When to keep your mouth shut

 How do you handle touchy situations with a boss who is doing something unethical?

 

There is the right way and the wrong way.

 

First the right way: When I was the Associated Press correspondent in Las Vegas, one of AP’s very top executives came to town for a convention.  He met me at the casino where it was held.

 

We got near a craps table. “Show me how it is played,” he said.  I explained it as we watched some gamblers toss the dice and shell out cash or rake it in.

 

 The next day, he told me he had lost all his money at the craps table and asked if there was a bureau fund. I said no, but I could lend him $100. I eagerly went to the bank, deciding that this was a really good investment. If Mr. Big owes you money, it it gives you a lot of leverage. 

 

When I brought the cash to him, he told me he had second thoughts and got his wife to wire him some money. 

 

When I told the Reno correspondent about it, he said, “This story really made my day. But I think we should keep this to ourselves.” Our little secret! No problem, nothing happened.

 

Then here is the wrong way!

 

After our Saturday shift in Washington, D.C., a colleague and I visited a bar nearby. My friend and I were chatting with the attractive barmaid, when we told her we both worked for Associated Press. “Oh?” she said. “I have an interview here to work for AP an hour from now.” 

 

My friend and I looked at each other in disbelief. Saturday night at a bar? She must be putting us on, we thought. We couldn’t resist hanging around for another hour to see what happened. Big mistake. 

 

At the appointed hour, one of my bosses walked in with a high-ranking executive from New York, who was staying in the hotel across the street. They recognized us and my boss had the look of a deer in the headlights. Still, we all greeted each other with meaningless chatter. Sensing their mood, we decided to beat a retreat.

 

 My friend said to keep quiet about it, but I just couldn’t resist telling one of my friends at AP. I swore him to secrecy, but of course he spread it all over the office. 

 

The Washington boss confronted me days later and said, “Everyone thinks I am having an affair. I’m not!” I refused to believe this incident was the reason for my demotion several months later. 

 

It turns out the barmaid was hired, and I ran across her months later at the AP bureau in New York, where she launched a very successful career.

 

-0-

 

Some more thoughts:

 

Wasn’t the Sixth and Main band great at the Harvest Festival? It’s amazing that they could play a four-hour set.

-0-

Why don’t they just abolish the kickoff return in pro football now that the rules have changed? Oh, I know: they can have more commercials!

-0-

The coldest place in South Boston is the produce section at the supermarket.

-0-

My dentist used to tell me after filling a tooth: “Yes, you may have dinner, but it must be an elegant dinner.”

 

Southside jazz isn’t dead after all

Trevor Percario’s music is an oasis in the desert that is  Southside Virginia jazz.

 

Only a few months are left to catch the 22-year-old pianist’s music before he heads for the big time in New Orleans.

 

On Sundays from 11:30 to 1:30 p.m., Percario plays at Crema & Vine in Danville, spinning out standards such as “Take the A Train,” “Honeysuckle Rose” and “Tea for Two” on his electric keyboard. Besides the familiar melodies, listeners can hear some cool jazz improvisation. You won’t hear anything avant-garde. “I am trying not to stray too much from the atmosphere of the venue,” he says, entertaining a mix of listeners and people who want to socialize.

 

“For my last time in the Danville area, I just wanted to play music that I would enjoy doing,” he says.

 

Why would he leave his Chatham home and Southside for the big city? “I have to be surrounded by musicians who are better than me in that genre,” he says. “Music is all I care about right now.” He also can play bass guitar and can sing as well.

 

Percario, whose father is a noted guitarist, has had a one-track mind for music since he was 5 years old. When his father taught his brother to play a song on the piano, Trevor picked up the tune right away by ear and then took piano lessons.

 

He played for the University of Lynchburg jazz ensemble, then the Liberty University jazz combo and the combo Flat Five in Lynchburg before moving on to the University of Augusta in Georgia. It was there that he played in a jazz ensemble led by the fabled trombonist Wycliffe Gordon. Other groups include the Danville Jazz Sextet, Define Jazz and his current group, On the Margins, appearing at Crema & Vine on Oct. 14.

 

At Crema and Vine, on Main Street near the Danville Museum of Fine Arts & History, he has been arranging music bookings and doing promotional work as well.

 

As a jazz fan and part-time pianist myself, I was thrilled to see this music form alive and well in someone so young.

 

-0-

 

At the other end of the age spectrum, I recently met an astonishingly accomplished jazz musician, Bill Joor, who has lived in Alton for the past eight years.

 

Bill, now 88, has played trumpet and harmonica and sung in a 48-year career in Las Vegas, Nashville and elsewhere with an amazing list of performers. Just a few: Judy Garland, Ella Fitzgerald, Tom Jones, Carlos Santana and Jimmy Durante. He has recorded with Kenny Rogers, Roy Orbison and Frank Sinatra.

