When "the Singing Cowboy" became "the Singing Chipmunk"

            In 1949, when I was five years old, Gene Autry made the first recording of “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”  Autry, a star of “B” movie westerns, was known as “the Singing Cowboy.”   In the post-World War II era, his fame and following rivaled that of Roy Rogers, who also was known to break into song – particularly duets with his wife, Dale Evans.

            Popular legend has it that Autry didn’t want anything to do with the song, but his wife talked him into recording it.  It sold two million copies in the first year and ultimately became the second biggest-selling Christmas record of all time, after Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas.”  It also put Autry on the path to becoming one of the wealthiest men in Hollywood.

             One of those two million records that were sold in 1949 was purchased by my parents.  “Rudolph” was all the rage that Christmas season.   The song was being played incessantly on the radio and I, like all children my age, loved it.  We didn’t own a record player, but my cousin’s family, with whom we would be visiting on Christmas, did.   I insisted that my cousin must have a copy so we could listen to the song over and over.  My mother invested in a long-distance call to tell my aunt not to buy the record, because I wanted it to be my big surprise.

            As the present de jour, the record naturally was in short supply, especially in small towns like the one where we lived at the time, but my parents scoured the stores, and just before Christmas my father came home in triumph bearing a paper sleeve with a picture of Rudolph on the outside and the record nestled inside.

            On Christmas Eve I presented my cousin with our treasure within minutes of our arrival.  He ran to fetch his record player, which was a little portable model in a case with a metal latch.  We plugged it in and pulled the record out of the sleeve, but when we went to place it on the turntable we saw that the hole in the record was much too large for the spindle.  The prospect of not being able to listen to “Rudolph” for the ten-thousandth time almost brought me to tears, but my ever-resourceful father quickly came up with a solution.   He measured the hole in the record, cut a piece of corrugated cardboard from the box in which we had carried our gifts, and trimmed it into a disc that fit the hole perfectly.   He punched a small hole in the jury-rigged insert and placed the record on the turntable.  Excitedly, we switched on the record player and dropped the needle onto the record.

            When the music started, we heard “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” but not in Gene Autry’s mellow tenor voice.  Because we didn’t understand the difference between 78 and 45 rpm, that Christmas my family members were the first people everto hear a version of the song that others had to wait for until 1960, when the Chipmunks recorded “Rudolph” for the first time.

           

Now I Understand Why Rhett Butler Didn't Give a Damn

            This past summer I devoted three or four pleasant Maine mornings to My Reading Life, a delightful literary memoir in which Pat Conroy, effusive and autobiographical as always, pays tribute to the books that have engaged and influenced him, both personally and professionally, over a lifetime of voracious reading.  His deep and eclectic list ranges from Thomas Wolfe to Thucydides and from Charles Dickens to James Dickey, but the chapter that grabbed my attention was his lengthy paean to Gone with the Wind, which Conroy considers “magnificent” and dubs “the Iliad with a Southern accent.”  Goaded by his unstinting praise for the book, and intrigued by the fact that it sold a million copies in the first four months after its publication in June of 1936, I decided that I owed it to myself to do what I had never done, and read it.

            Figuring that I could knock out the book during a couple of upcoming trans-Atlantic flights, I called my local book independent book store and reserved a copy.  When I picked it up I was startled to find that the paperback edition weighs 23 ounces and is 1448 pages long – not counting Conroy’s preface, which is a duplicate of the GWTW chapter in his book.  (“Hmm,” I thought, “looks like Pat got paid twice for the same piece of work.”) 

            The book took up more space and weight in my carry-on than I had allotted for it, but I decided to take it to Italy anyway; after all, I’ve always been the sort of person who says, “in for a penny, in for a pound and a half,” and GWTW just didn’t seem like a Kindle^® kind of book.

             As it happened, I only got through about a quarter of the book during our two-week vacation; food, wine, art and rambling around charming hill towns left little time for reading.  Worse, the more I read, the more I disliked Scarlett O’Hara.  Between her self-absorption and her incessant mooning over Ashley Wilkes, I found her increasingly annoying and tedious, and by the time we arrived back home I wondered whether I could summon the energy to finish the book at all.  I began to suspect that several hundred thousand of those first million copies were never read and even now are moldering on mahogany bookshelves in many of Georgia’s finest homes.

            By the time I finished the book it had morphed from a challenge into a chore.  Scarlett remained insufferable to the end, and I eventually became impatient with Melanie Wilkes’ cloying sweetness and naiveté as well.  Were it not for Rhett Butler, Mammy and Uncle Peter, each of whom saw the world through unblinking eyes, I would have consigned GWTW to my own shelf of never-reads and never-finished books.  By the time I got to “After all, tomorrow is another day,” I was glad to know there was no sequel.

            Having persevered, I now face a new dilemma.  Because My Reading Life extolled The Great Gatsby, Of Time and the River, and other books that I had read and liked, I trusted Conroy’s enthusiastic recommendation of Gone with the Wind, only to come away tired and disappointed.   Dare I take him up next on Anna Karenina or War and Peace?