Al “Jazzbo” Collins at the microphone of WNEW AM radio in New York City, undated. Metromedia photo
I don’t know where they came from, or who in the family bought them. I think they appeared before 1956 and our move from Overland Avenue to Conant Avenue in Burley, Idaho.
There were two discs, 78 rpm as I recall. Fairy tales, told by a guy with a great baritone and cool jazz playing behind him. Four stories, right out of the nursery rhyme/fairy tale books — but with the conscience of a beat raconteur thrown in.
My favorite: “The Three Little Pigs.”
“Cream of Nowhere!”
Al “Jazzbo” Collins told the stories, according to the label. I think I was in my teens before I noticed the name of Steve Allen, polymath genius, as author. And I assumed that the narration was Allen in one of his characters, and maybe the jazz piano, too.
Later I discovered there really was an Al Collins, who went by the nickname Jazzbo. Two discs by a guy using Steven Allen’s writing . . .
I wish I had those discs now.
It’s almost impossible to do justice to the great beat twists in the stories, from memory. The music was good, and that can’t be retold. To tell the great good humor and joy of those records, you gotta have the records to listen to.
Then I stumbled across “The Three Little Pigs” on YouTube. Brilliantly, this video features an old record player playing the thing. It’s almost like we used to play it, set the needle down on the record and watch it spin while we listened.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
August 26 is the anniversary of the first television broadcast of professional baseball, in 1939; the future-legendary Red Barber called a doubleheader between his Brooklyn Dodgers and the Cincinnati Reds from Ebbets field.
Both games were carried on experimental television station W2XBS, which evolved into New York’s NBC affiliate Channel 2, WNBC. Two stationary cameras were used, in contrast to the several used in modern broadcasts — and it was in black and white. About 3,000 people are estimated to have watched.
The Reds won the opener, 5-2, but the Dodgers roared back in game 2, 6-1.
Ebbets field is gone. The Dodgers absconded to Los Angeles in the 1950s. Baseball games are in color.
Red Barber is gone, too. We have great play-by-play guys, and wonderful color commentators. There will never be another Red Barber though. Below is an old post noting Barber’s ways with typewriters.
The great Red Barber, when his hair was still red, working at his typewriter, with a volume of Roget’s Thesaurus close by.
Many of us knew Red chiefly through his weekly chats with Bob Edwards at NPR’s Morning Edition. The biographies say Red died in 1992. That was 19 years ago — it seems more recent than that. (Edwards left Morning Edition in 2004.)
It may be ironic to show Barber at his typewriter. He would be more accurately portrayed, perhaps, behind a microphone at a baseball park.
From 1939 through 1953 Barber served as the voice of the Brooklyn Dodgers. He was working for the New York Yankees when he retired in 1966. Barber had the distinction of broadcasting baseball’s first night game on May 24, 1935 in Cincinnati and the sport’s first televised contest on August 26, 1939 in Brooklyn.
During his 33-year career Barber became the recognized master of baseball play-by-play, impressing listeners as a down-to-earth man who not only informed but also entertained with folksy colloquialisms such as “in the catbird seat,” “pea patch,” and “rhubarb” which gave his broadcasts a distinctive flavor. (Radio Hall of Fame)
1958 Publicity photo of Groucho Marx from the television program You Bet Your Life. NBC Television-NBC Photo/Photographer: Elmer Holloway
36 years ago? Grouch Marx died on August 19, 1977?
The man became an icon, though too few know the great history behind the icon. “Self-made caricature of Groucho Marx” Wikipedia image
That means that not only have your high school history students probably never seen much, or anything, of Groucho Marx and his comic genius; it means their parents don’t know him, either.
What a great tragedy.
Groucho Marx brought genius to American comedy films, to radio, and then to television. His genius was of a sort that does not age, but remains fresh to audiences of today — get a group of teenagers to view Duck Soup or A Day at the Races and you’ll find them laughing heartily at even some of Marx’s more cerebral jokes. It is symbolic that the films that brought writer Norman Cousins to laughter, and a lack of pain, were Marx Brothers movies (in the day when one had to rent a projector to show the film, long before VCR). Cousins went on to a grand second career talking about hope in healing, starting with the book, Head First: The Biology of Hope and the Healing Power of the Human Spirit.I recommend these films to anyone seriously injured or ill, or recovering. We got VHS, and then DVD copies of several of the films when our kids were ill, with great effect.
