In here are stored broken dreams, lucky strikes,
dried bones,
and desert storms,
memories of towns and lakes that are no more,
and of Julia Bulette, who never died.
Sunshine!
Stars!
Blue bright glory of sky, sky,
sky.
In here are a peepshow of
Easter egg hunts in brittle grass, of
icicles two feet long, and snow at Christmas,
of a gleaming arch over a street beaming and
buzzing neon stories,
of a casino whose front
was a testimony to those who came before us
and loved it here,
but none more than I.
MLydiaM (1991)
I was too late (by five hours) to submit this poem at the Mr. Linky widget for Thursday's dVerse-Critique and Craft.
I had hoped to get this posted there in order to be behind James Rainsford in the list, because his poem reminded me of this poem of mine that in ways related to his subject and that got me going on this post. His subject was, um, ladies of the evening — and a famous one from the Victorian Era in Nevada is mentioned in my poem. You can read a bio of Julia C. Bulette HERE, where you can see the marker established in Virginia City in memory of her by the men who, um, appreciated her kind services. So I am off the hook for having to follow critiquing guidelines for the first time, which seemed daunting on a lack of sleep anyway — but I so enjoyed his poem that I'm still going to link it to this post.
I am mourning the horrific crash at the Reno Air Races on Friday afternoon. Reno is my hometown, as some of you know, and so my heart is there right now. This old poem is my tribute to the pilot who lost his life plunging from
Blue bright glory of sky, sky,
sky
and to those in the box seat area who were killed and horribly injured. From early reports it appears that the pilot made last-second efforts that successfully kept him from crashing directly into the stands, thereby saving hundreds of lives. I refer you to my hometown newspaper online for the latest details.
Finally, the casino front mentioned in my poem was the huge ceramic mural in front of Harold's Club, with words on the top that said: Dedicated in all humility to those who blazed the trail.
A friend (left) with my mother (right) at Lawton's Hot Springs
In this month that has become an annual remembrance of my mother for me -- she died in October 2000 -- songs are in my head. It interests me how, each year, without any particular prompting or planning, certain particulars about her scurry ahead of other memories to predominate. In 2009 it is the music she loved, so I'll be sharing some of these songs at Writerquake in tribute to her and as a means to afford myself the time and space to let what memories come flow out with the tunes.
I'm calling this series Songs My Mother Taught Me, but that isn't altogether true. She taught me many, but some I learned because I lived them as she lived in them. The songs played.....over and over.....and I listened and made up my own stories about what they meant. I watched her emotional reactions to the music, and studied her to try to figure out what they meant to her, why her eyes got that foggy, far-away look, why her red-lipsticked mouth would take on that crooked smile leading to a self-inflicted bite to her lower lip as the tears began to fall.
The English translation of the poem by Adolf Heyduk that Antonin Dvorak set to music in 1880 are a 99% fit for many of her favorite songs (the 1% being that I don't have children to play them for.....but I have you):
English Translation
Songs my mother taught me,
In the days long vanished;
Seldom from her eyelids
Were the teardrops banished.
Now I teach my children,
Each melodious measure.
Oft the tears are flowing,
Oft they flow from my memory's treasure.
Ivory Tower. You will see below that the song was recorded by three separate artists in 1956. Learning the year helped me to understand why the song was so mysterious to me. I was five. She was single (and would later that year marry for a fourth time, settling for a man she thought would be a "good daddy" for my sister and me). But she swooned over Ivory Tower for the unattainable married man, a boss at Harold's Club where she was a blackjack dealer, the man who had been instrumental in helping her through the hell of her divorce from my father, the man who lived with his family out Mayberry Drive parallel to old Highway 40 with the Truckee River snaking in between them on its way from Lake Tahoe to Pyramid Lake. I remember her taking us on our "country drive" on Mayberry, always in the gloaming of evening, and that there was a ranch-style house with a huge front lawn where we always slowed down and we would ask why. She told us JH lived there, saying his name with adoration - so we also adored him...or the name of him. Once or twice we saw his children at play and I wondered why we couldn't stop to play with them, since she knew their dad.
