the green grapevine

Trebor Jay Tichenor, Al Stricker, Don Franz and Bill Mason, October 18, 2009

By Peter H. Green, illustrated by the author

Napoleon said, “Always have a plan–leave nothing to chance; always have two plans–leave something to chance.” The St. Louis Ragtimers, in their 48th anniversary celebration and the centenary of the Goldenrod Showboat on Sunday afternoon, demonstrated such superior strategy when Al Stricker popped a string during the third set on his vintage plectrum banjo. Instead of a second instrument, which he said he normally would bring, Stricker had re-strung his just before the concert and brought along two other musicians to keep their marathon jam session moving. So he called on Stephanie Trick—she had already wowed the more than 250 fans that packed St. Louis’s Sheldon ballroom during the second break—to keep the festivities lively while he made the needed repair.

A recent University of Chicago music grad with international touring to her credit, and three-time winner of the St. Louis Ragtime Piano Competition, the lissome and vigorous young musician stepped back up to the concert grand as Trebor Jay “The Professor” Tichenor graciously yielded his seat and stood listening and watching her prodigious talent with an eagle eye and a fine-tuned ear from the sidelines. Her second selection, a rousing stride piano version of the George Gershwin-Earl Wild classic “Liza,” improvising with elaborate riffs on the melody line and concluding with harmonious arpeggios, brought the audience to their feet, cheering to the hall’s intricately illuminated rafters.

As Stricker tuned the new string and gingerly strummed a few chords he said, “Keep your fingers crossed.”

“Maybe that was your problem in the first place,” cracked Don Franz from the tuba section.

With such easy familiarity and a gut sense of what’s right for the moment, the product of  almost a half-century of playing together, Tichenor, Stricker, Franz, and Bill Mason–playing lead on cornet (and occasional harmonica) – revived the songs and legends of the ragtime era. Ever since their first 1961 Pierce City concert, they have regaled audiences on riverboats and in concert halls worldwide with their renditions of Scott Joplin tunes and compositions of a host of other greats. Such favorites as Mississippi  Rag (“M-I-crooked letter-crooked letter-I”), “Peoria,” “Mississippi Mud” and “New Orleans” took them to the first break, when Dave Majchrzak, president of the Friends of Scott Joplin organization, entertained with his own ragtime piano stylings.

In the second set Stricker delighted the crowd with his patter as he introduced the songs with a bad-boy twinkle in his eye and talk of sporting houses. “Contrary to popular belief,” he said, “they didn’t have jazz bands: that hot wind is the last thing you’d need in a sporting house.” He noted that “Everybody’s Doin’ It,” Irving Berlin’s 1911 classic, which brought in the dance craze of that era, has been popular ever since with husbands. Bill Mason displayed his peerless horn virtuosity in this set with solos in  “Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home” (Hughie Cannon, 1902), and Jelly Roll Morton’s “Dead Man Blues,” to which Bud Raeder, a former big band era drummer sitting at my left, certainly equal in age to the banjo player, quipped back at Stricker, “You’re getting close!” Mason capped off his afternoon with a “Dippermouth Blues,” a song King Oliver wrote for Louis Armstrong when a young Satchmo joined the band as second cornet in Chicago, in a rendition worthy of the jazz great himself.

Al Stricker got in a few licks in the third set with a favorite, adopted as a campaign song for a forgotten candidate named “Champ” Clark, an underdog who won 45 convention ballots but lost overnight to Woodrow Wilson: “They’ve Gotta Quit Kickin’ My Dawg Around.” Al then topped it with “When ‘Rastus Plays his Old Kazoo,” somehow juggling the banjo, the vocal and the kazoo. Perhaps inspired by Stephanie Trick’s tour de force, Tichenor rallied with several robust and richly textured solos, including “’Cabarlick Acid Rag,” written in 1901 by Clarence Wiley, a pharmacist, the banjo master explained. Wrapping up with “Ophelia,” a request – the spiritual, “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” – and “King Chanticleer,” Stricker thanked the rapt audience and signed off with, “Let’s hope we make it to our fiftieth.”

