Archives for July 2013

I recently treated myself to a “mental health day.”

With my wife off visiting her family in Minnesota and the weatherman promising bright sunshine and temps in the high 80s, the conditions seemed perfect for some serious self-care.

I arose early and by 6 a.m. I’d fed and walked the pooch, taken out the trash and loaded the dishwasher.

Household duties duly dispatched, I headed to the garage for the ancient and mystic ritual of awakening my vintage 900 cc Honda.

After keying the ignition, I always check to make sure the green “neutral” light is on, after engaging the manual choke, I hit the starter button and stand around sipping coffee for another 3-4 minutes. When the engine is sufficiently warmed up, I back off the choke, reveling in the mellifluous four-cylinder symphony.

The auditory and olfactory stimulation accompanying this ritual affect me pretty much the way all that bell ringing must have affected Pavlov’s dogs.

I’m ready to ride.

Cruising a ribbon of fresh two-lane blacktop up near the Belgrade Lakes, I encountered plenty of other bikers with the same idea as me. I couldn’t help reflecting upon how far the sport of motorcycling has come since I started riding in the late 60s.

Back then, the prevailing image of bikers involved scruffy leather-clad outlaws looking for trouble. But this stereotype, reinforced in movies (like the “The Wild One,” featuring Marlon Brando and Lee Marvin attempting to terrorize the good citizens of a small California town) was about to be eclipsed.

Nobody could have imagined that a scant dozen years later, those bad-boy bullies would be sent packing, not by some rival motorcycle gang, but rather by a cheerful assortment of middle class housewives, Ivy League jocks, coeds and buttoned down junior execs zipping around America on a new breed of brightly colored, inexpensive, gas sipping Japanese motorbikes.

The sound track for this two-wheeled revolution was a catchy Top 40 style advertising jingle, the chorus of which promised: “You meet the nicest people on a Honda.”

So it should come as no surprise that I took my very first motorcycle ride on one of these diminutive imports.

That brief ride was all it took to convince me I had to get my own bike. In the spring of my senior year at high school I did just that after I spotted my dream machine parked in a dusty corner of a shabby used car lot on Route 196 in Lewiston.

The bike’s Ferrari red paint job and gleaming chrome tank cast a powerful spell, temporarily blinding me to its long list of less than stellar qualities including, but not limited too, its tiny size, skinny tires and conspicuous lack of anything remotely resembling actual horsepower.

Ah, but the clincher was the price. How could I possibly go wrong when the salesman promised I could drive it off the lot for under $250 including sales tax and 14-day plates? How indeed.

Did I mention the part about me driving it off the lot? Despite my utter lack of two wheeled experience or a valid motorcycle permit, I managed to talk the salesman into forking over the keys and my friend Bill into driving me to Lewiston to pick it up and to follow me home to make sure I got there in one piece.

Bill was one of the genuinely cool kids in town, due in large part to the fact that he drove an electric blue Chevy Malibu 396SS, one of the hottest muscle cars on the planet.

Only years later did I realized what a ridiculous sight the two of us must have made driving into town on that warm spring night.

The bike I’d just spent my life savings on was a well used Honda “sport 65” which might have hit 55 mph flat out in top gear going downhill with a strong tailwind.

At 6 foot 3 inches and 200 pounds, I’m sure that on the road I resembled a Shriner who’d lost track of the original parade. Bill, following close behind me in his rumbling muscle car, must have only served to accentuate the visual absurdity.

None of that mattered to me, of course. I finally had my motorcycle and the freedom was absolutely intoxicating. But that freedom was, sad to say, short lived.

Within a matter of weeks the bike and I came out on the losing end of an altercation with an octogenarian motorist piloting a huge battleship grey Plymouth Fury.

Sadder but certainly a bit wiser, I survived the encounter with nothing more serious than a bruised ego, a broken leg and the memory of my brief stint as a “rebel without a clue.”

