Train Stories

CN passenger train.

It was late spring in 1967 in Montreal. I was stone broke and living in a former coal room in the basement of a fraternity house that was about to be torn down. I had been camping on the floor of a friend’s room who was an American student at McGill University from Fairfax, Virginia when the powers that be in the frat house decided that I was a distraction to his studies and offered me the windowless room in the basement rent free. You might say my prospects didn’t look too good.

Expo 67 was about to open and all of the jobs there had been sewn up by university students some months before. I was glancing through the local help wanted ads and spotted one that was looking for summer employees to work on the CN passenger trains out of Montreal. Normally these jobs would have been snapped up quickly but most young people didn’t want to miss the chance in taking part in Expo 67.

I went down to Central Station and was pretty well hired on the spot. I faked being a university student and they never asked for any proof. Training started a day or two later and I was joined by about twenty real university students. The guy who showed us the ropes was a no bullshit type named Mike Hogan who kind of resembled Ernest Borgnine in his prime. He crammed a lot into our two days of instruction including how to carry a tray. Our training was done on an old dining car in the train yards. I think they were located in Point St. Charles.

Being that we were summer help we worked off of what was called a spare board. We could be called at any time to go anywhere on the CN line out of Montreal as long as the route was initiated in Montreal. Ottawa, Toronto, and Winnipeg to the west. North to Senneterre, Quebec. East to Quebec City, Gaspe, Quebec, and Campbellton, New Brunswick.

We were trained to do two different jobs. One was as a waiter where we wore a white shirt and a black tie along with a short red jacket. The other job was the one most of us were not fussy about and that was as a dishwasher or as they called it on the trains, a “pearl diver”. The dishwashing area had a fairly small sink that was portioned in two. On one side was the very hot soapy water and on the other side was water for rinsing. The hot water was generated by a steam tap. Fortunately, I only found myself covered in food slop a half a dozen times before exclusively working only as a waiter.

Getting up close to a train can be rather ominous. They aren’t built of fiberglass. The power of a locomotive is incredible. And the whole shebang goes hurtling down tracks at high speeds counting on nothing being in the way. Trains are very unforgiving beasts and not to be taken lightly. They demand respect.

I was just about ready for my first trip but didn’t have any black shoes. I found a nice fairly new pair of brown ones that one of the frat boys had left behind and they fit so I got some black shoe polish and I was in business. It wasn’t as if the shoes were going to be missed what with the building about to be torn down.

I didn’t have a phone but shortly after I started to work I rented a room on Hutchison Street that had a pay phone in the hallway. That phone was my way of being contacted for a few months. Before that I would just check in physically at the spare board office that was just outside the south door to Central Station.

To get to the station platform we took the same stairs with the brass handrails that the passengers did down to the bowels below. The first thing I noticed was a lot of hissing sounds and a dank kind of odor.

Central Station Montreal

The guy in charge of the dining car was the steward. There were usually 4-6 waiters under his command. The kitchen was run by a chef with 2 or 3 cooks as assistants. The dishwasher was under the steward’s authority. The porters were almost always black. A few of the cooks were also black. I can’t recall seeing more than maybe one black waiter. Hey it was the 60s! Oscar Peterson’s brother worked as a chef on the CN trains. The guy that was in charge of everything on the train was the conductor. He was the sheriff, the judge and jury, the king. Whatever he said was gospel.

Working on the passenger trains back then had a whole culture. Almost all of the workers came from rougher parts of Montreal like Point St. Charles, Little Burgundy, Griffintown and a poor neighbourhood that once had the nick name Goose Village. Some of them had some resentment for preppy college boys who were just there for the summer.

Seniority ruled. The longer you worked for the railroad the better choices you had as to which runs you worked on. The conductors and stewards wore blue dress jackets that had little bars near one of the sleeve cuffs that indicated how long they had been with the company. From what I can recall, the most desired run for old timers was the Montreal-Ottawa one because you could be in your own bed at home each night. I think a old guy named Jimmy Dodds had top seniority at the time as far as stewards go.

A lot of the employees had limited educations and they knew that their jobs were important as far as providing for their families. That isn’t to say that there weren’t some characters also working on the train. A few were involved with criminal activities away from the job. There were also some I wouldn’t have wanted to face in a dark alley. There were some really tough buggers. The craziest guy I worked with once came out of the kitchen with his package laid out on a glass celery and olives dish. It was rumoured that he was once arrested for stealing a TV when it fell on his head from a window ledge and knocked him cold.

