14 posts tagged “memories”

Among other instruments, I learned how to play the French horn in high school, starting when the band director asked for volunteers, as we only had one horn player.  I taught myself to play it over the summer, which wasn’t that hard to do, as I already knew how to play the trumpet.  I took to the horn well and eventually went to college to major in Music Performance.

Today, I thought I’d give you a pictorial tour of the horns I’ve played and/or owned in my lifetime.

The first horn I used was a one of the school’s old battered Olds Ambassador F single horn models:

Olds Ambassador

It looked pretty much like this one — even down to the big crinkle in the bell.  Still, it was built like a Timex watch and was quite playable.

My next horn, was the school’s Conn 6D, which was quite a step up, as it was a semi-pro double F/Bb horn.  I got this horn passed down for me when the school bought a new Reynolds for the first chair player.

Conn 6D

I loved this horn.  I progressed quickly on it and it had a nice, fat sound to it.  I remember the band director, whose main instrument was French horn, that between him and I, the two of us could drown out the rest of the band.  I remember that I cultivated a trombone-like tone to my playing, which worked well when playing pieces that featured the brass sections.  When we did Kenton’s Malaguena, I learned the trombone solo by ear, and played that, rather that the boring French horn part the score called for.

I made All-State band playing this instrument and it carried me the rest of the way through high school.

The band director owned a coveted pre-war Conn 8D, which he brought to school and let me play a few times.   The 8D, first introduced in 1937, was considered the creme de la creme of French horns at one time.  Along with the 6D, introduced in 1935, the 8D is still produced to this day, and they are both still well-respected choices.

Conn 8D

When it came time for me to go off to college, I got a French horn as a graduation present.  My father thought the 8D was too expensive, so I ended up with a Holton H177, which was quite popular at the time and, like the Conns, is still in production.  I think I was partially influenced by the fact that my favorite jazz musician at the time, Maynard Ferguson, played and endorsed Holton brass instruments.

Holton H-177

While, this was a good horn, in retrospect,  I have to say that the Conn 6D was my favorite of the bunch.  I kept this horn until the mid-90s, when I sold it during some lean times.  I’m kicking myself in the ass now, wishing I’d kept it, as there’s no way I could afford to buy another one now.

However, I’ve been browsing Ebay, and from what I’ve seen, I might be able to find a mechanically sound used 6D some day for under five hundred dollars.  In fact, an older horn, approximately of the vintage I played in high school, would likely be preferable, as it’s generally accepted that the older horns were better ones.  One day, maybe.

While looking on Ebay the other day, I saw something I’d never heard of before: a piccolo French horn.  Apparently, this is something that has been invented in the last couple of years or so.  I went to a site where they had a You Tube of someone playing one — and I waited the 45 minutes or so it took to download on my crappy dialup — and it didn’t sound half bad.  It played in about trumpet range and has kind of a flugelhorn tone quality to it.  I wouldn’t mind having one of these to mess around with, as they’re not that expensive, but currently there are only two Chinese-made versions available.  At present, Chinese-made musical instruments don’t have a very good reputation, so I’d be quite leery of buying one now, though this rep could very well change in the near future.

Piccolo horn next to standard size French horn

Lately, I’ve been turning to the library to fill in the gaps in my music collection. I’ve been borrowing CDs to take home to upload into my Windows Media Player and will, at some point, load selected songs into my MP3 player.  Money is tight right now, plus I’ve noticed that the places I usually buy CDs at have drastically reduced their selections for some reason.

I didn’t have anything particular in mind, so I just browsed the stacks.  After looking through the jazz selection, I ended up with a Dave Brubeck CD, “Time Out”, which included the track “Take Five“.   It brought back a lot of memories, as this was a song that I discovered when I was around 11 0r 12.

I began taking piano lessons when I was ten years old, and started in band the following year.   At that time, kids in the “band culture” of my school were exposed to a lot of jazz.  So, while most kids my age were listening to rock, pop, and the like, I was listening to jazz.  Though I like rock music now, my first choices in music when I started getting my own albums were in jazz.

“Take Five” was one of the first jazz songs I got into, and I was fortunate to hear Brubeck, along with Gerry Mulligan perform this song in the summer of 1972 at the Newport Jazz Festival in New York City.  I was also lucky enough to meet them after the set, and I think it pleased them that someone as young as I was at the time was getting into their music (I was 14),   In next few years, I also saw Maynard Ferguson in concert twice and participated in a jazz workshop with Stan Kenton at my high school.  At that time I wanted to be a jazz musician myself (and I’m sorry I didn’t fulfill my dream now).

