THE HAMILTON ROAD BRIDGE

 

My hometown of Wapakoneta, Ohio is stitched together by three main bridges, the Blackhoof Street Bridge, the Harrison Street Bridge and the Hamilton Road Bridge. That’s because although the town itself grew up along the high south bank of the Auglaize River, its surrounding neighborhoods expanded both north and south of that river.

Hamilton Road Bridge
Courtesy of Auglaize County Historical Society

The town was built more or less in the same area where several Native American tribes, headed up by the Shawnees, had a major settlement. It was, in fact, the Council House of the Shawnee Nation. That is, before white settlers reneged on a treaty resulting from the Battle of Fallen Timbers and had them unceremoniously packed off on a grueling exodus that eventually ended in Kansas and Oklahoma, where the now much reduced population of Shawnees is today headquartered under the leadership of Chief Ben Barnes.

I doubt the Shawnees, who considered Wapakoneta a sacred venue, were unaware of the fact that the Auglaize was special. I once read that it and the nearby St. Marys are two of only a few rivers in Ohio that flow north instead of south. And Wapakoneta is where the impetus for this rare phenomenon takes place.

The Auglaize indeed starts out flowing south from its source near Harrod in the next county over. But just as it flows into Wapak—as the name is familiarly abbreviated—the Auglaize bends sharply and runs east to west, smack through the middle of town. After that, it meanders west by northwest, makes a couple of snaking turns through a deep ravine at Horseshoe Bend and takes a long loop through the countryside to the site of the War of 1812 outpost known as Fort Amanda about eight miles from Wapakoneta, before turning more or less straight north to eventually join the course of the Maumee River, that carries its waters into Lake Erie.

Courtesy Auglaize County Historical Society

By the time I was growing up in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, the Native Americans who had lived and thrived on the banks of the Auglaize just a little more than a century before seemed mythical to us. The only signs to attest to their passing were our town and street names—Blackhoof, Logan, Willipie, historic chiefs all—and the arrowheads and stone tools that even today are not infrequently discovered in plowed fields and along the banks of the river. Little did we know that they weren’t legends at all but still a living, breathing people, descendants of Chief Blackhoof, among others, who had remained where the Shawnee diaspora ended up after being driven from this, there sacred land.

Still, for me there was always a mystique about the Auglaize, something that attracted me to its banks and bridges and encouraged introspection. Although the Blackhoof Street Bridge was the unavoidable corridor from practically anywhere to anywhere in our town, the one that I considered “my bridge” was always the one on Hamilton Road.

Like the others, back then the bridge on Hamilton Road was a riveted iron-girder bridge—in more modern times replaced by a far less impressive and less romantic concrete abutment bridge. The old bridge with its iron super-structure seemed so much more of a landmark, more of a venue, a “place to go”, not just to cross. I will sometimes still dream about it, standing on the old wood-plank walkway above the dam, hands folded on the iron railing, gazing up-river toward town, a full moon shimmering on the surface of the pitch-black nocturnal water.

Courtesy Linda Knerr Collection

The Hamilton Road Bridge was also unique in that it was where the dam was (and is), a kind of definitive man-made dividing line between the up-river and down-river segments of the Auglaize—a name sometimes said to be a bastardization of eau glaise (muddy water) which is what French fur trappers down from Canada may have called it, back when they were the only white men sharing the surrounding hunting grounds with the Indians. And indeed in the spring, when it runs high and fast and is fed by clay-laden snow-melt, it does become a rich coffee and cream color. But in the winter-time, when the river freezes solid, the surface often resembles nothing as much as dark green marble under the grey leaden winter sky.

When we lived in a stately old house on the western end of historical Auglaize Street, Wapakoneta’s main thoroughfare, this was the bridge I crossed on foot or on my bike to go to the public swimming pool or to surrounding Harmon Field, the town’s main park, where I would often meet my friends. But the bridge itself was often my destination even then. I fished from it and under it and along the nearby lower banks of the Auglaize beneath the dam.

Flood of 1913
Courtesy Linda Knerr Collection

In flood season it was a scary place to stand in the rain and look down at the roiling water that grew higher by the day, so that the dam was engulfed and the water flowed almost level past it, swamping the banks below it and spilling into fields and backyards. In Ohio’s violent spring-time thaw, the river fairly roared and threatened to wash one or all of the town’s bridges out, sometimes skimming their undersides, but their soundly engineered infrastructure always prevailed—even as it had back in the town’s historic flood of 1913.

When we moved to the other bank of the river, the house on Kelley Drive where my parents lived for the next forty-two years, the Hamilton Street Bridge became my link to the other side of town. In other words, to town proper, the shops downtown, the Wapa movie theater, the soft ice cream dairy bars and the homes of many of my friends. It also connected me with school and with my jobs selling papers, cutting lawns, raking leaves and shoveling snow.