My mother had one day off per week, amazing to think of now. No paid vacations, no sick leave. Those days off were treasures to her, especially in the summertime. She'd pile us into the convertible and off we'd go to Lawton's Hot Springs or Reno Hot Springs, depending upon which way she felt like driving. I loved both places: Reno Hot Springs for the stark sagebrush surroundings and the refuge of the cafe on the same property, and Lawton's for the tall diving tower and shady park along the Truckee River.
Lawton's Hot Springs (air view of the place here) had popular music playing out over the swimming pool from giant speakers that covered the far reaches of the picnic area. I remember many of the songs that played at Lawton's, and Ivory Tower was one of them. In my mind the song had something to do with the tall diving tower at the deep end of the olympic-size pool. That, and also I thought of elephant ivory because I'd heard that was what piano keys are made from.....and the piano in the song was pleasing to me, so it seemed there was a connection.
To read about Lawton's Hot Springs directly from the book The Rise of the Biggest Little City: an encyclopedic history of Reno gaming, by Dwayne Kling, click here. I think I must order this book because my mother always wanted to write about the early days of casino gambling in Reno. Somewhere in her papers are essays she wrote as a start on the project, never completed. But I'm not looking at her papers this October. This year, around the ninth anniversary of her death, I'm listening to those songs my mother taught me, the soundtrack to parts of her life and her heart (which was her art).
CORRECTION REGARDING ARTIST: The singer is not Gogi Grant, but, in reality is Gale Storm singing this version of Ivory Tower. Gogi Grant (famous for other 1950s songs) never recorded Ivory Tower. The correction is noted at comments after this particular video at youtube. Where there were other videos of the song with actual photos of Gale Storm, I selected this video to post here because of the interpretive photos.
There were three versions of Ivory Tower recorded in 1956. First by The Charms, then Cathy Carr (#2 hit), and Gale Storm (#6 hit). Click on links below to hear the different versions. I am not totally sure whether the 45 rpm record that my mother played at home was the one by Gale Storm or Cathy Carr. Maybe she had one by each of them.
waynebrasler left comments after a youtube video of The Charms version, correcting some information there that said the black group, Otis Williams and The Charms, weren't the original artists of the song. They were.
Gale's version actually was a cover of Cathy Carr's cover of the Charms' original. Cathy was on Fraternity Records, Gale on Dot but both versions were done at Universal Studios in Chicago with the same engineers. Gale covered many black artists, including Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers' "Why Do Fools Fall in Love." For an artist who was a classically-trained soprano she did amazingly well with this music, mostly because she respected much. With her perfect pitch, Gale was a dream to record.
Another person commented about the different black and white artist versions:
I always bought the black originals, except for Gale Storm, because she was so good on 'My Little Margie' I bought both versions.
Gale Storm passed away . . . 2 days after Michael Jackson and almost no one noticed.
Gale was an unappreciated talent both as a singer and actress, she made 50s TV worth watching.
After reading the comment about her death, I checked. Gale Storm died on June 27, 2009. Her interesting obituary at The New York Times included what, for me, is a special tie to the woman behind the voice - because my sobriety anniversary is October 15:
After her decade of television fame, Ms. Storm turned to stage work in Las Vegas and to regional theater. But she also battled alcoholism in the 1970s and wrote about her struggle in her 1981 autobiography, “I Ain’t Down Yet.”
“I was the star of my own cornball B movie,” she wrote, alluding to her success and her stable, happy home life, “and suddenly it turned into a horror story.” She gave the credit for her recovery to a California hospital’s aversion-therapy program.
I stole the captivating photo of Gale Storm from the blog Inner Toob, where there is a great post written about her in memoriam.