The CD I borrowed was the original recording with Brubeck and alto saxophonist Paul Desmond (who wrote the song).  I was surprised to see that this song was originally recorded in 1959 — at the time I first got into it, I’d assumed it was a recent recording.   But as I listened to it in the car on the way home from the library, it still had all the original electricity that attracted me to the song in the first place and in no way sounded as if it had been recorded 50 years ago.  It sounds as fresh now as it did in the summer of 1959 when they recorded it.   And it still has sufficient power to make me feel the feelings all over again I had as a teen in the early 70s when I first wanted to become a musician.

I live very close to a set of railroad tracks, which runs along the back of my property and passes close to the eastern entrance of my street.  I am close enough to the tracks that if a train passes at night, I can look out my kitchen windows and see the lights from the locomotive, even through the pine trees.  It was rather disturbing to live so close to railroad tracks when I first moved in here more than two decades ago, but neither the rumbling of passing trains, nor the sound of the horn bothers me in the slightest.any longer.

Late the other night, when I was coming home, I turned onto my street at the eastern entrance and noticed the lights of a train about two hundred feet from the crossing.  I stopped, figuring it was better to be safe than sorry, considering how close the train was.  But after a moment, I realized that the train wasn't moving.  Still erring on the side of caution, I turned my radio off and let the windows down to listen for the telltale rumbling of a moving train.

Not hearing any rumbling and in the absence of a warning horn, I proceeded across.  No sooner than I'd cleared the tracks than I heard the horn sound signaling that the train had finally begun to move.  But I'd already pulled into my driveway by the time the train actually passed over the crossing, as my house is only five or six houses beyond.

As I got out of my car and listened to the rumbling of the train heading up the tracks toward town, sounding the horn several more times along the way, my mind traveled back to an incident that happened several years ago when I was still on the police force.

At that time, an old man made the same turn I did the other night, except he did not take the time to look and listen before crossing the tracks.  He was hit by the train, which pushed his car quite a ways up the tracks before it was able to finally stop.  The man was dead on impact, which was obvious to those of us first on the scene responding to this call.

It was noted at the time that crossing gates and signals were needed for this intersection, considering that the northern approach to the crossing was screened by trees, obscuring the approach of a train from that direction.  Plus, someone listening to the radio and running air conditioning with the windows up could easily miss the sounds of an oncoming train.

Nothing has changed, however, in the nearly 20 years since that old guy was killed by a train.  There are still no gates and no signals, and the trees lining the tracks are even bigger.  I've always been careful when crossing over the tracks there; I suppose what happened to the old man has stuck in my mind all these years. 

But as I walked into the  house as the receding sounds of the passing train still reached me, I thought that I could have easily missed noticing the train if had been daytime, as there would have been no lights to quickly call my attention to its presence.

As busy as my street is, I'm surprised there haven't been more such accidents at that crossing, which is why, I suppose, they've not bothered to add gates and signals..

When I was a kid, the towns I lived in always made a big production out of the Fourth of July.   There were outdoor festivals, public and private barbecues, parades, and the town always sponsored a fireworks celebration, usually held at the high school football stadium.  

When I was in high school, I was in the band, and we marched each year in a parade that culminated at the Revolutionary War battlefield in my town, which was across from the southern end of Philadelphia, near the Navy Yard.  It was a good time and I always enjoyed doing it.

And the year of my high school graduation, 1976, was the biggest 4th of July celebration I'll likely ever see in my lifetime, as it was the Bicentennial Year.  I have to say that the City of Brotherly Love, Philadelphia, really outdid itself that year and I remember being quite proud to have graduated the year that I did.

Over the years, I've seen the celebration of this holiday slowly decline, though the town I currently live in still put on impressive fireworks displays as recently as the mid to late 90s.  I remember taking my son to the annual fireworks show down by the lake, at which half of the spectators watched from their own boats in the lake.

That's long gone, now, unfortunately.  Last night, there were no public fireworks celebrations whatsoever in my town, nor any parades or public barbecues.   The holiday passed relatively unnoticed, barring some obnoxious kids throwing firecrackers at passing cars and people in yards lighting sparklers and bottle rockets.

A shame, really.

While listening to the radio the other night, a favorite song from years ago came on the radio: "Spirit in the Sky" by Norman Greenbaum. This song, heard in several movies over the years, such as Apollo 13, embodies what I consider to be the best of rock: a hard-driving bass line, a growling guitar, fun lyrics, innovative sound effects, and a beat that inspires energy in the listener. It is one of the finest examples of what I call "a song with muscle". And, after nearly 40 years, it still sounds fresh and exciting. It was included in Rolling Stones' 500 Greatest Songs of All Time and also VH1's Greatest One-Hit Wonders.

