by Peter Cates

Harry S. Truman

The 33rd President Harry S. Truman (1884-1972), upon being sworn in as FDR’s vice-president, was told by his mother, “Now you behave yourself.”

Like every other president since George Washington, Truman was, warts and all, a character. A highly controversial 1974 book, Plain Speaking, by Merle Miller (1919-1986) has Truman recounting a number of fascinating stories about his life.

One in particular recounts his problems with General Douglas MacArthur (Old soldiers never die, they just fade away!). It seems that MacArthur had a very high opinion of himself and treated Truman as a small town hick from Missouri. He also disregarded several orders from Truman which included talking to the press out of turn and trying to provoke a full scale war with Red China.

Truman finally fired MacArthur and the before and after repercussions have been extensively documented elsewhere. Truman commented that he fired MacArthur for insubordination, not because he was a dumb [son of a gun, censorship of the other word Truman used instead of gun because this is a family newspaper]. He also stated that if generals were jailed for stupidity, three quarters of them would already be there.

Truman’s daughter Margaret published her own biography, simply titled Harry S. Truman, in 1973 and provides some hilarious details of her parents later years in Independence, Missouri. One tells of Truman’s own laziness about mowing the lawn, instead wanting to hire a neighborhood kid, against the opposition of his wife Bess, who could be just as stubborn.

One Sunday morning, Truman told his wife he was going to mow the lawn. Bess quickly realized that people would be driving by their house on the way to church and would see the former president of the United States mowing his lawn on the Sabbath Day instead of going to church. She decided to hire a neighborhood boy.

When Truman was vice-president for a few short months, he rarely saw Roosevelt. However, a photo was taken of them having lunch at the White House; Truman later commented that Roosevelt was already showing signs of his failing health and that, when the latter lifted the cup of coffee to his mouth, he kept spilling it due to his shaking hands.

FDR kept Truman in the dark about a lot of national security issues, including the Manhattan Project, at Los Alamos, New Mexico, but Truman made the decision to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, believing that it would force Japan to surrender a whole lot sooner than otherwise.

At the 1944 Democrat Convention, Roosevelt’s decision to replace vice-president Henry Wallace with Harry Truman became known as the Second Missouri Compromise.

by Peter Cates

Charles Adams Prince

From August 1915, a ten-inch acoustically recorded shellac (Columbia A1882) presents Prince’s Band under the direction of Charles Adams Prince (1868-1937), Columbia’s highly-accomplished musical jack of all trades and a relative of former Presidents John and John Quincy Adams.

The two marches are Under a Peaceful Sky and R.B. Hall’s New Colonial March.

R.B. Hall (1858-1907) was a Maine native, having been born in Bowdoin­ham, and resided in the Pine Tree State most of his life. But his marches achieved renown in this country and, even more, in England, bandleaders and listeners there frequently believing that Hall was an English composer despite efforts to inform otherwise.

The marches are not that musically captivating but they do pass the six to seven minute duration nicely; the performances are perky, precise and imbued with conviction; and the 1915 acoustic sound is quite vivid. Interestingly, Hall’s March was used in later years by Palo Alto, California’s Stamford University as the melody for its school fighting song, whatever that means.

Both sides can be heard via Internet Archive.

Oscar Shumsky

Violinist Oscar Shumsky (1917-2000) was born in Philadelphia to Russian Jewish parents and started playing at 3 years old, giving his first public performance at seven with Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra.

He was invited personally by ArturoToscanini, when he was 21, to join the NBC Symphony in 1939.

Shumsky also had a phenomenal memory. Once, after hearing violinist Fritz Kreisler (1875-1963) play a cadenza that the latter composed for Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, the younger man played it by heart shortly after that concert .

During the 1960s, Shumsky collaborated with pianist Artur Balsam (1906-1994) in the complete Mozart Violin Sonatas for the mail order record label Musical Heritage Society, of which I have one LP of Sonatas K 454 and 481. The music is among this composer’s finest.