In summer, when the flow of water over the dam waned to where it just remained interesting, my new neighbor Joe, who was my same age, and I would dare each other to walk across the green slime-slippery dam under the bridge from one bank of the river to the other with the water flowing over our bare feet and carrying our shoes and socks in our hands. Joe was more agile than I was—just about everybody was—and as an earlier resident in the new addition known as Oakwood Hills, had had more practice. He would hurry swiftly across with mincing step, arms out for balance, his sneakers hanging from one hand, and then taunt me from the other side as I moved across sideways, shuffling with agonizing prudence from one end to the other.

Harrison St. Bridge
Courtesy Linda Knerr Collection

Falling east would most likely have deposited us unhurt, except for our pride, in the deeper water above the dam—although, truth be told, even that side of the dam was often filled with branches and twisted debris carried there by the spring thaw and hung up against the wall. Falling the other way, however, would almost surely involve injury, perhaps smacking your head on one of the concrete supports of the spillway and falling unconscious into the water to drown. But the consequences were clearly not something we were thinking about—merely enjoying the vertigo of the dare and the accomplishment of completing the entire trajectory without slipping into the drink.

I did fall in once. It wasn’t in summer however, but in winter. Again, for that event, I was with Joe. We must have been about twelve at the time. It was a particularly cold winter and the river was frozen solid enough to drive a truck onto it. But near the dam the ice was never safe. Joe and I were taking a shortcut back to our bicycles over a part of the dam that was merely a floodwall with no spillway. We were both bundled up against the cold and were wearing rubber boots over our street shoes, so I was moving even more gingerly than usual. Joe had climbed up onto the dam wall behind me so was having to follow the indecisive pace that I set.

At some point, he was like last-one-to-the-bikes-sucks-eggs sort of thing, and tried to rush past me on the narrow wall. His shoulder accidentally clipped the side of my head and knocked my horn-rimmed glasses off my face. I kept my balance for a second, but when I tried to catch the glasses in the air, I lost it and went over the wall, breaking the ice and falling through.

The shock of sliding into the freezing water and trying not to be pulled under completely by my soaked winter clothes delayed any panic that might have gripped me. There had been an almost historic dredging operation on the upper segment of the river the summer before and the water was unusually deep. But I was a strong swimmer, and keeping my head, I was able to find my way back out through the same hole I’d fallen through. I struggled back up onto the dam wall, dragging with me what felt like gallons of water that had filled my boots and soaked into my heavy wool coat.

I had lost my glasses and all I was thinking about was punching Joe in the nose, but by the time I regained my composure and sat panting on the flood wall, he was nowhere to be seen and his bike was gone. He had evidently panicked and taken off, maybe, I thought, to find help. I couldn’t blame him.

Heavy with freezing water, my coat was rendered useless. It felt warmer without it, so I threw it over my handlebars and pedaled home with water squishing out of the tops of my boots. By the time I arrived, I felt like I was freezing. In fact, my shirt was stiff with ice crystals.

I was grateful that my mother, Reba Mae, wasn’t home. She couldn’t swim and was deathly afraid of the water. She was always warning me, when I said that whatever body of water I was swimming in “wasn’t deep” that “a person can drown in six inches of water.” I was alone in the house, with my father working and both my sister and brother off who-knew-where. I hid my clothes to let them dry in a corner of the basement that my mother wasn’t likely to visit.

I told Reba Mae later that my missing glasses had fallen out of my pocket. She said that they should have been on my face and reminded me that eyeglasses “didn’t grow on trees.”  I never mentioned the incident to her or anyone again. Nor did Joe and I ever talk about it. We just avoided each other for a week or so and then took up our friendship where it had left off before we climbed onto the wall of the dam.

In my early teens, the bridge on Hamilton Road became the place I went at night when I wanted solitude. It started out just being the place I went to smoke. I’d taken up the habit tentatively at twelve, when I would pilfer cigarettes from my father Whitie’s pack. Shortly, however, I started buying them myself, telling the local grocery store owner that they were “for my dad.” I eventually figured out that I needn’t make up a cover story, because just about any gas station or grocery in town would sell them to me no questions asked whether I said they were for Whitie or not, so I no longer had to smoke the filterless Pall Malls that he favored. But I needed a place to smoke them so my mother wouldn’t find out.

The bridge after dark was the perfect place. Stand by the rail and smoke, then toss the butt into the water when you were done, or if somebody came along whom you were afraid would squeal. The town had no police curfew back then and after I started working part-time at age twelve, my parents didn’t impose one on me either, as long as I was back before eleven.

That interval there between ages twelve and fifteen was not a good one for me at home. There were all the normal pitfalls of early adolescence combined with an extremely stormy relationship with my father. Whitie was sick and I couldn’t understand it. We were constantly either at each other’s throats or not speaking at all.

If he’d had heart disease or diabetes it would have been easier to comprehend. But he suffered from mental illness. And in the mindset of those years, being mentally ill was seen as somehow phony, an excuse for not manning up and doing what you had to do. But poor Whitie had done more than should be expected of anyone, spent the last three years of World War II in front-line combat zones, then came home, started a business and provided for a family from the outset. At some point, something had broken inside of him. If he had externalized it, it would surely have been manifested as a large and gaping wound, a horrific running sore that never closed. But since he carried it on the inside, I, for one, couldn’t see it. And being a typically self-centered teen, I figured it was just that he didn’t love me and clearly didn’t approve of me.

