♫Watchin' Those Old Ithaca Memories....♫
Jun. 22nd, 2022 11:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogApologies to the singer-songwriter for that appropriation of one of my all time favorites from that era. I even got him to sing it online for me with a dedication, which also mentions the two trees Minnie and Max, named for one of his other songs, that we planted outside our last Rochester house, the first in 1991 when we found out Emily was coming.
The house and trees were still there last I checked- another culinary legend of that era, soon to be departing- but I still have memories of those Ithaca Sunsets. And other things from back then. The first definitely coming back to me yesterday on the occasion of the longest day of the year:
I still have my first edition of that publication stuck in a drawer here someplace, and as recently as last year on the calendar's Summer Solstice, I told the tale here- of how we tried to keep quality independent journalism going in a town that largely went quiet during the three summer months. That 2021 visit to the past got exactly one comment- from dauntless_heart (Hi- howareya?), mainly reacting to the Newsroom icon I used then and use again today- but when I posted that picture above on Facebook yesterday, it got a surprisingly large response, at least as my Facebook posts go. At last count, it had picked up 22 24 likes, only one from one of the people named in the photo. That may have exceeded the number of people who actually read the thing when we published it that summer. (It soldiered on for one issue after the debut.) Another on the masthead list who did comment was Andy, the unofficial leader of our little collective (we took turns to act as a sort of executive-officer-for-the-week), who also uploaded a copy of the manifesto of our lofty ambitions in his initialed editorial in that first and second-to-last issue:
Oh well. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
----
Later in the day, yesterday, my mind did go back to Far Above or at least Nearby Cayuga's Waters, but via roads leading a bit to the south and way to the west.
I met a new client in Rochester on Thursday who needed some work involving a job they did just over the state line into Sayre, Pennsylvania. Sayre's about an hour south of Ithaca on Route 34 once you get across the border into Waverly, New York. Or, if you do it the way I did the first time I made that drive, it takes quite a bit longer.
It was almost the summer of '78. No memories of a first real six-string from nine years earlier. Rather, memories of my first real four-speed, purchased on a May afternoon from a co-worker of my sister's who lived in Sayre. I had never driven a car with a stick shift except in a driver's ed simulator two years earlier, and right around Middle of Nowhere, New York north of Waverly, the stick detached from the transmission and I was stuck on the side of the road. No cell phones then, of course, unless you were a fat tv detective. Finally someone arrived from someplace and I got a call in to road service and another to my sister. We got the thing jammed into second gear, and drove it back to Binghamton on Route 17, Donna and Joe in a slow moving convoy with me- we were never above 35 miles an hour, and got about 1,000 curses an hour from the other drivers on the road.
The car was totaled three weeks later. Another good idea gone bad.
----
So, back to the summer of '22.
I don’t think I’ve ever stopped in Sayre for anything except possibly a tank of gas in all the years since then. There is a weird stretch of 17, now known as Interstate 86, that dips down over the state border. For about a mile, you’re outside the jurisdiction of New York state and county constabularies. We refer to it as “the DMZ” and it’s a good place to test just how fast your car can go for about 10 seconds. Unfortunately, I am also powerless to practice law over that line, and last week's client needed a lien filed against a property in Sayre.
I thought it would be simple enough to find somebody to do it. A guy in my office here graduated from a Pennsylvania law school. Hey Mike, are you still admitted in Pennsylvania? No, I let it lapse. Then I thought of a lawyer just on our side of the line in Elmira, who I settled a case with a few years ago. Never even heard back from her. But- we have directories for this sort of thing. I am in several of them. You look up the town, it gives you one or more collections lawyers to refer to, or points you to a nearby town that has somebody listed there.
I try the first book. Under Sayre, it sayres, “See Towanda.” That is not Tonawanda, the indigenous tribe local to our area that’s so nice we named things after them thrice. I flip to the T’s and the book tells me the listing for Towanda is “vacant.” Bummer. But, I do have a recommendation for them now, of the woman I first thought of when I saw the name of that town. She may not be licensed to practice law in Pennsylvania, but she’s older than me and has more insurance:
I try the second listing book, and I am again leapfrogged from Sayre to Towanda, but this time I get an actual name of an attorney. In Williamsport. Which I also remember from drives in that area, as being about an hour south of the state border and pretty much entirely downhill. But hey, I’m actually the only attorney on some of those lists for much of the Southern Tier halfway to Binghamton, so I look him up.