Some of these recordings can be heard via YouTube.

Shumsky also had an avid interest in photography and became a close friend of Ansel Adams.

Artur Balsam taught several summers at Blue Hill Maine’s Kneisel Hall during the 1970s.

by Peter Cates

George Raft

Having for so long equated actor George Raft (1901-1980) with his role as the Saint Valentine’s Day killer/bootlegger Spats Columbo in the 1958 comedy Some Like It Hot, I found it interesting to see him in a good guy role in the 1952 film noir Loan Shark. He portrays a just-released ex-convict Joe Gargen who simply wants to live a quiet life and mind his own business.

Through his sister’s husband, he lands a job at a tire plant.

Unfortunately, he finds out there’s a gang of loan sharkers preying on workers there and at other plants. And after his brother-in-law is killed because he tries to rally workers to fight back, Joe decides to go undercover to find the individuals behind the operation.

The script was written by Martin Rackin, who also did a superb one for 1950s The Enforcer with Humphrey Bogart. And with a very good support cast, including Dorothy Hart, Paul Stewart and John Hoyt, the movie is highly entertaining.

Black List

I am watching the 10th and very unfortunately last season of NBC’s Black List starring James Spader as Raymond Reddington, a master criminal who knows everything there is to know about every other criminal and becomes a secret informant for a secret branch of the FBI.

In its 10 seasons, Spader constantly steals the show with his wit and insights.

Elevator Music

A 1995 book entitled Elevator Music, by Joseph Lanza, is the first to provide a history of easy listening. Its practitioners in the U.S. include the orchestras of Lawrence Welk and Mantovani, the synthesizer musician Yanni, pianist Richard Clayder­man and Celtic New Age singer Enya, etc. With all due respect to individual talent, this brand of music making from them relaxes people, provides background noise and even works as a sleeping pill.

According to the author, easy listening came in with early radio and one of its inventors Lee De Forest believed “in the physical existence of a universal medium termed either, …’those silent etheric voices, which seem often less of nature than of the spirit realm.’…..Merging the language of science and fantasy, we can infer that from ether came ethereal music” – thus a jump from ethereal to elevator music that lifts the passive listener to the shining stars of the solar system and its dreamland. Enough said!

Hunter Thompson

The late writer Hunter Thompson (1937-2005) created the term Gonzo Journalism which is a form of journalism having little to do with objectivity and more to do with the subjective participation of the reporter and whatever the point of view is being conveyed by him.

In his crazily witty 1988 book A Genera­tion of Swine, Thompson not only mentions the well-known fact of Benjamin Franklin flying his kite during a thunderstorm and getting a shock but also blubbering like a baby every time a thunderstorm occurred after that experience, which just might be a fabrication of Thompson’s imagination.

Rachmaninoff

I wrote some months ago about composer Sergei Rachmaninoff’s desert island melodic masterpiece, the Second Symphony, and how it has generated several distinguished recordings during the last 80 years, including four different ones by his close friend Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra.

A recording from September 19 and 20, 1994, and released by the BBC Music Magazine featured the late Edward Downes (1924-2009) conducting the BBC Philharmonic in a performance that glows with a consummate combination of power, beauty, rhythmic pulse and a shining array of exquisite details . And copies are available from Internet vendors such as Ebay and Amazon.

During the last two years of his life, Downes had been going both blind and deaf, and suffering from other health problems after hip replacement, totally dependent on his younger wife Joan’s caregiving.

Meanwhile she had come down with pancreatic cancer and had just a few months to live. Both believing that life under these conditions was no longer viable, they jointly terminated their lives at an assisted suicide clinic in Switzerland, with their son and daughter in attendance, on July 10, 2009. Downes was 85, Joan 74.

An example of classy easy listening done with good taste is a budget-priced LP on the t$2 RCA Camden label which was a subsidiary of the parent label RCA Victor. Its producer Ethel Gabriel organized a group of skilled singers known as the Living Voices who recorded numerous albums with different arrangers such as Nashville’s Chet Atkins; the superb Anita Kerr who passed away last year at 95 and whose records with her singers are consistently lovely; and several others.

