Of Baseball, Comic Books And Records At Village Music

In March of 1957 I was the smallest child in Mrs. Blaugh's fourth grade class at Homestead School and, though I had just turned ten years old, I probably looked about six.

   Being so tiny didn't bother me too much though the unrequited love of my life, Lily Burris, was taller than me and this may have been why she never gave me the time of day.

   The playground at Homestead was a whirl of contrasting activities. During recess, long jump ropes were wielded by pairs of girls while other kids stood in line to skip into it's constant rotation. Whether their skipping was successful or not, they all sang a counting rhyme as the rope came around with the regularity of a metronome.

   Groups of boys with arms around each other would stalk the playground chanting: "We won't stop!" There was hop scotch, marbles and, of course, sports.

   One of my best friends was Alex Robertson who was big for his age, a keen athlete and had a passion for baseball. My other best friends, Glen Pritzker and Billy Bowen were competent enough athletes unlike myself who was not. Because I was so small it was expected that I wouldn't be any good at sports and, sadly, it was a self fulfilling prophecy.

   At home I would play touch football and softball with my brother's friends but never at school. Whenever I would get up to bat at Homestead the cry would go out: "Myers is up!" At this point the outfielders, chuckling amongst themselves, would walk in past the base lines. The humiliation of this would fill me with a rage which guaranteed that I struck out three times in a row.

   The truth was that I had a terror of the ball. Had I used my time at the plate focusing on it and connecting with the bat I might well have knocked it over the fence onto Montford but instead I surrendered to my rage and didn't approach the situation with any clarity.

   My time out in left field was sadly worse as I spent it dreading that the ball might come in my direction and, again, my lack of focus and terror made me a lousy player.

   At home I wasn't too bad. Our father Blackie had got us a pair of fielders' mitts and brother Jim and I would regularly play catch with a hard ball up on Seymour Avenue just above our house.

   So it was mostly other areas of interest which I shared with my friends. Whenever Billy or Alex visited our house they would invariably lose themselves reading my comic books or listening to my records.

   I was, by now, a committed collector. The 45s and LPs were all kept in their original packaging and the comic books were stacked neatly in chronological order on a piece of furniture I had commandeered. I had Uncle Scrooge, Walt Disney's Comics & Stories, Superman and MAD magazines. My one strict rule was that nobody was allowed to fold back the covers on the comics.

   Glen and I would always make our weekly pilgrimage to Village Music where we'd pick up a copy of that week's Top 40 and listen to records in the sound proof booth. In those days the record shop was in one of the shops which nestled within the Sequoia Theater building. 
   Sara Wilcox was possibly the only adult shopkeeper in Mill Valley who didn't treat kids like second class citizens. A wander into Bennetts Variety store always invited the laser like surveillance of whichever bad tempered adult was on duty whereas Sara was always friendly, funny and never tired of playing us whatever records we wanted to hear.

   One record which came out around this time and I purchased was Perry Como's Round And Round. The simplicity of the song's arrangement appealed to me. It began with a quiet rhythm provided by a drummer using brushes. Then Como's voice came in, very gently.

       Find a wheel and it goes round, round, round,

       As it skims along with a happy sound,

       As it goes along the ground, ground, ground,

       'Til it leads you to the one you love,

It proceeded to build with the addition of male singers and soon after with female voices which intertwined through key changes and a middle eight. The whole thing built to a swirling crescendo then returned to the gentle brushes and Como's quiet voice. I loved this record and played it over and over.

   Perry Como recorded on the RCA Victor label which also had Elvis Presley and Harry Belafonte. Glen and I would study the actual labels which, in this case had a full color picture of a dog gazing into the horn of an old gramophone speaker against a black background. We came to know that the names inside the parenthesis under the song's title were those of the composers.

   The pop music of this time was a very broad church and Glen and I followed the fortunes of a wide range of artists. Tab Hunter had gotten to number one with his version of Young Love which was really inferior to Sonny James' recording of the same song but then Tab was a movie star despite being a completely unnatural singer.

   Another movie star who put out a few singles was Tony Perkins. He had a minor hit with Moonlight Swim that same year. The big difference between Perkins and Tab Hunter was that he could actually sing whereas all Tab could do was a passable imitation of singing.

   I guess it was the success of Tab Hunter's single which prompted the other Hollywood studios to put their juvenile leads into the recording studios as, before the year was out, a disk cut by Sal Mineo came into the charts and, presumably, sold quite a few copies. Keep Movin' was its title and it was not very good.  Like Tony Perkins Sal had a good voice but the song was not well crafted and I would never have bought it.