He was 91 years old and died of Covid last year.
I’m in need of some better ideas right about now.
----
Fortunately, I think I have one, just not for that. Because my third memory of Bright College Days came to me all the way from California and may end up with me about half an hour north of here next month.
This is the picture that got me down this rabbit hole:
Doctor Demento and "Weird Al" Yankovic. The first from the singer/parodist's early days in the 70s, the second at one of Al's California shows earlier this week.
Comedy records were a big part of my upbringing, along with many of my generation. Parents from all over East Meadow had Bob Newhart, Bill Cosby back before he lost his mind, the First Family spoof on the Kennedys, Hello Mudda Hello Fadda. Many got introduced on Sunday nights on the Ed Sullivan Show, and everyone would run out and buy them. Later, I'd acquire my own somewhat more adult-rated stuff like George Carlin, Robert Klein and parodies of things like The Godfather and The Exorcist. A Long Island college station did a weekly show called Smile! that reinforced some of these loves and introduced me to others.
Ithaca only had two FM stations of any value to the college market, and while they played good music and had some great specialty shows, comedy was mostly left off the dial. But somehow one of us had heard of some guy in a top hat who'd made a two hour syndicated Sunday night show out of the very things I'd come to love. I still got me my Carlin and Sherman, but now "Fish Heads, "Boot to the Head," "Wet Dream" and "Psycho Chicken" got added to my repertoire. The closest we could find The Dr. Demento Show was on a barely-there signal out of Rochester on a station then going by WMJQ- Magic 92. It took a long string of antenna wire connected to Jim's FM receiver, and some tin foil clipped to the end, to get it to come in, but it mostly worked.
The Good Doctor not only played record-albumed famous artists but would accept the occasional demo tape from someone he thought was good enough to make that week's Funny Five. One came in that we heard in 1979 through that spit-and-Scotch-tape connection- from a kid in California, who recorded a parody of the then-PreFab Four hit "My Sharona" in a bathroom (for the acoustics), with only his voice and accordion used in the production. "My Bologna" became a hit for "Weird Al" Yankovic and launched a career that brought him much higher production values, famed spoofs of Joan Jett, Queen and Michael Jackson, a string of music videos, Grammys and even a full-length film. His tours have brought him to Western New York throughout the past several years; right now, it's on the West Coast, and that led to the reunion photo, second above, of the Master and the Pupil who has now reached greater heights of the Farce. (The radio show was on in Buffalo in the 80s, and it may have resurfaced on RIT's station in the 2000s, but format and syndication changes in the radio biz caused the broadcast to die a slow death, and the funnies are now only available through a paywalled stream.)
I've never been to one of Weird Al's shows, and it may be turning into Bucket List time. He's at Artpark, just north of here, at the end of next month. Some friends in the past have sprung for the "VIP" deal where you can get a meet-and-greet picture with Alfred Himself. Nope, not worth 300 bucks. But covered seats for just over fitty? If I can find company, I think it's time I finally Eat It and see him:)
Now if only he'd been coming to Ithaca....
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Date: 2022-06-22 08:16 pm (UTC)But do go. His band is one of the tightest I have ever seen, capable of going from country to blues to Zappa-ish speed rock like >snaps fingers< that.
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Date: 2022-06-22 11:14 pm (UTC)We overlapped, but I think I completely missed The Summer Solstice. 1979 was my first summer while at Cornell, and I was in Norway because they sprang a requirement on me to study a modern Scandinavian language, and the university didn't offer any. My advisor said I could ignore it and hope nobody noticed, but my parents grimly paid out, and it turned out to be invaluable; Old Norse only takes you so far reading the modern scholarship outside of Icelandic and Faroese, but with one of the other 3, it's possible to fumble adequately through them all. I suspect 1980 was the summer I went to Iceland.
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Date: 2022-06-23 01:06 am (UTC)