I think waiters and dishwashers got paid something like $1.30 an hour. We were off the clock as soon as we stepped off of the train. Meals were free while we were working. When I first started I made the big mistake of gulping back orange juice like it was water. The tips were pretty good while we were working as waiters. Our accommodations in other cities were paid for by the company and always at a 3^rd rate hotel including The Walker House in Toronto, The Empire Hotel in Winnipeg, and The Baker House in Gaspe, PQ.

CN pay stub 1967.

Over the summer I hardly ever ran into any of the students I had started with except for one. He was a short Jewish guy who had to be one of the hairiest people I have ever met. Nice enough guy but he must have had an itchy life.

It was a really busy summer in 1967 on the trains what with Expo 67 The passenger cars were packed and some people were quite demanding. We often had 4 calls for a meal and people were lined up down the corridor. Some would sit down before we had a chance to clean the table. I got to be pretty proficient at handling the big serving tray while the train lurched about and somehow never managed to spill anything on anyone.

I remember one trip between Montreal and Toronto when I was assigned the duty of wandering through the passenger cars to announce the first call for dinner. I entered one car and was kind of taken aback by the sullen looks from some of the passengers. It was a few minutes before it dawned on me that they were manacled and on their way to the pen in Kingston.

On another trip the staff was eating dinner after having completed 4 sittings and an old farmer wandered in. We told him that the dining car was closed but the steward let him eat anyway. Apparently he didn’t like cigarettes and took it upon himself to put our smokes out in the ashtray they were resting in.

In the beginning, I would sometimes go down to the last car and go outside and have a smoke. I would feel little drops of water but thought nothing of it. Someone later pointed out to me that those little drops of water were coming from the washrooms.

I started to become a bit of a cowboy. In northern Ontario if a passenger asked me what lake was outside the window, I would tell them Round Lake. ”Round Lake?” “Yeah it’s round somewhere.” None of the other waiters wanted to call bingo after the last meal at night but I kind of liked it. It gave me a chance to joke around with the young and older babes. There was one steward, a guy named George Stundon, who was a bit of a cool dude. I think he asked to get me on his crew if they needed someone from the spare board. I must have told that guy every joke I ever heard in my then 20 years on this planet.

Things got very hectic on the train during Expo 67. Once in a while the steward and chef would agree to condemn some food just so they could shut the dining car down because of lack of food. Occasionally garbage was tossed out to the side of the tracks. It was kind of like us and them. The hordes at the gates.

Trip record Montreal To Winnipeg and back.

The porters and the conductor and assistant conductor were also fed in the dining car. Some of the young black guys had copped an attitude. Race relations were a big deal in the 60s. Some of the young black guys would just glare at you if you asked them a question. There wasn’t any point in telling them that I wasn’t the one oppressing them. “I’m on your side man!”  I do remember getting pissed one night with some of the older black porters at a dive in Quebec City called The Fez.

In 1967 they added a disco car to the passenger train between Montreal and Toronto where people could dance while hurtling down the tracks. I was never in that car while working but saw the interior when the train was in the station. It was decorated in early acid trip.

You may be asking yourself what was on the menu in the dining car? Maybe not? Anyway, there were about 5 main choices. Prime rib was #1. A lot of people wanted the end cut but there were only two per roast. I kind of got sick of the stuff after a while. #2 was some kind of chicken. The only other entrée I can remember was trout and it was seldom ordered. I think they pronounce it “trit” in French. Celery and olives (without the package) came with the meal. Pie and ice cream or pie and cheddar cheese were the desert standards.

I found that the worst place to sleep at night on the train was above the wheels unless you really liked listening to that “clack-clack, clack-clack sound”. I learned what a “deadhead” was, a worker who was travelling but not being paid.

I never met anyone really famous working on the train. I saw Elwy Yost (look him up) who was rather tall get on a late night train to Toronto. I also ran into a folksinger on a trip to Winnipeg. He wrote a song that became popular in Canada for a few months called Moody Manitoba Morning.

I was too young to work the club car as a bartender. I probably would have had to take a course. Seemed like a cozy kind of job. Shmooze with the passengers, load them up on alcohol, get great tips. The breaking up of fights might not have been much fun. I started bringing home those empty miniature liquor bottles that held about an ounce of liquor. They are probably worth something today.