A 1964 LP, Living Voices Sing Moonglow and Other Great Standards, has ten favorites from the ‘30s and ‘40s Great American Songbook – the title song, Solitude, I Get a Kick Out of You, My Funny Valentine, These Foolish Things, etc.

by Peter Cates

Sarah Orne Jewett

South Berwick native Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909) advised younger writers to “Write about what you know!”

Aroostook County native Helen Hamlin (1917-2004) once commented on the fascination of one’s childhood for so many:

“It is only natural that a person’s childhood environment should always remain the most glamorous and most interesting phase of one’s life, and I am no exception. Growing up in a town like Fort Kent, with a generous dose of Grandpa’s rich woods lore of old Aroostook, and in a mixed French and English household, has done more than just build a collection of reminiscences. It has left a distinct love and admiration for a land, and no other place can ever seem as attractive.”

Have Gun Will Travel

Many episodes of Richard Boone’s TV series Have Gun Will Travel, which ran for six seasons from 1957 to 1963, can be accessed via YouTube; a season 6 episode, The Fifth Bullet, has Boone’s character, a well-read gunfighter named Paladin giving a man just released from prison some safe passage back home to his wife and their young son (For reasons not totally clear, five outlaws have contracts to kill him.).

Guest star Ben Johnson conveyed a most vivid presence as the man eager to be reunited with his wife and son. He did memorable acting in the movies Mighty Joe Young with Terry Moore, Shane with Alan Ladd and Van Heflin, and the Last Picture Show with Cybill Shepherd and Ellen Burstyn.

Martha Scott

One very heartfelt movie on a wonderful teacher is the 1941 Cheers for Miss Bishop, starring Martha Scott (1912-2003), with a superlative supporting cast that included Marsha Hunt (who passed away last year at the age of 104.), William Gargan, Sidney Blackmer, Edmund Gwenn, John Hamilton (perhaps best known as the Daily Planet editor Perry White on the 1950s Adventures of Superman), Pierre Watkin (who portrayed Perry White for the Superman late ‘40s movie serials starring Kirk Allyn) and Mary Anderson.

Gerry Mulligan

In 1955, baritone saxist Gerry Mulligan assembled a sextet that included Zoot Sims on tenor sax, drummer Dave Bailey, trumpeter Jon Eard­ley, trombonist Bob Brook­meyer and bassist Peck Morrison on the Mercury Emarcy jazz LP simply titled Presenting the Gerry Mulligan Sextet.

According to the liner notes, Mulligan’s greatest fear was “musical stagnation and boredom.” Thus, after completing a very successful concert tour with his acclaimed quartet, he disbanded it and chilled out for six months to figure out what was next.

This LP of eight selections has some very eloquent musicianship ; the six participants were reported as being very pleased with the results.

Of the then-very young musicians, only Dave Bailey is still living at the very young age of 97.

In 1968, Gerry Mulligan collaborated with pianist Dave Brubeck in the Columbia LP, Brubeck-Mulligan Compadres, also featuring eight selections and recorded live in Mexico.

Before the comments on the album, a personal memory – during the summer of 1965, I attended New England Music Camp, in Sidney, along the fabulous Messalonskee Lake and had as a fellow camper Chris Brubeck.

One afternoon, he comes into the bunkhouse with a sly grin and states, “Peter, my father’s here.”

I replied, “Bulls..t he is, Brubeck!”

Within less than half a second walks the great man. And a truly down to earth gentleman.

The above album came as a result of Brubeck assembling another quartet (the famous one from the 1950s into early ‘60s had been disbanded in 1967) for a concert tour of four cities in Mexico arranged by promoter George Wein. The new quartet had Brubeck, Mulligan, Alan Dawson on drums and bass player Jack Six.