Original Appeared in the Boothbay Register

At age eight I contracted a serious case of the TV bug.

Not the common variety whose primary symptom is a compulsion to watch endless hours of television, but the infinitely more virulent strain characterized by an overwhelming urge to appear on television.

It all started innocently enough when my mom, serving a hitch as our Cub Scout den mother, loaded a boisterous scrum of 8- to 10-year-old Scouts into our Ford Country Squire station wagon (forest green with about a half acre of plastic-wood bolted to its gleaming metallic flanks) and drove us to the studios of WGAN TV in Portland to join the audience of the popular local program “The Ken MacKenzie Show.”

Back then, when affiliates like WGAN worked hard to develop original programming to supplement the nationally syndicated network offerings, a fellow like MacKenzie, an affable country & western singer, guitarist and enthusiastic yodeler made the ideal host.

Basically a home grown version of big time “singing cowboys” like Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, Ken had paid his dues on the dance hall and county fair circuit. With his backup band, wife Simone and guest vocalist Betty Gribbin, he brought genuine talent to the brand new world of the tiny screen.

Not that I gave two hoots about any of that. Nope.

All I could think about while riding the elevator up to the TV studio was that I was finally entering “TV land.” Heck, for all I knew, I might bump into Annette Funicello. I had the TV bug all right, but, I sure wasn’t looking for a cure.

In the years since, I managed to find enough TV work to make a living at it. And while I never did meet Annette or any of the other Disney stars, I had plenty of fun along the way. Plus, I had the chance to meet some of Maine’s true TV pioneers; folks like Dick Stacey, Charlie Tenan, Curly O’Brien and Dick Curless.

By the time I met Curless in the early 1980s, he was an established country music legend with dozens of top 40 hits to his credit, including the 1965 Billboard Top 5 ballad “A Tombstone Every Mile,” in which he warns, in that trademark booming baritone voice, of the danger facing truckers foolish enough to drive on “ … a stretch of road up north in Maine … ”

The song’s title should give you a pretty good idea of how the story turns out.

Although Curless was the biggest star, the others (Dick Stacey, Curley O’Brien and Charlie Tenan) all earned their place in the Maine homemade TV Hall of Fame by virtue of their contributions to the legendary Country Jamboree show.

Originally broadcast late at night from a tiny studio in Bangor, The Country Jamboree ( universally known as “Frankenstein’s” for reasons that will soon become obvious ) quickly built a cult following.

The format couldn’t have been simpler. Charlie Tenan (later replaced by Dick Stacey) was the genial host of a rambling, off-the-cuff “not-so-grand old opry” style local talent/variety show.

Although there were “regulars,” like Jennie Shontell with her heartfelt rendition of the gospel standard “On the Wings of a Dove,” people really tuned in because just about anybody could, and frequently did, walk in off the street and start performing.

Dick Stacey began hosting the show in 1973 and I believe the show was eventually broadcast from the downstairs lounge at his eponymous motel in Brewer. If memory serves, ads for the bar, called The Corral featured the tagline “Where stable people horse around.” Stacey even took the show on the road a few times, once filling a 2,000 seat auditorium in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.

OK, but how come everybody called the show Frankenstein’s. Ah, it’s devilishly simple really. The show’s long time sponsor was Frankenstein’s, a general store in downtown Milbridge. The last time I saw Charlie Tenan, he asked me if I’d ever wondered how a store called Frankenstein’s came to be located in a remote village on the Maine coast.

Charlie’s explanation was a classic example of good old-fashioned Yankee ingenuity.

Apparently the store had originally been called The Ben Franklin Store. Then, following a dust up of some sort with the home office, the franchise (including all rights to the name) was abruptly terminated.

What to do? Well, the owner obviously couldn’t continue using the original name.

But since the sign and the moveable theatre marquee style lettering that came with it was bought and paid for; he could do with it as he wished.

And that, dear friends, is a fresh, homemade slice of Maine TV history.