Ah, Reno......my birthplace, looking here in this old postcard like it did when I was born and not all that much different than it looked when, in high school, we'd "drag main" right up Virginia Street after school games, flirting, smoking, hollering at tourist jay-walkers as they crossed the street in the middle of the block without the slightest consideration of this being our town, that we were born here, that we'd just won State for god's sake.
There's Harold's Club where my mother dealt 21 for 17 years. It's as familiar-looking in this shot as my local grocery store is to me today. When I was a kid Harold's Club replaced the glass doors with the amazing air curtain that meant the front entrance to the casino was miraculously wide open to the elements without letting the elements affect what was beyond the constant warm blast of air.
Dreamland was inside. Children accompanied by adults were allowed in the restaurant on the third floor, which meant that after walking through the warm swoosh and inhaling the first heady smells of cigarette smoke and alcohol, money and makeup, we could walk a short distance to the escalator that crawled to the floors above. Harold's Club restaurant was known for its bakery and I loved their banana nut cake. As a college student I worked in a savings and loan just about one block up and one block over from the top of this view and we ordered Harold's Club cakes monthly to celebrate all staff birthdays in a month. When my turn came I requested banana nut cake (my mother had long since left "the club" and was excelling at a change in career so this meant our steady supply of said cakes had gone dry).
An excellent source of information about Harold's Club lists what was special about the place, including (read the full list at the link):
* Casino gambling's first national and worldwide advertising campaign placing 2300 billboards featuring a covered wagon and "Harolds Club or Bust." A world map was hung in one of the casino's hallways, sprouting a veritable fur of little red pins representing the location of a Harolds Club or Bust sign. * They introduced "mouse roulette," with a mouse released into a cage onto a circular board with numbered holes. The mouse would eventually go into one of the holes, and the number on the hole would be the winning number. * They were the first casino to hire women dealers. * The Children's theatre, the forerunner of the requisite arcade for player's children. * A sign was placed near the escalator leading up to the bar with the gun collection meant to attract all the potential gamblers. It read "Gambling is a game of chance. We advise you to wager no more than you can afford to lose. The Management." * Harold's Club was the first of the modern themed casinos.
The famous Reno Arch, first erected in 1927 with different wording to commemorate an exposition held there, was reconfigured into the one shown here around 1935 and didn't change until 1963. I hated the one that replaced it. As a native Renoite I absolutely loved reading this short but excellent history (with photos of each of the versions) of the Reno Arch.
See that signage painted on the building in the left foreground? There's a personal story linking me to a later-generation male of that family. Could I have attended grammar school with him? Could we, years later but still way too young, have coupled for one night only but in the first-time way that binds us in one way forever? Could he have introduced me to marijuana later on in college, we listening to a tape by Taj Mahal while parked up on Peavine Mountain, looking down at the twinkling lights of the town we'd known all our lives?
At the end of the street in this shot, on the left, stands the Mapes Hotel (she writes with a lump in her throat) that is no longer. The same people who did such a nice job with the history of the Arch share the so very poignant history of The Mapes. The authors note that The Mapes was Nevada's first highrise.....hard to believe given all the construction in Las Vegas and Reno since that time. A Reno landmark from 1947-1982 (and finally demolished in 2000), I remember it for these things:
the giant standing polar bear (a taxidermy specimen) that greeted us at the front door, a marvelous huggable someone that I didn't identify with death, and certainly couldn't have imagined being representative of a species that would be in a dire struggle for survival within four decades
my occasional lunches with Silas E. Ross, the benefactor of my studies at the University of Nevada in Reno, who was a true and great Nevadan I was richly blessed to know; he had a regular table in The Mapes main floor dining room and would be seated before my arrival but always stood at the table when the hostess escorted me there
Thanksgiving Dinner in 1975, my first as a married woman, and I chose to break away from family and to instead have dinner with ex-husband, Jack, and some of our friends in The Mapes Skyroom on the top floor overlooking Reno and the valley surrounded by snow-capped mountains; the next night we couldn't get over to my mother's house fast enough for real leftovers
the last time I saw the old crumbling and boarded Mapes Hotel, when Mike and I were in Reno for a high school reunion in 1999; I recalled these stories, took pictures, waved my fist in the air...............and did not say good-bye
This post is to thank my new friend, Francessa, for honoring me in her recent fascinating post from Germany titled, The Road to Reno. Francessa's post concerns the relationship of an award-winning (2007) book titled The Road to Reno with the 1960 movie The Misfits that was filmed there, starring Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe.
