Uncle Earl

 

His name was Earl Frederick Samer, my mom’s oldest brother, an uncle I barely knew who had a fascinating life as a big-time musician back in the ’30’s, ‘40’s, ‘50’s, and even the early '60's, performing with some of the biggest headlining entertainers of the era. Earl was born in Oshkosh, WI in 1910 and died in 1969. He played piano, sax and clarinet, and could even double on brass instruments and violin.  His principal instrument was the tenor sax.

The photo above was taken on June 5^th, 1948, my mom and dad’s wedding day. Earl is the handsome guy on the far right. My mom’s other dapper brother, Uncle Carl Samer, is on the left; dad and mom are in the middle. Carl and Earl were ushers at mom and dad’s wedding in Oshkosh.

 

Here's an early photo of brothers Carl Samer (left) and Earl Samer (right) at a very young age.

 

Earl shared the stage with such big-name entertainers as Eddy Howard, Freddy Martin, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Harry James, Benny Goodman, and many others. Earl played on many of their hit recordings, did countless radio broadcasts with big-name big bands, and even toured with the most famous circus in history.

Before I tell what I know of Earl’s story, I’d like to go back one generation farther, and talk a bit about his dad, my grandpa, Albert F. Samer – because that’s where the music really starts in our family. Grandpa Samer was born in Bavaria, Germany in 1881 and died in Oshkosh in 1940, nine years before I was born. His parents moved to America in 1884 and settled in Oshkosh. Albert was an accomplished trombone player, who doubled on baritone horn. For a decade in the 20’s and 30’s he was president of the Oshkosh Musicians’ Association, Local 46 of the American Federation of Musicians (AF of M).

When I joined Local 46 in 1965 and began my playing career, a lot of the older members of the union would introduce themselves to me by saying “I hear you’re Al Samer’s grandson – man, he was one hell of a player!” The man who signed my union card, Ray Pfeiffer, was a trombone player himself, who knew Earl. Pfeiffer would go on to join me on John Check's band for many years.

Here’s a photo of the Arion Orchestra, which Grandpa Al played with; later, he was selected by Arthur Pryor to join his world-famous band. Pryor was considered the world’s greatest trombonist at the turn of the century, and his band toured the U.S. and Europe several times. It was quite an honor to be selected to play trombone in the band led by the man considered the finest trombonist alive!

When his travelling days were over, Al worked for the U.S. Postal Service and continued to play trombone in and around Oshkosh. My mom recalls that her dad would conduct the local band at the South Park bandstand on Saturday nights in the summertime, and she and her sisters would sit on the porch of their Ohio Street home in Oshkosh, which was directly across from the park, and listen to their dad conduct the band.

Earl was a musical prodigy whose first instrument was the piano, which he could play proficiently by the time he was 6 years old. At that time, he began violin lessons with Charles Bauer (the leader of the Arion Band); then learned clarinet and saxophone; and studying with other local teachers, also learned trumpet and trombone.

He started his professional career playing with the Arions and a number of other local groups, working jobs at the Eagles Club in Oshkosh, the Moose Lodge, the Elks Club, and a number of other local venues which hired bands several nights a week for entertainment.

When he turned 27 in 1937, his career began to take off. Earl married Charlotte Schoenig and they moved to Madison. Charlotte was a very attractive woman – above is a photo taken at Carl Samer's wedding on February 8th, 1941.  Earl Samer is farthest left; Carl and his bride Marie are next; the next three people I don't recognize, but the lady with the fancy fur coat on the right side of the photo is my Great Aunt Helen Johnson. Next to her, Earl's wife Charlotte is half visible on the far right of the frame. My mom and her sisters loved Charlotte, who they said had a wonderful, happy personality and they called her “Sparky”.  Her death of cancer at an early age was a real blow to the entire family.

Here's a better photo of Earl and Charlotte Samer, taken in June of 1945. Left to right are Marie Samer, Carl's wife; my grandmother, Lydia Samer; Carl Samer is in the center, holding their son Bob Samer, my first cousin, who provided the three family photos above; Earl and Charlotte Samer are on the right of the photo. Apparently her photos don't do her justice; several of my cousins told me there was a very nice portrait of Charlotte which Earl had made, and she was a very beautiful woman.

During those days, Earl worked various gigs, picking up jobs as he could, and then caught on with his first “name” territory band: Johnny “Scat” Davis, and moved to Milwaukee.  When he wasn’t working with that group, he played at the Alhambra Theater in Milwaukee and the Riverside Theater in Milwaukee. My cousin Jeanne Stroh who now lives in Kansas City and was one of our "gang of first cousins" in our younger years - a group that included me, my brothers and sisters, Bob Samer, Jeanne Stroh and her sister Kathy Matonich - told me she recalls clearly her mom, Earl's sister Genevieve, telling her how Uncle Earl spent a fair amount of time in his Milwaukee years hanging out with a piano player who went by the name Liberace, frequently a guest in Liberace's West Allis home. Their paths would cross again when both were working in Las Vegas in the 50's.

