Slide 21

The  Slide:  My sister Ingrid

The Date: Early Spring 1964

The Photographer:  My sister Sally

  It is late Saturday morning in my older sister Sally’s bedroom.  Our two-year-old sister Ingrid sits in a tangle of bed covers.  She wears cold weather pajamas—the kind with plastic bottomed feet.  Her left leg is not pulled fully into the PJs so the empty foot, beneath the twisted ankle, dangles comically off the edge of the mattress. Minutes earlier, Sally rinsed Ingrid’s hair and set it in rollers.  Now for the first time she sits inside the inflated helmet of a modern home hair dryer circa 1964.  She cringes in delight as a din of rushing air flows up the corrugated plastic tube covering her head in noisy warmth.  With adoring smiles, the rest of her family gathers in the doorway as her big sister snaps a picture to be enjoyed for years to come.

Nearly half a century later, I study the slide and feel my eyes pulled steadily away from it’s subject to the back left corner of the room. There, a phonograph sits on its own tubular metal cart.  Beneath the phonograph, a wire rack holds a dozen record albums.  I remember them all.  In the picture I can clearly see the smiling face of a very young Steve Lawrence, but in my mind I see the other albums nearly as well.  There are three by Ricky Nelson, two Bobby Vee’s, a Kingston Trio, a Brothers Four, a couple Henry Mancini’s, an album of Ferranti and Teicher piano duets and one other… which was a treasure. 

All but the last one was sent to our home from the Columbia Record Club in Terre Haut, IN.  After much discussion my parents allowed Sally to join the club.  Many other teenagers in our town and presumably across the country were doing the same. Had this not happened we could not have afforded to buy even this small collection.  As I recall, the club worked something like this.  Club members were required to buy a few record albums at full price.  This was the tough part because albums cost over three bucks—a hefty sum for a teenage girl who might only earn seventy-five cents for a day of babysitting.  But here’s where the rules of the club got exciting.  If you bought those first ones at full price, you got the next four hundred for a nickel.  Maybe my numbers are off a bit but it was something along those lines. 

You chose from a huge selection of albums and if you didn’t choose the club chose for you and another record would arrive in a cardboard mailer.  Unfortunately most kids discovered pretty quickly that there weren’t all that many albums they actually wanted.  The Columbia Record Club didn’t care.  The albums kept coming anyway and that explains our Mancini’s and the piano duets.

Steve Lawrence was one artist that Columbia chose for us but he was worth whatever we paid if only for the song “Go Away Little Girl”.  I ignored most of the other cuts that sounded like “grown up” music but that one I listened to hundreds of times carefully placing the needle as close to the beginning as I could and then lifting it off at the end. Eventually I ruined that song and the ones on either side.  I remember every word of the lyrics and often stood before the high closet door mirror, holding my sister’s hairbrush mic and harmonizing a third part to Steve’s lush double tracked vocals.  The end was particularly moving.

 

When you are near me like this

You’re much too hard to resist

So go away little girl

Call it a day little girl

Please go away little girl

Before I beg you to stay

 

I was eleven so the little girl I sang to was probably in the second grade but… what a song! 

During this time my favorite albums were those of Ricky Nelson.  I felt like I knew him personally because my family watched his family on the Ozzie and Harriet show every Saturday evening.  I thought the Nelsons were very normal… much like us.  Ricky was their youngest boy and during his teen years he often closed the shows with a song.  He’d be on a gymnasium stage, strumming his leather-covered acoustic, licking his lips while mouthing his latest hit.  Beautiful pony tailed girls in saddle shoes, poodle skirts and tight cashmere sweaters held their hands to their mouths waiting for him to finish before erupting in cheers.  Jumping and clapping they glanced at their boyfriends as if to ask, “Isn’t Ricky so much more handsome than you? Don’t you love his dreamy voice?” And the boys clapped along as if to answer, “Oh yes we do! Honest we do!”  That’s what they got paid for.

Despite my best efforts to be careful, I destroyed Ricky’s albums.  It was just too easy to inadvertently drop the player’s arm and watch the needle bounce noisily over a new disc of shiny black vinyl.  It was too easy to bump the cart and jump to the screech of the needle scratching a new gutter across five pristine songs.  From then on, each trac had one more annoying crackle per revolution.  When a record was scratched badly enough the needle couldn’t decide which groove to follow.  That’s when I taped a couple lead toy soldiers to the arm hoping the additional weight would hold the needle where it belonged.

Technically all of our albums belonged to Sally.  She was, after all, the Columbia Record Club member. I was just a human being.  My music collection was strictly 45s.  The Five and Dime was the one store in my town that sold music and my friends and I spent a few hours a week there.  The storeowner allowed one of each new 45  to be used as a demo. As long as we behaved ourselves, we were allowed to quietly listen to them all.  They cost eighty-four cents apiece so every few weeks I was able to scrape together enough nickels and pennies to buy one. On a display rack to the left of the 45s were the albums. They were way out of my price range. 