I stayed on at the trains after the summer. I was saving up a bit for a trip I had planned to take to Australia. You couldn’t quite call me a college drop-out since I wasn’t going to school anyway. A few of the regulars would give me a hard time for being a student. If only they knew.

The snows had come. One day I got a call telling me I was going to Senaterre in northern Quebec . Somewhere past Chicoutimi and on the way to Chibougamau I think. Love that name. Chibougamau. Anyway, I was changing into my waiter’s garb when I was told that was not going to be a waiter but “the” cook. It only involved making sandwiches which wasn’t difficult. When we got off the train the snow was about 4 feet high on the ground. We had to carry our valises (there’s an old word) over our heads. I remember the windows in our hotel were glazed over with ice.

One of the awkward things about working on the trains was sharing a room in some far off distant city with strangers. It isn’t that comfortable seeing an old guy you hardly know getting undressed out of the corner of your eye. The other thing is a lot of these guys liked to get shit faced drunk when they were out of town. It wasn’t so bad when I was with them but getting drunk was just a sometimes thing for me.

I had a couple of run-ins with a few waiters but never on the train. I was sitting at the bar in The Baker House Hotel in Gaspe talking to a taxi driver when a French Canadian waiter from the trains approached us. He started giving me a hard time about being a student and I don’t think he was fussy about my English speaking background either. He was throwing a lot of insults around and wouldn’t let up. Finally I got up from my seat and punched him in the noggin knocking him over some nearby empty tables and chairs.

Back then they had newsstands on some trains that were operated by women. On this trip the the newsstand woman had brought along her boyfriend who was a bit of a gorilla. I was serving the two of them breakfast the next morning and the gorilla guy started laughing when he found out that it was me who was involved in the short fight the night before. Apparently the waiter had gone to the gorilla’s room seeking help in fighting me. I might have weighed all of 150 lbs. at the time and I wasn’t Bruce Lee.

I had two run-ins at the Empire Hotel in Winnipeg. I’m not sure, but this may be the same Empire Hotel that Joni Mitchell sang about in one of her songs. “Raised On Robbery”. The first run-in happened in the hallway outside of our room. I was on the way to the bathroom in my skivvies (this wasn’t a classy hotel) when an old guy accused me of making a lot of noise. He wouldn’t accept that it wasn’t me and looked like he wanted to lay a beating on me. He kind of skulked away when I picked up a floor ashtray and told him I would clobber him if he got any closer.

The 2^nd run-in was with another waiter. He had an English last name but was French. 4 of us were sharing a room and he came back to the room totally wasted. I was sleeping. He started to harass me with the student stuff and I told him to take a hike. Then he got in my face and did a few fake punches at my chin. I knocked him out. He deadheaded it back to Montreal. It turned out he had once had his jaw wired. I had to explain to the union guy on the train why I had done what I did.

This same guy had a brother who worked on the trains who was rumoured to be a pimp. I didn’t like my chances of being on the same crew and in some strange town with him. Pimp guys were probably out of my league as far as fighting goes. I did about 5 or 6 more trips and then quit.

I remember the names of some of the smaller towns the train stopped at. Places like Sioux Lookout, Armstrong, Hornepayne, Gogama, Madapedia, and Campbelton. I remember some of the characters who worked on the train. One guy told me about how he had joined the army at 15 and had been in WW2. He said he had cut fingers off of dead German soldiers on the battlefield to take their rings. One of the train conductors was also an opera singer. One guy aspired to be a professional gambler and would get me to play cards with him so he could practice his skills.

All in all I thought working on the trains was kind of like the Foreign Legion.

The last time I was on a train other than a sky train in Vancouver or a subway in other cities was the one from London to Paris. It was like being on a quiet rocket.

Train travel has fallen off in Canada over the past decades but there is still something about them. Partly because of our history I guess. Beats the hell out of having your ass crammed into an airline seat next to someone with bad breath.  Trains also make better songs than planes. “From Natchez to Mobile….wherever the four winds blow….”

Pardon mois garcons! C'est le Chatanooga choo-choo!

 

 

 

Jazz.....My Take On It (Part 1)

 

Duke Ellington was once asked what he thought jazz was all about and he answered “It’s all music.”