 

Oh, I left out South Boston, where he played in “Chicago” with the Halifax County Little Theatre in 2017.

 

Besides musicals, his favorite music is jazz. I have never been a fan of harmonicas, but when I listened to a recording of his, I told him, “I didn’t know a harmonica could do that!”

 

Maybe Southside isn’t a jazz desert after all!

 

 

-0-

 

Maybe not a classical desert either. Svetlana’s Smolina’s concert at The Prizery last Friday was a brilliant triumph. When her left hand switched to play the melody, and the right hand the accompaniment, it sounded like two different instruments. 

 

As a pianist with sore hands, I marveled at how she could hit the keys so hard and make such magnificent runs for almost two hours.  

 

Her choices of Tchaikovsky, Liszt and Chopin pieces were familiar enough to capture a non-classical audience yet varied enough to thrill aficionados.

 

After intermission, she said, “This is the best piano I have ever played.” Wow! Congrats to the volunteers who tirelessly raised money for the Steinway years ago.

A surprising forecast from long ago

“California is in trouble. It is growing too fast, and its problems are becoming too big to handle. The state is overcrowded, polluted, and running out of water. And its population is becoming increasingly diverse, which is creating social tensions.”

 

Was that from the Los Angeles Times this week? No. It was from Collier’s magazine on Aug. 17, 1954, in a cover story called “The Troubled Future of California.” The state had 12 million people then and has 39 million now.

 

As a 12-year-old, I remember seeing the article on newsstands, the first bad thing I had heard about the high-flying state I lived in. I was amazed to find this article summarized through a search on Bard, Google’s AI chatbot.

 

The article went on to say: “If California does not take steps to address its problems, it could become a major liability to the nation. The state is already a major economic powerhouse, but it could become a drain on the federal treasury if it cannot solve its problems.”

 

Well, with its high incomes and relatively young population, California has donated more in federal taxes than it has received in benefits for a long time. Rather than being a drain on the U.S., the state has the fifth largest economy in the world, behind Germany and ahead of the United Kingdom and India.

 

People often think of California as wall-to-wall people, but a recent map book of the state showed about 30 pages of mountains, deserts and rural areas. Only three or four showed the packed Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco Bay regions, and parts of the Central Valley.

 

Easterners love to complain about California, but I know a lot of young people who have moved there from the East. There is a reason the place is so crowded, salaries are high and everything is expensive. People just want to live there.  Though its growth has stalled, it’s a bigger draw for bright minds than Austin, Tex., and other newer tech hubs.

 

 When I was editor of the Kiplinger California Letter in 2007, I received a distraught phone call from a man visiting San Clemente, Calif., just north of San Diego. “I sold my home in Buffalo for $200,000 to move out here, but I can’t find even a condo for less than $1 million.”  It’s amazing what some sunshine and a beach will do to make a home more valuable.

 

Well, I guess my family missed our big chance.We should have owned California by now. Like Mark Hopkins, Leland Stanford and the other rich titans of the 1800s, my ancestors settled early and made the right investments. They went to the Sierra Nevada foothills in 1851, just after gold was discovered, and opened a hardware store and a bank in the booming town of Placerville.

 

But while the big guns were getting rich, the family gave numerous bad loans and somehow frittered away its bank in the next generation. They stayed and settled in the San Francisco Bay Area. Growing up, I had “a view to die for” on the hills overlooking the San Francisco Bay. But then the…well…downside of California appeared, when a storm caused our house to slide just enough in 1958 to make it nearly unlivable. We moved into a new house—under an earthen dam on a major earthquake fault.

 

We thought we had another opportunity when we discovered some cereal boxtops my grandfather had saved in the 1920s or 1930s They actually gave him California property north of the Russian River. My father drove us there once…and the land was on the side of a very steep hill, virtually worthless. Eventually I gave the land away (maybe a mistake?)

 

I left the state for great job opportunities in Washington D.C. and elsewhere and lost track of California. Amazingly, my boss at the Kiplinger Letter came up to me in 2000 when she needed to replace the editor of the Kiplinger California Letter. “I’m asking you,…uh…ordering you, to take over the California Letter,” she said.

 

“I’d love to,” I said. “You’re kidding,” she responded, aware of its small circulation. “No, I’m ecstatic.’ For one thing, I could spend more time with my aging mother in Placerville.

 

So I rediscovered the state after being gone for 40 years and liked what I found. Service industries were booming. Smog had diminished remarkably. The scenery hadn’t changed. The Collier’s forecast might still come true, but it hasn’t yet 69 years later.