The 1940 census shows Earl and Charlotte living in the Jackson Hotel on 13^th Street in Milwaukee. The census-taker noted that Earl had worked 52 weeks in the prior year and had earned $1200. A hundred bucks a month doesn’t sound like much right now, but back in 1940, two could easily live on 23 bucks a week. The average annual wage in America in 1940 was $1248.

The early 40’s were Earl’s “circus years”.  He took a job as lead tenor player and assistant conductor with the Barnes-Carruthers Shows #1 unit. Back then, some circuses had more than one “unit” on the road at any given time. After one tour with Barnes-Carruthers, Earl took over as lead tenor sax player for The Greatest Show on Earth, as they called the Ringling Brothers – Barnum and Bailey Circus. Earl did six national tours with the #1 circus in the world.

1944 was a big year in Earl’s career. He took over as lead tenor sax player for Eddy Howard’s band. Howard was a hugely popular vocalist who toured constantly, doing a live radio broadcast essentially every night of the week. This was a big-time job with big-time pay. In 1946, Howard had the #1 national hit with his recording of “To Each His Own”.  You can hear that recording at this link, and you can hear Earl’s brief but prominent tenor sax solo about two minutes into the recording.

As I was reminiscing with my mom a few days ago about Uncle Earl’s career, she told me a story about “To Each His Own”. My mom, Pauline, and her sisters Genevieve and Virginia - "The Samer Sisters" -were a very popular vocal trio in Oshkosh, singing for church fairs, picnics, and public and civic gatherings of all sorts, and when “To Each His Own” became a hit, they sang it, and always mentioned that their brother Earl was a member of Eddy Howard’s Orchestra.

On a brief visit with his family in Oshkosh, mom and her sisters sang “To Each His Own” for Earl, who was so taken with their performance that when the brief break from touring was over and Earl went back with the Howard Orchestra, he asked Howard’s staff arranger to do a really nice, unique arrangement of “To Each His Own” for his sisters’ vocal trio. He did; Earl sent the music back to his sisters in Oshkosh, and they proudly sang that arrangement in all their appearances!

Constant touring, which was necessary back in the pre-television days, can be a tough life – always on the move, living out of a suitcase for long stretches of time, 4-hour gigs and radio broadcasts just about every night of the week. In1946, after a couple years of touring with Eddy Howard, Earl decided to take a break from constant travel and settled down in Chicago.

Earl joined the Chicago Musicians’ Association, Local 10, which was run by James C. Petrillo, a Chicago-born trumpet player who was also head of the American Federation of Musicians – the national musicians’ union. Petrillo was often called “the most powerful man in America” at that time, because he had just successfully concluded a two-year-long ban on commercial recordings for all union-member sidemen, with a new deal that paid the sidemen a great deal more for their performances on recordings.

Earl’s first job in Chicago in ’46 was a full-time gig with the WGN Radio Staff Orchestra. He also did fill-in work with many of Chicago’s famous bands and hotel orchestras, like Dick LaSalle, Sherman Hayes, Orrin Tucker, and others. Union records also show that Earl also did a stint during that time with the famous Freddy Martin Orchestra.

Here’s a photo of the Freddy Martin Orchestra with Earl in the center of the sax section.

Apparently the touring bug bit Earl again after a few years of being headquartered in Chicago, and he spent a few more years on the road and recording with some fairly famous bands.

Here’s a picture of a 1948 album, with Earl playing lead tenor sax with the famous Jimmy Dorsey band. You may have heard of Maynard Ferguson, the featured soloist on the album, who was all of 19 years old at the time.

Above is the famous Tommy Dorsey band, which Earl played, recorded, and toured with.

Here’s the great trumpeter Harry James and his world-famous band. Earl did a couple tours and some records with this band.

In 1949, the year I was born, Earl got tired of doing all the touring and recording work, but he’d played with many of the really big-name bands of that era. He took a job as lead tenor sax player for the Cee Davidson Orchestra, which meant six nights a week in Chicago at the Chez Paree Club.

But, as fate would have it, Cee Davidson wanted to be a part of the Las Vegas scene in 1950, feeling that was the future of live entertainment. So Earl packed up again and moved to Vegas. Above is a 1953 poster advertising the Davidson orchestra’s regular gig at the Conga Room in the Sahara Hotel.

Among musicians back then, Paul Whiteman’s band was considered the best of the best. Whiteman was known as the King of Jazz, and music columnists in major newspapers in the early ‘50’s referred to Whiteman simply as “PW”. His reputation for attracting the best musicians and running the most popular band was such that he was known in music circles simply by his initials.

Earl got his chance to perform with Paul Whiteman’s band, which, like Cee Davidson’s band, had a permanent gig in Las Vegas. Davidson’s band played six nights a week at the Conga Room of the Sahara Hotel, and Whiteman’s Band did the same at the Thunderbird Hotel, which was one of the newer hotel/resorts in Las Vegas at the time. Whiteman’s lead tenor sax player had to take an 8-day leave, and “The Great PW” called Davidson to ask if he could “borrow” his lead tenor player to fill in during that time. Even though the Whiteman band was past its prime, it was still one of the biggest names in show business, and Earl considered that short stint with Whiteman to be the highlight of his career.