One winter day during my sixth grade year, I walked into the store after school.  A new shipment of records had arrived that afternoon. There on the display rack, from a cover photo, four men stared.  The photo was dramatic, high contrast black and white, with the light source streaming from the left.  Their hair was unusually long and oddly combed straight forward.  They wore high dark turtleneck sweaters and the background was black so their faces were only visible from the eyes down.  Three men made a row across the top. The fourth, (and probably least attractive) nestled beneath the others in the right corner.  I knew who they were. 

Grabbing the album and franticly looking for the Columbia Records logo, I felt my heart sink as I read the word “Capitol”.  I knew I had to have that album and I knew now that it wouldn’t be arriving in a cardboard mailer. 

Fortunately for me, Sally’s birthday was only a few weeks away. It took very little persuasion to convince my mother and father that I knew the perfect gift.  When the big day arrived, Sally sat on our living room sofa and excitedly opened a box that looked to me to be just about the right size.   Both of our faces registered disappointment as beneath the birthday decorated paper we recognized a familiar cardboard mailer. 

“Oh Mom… Dad… thanks,” she said allowing sarcasm to leak into her voice.  “Did you give me my own records for my birthday?”

“Well now Sally,” my mother said, “you need to look closely.”

There were three albums.  The top one was a Perry Como for which neither of us could even fake a smile.  The next was the original Broadway cast recording of  “The Music Man”.  On the bottom my parents had snuck in, “Meet the Beatles”. 

“Oh, thank you!” Sally cheered.

“Let’s go listen!” I said, and with that we ran to her room and closed the door.  She split the cellophane sleeve with her fingernail and removed the shiny record with the rainbow label.  As she placed it over the player’s metal stem, I sat on the bed staring at the picture on the back jacket. The four stood smiling in their collarless grey suits and pointy boots.  They appeared to be very happy guys.  Sally swung the stabilizer bar over the stem and flipped the switch to automatic.  The disc dropped on to the turntable. The arm lifted, moved over the edge of the record and then lowered with a soft rumble onto the vinyl—four bars of joyous guitar and a voice began.

 

Oh yeah I’ll tell you something

I think you’ll understand

When I say that something

I want to hold your hand

I want to hold your ha aa aa aa and

I want to hold your hand

 

We sat motionless, taking in every sound and at the end both of us laughed out loud.  Just for the joy it—we laughed.  Four more bars,  the same guitars and the voice continued.

 

Well she was just seventeen

If you know what I mean

 

Well, to be honest I didn’t know what he meant. I’m still not sure I know what he meant though I suspect he meant that she could have been just thirteen or just fourteen, fifteen, sixteen or nineteen but the syllables would not have fit nearly as well… if you know what I mean. But it didn’t matter because I was caught up in the most joyous sound I ever heard.  I would be wasting words to explain the effect the Beatles had on my generation.  Too many have done so and besides, the whole world knows it’s true.  But I will share one extreme example.

In August of ’65, two girls from my school—one from my class and her older friend—talked their parents into driving them to Toronto to see the Beatles at Maple Leaf Gardens.  This was in itself an amazing thing.  Toronto was over five hours away not to mention in a foreign land. But somehow they got their parents to agree.  A couple days later I rode my bike to the Tastee Freeze and saw her seated at a picnic table surrounded by a gaggle of friends.  She excitedly shared her experience, speaking oddly in a Liverpool accent.

“It was the coolest thing evah!” she said.  “Everyone was screamin' and cryin' and one bird passed out clean away.“

“One what?” I said.

“Bird,” she said. “That means 'girl'. The bird just fell plumb ovah and the bobbies came and auled her away.”

“The bobbies?” I said.

“Yeah the bobbies… the constables.” She looked at me with exasperation. “The POLICEMEN,” she said.  Perhaps a dozen of us stared as her accent thickened with each phrase.

“Why are you talking like that?” I said.

“Like whuh?”

“Like that,” I said.  “Why are you trying to sound like you’re from England?”

“I’m naw,” she said. “I’ve always talked ligh giss.”

“No you haven’t,” I said.  “Why are you doing it?”

“I doan ave to ansah yo questions,” she said, “and besides, why are you gettin' yo knickahs in a knot?

“My what!” I said.

“ Ooo ahh you to criticize ow I speak?” she said, “I’ll speak anyway Oi bloody well please.”

And she did.  I swear—she and her friend spoke that way for two full years.  A few weeks later, when we began the eighth grade, some of our teachers were not happy about the accent but decided to ignore it hoping it would go away.  Eventually it did though upon graduation five years later she was still the only person in our part of Pennsylvania who pronounced the word "either" with a long “i”.

Now, nearly half a century later, I stare at my little sister sitting on the bed.  The kind of hairdryer she enjoys would only be sold a few more years before the design gave way to a better idea. Some ideas, like The Beatles, would last longer than most could imagine. They would even change the world. That’s the thing about ideas.  You never know what they might lead to. 

 Sally and I listened to the album clear through and then we listened to it again.  In fact, for many months, I listened to little else.  Later, Steve Lawrence, Perry Como and Henry Mancini were replaced by The Association, The Beach Boys and Peter Paul and Mary.  I loved them all.  I loved all the music.   But more importantly, I loved the idea that there were people who could make a living by writing and performing. That idea transformed my life.