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?

1963: The Year That Changed My Life -- and Many Others

            Although I didn’t appreciate it at the time, 1963 was a year that changed my life, and undoubtedly the lives of many others as well.

            From the vantage point of 50 years on, I can see plainly how greatly I was affected by four memorable events that occurred that year: civil rights demonstrations and protests, particularly in North Carolina and Alabama, in the spring; passage of the North Carolina “Speaker Ban Law” in July; the Great March on Washington on August 28; and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November.   Looking back, I am pretty sure that if these events had not happened when and as they did, my life and career would very likely have been very different.

            When my sophomore year at UNC wound down in the spring of 1963 I was a hopelessly naïve and self-centered 18-year-old who had only the vaguest thoughts beyond immediate existential issues, which centered on hanging out with my fraternity brothers, playing gin rummy with my roommate, making out with my frisky freshman girlfriend, and compiling a decent GPA without exerting too much effort.   Then the world began to intrude on my life of comfortable complacency in the person of Theophilus Eugene Connor.

            T.E. “Bull” Connor was the Commissioner of Public Safety in Birmingham, Alabama.  When Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights leaders organized anti-segregation boycotts and demonstrations in Birmingham in May of 1963, Connor responded by ordering police and firemen to turn police dogs and high-pressure fire hoses on the demonstrators, many of whom were children.  The shocking images of the violent confrontations that television brought into my fraternity’s chapter room hit me in my gut.  For me – and, I now know, for many other white southerners – those images caused me to think seriously for the first time about something that up until then I had more or less taken for granted: racial segregation.

            I know that some of you who just read the previous sentence are saying to yourselves, “How is that possible?  How could anyone have been so blithe about something so inherently evil and unfair?”  Believe me, over the years I have asked myself the same questions many times.  But unthinkable as it may seem today, the truth is that I was no different from most people who grew up during the 1950s and early 1960s in places where racial segregation was legally required: it was just “the way things were,” and we just accepted it. 

            In retrospect, I think that one of the reasons I had never thought deeply about segregation prior to 1963 is that the system was remarkably successful at accomplishing its underlying purpose, which was to prevent the “mixing” of blacks and whites.   As far as I was concerned, my family and friends lived in one world and “colored people,” as my mother referred to them, lived in another.  By law we attended separate schools, sat in separate sections of movie theaters (after buying our tickets at separate box offices and entering via separate doors), ate in separate restaurants, and drank from separate drinking fountains.  By custom and practice we attended separate churches, listened to different radio stations, and patronized different banks and merchants.

            Because my parents did not regularly have “help,” I infrequently came into direct contact with African-Americans as a youngster.  On the rare instance when I did, such as when Arlington Grey, a huge black man, came to our house to dig a hole for our fuel oil tank, my parents treated them courteously, just like they treated everyone.  When I visited in the homes of my few friends whose families employed maids or gardeners, I probably should have been taken aback that the servants were addressed only by their first names and that they came and went via the back door, but I wasn’t.   That was” just the way things were.”

            Regardless of how things were in my world, I knew in my gut and my heart that loosing police dogs on children was not the way things were supposed to be.  I was outraged by Bull Connor’s actions and mesmerized by the hatred and bigotry reflected in his eyes.  “Nothing good,” I thought, “can come of this.”

            As it turned out, I was wrong; some good things did happen because Bull Connor saw a crusade led by brave little black boys and girls as a serious threat to his way of life.  By responding with violence and hatred, he almost singlehandedly fired black peoples’ determination and white peoples’ disgust, thereby stimulating more protests by the former and more support for them by the latter.  Sometimes I wonder what would (or wouldn’t) have happened if he had had the political savvy to pat the children on their heads and hand them ice cream cones instead of attacking them with water and dogs.

            North Carolina was among the places where public protests intensified in response to the events in Birmingham.  Galvanized by the images of youngsters fleeing from fire hoses and police dogs, students from Shaw University staged sit-ins at Raleigh theaters and restaurants, protested at the Sir Walter Hotel where most members of the General Assembly stayed during the legislative session, and swarmed over the grounds of the Governor’s Mansion while Governor Terry Sanford hosted the annual North Carolina Symphony Ball. 

            Although Governor Sanford defused the symphony protest by appearing on the south porch of the mansion and offering to meet with the protesters, some other prominent citizens reacted very differently.   Jesse Helms, who was then an on-air editorialist for WRAL-TV, saw the protests as evidence of Communist influence, especially at colleges and universities.  In June he praised the Ohio legislature for proposing a bill to restrict speakers at their universities, suggesting that it "should also provide a lesson for the rest of us."  Four days later, on the verge of its adjournment, the General Assembly enacted what became known as “the Speaker Ban Law.”   I wasn’t even aware of the law until shortly before I returned to Chapel Hill for my junior year, and even then I didn’t appreciate the degree to which it eventually would influence my life and career.  An explanation of how and why it did so is material for another article; suffice it to say that over the ensuing two years the fight to repeal or overturn the law awakened me to the importance of the First Amendment issues that have been the primary focus of both my law practice and my teaching gigs for more than three decades.