 

Above is a photo of Benny Goodman's band - at least, part of the band - and you can see Benny's clarinet on the far left side of the frame. In the 1950's, as recording technology improved, Columbia and several of the other major record companies brought some of the top big bands back into the studio to re-record their hits from the 30's and 40's which were originally released on 78 RPM records, with much lower fidelity. Earl played tenor sax on this 1950's Benny Goodman session, re-recording Goodman's hit song "Perfidia". You can hear that recording on this YouTube video. The video shows the old 78 RPM record label, but the audio is from the 50's re-recording session when the song was released on an LP album.

Years ago, in the early '70's, during my broadcast career, I did an hour-long Saturday morning big-band radio show on an Oshkosh FM station. The show had a loyal following and one of the most enthusiastic fans was a fellow named David Kingsbaker, a record collector and musicologist, who knew Uncle Earl from his Oshkosh days and had carefully followed Earl's career and visited with him many times when Earl would come to Oshkosh to visit family and friends. Earl had been dead several years by the time I was doing that big-band radio show, but Kingsbaker had a copy of that 50's Goodman LP re-recording of "Perfidia", and he joined me on the air one Saturday morning; I played the record, and Kingsbaker told the audience that Earl got a call to fill in on that particular session.

Earl spent the rest of the 50’s and early 60’s working various gigs in Las Vegas, and then returned to Chicago. By the mid-60’s television had completely changed American entertainment, and the great ballrooms of Chicago – the Aragon on the north side, the Trianon on the south side – were long gone as venues for dancing to the great bands. The Aragon had been converted to a roller-skating rink, and the Trianon was demolished to make way for a housing development. 

In 1962 Earl was working a patchwork of gigs to keep the money coming in, including a brief stint with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He decided to abandon his career in music and tried his hand working for some large advertising agencies in Chicago. He passed away in 1969.

 

The only tangible thing left of Earl's life, besides the photos, recordings, and transcriptions, is the shipping trunk above. It's in my cousin Kathy Matonich's home in Wisconsin Rapids.  She was kind enough to send me this photo and the one below. The large photo above the trunk is our grandma Lydia Samer's wedding photo.

As you can see in the larger picture of the trunk above, Kathy kept the original shipping tag with the trunk. It's sent from Earl's Chicago address to his mother, Lydia Samer, at her Oshkosh address. Our best guess is that it was shipped sometime in the late 50's or early 60's; you can read "Dec 3" near the "date of shipment" section on the bottom right of the tag, but the year is obscured. The tag says this is one of a shipment of four trunks, and Earl has placed a value on the shipment of $5000 - certainly a pretty good chunk of change back then. In 1960, the average annual household income in America was $5600, so that trunk represented a value of nearly a year's wages.

No one remembers what was in the trunks, whether it was Earl's musical instruments, once he gave up playing and started work in the advertising world; certainly a great deal of memorabilia from his performing days; who knows what else.

When I was chatting on the phone with my cousin Jeanne Stroh the other night, she reminded me of the huge scrapbook that Grandma Samer kept in her home, filled with photos of Earl and the bands and musicians he played with - a scrapbook that has long since disappeared. Jeanne recalled clearly that there were dozens of photographs of  Earl with world-famous singers and musicians, many of them autographed with inscriptions like "Best Wishes to Earl Samer from Frank Sinatra" - and dozens of others like Tony Bennett, Bing Crosby, and so many other big-name entertainers who had worked with Earl either on the road or backing them up in a band in Earl's Las Vegas years.

Some time in the early 70's, my grandmother, Earl's mother Lydia Samer, moved from Oshkosh to an assisted living facility in Wisconsin Rapids to be closer to her daughter Genevieve (and her daughters Virginia Steen and Kathy Matonich, who also live in Wisconsin Rapids), and whatever became of Earl's possessions and the wonderful memorabilia is anyone's guess.

 

Earl’s last few years were, by account of many of my relatives who knew him, not the best. My cousin Virginia Steen, my Aunt Genevieve's daughter who is a few years older than me, told me she was in Chicago with friends and met Earl for lunch at a restaurant near Wrigley Field in the early 60’s and he stuck her with the bill. And, like many musicians of my acquaintance, Earl was known to “take a second drink” more than once. I choose not to dwell on those things, but rather to focus on the fantastic musical career Earl had. He was guilty, as my friend Tom said when I shared some memories of Earl with him, of being a musician who didn’t save much money. But, as Tom said, Earl had a lot of company in that department among musicians of that era. Sidemen could make a good living playing music, but it was the bandleaders and featured singers (like Frank Sinatra, Helen Forrest, Vaughan Monroe, and so on) who “made the big bucks”.

Rest in peace, Uncle Earl.  I wish I’d known you better. Your reputation as a first-rate talented musician lives on, as does some of the great music you made.

