GrooveCentralLA

What I groove on

Archive for the month “September, 2012”

29 Sep 2012
3 Comments

Lucky Lindy we dug you as a flyboy, but what’s the deal with all the chicks ?

OK, we can give the nod to Charles Lindbergh as the first flyboy who flew solo from New York to Paris (has Jimmy Stewart ever been finer?), but the whole America First Committee (AFC) thing, where as the chief spokesman, he campaigned to keep the United States out of World War 2 and was branded an anti-semite for statements he made on behalf of that cause (” The Jews are a race with undue influence in the media, warning that the passions and prejudices of such ” other people” would lead the country to ruin.”) We knew then that there was something dark, twisted, and acheiving a high mark on the weirdo meter, behind his big blues.   He was  a supporter of racial purity and a staunch eugenicist, which is someone who believes in the improvement of the human species through control of hereditary factors in mating.  Lindbergh’s knowledge of this came from breeding animals on the farms of Minnesota.    More black marks on his resume –  he never really retracted his groove of Nazi Germany in the 1930’s and made public the invincibilities of the Nazis and their value as a bulwark against the hated Russians, who he regarded as a much greater evil.

(By the way, the AFC was the foremost non-interventionist pressure group against the American entry into WW2 that was not started by a bunch of extremest weirdos – but by Yale law student R.Douglas Stuart, future president Gerry Ford, future Peace Corps director Sargent Shriver, and future U.S. Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart.  Members included Chairman of the Board of Sears, Robert E. Wood,  Sterling Morton of Morton Salt, novelist Sinclair Lewis, poet e.e. Cummings, film producer Walt Disney, actress Lillian Gish and author Gore Vidal.  Architect Frank Lloyd Wright was rejected on “a reputation for immorality.”  (That would leave out all my friends.)

Lindy’s private life was no day at the beach, most of which was his own doing. He married Anne Morrow, daughter of the U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, and stayed married for 45 years. Towards his own family Lindbergh could be cruel, locking his 18 month old son out of the house to foster independence and forbidding his wife to cry when the baby was famously kidnapped and murdered a few months later.  Anne was a very accomplished author and a champion of women’s flight but Lindy was ” physically and emotionally absent” and was a control freak of the highest degree.  Needing someone to tell her she was a groove, Anne entered into an affair with her own physician who provided support and fun – something that Charlie was never good at.

Lindbergh’s real weirdness emerged when after he died of cancer, it was revealed that in addition to his five kids he had with Anne, Charlie had not one, not two, but three separate families living in Germany and Switzerland from which he had 7 more kids.  All were perfectly concealed until after he was gone.  The three lovers bore him  7 kids between the years 1958 and 1967.  The children recall a tender father who always arrived in a Volkswagon beetle wearing a beret (was it raspberry in color ?)   Their mothers told the children that their father was a famous writer from the United States who had been trusted with a secret mission and they should never speak of him.  Their birth certificates declare “father unknown”.   No wonder that the very popular dance ” The Lindy Hop” was named for Charlie.

Then in 1972 , at age 72 , the ” Lone Eagle” crashed to earth, dying of lymphatic cancer at his home in Maui, Hawaii. Always the control freak, he specified the exact dimensions and constructions of his grave (” Father was obsessed with drainage” said son Jon.)  (Aren’t we all?)  He wanted his body wrapped in all cotton sheets, but had to settle on a cotton- polyester blend (all they had at the local store – don’t you hate that).   Only his wife Anne was allowed to sit at his deathbed when” Lucky Lindy ” exhaled his last breath and only then by instructions could she kiss him. He hated to be touched.

Charlie Lindbergh was an excellent flyer, but a flawed man who was a cold customer with deep rooted weirdness.  Maybe  he is guy who could fly you out of a sky full of trouble, but let’s not call Charlie for the good times. Groove.

Posted in Uncategorized and tagged , , , , , ,
26 Sep 2012
7 Comments

Sandy – Baseball’s Reluctant Icon

” There are two times in my life when the hairs on my arms stood up : When I saw the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and the first time I saw Sandy Koufax throw a fastball.”

