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If you’re ever wandering down Leinster Gardens in Bayswater Road in London, take a careful look at Numbers 23 and 24. These houses are in fact just façades, built to disguise an exposed part of the Metropolitan underground railway that runs behind them. In the 1930s, a man famously sold hundreds of guests tickets to a black tie charity ball there – only for them to turn up and discover the houses were fakes.
Edit: Since I wrote this little post, these building fronts have featured prominently in an episode of “Sherlock Holmes,” the wonderful new series staring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman. I was delighted to see them written in to the plot.
Picture: Murray Sanders / Daily Mail /Rex Features
Clara Luper, an Oklahoma history teacher, ordered thirteen Cokes at Katz Drugstore in Oklahoma City on August 19, 1958 for herself and twelve children, ages 6 to 17. Lunch counters in Oklahoma, like much of the South, were segregated. This wasn’t just a request for drinks, but a request for civil rights.
Waitresses ignored them. Other patrons did not: leaving the restaurant, pouring drinks on them, cursing at them. The group left after a few hours without their drinks. They returned the next day and were served their Cokes, and burgers, too.
“Within that hamburger was the whole essence of democracy.” – Clara Luper
Note: This took place a year and a half before the much more famous sit-in at the Greensboro (NC) Woolworth’s on February 1, 1960. Luper would continue her fight to desegregate public spaces in Oklahoma City. She was arrested 26 times between 1958 and the passage of Oklahoma law to desegregate. (Passed two days after the Civil Rights Act.)
Before Halloween was the holiday known for dressing up in costume and begging for candy (this practice did not become common until the 1940s and 50s), children in NYC often participated in what was called Ragamuffin Day. On Ragamuffin Day – which was Thanksgiving Day – children would dress themselves in rags and oversized, overdone parodies of beggars (a la Charlie Chaplin’s character “The Tramp”). The ragamuffins would then ask neighbors and adults on the street, “Anything for Thanksgiving?” The usual response would be pennies, an apple, or a piece of candy.
In 1936, The New York Times’ only mention of the ragamuffins is to state:
Ragamuffins Frowned Upon: Despite the endeavors of social agencies to discourage begging by children, it is likely that the customary Thanksgiving ragamuffins, wearing discarded apparel of their elders, with masks and painted faces, will ask passers-by, ‘anything for Thanksgiving?’
In 1937, organizations such as the Madison Square Boys Club were reported as having Thanksgiving parades as an effort “to discourage the Thanksgiving ragamuffins.” By 1940, that parade had grown in size to over 400 children and sported the slogan “American boys do not beg.” Though the parading boys still dressed in costume as ragamuffins, many donned costumes of other things and people – such as alarm clocks and Michelangelo. – New York Public Library
According to one expert, “Ragamuffin parades, which harkened back to European traditions, were a chance for the poorer immigrants of New York to march through the streets in extravagant costumes, begging for change.” (From Bank St. Irregular)
On November 1, the FTC announced it had shut down 5 companies that were participating in the “Rachel from Cardholder Services” scheme, but over the last 3 days I have been being called relentlessly by “Ann from Cardholder Services”; I have been receiving phone calls from 701-671-9224, which is apparently a new prefix for Pacific Telecom Communications Group.
This article from the Telecom Compliance News Press gives abundant information about the scam and, based on the area code and prefix that is calling you, places you can lodge a complaint. Here is the salient text from the article:
If you’ve received an unsolicited telemarketing call from Rachel at “Cardholder Services”, Tom with “Home Security”, or other robocall originating from a phone number listed below, it likely came from a telemarketer that has entered into a revenue sharing agreement with a public utility named Pacific Telecom Communications Group.
Pacific Telecom is involved in a scheme whereby they profit from the millions of seemingly illegal unsolicited telemarketing sales calls made each week that are identified with their phone numbers, all in apparent violation of 16 C.F.R. §310.3(b) of the Federal Telemarketing Sales Rule.