(Author’s note: I did the best job I could to piece together my Uncle Earl’s career, relying on newspaper articles, census notes, union newsletters and records, archivists, and recollections from relatives and friends. If there are errors here, they’re mine alone, and I apologize. My attempt was not to mislead, but to fairly chronicle Earl’s music career as best I could.)

The Last Drug

 

The overdose death of actor Philip Hoffman surprised me. I didn’t know he was a heavy drug user. I don’t pay much attention to the constant din of celebrity news the so-called news channels force-feed us these days, so I’m not up on which star is in rehab, out of rehab, or going to rehab.

 

I really liked his acting, and many of the characters he played, from the fun-loving young weather scientist in “Twister” to the tabloid reporter in “Red Dragon” to the CIA Case Officer in “Charlie Wilson’s War”. These diverse and memorable roles display to me his tremendous depth and range as a character actor.

 

A couple weeks ago I did a story (for my day-job as a producer for Public News Service) about the latest spike in heroin deaths in Wisconsin. I talked to the agent-in-charge of the Department of Justice’s anti-drug effort, and he confirmed for me – again – that heroin is “the last drug”.   Once you are hooked on heroin, the odds are really strong that your days are numbered and your life is essentially over.

 

The term “the last drug” is not mine; many years ago, in a former life as a news anchor, I visited with a couple of hardened drug cops who were in the cavernous main foyer of the radio stations where I worked. They had a drug-dog with them – a Belgian Malinois (Shepherd) – and were waiting to do a live shot with Johnny Danger on the JJO morning show to try and raise more money for K-9 units. I visited with the two cops for a moment; I asked what the latest scourge was, and they quickly said “heroin”.

 

This was at least ten years ago.

 

The two cops talked about how so many people who are hooked on the drug want desperately to get off it; how they hate what it did to their lives; how much they wish they’d never tried it; how little room there was in treatment programs for heroin addicts. “We can get you in next spring” was a typical response to a plea to enter a heroin rehab program.

 

Fast forward ten years to this past January 23rd, when I did the story with the DOJ's SAIC about heroin. He said the same things.  (The story is here.) Heroin is the last drug you get hooked on.  It seems very little has changed in the decade since I had the brief chat with a couple hard-edged local narcotics cops. Still the worst of the scores of things you can get hooked on; still apparently the most addictive; still nowhere near enough resources to help people who are on it and want to get off it.

 

Still taking the lives of anonymous addicts and famous stars.

 

Still the last drug.

The Weather Channel Has Lost Its Focus

The Weather Channel has been doomed since NBC bought into it several years ago and changed it from a place where you could get instant, up-to-date weather forecasts around the clock, 24-7-365, to just another cable channel filled with horrid reality shows and has-been TV personalities.

 

I’ve made this observation before and I’ll make it again: the Weather Channel has lost its focus.

 

If you tuned in to get the forecast yesterday, like I did, you couldn’t escape seeing the message delivered by Jim Cantore (a true weather geek and formidable weather personality, unlike Al Roker, an old-school TV personality) intoning in dire terms that DirecTV is, in essence, going to be responsible for countless deaths because – the way Jim spun it – DirecTV refuses to carry the Weather Channel.

 

After all, these meteorologists at the Weather Channel are serious scientists, and they’re in the business of saving lives.  That is, unless they happen to be running one of those horrid reality shows they’ve loaded onto the daily schedule.

 

The deal between the Weather Channel and DirecTV expired at one minute past midnight Tuesday, and the Weather Channel was ready with the Jim Cantore announcement, which ran seemingly every 8 minutes.  The business end of the Weather Channel was busy sending out news escapes calling the move by DirecTV “reckless”, and saying the move “will have an impact on….national safety and the preparedness fabric of our country”.

 

Serious stuff, this weather business.  Except, of course, like yesterday morning, when my wife and I tuned in the Weather Channel, and they were doing a LONG segment on how to cook a nutritious breakfast. (I’m not kidding.)

 

See what I mean about loss of focus?

 

Here’s the thing: this is not just an argument about how much money The Weather Channel wants from DirecTV to carry their programming, like the recent local spat between WISC-TV Channel 3 and Charter Cable about what the fee would be set at.  Or the one between Channel 3 and DishNet a few months before that.  That’s just business, and contract renewals can involve heavy-duty give-and-take; and, often, threats.

 

Apparently, more and more weather geeks – like me – have made their feelings clear about the loss of focus at the Weather Channel.  When the contract between the Weather Channel and DirecTV came to an end, DirecTV kicked the Weather Channel to the curb and put its own meteorological service, a new thing called Weather Nation, in place of the Weather Channel.  One DirecTV executive (Dan York, whose title is “Chief Content Officer”) said “Most consumers don’t want to watch a weather information channel with a forecast of a 40% chance of reality TV”.

