Jerome Kern

by Peter Cates

Jerome Kern

Great American Songbook composer Jerome Kern (1885-1945) was so captivated by reading Edna Ferber’s 1926 novel Showboat that he immediately saw its possibilities as a musical on Broad­way. But he had never met Miss Ferber and had no idea how she’d respond.

One even­ing at a theater reception, he spotted an acquaintance, the notoriously outspoken book re­viewer/­author/theater critic/­radio personality Alexander Woollcott (1887-1943) who was chatting with a woman and who could possibly arrange an introduction, given his own connections in the publishing world; Kern approached Woollcott with his request.

Woollcott replied that Ferber was very reclusive and inapproachable and could not imagine her wanting to even discuss the matter but would see what could be done. He then turned to the woman sitting next to him and said, “Edna Ferber (1885-1968), meet Jerome Kern. ”

With lyricist Oscar Hammerstein, Kern worked very quickly and the musical premiered on Broadway in less than a year. It was a huge success, it has generated at least two films in Hollywood, numerous recordings of selections have been released – I am quite fond of a 1946 Columbia Masterworks set- but Showboat had to wait until the mid-1980s for a complete recording of its three hour plus length of music and drama.

Edna Ferber

In 1980, I attended a production of Showboat at the Houston Grand Opera starring Donald O’Connor, a quite memorable evening.

Certain songs from the musical still resound – My Man Bill, Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man, and Old Man River.

A Music Treasures of the World LP from the ‘50s contains the nicely scored Showboat Symphonic Suite conducted by William Strickland (MT-31).

I recently listened to several other records here at the house of Kern compositions:

Columbia A5081 – a December 31, 1908, 12-inch shellac featuring soprano Elise Stevenson singing a very charming song, Frieda, from the 1908 Broadway musical, the Girls of Gottenberg, which closed after less than a year.

Victor 35425 – a November 24th, 1914, shellac, also 12 inch, featuring the Victor Military Band performing a medley of tunes from the Girl from Utah, which includes the classic They Didn’t Believe Me.

Victor Red Seal – a 1938 set of six 12-inch 78s, Gems from Jerome Kern Musical Shows, presenting the Victor Light Opera Company directed by Leonard Joy.

ES 10, a 1960 LP with Ed Sullivan’s written notes on Kern’s 1933 musical Roberta and selections from it performed by the uncredited vocalists listed simply as the Ed Sullivan All Star Cast, the record having sold in supermarkets for $1.69. Selections included Yesterdays, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Lovely to Look At, and were very nicely performed.

Book of the Month Records 41 – 7511, a 1984 three LP set with booklet, Jerome Kern Master of Melody, and containing vintage recordings of his music that range from Paul Whiteman to Perry Como.

The arranger/composer Paul Weston related an anecdote about working with Kern in Hollywood. The older composer told Weston, “Whenever you get told to do something that doesn’t make any sense, you ask why and keep asking why until you get an answer that does.”

On November 11, 1945, Jerome Kern died in a New York City hospital, at the age of 60, from a cerebral hemorrhage he had suffered six days earlier; Oscar Hammerstein was keeping a vigil in the room when Kern stopped breathing.

Richard M. Nixon

by Peter Cates

Richard Nixon

The 37th President Richard Milhous Nixon (1913-1994) would often take long walks along the beach at his San Clemente vacation house on the Pacific Coast. I vividly remember seeing photos of him taken from a distance by the journalists whom he despised and whose favor he rarely, if ever, sought.

Regardless of the pressures any president of the United States experiences even in recent years, Nixon conveyed a definite aura of mien in his bearing (During the final months of his presidency when Watergate was the most frequently reported topic, Press Secretary Ron Ziegler made the mistake of speaking to the president who suddenly lashed out at Ziegler with his arms.)

Nixon doggedly fought his way up the ladder, did well in school growing up in Whittier, California, and attending Whittier College before getting a scholarship to Duke University Law School; he was elected to the House of Representatives in 1946 and became Senator in 1950. And he wasn’t above using smear tactics in both campaigns.

