A Natural History of Elevator Music

I have never heard elevator music while standing in an elevator. Ever. The term is a gigantic misnomer. But whether it’s called easy listening, mood music or lounge music I have a passion for the stuff.

Like most forms of modern music, elevator music has its roots in classical music. Just give a listen to the impressionistic melodies of Debussy and Ravel. Those light, soothing tonalities that you hear have a direct connection to the accessible, laid back harmonies of Henry Mancini. In a sense Debussy’s Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune is the musical grand-mère of Henry Mancini’s Pink Panther.

Well, sort of.

One of my favorite American classical composers, Leroy Anderson, wrote happy, uplifting tunes throughout the twentieth century. His “hits” include songs such as Sleigh Ride, Blue Tango, The Typewriter, Serenata, Belle of the Ball, Bugler's Holiday and Forgotten Dreams. In many ways Anderson could be considered the father of modern easy listening music, if anyone really wanted to be called such a thing.

Anyway, by the time I arrived on the scene in 1952 elevator music was in full flower. With the advent of FM radio, easy listening music became the background score for the Eisenhower administration. In short order orchestrated versions of popular music flooded the airways. Purveyors of this musical art form included such luminaries as Ray Conniff, Percy Faith, Andre Kostelanetz, “Montovani,” and the musicians of the 101 Strings to mention a few.

One of my favorite performers of this period was Fred Warring. Fred was the conductor of a choral group, the Pennsylvanians (was there ever a more humble moniker?) It seems odd today that a choir could gain national recognition without a lead vocal, but the Pennsylvanians were a product of their times. They peaked in popularity in the decade after World War II, the penultimate group effort.

Is it possible that once millions of people sat in front of their radios and listened to the Pennsylvanians vocal interpretation of the Whiffenpoof Song? Hard to believe, but it happened.

Elevator music reached its crescendo with Jackie Gleason and his Orchestra. Gleason had zero musical training. He did, however, have an idea. After watching a Clark Gable movie Gleason noticed that the love scenes were heavily scored. “If Clark Gable needs music,” Gleason figured, “the regular Joe must be desperate!”

Romantic background music for the regular Joes was the raison d’être of Gleason’s musical mission.

Using his clout as an entertainer, Gleason gathered the top jazz musicians of his day and put together his “orchestra.” His contribution to the effort was to provide the vision. In short, he would explain to the musicians what he wanted and leave it to them to figure out the musical stuff.

It must have been a winning formula because throughout the fifties and sixties Gleason produced close to three dozen albums. On the back of one album Gleason is pictured directing his musicians with what appears to be a cigarette.

Perfect.

The sixties put an end to the elevator music era. A combination of rock and roll, bosa nova and country western music rendered the form even more meaningless than it already was. Yet it was a slow death. Peter Nero attempted to breathe life into its dying body with his piano hunt-and-peck versions of the Beatles’ music. Barry Manilow tried valiantly to re-invigorate it with his over the top lyrics and big band-like orchestration. And the Tijuana Brass as well as the Carpenters performed CPR on the corpse. It was all too little, too late. By the end of the seventies elevator music lay dead on the disco dance floor.

And no one cried.

But even though it’s dead, its spirit is still with us.

You can hear the echoes of easy listening in any John Williams score.

You can hear it in every televised Handy Wipe commercial.

You can hear it in the umpteen versions of Leroy Anderson’s Sleigh Ride played endlessly during Christmas.

And what is a Phillip Glass symphony except the same three bars from Montovni’s Moon River endlessly looped?

And if you ever need to listen to Andre Kostelanetz or Percy Faith or Jackie Gleason, just go to your local Goodwill. Head to the back and look in the cardboard box hidden underneath a card table displaying chipped coffee cups. You’ll find all the albums you need, up to and including Herb Alpert’s Going Places.

You see, elevator music is not really dead.
It’s just tucked away.
Forever.

The Resurrection of Mr. Phillips

Mr. Phillips had been dead for ten years and Mrs. Phillips was chained to him by her memory. That was the crux of the situation. And while I remember her as being incredibly old, she could not have been too much older than I am now.