Born and raised in Reno, I left there for Oregon when I was 25. I do so love Oregon and haven't regretted moving here. However, you can take the Nevadan out of the desert but you can't take the desert out of the Nevadan. So I travel there in my thoughts frequently, and make the occasional 500-mile trip back to my hometown for a dose of the land that raised me.
I was nine-years-old when The Misfits was made. My mother was a 21 dealer at Harold's Club and told Nel and me about seeing Clark Gable and some of the film crew in "the club." I don't recall that she sighted Marilyn Monroe or Arthur Miller, but I'm fairly sure that my mother wouldn't have known who Arthur Miller was at that time.
It became a part of Reno lore that The Misfits was Gable's last movie, some believing the strife with Monroe on and off the set to be the cause of his spiral into-illness-into-death.
But that was before a Kansas-based church (actually a hate group) proclaimed at the beginning of 2008 that "God hates Reno," and surely if they'd known this in 1960 Monroe would have been let off the hook and the location of the film might have been blamed for Gable's death. The original post in the iconic and irreverent blog God hates Reno describes how 21st-century Renoites reacted to the insane comments by the sect reported by the Associated Press. For one, that wickedly funny blog was born. It's listed in my Reno blogroll separate from my main blogroll. Just love that gaudy "neon" header.
This photo is from my solo drive to Reno in April 2007. I hadn't been "home" since 1999 and I'm sure it won't be that long until my next visit. That trip was to attend the surprise 80th birthday party of the mom of a childhood friend of mine. Carol's mom and mine worked at Harold's Club together and were close friends. My mother is gone now and I was anxious to represent her at the gala.
Mike couldn't be away from work so I hit the road alone. Every mile that took me closer to Reno held more excitement than the next. I just didn't realize how much I'd missed that familiar place until I saw the Sierras come into view and the air became drier and warmer and I heard Reno radio stations. Sure, I know I can get them online but there's nothing like knowing the music is coming from where I'm heading. Faster. Giddier. Younger. I drove straight into the pages of my past, passing this scene and then stopping and driving in reverse to take the shot.
In my blog-roaming I came across some posts describing bloggers' first memories, and their memories seemed amazingly clear. That was three days ago and I've been returning to the thought of first memories as I've gone about my work, as we had a scare over Abby's health (her vet just called to say her blood work was perfect so big worries are over), as the rainy, cold weather sapped me with ennui and some depression.
My own first memories aren't as vivid as those of the bloggers whose posts I read. I have early memories, but pinpointing an absolute first memory isn't something I think I'll be able to do.
As I considered it there were childhood scenes, feelings, tastes, and sounds that competed with one another for my first memory. This one edged the others out:
Cinnamon toast My mother was a 21 dealer at Harold's Club in Reno until I was in 6th grade. She worked the graveyard shift when I was little so that she could be with Nel and me during our waking hours. In this memory Nel was an infant and I was around two years old. I would wake up while my mother was getting ready for work and she'd pick me up from my crib, and set me in my high chair in the kitchen where we'd have cinnamon toast together. I can sense the quiet dark night all around us, and remember the excitement of this stolen time.
Harold's Club employees wore western clothes and she'd be in her tight western pants, cowboy boots, western shirt with her name tag on the lapel (she'd put on the white western hat before leaving for "the club"). Often she used this time to touch up the deep red nail polish on her perfectly shaped nails while she talked with me.
