, at least, wore a hat, sunglasses, and a beard. Without all that, he would have looked almost identical to Robin. Barry is � or was � the handsome one. Still, he was taking no chances, wearing a beard and some tinted shades. He still had his long, 60s-ish hair, that or he knew a good wig maker. I did not expect these people to get old and not age. They fared far better in that respect than some of their counterparts with the unnatural black hair-dye jobbies and the obvious plastic surgery and bad hair transplants. Call me socially conditioned (I think not in this case); I will repeat what I said at the beginning: Watching a highly unappealing person sing love song after love song does not work for me. Neither, necessarily, does watching a highly appealing person sing love song after love song work for me. Believable works just fine.

The Bee Gees were not singing some songs they just pulled from a hat. The songs were their songs and will always be associated with the group. At some point, however, consideration should be given to the difference between what you see on stage and what you hear from the stage.

Sure, the headline is a cheap shot, unoriginal, too. And just what are you supposed to do when you have spent the best years of your life singing about young love to young people in love and now you are old and worn? You should have saved your money and called it quits long ago. That's what.

SEE YA IN THE FUNNY PAPERS
by Bryce Martin



I wanted to be a cartoonist at an early age. In pencil, I drew a panel of how my private detective � Ace Armstrong � looked frontal, three-quarter and profile. It was a daunting desire and I put my pencil aside after that burst of creativity to admire the fabulous artwork, the line drawings and the ink colorings of the masters of the form.

I guess I enjoyed looking at the comics better than trying to reproduce them.

Keeping up with the main comic book characters was easy. It was fun to look for the lesser-known, minor comic figures. Ollie Owl, who wore huge eyeglasses, and Barney Bear were not only rare in comic book form but in movie cartoons as well. The movie houses always had a double feature, and in the middle was a cartoon. I would silently root for one of the minor characters to appear, and would be happier than usual when it was someone like Barney Bear. Some of the minor comic book characters never played in movie cartoons, such as Gyro Gearloose.

I enjoyed seeing the Beagle Boys get their comeuppances. They wore black masks, orange sweaters, caps, and blue trousers. They were always trying to steal Uncle Scrooge McDuck�s gold.

One of the oddest television cartoons, besides Crusader Rabbit, was Clutch Cargo. Talk about cheap. I thought Crusader Rabbit was primitive when it came to its minimal artwork. Clutch Cargo made that series look like Rembrandt by comparison. About the only thing that ever moved on the screen were the speaker�s lips. That part worked very well. It rather reminded me of Ricky Nelson. Ricky would sing one of his rocking hits on his mom and dad�s television show, with everyone clapping and keeping time and Ricky, with a minimum of movement, would be working just his lips and his fingers on the strings of his guitar. An ideal advertiser for the show would have been Geritol, a remedy for �tired blood.�

A neighbor boy in those days had smoked since he was in grade school. He was not caught up in whether a Pall Mall was better than a Lucky or if a Camel was the only real cigarette. He had to bum, steal or borrow something to smoke, so any cigarette was a good one if he was smoking it. That is how I feel about the comics and the cartoons. There are no bad ones; some are just a little better than the others are. Therefore, instead of saying odd, I guess I should have said different. Still, one comic stands out as actually being odd.

Creepily odd were the comic books titled Pinhead and Foodini. They were first conceived as puppets on an early television show. What I could not figure out was why when the pair branched out into comic books they were still puppets. They were not drawn as a regular comic book character might be, but as puppets, with blank, frozen faces.

Just as the Soldiers of Fortune was one of my favorite television shows, I liked The Blackhawks, another group of solders of fortune, in the comic books. The actual title was Blackhawk.

The Blackhawks were a group of guys who wore black leather jackets and piloted fighter planes in WW II battles mainly against the Commies and the Nazis. They got together on their own and put trouble on the run. There was Blackhawk, the leader, Olaf, Chop Chop, Hendrickson, Andre, Chuck, and Stanislaus. Much of their language was from their native tongues. I picked up many foreign language words and phrases. The various sentence structures in the different comics taught me about rhythm. It was not until much later I was able to realize how much of a learning tool the comics had been for me.