So I rebelled and spent a good deal of time feeling sorry for myself. The bridge was a great place for it. I would stand there smoking cigarettes and watching the black water slide over the dam. I’d gaze at the night sky or watch the lights of Wapakoneta and the moon play on the breeze-riffled surface of the Auglaize. I’d stand in the rain and enjoy getting drenched, or in the snow and turn my face up to try and track the course of snowflakes as they fell. A few times, when I was feeling reckless, I even scaled the girders and used the upper part of the bridge as my observation point.

I thought about the books I was reading—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Kerouac, Steinbeck and Salinger—and wonder what their protagonists would do. I wondered how old I needed to be to join the merchant marines. I wondered whom you had to know to become a drummer in a traveling circus band. I thought about the stories I would write, and the jazz clubs in New York and Chicago where I was sure I would play, sooner than later. I thought about traveling the States and traveling the world. About going away, far away. The further the better. And the sooner the better.

And then I thought about Whitie, and wondered why I wasn’t enough. Why he didn’t love me. Why he couldn’t be supportive of what I wanted to do even though it wasn’t what he would have preferred I did. I wondered, mostly, why he couldn’t just be happy. Was I so awful that I was ruining his life, that he could never seem to be proud of his son?

It would take decades for me to comprehend that what I did or didn’t do had little or nothing to do with Whitie’s state of mind. He was off on his own road. He was just coping as best he could with his own tortured mind and no amount of striving on my part was ever going to make him happy. The bridge was the confidant I talked to about all this, the holder of my doubts and secrets, the place I went to feel solid and grounded beneath its girders.      

Now, when I periodically return for a visit to my home town, the journey is never complete without a walk to the Hamilton Road Bridge. I like to stand there a while, hands folded on the railing, and remember all the people I knew, and the ones I still know. I remember both the joys I celebrated and the heartbreaks I sought to quash there. I remember the dreams I entertained so long ago and think with satisfaction about the ones that, one way or another, have come true, and try to contemplate without regret the ones that haven’t. Often I think of Whitie, and hope he’s having a much happier life wherever he is now.

Even now, that bridge remains, in my mind, much more than a practical piece of engineering over which to travel from point A to point B. But it is indeed a bridge, a unifying link between my past and my present, between one world and another.           

 

VIGNETTE THREE: DOC—THE TANGO KING

The first time I played with Doc, it was by pure coincidence. I was working as a relief drummer, but with a band I often played random gigs with, whenever their regular drummer couldn’t make it. They’d had a piano-player who, when he played solo gigs, played the Cordovox instead. One night they’d played a place that didn’t have a piano and he’d taken his Cordovox along instead, and they’d loved the fresh new sound that, in his able hands, the strange instrument gave to their dog-eared gig book and they’d decided to incorporate it full-time.

So anyway, one night when their keyboard man couldn’t make it and neither could their drummer, they called me—because I was available—and Doc, because Cordovox-players were scarce as hen’s teeth in the roster of Lima Ohio Local 320 of the American Federation of Musicians, and that was Doc’s exclusive “axe”. Their guy was an extraordinary Cordovox-player, but Doc had nothing to envy him. He had all the technique, but with a slightly different, more melodic, less aggressive style.

It was a jazz and swing sextet. Everybody was a little nervous at first with two subs working the gig, but after the first couple of tunes, we were cookin’. I had been a relief drummer for the better part of a year when I was seventeen, and now was back at it. I was used to accommodating myself to the different styles of the different bands, and Doc was a natural, a guy with an ear and a feel for every tune, every style, every tempo. This cat had listened a lot and everything he’d listened to had sunk in and become an integral part of him.

The Cordovox was a crazy instrument. Unfortunately, they quit making them, because they had a unique and wonderful sound. To the uninitiated, it looked like an plain accordion, but it was so much more. It was practically a synthesizer in “squeeze box” format.

It was by chance that I had earlier worked with a Cordovox player when I landed a steady gig while I was still in my senior year of high school. That was when I was with an outstanding band called The Doug Price Trio, the trio being thrilling Berkeley Jazz School-educated trumpet-player and front man Doug Price, myself, and an absolutely amazing Cordovox-player called Gene Wallenhaupt, a veteran musician who was also a high school band director. Wallenhaupt’s exciting and multi-faceted sound eliminated any need for a bass-player (part of the usual trio format: piano, bass and drums) and added an incredible range of accompaniment and rhythm capable of giving us the sound of a much larger musical ensemble. Put that together with Doug’s absolutely wailin’ trumpet and the band was amazing. The final touch was added by Doug’s brother-in-law, Tom, with his easy-listening style voice, who sang a few songs a set between instrumentals.