We see the world differently when we’re nine.

My mom was absolutely certain on the cause of Mr. Phillips demise. “Ada (Mrs. Phillips) worried the poor man to death.” It had to be true. Mom was well connected with the neighborhood gossips and knew virtually everything about everybody.

I wasn’t exactly clear on what “worried to death” meant, but it sounded like Mrs. Phillips had a hand in it, which made sense to me After all, she was a witch.

And if her husband’s death was somewhat a mystery, his resurrection was positively astounding involving, as it did, numerous governmental agencies and an act of Congress. The greatest mystery of death is not the after life, but the paperwork.

That summer of ’61 my brother Allen developed a kind of a sixth sense. He had the ability to predict the weather. His accuracy was, and this is no exaggeration, miraculous. Each morning inspected the readings of his various pieces of meteorological equipment, looked intently at the sky, consulted his How And Why Wonder Book, and then announced his latest forecast over a bowl of Rice Crispies ®.

Among other things, Allen predicted a dry summer.
And dry it was.

I continued my employment as Mrs. Phillips’ all-round errand boy. I was sort of like Pepino on The Real McCoys, a smiling presence on which not much was expected. I was a salaried employee. No matter what I did, no matter how long I did it, my pay always remained the same: two shiny new quarters. I did not complain. Fifty cents wasn’t much but it kept me in Mad Magazines ® and pixie stix, the nectar of life for a young boy in the early sixties.

My relationship with Mrs. Phillips evolved during those months of servitude. Mrs. Phillips changed as well. Her facial expression slowly altered from her normal everyday hardened scowl to a softer, more sentimental hardened scowl. She also started calling me by my first name. No more did she yell, “Boy, get over here, now!” Instead she would yell, “Owen, get over here, now!”

Little things like that make a big difference.

Soon my list of duties expanded to include grocery shopping. Every Saturday I would follow Mrs. Phillips for four blocks to the corner grocery story lugging her collapsible grocery cart. Corner grocery stores have since disappeared. Gone are the narrow aisles, the creaky wooden floors, and the over priced canned goods.

And now that I think about it, we’re all better off without them.

Once, when we were in the fruits and vegetable section, I saw Mrs. Phillips secretly pop a grape in her mouth. I suppose she could have been checking for freshness, but she could also have been engaging in a bit of undetected pilfering.

That’s the thing about adults. They’ll talk all day on the Ten Commandments, but turn your back for a second and they’re stealing fruit. God found that out the hard way.

As summer progressed, I slowly made my way inside Mrs. Phillips house. When I first started, I was kept waiting in the backyard with the sunflowers. A week or so later I moved to the garage. And then I moved to the back porch. By the last week of August I was in her front room.

Mrs. Phillips was at odds with her furniture. Where Mrs. Phillips wore the same basic, drab outfit- gray dress, white socks, heavy black leather shoes- her furniture was stylish, ornate, even delicate. Everything smelled of lemon Pledge. Strangest of all, everywhere I looked there were framed portraits of Mr. Phillips.

There was a lesson here, but I was too young to recognize it. The prime motivator, the most important shaper of personality, and the single most cause of causes where human behavior is concerned can be summarized in one word: guilt.

It was about this time that Mr. Phillips literally rose from the grave. Highway construction had forced a local cemetery to exhume caskets and transport them to a new location. Although unusual, it does happen. The 1956 Interstate Highway Act demanded it.

Mrs. Phillips took the opportunity the exhumation offered and had the casket opened in order to view the corpse of her husband one last time. It was the scandal of the neighborhood. My mom harrumphed an entire afternoon over the story. My dad simply rolled his eyes mumbling something about that crazy woman.

It got me thinking, though. I was in servitude to Mrs. Phillips, but she, in turn, was enslaved by the memory of her dead husband. And she didn’t even get two shiny new quarters in the bargain.

