Spinning 45's

A prologue for those too young to know:  There was a time in history, after the age of the Cro-Magnon man, but before that of pop tarts.  It was the age of saddle shoes, black and white television sets and Ford Edsels.  It was also the era when the latest craze in sound reproduction hit the music market; more specifically the youth music market.  It was compact, fairly inexpensive, relatively light, and who cared in those days if the the listening quality was just one notch above "tolerable"?  This was the time of the 45 player.

"45" was a designation for the discs which turned on the machine at a rate of forty-five revolutions per minute.  (R.P.M.'s referred to things beside car engines in those days.)  45's were considered an advance over those ancient 78's, which were heavy and brittle enough to crack under the impact of scarcely more than a poorly placed elbow.  The 45 was engineered for survival, and pliable enough to withstand the weight of an adult male sitting on it, if it wasn't for a very long period of time, and the male in question wasn't over-indulging on pop tarts.  In size and weight,  they are what a cd on steroids would look like.
           
            The playing device adorned many a bookcase of high school and college kids; yours truly included, of course. The fact that they were high maintenance, requiring repeated disk replacement for every four minutes-worth of music, did nothing to dissuade the afficionado of his day... or even the would-be afficionado. I remember, as a high school freshman,  the first time I ventured into West Portal Music in San Francisco and asked for a 45 of a certain tune that was given a lot of play on the radio.  Knowing my parents, as well as their old school 78 equipment, the clerk asked, "Why do you want to buy that?"  He received the most lame of justifications, "Because."

             It is a point of pride with this writer that he is able to associate almost every song, every disc he has collected with a time and place when it was first heard.  Some might call that a trivial pursuit, but anything that deters a septuagenarian's aging is not trivial.  Pat Boone: the prince of the pop charts, the "April Love" movie, and Yale University.  What more does a guy need?!  Boone provided the only incentive necessary to buy my first pair of white buck shoes.  "Don't Forbid Me" was a tune which defined the last days in the age of naivete, when a beau worried about negative reactions of his intended to "the whisperings of sweet nothings in her ear."  That age ended around the time of the McCarthy Hearings in the U.S. Senate.

       Patience and Prudence was a female duet whose monikers defied, dare we say,  "credence".   What are the odds, after all, that these two girls would discover each other's names before entering into a recording contract?   As things turned out, "Tonight You Belong to Me" was their only big hit, but in the fall of 1955 it was well worth a buy.  
           The disc was played countless times in my room at the Phi Delt fraternity where I pined over the girl who captivated me.  The result was that academic pursuits were pushed into mañana status.   Bye-bye, four- year degree, and hello, girl of my dreams!  It was not all that difficult to dismiss the consequences of his deeds for a young and reckless soul.
               Comes September of 1958 and the approach of matrimonial bliss. My two closest and dearest high school  friends, "Deacon", and "The Mule Skinner" accompanied this writer on a ride up highway 99E from Palo Alto, California to Portland in a newly purchased, but not-nearly-so-new 1953 Ford Customline four-door sedan; equipped with four partially-bald tires.  The ultimate destination was a chapel with a priest and lady in white rainment. As we sped along the highway, I felt a tell-tale wobble from one of the front tires.  Deacon told me that if my car was like his, once we passed 50 mph, the wobble would go away.  It did,  just as he said it would.  What a guy, and what a best man!! The three of us continued our northward journey;  interspersed at junctures with moments of personal, voiceless prayer whenever the critical speed was approached.  
                 The music on the car radio filled the air, and provided brief respites

from anxiety and road-exhaustion.  One of the songs we heard was Don Gibson's "It's been a blue, blue day.  I feel like running away.  I feel like running away from it all."  That song drew rounds of guffaws each time we heard it.
            But for your scribe, the most memorable of tunes was composed and produced by another  virtual unknown,  Peter De Angelis, called, "The Happy Mandolin."  The station we were listening to must have played that at least a half-dozen times altogether on the round-trip.
           It is indeed a happy song, but it also carried with it a "coded" message that everything was going to turn out well.  So far, it has.  Upon my return to the work-a-day world at St. Paul Insurance Co., I bought two copies of that song.  There was the distinct chance that this guy's gem might never come my way again.  There was no sense in taking a chance with something so special.  As it turned out, it's now available on I-Tunes.  Whenever I play it on the car cd player, I have to ask the Bride if she remembers when she first heard it.  She smiles, but has grown tired of answering the question. 
             Finally, there is Joe Dowell who recorded a handful of hits that grossed a million dollars, including "Little Red Rented Rowboat," and, "Wooden Heart", which Elvis made popular in Europe.  However, in our house, he is best remembered for "Bridge of Love", which was oft-played on the air while yours truly was stocking Safeway Store shelves after hours in the early '60's when our children were very young.

      When I hear it play, it brings back memories of the first home that we were able to call "our own".  The house was situated in a working-class neighborhood in s.e. Portland.  Almost all the neighbors were good friends, and were actively, but respectfully engaged in each other's lives.  Fast forward now to 2014, and a hill in Boring.  Here, we can honestly classify but one pair of neighbors as good friends.  Times change, and not necessarily for the better.
         This collection of 45's was lost for well over a decade, and was "unearthed" during the course of an archaelogical expedition, conducted by the Bride,  into the deepest, most remote reaches of basement storage room #2.  This "cavern" allows for inspection in an upright position, but still, it is not a place where the feint of heart nor weak of knees should ever venture.  That cavern-caveat notwithstanding, if the reader has such a burial ground, it would be adviseable to explore it more often than once every ten years.  Who knows what riches might be rediscovered?!