The Times To Try Men’s Soul (Women Too)- With The Music Of Irving Berlin In Mind

 

 

 

 

 

 

By Bart Webber 

All Josh Breslin knew was that he didn’t like it, didn’t like the music on the lonely family pride radio planted squarely in her, his mother’s   kitchen and the record player (both RCA of course in those days, maybe today too, a sign of quality, you know that dog guaranteeing said result)  sitting forlornly center stage in the threadbare living room alongside  the  well-worn second-hand sofa given to them by Delores mother when her parents up-graded theirs and mismatched chairs courtesy of Big Max’s furniture store, also second-hand, and a handwoven by grandmother braided rug that his mother had gone to work at some cost to her standing in the community and at a cost to her husband’s pride, in order to purchase. Didn’t like the constant every housewife working day turned to WJDA music, worse, worse if that was in itself not enough to set a five year old boy’s teeth on edge if he could have explained it that way, or if he had dared to, was the inevitable Saturday night mother, father and four brothers, three older plus him, sitting in that threadbare living room on that second-hand furniture listening to the record player play that music that he did not like. 

That music that had gotten his mother, Delores (nee Leblanc) through the hard time of the Great Depression when her father Lauren was out of work more than in work in the town of Olde Saco’s main textile mill, the MacAdams mil that had employed more than one LeBlanc and had on occasion gone back to the farm in the old country, old country Canada, really old country Quebec, which is where he would tell everybody him was from with a certain benign pride rather than Canada as a whole, where things had been so bad that his whole generation had flee south to work in the mills in Maine and New Hampshire but with no work the farm at least provided some relief, a some wages. Had gotten Delores through the waiting first for her three brothers off to war with the American Army in Europe (one brother having transferred over from the Canadian Army which he had enlisted in in the days before America got into the war) and later for her future husband, Prescott, when he went off to the Marines to finish up the Pacific War against the Japanese. Had gotten Prescott Breslin through the Great Depression too down in benighted coal mine country Kentucky where he hailed from (his always curious to Josh term reflecting that slight regional difference in expressions) where he had worked as a coalminer before the Japanese decided to make their play for the world. Had gotten him through (along with those forever country mountain ballads that Appalachian dwellers were addicted too) the war too once he knew that there was somebody back home who would be listening to that same music, and would be channeling him (of course nobody by fortune-tellers used such an outlandish word back then speaking of the bonds to loved ones.  

So that was the history, family history but history nevertheless, that Josh was up against. What he had had to put up with at ages five, six and seven the latter the age when he finally got the nerve to ask one Christmas after the fifteenth hearing of White Christmas why they had to play all that Irving Berlin (he didn’t know how much of what they listened too had been composed by him and other Tin Pan Alley composers then and was shocked later how much had been in the days before singer-songwriters took the lead during the folk and rock days), Frank Sinatra, Vaugh Monroe, Peggy Lee, Dick Haymes, Perry Como, Helen Whiting, Tony Bennett and all the rest (of course those were only names to him then, names dutifully recited by the mellow-voice announcer, Marlowe James on WJDA).

He, aged seven, was met with stone silence, not a word one way or the other. Maybe if he had been more perceptive, more attuned to emotional nuances he would have sensed that he had made a huge faux pas. He let it go at that until about age ten when he had begun listening to fugitive rhythm and blues caught via the airwaves late at night from out in Chicago, something called Be-Bop Benny’s Blues Hour and then rock and rock from a Boston station, WMEX, which would later be a big part of his growing up life, on his transistor radio bought by Delores to keep him away from changing the channels on the radio and turning off the record player. Before that compromise though he had gotten seven kinds of hell for his uncalled behavior, uncalled for by Delores, the main executioner, including a few leather belt hits on his ass by Prescott (they had hurt too).                

What Josh didn’t know, didn’t know until he was in high school, when that radio in the kitchen and that record player in the increasingly threadbare  living room were still in place of pride was that they were what held Delores together, Prescott too but less so, as the reality of their poor lives finally hit home. That realization they would not partake of what would be called by later generations the” Golden Age of the American working-man.” So they reverted back to sunnier times in one of the few ways that they could by listening to the music that got them through their own troubled youth. Held to the dreams from the days when Prescott had met Delores in Portland at a USO dance where he asked her to dance to Tangerine, their first song. Later that night they finished up the evening with a slow one, Till We Meet Again, which would be their forever song.    

It was not until high school either that Josh realized why his first pleas to stop the music had met with stone silence. To have spoken to his concerns his parents would have had to open a whole can of worms, had to let Josh know a little about the dire circumstances under which that precious radio and record player had been bought not as a sign of prosperity in the golden age but as one small token that they had at least a couple of things they could call their own. (It was not until those high school revelations that Josh got the import of his family not having a television until 1959 and not having a reliable car for most of that period as well.)

See Delores had had to work at Molly’s Diner across the street from the MacAdams Textile factory, the main employer in Olde Saco then. She had served them off the arm, as one of her fellow waitresses (today wait staff but lets’ stick with the terminology of the times the late 1940s and early 1950s time when waitress was the term of art for females serving them off the arm) to the morning shift guys for a few years in order to be able to afford the luxury of that radio and record player. Josh had not thought it unusual then that his mother was working in a diner, thought that she liked it. The reality was something quite different.

First off Delores had actually graduated from high school (something Prescott had not done, having only gone to the eight grade before hitting the mines-his own father saying “what does a coalminer need with ‘larning’ to pick the coal out of the ground”). Had gone to business school for a year too but with four close together boys to take care of anything other than mothers’ hours was out (even though many days when Molly was short some waitress who had stayed out too late with a boyfriend, or had her “friend” or some other excuse she would be asked to cover and during the school years the boys would be left to themselves after school-not good, not good at all as it turned out). So Delores took lots of heat from her parents by working, working when other mothers were at home doing their motherly thing. Got grief handed to her too when her high school and neighborhood girlfriends wondered out loud why she had to work. Worse of all took grief from Prescott who went through the roof when she proposed that she take the morning shift at Molly’s. What would his fellow workers think, what would she have to put up with from guys who would “hit” on her since most of Molly’s waitresses were older, younger and single, or divorced and thus “fair game.” But worse, if anything could be worse, was what not being the sole breadwinner, not being able to provide even the necessities for his family rained hell on his self-esteem.

So Delores worked, got those few extra things, worked longer than she had expected too when MacAdams started shifting his operation to the South and Prescott lost his job never really to get back on track while Josh and his brother were young. In the end that radio and record player went to his older brother Lauren when his parents passed away. And here is the funny thing Josh these days when he listens to Vera Lynn doing We’ll Meet Again says it doesn’t sound half bad. At least he knows all the words from memory.