Anyway, Wallenhaupt used to get really irritated when anyone mistook his mega-versatile Cordovox for a simple accordion and was always dumbfounded when we’d just done an eclectic set of everything from Miles Davis and Duke Ellington to Herb Alpert and Burt Bacharach, with a smattering of sophisticated fusion music thrown in for good measure, and some drunk would stumble up to the bandstand and ask, “Hey guy, can you play the Hoop Dee Doo Polka like that guy on the Lawrence Welk Show?” It drove Gene insane and at the end of each set, when we’d take a break, you could hear him mutter, “Next sonuvabitch that asks if I can play Lady of Spain or the Beer Barrel Polka, I’m deckin’ ‘im.”

I had quit the trio at the end of the year before and traveled to South America to visit the exchange student I’d fallen in love with during my senior year. That’s why, now that I was back, I was just gigging again on the weekends with whatever band needed me and attending classes a couple of hours away at the Ohio State University music school during the week.

But back to Doc. It wasn’t until the first break on that gig with the sextet that I first noticed that Doc was blind.  It was when we all bellied up to the bar and Doc and I ordered Cokes (he because, I assumed, he didn’t drink, and I because I was still underage for hard liquor and never even drank three-two on a gig), while the rest of the band ordered beer or whiskey. I know that nowadays it’s PC to say “vision impaired”, but Doc wasn’t vision-impaired. He was lights-out blind. I noticed when I talked to him and he looked toward my voice but seemed to be focusing on a point somewhere over my shoulder. Before that, I just thought he was one of those musician-types who liked to wear shades even in the low lights of a nightclub.

But no. The super-dark shades were to cover his disability. Still, they made him look cool, with his trim well-groomed, dark Italian look and sharply-pressed dark blue suit.

We liked each other right off and started feeling each other out and matching each other’s licks on the thirty or so different tunes we played that night. Doc lent a new feel to the band. He knew every tune we played like he’d learned them in the cradle, but since he couldn’t read the fake book, he gave a new dimension to the arrangements, a new skillfully-improvised feel that sought to blend, even as it modified the sound.

It turned out to be a really fun gig.

After the show was over and we were tearing down our equipment, Eddy, the trumpet-player, came over to me and said, “Hey Danny, you and Doc are both from Wapak. Would you mind taking him home?” and I said sure thing.

I went over to Doc and said, “I didn’t know you were from Wapakoneta, so am I,” and he asked me my last name and I told him and he asked, “Are your folks Whitie and Reba Mae who owned the Teddy Bear restaurant.” And when I said they were indeed, he said he knew them well.

But it wasn’t until we were back in Wapakoneta and I’d pulled up to his house and recognized it that I realized that, besides being a helluva musician, he was also the well-known chiropractor that both my dad and my grandfather had gone to for their sciatic pain. Granted, Whitie and I didn’t talk to each other much back then, but I was surprised I’d never heard him mention that his chiropractor was blind.

Anyway, it was as we were unloading Doc’s stuff from the backseat of my ’63 Chevy Nova—the trunk was full of my drums—and taking it inside, that Doc said, “Hey Danny, I like how we play together. I’m about to start a gig every Saturday for the summer, and maybe beyond, at a place in Bellefontaine. I thought maybe we could form a duo if you don’t have anything better to do.”

And that’s how I started working with Doc for a string of Saturdays, the summer before I turned twenty. 

Doc and I didn’t share the usual musical relationship, where you meet up at the site of the gig, say, “Hey man, how’s it goin’?” and just about all communication after that is through the music. No, in this case, I spent a lot of time with Doc. I drove us there and home, obviously, every Saturday night and on two-lane roads back then, it took the better part of an hour each way, so we talked—a lot. But I also always arrived a little early at his house to pick him up and his wife, who was also his nurse and receptionist, would invite me in to wait for him to finish getting ready.

She would show me into what was essentially Doc’s waiting room for his chiropractic patients. But honestly, it felt a lot more like a comfy sitting room with overstuffed armchairs and a big old couch of the type that we called davenports back then. The house itself was of the rambling old two-storey type with a dark varnished staircase up to the second floor and wall-papered walls, like many other of the turn-of-the-century places that formed the core real-estate in Wapakoneta, with the more modern ranch and modified A-frame houses being relegated to peripheral neighborhoods known as “additions” in those days.

Doc had a pretty German shepherd seeing-eye dog called Pepper, who would always find her way into the waiting room when I was there. We got pretty friendly after a few Saturday evenings. I was a young wise-ass and so naïve that I actually thought if I could keep Pepper from going to Doc when he came downstairs into the room, he wouldn’t know I was there. So when I’d hear the stairs creak, I’d hold onto Pepper and pet her to see how long it would take Doc to figure out that I was in the room. I was always amazed that he was never more than halfway down the steps before he’d call out, “Hi Dan!”

Once I said, “How the hell do you know I’m here, Doc?”

And he said, “Well, let’s see...you smoke both pipe and cigarettes. Not sure of the brand, but the cigarettes are menthol and the pipe tobacco’s probably Sir Walter Raleigh.”

“How do you know that when I never smoke in your house?”

“Well, hell, Danny, I’m just blind, not dead! I can smell it on your clothes...And then there’s that English Leather cologne you wear that Pepper and I can smell a mile off. You know, Dan, you shouldn’t be so friendly with Pepper. She should only be friends with me.”

I laughed.