Blackhawk always yelled �Geronimo!� when he jumped from an airplane. That was a hard word to pronounce at my young age. After several Blackhawk comics had crossed my path, I realized it was a war cry of sorts gleaned from the name of the Apache Indian chief, Geronimo. I knew the name. He was one of the historical trading cards I had. All trading cards are not sports related. I could not conceive or comprehend what the word meant in that context. The Blackhawks used so many foreign words it might have been Italian for all I could tell.

Andre I liked best. He spoke quite a bit of French. I learned that �Oui, oui� was �Yes, yes.� I was able to figure out that the �Wee, wee� I had heard French people say in the movies and on television was spelled �Oui, oui.� That even helped me in grade school, more like got me in trouble. We had a girl substitute teacher one day and she was having each of us take turns reading passages from a textbook. One of my classmates stumbled on a pair of italicized works, �Oui, oui.� When he did, the substitute stepped in and, much to my surprise, she pronounced it �Ohy, ohy.� Without giving it a thought, I corrected her. �It�s �Wee, wee,� I said. She got that look of incredulity on her face, like �How could you possibly know that?� I would have told her if she had asked. The Blackhawks, Andre in particular.

I also learned from Andre about �bon ami,� which is French for �good friend.� One of my grandmother�s favorite soaps was Bon Ami. I told her it was French and what the name of the soap meant in English. She wondered how I could know such a thing at my tender age. After all, all I did was read comic books.

UNDERCUTTING THE SELF-INDULGENT COMPETITOR
by Bryce Martin


Members of the St. Louis Cardinals football team put together a touring basketball squad after the 1962 season ended. It was a way to rake in a little off-season money and keep in shape. I got a chance to watch them in a game at Joplin against a pickup team. One of the Joplin players was a local hero, �Bones� Turner, who had just concluded a college career at Baylor University in Waco, Texas.

The Joplin Globe newspaper had wasted no opportunity during Turner�s stay at Baylor to inform readers of his latest heroics.

The draw for me, however, was seeing the Cardinals halfback, and a favorite of mine, John David Crow. Crow was well over six feet tall, wore a flattop and looked mean as hell. That was partly because he had a crooked mouth. I didn�t know if it was from birth or from an injury. Another player who stood out was defensive end Joe Robb -- for the wrong reasons. Robb was a big lineman all right, but, surprisingly to me, he had a big gut. I thought pro football players, no matter their size, would be solid as a rock.

Turner was a hotshot ball handler. Cocky and a show-off, he carried it too far, unless he saw it as a vehicle to hone an audition for the Harlem Globetrotters. Even that wouldn't have been fair to his teammates, whom he gave casual notice. I could see that Turner�s demeanor was raising the hackles of Crow, a bruiser and Heisman Trophy winner as the best college player in 1957 while at Texas A&M. Crow, who played college ball under coach Paul Bryant, seemed to be the floor leader for the Cards. As such, he apparently did not like seeing Turner trying to show him up or his teammates on the hardwood with his self-indulgent dribbling and ball-handling antics.

You could see the extent of Crow�s irritation by his glares and stares directed at Turner, who seemed oblivious to any detail of attention aimed his way.

I was not prepared for what Crow had in store for the upstart Turner.

Robb may have been an accomplice. The huge lineman sent up a shot from underneath the basket that caromed softly to the other side of the backboard. Crow went into a squat where he was stationed to the right of the basket. Turner was underneath and when he went up for the rebound, Crow sprang up, undercutting Turner. Turner hit the floor hard and in a heap. A referee blew his whistle for an injury timeout and Turner had to be helped off the court. I did not much care for Turner�s style of play myself but I had to admit his punishment was rather ugly under the circumstances.

Intentionally undercutting a shooter or rebounder is not only against the rules it is dangerous. It is an act designed to harm another and can easily end in serious injury. I had seen it performed once in a physical education class but never in an actual game. Because of all the action in a basketball game, it can be a difficult and unexpected call to spot for an official. The two officials missed this one, or maybe they ignored it.

The moral I gathered from John David Crow was: Beat us if you can, but don�t show us up in trying. While �Bones� Turner may have been a star at Baylor, he was just now going up against the big boys.

THE DINES SOUTHERN AND OTHER MINING DISASTERS
by Bryce Martin


Lead and zinc mining was a big business in my part of the country. It was a dangerous profession.

My part of the country is Galena, Kansas, in the extreme lower southeast portion of the state and in the heart and center of the historic Tri-State Mining District of Missouri, Kansas and Oklahoma � a kidney-shaped lead belt of a region on a geologic map.