By mid September Allen had abandoned his fascination with predicting the weather. His equipment quickly deteriorated into a pile of non-descript junk. His new passion, biology, took the form of collecting butterflies. This meant a whole new catalog of equipment and procedures: nets, killing jars and sticking pins into dead insects. To this, I could only say one word: neat! In short order we were traipsing through high weeds brandishing nets our fingers smelling of mothballs.

(It turned out that Allen never predicted anything. He merely listened to the weather forecast on the radio and parroted what he heard. I was impressed. Allen had taught himself the essential skill needed to succeed in this world- putting on a believable show also known as lying.)

Winter put an end to my work for Mrs. Phillip. When spring came I was off to a new endeavor: piano lessons. Though my mom never spoke of it directly, I suspected that I was removed from Mrs. Phillips influence because of the weirdness of viewing her deceased husband. That sounded completely unfair to me. I mean, how different was that from looking at my dad lying on the couch watching the Mike Douglas Show in his jockey shorts?

Years later, after we moved to the suburbs, I learned the final chapter in the story of Mrs. Phillips (My mom had remained in contact with the neighborhood gossips long after we moved away.) It turned out that Mrs. Phillips got herself a boyfriend and, if that wasn’t incredible enough, he actually married her!

My mom announced the coda of the story with a sense of triumph. As fate would have it, Mrs. Phillips did not marry the ideal man. He was something of a rogue. “He took her for everything,” she said smiling. “He took her for everything she had.”

The vicissitudes of Divine Justice is well beyond the ken of human understanding.

The Witch of Maple Street

When I was in the fourth grade my older brother Allen decided to give up his serious work in detonating small explosives and take up the study of meteorology. This seemed like an odd career move to me. Perhaps he originally thought meteorology was the study of meteors and was too proud to admit he made a mistake. Or maybe he really was interested in predicting the weather. For all the years I’ve known him I’ve never been able to figure him out.

Soon Allen’s room filled up with weather equipment: weather vanes, barometers, thermometers and wind cups. Some of the stuff we picked up from around the house. Other items Allen sent away for. We even made a trek to the shabby Army Surplus store on Main Street. We didn’t find anything there, but it did give us an excuse to rummage through the piles of blankets, mess kits and canteens.

We smelled like moth balls for almost a week.

Once assembled, the equipment needed to be set up outside. Since Allen’s room overlooked the garage that seemed like the logical place. It wasn’t long until I was going EVA on the slanted garage roof festooned with equipment while desperately trying to balance myself. As project manager, Allen remained inside by the window overlooking the assembly.

It was then that I saw her: the witch of Maple Street. Actually, I didn’t see all of here, just her sun hat bobbing up and down among her sunflowers. Her name was Mrs. Phillips and she was our next-door neighbor. I only knew a few things about her. I knew she lived alone. I knew she pretty much stayed in her house. And I knew her husband was dead.

No adult seemed to know the exact cause of his death, but every kid in the neighborhood had it figured out. Mrs. Phillips had devoured him. That’s what happens to you if you are foolish enough to marry a witch.

It wasn’t long until Allen, frustrated with my natural ineptness, joined me on the roof. His focus was securing and proper placement of the equipment. There was weather to predict after all. To his growing annoyance my attention was not on the science of meteorology, but on the simple joy of being on the garage roof. How cool was that? I was on equal footing the backyard sycamore tree!

Then the magic shattered. A voice shot up from below: “You, boy.” I looked down. It was Mrs. Phillips standing in the middle of my backyard calling to me.

The witch of Maple Street was in the middle of my backyard calling to me!

I looked at Allen. He was on his knees pounding the weather vane into the shingles. He acted like he heard nothing.

“You, boy,” growled Mrs. Phillips. “Come down here.”

What could I do? An adult had commanded me to do something. I had to obey. It was like a rule or something. I climbed back in through the window and went out to the backyard where the witch was waiting for me.

“Come with me,” she said. We walked to her garden where she gave me a bucket and a pair of big yellow gloves. “I can’t bend down like I used to. I need you to pull those weeds. Do you see them?”

I looked. “Yeah,” I said tentatively.

“Pull out the weeds and put them in the bucket,” she said, and then she disappeared into her house.