There are people who live and breathe jazz. Some of them have whole walls of vinyl records of the greats and the more obscure in their living rooms. There are folks who can tell you who played with who and when. Some have met jazz musicians in their lives and have formed personal relationships with them. Some might even feel that they are part of a small unofficial club. At best, jazz has a small market place. It isn’t kid’s music and requires more attention. To play the music requires a lot of skill. It is almost impossible to fake.

Like most other baby boomers, I grew up on rock and roll. A few years later it was folk music. Then came the British invasion. For me personally, rock started to fade away in the early 1980s although there were still some good tunes every now and then.

I was always aware of jazz growing up but never really looked at the music in any depth. Occasionally on TV in the 1950s and 1960s I would see some of the jazz greats but most often they were doing tunes in the pop music fashion, Peggy Lee singing Fever, Sarah Vaughan singing Broken Hearted Melody, Louis Armstrong and Hello Dolly. On a rare occasion you might see Dave Brubeck and Take Five or Erroll Garner playing Misty.

Montreal, where I grew up, was part of the circuit for great jazz musicians over the years. Maynard Ferguson, Oscar Peterson, and Oliver Jones all grew up in Montreal. I remember once listening to a radio interview with Billy Eckstine. I think Montreal had a warm place in the hearts a lot of black jazz musicians as it was an open city with not much racism.



Oscar Peterson

In 1968 I lived in a boarding house in the west end of Vancouver for a few months without a TV and only a radio. Every night I would listen to a guy named Jack Cullen. He had one of the largest record collections in the world. If anyone was an authority on music other than rock and roll this guy was. His musical knowledge stretched all the way back to the late 1920s. He was a big fan of big band music and crooners and he was great at telling stories about musicians he had met or seen over the years.



Jack Cullen

In late 1971 I was living in Toronto and we used to get drunk at a Holiday Inn sometimes after work while watching a really funny and dirty Irish comedian. One evening I staggered out of the washroom and heard some music coming from a large room nearby. I stumbled in and found a seat. A small jazz orchestra was playing. I was only a few feet away. One guy caught my eye. There was a highball glass by his feet and every so often he would take a nip. When his turn came, he brought the horn up to his lips and played incredibly. At least I thought so. His drinking alcohol and his musical talent left an impression on me. A lot of jazz musicians have obviously had problems with alcohol and hard drugs over the years.

About a year later I was living in an attic room in a downtown Toronto rooming house and had borrowed a record player from a guy from across the hall. One day I was in Sam The Record Man`s leafing through some albums when I came across one I decided to buy. It was a double album of big band music. I can still remember some of the tunes, Artie Shaw`s Begin The Beguine and Frenesi, Duke Ellington`s Take The A Train, and Bunny Berigan`s I Can`t Get Started. I was hooked on big band music from the 1930s and 1940s.

Some years later I became fascinated with Artie Shaw. There is no doubt that in his personal life he was one damned ornery individual but there is no doubting his musical genius. The guy led one amazing life. Married some of the most beautiful women in the world, was at the top of his game for close to 10 years, lived in exotic places, and packed it all in trying to find some sanity in it all. There is a rumour that he made a lamp out of his clarinet. On top of all that he lived into his nineties and was teaching music up until his death.

Artie Shaw

The first live jazz I ever saw was around 1975 in Hamilton, Ontario, the high octane Maynard Ferguson. His orchestra was made up of mostly college kids. It kept the overhead costs down I guess. Man oh man Maynard could blast it.

Maynard Fergusson

It wasn`t until the early 1980s that I started to buy jazz records and really get to see a number of live jazz groups. One weekend we were down in Seattle Washington for a weekend and staying at a Holiday Inn in Bellevue. We decided to grab a cocktail before bed and wandered into a tiny bar. A black guy was tinkling on the piano. We didn`t know it at the time but the place, although small, was full of regulars. People sitting at the bar were called over individually to join the piano player and sing a song or two. It was one of those sweet memorable evenings for me.

I started to delve into jazz. I tried to break it down a bit. I knew most of the names of the greats but I was interested in the music also in a historical sense. I bought a number of compilations and discovered a lot of great tunes. I also got my hands on a number of books about jazz.


Louis Armstrong

I loved it all starting with the 1930s stuff. Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller, Bix Beiderbecke, Bennie Moten, Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Hoagie Carmichael, Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappeli, Sidney Bichet, Jack Teargarden.