Original Appeared in the Boothbay Register

Independence Day is that marvelously homemade celebration of liberty, reflecting the unique values and sensibilities of small town America.

Oh sure, big cities have celebrations, too. But, if you can set aside your political cynicism long enough to experience the kind of heartfelt patriotic pride and genuine optimism, which, against all odds, still runs like a spring-fed stream through the landscape of contemporary American life, I’d recommend spending the Fourth in a small Maine town.

Having grown up in just such a place back in the 1950s and ’60s, my earliest memories of July 4th celebrations conjure up an increasingly hard-to-imagine era when gift shops were few and far between and fishing boats, a massive seafood processing plant, and busy shipyards dominated the local waterfront.

My childhood home still sits on a hill overlooking the harbor. Although these days the view is obscured by more than a half-century’s worth of tree growth, back then, on a clear day, I could see Monhegan Island from my bedroom window.

Despite this enviable bird’s-eye view, we always walked downtown when it was time for the fireworks show to start.

Who could blame us?

There’s just something magical about standing on the town dock at sunset with your siblings, the mailman, a stray dog or two, your first grade teacher and her husband and everybody else packed in tighter than Maine sardines in a can, anxiously anticipating that first whistling contrail rising into the night sky, arcing toward its spectacular “bombs bursting in air” payoff!

Speaking of bombs bursting in air, July 4th remains the one day of the year when you will absolutely be expected to sing all six verses of “America the Beautiful” from memory, including the one with the unlikely reference to feet:

“Oh beautiful for Pilgrim feet

Whose stern impassioned stress

A thoroughfare for freedom beat

Across the wildernesssssss…”

You gotta love that one. Besides the quirky foot reference, catchy tune, patriotic theme and awesome rhyming, you get a couple of new vocabulary words tossed in at no extra charge.

In my professional life I’ve been privileged to participate in plenty of memorable small town Maine July 4th events.

Have you ever been to Brooks, Maine? Brooks is a tiny Waldo County town with an amazingly big spirit. The year I performed there the whole 4th of July show was staged at the gravel pit and I think all of the 1,000 or so residents showed up.

The big draw was a local long-haul trucker with several million miles in his rear view mirror, giving guided tours of the cab of his brand new 18-wheeler. Before you start snickering, have you ever been inside one of those rigs? It’s a fascinating experience, one you’re not likely to duplicate in New York or L.A.

These days I like to spend July 4th in Washington County. A couple of years ago I performed at Grand Lake Stream with some local acts including my old friend Randy Spencer, the Singing Registered Maine Guide who really got the crowd going with an original tune everybody could relate too, “The Black Fly Blues.”

My wife and I have also watched the Lubec 4th of July parade from our friend Vikki’s front lawn. Lubec is about an hour’s drive from our place in South Princeton and although the actual parade only lasted 15 minutes that year, everybody was having such a good time that when they returned to the starting point they decided to keep going and do the whole circuit one more time.

See what I mean about “homemade”? Naturally, the cheers were even louder the second time around.

Perhaps my favorite Independence Day memory ever is from 1986 when I was Grand Marshal of Eastport’s Annual Callithumpian (look it up yourself, I’m on deadline here) Fourth of July Parade. That year marked the 100th anniversary of the installation of the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor. Millions of dollars had been donated by private citizens toward restoration of the iconic landmark in time for her centenary.

Since the project had received a lot of press, I wasn’t surprised to spot a young girl marching along, covered in tin foil, holding aloft a cardboard torch. I was, however, baffled to note that her tin foil costume was almost entirely obscured by an intricate network of plastic soda straws painstakingly scotch-taped together.

The mystery was solved when her mom explained that her daughter had insisted on the elaborate overlay of straws, meant to represent the metal construction staging, an integral part of Miss Liberty for the entire span of this young girl’s life.

Ah, I thought, of course. God bless America!

Original Appeared in the Boothbay Register