There was nothing preventing me from just walking away. But I lived in a world where adults were always granted unquestionable authority. I had been commanded to “weed” so therefore I must weed. It was the grim logic of the day. To do otherwise risked grave unknowable consequences.

It took me a half hour to fill the bucket. When Mrs. Phillips returned she gave me a glass of lemonade. I drank while she inspected the bucket.

“How did you do this?”

“What?”

She pulled a dandelion weed out of the bucket. “How did you pull the dandelion out, root and all?”

I showed her. My method was not to use the gloves. My hands were small allowing me to get a sure grip on the base of the weed. One quick snap and up came the dandelion, root and all.

Mrs. Phillips looked at me then looked at the dandelion. She nodded her head then reached into her apron and pulled out two quarters. “Come back tomorrow.”

I officially had a job. Given my needs at the time, it was a relatively well paid position. True, I was working for a witch doing menial labor. And the job itself was hardly rewarding. But I figured as long as I didn’t marry her I would probably be okay.

And then I found out what happened to Mr. Phillips and how he rose from the grave.

Next:
The Resurrection of Mr. Phillips

My Favorite Books (non-fiction)

It’s Saturday morning and I’ve just finished the novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark. I found the book thoughtful, puzzling, contradictory and refreshing. I’m still mulling it over which means it is everything I want in a novel. The book was published in 1962, made into a play five years later and then into an award winning film. As recently as last week I had neither read the book, nor watched the play, nor rented the movie.

I am way behind the times.

I connect books in my mind. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie falls into a category dominated by Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, Plath’s The Bell Jar, and Knowles’s Separate Peace. They are books where teenagers question the world around them. I suppose these novels appeal to me because some part of myself will always be a wide eyed thirteen year old.

The reason I decided to read Prime is that it was referred to in another book I am reading: How Fiction Works, by James Woods. Yes, I also read books about books.

That’s the thing about reading. It’s not static. My reading tastes change as I change. When I was an adolescent it was all spaceships and dinosaurs which evolved into Hammett's world of hard boiled detectives which transformed into historical novels which changed into non-fiction and a plethora of other subjects. Yes, a whole, complete plethora.

Everything, it turns out, is linked with everything else.

Below is an (always) incomplete list of some of my favorite non-fiction works.

Stillness at Appomattox by Bruce Catton
One of the most harrowing books I have read on the Civil War. It concerns itself with the war’s final year, basically when Grant took control of the Union Army and, from the South’s perspective, the Civil War stopped being fun. The scope, range and tragedy of the war is laid out brilliantly. If you read this and want more, Catton’s trilogy on the Civil War is also remarkable.

Reflections on a Ravage Century by Robert Conquest
By any measure, the twentieth century was a bloody mess. Conquest examines what he considers the root cause of the horror: blind adherence to ideology. The combined madness of Stalin, Hitler and Mao ended the lives of over one hundred million people. This mind blowing tsunami of death is examined by Conquest not only as a historic fact, but as a horrifying portent for the next century.

The Uses of the Past by Herbert J. Muller
The title is out of print and the book I have is a hardbound 1952 edition. I purchased it for a buck at a used bookstore. I love this book. It is a study of past societies along with an intelligent analysis of current history. This book is reminiscent of Toynbee’s Study of History.

Man’s Search for Meaning by Victory Frankl
I admit it: the title is politically incorrect. It should be re-titled Everybody’s Search for Meaning (which has a kind of Sesame Street ring to it.) But gender sensitivity aside, Frankl’s insight is that there is only one true human freedom, and that is the freedom to choose one’s attitude about a given situation. The first half of the books is the author’s first hand account of life in a Nazi death camp. The second half explains his psychotherapeutic method.

The Algiers Motel Incident by John Hersey
Yes, this is the same John Hersey that wrote A Bell for Adano and Hiroshima. This time he records the events at the Algiers Motel the night of Detroit’s race riot during the summer of 1968. Shots are reported to have come from the motel, police arrive, and three men are shot. What happened and how it occurred are Heresy’s concern. The book is written in a matter of fact style and is an example of what investigative journalism should look like.

