Tales of the Tarantula
Page 3
Anyway, I had a great time working on the T&G copydesk, and after graduation, I found a job doing the same job on a daily paper in Westchester County, New York beginning in 1975. I worked every shift imaginable, and in just about every editorial department. I loved the fact that every day was different, the work required creativity, and that at the end of the day you got to take home your day’s work in your hands. And each day was a clean slate.
Then in 1980, CNN was founded. It had an immediate effect on newspapers. Editors felt they could no longer compete on breaking news. The focus changed from news to analysis. Deadlines of formerly afternoon newspapers were adjusted so that papers would be available for the morning commute. That way, the production and distribution time between the writing of the newspaper and its availability to the public would take place at an hour when news was not likely to happen.
I saw the writing on the wall. I applied to law school to have a parachute out of what I saw even then as a dying industry. The year I left the newspaper business – 1984 – was the peak year in number of papers sold daily. The total daily circulation numbers have been going down ever since. The coming of the Internet just hastened the decline.
And so, here we all are on the World Wide Web. We are in the age of do-it-yourself journalism. Unsubstantiated rumor stands on an even par with double-sourced facts. There is no money for proofreaders, or even copy editors. Twitter is touted as a news source. It’s depressing for those of us who remember when journalism was a profession and journalists were professionals.
With newspapers cutting back their staffs, or closing altogether, former journalists can be found doing just about every job imaginable. Some of us are lawyers. Others have tried to eke out a living in public relations, advertising and even as teachers. But I think we all miss the excitement of crafting a quality newspaper on deadline. For me, there is no joy in being right 30 years ago about the decline of the newspaper business. It has not been pretty watching the decline. All I can hope for is that new online organizations will arise from the ashes and bring back the professionalism and respect that once caused print journalism to be reverentially referred to as the Fourth Estate.
I believe in the power of serendipity
March 2013
The dictionary defines “serendipity” as “the phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for.” Probably the most common form of serendipity these days is using an internet search engine and finding something great that was not what you were looking for. This is part of the attraction of “surfing the web” for many people.
But serendipity is not a new phenomenon. I first noticed its power back in the 1970s when I got my driver’s license. I would set out on a Sunday afternoon in a random direction from my house seeking an adventure. I would make turns on a whim. Sometimes, the reason for a turn would be simply to follow an interesting car like a Corvette or an Alfa Romeo. Sometimes, after the law allowing right on red was passed, it was simply a matter of making a right to keep moving. Most often, the turn was just a feeling drawing me off in that direction.
These trips (long before GPS) invariably ended in an intriguing new place. In addition to adventure, these trips served to familiarize a new driver with all the roads in a 50-mile radius of his home because I always had to find my way home.
Then in college, I found serendipity in choosing college courses. My school had a system of registering for courses back then that was based on seniority. Juniors and seniors got first choice of their electives over sophomores and freshmen. I remember one year trying to get into a popular professor’s history course that was filled and having to settle instead for a course with a professor I did not know. The course proved to be fascinating and I went on to take two more courses with the professor.
And then there’s serendipity television. That’s when you turn on the television and a great movie you’ve never seen is on the channel that the television happens to be tuned to. Back about 30 years ago, my wife and I turned on our television on a Saturday morning just to have something to watch while we woke up and ate our breakfast. Three hours later we finished watching The Best Years of Our Lives. The film pulled us in and never let go. We later found out that it was an Academy Award winner in 1947, but neither of us had ever heard of it and probably would not have seen it for many years, if not for serendipity.
The internet has increased exponentially the possibility of serendipity. Just about every time I go to Netflix to have a particular movie loaded into my queue, I come across another movie or two that I have never heard of that goes on to be a favorite. Companies like Netflix and Amazon have raised “we thought you also might like” to an art form. This is manufactured serendipity, but it still works if you go along with it.
And of course that’s the secret to serendipity. You have to have a mindset that allows you to go off in an unexpected direction. I know people who have never had a serendipitous experience in their lives because they simply opt not to. I feel sorry for them. Serendipity adds wonder to life.
A few years ago my wife and I planned a trip to Colorado and nearby states. We had plotted a complete course for the 4,500-mile drive. Then, two days before we left, I happened upon a picture online that was just breathtaking. I found out that it was taken in Arches National Park near Moab, Utah. As a man who knows serendipity when he sees it, I knew that I had to re-plot my entire trip (including changing motel reservations) to fit in a swing into neighboring Utah. I did that, and the Utah detour proved to be one of the most enjoyable parts of our road trip.
So I am sold on serendipity. I think it adds spice to life in wondrous ways. It’s not knowing what’s around the next bend that makes life interesting. The great sage Yogi Berra would agree. After all, it was Yogi who said, “When you arrive at a fork in the road, take it.” That’s serendipity.
I have a doppelganger
in Denmark
March 2013
Thanks to an invitation to lecture in Copenhagen, I recently was reunited with my first cousin for the first time in 40 years. And here’s the kicker – his name is exactly the same as mine. Now, there are many people who have common names, and some with less common ones. I have a rare name. I don’t know of another person in the world alive today with the name Frank Terranella, except my cousin in Copenhagen. It was the name of our common grandfather, who died many years ago. I’m sure there are others, but I have never crossed paths with one.