Groucho Marx should be in the pantheon of great Americans, of the 20th century, if not all time, studied by children in high school, for history and for literature purposes.
Groucho’s been gone for 36 years, and we are much poorer for his passing.
Tiny Desk Concerts provide a lot of fun in live performance in the offices of a radio network. To document the move, musically, Tiny Desk called in OK Go. OK Go is a favorite here at Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub — regular bathing music, you might say.
And in 223 takes, they recorded the move.
I’m especially fond of the elevator ride with Carl Kassell. (At least, that’s who I think it is.)
Who else can you recognize from NPR’s famous voices?
The Tiny Desk has moved, and OK Go has helped make it so.
Earlier this year, we needed to figure out the best possible way to move my Tiny Desk from NPR’s old headquarters to our new facility just north of the U.S. Capitol. We wanted to go out with a bang and arrive at our new space in style, so our thoughts naturally turned to a catchy pop band we love: OK Go, whose unforgettable videos have been viewed tens of millions of times on YouTube.
Bandleader Damian Kulash used to be an engineer at an NPR member station in Chicago, so we figured he’d be up for helping us execute a simple idea: Have OK Go start performing a Tiny Desk Concert at our old location, continue playing the same song while the furniture and shelving is loaded onto a truck, and finish the performance at our new home. In addition to cameos by many of our NPR colleagues — Ari Shapiro, Audie Cornish, David Greene, Guy Raz, Scott Simon, Alix Spiegel, Susan Stamberg and more — this required a few ingredients: Number of video takes: 223; Percent used in final version: 50; Number of raw audio channels: 2,007; Percent used in final version: 50; Number of microphones: 5; Number of hard-boiled eggs consumed: 8, mostly by bassist Tim Nordwind; Number of seconds Carl Kasell spent in the elevator with OK Go: 98; Number of times Ari Shapiro played the tubular bells: 15; Number of pounds the tubular bells weighed: 300; Number of times the shelves were taken down and put back up: 6; Number of days it took to shoot: 2; Number of cameras: 1
OK Go played “All Is Not Lost” from Of the Blue Colour of the Sky, with words tweaked by the All Songs Considered team. And so begins a new era for the Tiny Desk, after 277 concerts (counting this one) in our old home. — BOB BOILEN
FEATURING
Dan Konopka, Damian Kulash, Tim Nordwind, Andy Ross
CREDITS
Producers: Bob Boilen, Mito Habe-Evans
Directors: Mito Habe-Evans, Todd Sullivan
Audio Engineer: Kevin Wait
Assistant Producer: Denise DeBelius
Camera Operator: Gabriella Garcia-Pardo
Supervising Producer: Jessica Goldstein
Editor: Mito Habe-Evans
Assistant Editor: Gabriella Garcia-Pardo
Production Assistants: Lorie Liebig, Lizzie Chen, Gabriella Demczuk, Marie McGrory, Andrew Prince
Executive Producers: Anya Grundmann, Keith Jenkins
Special Thanks: OK Go and our cast and crew of volunteers.
OK Go at the Albany Tulip Festival. Wikipedia image
The great Red Barber, when his hair was still red, working at his typewriter, with a volume of Roget’s Thesaurus close by.
Many of us knew Red chiefly through his weekly chats with Bob Edwards at NPR’s Morning Edition. The biographies say Red died in 1992. That was 19 years ago — it seems more recent than that. (Edwards left Morning Edition in 2004.)
It may be ironic to show Barber at his typewriter. He would be more accurately portrayed, perhaps, behind a microphone at a baseball park.
From 1939 through 1953 Barber served as the voice of the Brooklyn Dodgers. He was working for the New York Yankees when he retired in 1966. Barber had the distinction of broadcasting baseball’s first night game on May 24, 1935 in Cincinnati and the sport’s first televised contest on August 26, 1939 in Brooklyn.
During his 33-year career Barber became the recognized master of baseball play-by-play, impressing listeners as a down-to-earth man who not only informed but also entertained with folksy colloquialisms such as “in the catbird seat,” “pea patch,” and “rhubarb” which gave his broadcasts a distinctive flavor. (Radio Hall of Fame)
3:30 p.m. Central Daylight Time. In Barcelona, Spain, London’s Wembley Stadium, Manchester United and Barcelona(Spain) tangle for the Champions’ League trophy.