            While the Speaker Ban Law’s influence on my life unfolded over time, the effect of the August 28 March on Washington was immediate and electric.   That afternoon, on the day before my 19^th birthday, I sat on the floor in front of my parents' television and watched the coverage of the March on Washington. Violence and chaos had been feared and predicted, but the immense and diverse crowd was not merely peaceful, but joyful.  Joan Baez sang.  Mahalia Jackson sang.  And then Dr. King began to speak. Even as his cadences and metaphors unfolded I knew that I was hearing something very special, and when he reached his peroration and thundered "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!" a shiver ran down my spine. Every time I have heard the speech since then I have experienced the same sensation.

            By the end of that day my apathy and indifference about segregation was over.  I promised myself that whatever else might happen, I would make a point of never again turning a blind eye to discrimination.  Whether I have kept that promise is for others to say.

            As a direct result of the sobering and eye-opening events of the spring and summer of 1963, I returned to school that fall imbued with heightened purpose and seriousness, one manifestation of which was working regularly at The Daily Tar Heel.   On November 22, I was planning to report to the newspaper’s office around two o’clock.  I was eating lunch at my fraternity house when someone rushed in saying “the President has been shot.”   I joined the crowd that gathered in the television room and stood watching as a shirt-sleeved Walter Cronkite gravely reported the stunning updates from Dallas relayed via the AP and UPI tickers and jangling telephones in the CBS newsroom.   As he spoke into a visible desk microphone, Cronkite repeatedly put on his heavy black-framed eyeglasses, then took them off to look into the camera.  Finally, he took them off one more time and wearily announced the official “news flash” confirming that the President had died 38 minutes earlier at 1 p.m. Central Standard Time.

            I was stunned, dismayed and disoriented by what I had just heard.  Questions tumbled through my mind.  How could such a shocking thing happen?  Who did it?  What did it mean for the country?  I certainly didn’t know.  What I did know that this was news – big news – and I needed to get out of the fraternity house and to the DTH office as quickly as possible.  My impulse was to DO something, and that something was gathering information that might answer the questions roiling my mind, whether it came from the wire machines or television screen in the newsroom or from talking with my colleagues or from interviewing University officials and others older and wiser than me.  A list of such people whose views we might want to include in our coverage was already forming in my mind as I crossed first Rosemary and then Franklin streets and headed up the sidewalk in front of Spencer dorm.

            My brief walking route to Graham Memorial took me past Chapel Hill’s venerable Episcopal Church, the Chapel of the Cross.  Like most college students, I had hardly darkened the door of a church since leaving home, and if I had ever been inside an Episcopal church it was only because my the members of my high school Key Club made monthly rotating visits to each other’s home churches, but in my confused and disconsolate state the church suddenly seemed like the place I needed to be.   I tried the door to the historic chapel on the west side of the church; to my surprise, it was open.    I stepped inside.

            Entering the chapel, I crossed a threshold between turmoil and serenity.  Autumnal afternoon sun suffused the silent space with soft golden light.   A small brass cross stood between two candlesticks on the altar table, which was covered with a green cloth.  The pews and ceiling, dark with age, spoke and smelled of history.   For the first time in my life I needed, and had found, a sanctuary. 

            I sat down, alone, and tried to untangle the confusion, apprehension and dismay that were tying my brain in knots.  After a while I said a silent prayer for our Country and for myself.  Then I got up, opened the door, and walked out into the rest of my life.

           

I haven't tried my hand at poetry in quite a while, but two young women who walk past our house several mornings each week inspired this effort:

Jabberwalkers***

On nice days (never in the rain), they walk down our street around sunrise:

Two lithe young women in color-coordinated shorts, t-shirts and baseball caps.

They lean forward as they walk, swinging their arms meaningfully;

You’d think they were on an important mission unless you listen to them.

While they walk they talk, loudly, but they don’t say anything profound; only

Snatches of bitchy gossip drift in through our open bedroom window as they pass.

Lime green cap: “I hate to say it, but she . . .” and “I wouldn’t say it to her face, but . . .”

Pink shorts whines, “He just doesn’t get it . . .”or “I don’t know why I put up with . . .”

I don’t know them, and if I say “Good Morning” while fetching the newspaper

Their disdainful glances make it plain they don’t want to know me.  At dawn

I much prefer to encounter the runners and cyclists who wave, or even the neighbor

Who stops to chat while her Labrador patiently pees on my rosemary bush.

Still, I’m intrigued by these haughty women who wear big diamond rings

And pony tails while they walk and talk at sunup.  Why, I wonder, do they dress

As if they are on their way to the country club, but jabber in tones

More appropriate to a honky-tonk bar where the music is very loud?

            *** with apologies to Lewis Carroll