 

Yup.  That’s me, all right.  You can keep “Weather In Space”, “Prospectors”, “Coast Guard Alaska”, “Breaking Ice”, “Freaks of Nature”, “Highway Through Hell” and all those other  Weather Channel reality shows….and you can put “Wake Up With Al” on that list. Al Roker is the LAST person I want to wake up with.

 

 

All this extraneous stuff they do would be like ESPN suddenly deciding to do shows about sewing or first-time home buyers.

 

DirecTV went on to say that they’ve heard loud and clear from their customers that they do NOT want to see reality shows when they tune in for the weather, and – Lord of mercy – they think the Weather Channel’s policy of giving names to storms is STOOPID!!!!!!

 

There is hope for humanity.

 

I’ve discovered I’m far from alone in despising the gimmicking-up of weather.  Whatever finally happens….whether the folks at DirecTV decide to get out of the weather business and come to terms with the Weather Channel again; or whether the Weather Channel wakes up with Al one morning and decides to resist the crap foisted on it by the NBC-Universal people and get back to the business of doing live forecasts 24-7-365, one thing is certain: the people – at least, some of them – subscribers to DirecTV - have been given an alternative, and as far as I’m concerned that’s a good thing.

 

I’ll be watching eagerly to see how this plays out.

An Ode to Rosie - Our Favorite Family Car

I think a lot of families have a particular car in which many fond memories reside, and in our case that car is a 1994 Colt Vista Wagon that my wife and kids dubbed “Rosie”. Rosie’s full name was “Rosebud”, mainly because of her rose-red color. That’s Rosie above, in a 2003 photo. She’s sitting in front of the house of our friends Tom and Mary. Nine years old but still looking like new!

 

My wife bought Rosie brand new from a Madison dealer (Russ Darrow) when we had just started dating. The decision was between Rosie, with her practicality and fuel economy and room for two kids and a dog, and a bright green, sporty, Chrysler Neon on display at the same dealership. Rosie won, and she stayed in our family from that day in 1994 until the day she died, in 2009. 15+ years of solid service.

 

Both kids learned to drive on Rosie. By the time our son was old enough to start learning to drive, in 1999, Rosie had already delivered five years of maintenance-free service, and her tiny 4-cylinder engine started up every time and purred like a kitten. At that time, I was driving a huge Cadillac ElDorado Touring Coupe with a Northstar V-8 that delivered 300 horsepower, and although our son campaigned heavily to “just take it for a cruise” after he got his license, he was restricted to driving Rosie. I know what it’s like to be 16 years old and have 300 horsepower at your command, and, well…..suffice it to say the only time our son got to drive the big black Caddy was one very late night around the turn of the century when my judgment was impaired.

 

It happened during a period of time when my radio compadre Sly was still in his drinking days. We’d had Sly over for dinner one Saturday night, and it was just one of those nights when everybody had a bit too much to drink. Some time after the midnight hour, while our son and several of his pals had a sleep-over going on in the lower level of the house playing video games and such, it became apparent that none of the “adults” were in any shape to drive.  I can’t recall whether Sly had driven the big Mercury sedan I called his “FBI Car” – because it looked like an FBI-issue sedan with heavily-tinted windows and a big V-8 – or if it was his big-ass classic Buick Roadmaster.

 

Anyway, the course of action decided upon was to have one of our son’s pals drive Sly home in his car, while our son and the rest of his pals would follow Sly home, and then bring the driver back after Sly’s car was safely parked at Sly’s west-side home.  In a moment of weakness, I allowed them to take the big Caddy, and stories of that night still abound among our son and his friends.  I never wanted to know the specifics.

 

As both kids went off to college at the UW, Rosie remained in the family, parked in the driveway. When my wife went to get a new car in 2002, the amount they offered us for a trade-in on Rosie was, I thought, insulting, so we decided to keep Rosie and “deal on the invoice” as the car folks used to say.  I gave Rosie plenty of loving attention, after all the years of service she’d given in family trips to Chicago and Hortonville, hauling brush to the dumpsite, getting groceries, and then becoming “the kids’ car” that sat in the driveway, off to the side, so my wife and I could get in and out of the garage without moving Rosie every time.

 

 

No matter what we asked of Rosie, she delivered. Even when she was just sitting and waiting to be driven.

Her low horsepower, front wheel drive, and narrow tires were perfect for battling heavy snow, and there were many snowy mornings over the years 2002- 2006 that I left the Caddy (and its sucessors) in the garage and took Rosie to work at 2:45 AM, long before the county plows went to work on the Beltline. We replaced a water pump and timing belt at some point; replaced the exhaust system; had ignition work done; but other than that, Rosie cost us little but gas, oil, and insurance.

 

After our daughter graduated from the UW, we gave Rosie to her. Our son did not like Rosie, and when we offered her to him, he said he would just sell her or trade her in – a concept we couldn’t live with. He wound up buying a nice 2000 Chevy Impala, which he still drives!

