The Point

The Brew House or more commonly known as The Point was a bar in Germantown that we frequented when we lived there in the 70's. It was one of the few bars in the neighborhood that we would hang out in. I would go there a lot when I was visiting the neighborhood while home on leave from the Navy. It was a place where I was sure I'd run into people. Then in 1974 when I was living on Seymour Street it was easy to stop by and hang out.

The Point was a lot of fun. There was a glass cabinet full of six packs of beer for sale right in the front as you walked in. Then there was the long bar that looped around on both sides of the room. There were some booths on the side as you went in and then a jukebox which was always playing music. Then at the back on the entrance side was a shuffle bowl game which we played all the time. Beyond that was a pool table and then more booths along the other side of the bar. The restrooms were just beyond that. I remember every foot of that place and can visualize it completely.

We played a lot of shuffle bowl there. 

The picture here shows the location and the building now. It hasn't been a bar for many years.

All Hopped Up

 

The Book List

All Hopped Up and Ready to Go: Music from the Streets of New York 1927-77 by Tony Flectcher, 2009

Read in December 2019

I loved this book.  A history of New York's music scene over five decades and a fascinating look at how the local art, theater, literature and political movements came together to create the unique music environment and made vast contributions to American culture. The author tours the various neighborhoods of New York as he explores the distinctive sounds from the streets that created bebop, pop, doowop, the Latin music scene, the folk revival, glam, metal, punk, disco, New Wave, No Wave, and hip-hop. 

I explored a lot of this music from my own collection and on Spotify as I read through this book. It was mostly the Latin music I needed help with streaming and most of the hip-hop.

Stenciled Clothes

Everything I personally owned in the Navy was stenciled with my name and service number on it. This was especially true for any clothing or towels. One of the very first things we were issued in boot camp was your stencil. Your seabag, carryon bag, hats, underwear, uniforms, everything had your name and service number stenciled on it. We would use the stencil with large black crayons which we would rub our names and numbers on to our clothes or other possessions. It was all very efficient. The photo here is off my stenciled seabag.

That certainly made sense when you lived in a very tight environment like a warship with other people in very close quarters. In boot camp we learned to take care of our uniforms and keep them clean. We were issued little sewing kits for mending problems. Polishing our shoes and boots was always very important. We learned to wash our clothes by hand the proper Navy way. Later while in A school training we did our laundry personally in a laundromat type facility on the base.

On a ship things were very different. There was a small laundry and some guys were there everyday as their job on the ship. They were part of the ship's service team. We had mesh net bags that we would put all of our laundry in for cleaning. Each crew member had a bag with their name on it and all of there clothes would be laundered in that bag and come back cleaned and dry.

I carried that stencil around with me for four years.

Jack Nicholson and the 70's

I loved going to see Jack Nicholson movies in the 1970's. He was in many classics. I had only been out of the Navy a month or so when I saw The Last Detail at a theater in downtown Philly. It was a very funny, interesting and tragic story of a particular aspect of Navy life. A liberty adventure. Buddhist chanting "damnedest thing I ever heard".

I had read the Daryll Ponicsan novel a couple of years earlier and had been looking forward to the release of the film. Seeing him in his earlier 60's films did really prepare me for how good he was going to be during the next decade although 1969's Easy Rider certainly was a big hint.

I really liked Five Easy Pieces especially with Karen Black in it. She was also one of my favorite actors of the 1970's and starred with Nicholson in Easy Rider and Drive, He Said too.

Speaking of Drive, He Said. I thought that was a very fascinating movie about a college basketball player and the draft during the Vietnam War which was also the first film directed by Jack Nicholson. Two other great movies of his from that time was Chinatown and One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. Both are worth seeing repeatedly. 

I read the novel One Flew Over The Cuckoo's by Ken Kesey in July 1974 which was about a year and a half before the film was released.

Some of my favorites of that time:

• Five Easy Pieces, 1970
• Carnal Knowledge, 1971
• Drive, He Said, 1971
• The King of Marvin Gardens, 1972
• The Last Detail, 1973
• Chinatown, 1974
• The Passenger, 1975
• One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, 1975
• The Missouri Breaks, 1976

Pastime Lounge

The Pastime Lounge was located on Grant Street at Forest Ave down the street from Buffalo State College. I worked there as a DJ spinning records on Saturday nights from 1981 through 1986. I was also involved in bringing in local bands to play on the stage in the back of the bar.