“I’m serious,” Doc said. “A pilot dog’s no good to a blind person if it’ll make friends with any Tom, Dick and Harry who comes along.”

Adolescent that I still was, I was hurt, but after that, Pepper and I never shared anything more intimate than a handshake. Doc didn’t take her along on the gigs, so he had to teach me how to be his guide dog.

I always remember Doc when I see the Al Pacino version of Scent of a Woman, the scene where Pacino’s character, Lt. Colonel Frank Slade, who has lost his sight, turns on a street-corner to his weekend chaperone, a private school kid called Charlie Simms, and snaps, “Are you blind? Are you blind?”

“Of course not!” Charlie says.

"Are you blind? Then why do you keep  grabbing my goddamn 

arm?"

“Then why do you keep grabbing my goddamn arm? I take your arm.”

Well, Doc and I had that same conversation on a street-corner in Bellefontaine, Ohio. “Don’t grab my arm,” Doc said. “You’re not dragging me anyplace, see. Just let me rest my elbow in the palm of your hand, as if you were my dog’s harness, so I can feel when you step up or step down. And for chrissake don’t go telling me, 'Careful now, there’s a step here or a curb there.' I’ll feel it by how you move. It’s like when I’m on a plane and ask for a cup of coffee and the stewardess comes and says, ‘Here’s your coffee, sir. Careful now, it’s hot!’ Well, of course it’s hot! If it wasn’t, I wouldn’t want the damn thing!”

He was always telling me that I was a terrible guide dog. Pepper had me beat all to hell, he’d say. When we got to know each other better, if he bitched and told me what a bad dog I was, I’d lead him into a parking meter for spite and then laugh about it. I was easily entertained back then.

“Funny Dan. Really funny,” he would say with half-mock anger. “Playing tricks on a blind man. Real nice!”

Once when I showed up early, I was amazed to find Doc sitting cross-legged on the floor, rewiring his Cordovox sound mixer. This, I figured, would take ages with a blind guy doing it.

"Hey Doc," I said. "What gives?"

"Hey Danny," Doc answered, "a minor wiring problem...And you're just in time! What color's this wire? And how about this one? And this one over here?" And just like that, bing, bang, boom, he had the complicated circuitry rewired and the cabinet put back together.

Once I asked him about being blind. Thinking aloud, I said I didn't know what I'd do if it were to happen to me. I was sure I'd be desperate.

"Look Danny," Doc said, "being blind's a pain in the ass, but it's not the end of the world.You can't see, so you just learn to do other things a lot better." 

The hour-long drive was always interesting. I remember having an attack of hay fever one summer evening, as we were driving along with the windows down in my non-air-conditioned car, and having a sneezing fit over near Indian Lake.

“What are you allergic to?” Doc asked.

“No idea,” I said.

“Because back there where you started sneezing there was ragweed, golden rod and ryegrass among other things.”

Another time, we’d ridden along in silence for a long time, when all of the sudden, Doc said, “Coming up over the next rise, there’ll be an S-curve. Coming out of the second one, you’ll see a big white farmhouse with a barn right up close to it.”

Sure enough, as I pulled out of the second curve, there was the house.

“Damn!” I said. “You’re right!”

“Don’t sound so surprised. Of course I’m right. Listen, if we’re still playing this gig in the wintertime and get into bad weather coming back, we can always stop there for the night. They’re old friends of mine.”

The place we played on the main drag in Bellefontaine was a bit “divey” and was frequented by beer-mellowed rednecks and belligerent rural roughnecks as well as a crazy-quilt mix of local regulars. But they tended to be an appreciative crowd and Doc and I enjoyed their applause. Still, we enjoyed playing together even more. It never felt like “a job”. It was always fun.

The only time things got dicey was once when this mean drunk came up to the tiny bandstand (on which Doc with his Cordovox and speakers and I with my full drum set barely fit), and wanted to sit in on the drums.

“Sorry, pal,” I said, “Doc here’s real touchy about who he plays with, and I never lend my drums to anybody.”

I thought that would end it, but the guy was back every few tunes to ask to sit in and every time, I tried as nicely but firmly as possible to get him to understand that it wasn’t happening. Finally, I said, “Look buddy, how about going back over to the bar and having a beer and coolin’ it. Just stop annoying us before I ask the bartender to throw you out.”

The guy had a few choice words for me, but in the end, turned and weaved his way across the barroom and out the door.

“Good riddance,” I thought, and figured it was over.

But as we were playing the next set, I was riding the high-hat and looking toward the wall when I heard a whoosh and whistle and then the clatter of a tire iron hitting my ride cymbal and then the floor. Doc’s right arm was over his head blocking the skull-crushing blow the mean drunk had tried to lay on me, and now, with his left he was punching the guy in the face with a haymaker that knocked him off the stand onto the barroom floor, where the bartender and a couple of other men were already picking the guy up and giving him the bum’s rush into the street, opening the door with the top of his skull.

“What the hell are you doing for eyes?” Doc turned and shouted at me. “You almost got your goddamn skull split!”

All I could say was, “Thanks for the save, Doc. Man, you are amazing!”