This song also brings back a personal memory for me as well. In the spring of 1970, when I wasn't quite 12 years old, my mother was hospitalized for several days. One rainy afternoon, my father and I went to the hospital to visit with her. In the car, while on the way to the hospital, this song came on the radio. I can remember turning it up and listening intently, accompanied by the slap, slap sound of the windshield wipers keeping time with the beat.

When my mother died 18 months later, I was reminded of that afternoon, and the words provided some comfort to me then. I don't always relive the memory of that afternoon when I hear the song now, but it's never entirely forgotten, either. Either way, this song will always remain on my list of all-time favorite songs.

Every year, when it came time to decorate the Christmas tree, when my mother and, later, my father, would unpack the lights and the ornaments, they'd find light strands that no longer worked, boxes of broken ornaments, and there would never be enough extension cords.

So, we'd all go out to buy what we needed.  When we lived in South Jersey in the late sixties and into the seventies, there was always one place we went to first.  This was a garden center/nursery called Gaudio's.  My parents used Gaudio's in the summer too, for plants, fertilizer, lawn care items, and the like, but it was only when the Christmas season rolled around that Gaudio's became interesting to me.  This store really outdid itself when it came to providing everything needed to decorate for the holidays. 

As well as having aisles devoted to every type of Christmas decorating imaginable and also wrapping paper, ribbons, and bows, Gaudio's devoted one room as a kind of a Christmas wonderland.  Inside this darkened room lit only by strands of Christmas lights, were several Christmas trees decorated in various styles.  There was a winding path among the trees with fake snow covering the floor.  As a kid, I couldn't wait to see this each year and it never failed to get me into the Christmas spirit.  I don't know if I'd be as impressed seeing it now as an adult, but just remembering it now is enough to put me in a Christmas mood.

Indeed, while looking online to see if there was anything on the net about Gaudio's, I was suddenly overcome with a great homesickness for New Jersey, a place I've not seen in over 25 years.  Unfortunately, all I could find were some passing references to this store, and I'm guessing it's no longer in business.  Too bad.

Is there a place like Gaudio's in your Christmas past?   And for those of you who lived in the South Jersey, Philadelphia metropolitan area, did any of you ever go to Gaudio's?

 When I was a little kid in the sixties, nearly everyone used multi-colored strings of lights for their Christmas decorating. Strands with small bulbs were used on the indoor trees, sometimes the blinking kind, while most people used the large-bulbed strands to outline the house with. We even had two large Christmas candle lights, that stood three feet high, which we placed on either side of the front door. My welder grandfather had made these out of lead pipe back in the 1940s and they had huge flame-shaped lightbulbs that I still have no idea where my parents got the bulbs from.

I remember as a kid sitting under the Christmas tree with all the lights in the room turned off, so I could enjoy the beautiful pattern the multi-colored lights made in the otherwise dark room. Doing so always put me into the Christmas spirit, making me look forward that much more to Christmas morning.

But in the seventies, many people got the idea that using multi colored lights, especially the ones with the large bulbs, were not tasteful, but were actually quite tacky. These same people began using white lights exclusively for their Christmas decorating -- on their Christmas trees and everything they lighted outdoors. Some went the minimalist route, confining lights to the Christmas tree only, with a single white-lighted electric candle in each of the front facing windows, and nothing outdoors.

My family continued using the small multi colored lights for the Christmas tree, but we'd always used the white lighted candles in the windows, simply because they looked the most like real candles. With my grandfather's outdoor candles, we usually had a pine tree outdoors with a strand or two of the large colored lights on it. We didn't go overboard with the outdoor decorations -- nothing we did gave the electric company orgasms, but what we did was colorful.

Nowadays, I see more and more people doing the all-white light thing, but the amount of lighting has increased. Similarly, the colored light crowd is still holding its own, though in recent years I've seen strands with all one color lights: green, red, blue, purple, orange, and so on. People that use those, usually combine them with white light strands.

Personally, I'm in the colored lights camp. Nothing says Christmas to me like the strands of multi colored lights I remember from my childhood. I still get the same feeling I did back then when I see them. Sometimes, it's a bit gaudy, but lights on their own are never tacky.

White lights, on the other hand, are the same color as what you see year-round in your lamps and other types of everyday lighting. There's nothing particularly festive or Christmas-y about them, unlike the colored lights, which are seen only at Christmas time.

Though I like to see the white lights combined with single-colored strands of colored lights, seeing a home decorated solely in white lights leaves me cold. There's something sterile and ho-hum about them, not to mention the snobby, pretentious aura they can have on an expensive home that says, "more tasteful than thou."

Thoughts? 

Several years ago, I used to see this woman walking her son to school, when I was driving my son there. Her son was a few years younger than mine, probably in the first grade, when my son was in fifth.