 

Rosie left home and went to live with our daughter in 2006. She got our daughter safely to and from work at Meriter Hospital, and then at UW Hospital for many years, and transported her to and from the nice apartment she and her BFF Breanna rented in McFarland. But then one warm spring day in 2009, our daughter called and said Rosie was not behaving well. I said “bring her over and we’ll take a look at her”. The test-drive was terrifying – at any speed above about 30 miles an hour, Rosie wobbled like a drunk and was very hard to steer.  I had a mechanic look at her, and the diagnosis was fatal: cost of repair would far exceed the value of the vehicle, to the point where it was time to put Rosie to sleep. Ball joints, tie rods, struts – a long list of things which had to be replaced. She had pretty serious body cancer by then; the air conditioner had given out quite a while ago; the tires were in need of replacement; add it all up, and it was a death sentence.  At that time, Rosie had about 161,000 hard-earned miles on the odometer.

 

So, the next day, driving on “surface streets only”, my daughter brought Rosie home for one last time; we drove Rosie to the huge Zimbrick dealership just off the Beltline, and picked out a nice, safe, low-miles Buick Regal to replace Rosie, and as part of the deal, the guys at Zimbrick said they would “dispose” of Rosie.

 

Rosie is gone, but will never be forgotten.  She was a good girl!

Ice Bowl II ???

I have been to the coldest game ever played at Lambeau Field – the famous Ice Bowl on 12/31/67 – and the hottest game ever played at Lambeau Field – the re-dedication of the stadium after renovation, on 9/7/03.  So I speak to this coming Sunday’s game with some authority on the matter.

Lots of Packers fans claim they were at the Ice Bowl, when the Packers defeated the Cowboys in a playoff game on New Year’s Eve in 1967, but I was really there.  Section 9, Row 58. Me, my mom and dad, and Grandpa Morrissey.

More on that, later.

As of the time this is being written Thursday noon, there are still about 5,500 tickets unsold for Sunday’s playoff game with the 49ers. It’s a big topic on talk radio, and sports radio is abuzz with speculation about the possibility of a TV blackout of the game. On Dan Patrick’s radio show, he said a Green Bay businessman is standing by to purchase any unsold tickets at the deadline, so the game won’t be blacked out in the Green Bay and Milwaukee TV markets.

Patrick says he was at the coldest game in NFL history, which some say was the AFC Championship game played at Riverfront Stadium between the Bengals and the Chargers on January 10^th, 1982. He was in the press box, freezing his butt off, as the air temperature was 9 below and the wind chill was 59 below.

That was one cold, cold game.  Some argue the Ice Bowl was the coldest game in NFL history, because the air temperature was 13 below, 4 degrees colder than it was in Cincinnati in ’82. But the wind chill at the Ice Bowl was calculated at 46 below, 13 degrees “warmer” than the famous Cincy game.

If the temperature Sunday is colder than one below zero, Sunday’s game will go down as the second-coldest at Lambeau field. Right now the #2 slot is held by the playoff game against the Giants on January 20^th, 2008, when the temperature was 1 below and the wind chill was 23 below.

I remember the Ice Bowl clearly, even though it was 46 years ago. I was 18 at the time, and was a college student home in Hortonville for the winter break. My dad had four season tickets for the Packers, and I went with him, my mom, and my Grandpa Morrissey to all the home games during the “glory years”. I remember listening to WHBY-AM (Appleton), and all the talk that Sunday morning on the station was about the frigid temperature and its impact on the big game. Everyone knew the Cowboys were staying at the Midway Motor Lodge in Appleton, where it was just as cold as it was in Green Bay, and Packers fans said this was decidedly a great home-field advantage for the Pack, playing against the warm-weather Dallas Cowboys.

We bundled up in snowmobile boots, heavy layers of clothes, scarves, and hats, with hand-warmers and several flasks of brandy as “anti-freeze”. Grandpa Morrissey drove from his home in Oshkosh to Hortonville and then we all got into my dad’s car and made the half-hour trip to Lambeau Field. We parked about a half-mile from the stadium in what used to be a huge open field and made the trek in.

At halftime, my mom couldn’t stand the cold any more, and she left the stadium to go back to the car and warm up. But my dad and grandpa and I toughed it out, and we were rewarded. The famous Bart Starr quarterback keeper that went over Jerry Kramer’s block on Jethro Pugh was at our end of the stadium, right below us, and we saw it perfectly.  Out seats were just to the right of the top of the scoreboard in the photo above.  In 1967, the Lambeau Field grandstand was 60 rows tall, and our seats in row 58 were two rows from the very top of the stadium, right in the teeth of the wind. I clearly recall that my feet were the coldest part of my body, even though we were sitting facing the wind. That concrete was COLD and it soaked right through my Canadian Sorel snowmobile boots!

After the game, we walked back to the car and then headed for a tavern in Black Creek, where we traditionally met up with a lot of folks after the game, for a brewski and a burger, to rehash the game, and warm up. The heater in my dad’s brand new ’67 Ford Country Squire wagon was good, but when it’s that cold, you need to keep your heavy clothes on inside the car.