The Making of a President 1968 by T.H. White
The classic, of course, is White’s Making of a President 1960. My favorite is the book White wrote on the 1968 campaign. This one includes many of the seminal events of the 60’s (assassinations, riots, George Wallace, Vietnam, the Chicago Democratic Convention) culminating with the election of Richard Nixon. White ended up writing a total of four books covering Presidential elections and, incredibly, three of them involved Nixon as a candidate. White also wrote a pretty good Watergate book, Breach of Faith.

Life on a Little Known Planet by Howard Evans
“Is the fly more a more intricate machine than he appears, or are we less clever than we suppose…?” Howard Evans will tell us in this wonderful book on insect life. Evans is both a distinguished biologist and an accomplished writer. If you have any interest in biology and insects, you will love this book.

How Should We Then Live?: The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture by Francis Schaeffer
Bible scholar Schaeffer looks at Western Civilization and presents a cogent analysis of the changes taking place in the late twentieth century. He opens up the treasure chest of western culture including philosophy, poetry, novels, and films, and declares them to also be the property of Bible believing Christians. Always interesting, Francis Schaefer is never pugnacious yet anxious and ready to debate his beliefs. The television series on which the book is based is definitely worth a look.

The Human Zoo by Desmond Morris
The book The Naked Ape made Morris famous, but I like his follow up work better. The Human Zoo is a sociological study of human behavior. Morris is audacious, thought provoking, frustrating and fascinating. My paperback edition of the book eventually fell apart in my hands from over reading.

Shelton College

In May of 2005 I stopped by Cape Canaveral and visited what was left of Shelton College. Reverend Dr. McIntyre’s four-year institution of higher learning had closed its doors thirteen years before in 1992. There wasn’t much that remained. The boys’ and girls’ dorms had been reconstituted into condos. The main college building was now a dilapidated sign company. And the jungle in front of Satellite Beach had been leveled. It was now a residential neighborhood filled with split-levels, basketball hoops and two car garages.

The only building to remain unchanged was the Under the Stars Hotel.

In September 1971 Cape Canaveral was a depressed city. The American opinion of the NASA Space Program had moved from high exuberance to the low doldrums in a mere twenty-four months after the lunar landing. A kind “been there, done that, bought the t-shirt” mindset developed. I suppose most Americans felt the way I did. We landed on the moon, hit a few golf balls around and discovered it was boring.

I had been brought up on the space paintings and drawings of Chesley Bonestell. His lunar vision had colonized my mind; the moon was supposed to be mountainous, filled with high peaks and vast, flattened seas of hardened lava. The Hollywood lunar set of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey was pure Bonstell. In reality, the landscape was just an unending rolling plain of gray dust. The lime lakes down Vanderhoof Road in Majestik Township were more intriguing.

The moon turned out to be no big deal.

Interest in the space program waned, tourism fell and by the summer of 1971 businesses were fleeing Cape Canaveral. It was as if the whole city was part of a gigantic closeout sale. That’s how the Reverend Dr. McIntyre got his hands on the property. Desperate people in desperate times do desperate things. The Reverend walked away with a complex of buildings for a pittance.

The center of the complex was the Under the Stars Hotel. During its heyday in the late 1960’s it was the place to go. Partiers from as far as Atlanta would travel to the Cape just to be part of the scene. In September of 1971 it was the cafeteria for Shelton College. In those first months it was not uncommon to have a group of partygoers pull up to the hotel in hopes of fun, frolic and fornication only to find themselves in the college snack bar.

I didn't studying much during my semester at Shelton. I remember buying text books and sitting in class and doing all the stuff that you do in college, but the memory that stands out the most is of Satellite Beach.

I loved that beach.

Satellite Beach stretched for miles in both directions. It seemed endless. At the time I was there it was completely depopulated. On some days you would find a couple of surfers, but more often than not the waves were few and tepid. Every so often a stray dog would wander by, sniff at the Atlantic surf and then go on its way. Most of the time it was just me. After class, I would sit on the sand underneath a palm tree and read.