As said by Al Campanis, future Dodger General Manager, who at the time was a Dodger scout  and gave Sandy a tryout.  The Dodgers signed him to a $6000 salary and a $14,000 signing bonus. Koufax said he planned to use the signing bonus for tuition when his baseball career failed. To make room for Sandy on the Dodgers, a left hander named Tom Lasorda was optioned to the Montreal Royals of the International League.  There are those who say the resentment from Lasorda remains to this day.

Koufax struggled in his first 6 years in the majors finishing his 1960 season with a 8-13 record. After the last game of the season he threw his glove and cleats into the trash (only to be retrieved by the clubhouse supervisor and returned to Sandy the following spring) and vowed to quit baseball and devote himself full time to an electronic business. Persuaded to give it one more year, a hitch was found in his delivery mechanics, and with that correction – the best 6 years of a pitching performance in Major League History was started.

His stats are unmatched in such a short period of greatness (2x World Series MVP, 4x World Series Champ, 3x Cy Young winner (all three were unanimous),  4 no hitters, 1 perfect game,  Major League Baseball all Century Team, Major League Baseball All- Time Team, the youngest man ever inducted to the Hall of Fame,  best post season ERA (an incredible o.95),  but I think Sandy Koufax the Man is much more interesting.       

Koufax is remembered for his decision to not pitch Game 1 of the 1965 World Series because it fell on Yom Kippur.  Derided by many, “the Great Jewish Hope” as Walter O’ Malley called him, inadvertently made himself a religious icon and a reluctant celebrity. (When Senator Joseph Lieberman became the first Jewish American to be named to a national political ticket in 2000, he was dubbed ” the Sandy Koufax of politics.”)  Just one year later, at the age of 30, he was gone from the game retiring at the peak of his career going 27-9 with a 1.73 era. Suffering from arthritis and concerned what continuing his baseball career might do to his body, he left on top.  Words of wisdom that we all should follow.  Sandy summed it up this way : ” I’ve got a lot of years to live after baseball and I would like to live them with complete use of my body.”

With Sandy’s retirement came the notion that he was a recluse. Because he chooses not to comment publicly on his life or to refute other’s impressions of it, he is labeled aloof.  Sometimes these perceptions are hardened by a mistake, like when his absence at the 1999 All-Star game in Boston, when the top 50 living players of the 20th Century met (including a final appearance of Ted Williams), Sandy’s absence was cited as more evidence of his reclusiveness.  In fact, he had never received an invitation. Often when he does show up at events and is asked about being a recluse,  he frequently responds: ” My friends don’t think I’m a recluse.”   He is someone who knows and values the difference between solitude and loneliness.  He is offended by the right things: lack of civility, honesty, and kindness and as Walter O’Malley says of him “He wants to see the best in everybody.”  The editors of Sports Illustrated named him their favorite athlete of the 20th Century with an article headlined  “The Incomparable and Mysterious Sandy Koufax.”  Fans were stunned to learn he hadn’t read the article. “I haven’t disappeared, I’m not lost, and I am not very mysterious.”  The only subject matter that doesn’t interest him is himself.  He is a genuine modest man who dismisses any talk of idolism with “The older I get, the better I used to be.”  Dusty Baker, known as El Lizard in certain circles, ex Dodger, and current manager of the Cincinnati Reds , says” He’s one of the coolest dudes I’ve ever met, ever.”

On a magical night at Dodger Stadium on Sept.9th, 1965 Sandy threw a perfect game. (“2 and 2 to Harvey Kuenn…” the line uttered by Vin Scully that is etched in many of our minds.) It was the first perfect game thrown by a left hander since 1880. The game also featured a quality performance by the opposing pitcher, Bob Hendley of the Chicago Cubs, who pitched a one hitter that night.  35 years after the game Bob Hendley received a package with a note that read ,”We had a moment, a night, and a career. I hope that life has been good to you. -Sandy .” Inside was a signed ball with the inscription “What a game.”  When Hendley showed the ball to his son Bart, he noticed it was signed by Warren Giles, the long dead National League president and that it was a ball from the era of the perfect game.  It was the game ball of that magical night at Dodger Stadium. “I’ve been offered a lot of money for that ball and a lot of folks ask what was it like to be the other guy that night?, I tell ’em it’s no disgrace to get beat by class.”