In 1952, Dwight D. Eisenhower picked Nixon as his running mate, although reluctantly since he didn’t particularly like Nixon as a human being, because Nixon had strong appeal to the very conservative Midwest and California Republicans which Eisenhower lacked as a more moderate Eastern establishment candidate.

After eight years as Ike’s Veep, the defeat in 1960 for the White House and the unsuccessful California Governor’s race in 1962, Nixon bided his time until a chain of circumstances, some of them perhaps engineered by Nixon himself, led to his being chosen as the Republican candidate in 1968, with Maryland Governor Spiro T. Agnew as the running mate, in a three-way race with Hubert Humphrey and Maine’s Edmund Muskie for the Democrats and the American Independent Party’s George Wallace and Curtis Lemay. Nixon and Agnew won by a narrow margin.

Rather than getting into Nixon’s leadership legacy which is voluminously documented, I wish to share a couple of brief personal items. When Nixon attended Whittier College, he took history courses with Professor David Henley who was married to my grandmother Cates’s first cousin, and East Vassalboro native, Lila Upham.

Secondly, uncles Paul and George Cates went to a Republican rally, in Augusta, in 1964, for Congressman Clifford McIntire who ran unsuccessfully against Muskie for the Senate; Nixon came that day to drum up support .

To conclude, I found a quote from Gore Vidal in a piece he wrote about the 1968 Republican convention at Miami Beach that nominated Nixon. Vidal is describing Ronald Reagan who had thrown his own hat in the ring after being elected in 1966 as the Governor of California. Vidal is remembering Reagan at the 1964 convention in San Francisco.

“I recalled my last glimpse of him, at the Cow Palace, in San Francisco, four years ago. The Reagans were seated in a box, listening to Eisenhower. While Mrs. Reagan darted angry looks about the hall (displeased at the press?), the star of Death Valley Days was staring intently at the speaker on the platform: as the age of television progresses, the Reagans will be the rule, not the exception.”

Back during the 1960s, I really didn’t think Ronald Reagan ever had a chance of becoming president.

George McGovern

In later years, the former president did a series of interviews with Diane Sawyer and David Frost and mentioned that two of his closest friends were Ed Muskie and George McGovern, Nixon’s Democratic opponent in the 1972 race who carried only one state out of the 50.

On March 16, 1974, Nixon appeared on a Grand Ole Opry TV special in Nashville with country music legend Roy Acuff (1903-1982) who taught the president how to manipulate the yo yo and talked him into playing the piano.

Another country legend Hank Williams may have best summed up Acuff’s appeal:

“He’s the biggest singer this music ever knew. You booked him and you didn’t worry about crowds. For drawing power in the South, it was Roy Acuff, then God.”

Two ten-inch 78s here at the house feature Acuff’s uniquely down home singing and fiddling with his long time colleagues, the Smoky Mountain Boys.

Okeh 05297 from July 5 and 6, 1939, contains two sacred music selections, Drifting Too Far from the Shore, and Eyes are Watching You; Columbia 36856, recorded August 2, 1945, has Pins and Needles, and a song composed by Acuff’s business partner Fred Rose, We Live in Two Different Worlds.

Lily Pons

by Peter Cates

Lily Pons

Soprano Lily Pons (1898-1976) sang at the Metropolitan Opera at least 300 times between 1931 and 1960 and had a knack for using mass media to advance her career.

My first exposure to her was via a Columbia 45 rpm extended play album that Mother played at home and which went in one ear and out the other, since my opera musical sensibilities were pretty limited during second grade (I did give every record in the house a listen, being a record-holic since the age of two, if not earlier.).

However, in seventh grade, I was developing a love for classical music and was gifted a pile of 78s by a family friend that included her Victor shellac of Caro Nome from Verdi’s Rigoletto and a Columbia Masterworks 78 set featuring 4 Arias from Donizetti’s Daughter of the Regiment.