Is there anything better than that?

One October afternoon I grabbed my latest paperback book and headed for the beach. You should know that there was a paved road to the shore, but that it meandered around and around.

But there was another way.

A trail that led through the jungle seemed to be a quicker and more direct route. I had seen that path every day and had been tempted to take it. And though I had never seen anyone actually on it, others must have taken that route. I mean, it looked well traveled. It was a path, after all.

After a second’s worth of hesitation, I started walking nonchalantly into the jungle. Immediately I notice the leafy growth on both sides of the trail. Everything seemed so incredibly green. Life was everywhere. It surfaced from the jungle in twerps, tweets and chirps. In front of me a swarm of Florida love bugs flew in random, stupid circles.

At that moment I fancied my self as a kind of ad hoc naturalist, a sort of everyman Darwin. I was an exploer seeking an understanding of nature and at one with the natural world.

Halfway into this complicated maze of growth I heard a rustle off to the left. A few feet in front of me a ten-foot rattlesnake crossed my path. It turned its head, sized me up and then sped into the jungle on the other side of the trail.

It would have been interesting to observe the snake more closely. Its speckled pattern, for instance, seemed incredibly complex. Also it didn’t seem to slither, but somehow used its scales to scoot through the foliage. Unfortunately I didn’t have time to take notes. At that moment I was screaming and running for my life.

At some point while in this mindless panic I left the path and flailed through the brush towards the road. I tripped and fell head first into a nest of bristles. I lost my book. Unfazed, I pulled myself up and continued my flight. I did not stop until I was back in my dorm room with the door locked behind me.

I discovered something about myself on that afternoon.
I hate nature.

I completed just one semester at Shelton College. I returned to Akron, Ohio, in January ’72 and did not revisit Cape Canaveral until 2005. By then Satellite Beach was more crowded, more commercial, and barely matched the scenes from my memory.

One memory was from December 1971. In the early morning hours I went to the beach to view the launch of a weather satellite. The newspaper described it as a minor launching. I sat on the sand and stared across the ocean to where, supposedly, at 5:30 AM the launch would take place.

5:30 AM came and went.

Another dud, I thought. Typical of the ghost town that Cape Canaveral was quickly becoming.

And then, in the distance, there was a spark followed by a growing roar. A brilliant column of fire appeared. Light flooded the horizon changing the sky into a false dawn. The fiery column rose higher and higher becoming a brilliant sun, then a white comet, and finally a shooting star.

There is only one word I can use to describe this.
Unforgettable.

Next:
My Favorite Books (Non-Fiction)

Hurricane Doria

Well, for starters, it was never really a hurricane. It was almost a hurricane, but not quite. Yet, in the 1971 Atlantic hurricane season, it was the costliest tropical storm of the year. Total damage in 2009 dollars was around eight hundred million bucks.

It was the season for political storms as well. In the summer of 1971 the Nixon Administration enacted wage and price controls. Earlier in the year, in April, 175,000 war protesters marched to the steps of the Capital. But worst of all, in the same month, the American table tennis team played in the People’s Republic of China. That would be red China. Godless Communist China.

The Reverend Dr. McIntyre was beside himself.

As an employee at his hotel in Cape May, Jersey, I had a ring side seat to the ongoing political brouhahas of the day. Of course he raged about surrendering to communism. But the important thing about McIntyre was that he did more than just rage.

McIntyre did things.

To show his disapproval, McIntyre and a few hundred of the faithful marched on Washington with the intent of playing ping pong in front of the White House. The plan was for Reverend Dr. McIntyre to bat the ball around with a Taiwanese team thereby demonstrating his condemnation of the Nixon Administration pro-Red China foreign policy. When informed by the Capital police that a stationary protest was prohibited, McIntyre had the table slowly carried as they played ping pong. No mere regulation would stand in his way.

When it came to staging ridiculous protests, the man was indefatigable.

I don’t remember having an opinion about Nixon’s China policy. I had my own interests that summer and protesting the Nixon administration was not one of them.