At the Ice Bowl, the vendors at the stadium ran out of coffee and hot chocolate before half-time. Suffice it to say tap beer was not a big seller.  At the re-dedication game on September 7^th of 2003, the mercury soared well into the 90’s, and the vendors ran out of bottled water some time early in the 3^rd quarter. With the oppressive heat and humidity at that game, again, tap beer was not a big seller. Toni and I had purchased a package deal for that game, which included round trip transportation in a luxury bus from Pier 37 in Monona to Lambeau Field, a tailgate lunch at Brett Favre’s restaurant a block or so from the stadium, and tickets to the game. The package also included free “beverages” on the bus, and we didn’t have a beer on the way home until after all the bottled water was gone.

The talk shows are speculating about why the tickets for the 49ers game on Sunday didn’t sell out immediately, and everybody has their pet theories.  Season ticket holders were apathetic because the team didn’t have that good a year, with Rodgers injured and unable to play until the Bears game last week; people don’t want to sit in weather that cold that late in the day; you name it.

But HiDef TV has got to be another factor, along with the way NFL games are televised these days.  Back in the days of the Ice Bowl, you were more likely than not to see the game in black and white rather than in color, and there were maybe 5 or 6 camera angles available to the director.  Instant replay was just coming into use on the telecasts. Slow-motion or stop-action replay was still decades away.

Now, there are 25 to 30 different camera shots available to the person directing the telecast; there’s sky-cam or its equivalent, overhead shots, isolation shots on all the key players, slow-mo, super-slow-mo, and stop-motion shots available from at least four angles on every play. The whole TV game experience is vastly different from 1967.

So, Sunday afternoon, I’ll have a beverage standing by next to my giant recliner chair in the media room of the Morrissey compound, snacks of all sorts, and we’ll be watching the game in Hi Def on a 66-inch screen with a 500-watt surround sound system. It will be about 68 degrees in the room, with a fire crackling in the fireplace, and I will be able to stop, pause, or rewind the action any time I want with my DVR.

Call me a fair-weather fan, but that scenario is much more appealing to me than freezing my butt off at Lambeau Field.  I wouldn’t trade my Ice Bowl experience for anything, but those days are gone for me.

Adventures on the Beltline

I saw it coming a split-second before it hit – a chunk of ice, about twice the size of my fist – and it made a huge noise when it hit my windshield and did the damage you can see in the photo above. I’ve lived in Madison long enough to know that when you’re on the Beltline near the Channel 15 tower in winter, you need to be aware that you could be attacked by chunks of ice falling off the tower and guy wires. And, sure enough, when we were on the eastbound Beltline at that spot at around 1:30 Friday afternoon, we got hit.

A lot of my friends say we’re lucky it didn’t sail right through the windshield and either kill us outright or cause me to lose control of my venerable road-warrior SUV and get into a multi-car wreck.

A year or so ago, they had to close the Beltline for about three hours when Channel 15’s tower and guy wires were shedding ice like crazy. The circumstances yesterday were similar to what happened back then: lots of moisture in the air, condensing and freezing onto the tower and guy wires; a nice sunny day with a moderate southerly wind, which blows the falling ice right onto the Beltline.

My daughter and I had gone to see Anchorman 2 (don’t bother; it’s one of the worse movies either of us have ever seen, dishonoring the original movie which was pretty funny) and then to lunch on the far west side. As we were coming home, right across from the Channel 15 studios, the chunk of ice hit and made enough noise to scare the wits out of my daughter, who let out a hundred-decibel yell. When I explained what had happened, I said “take a picture of the windshield”- and that’s the image you see above.

When we got home, I called Channel 15 to see if they were aware of what was going on, and they said Madison police and the State Patrol were in their parking lot “monitoring” the situation, ready to close the Beltline again if it got really bad.  Then I called to make an appointment to get a new windshield, and discovered that it’s essentially a monopoly now. I called a company which I thought was a local outfit, wound up on hold, and when the guy finally answered and I went through the song and dance with him, he told me the earliest they could come would be Tuesday.

Not good enough.

I called another company which I thought was local, and got the same message as the first outfit I called, and got put on hold. I hung up.  I called a third company (these were all local, Madison phone numbers) and went through the rigmarole again, assuming that there’s just one giant glass company which operates under different names. The order-taker asked my zip code (53713) and asked “do you live in Madison, Fitchburg, or……ah……Ma-na-no?” I said “where are you, that you have no clue on how to pronounce Monona?” and he said “Phoenix”.

After some wrangling about my insistence that Tuesday was just not acceptable, the deal was done and set for 2 o’clock this (Saturday) afternoon.

I posted the picture above on Facebook and I’m still getting comments from friends, reminding me how lucky I am! My lawyer said “be sure to file a claim against Channel 15” (thanks, Counsellor….) and several other friends from my days in broadcasting commented on the irony of ME getting hit by ice off a broadcast tower. One messaged me and said it was broadcasting’s “revenge” on me for winning a settlement from my former local employer after I was fired several years ago. My tuba-playing friend Tom from western Iowa, after saying he was glad my daughter and I were OK, asked if I had to change my shorts when I got home! (darn near) 

Eric Franke, my friend and anchor at WISC-TV News 3, posted lightheartedly “I blame it on John Stofflet” – his counterpart at Channel 15. Stofflet replied that he was on vacation, hence blameless, and then was kind enough to say “glad you’re OK, Tim”. I replied saying I was blaming it on Charlie Shortino (Channel 15’s main weather guru).