So how did my doppelganger end up in Copenhagen for the last 40 years? Well it’s a wonderful love story. My cousin spent his college junior year abroad in Copenhagen in 1970. There he met and fell in love with a beautiful blonde Danish girl named Karin, who stole his heart. They were married soon afterward. My cousin finished his education in Denmark, and then found a job as a teacher. Their daughter, Anna, came along a year later. Frank never saw a reason to go home much after that. Of course, that’s because he was home. And Copenhagen has been his home for the last 40 years.
My cousin Frank and me in Denmark
Frank would visit the United States occasionally, but those visits were never in the New York area, so we never connected. As time passed, Frank’s daughter Anna grew up and gave him a granddaughter, Lea. She’s a teenager now, and I’ll swear that the 25 percent of her that’s American is dominant. Or maybe that’s just a function of the Internet, or American television on European youth.
So all this was going on a continent away, while I resolved year after year, decade after decade, to get to Copenhagen to visit the other Frank Terranella. Finally, I was asked to lecture in Copenhagen on United States trademark law. It was an offer I couldn’t refuse (even though lecturing is not something I’ve ever done). I knew it would give me the chance to see my cousin.
So my wife and I flew over to Copenhagen, and I gave my lecture. All went well. As soon as I was done, I called Frank. He came over to our hotel, and there we had the historic 40-year reunion. Both of us have a lot less hair than the last ti
me we saw each other, but the ties of family are strong. It wasn’t long before we were telling stories of our youth and bringing each other up to date on our lives for the last 40 years. It made us both smile – a lot.
Frank walked us back to his apartment where we met Karin. Now, when Frank’s daughter, Anna, was about a year old, he and Karin came to New Jersey to visit my grandfather, and I met Karin and Anna there. Seeing her 40 years later, her eyes and smile were just as bright as they were all those years ago, despite the fact that multiple sclerosis has now taken away her ability to walk. I recognized her immediately. She’s like a ray of sunshine, a grown-up flower child. It’s not hard to see why Frank gave up his home country for her.
Seeing my cousin with his wife was a testament to the fact that true love conquers all – including multiple sclerosis. I know that it sounds corny, but Frank and Karin are as much in love in their 60s as they were in their 20s. All that’s changed is that Karin requires a little more assistance than she used to, and Frank is more than happy to provide it.
The next day, I got to meet the now grown-up Anna and her daughter Lea. As do most Danes, they both speak flawless English. I am so sorry I didn’t get to see Anna grow up, but maybe now I’ll get to see Lea from time to time. We invited her to stay with us if she comes to America.
Family reunions can sometimes be dreadful, but my recent trip to Copenhagen couldn’t have been a better experience. Reconnecting with Frank and his family made us forget the cold and often-dreary Copenhagen weather. We all resolved that we won’t wait another 40 years to connect again.
Music is in the blood of baby boomers
April 2013
The Baby Boomer generation has some terrible PR. Most people see us as the selfish Me Generation – idealists who sold out. This is in stark contrast to our parents who I am convinced are called the Greatest Generation just to annoy us. Damn you, Tom Brokaw!
But whenever I get into a discussion about how little Baby Boomers have contributed to society, I always point to two things that our generation provided the world – rock music and personal computers. Interestingly, the brand name “Apple” covers both of those.
Now I don’t think that our music is “better” than the music of our parents or children. (Well, okay I do think it’s better than most of the music my children listened to when they were teenagers.) But obviously “better” is a function of taste and our music appeals to our tastes just as big band music appealed to our parents and rap appealed to our children.
Back in the ‘60s, most New York-area Baby Boomers got their music from AM radio. Our parents were listening to Dean Martin on the hi-fi, while we listened to our music on lo-fi (or no-fi) transistor radios. WABC was the perennial top dog in this market with talented people like Dan Ingram and Ron Lundy behind the microphone.
I was reminded of this recently because back on July 3, 1981 I ran my reel-to-reel tape recorder while Dan Ingram celebrated his 20th anniversary on WABC. I put the tape away and forgot about it. A few weeks ago this musical time capsule resurfaced at my house. I carefully threaded the take-up reel and hit the Play button. I was instantly transported back to my youth. The music was there and that iconic voice who referred to his audience as Kemosabe and in beach weather told you when to “roll your bod,” presided over “the Ingram mess.”
For much of our youth in New York, WABC was our music. And then on May 10, 1982 the music died as WABC changed to an all-news station. I think that for many Baby Boomers that day marked the end of our youth. Our music was gone from the mainstream.
Well of course it wasn’t gone altogether. It had just migrated to FM. But it wasn’t the same after WABC. I never listened to Top 40 radio again. And certainly the music post 1982 was less “our music” than the music that had dominated the airwaves for the 20 years before that. So Baby Boomer music became oldies, and some of the former WABC disk jockeys migrated to the oldies station, WCBS-FM. Cousin Brucie can still be heard on Sirius/XM satellite radio. Dan Ingram is retired from radio and Ron Lundy passed away several years ago.