The poster here is from November 1983. We had 10,000 Maniacs for shows many times.

The only time we had a touring band was The Replacements in 1985.

I enjoyed spinning records at that bar. I had tried a few other places but their was something about this bar. I really could play whatever I wanted. I learned to read the crowd. Sometimes people wanted to dance but most of the time people just wanted to hear some good music. It evolved into a artist hangout dive bar down the street from the state college. It certainly still have the local flavor of Grant Street but Bob the owner didn't tolerate the bullshit that was seen at other bars up and down Grant. There were a lot of locals banned from his place.

Other bands

• The Stains/Elements
• 10.000 Maniacs
• Pauline & The Perils
• The Jetsons
• Davy & The Crockets
• Ani Difranco
• Splatcats
• Extra Cheese
• Electroman
• The Cobras
• The Pine Dogs
• The Fems
• The Vores
• Attendance
• Extra Width
• 
  

Shipboard Memories - Locker Space

I'm using the towel as an example of our tight quarters and lack of personal space onboard a Navy ship in the early 1970's. I doubt things have changed since then but I'm only speaking to my experience.

All of your belongings were stored under your bunk. That included all your uniforms, underwear, towels, toiletries and personal belongings. Your towels were a good example of the sacrifices made for space. Our towels were very small and closer to the size of a hand towel. They certainly were not the size of a bath towel. They taught us in boot camp to use your hands to remove water drops from your body before using a towel because you didn't have much of a towel. I still do that today with my hands to shake off most of the water before using my towel.

A major change to our use of personal storage space in 1971 when Admiral Zumwalt, the Chief of Naval Operations, announced that Navy personal would be allowed to have civilian clothes onboard their ships to be used on liberty when in port. This was a big deal. Nobody had civilian clothes on a ship before this order was given to the fleet. Of course that meant you needed to give up something in your locker space because everyone always had used their lockers to capacity. Now suddenly you could have shirts, pants, jackets and shoes that were not part of your uniform but you still needed to have the same amount of uniforms you had before the order. The space available did not change.

Having the option to wear civilian clothes on liberty while away from the ship was a game changer although we still looked like a group of American sailors wandering around a foreign city looking for a bar. Before the change we would all be wearing our uniforms in foreign ports.

There used to be businesses located outside of Navy bases that had lockers for rent where you could store civilian clothes. You would leave the ship, walk down to the locker place and change into your civvies before going out on the town.  You then had to go back there and change into your uniform to get back onboard the ship. Suddenly all that changed and those places went out of business.

Laundry was regularly done on the ship including your civvies. We had these mesh laundry bags that kept all your stuff together in the laundry. You never lost anything because it was all washed and dried in the mesh bag. Towels, uniforms, underwear, civilian clothes all went into the bag.

Wibbage

WIBG was my go to radio station as a teenager growing up in Philadelphia throughout the 1960's. The nickname of the radio station was Wibbage. It began playing rock and roll in the late 50's and was the main source of contemporary teen music until WFIL began playing rock and roll in 1966. There were also two R&B and soul stations that I would sometimes play... WDAS and WHAT.

Wibbage was where we all heard the music of the Beatles back in the day. I carried a little transistor radio with me everywhere I went and WIBG was on the dial. Here is more about that old little radio.

I played WFIL a little in the later 60's but I would always turn back to 99 on the dial to Wibbage. I really liked the DJs there too and bought a lot of their oldies collection LPs. I would stick with Wibbage until the FM underground radio stations appeared around 1969. Then it was an all new thing. For me that only lasted a little while and then I was off to the Navy for four years. When I returned the FM stations had evolved into the WMMR stations that we would listen to throughout the 70's along with the two university stations WRTI for jazz and WXPN for almost anything.

WIBG was originally founded as a religious station in the suburbs. The call letters stood for I Believe in God but that didn't last very long. The Philadelphia station went off the air in 1977 but was later revived as an FM oldies station out of South Jersey.

Chances Are

The Book List

Chances Are by Richard Russo, 2019.
Read in December 2019.

Richard Russo is another one of my favorite authors and I always try to read his latest book. This was a fascinating novel about friendship and a suspenseful mystery about a long ago disappearance and a little different from his usual stories. Russo never disappoints. 

There was also a scene in the book that brought be back to my youth. The main characters are sitting around a table during the 1969 draft lottery waiting for their birthday to be called and the future decided. I remember that night 50 years ago very well. My draft number was 10 and I enlisted in the Navy right away. 