My grandfather, Noah Wesley Martin, was born in 1879 in Tipton Ford, Mo. Old maps show that a wagon trail led from there directly to Joplin, Mo., the largest town in the vicinity back then and the gateway to the lead fields extending westward and southward. He settled near Joplin in Kansas just over the state line in Galena. Galena was then a just-recent booming place, its population greatly swelled by the lead and zinc mining flurry along the Ozark Plateau.

Noah Martin worked some at other jobs, but he was primarily a life-long lead miner. He worked as a hoisterman (he pronounced it �hoisti�man�) right up to 72 years of age. He had to. Miners were often paid in silver dollars. Companies came and went and record keeping was not much of a priority. When he reached normal retirement age, he could not draw his pension because either he did not have proof of employment or he was not always supplied with such information. He had to continue working to gain eligibility.

The derricks on graveyard shifts were lonely, my grandfather said. They were rickety, too, and seemed ready to topple when the winds blew.

They came from all over to work the diggings and the tailings and created boomtowns, short-lived mostly, alongside the creeks and shoals of the small hamlets. Those who did not mind hard, dirty and hazardous working conditions, survived to raise families and some even flourished.

Times were rough and there was a price to pay. Some times the price was your life.

Explosions from dynamiting rock were common sources for accidents. Sparks, too, sometimes ignited gases in the hollows of the mines and took lives. The biggest safety concern, though, for the miners was from falling boulders or timbers down deep in the mines. Men worked in the mines at depths of 500 feet and deeper. No matter how closely the mines were inspected by independent engineers, cave-ins were far too common.

One of the most deadly mining disasters happened in January of 1939 at the Dines Southern Mine northwest of Treece, Kan., in which five men perished when the roof collapsed. Three of the dead were from my hometown of Galena: James Campbell, 34; John McCumber, 24, from the Blackjack region west of Galena; and Harry Burtrum, 32. Burtrum�s father was J.W. Burtrum of Seneca, Mo. Rescue workers toiled for nearly 70 consecutive hours to retrieve the bodies. Of two injured workers, Louis Hensbregh, 35, was also from Galena.

Another wholesale tragedy occurred at the Swalley Mine, owned by Beck Mining and Royalty Co. of Miami (Okla.), a mile and a half west of Baxter Springs, Kan., with the deaths of four miners in the summer of 1945.

At the Swalley, engineers blamed the cave-in, estimated at consisting of 10 to 15 tons of rock and dirt, to the brittle nature of the �sheet ground� layers. A �sheet ground� consists of flat seams extending horizontally in layers measuring from a few inches to a foot. Lead miners say it is a formation similar to those witnessed in coal mining.

It was not necessarily a safe place on the ground, either. Miners often died of suffocation after being buried alive due to slides from enormous chat piles. Such mishaps could not only cover a human body in a moment but could involve thousands of tons of chat.

A relative killed in the mines was Clarence A. Thomason, who, at just age 19, died November 20, 1925, struck by a falling boulder at the Velie Lion mine near Baxter Springs. From an old news clipping of his death, it states that a �boulder� struck him. The headline reads differently:

Miner Killed by Slab
Will Be Buried Today

While there is a difference between a �boulder� (round) and a �slab� (flat), I would imagine that the two were used interchangeably when referring to �sheet ground.� Also, it was sometimes never known for sure whether a miner actually died from being struck by timber or by rock. The cause of death for the lead miners, though vague in nature at times, was usually sudden in execution.

At the time of his death, Thomason was working as a tub hooker � the person who hooks or unhooks the hoisting rope from the ore buckets. (A hoisterman, situated at the top of the derrick, raises the load from the shaft by rope or cable.) Tub hookers were especially vulnerable to falling rock.

Men were lowered in a barrel by the hoisterman down into the shaft to start a day�s work. Even that was dangerous. In January of 1945, dragline foreman James Cowan, 53, who was raised just north of Galena, died from injuries received when the can he was riding plunged out of control to the pit of the shaft at the Muncie Mine outside Treece. No one could judge how far he fell. The hoisterman blamed the accident on a faulty hoist friction band. A cable broke late in the year in 1917 at the Vinegar Hill Wilson Mine, located two miles north of Commerce, Okla., where a young Otis Davis, 17, was being lowered into the hole. He fell an estimated 200 feet to his death. The cause of the cable�s failure was unknown but attributed to �constant strain.� Another such fall happened in an accident when a man fell from the can after it swung violently and struck the side of the shaft.