When I’d turn at the end of my street, to head to the school, I’d see them walking from a good ways up the street, so I knew they had a pretty long walk each morning and afternoon. One time, I’d stopped, offering to take them the rest of the way to the school, but she refused and I didn’t ask again.

I sometimes saw her walking elsewhere in town, and I knew she didn’t have a car and didn’t have much.

That same year, I’d bought my son a new bicycle for Christmas. There was nothing wrong with his old bike, except that he’d outgrown it, and I hated the idea of it being in the shed gathering dust, when another child could enjoy it. I immediately thought of that little boy, whom I imagined would not get much that Christmas.

The only problem was, I didn’t know where they lived. I was still on the police force then, and when I went to work that day, I went up to the jail to talk with one of the jailers, who lived on the same street as I did. I asked her if she’d ever noticed that woman and her son when she took her kids to school. When she said she knew who I meant, I told her what I planned to do with my son’s bike, and asked her if she knew where these people lived.

She said that she did, then offered to go with me to deliver it, as she had an SUV, in which it would fit better than my small car. I agreed, and we decided to deliver it on Christmas Eve.

On Christmas Eve, I polished the bike up and washed the tires, before tying a big ribbon on it with a gift card that said, “From Santa Claus”. After loading it into the jailer’s SUV, I rode over there with her to deliver it.

I was appalled when I saw where these people lived, in a house so rundown that I was surprised it wasn’t condemned. It was fairly late when we drove up, so I quietly carried the bike onto the sagging porch. We left quietly, so they wouldn’t know who’d left it there. I knew the mother’s pride wouldn’t have allowed her to accept the bike, if she'd known who’d given it.

A few days later, I went back, driving slowly down the street. As I passed the house, I saw the little boy happily riding it up and down the sidewalk. I drove on, satisfied that the gift had reached its intended recipient.

I've always greatly enjoyed Halloween. And Halloween was a lot more fun for those of us of the Baby Boom generation than it is for kids nowadays. For one thing, nearly every neighborhood participated in trick or treating. Those of us who had the good fortune to live in subdivisions or other areas of high population density made out like bandits on Halloween.

Another factor is that most kids were considered old enough to go trick or treating on their own in groups of other children from about age eight or so. Even though our parents warned us about not eating candy not in its original packaging until they'd checked it and about razor blades in apples, there wasn't the widespread worry about children being safe on Halloween back then.

I can remember when my son went trick or treating with a friend when he was ten, his friend's parents drove them to each and every house in their minivan, and the kids spent most of the night getting in and out of the van.

That would have taken all the enjoyment out of it for me, as part of the attraction of Halloween was the air of mischief and being out on our own having fun, as well as getting good exercise walking around the subdivision going from house to house. There were enough people out on foot back then that this was a safe thing for older children to do.

Also, the fundamentalists had not yet deemed Halloween an eeeeevil holiday, so all kids were free to participate and the schools were able to openly celebrate Halloween without worrying about wet blankets trying to rain on everyone's parade.

I remember one good Halloween for my son and I. The local mall sponsored a costume contest, and he wanted to participate. I was determined he'd have an original costume; not something fifty other kids were wearing. I was working for the PD then, so he and I decided he would be a police officer that year.

I bought him a blue shirt styled like a police shirt, along with navy blue pants. I brought the shirt to the police uniform supply store, where the lady there offered to sew our town's police logo patch on each on each upper sleeve. He wore my actual badge pinned in the proper place on his shirt, plus my hat, even though it was miles too big for him. He had my cuffs in their leather case attached to his belt, plus my PR-24 baton suspended on its ring holder. At eight, he was just barely tall enough to hang the PR-24 on his belt without it dragging the floor. The only thing that wasn't real was his gun, of course, though the realistic looking toy gun I bought him was placed in a real leather holster.

While we waited at the costume contest, I noticed that most of the other kids were in typical, unoriginal costumes, such as devils, ghosts, witches, and the like. There were several categories for costumes, with "Most Original" being the category we were gunning for.

We saw only one other truly original costume, a little boy dressed up as the Titanic! The hull and superstructure of the ship was constructed of painted cardboard, extending in front and in back of him. On top of his head was a painted cardboard funnel. I remember my son telling me that this kid's costume was so good, that he'd not mind losing to him.

But it was not to be. The winner of the "Most Original" costume was a kid in a generic devil's costume, with several other kids in the audience dressed just like him. This child, while cute, was in no way original, and the Titanic kid's parents and I concluded that this child had to be a relative of one of the judges.

My son lost quite a bit of faith in humanity that day, particularly in the idea that people can be fair and impartial. I was sorry that he had to learn this at such a young age.

Feel free to share your Halloween memories in the comment box.