I played these numerous times and find them generally unsurpassed . Lily Pons sang with exquisite delicacy, her trills and high notes were technically phenomenal and she was quite knowledgeable about the history of the operatic literature.

Evidence of this is the fascinating essay she wrote about the background of the Daughter of the Regiment, the sopranos who performed it in earlier years and its technical challenges, that was included with the 78 set on Columbia.

She recorded numerous sides for Victor Red Seal during the 1930s before signing with Columbia around the time of her marriage to conductor Andre Kostelanetz (1901-1980) in 1938. As her Columbia discs were best sellers, Victor released a set of her earlier records for them in 1943 in the certainly justifiable attempt to capitalize on her success with Columbia and one in which she would also benefit.

The set, Victor Red Seal M-702, consisted of three 12-inch 78s and a 10-inch one, and very fragile; the mix of different lengths by manufacturers even in an album with cardboard insulation around the records themselves was not particularly conducive to the prevention of breakage.

The contents were a combination of arias from operas of Mozart, Rossini, Rimsky-Korsakov, Ambrose Thomas and, of course, Verdi and three semi-classical concert pieces, including a very beautiful Last Rose of Summer.

Operatic high points were an aria from Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio, currently my favorite Mozart opera, and duets with baritone Giuseppe De Luca (1876-1950) in Verdi’s Rigoletto and Rossini’s Barber of Seville. The other selections failed to make an impression despite her vocal prowess, especially the Rimsky Le Coq D’Or Hymn to the Sun in which her trills and gentle dynamics failed to communicate the haunting Oriental mystery of that Russian opera aria.

Pons and Kostelanetz divorced in 1958. During the ‘50s and early ‘60s, she made guest appearances on such TV shows as the Ed Sullivan Show and What’s My Line.

Lily Pons died of pancreatic cancer in a Dallas, Texas, hospital in 1976. She was 77.

Legendary saxophonist Charlie Parker once compared the lyrical beauty of fellow musician Johnny Hodges in his own playing of the soprano sax in Duke Ellington’s band to the singing of Lily Pons.

Many of her recordings and broadcasts can be heard on YouTube.

Carl Stevens

by Peter Cates

Carl Stevens

Carl Stevens was the professional name of trumpeter Charles H. Sagle (1927-2015). A 1959 Mercury LP, Muted Memories, featured him with a group of four outstanding session players performing a dozen pop classics.

They include Cole Porter’s I Concent­rate on You, Harry Warren and Johnny Mercer’s Jeeper Creepers, Cy Coleman’s Witchcraft, Duke Ellington’s Satin Doll, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Younger than Springtime , etc. The accompanying musicians included Bobby Christian (1911-1991) on percussion, guitarist Frank D’Rone (1932-2013), John Frigo (1916-2007) on bass and pianist Dick Marx (1924-1997). For those who wish to explore further, each of the four have recorded albums under their own name for Mercury and other labels.

On the surface, the music here might sound like typical background music at a bar or restaurant but, if one listens closely, he/she would hear different shades of phrasing provided by an assortment of mutes and the sharing of solo spotlights among the five musicians.

My copy of the album is on Mercury’s budget priced Wing label whose various classical and pop reissues were found often in downtown Waterville’s long gone dime stores such as Center’s and McClellan’s for $1.47 when I shopped for records at the cheapest possible price. Nowadays, some of the recordings of all five musicians can be heard via YouTube, including the above album.

Lotos Club

The Lotos Club

The Lotos Club was founded in 1870 as a gentleman’s club for the promotion of literature, art, music and other cultural topics; still in operation in New York City, it would eventually honor women with membership.

A 1911 book, Speeches at the Lotos Club contains after dinner speeches from the likes of Teddy Roosevelt, Andrew Carnegie, composer Richard Strauss and Mark Twain, and many long forgotten luminaries.

Current members include soprano Renee Fleming, cellist Yo Yo Ma and trumpeter Wynton Marsalis.