Pacific Telecom has a foreign “subsidiary” registered in Belize, which seemingly acts as a “shell” company to hide the identity of the individuals who initiate these outbound telemarketing calls and makes it difficult for regulators to investigate this activity.
Our analysis of FTC consumer complaint data shows that Pacific Telecom phone numbers are the target of over 25% of consumer telemarketing complaints to the FTC. A staggering 208,362 complaints were filed with the FTC against Pacific Telecom phone numbers over a recent 3 month period alone.
The mastermind behind these schemes appears to be an attorney in Portland Oregon named F Antone Accuardi. Although multiple State and Federal investigations are under way, so far Accuardi has not been brought to justice.
The more people that complain, the more the authorities will be motivated to keep working on shutting these bottom-feeders down.
This has been an Old Wolf public service announcement.
Once upon a time, when movies were silent, audiences would enjoy films accompanied by a live orchestra that provided background music and sound effects. This, however, was an expensive proposition for theater owners, and when Robert Hope-Jones introduced his “Unit Orchestra,” smaller theaters had the option of providing a reasonable fac-simile of orchestral music with a single instrument and a single musician.
Robert Hope-Jones (1859-1914)
Hope-Jones combined his organ-building operation with Wurlitzer, but apparently became despondent over the partnership and ended his life in 1914; his legacy, however, lived on and blossomed into one of the most unique eras in American theater music.
The Detroit-Senate 4/34 Wurlitzer
Today, only the devoted or the fortunate have had the chance to see, hear, or lay hands on one of these behemoths; I have been privileged to play several of them, although I am nothing but a dilettante, a duffer, and an amateur in the purest sense of the word – I simply love the music of these incredible one-man orchestras. While in their heyday there were hundreds of these around the country, only 40 or so exist in their original theatres, but many have been rescued, restored, and installed in private locations.
I was first introduced to the magic of Theatre Organ music when I worked at a restaurant in Salt Lake called Pipes and Pizza shortly before serving a mission for the LDS Church in Austria.
Edit: Pipes and Pizza was also mentioned elsewhere in a blog post about defunct Salt Lake pizzerias, here.
The Wurlitzer 3/32 console. This means that the console has 3 manuals or keyboards, and there are 32 different sets of pipes with different voices.
Typical theatre organ pipe chamber; note the percussion instruments above, and the accordion-like bellows below which vibrate up and down to produce the signature tremolo sound.
The console showing the pipe chambers behind half-moon windows. Notice the shutters above the windows, which open and close to control volume.
Theatre organs included many percussion instruments including xylophones, glockenspiels, marimbas, chrysoglotts, and traps (drums, triangles, castanets, bird whistles, etc.) and many others. This enabled a performer to provide endless combinations of sound effects to accompany silent movies.
Thanks to a comment from Mike Ohman, noted classical and theatre organist and co-owner with Cal Christensen in the Pipes and Pizza venture (also assistant director of the BYU School of Music), we have learned that this wonderful instrument was not disassembled, but transported to the Founders Church in Los Angeles. A manual was added to make the instrument a 4/34, and is played by venerable Lawrence Welk organist, Bob Ralston, weekly. Wonderful news!
This is the best photo I could find of the Holmes Chapel at the Founders Church of Religious Science. You can see the console at the upper left… barely.
The El Capitan Theatre Wurlitzer in Hollywood
Many of these organs were never envisioned by Wurlitzer itself – people bought consoles and various pipe ranks, added manuals, and created incredible monsters of astonishing range and power. Wurlitzer was not the only company to get on the one-man-bandwagon; Möller, Kimball, Compton, Robert-Morton and many others manufactured organs for theater use. In later years, Rodgers, Allen, Conn and others produced some amazing electronic theatre organs for home and professional use.
The Allen “George Wright IV” symphony organ
Rodgers 33-E
If you have more money than God, Allen would be happy to build you a behemoth, either to your specifications or from their catalog.