Django Reinhardt
 

I love swing and big band music and really don`t give a shit about jazz perfectionists who think this music was too plastic and contrived. I could listen to a lot of Glenn Miller, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman any old time. Smooth or jump it all had a sweetness to it. I am not embarrassed to say I liked Tex Beneke, Helen Forrest or The Andrews Sisters.

I can`t say I was always a big fan of Bop. I prefer music with a melody even if the musicians wander away from it for a while. I can appreciate Miles Davis but sometimes he lost me. Dizzy Gillespie too. Not always. Just sometimes. It isn`t hard to see the genius in Charlie Parker.

Over the years I have been a big fan of crooners.

Billy Holliday was haunting. Peggy Lee was simply amazing. Blues In The Night and Why Don`t You Do Right are as good as it gets as far as I am concerned. Ella Fitzgerald is in a league of her own. She had such a pure clear voice and was one hell of a scat singer. Dinah Washington and Anita O`Day could always deliver. I always had a soft spot for Dinah Shore but there were better women singers.

Peggy Lee

My kids grew up listening to Sinatra in the car. They still know a lot of his lyrics. I loved most of his music although he could get a bit corny at times. Nat King Cole was a damned fine piano player aside from being a great singer. Tony Bennett can still cut it. Mel Torme was probably the best male scat singer but could be a bit on the hokey side. Sammy Davis Jr. had a great voice but was terrible at picking songs. Lou Rawls with his baritone voice and Dean Martin were good singers but you could count on one hand good songs that they sung. Loved Chet Baker but he wasn`t someone a depressed person should listen to. Luckily for me I am not the depressed type. I know jazz buffs like to bring up the name of Johnny Hartman but unfortunately the guy didn`t ever have a real signature tune.

Frank Sinatra

I`ve always been partial to up tempo lively Latin jazz with that scratching sound in the background. I`ll take me some Stan Getz anytime. If I have choice between happy and reflective I`ll take happy.

Stan Getz



In the 1980s and 1990s I found that I could afford to go and see pretty well anyone I wanted in the jazz genre when they came to Vancouver. I saw Paul Horn at a joint on 4^th Avenue. We sat about 5 feet away. We saw The Manhattan Transfer at the QE Theatre and Earl Klugh and Maceo Parker at the Commodore Ballroom. I saw Frank Sinatra the last time he came through Vancouver out at the Pacific Coluseum. Sammy was the only one left with a voice. Dean was out of it. His son had died a year or two before. Old blue eyes, old red eyes, and old one eye….hey it`s a joke!

Paul Horn

 

I saw Michael Buble when he was starting out at a club called BaBalu in the basement of a hotel on Granville Street. I had no idea he would become so big. I can`t think of two better crooners to have the jazz torch passed to than Michael Buble and Nanaimo`s own Diana Krall.

Diana Krall

I got to see Ray Brown, the great jazz bassist, on his last trip through Vancouver when he appeared at Rossini`s in Kits. Also saw the Five Blind Men From Alabama at a big church in Burnaby one night. As an atheist, even I was carried away in the fervor. I was half expecting to see John Belushi doing summersaults.

Ray Brown

In the mid 90s I split up with my wife and found myself with more time to go out and explore Vancouver`s nightlife. I didn`t want to be the old guy hanging around a younger crowd kind of joint and I kind of naturally gravitated to places where I might fit in. Most of these places were jazz places. I hung around the Fairview Pub on Broadway a bit on jazz nights. I warmed a stool from time to time at Rossini`s in Kits. Linton Garner, the brother of Erroll Garner, was the house piano player.(Erroll often mumbled while playing the piano.)

I saw Kenny Coleman a number of times including at the revolving restaurant on top of the Sheraton Hotel on Robson. Had a few brief chats with him, once in a club he owned and once when I was having lunch in Richmond with my ex and he was sitting at the next table. This guy truly has had an amazing life. He is pretty decent singer too.

I started going to jazz festivals in the 90s including The Vancouver Jazz Festival. I even went to one on the Hood River in Oregon. Mostly I saw musicians that were not big names. There are some amazing not so well known talents out there.