” Trying to hit him was like trying to drink coffee with a fork” -Willie Stargell

” Pitching is the art of instilling fear” – Sandy Koufax

” Koufax throws a radio ball, a pitch you hear, but don’t see.” – Gene Mauch

” Koufax – he’ll never amount to much ” -Tom Lasorda

Sandy (at age75)

Posted in Uncategorized and tagged , , , , , ,
19 Sep 2012
5 Comments

A Torpedo for Your Thoughts…or a Three Hour Tour

Was it Gilligan’s fault that the S.S. Minnow ran aground on that uncharted desert isle?  Maybe, but the Minnow

The Minnow

(not named for the small bait fish, but named for Newton Minow, who Gilligan’s Island executive producer Sherwood Schwartz believed “ruined television.”  Minow was chairman of the F.C.C. and was noted for his speech in which he called American television “a vast wasteland”) survived the show and now resides on the east side of Vancouver Island as a charter boat for sightseeing tours. This cannot be said of the escort destroyer USS William D.Porter.

It was 1943 and the “Willie Dee’s” first duties were to be  assigned to one of the most secret and critical missions of ww2. They were to escort the mighty USS Iowa (currently docked at the Port of Los Angeles) whose mission was to deliver Franklin Delano Roosevelt,  Secretary of State Cordell Hall, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and many others (totaling more than 80 in the President’s party) to French North Africa to meet with Joe Stalin and Winston Churchill. This was the first of the high level summits between the Allied leaders. With maximum speed, the trip would still take up to 8 days in U-Boat infested waters, so the sailors were on high alert and radio silence was imperative.

The Willie Dee’s journey got off to a bad start. As Capt. Wilfred Walter backed his ship out of its berth in Norfolk, Virginia her anchor snagged the ship beside it and ripped off it’s railing, life rafts, a small boat, and various other equipment. It wreaked havoc on its neighbor, but just scratched Willie Dee’s anchor. In a hurry to meet the Iowa, Capt. Walter issued a quick apology and the destroyer was on it’s way.

The sun of ineptitude was shining on the Dee, so within of 48 hrs into her mission a loud explosion startled the convoy and this initiated anti submarine maneuvers. Not to worry signaled the Willie Dee. It was just a depth charge that had accidentally fallen off the ship because the trigger was not on “safe” as it should have been .

Soon after that the ship was hit by a freak “rogue wave” losing a man over the side never to be seen again. The wave caused the engines to temporarily lose power putting the “Porter ” far behind the convoy. The Chief of Operations, Admiral Ernest King, was on board the Iowa and was becoming increasingly embarrassed and frustrated by the actions of the Willie Dee. He made his displeasure known to Capt. Walter who assured the Admiral that things would improve. Improve they did not.

The USS William D. Porter

When the convoy was east of Bermuda, the Iowa’s captain offered to show Roosevelt how the battleship could repulse an air attack. As the Iowa fired its defensive guns at weather balloons sent aloft as targets, the president sat on the deck enjoying the show.  Over on the Willie Dee, Capt. Walter thought this would be a good shot at redemption and ordered his crew to battle stations.  They conducted a drill in which they would practice torpedo launching at another ship. The crew chose the Iowa, some 6,000 yards away.  The trick here is that all the primers, which are needed to launch the torpedoes, are to be removed.  The problem is that the crew did not remove all the primers – so when the bridge officer shouted fire #1 there was no sound which was good, when he said fire #2 there was no sound which was also good, but when he said fire #3 and a ‘ whooooooosh’ sound was heard, the astonishment was quickly overcome by pure horror. The crew of the Porter had just sent a torpedo at the Iowa carrying the President of the United States.