BBC News? This is the order of the stories:
In Afghanistan, the national police chief was murdered by a suicide bomber
In Egypt, Hosni Mubarak was fined $90 million for interfering with business by cutting phones and internet
Yemen’s got trouble
Palestinian independence got support from the Arab League, meeting in Doha, Qatr
U.S. President Obama ended his tour of Europe in Poland, with a pledge of friendship
In Moscow, Russian, gay rights demonstrators were attacked by a mob led by people who said they are members of the Russian Orthodox Church
Barcelona leads Manchester, 3 to 1, with minutes to play
I’m not usually one to complain, but doesn’t it appear BBC News has its priorities wrong in this order of stories?
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Some say the success of conservative radio can be traced to 1987 when the Reagan administration put an end to the Fairness Doctrine, making it easier for broadcasters to be one-sided. Others cite the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which led to mega-chains of stations and the widespread duplication of successful formats – including conservative talk radio – which gradually took over the stronger radio outlets in most markets.
Peter Funt, of Candid Camera
But such arguments really overlook the simpler truths of the matter: conservative broadcasters serve an audience that is often angry and easily stirred, that wants to be reinforced more than challenged, and that doesn’t always feel compelled to slavishly adhere to the facts of a matter.
More importantly, conservative broadcasters across the dial are vastly more entertaining than their liberal counterparts. Limbaugh and Beck are polished performers, with enough shtick in the tank to keep truckers engrossed over the long haul, or to rouse tired shift workers on the drive to and from home. Indeed, the daring diatribe of the right is so compelling that it often seems as if the most dedicated listeners of conservative broadcasters are their progressive competitors.
When you’re fed up with the hysteria that Glenn Beck offers instead of true history, when your neighbor complains about how government regulation should “get off my lawn,” point them to this story.
It’s truer than Beck, righter than Limbaugh, and it deserves a wider audience:
Alistair Cooke's typewriter, displayed at BBC headquarters, Bush House, in London - Photo by Jeff Zycinski
Alas, our students now are too young to remember Alistair Cooke’s hosting of “Masterpiece Theater” on PBS, and of course, back then the BBC America service — if it existed — was available only to shortwave fanatics or people who traveled a lot to the British Isles.
Perhaps more than anyone else other than Winston Churchill, and maybe the Beatles, Alistair Cooke tied England and America together tightly in the 20th century. BBC’s other writers are good to brilliant, but even their obituary for Cooke (March 30, 2004) doesn’t quite do him justice:
For more than half a century, Alistair Cooke’s weekly broadcasts of Letter from America for BBC radio monitored the pulse of life in the United States and relayed its strengths and weaknesses to 50 countries.
His retirement from the show earlier this month after 58 years, due to ill health, brought a flood of tributes for his huge contributing to broadcasting.
Perhaps for Cooke, from Cooke’s broadcasts, we could develop a new variation of the Advanced Placement document-based question: Broadcast-based questions. Heaven knows his Letter From America provided profound material on American history:
Or, until that account is unsuspended by the forces supporting Donald Trump: Follow @FillmoreWhite, the account of the Millard Fillmore White House Library
We've been soaking in the Bathtub for several months, long enough that some of the links we've used have gone to the Great Internet in the Sky.
If you find a dead link, please leave a comment to that post, and tell us what link has expired.
Thanks!
Retired teacher of law, economics, history, AP government, psychology and science. Former speechwriter, press guy and legislative aide in U.S. Senate. Former Department of Education. Former airline real estate, telecom towers, Big 6 (that old!) consultant. Lab and field research in air pollution control.
My blog, Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, is a continuing experiment to test how to use blogs to improve and speed up learning processes for students, perhaps by making some of the courses actually interesting. It is a blog for teachers, to see if we can use blogs. It is for people interested in social studies and social studies education, to see if we can learn to get it right. It's a blog for science fans, to promote good science and good science policy. It's a blog for people interested in good government and how to achieve it.
BS in Mass Communication, University of Utah
Graduate study in Rhetoric and Speech Communication, University of Arizona
JD from the National Law Center, George Washington University
Posted by Ed Darrell 
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 