I moved over to Vancouver Island (semi-retirement) and a place I owned in Fanny Bay in 2005. I took in the North Island Jazz Festival in Courtenay, BC. I think it has ceased operation. They had a pretty formidable venue, two different buildings and something going on in both buildings at the same time. A couple of things really impressed me. One was the first zydeco band I had ever seen. (A few years later I saw Buckwheat Zydeco at the Queens in Nanaimo.) The other thing that stuck in my mind was watching a young high school gal singing and being accompanied by a clarinetist who seemed to be in his eighties. There are no age barriers in jazz.

After a couple of years in Fanny Bay, I decided to move down to Victoria. The best jazz joint in town was and probably still is, is a place called Herman`s. Spent a number of nights in that place. Also took in the Victoria Jazz Festival. A lot of these festivals bring in musicians and groups from Europe. Jazz is truly a universal type of music.

The last jazz concert I attended was one with pianist Oliver Jones (from Montreal) and a combo at the Port Theatre in Nanaimo. That was about 2 or 3 years ago.

I have a damned good music system but I hardly ever use it. I have wide collection of jazz CDs but I hardly ever listen to them. Wynton Marcalis, Eddie Daniels, Wes Montgomery, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, David Sanborn. That kind of stuff.

David Sanborn

A couple of years ago I discovered what some top quality speakers can do with a computer. About once or twice a week I take a musical walk through You Tube. Sometimes I listen to jazz. Sometimes I listen to other music. Sometimes we light up a joint and listen for hours. Call me an old fool. I’ve been called worse.

I expect to see and listen to a lot more jazz in my life. I’m just not obsessed with it. I certainly don’t want to sound preachy but…I firmly believe that variety is truly the spice of life. There are times when music is a focal point or a great background and other times are good without any music at all. There is also something to be said about absence makes the heart grow fonder. It is nice to know that it can always be pulled out of the bag.

My jazz all stars…. 

Sax: Charlie Parker, Stan Getz, Cannonball Adderley, John Coltrane, David Sanborn, Jerry Mulligan, Bud Shank

Trumpet: Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Chet Baker

Trombone: J.J. Johnson, Tommy Dorsey

Clarinet: Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman, Sidney Bichet, Bud Defranco,

Piano: Dave Brubeck, Oscar Peterson, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Nat King Cole

Drums: Gene Krupa, Buddy Rich, Elvin Jones, Shelley Manne, Louis Bellson

Bass: Ray Brown, Charles Mingus, Stanley Clarke

Vibraphone: Milt Jackson, Lionel Hampton, Red Norvo, Cal Tjader

Guitar: Django Reinhardt, Charlie Christian, Wes Montgomery, Herb Ellis, George Benson

Singing Groups: Manhattan Transfer

Female Singers: Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee, Dinah Washington, Anita O’Day, Diana Krall, Holly Cole, Billy Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, Etta James, Blossum Dearie

Male Singers: Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Michael Buble, Nat King Cole, Mel Torme, Billy Eckstine, Joe Williams, Al Jarreau, Chet Baker

 

Gene Krupa

Charlie Parker

Gerry Mulligan

Dave Brubeck

Duke Ellington

Miles Davis

 

25 recommended jazz tunes……

#1 Take Five…..Dave Brubeck

#2 Blues In The Night…..Peggy Lee with Tommy Dorsey

#3 I Can’t Get Started…..Bunny Berigan

#4 Let’s Face The Music And Dance…..Frank Sinatra

#5 Take The A Train…..Duke Ellington

#6 Desafinado…..Stan Getz

#7 God Bless The Child…..Billy Holiday

#8 Salt Peanuts…..Dizzy Gillespie

#9 A Night In Tunisia…..Charlie Parker

#10 Feeling Good…..Nina Simone

#11 St. Louis Blues…..Louis Armstrong

#12 Ain’t Misbehavin…..Fats Waller

#13 Misty…..Erroll Garner

#14 On Green Dolphin Street…..John Coltrane

#15 Sunday Kind of Love…..Dinah Washington

#16 The Look Of Love…..Diana Krall

#17 Frenesi….Artie Shaw

#18 Everything Happens To Me…..Chet Baker

#19 Cry Me A River…..Ella Fitzgerald

#20 Honeysuckle Rose…..Anita O’Day

#21 The Sheik Of Araby….Django Reinhardt

#22 Dark Eyes…..Jack Teargarden

#23 Try A Little Tenderness…..David Sanborn

#24 Straighten Up And Fly Right…..Nat King Cole

#25 Am I Blue?.....Hoagy Carmichael

Ella Fitzgerald

Chet Baker

Billy Holiday
 

Nina Simone

Jack Teargarden

Anita O'Day

Saw the great Tony Bennett one night at the Orpheum Theatre in Vancouver with a trio of musicians. Bass, drums, and piano.