There was this one very special night. On the way to the gig, I had told Doc about the time I’d spent in Buenos Aires. He knew I had a “foreign girlfriend” but I’d never told him about the adventure of traveling on my own to South America when I was only eighteen.

He asked if I liked tango and I said that I loved it, but that “nobody in the States knew how to play it.”

He didn’t say a word in response. But that night, during the second set, he said, “Let’s do a tango.”

And I thought, “Oh god, get ready for Hernando’s Hideaway.”

But then he said, “Sit back. I’ll play this one solo. And with that, he played an amazing version of what was practically the national anthem of tango, La Cumparsita, and followed it, almost DJ style, with La Canción de Buenos Aires, Caminito, Sur and Adios Muchachos. He followed those with a couple of progressive tango pieces by Astor Piazzolla, Adios Nonino and Oblivion and I could have sworn that he had turned his Cordovox into that quintessential instrument of tango, the bandoneon. I just sat back and listened, dumbfounded.

After that, I would always think of him as Doc, The Tango King. He was nothing short of incredible.  

We did indeed get that gig for the rest of the year and even played New Year’s Eve. But I decided not to go back to school that spring. I wanted to travel a while. What actually happened wasn't what I had in mind, but travel, I did. By March, I'd been “invited” by the US government to serve in the Army. I joined instead of letting myself be drafted and for the next three years played with Army Bands in the States and Europe following Basic Combat Training and a stint at the military school of music.

I couldn’t have imagined at the time that I’d never see Doc again after that Bellefontaine gig was over. Never imagined that warm, friendly relationship Doc and I had formed would end with a handshake and a “see ya” after our last night on that steady gig. But sometimes that’s just the way things work out.

NOTE: It's really hard to find anything on the Internet even remotely close to the way guys like Doc and Wallenhaupt played the Cordovox but the closest thing to their style from when I was in the duo with Doc and or the trio with Gene is the jazz style of Wynton Marsalis and Richard Galiano. Take a listen:

https://youtu.be/dVxBDEqmwSA

https://youtu.be/Dtd4OhP8rvg
https://youtu.be/Tl21YlEVkl0

THE RELUCTANT ATHLETE: Part Four

By the time I was fourteen going on fifteen, I had graduated from a paper route and odd jobs to working as a movie theater usher and janitor and playing in a rock and roll band. I could have just played for fun, but this was my kind of in-your-face, rebellious raspberry to Whitie. “Look at this, Daddio,” I was symbolically saying, “not only did I buy my drums myself, but I’m also making money with them.”

Truth be told, back then, at the beginning, it was the grunt work that made me the money that kept me largely independent of parental interference (and of any insistence I go out for sports), even if I’d already started thinking of myself as “a working musician”. I worked three or four times a week as a ticket-taker and usher at the Wapa Theater and then made a little extra sweeping up the popcorn, popcorn boxes and candy wrappers, and scraping the chewing gum and half-sucked candy off the floor. After my father’s night janitor at the Teddy Bear Restaurant retired, I also took up that job for a while, after I got off work on movie nights and every other night of the week but Sunday.

Working at the movie theater was fun. My best friend Mark worked there with me for a while as well, which made it more fun still. And the concession stand was run by the theater-owner’s daughter, Barbara (who was a year younger than I was), and a classmate of mine called Debbie. They were both shy girls whom I’d never really gotten to know at school other than to say hi, but here at the movies, we chatted and joked and laughed during the lulls in our work and generally had a good time.  

The Wapa’s manager was a young guy called Leslie who was from out of town, someplace in Indiana. He drove a powder-blue Caddy convertible and dressed to the nines, but lived in a rented mobile home in a court on the north side of town. He was easy to work for and was always good-naturedly kidding us. When he found out Mark and I were old-movie buffs he used to now and then invite us to his place to eat popcorn and watch the black and white classics that he collected and projected on a screen in his living room.

Leslie didn’t own the Wapa. The building was from the turn of the century, had originally housed an opera house and theater and was quite grand inside for a small-town cinema, with a main floor and two balconies. One of the balconies—referred to as “the third balcony” for some reason the logic of which escaped me—had long since been hidden from view by a lowered acoustical ceiling, above which lived a colony of brown bats that would swoop down in the darkened theater and flash their scary silhouettes across the silver screen during projections, eliciting shrieks from the girls and nervous laughter from the boys in the audience, especially during viewings of Christopher Lee’s stunning portrayals of Count Dracula.

But you could still appreciate the scrolling and ornamentation on the side walls and the fancy fronts of the former box seats that had also been closed up.

I liked to imagine what it must have been like back in the building’s pre-Great War beginnings, when early twentieth-century Wapakoneta residents arrived in gala dress for the first shows at what was then the Brown Theater. It had been owned from the 1930s by the husband of a grade school teacher of mine and she had inherited it when he passed away.  Leslie leased the movie theater part of the building from her. A former Ball State University student, he had done some acting in college and had a real love of Hollywood and theater, but this appeared to be as close as he could come to getting into show biz.