Remember, this is a secret mission and radio silence is very important, for breaking it might signal its location to the enemy. A signalman was to alert the Iowa of the terrible situation, but the young inexperienced sailor instead signaled that the Willie Dee was “going in reverse at full speed.”  Capt. Walter put on the scale ” Should I break radio silence or possibly kill the Leader of the Free World.”  He broke radio silence and after haggling over who was calling, the Iowa obliged to turn hard right missing the torpedo by 350 yards which blew up in its wake. Capt.Walter and crew could breathe again, only to see every gun on the Iowa train their sights on the small destroyer thinking assassination was in the air. Walter tried to soothe the Iowa by saying it was a mistake. Admiral King had had enough of the Three Stooges act and ordered the Willie Dee out of the convoy and to report to Bermuda where the crew was met by fully armed Marines and the entire crew was arrested. A  first in American Naval history.  Somebody had to take the fall, so a crew member was sentenced to 14 years of hard labor. When Roosevelt heard the sentence he ordered the crewman freed since no harm was done.

The Porter was sent to the chilly waters of the Alaska to cool down, but a drunk crew member was determined to fire one of her guns, sending a 5 inch shell into a commander’s front yard while he was having a party for fellow officers and their wives. No harm, but another notch in the yardarm of the Navy’s goofiest ship.

The “Willie Dee” sinking

It is now 1945 and the Porter eventually found itself patrolling the seas off Okinawa where it was fighting off Japanese kamikazes, blasting several out of the sky. A kamikaze approached the Willie Dee and it successfully shot it down, but the plane was moving so fast that when it went into the water, it continued to moving underwater towards the ship. It moved directly under the William D. Porter and exploded, lifting the ship out of the water.

The ship who had caused so much trouble that it seemed Gilligan might have been their Captain, sunk in less than 3 hours without losing a single crewman.  It’s niche in history was kept secret until 1958, when the Navy made the story public. The Minnow or the Willie Dee?  Don’t know how many crew members of the Willie Dee looked like Ginger or MaryAnn nor did they have anyone as smart as the professor.   Groove.

Posted in Uncategorized and tagged , , , , ,
14 Sep 2012

The Man Ben Davidson

There was a memorial for Oakland Raider great Big Ben Davidson down in San Diego. Ben passed away on July 2nd, he was 72 years old. There were many of the old school Raiders in attendance whose stories were amusing and clean yet there was always the feeling that they were holding back. Otis Sistrunk (University of Mars), an overweight Marv Hubbard (” I used to be a fullback now I am a full front “), George Atkinson (criminal element), John Vella, Rod Sherman, Tom Flores (ex Raider head coach), Phil Villapiano, and many others honored Ben with their presence. A few told stories of their old friend (like how Big Ben got his friends in the Hells Angels Oakland Chapter to help insure prompt payment of rent at one of the apartment buildings he owned  or when Ben and a teammate after a night of heavy drinking took a shortcut through a pasture only to be confronted by an angry bull. The bull charged Ben (who was 6’8″ and close to 300 pounds) and had him between the horns, drove him back into thick bushes. The bull ran away leaving a moment for Ben’s teammate to check on his health. Ben stood up , dusted himself off, and said  ” If I wasn’t so damn drunk I would have been able to pull that guy off his motorcycle.”)

Ben was more than a Raider. He won two Rose Bowls and a National Championship at the University of Washington. He won a NFL Championship (Before Super Bowls) with the Green Bay Packers and took his bonus money and bought an apartment building which was very unusual both then and now. He continued buying apartment buildings his whole life and worked construction in the off season. But as a Raider he shined – winning multiple awards as their defensive end. He also broke Joe Namath’s jaw, speared Lenny Dawson, and almost took Bob Griese’s head off, but was convinced “they had it comin.”  

Ben, who grew up in East Los Angeles, spoke fluent Spanish, which came in handy for his many motorcycle trips to Mexico, Central America, and South America putting over 100,000 miles with his good friend and teammate Tom Keating (who also passed away recently). In his travels Ben visited over 100 different countries and collected over 2400 beer bottles from around the world which now reside at a bar in Normal Heights, San Diego.