We, too, sure hope they do.

This week the world lost a buddy: my dad’s lifelong friend and Marine Corps pal, a mentor to hundreds of inner-city youths that he helped with sports programs and a once familiar voice to baseball broadcast listeners across the country. His name was Buddy Blattner.

A sports celebrity in his day—famous as a teenager for worldwide championships in table tennis, a stint with the New York Giants, where before the war he rivaled his teammate Johnny Mize in runs batted in, and the Philadelphia Phillies—he became known to radio audiences across the country. Starting in 1950 he called games for the St. Louis Browns, alongside Dizzy Dean, the Hall of Fame pitcher. They developed a style where Dean made the colorful commentary, while Blattner described the action in a form that has come to be known as the play-by-play. He told me, “At the time I was the only major leaguer to do baseball broadcasts.” By 1953 He and Dean were on television, broadcasting ABC’s Game of the Week.

When I interviewed Bud in September 2000 for my 2005 book, Dad’s War with the United States Marines, he explained how he learned the art. “In 1946 in the off-season I begin to practice commenting on games. I would take a recent game, recall about four innings and call the game. I would go over the commentary until I could make it sound better, more exciting or better description of the action. In those days, I did the commercial layouts, filled in my own background on the players and worked with just an engineer. I learned play-by-play and not in New York, but in St. Louis, which had a more forgiving atmosphere.”

From there he went on to broadcast for the St. Louis Hawks and spent two seasons reporting for the St. Louis Cardinals before migrating west to work for the California Angels. A measure of his contribution to his art is the fact that when he left he was replaced by Dick Enberg, who then joined the Angels’ broadcasting team and later became an institution in sports broadcasting as anchor for a new venture called ABC Sports.

I asked about his World War II experience: how he reconciled his fortunate position, coaching recreational activities for the troops on the island of Guam, with the nastier job of the guys in combat. Bud said, “We were where they put us. I didn’t want the war: not one of these kids wanted the war. I never felt self-conscious. You do what you’re told. We toured the forward area in a DC-3—Peleliu, Kwajalein–trying to hit a little spot of sand in an ocean that extended as far as the eye could see. If you chickened out you had a miserable life. Anybody who enlisted and spent a reasonable amount of time in service was a hero. My God, I never could have believed I would live.”

Bud still fondly recalled his days with my dad, Ben Green, at WXLI, the Armed Forces radio station on Guam, as one of the highlights of his tense but humdrum Pacific war experience.  Bud wrote and Dad produced a sports quiz program for the station. “Perhaps we could give away beer,” he said. “Whether the show was any good or not, we would be giving away the nectar of the gods.” With permission from headquarters to give away the beer, they created a show called “Sporting Chance.” Dad arranged for it to be broadcast before live audiences of 2,000 to 3,000 troops at theaters that existed all over the island. “It became the most popular doggone show on the island,” Bud recalled. “It was more difficult to write every week—there wasn’t exactly a research library or panel of experts to ask on these questions.” He noted that the winners and even the losers got cases of beer for their units for being part of the entertainment. The generals, admirals and the troops alike praised the new sound of WXLI, and the radio station’s beer ration increased. “Life on Guam had turned the corner,” Dad said. “This post-surrender duty, if you had to do it, wasn’t so bad.”

Let’s hope that Bud and Dad are now happily reunited. I’m sure they’re already negotiating with The Man Upstairs for an increased supply of beer for the troops.

For more of Dad’s and Bud’s hilarious adventures on Guam, read my World War II memoir and biography, Dad’s War with the United States Marines.

More next time,

Peter

Peter H, Green

“Artists Behaving Badly” is a topic that has fascinated the public for centuries. It continues to this day in the publishing arena, with blogs by agents, booksellers and readers commenting on rude, insensitive and egotistical writers, who cut themselves off from other authors, their facilitators and even their reading public.