Tony Bennett

 

Playboy Magazine

 

In our living room on Harvard Avenue in Montreal in the 1950s there was a dark rectangular veneered coffee table. On it sat a brass bell and a brass turtle. The brass turtle had a hinged shell. It was actually an ash tray. Also on the coffee table were a number of magazines. They seemed to vary over the years. They were never thrown away. Once they became dated they were stored away until there were a number of bundles of them. My father would then take the stacks over to the war vets hospital on Queen Mary Road not far from our house.

Here are some of the magazines I recall sitting on the coffee table.

I was too young to realize that the New Yorker had some great writers. I pretty well only looked through it to see the cartoons. One cartoon that I particularly remember was one of two wealthy parents standing in a drawing room and addressing their son who was almost an adult. The caption read “20 years ago you were left on our front doorstep and that is why we always referred to you as….. hey you.”

The Saturday Evening Post had the great front covers by Norman Rockwell, a kid getting a haircut or some dogs running off with some links of wieners. Americana I guess.

Life Magazine always had amazing photographers. You didn’t have to read if you didn’t care to. You could just turn the pages and let the camera lens tell the story.

Look Magazine was a lot like Life Magazine with a more up tempo kind of presentation.

 

There was another magazine around at the time called Liberty and the only reason I remember it was because when I was about 10 years old I tried to sell subscriptions to it in the nearby Snowden area. It disappeared from circulation shortly after my door to door attempts.

Once in a while Newsweek and Time Magazine would make an appearance on the coffee table. Far too much reading for a kid like me.

Perhaps the strangest magazine was something called Scottish Field. It was my father’s connection to where he grew up I guess. There were lots of men in kilts and short tweed jackets. All the photos were in black and white and the sky always looked grey. It all seemed quite foreign to me.

In the mid 1950s I was reading (if that’s what you call it) Harvey Comics like Baby Huey and Sad Sack. I can’t remember exactly when I saw my first Mad Magazine. It had a big impact. My guess is that Mad Magazine was where a lot of kids in my age group first discovered sarcasm. Cracked was another magazine with the same sense of humour. Mad Magazine embedded forever in my mind Alfred E. Newman and “What me worry?” At the bottom of some pages they had tiny little cartoons called Spy Verses Spy. In some issues you could fold the back page to give you a funny alternative to what the page looked like before being folded. Mad Magazine readers were almost like some kind of inner circle. If you didn’t find this stuff funny then there wasn’t much hope.

 

Some kids had The National Geographic sent to their homes once a month. Always a good source for a naked breast even if some impoverished child was using it. At the age of 12 there weren’t many resources as far as seeing naked women.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Playboy Magazine

"I only read it for the articles."

I think the first time I ever got my hands on a Playboy Magazine was when I was about 15. I wasn’t the first in the neighbourhood. What 15 year old didn’t want to see naked women?

The first thing I would do is leaf through the magazine for all the nude gals. I would of course unfold the playmate of the month. Then I would search out the cartoons. The last thing I did was read the articles. Playboy left a big impression on me. In my later teens I wanted in on some of the action. There is no doubt that I could be easily influenced.

When I first moved out of my home and found my own place I would scotch tape the centerfold pictures on the wall. It never really dawned on me that if I was lucky enough to get some girl to come up to my room or apartment that she might be a tad intimidated by the pictures on the wall.

I was probably about 18 when I started reading Playboy from cover to cover. The magazine had really good cartoonists like Jules Feiffer, Erich Sokol, and the macabre Gahan Wilson. I remember one cartoon that had a dog at a typewriter…..”and the moon shone down on her 8 taught breasts.”

As far as I am concerned Leroy Neiman was a genius as an artist with his quick vivid brush strokes. Alberto Vargas was the master of the air brush. As far as graphics go, the whole magazine was tight.

Playboy had the best writers at the time contributing. Joseph Heller (Catch 22), Jack Kerouac, James Dickey (Deliverence), John Updike (Rabbit Redux), Roald Dahl (James And The Giant Peach), Ian Fleming, Norman Mailer, Vladamir Nobokov, Ray Bradbury, J.P. Donleavy, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Jimmy Breslin, were just a few of the best.