Having mentioned George Wright, I need to say that from where I sit, this man is the Babe Ruth of the organ world. As you will hear below, there are many people with absolutely mad skills on these instruments, but Mr. Wright is probably the best of the best. Of the best. Sir!
Organs I have been privileged to play include the Pipes and Pizza organ above;
The Salt Lake City Organ Loft 5/34;
The two-manual Wurlitzer in Salt Lake City’s Capitol Theatre,
and a couple of others in various places which are no longer existent.
In 1959, when my cousins were visiting New York from their country home in Connecticut, something possessed them to go take in a double-feature horror show (either at Loew’s or the RKO theatre, I can’t recall which one.) Double-billed was The Spider and Terror from the Year 5,000.
Bad idea.
My 8-year-old brain was scarred for decades. The Spider was bad enough, but The Terror had me pissing my pants any time I saw a closet door left ajar.
And not having TV or cable in later life, I missed the opportunity to poke fun at it on MST 3,000.
Until last year.
I found a copy of it at a vintage movie outlet online, and got my dear wife a copy of Don’t be Afraid of the Dark, the one that scared her to Nouakchott when she was young. They’ve been sitting on our shelves unopened, until the other night when the Goodwoman of the House was taking a nap, and I was working on a knitting project.
So I bit the bullet, and in it went.
Good idea.
Surprise! It’s not a bad film at all, as B-movies go. It had a plot, it had a message, and the effects were nowhere near as corny as some other things I’ve seen. And, over half a century later, not terribly scary.
The basic plot: A scientist develops a time machine that has been sending small objects into the future, and bringing back “trade” items – which happen to be highly radioactive. He’s got a fiery young assistant who’s got the hots for his daughter, and a bad case of paranoia as well. The professor’s daughter arranges for a former colleague of her father to come down to the island where the experiments are taking place, and during a demonstration of the machine, a Phi Beta Kappa key is exchanged for a medallion which has “Save us” engraved on it – in Greek.
The professor decides the machine is too dangerous to use until more information can be gathered, but lover-boy (Victor) – who thinks he’s being sidelined – runs the machine at ever higher power until he brings back a lady from the 51st Century (seen above). She’s badly disfigured from the effects of radiation and seems to have hypnotic powers accentuated by shiny fingernails and the thousands of reflective bangles on her outfit, but other than that she’s largely unremarkable.
Victor’s about to get a surprise.
Earth of that year is dying of radiation poisoning, and this lady’s mission is to bring back someone with undamaged genes to inject new life into their dying society. Unfortunately, she’s not beneath killing anyone who gets in the way of her mission, including a caretaker and a nurse, whose face she steals (perhaps they had vintage movies in her day, and she had watched Silence of the Lambs).
The “Future Woman” wearing a stolen face (actually her own, that of the lovely and talented Salome Jens in her debut rôle.) [1]
At any rate, after much drama, Victor is killed in the lab trying to send the woman back to her time, and the unfortunate visitor is shot. In the end, the professor explains that they don’t need new genetic material, because the future is yet unwritten, and mankind has a chance to avoid atomic holocaust by acting more sensibly now.
Having seen it again, about the only major complaint I had about the film was the soundtrack, which incorporated a lot of musical interludes that sounded like they were lifted from Disney’s Pinocchio. The atmosphere of the movie was serious enough that the tinkle-tinkle passages seemed out of place. Other than that, I give it a thumbs up.
And, it’s nice to know that my horrific memories from the 50’s were nothing more than a child’s untutored perception.
[1]Salome Jens
Salome Jens has had a vigorous acting career, and in later years has played some very-recognizable characters (at least, recognizable by their makeup).
Star Trek TNG – “The Chase” – Humanoid Progenitor
Star Trek DS9 – The female shapeshifter and “ambassador” of the Founders.
Salome Jens and Gil Rogers in I Knock at the Door and Pictures in the Hallway, 2007.
Yeah, yeah. The photography’s better, and they had the internet to spread it round, but here’s a shot of me and some friends on Mt. Sugarloaf in Maine, back in 1965.
Playing in the World Game 