But leading the pack of collegial, helpful and friendly writers, who hopefully are in the majority, was our guest speaker at last Saturday’s Movie Night, Author John Lutz. I had the honor of making the introduction to his pre-screening talk. His work includes political suspense, private eye novels, thrillers, regional suspense, urban suspense, humor, occult, crime caper, police procedural, espionage, historical, futuristic, amateur detective…virtually every mystery sub-genre. He is the author of more than forty novels and over 200 short stories and articles. His awards include the Edgar, the Shamus, and the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s Golden Derringer Award. His novels and short fiction have been translated into almost every language and adapted for almost every medium. He is a past president of both Mystery Writers of America and Private Eye Writers of America.

His latest published book is the crime thriller Night Kills. Another is due in October. From his private investigator novels–the Nudger series in the late ’70s and the Carvers of the 80s, to his more recent output of nail-biting thrillers, he has sent his flawed protagonists and misfit yet brilliant associates into danger in steaming Florida swamps, seamy St. Louis neighborhoods and the plush New York offices of drug lords as well as the sleazy hangouts of their operatives.

The conditioned air in the Engineers Club of St. Louis provided welcome respite on a warm July evening, as fellow writers arrived early to set up for an experimental program. In a new location, a new format and a new medium (for us anyway), we had decided to take advantage of the fact that one of our long-time members, this award-winning author, had scored a writer’s coup, launching a successful feature film.

As my wife and I pulled into the parking lot a few minutes before the doors were to open, sitting in a modest sedan waiting to go to work was Mr. Lutz himself, accompanied by his charming wife, Barbara. Soon joined by fellow members Brad Cook, David Lucas, Joe Passanise and our president, Rebecca Carron, we got down to business. He handed me a two-sided disk, which offered either the old TV format or the wide-screen version (we picked the latter), and we inserted it into the DVD drive of my laptop, which I had already hooked into the club’s high-tech projection system. We hoped for the best: when I’d plugged the computer in, I’d made a wrong menu choice that caused the picture to disappear out of view on the left side of the monitor, and it took Brad, some thirty years my junior, about twenty minutes to unravel my error and show the movie where we wanted it–on the projection screen.

In the midst of that confusion, Daniel, a slender, neat young man even junior to Brad, appeared from Left Bank Books, with his cartons of John Lutz mysteries and thrillers–although he regretted that he did not have copies of his 1990 classic,SWF Seeks Same upon which the film was based.

Meanwhile our audience began arriving and Joe and his wife set up shop to check members in; Rebecca set up popcorn sales, and David hauled in heavy coolers of chilled soda, all in the spirit of providing an informal movie theater atmosphere. The only thing missing (blissfully) was a pack of teenagers creating a disturbance in the front of the theater.

John’s remarks were illuminating. Unlike so many writers who’d been told to “deposit their manuscripts at the California state line” and invited to scram, he’d had a cheerful experience, complete with his own director’s chair, parties and even consultations on arcane details of scenery.

He credits the film’s artistry to Producer-Director Barbet Schroeder, Don Roos, who wrote the screenplay, cinematographer Luciano Tovoli, who created dramatic lighting effects, and to the original musical score by Howard Shore. He felt blessed by the fact that studio executives left them alone until the final screenings. At that point, one mogul who was known for meddling with and messing up many a good film changed the ending. Even that, John said, had its benefits.

“The net effect of this intervention was to take what would have been a good art film, struggling to earn back its $20 million investment, and turn it into a strong commercial thriller, which also developed a cult following and grossed over $80 million worldwide.”

In my note of appreciation for his marvelous program, I said, from an aspiring writer’s point of view, “I stayed up late last night to finish Night Kills. It almost discourages me to see how much skill in plot, pacing and character you’ve woven into this masterful story. While I said I admire your style and try to write the kind of story you do (with the same sense of atmosphere, complex plots and noir characters, although more amateur sleuth and romantic suspense than police procedural), I can only hope that someday I can approach the level you consistently maintain.” This fast-moving and enthralling novel takes the theme–anonymity in the big city breeds vulnerability to evil–that began with SWF Seeks Same and explores its possibilities in even greater breadth and depth.