   I had to really love a record to commit the six bits it cost for a single and that was the beauty of someone like Sara Wilcox because Glen and I would only have to ask to hear something like Party Doll by Buddy Knox and she'd play it for us and the sound proof booth meant that she didn't have to listen to it herself.

   I'm not too sure that I even noticed the overstated southern accent of a singer like Buddy Knox whose pronunciations of words like 'fair' (fay-aire) and 'hair' (hay-aire) were very exaggerated but after Elvis Presley broke out of the south and became the phenomenon he was after 1956 it seemed there was a wave of southern white singers in the top 40.

   Another single I had to have was Butterfly by Andy Williams as well as a peculiar one that I always felt uncertain about which was Teenage Crush by Tommy Sands. I could never make up my mind if it was good or not but I did buy it though I never purchased another Tommy Sands single.

   This was also the time that Fats Domino released the terrific I'm Walkin' and The Diamonds came out with one I loved which was Little Darlin'. The singing voices on this record were so eccentric that they wouldn't have been out of place in a Warner Brothers cartoon. The opening created a visual picture of a waterfall in my mind with castanets clapping like clams as they fell.

   I was, by this time, absolutely enthralled with every record made by Elvis Presley for this was at the beginning of his long career and he was still putting out terrific singles like the next one to come along which was All Shook Up. This absolutely fabulous disk reminded me of Don't Be Cruel which was not such a mystery as, like its predecessor, it was composed by Otis Blackwell.

   I knew nothing of the behind the scenes machinations that Elvis's manager pulled off but the wily old Colonel  Parker formed a publishing company and demanded that song writers like Blackwell sign over the rights to this firm which was the main reason why Elvis had a writing credit on it. Elvis, however, was a demanding perfectionist in the studio and almost certainly made some changes to the lyrics during the thirty or so takes that he did.

   There were always words I couldn't fully fathom on an Elvis recording and All Shook Up was no exception. The line: "My friends say I'm acting as wild as a bug" filtered through to my ears as: "My friends say Mack you're acting queer as a bug."

   The opening beguiled me immediately with its fluid boogie woogie rhythm. The individual notes seemed to melt into each other unlike the bass notes on Don't Be Cruel which were distinct and separate.

   Another disk released on RCA Victor was by Harry Belafonte who was one of my favorites. Banana Boat was a much played 45 in my collection and his next release was Mama Look At Boo Boo which introduced us to dialects and accents we'd never encountered before. His West Indian lingo and lyrics were enchanting to a ten year old.

  

“Mama, look at boo boo,” they shout,

Their mother tell them, “Shut up your mouth,”

“That is your daddy,"

"Oh, no! My daddy can't be ugly so,”

"Shut your mouth! Go away!

Mama look at Boo Boo they."

   1957 was turning out to be rich for popular music as each week brought new delights to Sara's sound proof booth. I already had a few singles by Chuck Berry on the Chess and, unlike Elvis, his diction was crystal clear. His latest release was School Days and the witty lyrics described the drudgery of the classroom giving way to the joys of dancing to rock and roll after school.

   Another singer I had no problem understanding was Pat Boone. His next record which entered my collection was Love Letters In The Sand, which was basically a sad song but there was nothing melancholy about his version.

   Glen and I regularly discussed what we were going to do when we grew up. I was going to be a singer and he would be my manager. I did have a good singing voice and could produce fair imitations of all the records which I listened to. I remember standing on a bench in the playground at Homestead singing Love Letters In The Sand to an audience of probably nobody.

   Unlike me, Glen was a straight A student and by the end of 4th grade he skipped a year, going to Alto then Edna Maguire and ultimately to a prep school in the city so I didn't see him again for many years.  On the advice of his little league coach Glen gave up baseball and took up tennis, becoming something of a star player along with his sister Robin. But I knew nothing of this.

   As for Alex Robertson he was the main reason that I was able to be a loud mouthed little guy for he stepped in on many occasions to protect me from whatever rough justice my big mouth would inspire.

   Billy Bowen I spied leaving Village Music in the early 1960s with entire albums of Chuck Berry under his arm. When I asked why he told me he used them to practice his drums to at home.

   We all went to Alto for sixth grade and for reasons I no longer recall I drifted away from Alex and Billy. New friendships developed and the Top 40 evolved into something less excitng than the early Elvis and Little Richard. Such was the way of things but those years at Homestead retain a special fascination for me.