Mostly, I loved just hanging out.

During my time off from washing dishes, I would walk into downtown Cape May and browse a bookstore I had discovered. It sold mostly paperbacks of the beach book variety. But it also sold other, less mainstream, fare. It was there where I picked up a copy of Charles Reich’s Greening of America.

I loved that book. It was the first time I read a political analysis of the United States. Reich first outlined the historical path of America, then detailed its many flaws, and finally provided an answer. In the nutshell, to cure America’s ills all one had to do was to don bell bottoms, smoke weed, and channel Bob Dylan. Of course it was a ridiculous proposition. But the seventies were a time for ridiculous propositions. One more wouldn’t hurt.

On August 27th, Doria was 200 miles off the coast of Daytona Beach, Florida. It gathered strength, and made landfall on the North Carolina coast on the 28th. By the 29th, it was in Virginia, and by the evening of the 29th it was pounding Cape May, New Jersey.

All during the day, preparations were being made at the hotel. I noticed a slight more hustle and bustle around the front desk. As the largest brick structure in city, it was the one place people could seek refuge. As the blankets, towels, food and others supplies were being gathered, I went about my day as if nothing unusual was happening. I was in the middle of a book, after all. I didn’t have time for all this hurricane stuff. And besides, in the whole scheme of things, how bad could it get?

It turns out, it was pretty damn bad.

I was in my eighth floor room the night the storm hit. Bob, a busboy from down the hall, burst into my room. “Are you watching this,” he cried.

“Watching what?”

“The storm, man, the storm! It’s unbelievable.” Bob ran to my window and opened it up. “Come over here and check it out.”

I put down my book and went to the window and looked out. Bob was right. It was unbelievable. The waves were nearly ten feet tall, and crashed over the sea wall. The streets of the town were flooded. Numerous cars had stalled in the water leaving the drivers stranded in a roiling sea of rising water.

“Look at that guy, look at that guy,” Bob screamed. A car drove down the street at high speed virtually hydroplaning across the water in a desperate attempt to reach the hotel. It didn’t make it. The car twisted and turned in the flooded street, stalled and began floating in the opposite direction.

“What an idiot,” Bob declared.

The wind was impressive. As I watched, branches, paper, and miscellaneous flotsam spiraled passed my eighth floor window, circled, and then came back around. I was like a scene from the Wizard of Oz.

“Look there, look there,” Bob yelled. Below, workers from the hotel had formed a human chain, reaching out to rescue people fleeing to the hotel. Not everyone made it to the other side without incident. More than one slipped and fell into the frothy water.

We both found this to be hilarious.

In self defense, I would like to point out two things. First, all humor is based on some form of human pain so, technically, there is something innately funny about seeing someone slipping and falling into the sea even if it is during a raging storm. And secondly, I was nineteen at the time and was both young and stupid. The defense rests.

I suppose we could have remained in my room laughing and screaming insults at the people below for the rest of the evening. But the fun and games came to an abrupt end when the door crashed open. Standing there, drenched from head to foot, was Brazilian John, my fellow dishwasher. He had a facial expression that could freeze water. Apparently he was one of the people in the human chain and had looked up to see us laughing at him.

John was not amused.

The only thing that saved us was the fact that Brazilian John was a devout Christian and he was restrained by the Ten Commandments. He looked at us with disgust.

Then he uttered two choice words that aptly fit the situation. Apparently Brazilian John's tenure as dishwasher had increased his vocabulary in colloquial English to include personal invectives. He tuned and left, slamming the door on the way out.

The next day there was mostly cleanup work at the hotel. Not only was there debris to remove, but the tourist season was ending. Some of the help had already left. It was time to rejoin reality.

Then again, maybe it wasn’t.

The Reverend Dr. McIntyre had just purchased the Holiday Inn in Cape Canaveral, Florida. He was starting a college. Tuition was low and admission requirements liberal.

Now THAT sounded interesting…

Next: Shelton College.