It’s fitting that John have the last word here. He wrote in reply, “Much thanks for your efforts. I had a good time reintroducing SWF to people who seemed to enjoy it. Thanks also for your kind words on Night Kills. Barb also enjoyed the evening, both the company and her two seconds on screen. Movies are fun but books are better.”

More next time, but, as the late, great John Ciardi would say,

Good words to you,

“

How could these well-intentioned goals lead to murder? If you’ve tried to get a zoning change lately, you may know what I mean.

Early in my design career, zoning hearings used to be routine procedures, in which a board offered minor regulatory adjustments and then rubber-stamped plans that would help a city or town create new jobs, increase the assessed valuation of the property within its boundaries and enable it to collect more taxes.

But beginning in the early seventies, someone turned up the heat in the hearing chamber. These formerly friendly, local meetings broke out in holy war. Zoning became an issue, and obtaining a change of land use from a local government gained all the furor, cost and intrigue of a hotly contested election campaign. Neighbors protested, saying the new project would use too much fossil fuel, eat up too much virgin forest and farmland and create too much dangerous traffic, noise and air pollution. The objectors were suddenly well organized and well funded: they brought legions of experts to zoning meetings—traffic experts, botanists, ecologists, zoologists and air pollution scientists. Developer’s forces countered with geotechnical engineers, fluvial geomorphologists, potamologists, entomologists,and hydrologists. It was after the third such confrontation that I began to think that maybe there’s something to it—other than futile blustering by stubborn residents who opposed any kind of change to their customary surroundings, people who did not share our team’s grand vision for improving it. For one thing, the more time went on, the truer seemed the environmentalists’ concerns. And for another, a few defeats handed to me at the bar of local approval soon brought home the fact that their efforts were futile: we were stopped dead in our tracks.

Then as I sifted through the wreckage of one particularly big setback I detected skullduggery. Someone had connived the young, wild-eyed environmental advocates into opposing the developers, but not for the reasons of environmental purity that the land developers claimed. We had planned our new town project to be a demonstration of good land use: with high densities to shorten walking distances, make residential property accessible to stores and shops, keep homes near jobs, make future mass transit stops accessible and preserve green space within the development. We soon learned that these kids had become the unwitting tools of larger forces—those that didn’t want apartments (and the lower income, racially mixed tenants they attracted) in the suburbs. Others joined in the fray: those that opposed competing businesses and those that just wanted everything to remain green, despite the fact that the land was not in a natural state—it had been farmed for generations—and to have their way, no matter what opportunities for economic growth and improved land use the community might lose out on in the process.

A third issue—and this was our Achilles heel—was that, despite our good intentions for better land use, our developer had selected a flood plain location, and this choice was due to the fact that the land was cheaper—for good reason: it was the least desirable and suitable for urban development. And over the years the true cost of making and keeping it suitable became apparent: it needed levees, pumping stations, drainage channels storage ponds, and a host of special engineering measures to create and maintain the basic conditions that exist at the outset on high ground. While the ability to protect from floods for long periods has been shown to be possible in entire countries, like the Netherlands, it has been less successful in New Orleans. Often the die is cast for urban development long before rational planning can be achieved, and then it is too late. While the premise of building on low land can be shown to be a fallacy, it is a romantic and seductive idea, one which many will defend. Hence the battle is joined.

It is this conflict between an immovable object (the city and its inexorable demands for growth) and the irresistible force (the river, Nature and the environment) that has fueled many costly urban battles, with casualties on all sides. It’s the stuff of conflict, and it has inspired many life histories and stories worth the telling. That’s what got me going in writing my new novel, Crimes of Design and how it came to be that an architect who loves to tell these stories and to write the histories of real people was inspired to create a murder mystery, set in St. Louis, during a flood of record rivaling the Great Flood of ’93.

More next time.

Till then, regards,

Peter