I also became friends with the projectionist, ‘Herbie’. That wasn’t his real given name, but he preferred his moniker. Herbie was a couple of years older than I was. He was shy and overweight and didn’t have many friends. At school he was a popular enough “folk figure”, since he was the photographer for the high school yearbook (known as The Retro) and for school newspaper publications. We didn’t have a school paper per se, but rather, a column in the Wapakoneta Daily News entitled The Lantern. Herbie’s nom de guerre at school, then, was ‘Flash’. When he showed up with his 35mm camera around his neck, everybody was glad to see him, but he wasn’t the sort of guy most of his classmates hung out with. He wasn’t one of the “cool kids”.

I didn’t feel cool either, but I tried to make eccentric, rebellious and non-conformist work for me. I felt it should work for Herbie too. To my mind, he was eccentric enough to be non-conformist-cool. He was a conscientious projectionist and a surprisingly mature and artful photographer. And his “secret cool” that nobody saw during school hours was that when school was out, he was a biker! Herbie had a Honda Superhawk. That and his Pentax camera were his two prized possessions. They were also props in his dual-life persona. Seeing him mounted on that bike with his oversized denim jacket, engineer boots and two-hundred-plus pounds of humanity, you’d have thought Herbie was really bad-assed, somebody you didn’t want to mess with. You’d never have guessed he was a melancholy, easy-going boy with a big sad heart who hadn’t had it easy.

Herbie used to invite me to the projection booth when there was nothing else pressing to do and show me how the twin carbon-arc projectors worked, how it was important to adjust the carbons every so often so that the picture didn’t dim, or how when a reel was reaching its end, you had to look through the little window that gave onto the theater to watch for some small white dots that would appear on the right-hand side of the screen to let you know when to turn on the second machine that held the next reel. Herbie also knew how to splice broken filmstrips and how to fix the huge projectors when they broke. Herbie knew a lot of things and I found them all fascinating.

Another thing Herbie was in charge of was changing the big metal letters on the marquee whenever the feature film title changed. I used to help him do that and found it a lot of fun. It involved going in through a restricted-admission lateral entrance from outside and climbing a narrow staircase on which a tall folding step-ladder was leaned up against the wall and covered that side of the staircase practically from top to bottom. The staircase led to a cramped store room, in which the wall on one side bore a series of large pigeonholes containing several sheet-metal cut-out copies each of every letter in the alphabet. Reading from a paper where the theater manager had written down the title of the upcoming movie, we gathered the letters necessary to spell it out twice (once for each side of the marquee), placing them in a sturdy wooden box. Then one of us would grab the box and the other the stepladder from the staircase. We would also take along another wooden box to put the letters in that we took down. Once the two-sided ladder was set up under the marquee, Herbie would climb up one side of the ladder and I’d climb up the other carrying the empty box. He’d take down the old title letter by letter, handing them to me, and I’d put them in the empty box.  Then I’d take that box down, carry up the other box holding the letters for the new title and hand them to Herbie as he called them off: C-H-A-R-A-D-E, for instance. Up close some of the letters looked kind of pitted and scratched and rusty. But when we would climb down to inspect our handiwork against the lighted marquee, they looked like for a New York premiere.

Herbie and I remained friends even after I quit working at the Wapa. A couple of summers later, he would announce he was joining the Air Force. People said, “Herbie? The Air Force?” But I wasn’t surprised. Herbie was a guy who knew what he wanted...and it wasn’t this. He had gotten into a special experimental training program that the Air Force was trying out on overweight recruits. It was not your regular Basic that did fat guys a lot of good but that didn’t get to the root of their problem. This was a rigorous regime of healthy eating, psychological motivation, and intensive, scientifically engineered physical exercise.

A few months later, Herbie came home on leave and had to tell my mother who he was when he showed up to say hi. She didn’t recognize him! And if he hadn’t spoken, I wouldn’t have either. It was as if he had gone into training as William Conrad and had returned home as Steve McQueen. We were amazed and Herbie was pleased, self-satisfied and more self-confident than I’d ever seen him before. After he shipped out for overseas, I would never see or hear from him again.          

The job at the Teddy Bear was a routine janitor’s job, but I managed to make that fun too. I was always my own best company, so working alone in the place after hours was okay with me. A couple of years earlier, I had enjoyed working at the Teddy Bear during business hours in the summer or on Saturdays because the older girls who worked there always treated me a little like a pet and I wasn’t all that used to that kind of attention from the other sex. Whitie had me in the back a lot, peeling spuds and cutting them for french fries, washing dishes and helping with other types of food preparation, while he was out behind the counter.

My most fun relationship was with a bouncy, bubbly girl called Linda, who was about eighteen at the time. She pretended to flirt with me, which caused me to have an instant and terrible crush on her and to loath her older fiancé who often dropped by for coffee and to see her. The Christmas that I had turned thirteen, Linda blocked my path under the mistletoe that hung above the kitchen door and laid a big wet kiss on me that left my lips smeared with her bright red lipstick, and then laughed her head off at the combined look of shock, embarrassment and contentment on my face.

