So many ways to hear music

Some kids collected stamps. Or marbles. Or coins. I collected records.

Those 78s I acquired at a local furniture store seemed like gems to me. I grooved on Patti Page, Guy Mitchell, the Four Aces and Frankie Laine. In retrospect, I don’t think they were as good as I thought.

Once, in 1954, a kid came up to me, lifted a record out of the bin and whispered, “You’ve got to try this.” He said it illicitly, like he was pushing drugs or something.

So I bought it. It was “Shake Rattle and Roll,” by Bill Haley and the Comets. I had no idea he was onto something there.

I did not become a rock ‘n’ roll fan, but I did buy Elvis Presley’s early records. I was able to play only the second half of “Heartbreak Hotel” after accidentally taking a chunk out of the fragile 78.

I transitioned to 45s for awhile, but the big change came with 33 1/3 LP (long playing)  records, which allowed much longer songs than the other formats.

I got records from the Columbia Record Club. When my first record arrived broken, my dad secretly called the company and got them to send me a new one.

My collection grew. I packed at least a hundred  of them in the back seat of my car when I drove from San Francisco to a new job in Delaware.  Not surprisingly my shock absorbers and rear tires gave out before I reached Denver.

Like everyhone else, I switched later to cassette tapes and CDs, which were easier to handle. Of course, as soon as I gave all of my LPs to Goodwill, vinyl became popular again because of its superior sound.

Well, superior if you had a top-of-the-line record player. When their price came down to $100, I bought one, but I never played it. So what was the point?

Years before I parted with LPs, Pickett asked me to do something about her uncle’s collection of 78s from the 1930s and 1940s, still stored in Cluster Springs. I took them to a record dealer in Richmond, who gave me $200 for the complete set without even looking them over.

“The real market today is in jazz LPs from the 1950s and 1960s,” he told me. Really? I still had maybe 50 of them! Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Dave Brubeck among them.

So I brought a bunch to the dealer, but he found that most of them were too scratched up to be re-sold. When I bought them, I was a teenager playing them in a rec room.

But he was fascinated with one that was pink. It was Cal Tjader’s Latin Concert album.

“Uh, what’s this?” He asked me, pointing to a hole in the record. “Oh, that’s a dart hole,” I said. “I wasn’t a very good player.”

We looked at each other without saying a word, and I left with my records, feeling stupid.

Today I don’t have any records. I switched to itunes for awhile because you could pick and choose individual songs rather than full albums. Now I listen to just about all of my music on YouTube. I do have a costly subscription to avoid ads, but I can find just about anything there.

But what do I want to hear right now? I haven’t a clue. What’s that box in the corner? Oh, a radio? I’ll just listen to that!

 

 

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Oh, I also collected baseball cards. I probably got so many cavities from the gum, they may have paid for a dentist’s retirement.

I had two shoeboxes full of cards in the mid-1950s. My mom gave them all way when I got older. Among them were several Hank Aaron rookie cards. They would be selling now for up to $300,000. Mom!!!

Boxing: Down for the Count

What ever happened to boxing? In the 1950s it was on prime time television twice a week. We had Rocky Marciano, Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson.

 

Everybody talked about it. Was Jersey Joe Walcott going to whip Ezzard Charles? There was the Yvon Durelle-Archie Moore fight, which was the most exciting I ever saw.

 

Next came the well-promoted championship fights only on radio and pay per view television and movies. I got out of the car once to cover a city council meeting as the Floyd Patterson-Sonny Liston fight began on the radio. By the time I got into the meeting room, it was all over, won by Liston.

Then there was the Cassius Clay (Muhammad Ali)-Liston fight in Lewiston, Maine, in 1965. It’s the only time I paid good money ($15) to watch a bout at the movies. After endless boring preliminary events, Liston went down in the first round and couldn’t get up. They have been examining the “phantom punch” that sent him down for years. A leading boxing official told me the fight must have been fixed. I felt cheated.

So did I give up on the sport? No.  I actually started covering boxing myself just when it was going out of style. First came the Wednesday Night Fights in Las Vegas. I was warned not to wear a white shirt at ringside when Roger Rouse “the bleeder” was in action. Bikini-clad girls roamed the stage between rounds right in front of me with signs of which round it was.

The spectators had no interest in the boxers, only the money they were betting at the Silver Slipper casino. Once, there was a better fight going on at the bar, but few paid attention.

At another time, I was thrilled to ask Muhammad Ali a question at a press conference. Years later, that was the only thing that interested the kids when I was invited to talk about my career at a class.

 

My big moment came when I was assigned by the AP to cover a doubleheader in Las Vegas: George Foreman’s first professional fight, followed by Liston’s second to last. It was exciting to sit at the ringside near Howard Cosell at the International Hotel.

 When Liston was floored by Leotis Martin, I dictated a story over the phone to the Los Angeles bureau, but at the same time, I multitasked to see if Liston was dead. I’m told the smelling salts to revive him were quite strong.

The country and I both lost interest in boxing over time. There were pay per view events featuring Mike Tyson, Floyd Mayweather and Sugar Ray Leonard, but they were so expensive that they drew small crowds.

Three other reasons: Many former fans couldn’t identify with the minorities that dominated the sport. Corruption was rampant. And the brutality of the sport justifiably turned off many people.

In that case, why are kick boxing and mixed martial arts so popular on TV now?

 

 

 

 

Avoiding the Dreaded B-word

1. 
   
   In her campaign for president, Kamala Harris is steering clear of the B-word
   
   
   
   , the scary word that might frighten many voters. I have avoided it too. Until now. It is Berkeley!

 

Like Harris, I lived first in Berkeley, California, just a few miles from the famous University of California at B….. Don’t say it, Mike! Today, some people call it the People’s Republic of Berkeley.

 

When Harris talks about her background, she usually refers to the East Bay or Oakland, where she did not live until she was in her 20s. Well, I can’t blame her. Oakland has a safer, diverse middle-class sound to it.

 

In her first home, she lived for a while in Berkeley, where Harris’ parents were pursuing Ph.D degrees in 1964. After they left and split up, she and her mother and sister moved back to Berkeley.

 

We only lived in Berkeley for about a year after I was born, moving to the next town over, El Cerrito, where I lived until high school. Many of my friends were sons and daughters of university professors.

 

Then I went to the dark side: I enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley! This was 1959, when there was no tuition and all you needed was a B average in college-related subjects to get in. There was no entrance exam to one of the country’s most prestigious public universities. Well, why not go there?

 

This was all before the famous Free Speech Movement, which took place the year after I graduated in 1963. But there were precursors of student radicalism when I was there. There were demonstrations of some kind all the time. Even at our Daily Californian student newspaper, we sang revolutionary songs at our parties.

 

I still think the campus of 28,000 people was too big. I got lonely and joined a fraternity. How different that was: full of engineering and business students who embraced conservative political views. What a contrast!

Upon graduation, I didn’t flee the Berkeley stigma. I got a job as a reporter for the Berkeley Daily Gazette  newspaper. Man, was this foreign to student radicalism! It covered the city’s largest industry by piecing together University of California press releases. It had a conservative editorial policy for the rest of Berkeley, which did not seem to be liberal at all.

 

Despite a few college reunions and football games, I had little connection since then with the now notorious city.

The only time I bring it up now is usually when someone in my rural town in Virginia questions one of my viewpoints in a conversation. My answer: “I can’t help it. I went to UC Berkeley!”