His acting career included movies Mash, Conan the Barbarian, and Behind the Green Door (Ben played a non participating Bouncer) and T.V. classics from the 70’s and 80’s as Chips, Happy Days, Charlie’s Angels, and Duke’s of Hazard to name a few. Of course he had one of his biggest roles as a spokesman for Miller Light for 17 years. Ben visited over 100 U.S. military bases around the world shaking hands and visiting hospitals.

Ben and his wife

Among the speakers at the memorial were the national and local presidents from the Muscular Dystrophy Association who tearfully related how much Ben had done for them not just raising money and playing in golf tourneys around the country, but visiting the children at the hospitals who had been taken down by the disease. According to them Ben Davidson had given as much as any celebrity and always asked what he could do more. Ben supported other charities in San Diego and across the U.S.

Many a family member and friend spoke that day , but one of the more moving tributes was given by Ben’s mailman who spoke of him as a generous, intelligent, thoughtful, giant of a man who became his friend.

I think that says a lot.

Ben and his 3 daughters

 

Posted in Uncategorized and tagged , , , | Leave a comment
07 Sep 2012
7 Comments

Gaylord Wilshire – Quack but Cool Cat

Gaylord Wilshire

” Get your I-ON-A-CO electric belt.”” It ironizes your iron and cures everything from baldness, cancer, tuberculosis, diabetes and almost any other disease and will change your hair back to its original color.” Ravings from a “pompous-fake,”  a “pointed bearded charlatan, “a natty dressed quacksalver”?  Henry Gaylord Wilshire  was all those things, but he was also a friend of the great writer Jack London, socialist politician and writer Upton Sinclair, Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, science fiction writer H.G.Wells, and Julian Hawthorne, son of Nathaniel. He co-formed the exclusive Los Angeles Country Club and helped establish the California Club, the city’s first private men’s club.  But Gay, as he was called by friends, is known primarily as the namesake for the most important thoroughfare in the history of Los Angeles.

Automobiles had yet to make an appearance and the Rio Porciuncula still had enough water to sustain a run of steelhead when Wilshire bought 35 acres in Los Angeles for $52,000 in 1895.   He filed subdivision papers announcing his plans to carve a wide magnificent boulevard, but his creation would travel just 1200 feet, then empty into trash filled brush. It was an abandoned barley field as recorded in “Hancock’s Survey of Pueblo Lands” ( Major Henry Hancock, father of Hancock Park’s founder G.Allen Hancock, was the city’s surveyor at the time). Gay had little to do with the growth of the boulevard and several attempts have been made to change the name of the street.   No one would suspect that Wilshire’s 4 block long dusty road would someday connect with El Camino Viejo and other fragments of Indian and Mexican dirt roads, become 16 miles of the grandest boulevard in Los Angeles, and lead us out of the horse drawn era. It would be the first to traverse the entire city, from downtown to the sea.

Having inherited a lot of dough from his father, Gay was known for his voracious hunger for the spotlight, and like a few gents I know, would erupt in long oratories almost always accompanied by groans by those surrounding. He was called the “Millionaire Socialist” but also was a grapefruit grower, gold miner, billboard mogul, inventor, publisher, and made and lost several fortunes. He ran for office at least six times and never won (including office for the British and Canadian Parliament).  His second wife Mary McReynolds studied with Freud and Jung in their early days and eventually opened a psychoanalytic practice in Brentwood. She became the primary earner of the family and bought one of the first homes in Palm Springs.

An I-ON-A-CO Belt

At first, the I-On-A-Co electric belt sold well, but the research institutions and doctors who supported it in the advertisements were made up. It turns out the device was a leather collar wrapped around eight pounds of meaningless wire coils that plugged into a wall socket.    The American Medical Association was hot on his trail when he called it a day on September 6th 1927.

Gay was quite the guy and we would do well to have more characters like him around us. So next time you roll into the H.M.S. Bounty bar (at 3357 Wilshire), when it comes time to take a leak you will be doing so at the residential hotel “The Gaylord”, a once proud establishment named after Henry Gaylord Wilshire. Give the guy the nod and go back into the H.M.S. and pound three more.  Groove.

Posted in Uncategorized and tagged , , ,

Post Navigation