In a speech given January 11, 1908, Mark Twain reminisced about his very happy recent trip to England and then stated, “that you know you can’t understand an Englishman’s joke, and the Englishman can’t understand our jokes. The cause is very simple, it is for the reason that we are not familiar with the conditions that make the point of the English joke.”

John F. Kennedy (AI generated)

by Peter Cates

John F. Kennedy

The 35th President John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963) was a most vivid, vibrantly alive presence on the family Philco TV set from when I first saw him debate Richard Milhous Nixon (1913-1994) during October 1960, it being a very cold Friday night, to the assassination in Dallas; I remember Kennedy’s highly strong Irish Boston accent and debonair appearance versus Nixon’s coarse bass speaking voice and the derailing 5 o’clock shadow.

On Election Day in 1960, my 4th grade East Vassalboro School teacher Susan Brondmo all but declared Nixon the winner and everyone in class applauded, except one girl whose family was both Catholic and Democrat. The following day when the Illinois vote came in, she was the only one smiling.

Key events during Kennedy’s 1,000 days in office have been chronicled in detail – the inaugural ceremonies with Robert Frost reading a poem for the occasion (Frost was a dyed in the wool Republican and a huge fan of Eisenhower but was thrilled to be invited by Kennedy that freezing snowy day in January 1961); the Bay of Pigs fiasco; First Lady Jackie’s televised tour of the White House; the enrollment of the first African-American student, James Meredith, at the University of Missisippi, with the National Guard called in; the, for me personally, nightmarish week of the Cuban Missile Crisis; Kennedy’s phenomenal charm at his press conferences; and finally November 22, 1963.

One occasion just a month before Dallas was Kennedy’s visit to the University of Maine/Orono when Dr. Lloyd Elliot was president there and which I watched on TV.

A 1975 book, Conversations With Kennedy, by former Washington Post editor Benjamin C. Bradlee (1921-2014), provides fascinating anecdotes of a close personal friendship between the two men and their wives, beginning in 1958 when Kennedy was still a Senator and he and Bradlee were neighbors.

A few examples:

Early in his campaign, Kennedy admitted to feeling strange about running for the Oval Office himself but then stated that “I stop and look around at the other people who are running for the job. And then I think I’m just as qualified as they are. ”

Joe Kennedy Sr. was testily against his son running in the 1960 West Virginia primary because of its hostility to Catholics. Kennedy ran anyways and won; he and Jackie invited the Bradlees to fly from D.C. to Charleston for a victory celebration and the very bumpy ride terrified Bradlee’s wife Tony and JFK’s sister Jean Smith who kept screaming for her husband Steve.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy consulted with Nixon, with whom he had similar views about the Cold War, but expressed relief that Nixon wasn’t president at the time.

Kennedy was friendly with Ed Muskie and the two went sailing off the Maine coast. He loved the ocean but otherwise preferred city life to the countryside.

As overnight guests at the White House, the Bradlees once witnessed the president wandering around in his night shorts wondering aloud what life was like in that mausoleum known as the Kremlin while the couples were watching an NBC special on it.

Kennedy had a deep admiration for Vice-President Johnson’s talents as a political sharpshooter but found LBJ’s presence at times creepy.

Kennedy sometimes enjoyed listening to gossip on other politicians.

Adlai Stevenson’s reputation as an intellectual may have been overrated. Kennedy read 10 books for every one that Stevenson read.

During the weekend when the country was grieving, Bradlee and his wife were at the White House and witnessed long time Kennedy family friend Dave Powers helping to assuage Jackie’s grief at odd moments with stories of hilarious moments during the 1960 campaign, but then the tragedy would intrude again from the TV coverage and all the other details.

The concluding paragraph – “Jackie was extraordinary. Sometimes she seemed completely detached, as if she were someone else watching the ceremony of that other person’s grief. Sometimes she was silent, obviously torn. Often she would turn to a friend and reminisce, and everyone would join in with their remembrance of things forever past. There is much to be said for the wake. Led by Dave Powers, this one was more often than not surprisingly cheerful, and always warm and tender. “