If I was to choose one writer for Playboy who left the biggest impression on me it would be Jean Shepherd. He is the same guy who wrote the movie A Christmas Story with Darren McGavin and the leg lamp and the Chinese restaurant employees singing “Fa ra ra ra ra” on Christmas day. More than once did I burst out laughing at Jean Shepherd’s stories in Playboy. He added a much needed sense of humour to the anguishes many of us experienced as kids. Priceless!

Jean Shepherd

One of the most informative pieces in Playboy was the interview. You got to decide what you thought about some famous person as they expressed themselves in their own words. These were not puff pieces. You could clearly see how really crazy people like George Lincoln Rockwell (the head of the American Nazi Party) or Robert Shelton (the head of the KKK) were. You got the inside view from Eldridge Cleaver and the Black Panthers and comedian Dick Gregory. Madalyn Murray O’Hair expressed her atheistic opinions. She later disappeared and her body has never been found.

Some of the other famous people at the time who were interviewed were Bob Dylan, Cassius Clay before he became Mohammad Ali, Jean-Paul Sartre, Orson Welles, Ralph Ginsberg, Fidel Castro, Arnold Toynbee, Ralph Nader, Stanley Kubric, Art Buchwald, Martin Luther King, Timothy Leary, Henry Miller, and John Kenneth Galbraith. It doesn’t get much better than that.

There was hardly anything that was taboo. Pretty well anything could be written about. Politics, wars, race relations, religion, you name it. Human sexuality was often discussed which was a far cry from the conservative 1950s. Playboy did a multi-part series on sex and the cinema.

This isn’t to say there wasn’t anything artificial about Playboy. Wearing English Leather cologne didn’t mean that you were going to get laid. You might have to add a bit of chit-chat.

My guess is that Hugh Hefner wasn’t the poster boy for a lot of us young guys. We never smoked a pipe (actually I did for about a month when it was a brief fad) or wore a shiny bath robe and an ascot (actually I did wear an ascot a few times) or lounged around in silk pajamas.

If you ever saw Hef dance back in the day (the head bobber) and you danced that way, I wouldn’t own up to it. He always seemed to appear that he thought he was a lot cooler than his actual appearance was. As the years went on he started to look like the perv uncle who had been cast out of the family.

Never the less Hef did have some good taste in choosing people for his magazine. It was one slick monthly.

I learned a lot about jazz from the magazine. Each year they would have a cartoon like drawing of the best jazz performers for the year. I never found much to argue with in their choices. Miles Davis, Ray Brown, Sinatra, Ella, Count Basie, Buddy Rich, Lionel Hampton, Bud Shank, J.J. Johnson, Gerry Mulligan, Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Getz ,and so on.

Each year Playboy would pick out the best college drafts in college football. Whoever did this bit was right on the money a lot of the time. I checked back on old issues a few times and quite often those picks had impressive pro careers.

As far as humour goes, one of the comedians that often contributed to Playboy (and hung around the mansion) was a Montreal born guy named Mort Sahl. He had a very sharp intellectual slant on politics and morality while being exceptionally funny at the same time. He was a really interesting guy to listen to.

Mort Sahl

Over the years I continued to buy Playboy until sometime in the early 90s. I think one of the reasons I gave up on the magazine was because 7-11 stopped selling it. Maybe I had finally grown out of it too?

There is a shed behind our house. In it there are about 10 file boxes stuffed with old Playboy magazines. Those boxes have moved around over the years. Some of the issues go as far back as the late 60s. I thought at some point in my retirement, that I might want to reread some of those stories that had an impact on me many years ago. Right now it is about #30 on my things to do list.

Unless someone is prepared to offer some decent bucks for them I think I will just hang on to them. Whose that really old guy at the home and why does he have all those boxes stuffed under his bed?

 

Shelby....First Pics

We picked up our new golden retriever puppy 3 weeks ago. He was born on August 15th, the day before our golden retriever Copper died. We are trying to get him house trained but it takes a bit of time. We bought him a big kennel to keep him contained at night so he doesn't eat everything in the house. He will chew on anything he can get a hold of. Everything is new to him. He seems to be like our old dog Cooper in a lot of ways but still different. We love his spirit.

The litter with mom in Honeymoon Bay, BC

Shelby at 4 weeks.