Trattoria Aroma - Birthday Dinner

We had dinner last night at Trattoria Aroma for my birthday with Sean and Ashley.  Sean and I enjoyed some nice grappa. The food was wonderful and the service was very good. We have actually seen a very nice improvement with everything including the dinner prices since the last time we had been here. We've been coming here at least once a year for a very long time and going back further when it was the Just Pasta restaurant back in the 1980's.

The owner recently sold off his other two restaurants to concentrate his efforts on this Bryant Street tradition. We could see, feel and taste the difference. He plans to renovate too. Looking forward to coming here again.

St. Francis of Assissi School

My old school… 1957-1965. St. Francis of Assisi, Philadelphia. Carved up wooden desks with ink wells, nuns with rulers, venial sins, warm soft pretzels at recess and a half block walk from home.

Sometimes we had to hide under our desks from the Russians but we were never worried about us all getting shot to death.

The building had a candy room, a pretzel room, a Boy Scout room and a very nice auditorium in the basement where we had student assemblies and shows. We had a lot of fun playing in that schoolyard at recess and before classes. Then the bell rang and we lined up.

There was no cafeteria in the building. Students all went home for lunch except for a handful of kids from Nicetown who ate in a classroom every day.

The main staircase was extraordinary and very beautiful. I loved walking up the stairs adjacent to those front widows. The building was torn down a year or so after I graduated because it was perceived as a firetrap. The replacement building was very mundane and nothing at all like our school.

We lived a half a block from the school and we could see those two towers from our backyard overlooking the neighborhood. The church next door had a large bell tower that rang the angelus every day and let us know when it was time to run home for dinner.

Every year there was a carnival in the early summer that would set up in the schoolyard for a week with rides that included a big ferris wheel. It was one of the highlights of the year.

In the aerial picture our house and backyard are in the very lower left corner.

Parent Conversation

50 years ago this week I sat down at the kitchen table with my mother and father and explained to them my intent to enlist in the Navy right after my upcoming 18th birthday. There was a nasty war going on and they were worried but they gave me their fearful blessing with the promise that I would go back and finish college on the GI Bill when I completed my four year service. I did.

There were a lot of similar conversations at kitchen tables all over America during that month of December in 1969. It was the first draft lottery on December 1st and suddenly young men knew more about their chances of getting drafted into the Army to fight the war in Viet Nam. There were many draft parties on college campuses that night where guys sat around and listened for their birth date to be read with the knowledge that there futures and possibly their lives were in the balance. A low number meant you were likely to get drafted and a high number meant you were safe.

My number was 10. I joked that it was the first time I was in the top ten of anything. I enlisted in the Navy a few days later following that conversation at the kitchen table with my parents. 

Following my four years in the Navy I did go to college for four years and I was fortunate that the state of Pennsylvania had a financial program for resident veterans where if you attended a state college or university then you had free tuition from the state. I went to Temple University and it did not cost me any tuition. On top of that I got the federal money from the GI Bill which I could that monthly check to pay for books, fees and living expenses. 

This turned out to be a blessing because a few months after I enlisted my father passed away suddenly from a ruptured brain aneurysm. My family would never have been able to pay for my college tuition after that and the veterans benefits got me my college education.

Fifty years later I still vividly remember that conversation at the kitchen table with my parents. It was actually probably the last time I had a serious talk with my father before he died.

Faded Love

Faded Love Mix - I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry

This is an example of the CD mixes I made and shared with members of the Art of the Mix online group. This was from 2004.

I had made a series of mixes that included songs about love and loss. This was one that exemplified the genre. Later I would rename the series Heartache and would describe it as mostly quiet songs of heartache and loss. Love songs. Break-up songs. Songs from different time periods and genres. There would be about 10 CD mixes in this original format.

After I retired in 2016 I began reworking my mixes and was no longer using CDs. I just stopped burning mixes on CD. I was using my iPod in the car to play new mixes.  I felt liberated to no longer be restricted by the physical time constraints of the CD format and I began making mixes that were an hour and a half which was actually closer to my original mix time of the 90 minute cassettes I used in the early 1980's.

So then I had the revised Love and Heartache series of approximately 90 minute mixes. I had about 20 of those mixes.

Well, that didn't last very long and by 2019 I started making the 8 hour mega mixes and the songs used in the Love and Heartache series were incorporated into those new long mixes. But that is another story.

Here is a slightly expanded version of the original Faded Love mix on Spotify.