Hoistermen were not safe, either. Many were injured or killed when derricks collapsed. The man who lowered and raised the buckets was stationed high atop the derrick. The usual height of a derrick was around 70-feet.

Death came in many forms at the mines. A truck driver, Harry Farrar, 38, from Joplin, delivered a hoister to a site near Picher, Okla., early in 1945 and died while trying to help install the machinery. He fell from the top of the derrick.

One morning when no action was coming from the derrick room, a group of miners waiting to be transported to the bottom of the shaft went to see if there was a problem. There was. The hoisterman, apparently attempting to do some quick repair work, was found crushed to death. He was entangled in the hoist, lodged between the belt and the drum of the hoist.

Some derricks were fashioned from steel and others from wood. Steel derricks were not necessarily a safe haven. A hoisterman and another worker were killed in a steel derrick mishap on July 27, 1944, at a site just south of Cardin, Okla. A double-girder steel leg from a 400-ton square-type steel hopper buckled and gave way, toppling the derrick nearby.

Lawsuits were not uncommon. Widowers and other family members often collected in court from companies regarding the deaths of their kin.

Stephen Henry Velie Jr. owned the Velie mine, where young Thomason, my relative, was killed. Velie was the grandson of John Deere. In addition to the Lion Mine, he owned the Leopard and Tiger mines in the region. He was also, at the time, the vice president of the Velie Motor Company in Moline, Ill., a company that built automobiles. Postcards from the era show Velie cars parked in front of his mining offices and facilities in Baxter Springs. In 1911, a song of the day was �Take Me Out in a Velie Car.�

In 1962, on a Friday morning, October 19, the Velie Lion Mine claimed its last victim during �chugging� activities to relieve the ancient hole of its last vestiges of raw ore. Bill Wilson, 31, a World War II Army veteran from Picher was the second of two miners to die from the results of a cave-in that took place two days earlier. He was victim No. 41 taken by the mine since it opened in 1916.

Much too late for Clarence A. Thomason and others before and after him.

FALLING DOWN ON MY STUDIES
by Bryce Martin


Another study. This one released in late 2003, informs us that scientists have concluded that video games are addictive. We needed them to tell us that? How much were they paid to conduct that study? Is it only official if scientists study the obvious and give us lay people the obvious results? I can add to that study. Before video games, pinball machines were addictive. I know because I was one of the addicts. We can probably take it back as far as the abacus.

As a matter of fact (and why not?) I will take it back as far as the abacus. I now offer that as a study. Headline: Study Reveals Ancient Greeks Were Hooked on Abacus.

If I were one of these scientists, I would take all the money given to me to conduct the study and spend none of it on the actual study itself and buy me a new Olds Aurora with the money left over (It would all be left over.). Why even bother? All I would need to do is to fill in some easy blanks to come up with some true results.

Tell us something we do not know -- or cannot figure out for ourselves -- then go conduct a real study and amaze us with your findings.

The one that first got my attention in a big way was the boondoggle done decades ago. As I recall, it was a $36,000 foray into reasons why kids fall off tricycles. More appalling was that it was a federal government study, which meant we had to cough up the money for it. I took it as a parody, but it was not, of course. They all read like parodies, don�t they?

It seems like there are two or three such �news stories� every year. I used to clip them out and collect them, but it got old. What I do not understand is how the media treats them so objectively, as if they really have something.

Imagine Joe Citizen looking up in the phonebook the number for the regional office of the Associated Press. �Hello, I have a news story for you, a little study I have done. Running downhill in bad shoes can cause your feet to swell. Hello�Hello!�

However, let Mr. Wizard call it in and, �By, Jove, I think we�ve got something. Your name, professor, and the details��

Here are just a few of several thousands such studies just waiting to be made official:

Fat people weigh more than people who are not as fat do.

Survey finds most people describe dill pickles as having a tart or sour taste and sugar as tasting sweet.

Live cows give more milk than dead cows.

Why do kids fall off tricycles? I can only guess. That is all it would take, too.

When do I start? I'll work for a stipend.