Spitball Army

[Letter postmarked on 15 July 1941 at 10 a.m. at Riverside, Illinois.  Addressed to Miss Crystal K., Marshalltown, Iowa, c/o Mrs. P.  Return addressed to Mr. Richard N., Riverside, Illinois.]

July 7

     To-day I arose at 8:00 and was down to the airport at 9, flew a half hour and rested an hour (Resting an hour – silly, isn’t it? Regulations call for an hour’s rest between half hour flights.)  Flew another half hour and then went to the office.  Boy, it was hotter than HCXXE (well, you know what I mean) to-day.  In all that heat, I had to traipse downtown with some papers during noon – the hottest part of the day.  Was I a happy lad!  (Oh, yeah!)  Worked and sweated all afternoon and sweated all evening in school with a test.  Got out at 10:30 and went to the Bonnet, had 2 brews and was home in bed at 11:30.

     (Honey, I love you) xxxx

The bird vaults off my bumper into a triple flip with a double reverse twist. In my rearview, I see its 10-point terminal landing.

Card is titled: “Azaleas and Spanish Moss in the Sunny South. Scene in Bellingrath Gardens, Mobile, Ala.”

Publishing information: “Genuine Curteich-Chicago ‘C.T. Art-Colortone’ post card (Reg. U.S. Pat. Off.) / Carter’s News Agency, Mobile, Ala.”

Decades before iPods, well before there were Walkmen, there were transistor radios.  I had one when I was a kid, and it looked exactly like this:

It was too big to fit in my pocket, but it had a leather strap that I used to hang it from the handlebars of my bike or from the bureau knob beside my bed.  The strap was an extension of the black leather case that was always covering the radio, and that case just looked too cool to remove.  I could pick up a couple of local stations (one being KUDE), and on a good day could capture some tunes wafting up the coast from San Diego.  So much music, so much good music, and it was all free (unless you count the cost of batteries).

One of the stations I could pick up used to run a “battle of the hits” during the summer weekends. Here’s how it worked: the DJ would play one hit (say, The Moody Blues’ “Nights in White Satin”), follow it with another (“Hey Jude”), and while the listeners called in to vote for their favorite, he’d play a new current hit. When that song ended, he’d announce, with great fanfare, the winner. Thus, it could happen that hours would go by when “Hey Jude” – all seven minutes of it – would play once in every cycle of three songs. I remember this happening with suprising regularity, specifically with “Nights in White Satin.” It wasn’t until I was well into my 30s that I could enjoy listening to that song again. I personally think the DJs tortured their listeners this way just to generate phone calls, even if the phone calls were on the order of “Can’t you play something different?!!”

The songs collected here are ones I remember hearing during my tenth year and, more than likely, they hit my ear after escaping from my little Westinghouse companion.

As a Christmas gift in 1971, I was given a Philco cassette deck, with a black leather case designed with an array of hole punches positioned over the speaker.  It matched my Westinghouse radio perfectly, but supplanted it tragically.  My first cassette tapes – Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s 4 Way Street and Cat Stevens’ Teaser and the Firecat – pulled my attention away from the radio, which eventually ended up in a cardboard shoebox in the back of my closet.

Approximate playing time: 78 minutes.

1. Rare Earth  “Get Ready”
2. The Delfonics  “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time)”
3. The Ides of March  “Vehicle”
4. Norman Greenbaum  “Spirit in the Sky”
5. Edison Lighthouse  “Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)”
6. Neil Diamond  “Cracklin’ Rosie”
7. The Five Stairsteps  “O-o-h Child”
8. Melanie  “Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)”
9. Mungo Jerry  “In the Summertime”
10. Charles Wright & the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band  “Love Land”
11. White Plains  “My Baby Loves Lovin'”
12. Alive ‘N Kickin’  “Tighter, Tighter”
13. Bobby Sherman  “Julie, Do Ya Love Me?”
14. Badfinger  “Come and Get It”
15. The Kinks  “Lola”
16. The Guess Who  “No Time”
17. Clarence Carter  “Patches”
18. The 5th Dimension  “One Less Bell to Answer”
19. Gordon Lightfoot  “If You Could Read My Mind”
20. Tony Orlando & Dawn  “Candida”
21. Stevie Wonder  “Signed, Sealed, Delivered I’m Yours”
22. Freda Payne  “Band of Gold”
23. Simon & Garfunkel  “Cecilia”
24. Diana Ross  “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”

Some notes on the songs:

• Hearing “Spirit in the Sky” on the radio encouraged me to buy it on a 45. The b-side was a song entitled “Milk Cow,” with the annoyingly lethargic refrain “Jethro bought himself a milk cow” repeated over and over. I didn’t like it.
• I also had 45s of “Cecilia” and “Signed, Sealed, Delivered…” both with superb b-sides (“Baby Driver” and “I’m More than Happy”).  Take that, Norman Greenbaum.
• It amazes me that I can recite the spoken sections of “Patches” perfectly and right in cadence with Clarence Carter even today, forty years after hearing it on radio broadcasts. That’s really strange, as I know I haven’t heard it but maybe three or four times since then. There are other songs I’d prefer to have lodged permanently in my brain.
• The Guess Who’s “No Time” is from their American Woman album.  “American Woman” was the bigger hit that year, but you know it so well.
• “Come and Get It” was composed by Paul McCartney.
• The radio version of Rare Earth’s “Get Ready” last only 2:48, but the album version is 21:06 in length. That’s some severe editing, folks.
• Because many hit songs are best remembered by their most unique line, I always did and continue to refer to that 5th Dimension song as “One Less Egg to Fry.”

Oh my gosh, I forgot one! Leaving this off the playlist would have been criminal:

[audio:Moments___Love_on_a_Two-Way_Street.mp3]
“Love on a Two-Way Street” (1970), by The Moments

[Letter postmarked on 15 July 1941 at 10 a.m. at Riverside, Illinois.  Addressed to Miss Crystal K., Marshalltown, Iowa, c/o Mrs. P.  Return addressed to Mr. Richard N., Riverside, Illinois.]

July 6

     This morning I arose at 9:30 after a good night’s sleep and took Dad, Mom, Aunt, Uncle and kids for a ride and returned about 1 o’clock. Played a little baseball after lunch and tore back to the boat with just the kids to do some fancy surfboard riding. It was a beautiful day for it.

     Sad to say, our fun was called to a sudden stop. Why? Oh, it was just a minor detail. The surfboard got stuck on the bottom of the lake after Robert fell off and the rope broke which meant it stayed there. We dove after it for about a half hour but there was no finding it. With no more surfboard to ride, we returned to the cottage about 8 o’clock. We had some dinner, played some cards, and were back in Riverside and in bed at midnight.

     (Honey, I love you) xxx

They warned me I’d encounter talent in college: my sophomore roommate could burp the alphabet and squeeze his farts into laughter.

(photo: spitballarmy.com)

Jury duty has its perks: this break-time hilarity was spotted along a corridor in the Jefferson County Courthouse in Birmingham, Alabama. No one was seen going through this door in either direction, so we assumed that all the Moms in the building that day were of the public variety.

[Letter postmarked on 15 July 1941 at 10 a.m. at Riverside, Illinois.  Addressed to Miss Crystal K., Marshalltown, Iowa, c/o Mrs. P.  Return addressed to Mr. Richard N., Riverside, Illinois.]

July 5, 1941

Dear Honey,

     Hi Hon, how are you? I hope you enjoyed your final day of traveling – you certainly had a fine day for it and I truly hope the rest of the days are like the first.

     By the way, how do you like my writing paper, some stuff eh Hon. This is my stationery. I don’t care what anyone says or thinks, I’ll stick to it.

     Hon, I hope you will like my plan of correspondence. In the place of sending you a letter every day, I will keep a sort of diary for you – all right?

     Yesterday I went out to the club with Mack and played a little golf. I mainly went out to watch the fireworks in the evening. Our folks were out there, so we had a quiet time. The fireworks were very elaborate as usual.

     I must tell you about the moon out here at this time, and what is more, let you know how mad I am watching it go to waste. I’m telling you, it’s enough to drive a man to quit drinking. (Nuts). People and their vacations. The fact of the matter is, this moon of ours was so big and bright it spoiled the effect of the skyrockets. Can you imagine its beauty now? Well enough said, the moon. I think about it the worse I get.

     (Honey, I love you) xx

     To-day we went out to the boat: Mom, Dad and myself. Rode for about three hours, had some dinner and reached my uncle’s place about 9 o’clock. Their cottage is a little out of Antioch. I dropped my folks off, picked up Robert and Teddy, and went back to town for some rope for the surfboard. We returned in about a half hour. I had nothing to do then, so I studied all three courses in ground school and went to bed about 11:30. Some Saturday night. It was horrible.

     (Honey, I love you) xxx

He turns up Vaughan Williams to the bearable limit, cheese straw crumbs dotting his sweater, his piquant pipe smoldering on the table.

Card is titled: “A January Scene at Camelback Inn, Phoenix, Arizona. p-61. 6B-H30.”

Printed on back of postcard:

During the winter months luncheon at the pool is a daily attraction for guests of Camelback Inn, the resort oasis “where time stands still.”

Publishing information: “Genuine Curteich-Chicago ‘C.T. Art-Colortone’ post card (Reg. U.S. Pat. Off.) / Distributed by Lollesgard Specialty Co., Tucson and Phoenix, Arizona.”