But it wasn’t like Linda was having a laugh at my expense. She genuinely liked me, as if I were an adoptive kid brother, and we shared little inside jokes and secrets. For instance, I had started pilfering smokes from Whitie’s packs of Pall Malls when I was twelve going on thirteen. The first time Reba Mae smelled smoke on me she said if she caught me smoking again, I’d be punished. But I wasn’t put off by the warning. I simply tried not to get close to my mother if I’d just had a smoke. Then I got greedy and started helping myself to Whitie’s cigarettes to the point that he noticed. My father was a lot more pragmatic than my mother, so his warning message was more economic than moral: If I was going to smoke I should “buy my own goddamn cigarettes,” because he didn’t plan to support his habit and mine too. So I took him at his word, found a corner grocery store that wasn’t picky about whom they sold tobacco to and, by age thirteen, was smoking several cigarettes a day. Linda, for her part, smoked incessantly and usually had one going in an ashtray on the shelf above the work counter in the kitchen, so when we worked there side by side on Saturdays, we would take turns smoking and if my father or mother came into the kitchen while I was having a smoke, she’d swiftly grab my cigarette and take a drag, leaving the end marked with her lipstick.

That part of working at the Teddy Bear during the daytime when it was open I sometimes missed, though not the almost constant bickering between Whitie and me, since none of the work I did was ever quite up to his exacting standards of quality control. Speaking of which, I don’t think there has ever been another restaurant in our town (or anywhere else) that had a more thorough clean-up routine than the Teddy Bear. After closing each evening every member of the staff had a specific cleaning task to do. And after they had all gone home, Whitie would go back and re-do every single one of those tasks—always alternating between whistling tunelessly and cussing under his breath. For himself, he reserved the jobs of re-ordering the refrigerators and cleaning and polishing the stainless steel back counter, soda fountain, under-counter refrigeration unit, fryers and grill. By the time he was done with them, these pieces of equipment always gave the impression of being brand new and having just been installed the day before. So when I came in, long after closing, the place was practically spotless, except for the dining room floor, which had merely been swept clean.

My job was, first, to mop it thoroughly with hot water and industrial detergent, to dry it with a squeegee and floor rag, and then to wax it with a thin layer of fast-drying liquid wax and buff it with the industrial buffer that Whitie kept in the back room—a machine so powerful that, more than use it, I was dragged around the room by it. The whole process took a couple of hours and I took advantage to turn it into some quality alone time (as if I hadn’t already been enough of a lone wolf). 

After making sure all of the curtains were drawn over the front windows, I would put a quarter into the cigarette vending machine and get myself a pack of Winstons or Salems, depending on my mood, and light up with a book of the free advertising matches that were in a fish-bowl by the cash register. Then I’d take a couple of “special quarters”—the ones painted with red fingernail polish that the restaurant got back when the maintenance man came to service the machine and change some of the records—and, putting them into the coin slot on the colorful Wurlitzer jukebox, I’d choose eight of my favorite tunes—usually ones that would have been the last choice of any other kid in town, numbers by Peter Nero, Duke Ellington, Enoch Light, Henry Mancini, Ferrante and Teicher, Frank Sinatra, Mantovani, and so on. Finally, being very, very careful not to leave a single mark or drop of water on the stainless steel fountain, the meticulous last inspection of which would surely have included a final obsessive once-over with my father’s own pocket handkerchief, I would build myself a vanilla phosphate with extra “dope” (trade jargon for syrup) and light on the ice. Then, and only then, I’d be ready to get down to work. I “danced” with my mop to the sounds of the Duke’s band playing Satin Doll, to Ferrante and Teicher playing Theme from The Apartment (a movie that had made me fall in love with Shirley MacLaine and loath Fred MacMurray even more than I originally had), Mantovani’s orchestra playing Hernando’s Hideaway, Frank singing I’ve Got You Under My Skin, Peter Nero mixing The Yellow Rose of Texas with Mozart in a fascinating fugue, and Enoch Light and the Light Brigade playing a rousing rendition of Whatever Lola Wants, among a list of other personal favorites.

There, alone by night in my father’s restaurant, I could be whoever I wanted to be. I didn’t see myself as a confused, unhappy fourteen-year-old boy. I was a cigarette-smoking adult with a vanilla phosphate that could just as easily have been a tall scotch and soda. And I could pretend that the famous musicians on the jukebox were my personal friends. I could see myself playing with a studio band in New York City instead of mopping the floor in my dad’s soda fountain and grill. I could imagine myself a whole other life that I had no doubt would eventually come true, one where I was doing what I wanted to do and was really good at it. I would be a writer and musician and was sure my combined arts would be my ticket out of here and into a brand new and glamorous world.

To be continued...

You can read Parts 1, 2, and 3  of The Reluctant Athlete at the following links: 

http://www.southernyankeewriter.blogspot.com.ar/2015/01/the-reluctant-athlete-part-one.html

http://www.southernyankeewriter.blogspot.com.ar/2015/02/the-reluctant-athlete-part-two.html

http://www.southernyankeewriter.blogspot.com.ar/2015/03/the-reluctant-athlete-part-three_2.html