One of the concerts was held in a bullring.

All in all, a good record.

Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli

Italian pianist Arturo Benedetti Michelan­geli (1920-1995), much like fellow virtuoso Vladimir Horowitz, not only had a superhuman technique with the keyboard but could also be quite eccentric and reclusive and was prone to depression.

Unlike Horowitz, Michelangeli could play the same composition twice over a period of months and both performances would have the same exact timing.

After winning first prize at a competition in Geneva, Switzerland, Benito Mussolini gave the pianist a full time Professorship at a Conservatory in Bologna.

Michelangeli made very few studio recordings but his live concerts have been released on numerous LPs and CDs. One such LP has him performing the Beethoven 12th Piano Sonata, better known as the Funeral March Sonata, and Schubert’s A minor Sonata, one of 22 magnificent ones that poured out of this composer along with over 600 songs, nine symphonies, numerous chamber music works and other pieces before he died at the young age of 31. The pianist performed both Sonatas with a cutting edge combination of dexterity and vibrant beauty.

Michelangeli had all 22 Sonatas of Schubert committed to memory.

by Peter Cates

Maine Novelist Ruth Moore

Maine novelist Ruth Moore (1903-1989) was born on Gott’s Island, spent several years as an adult out of state, and published the very successful novel Spoonhandle in 1946, which was adapted for the 1948 movie Deep Waters; the money enabled her to move back to Maine for the rest of her life.

During the 1930s, Moore was active in the NAACP , having begun working as a researcher. In 1930, she traveled to the Deep South where her investigation led to the release of two African-American men who had been falsely accused of murder.

A very powerful opening in Moore’s 1943 novel The Weir which takes place on one of the outlying islands along the Maine coast resonates on a universal level with any of us who sat through long years of school in quiet desperation:

“Sayl Comey went to school every day, but it seemed to him that things got worse instead of better. He couldn’t get used to the routine, and he couldn’t see any sense in what went on. In class he presented a face of bleak and absolute boredom.”

A writer well worth checking out.

The Adventures of Superman

My favorite childhood TV show was The Adventures of Superman, starring George Reeves (1914-1959). One particular episode started the 1953 season, 5 Minutes to Doom, which guest starred Dabbs Greer (1917-2007) as an innocent man wrongly sentenced to the electric chair. The depiction of the chair itself has stayed in my memory for decades, it was so well filmed.

Arvo Volmer

Now 60, the quite gifted Estonian conductor Arvo Volmer recorded the 7 Symphonies, Finlandia, Valse Triste and Violin Concerto (with soloist Adele Anthony), of Finnish composer Jean Sibelius between 2007 and 2010 with the Adelaide Symphony of Australia for the ABC Classics label on 4 CDs; while these performances don’t have the craggy power of other conductors (Sibelius used the entire string/woodwind/brass/percussion apparatus of the modern orchestra to evoke the rocky ocean landscape, fields, woodlands and hills that are so similar to our own Maine), they do have a lot of poetry and are quite effective on their own terms.

For anyone new to classical music, I recommend sampling any of the many YouTubes of Sibelius’s music, especially the stirring patriotic Finlandia, the rhythmically gripping Violin Concerto, the powerful 1st and 2nd Symphonies with their rich outpourings of gorgeous, brilliantly sustained melody and the haunting mystery of Valse Triste and the otherworldly Swan of Tuonela.

Country Music Anthologies

During the early 1980s, Time Life Records marketed a series of LP anthologies devoted to country music artists and sold them by mail and through supermarkets.

They included Hank Williams, Chet Atkins, George Jones (of course), Johnny Cash, Elvis, Barbara Mandrell, Tammy Wynette, etc.

I recently listened to the one devoted to Waylon Jennings (1937-2002) which contains nine selections drawn from his albums for RCA Victor and include Brown Eyed Handsome Man, MacArthur Park, Ladies Love Outlaws and Love of the Common People.

The man knew how to communicate a song in an impressive manner.