My Summer of 1971

During the summer of 1971 I worked at The Christian Admiral, a three hundred and thirty-three room hotel in Cape May, New Jersey. The owner and operator was the Reverend Dr. McIntyre, an old school anti-communist fire breather and a fundamentalist minister. He was considered by some to be the “Dean of the Radio Ministers,” a kind of politically bent Presbyterian Oral Roberts minus the faith healing rigmarole.

Of course all of this meant nothing to me. I was nineteen at the time and more interested in escaping home than right wing politics. By nature, I am conservative. I was brought up thinking that people should work for a living and equated welfare with failure. I was a child of the middle class and a holder and defender of the middle values of Middle America. The world seemed pretty much black and white

In other words, I was clueless. If the Reverend Dr. McIntyre was an anti-communist, well, that sounded pretty good to me.

The hotel closely resembled Rev. McIntyre’s anti-communist movement. Both had seen better days. Built at the turn of the century, The Christian Admiral was originally called the Hotel Cape May. It incorporated many of the architectural features that were used on the Titanic: winding staircases, Victorian facades, and skylights. And where the Titanic sank on it’s maiden voyage, the Hotel Cape May’s best day was the first day it opened. After that it was all bankruptcies and sheriff sales until finally the whole complex landed in McIntyre’s lap some six decades later like over-ripe fruit.

I worked that summer in the kitchen as a dishwasher. My job was to run glasses, plates and silverware through an antiquated dishwasher. I never really understood the inner workings of the contraption. There was a conveyor belt of some sort, a valve that controlled the steam, and a pressure gauge whose needle seemed to be perpetually in the red zone. Lacking any mechanical skill, I left the management of the equipment to my fellow worker, John.

John was from Brazil and only knew one word in English: his own name. Whenever he needed help, you would hear him shout “JOHN!” and there he would be, waving and gesticulating trying to make himself understood. I rarely knew what the hell he wanted, but it didn’t seem to matter much. The problem generally resolved itself. And if it didn’t no one seemed to care.

We worked all shifts, scraping, cleaning, stacking and occasionally breaking all manner of dishes, saucers, bowls and cups spending most of our workdays totally drenched. At the end of the day I stank like a concoction that was two parts ketchup and one part body odor.

The interesting thing about working in a hotel was that you could see everything from the inside out. There were connecting hallways to all points of the complex, hidden closets that stored all manner of goods, and elevators with access to floors that were not available to the “guests.”

Though technically the Admiral had seven floors, the kitchen help had rooms on the 8th floor. We each had our own room with a sink, but the bathroom and showers were communal.

My room looked like something out of a George Orwell novel. The mattress on the bed was lumpy, the sink facet dripped, paint peeled off the wall. The only personal fixture in my room was a Peter Max poster I taped above the bed. But from my window I could see the Atlantic Ocean, the boardwalk, and the summer cottages eight stories below. In the morning I would breathe in the salt air from the sea and feel as if I had a million dollars.

I had nothing except a few books and some clothes.
But in some ways, I had everything.

As a worker at the Christian Admiral I was required to attend at least one Bible meeting each week. There was always a vast array of speakers at these sessions. Strom Thurmond, I’m certain, spoke there. Most of the speeches and sermons were a combination of old time gospel along with a generous dose of patriotic nationalism. (There was never a loss of topics to expound on. After all, Nixon was president and Vietnam was raging. The world, as always, was a mess.)

Today I probably wouldn’t mind sitting through a good right-wing diatribe. If you are in the right state of mind, they can be fun in their own way. But in 1971 I was still a teenager. My nerves hadn’t settled yet and I needed to be on the move. I would walk in the front door, sign in, and then sneak out the backdoor.

The boardwalk awaited me.

It really wasn’t much of a boardwalk at all. It had a few places to buy hotdogs and pop and a gallery of pinball machines. Usually somebody had a radio playing the Beach Boys. Most evenings I ended up sitting on a bench, looking at the ocean and enjoying the evening sea breeze.

It was unlike anything I had ever experienced.
It was magic.

Then, sometime in the middle of August, Hurricane Doria began her destructive march up the east coast.

Next:
Hurricane Doria