Skip to main content

Flashback Friday


Betcha your Mom never played the accordion.  The musician of the family was Marj.  She forced us boys to have organ lessons for years from Ila Mae with varying degrees of failure.  Oh those mournful notes of "Long, Long Ago" still pound my brain!  How we managed to sit at that organ and go through the notes in repetition, eventually to stumble through simple tunes?  How Ila Mae managed to sit at that organ with us listening to that vapid, futile exercise?

Dick and Mona denied their daughter little.  Not sure if the need to explore the accordion was her idea or theirs, but here we are with a series of pictures of Marj looking every bit the part of Gus Polinski and the Polka Kings.  












Marj would graduate from the accordion and settle in with the organ, one of which was in our living room as we were growing up. To this day I can do a rousing "We Shall Overcome" but, sadly, Marj's hopes of bringing culture and music to the barbarians were dashed.  Every bit the trooper she carried on, even playing on weekends at the Oak View Country Club lounge area as a kind of guest entertainer.  The routine, as I recall, was to be dropped off at Harry's Flick House in Aledo on Friday nights then taken to the Club till the folks were ready to go home.  This gave us an opportunity to see what adults do.  Marj would sit at the organ and play all the popular current hits of the day.  I even remember her going to the Cities with us boys in the back seat and she would go to a place up there to get new sheet music.

 As for the accordion, we never uncovered any instrument of that ilk around the house so her romance with that particular devise may have been brief.  No info on these pictures.  I'm not smart enough to figure out the squiggly info at the bottom.  No 1/3/3?  Number 1, 1933?  Who knows.  If that is true, then we have an 8 year old Marj in these photos.  The series itself is professionally framed and I suppose there could be further info if I were to unwrap the back, which I won't do.   

 Marj, to her credit, never stopped trying to civilize the barbarians.  She had to give up hope for us boys as we grew up and left her tutelage, but poor Herb was still around, off and on.  One Christmas she got him a harmonica.  Her grasp as the musician of the family was never threatened.                

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Flashback Friday

Class, Or Lack Thereof The Dwight Vice gravestone in Oquawka, Illinois. I bring this old chestnut out every so often just to remind me that class is classless.  Dwight Vice was killed in his home near Oquawka in 2001.  It was one of those things that can generate crime:  two guys thought Dwight had a lot of money stashed at home because of his pot-selling sideline to supplement his fishing job.   Not really one of those big drug deals gone-bad things.  Marijuana was, according to the trial, about the only stuff Dwight sold.   But these two guys barge into the house and killed Dwight and attempted to kill his 11 year old kid, Darryl, before they took off with what money they could find.   His son, now 23, was stabbed in the back and left for dead.  He survived and is wheelchair bound and has undergone several surgeries to repair his wounds.  He will be paralyzed for life.   None of this is pleasant.  Reading the f...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Mary Davis Home - Part 2

None of these pictures were taken by me,  they came right from the MDH website.  I am posting these so that friends who have never seen inside where I worked can gain access.  After 27 years I have many stories, tales and acquaintances.  But, I wouldn't know how to express them appropriately in a few paragraphs.  I enjoyed 98% of my stay there and hope I made a difference in the lives of a fraction of the kids who entered.  The original MDH at this site was just the front part.  The large red-roofed area in back was added on in the 90's. This is the Jerry Carlton library.  It was unofficially named after one of the counselors who truly loved the place.   He passed away around 2002, I think.  Mr. Farber looks like he is explaining a few things to a client. The classroom. Activity area with the gym behind the windows. Another shot of the classroom. It was a little different area to teach since we had 2 classes and 2 teachers i...
Post a Comment
Read more

Statuary In North Straub Park

The Vinoy is not the only park in town.  The place is fairly littered with them, and almost all, except Bum Paradise, are pretty nice.  This is North Straub and they have some old pieces in that seem to have suffered from time and perhaps human folly.     These and some 30 other statues were imported from Italy by local developer C. Perry Snell to help beautify the city.  Mr. Snell was in real estate and during the depression he went on a European shopping trip to collect items for the city.  He obtained these from Italy and installed them in this park even after the bottom fell in the markets.  He fulfilled his obligations at great personal loss to his own company and wealth.  Halso continued to pay his staff during those tough times.  He developed many areas in the city, Vinoy, Snell Isle, Crescent Lake and the beach area down around Fort DeSoto.  He lived from 1869 until 1949 and then buried in Kentucky.  I wo...
Post a Comment
Read more