Gerrit Marshall, a tech wizard (engineer) at Channel 3, posted that he was glad we were OK, and went on to say that on his first day of work at WISC-TV in December of 1981, the Channel 3 tower shed a chunk of ice that took out the windshield of his car in the parking lot!

I also got a private message from my friend Tara, a former news colleague at MidWest who was an anchor at Channel 27 before that, saying she was glad we were OK, and telling me her dad – who is my insurance agent – was up in Minneapolis for the weekend visiting with Tara, her husband Kenny Jay (who’s with CBS radio in the Twin Cities), and their kids, and offering to have her dad call me right away. I thanked her for the offer but said it’s just a busted windshield, nothing that required taking time away from the grandkids!

So, in a few hours, I’ll go get a new windshield put in, and then the REAL fun – dealing with all the administrative paperwork about who winds up paying for it – will be the way I’ll start the New Year.

 When my daughter gets back to New York in a few days, she’ll be able to tell her friends about her great adventure on the Beltline. And we’ll have another tale to tell at future family gatherings.

At least we’re here to tell the story – which could have had a much different ending – about our adventure on the Beltline.

We All Wanted To Be Larry Lujack

It wasn’t Larry Lujack’s voice, although he had a great one for radio and he knew how to use it. I always thought the best voice on Chicago rock radio was Joel Sebastian. And, as far as voices go, Oklahoma-born John Doremus, who was on WMAQ in Chicago at the same time guys like Lujack, Sebastian, Bob Sirott, Gary Gears, Bill Bailey, and Steve Lundy were on WLS or WCFL, probably made more money with his voice than any of those famous rock-jocks.

It was what Larry Lujack did (said) on the radio that made me, and thousands of other guys like me, want to be like Larry.  Which is exactly what he counseled against, always telling the people he trained “be yourself”.

We wanted to have a sidekick like Little Snotnose Tommy (Edwards). We wanted to do Animal Stories. We wanted to read the Crank Letter of the Day (which later became the Clunk Letter of the Day) on a radio show like Uncle Lar did; we wanted to do Cheap Trashy Show-Biz News.  We loved that he would break format and just do whatever the hell he wanted to do. We wanted to work at a station so big that we had our own engineer, just like Spacey Dave engineered Larry’s show.

In college in the late 60’s, all the Radio-TV students had their own tape recorders (long before little portable tape recorders were available) and we made aircheck tapes of the big-time Chicago jocks. We studied the way Larry was so unlike the other talk-a-mile-a-minute rock jocks and how he used the dramatic pause – in an era where any unmodulated carrier (“dead air”) was considered a mortal sin. We listened to how the engineers processed his voice – how much reverb was added, what kind of equalization might be in the audio chain – we talked in class, in hallways, and over beers, about those big-time Chicago rock jocks.

But Larry was the king, the icon, the center of the young radio student’s universe.

I still have WLS and WCFL airchecks from those days.  You can still hear Lujack and all the legendary Chicago rock-jocks on YouTube and blogs and tribute sites all over the internet. My favorite tape from that era  is “Larry Lujack’s Farewell To Rock and Roll”, when WCFL changed format from Top 40 to beautiful music, and, as Uncle Lar said, “I’m needed here. I’m not going anywhere.” (Until a few days later when his contract with WCFL was bought out and he was back across town rockin’ away.)

I met Larry for the first time at some radio confab in Chicago, where he was one of the panelists on some discussion of where radio was headed. A few years later I went to a book-signing event in Chicago when Larry’s book “SuperJock” came out, bought a copy for me (which I still have, and stupidly never had him autograph) and a copy for my parents, which I did have him inscribe. He wrote “Your son is in a worthless dead-end occupation. With regret, Larry Lujack”.  Classic cynical Lujack! I hope mom still has that book somewhere.

When I opened Facebook this morning and saw so many of my broadcasting friends with links to stories of Larry’s passing (at age 73, of esophageal cancer), I paused a long moment and thought back to those days when so many of my friends and I were just beginning our radio careers, and how much time we spent talking about whatever Lujack did on the air that day.

What a wonderful time in my life – with great memories.  Rest in peace, Uncle Lar.

(Editor’s note: many people know my on-air persona as that of a news anchor. My first decade or so in radio was as a DJ (“air personality” as we called ourselves back then), and while Larry Lujack was always an inspiration, I owe my real mentors, the late Dr. Robert Snyder and my good friend Jerry Burke for really showing me the way. Jerry went from being a premiere DJ in the Fox Valley to a distinguished career as a TV news anchor and reporter. I could not have had a better path to follow than Jerry’s when I transitioned to news broadcasting.)