But now I know that whenever I want to be transported back to the heyday of AM radio I have that WABC time capsule on my tape deck. And there is a website called http://www.musicradio77.com/ that is full of recordings and information about this New York radio institution from our youth.
Clearly WABC was not the only radio station in New York that played rock music. It was simply the most popular. It provided that community of common experience that is so hard to find today in our fragmented media world. It was the chief outlet for Baby Boomer music in the New York area (I’ll speak more about the music in a future post). I will put the music that Baby Boomers produced up against the best of any other generation.
Musical chauvinism – And the beat goes on
April 2013
On a previous post I mentioned that I thought that rock music was one of our generation’s greatest gifts to society. Now the first thing I want to make clear is that Baby Boomers did not create rock music. The Baby Boom era did not begin until 1946. Bill Haley was born in 1925. Chuck Berry was born in 1926. Elvis Presley was born in 1935. So the first generation of rock musicians were not Baby Boomers. Technically, even the Beatles were not Baby Boomers. George Harrison, the youngest Beatle, was born in 1943. No, we Baby Boomers were not the creators of rock music; we were the generation that brought it from an obscure offshoot of country and jazz and made it mainstream. We supported it with our dollars and adopted it as the music of our generation.
There is actually a lot of musical real estate under the rock umbrella. It ranges from blues rock like The Rolling Stones to country rock like the Allman Brothers to folk rock like Crosby Stills & Nash to hard rock like Led Zeppelin. Most Baby Boomers embraced one or more of these flavors of rock music. And those that didn’t probably embraced Pop Rock bands like Gary Lewis and the Playboys or the marvelous Motown stable of artists like the Supremes and The Temptations.
It’s no accident that the seminal Baby Boomer event was a music festival. That’s how important the music was. Rock music reached its zenith in cultural influence at Woodstock. While I wasn’t fortunate enough to attend, I own a copy of the wonderful documentary that was directed by Michael Wadleigh and recommend it to everyone. It’s one of those films you can run in the background and just revel in the music without getting wet. As marijuana slowly becomes legal across the country, the film may make a big comeback.
The thing that strikes me about watching the Woodstock film is just how broad a spectrum of music it featured. Richie Havens opened the concert followed later in the night by Ravi Shankar, Melanie and Arlo Guthrie. The next day Santana, The Who and Jefferson Airplane rocked the crowd along with John Sebastian, Sly & the Family Stone and the Grateful Dead. Jimi Hendrix closed the weekend event. This was the music of a generation and the generation showed up in force to hear it as the ‘60s came to a climax.
By the early ‘70s we were entering the heyday of the singer-songwriter. Bob Dylan had dominated this field in the 1960s, but as the new decade got under way, James Taylor, Jackson Brown, and Carole King were climbing the charts.
Notwithstanding the popularity of folk rock groups like Seals & Croft and America at this time, as I arrived on campus for my freshman year, it was “Layla” that was blaring out of dorm rooms everywhere. Eric Clapton’s epic rock anthem was released in November 1970 on an album that Eric made with Duane Allman, Bobby Whitlock, Carl Radle and Jim Gordon under the fanciful name Derek and the Dominos. The album is such a classic it was inducted in the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2000.
Throughout the ‘70s groups like Yes, Deep Purple and Pink Floyd kept the rock flag flying. Radio stations like WNEW-FM in New York, WBCN in Boston and WMMR in Philadelphia played entire album sides without commercials. And it was good. It was very good.
And now here we are in the 21st century and not only is our music still alive, it’s more accessible than ever. As I write this, I’m listening to “Smo
ke on the Water” by Deep Purple. But I’m not listening to the radio, or a record, or even a CD. I’m listening to the online music service Spotify. We now can get ‘60s and ‘70s music on demand via the Internet from services like Pandora, Spotify, Rhapsody, and many more. And when I feel a need to hear “Stairway To Heaven,” I can just say to my iPhone “play it again, Siri” and Jimmy Page’s guitar solo begins. What with MP3 players and smartphones, we are never more than a few seconds away from “our” music. And “our” music is still the best that the world has ever heard.
The big six-oh!
April 9, 2013
Fingers. We have 10 of them. So ancient people decided that our numbering system would be based on 10 – one number for each finger. I bring this up because it causes us to get all worked up about birthdays ending in a zero. Does turning 50 or 60 or 70 really mean anything? The answer is that it does for many people.
The first zero birthday that mattered to me was when I turned 30. Having grown up at a time when we were warned not to trust anyone over 30, there was some trepidation at reaching that milestone. Turning 40 was a bit more traumatic. It’s the entrance to “middle age.” It would have been tough to take no longer being “young” except that by this time I had two young children and I knew full well what young was.
I can honestly say that turning 50 was a big snore. Oh sure it’s a half century and that sounds really old, and the AARP comes to claim you, but all in all it’s no worse than turning 40. That being said, my body sure knew the difference between 40 and 50. The Big C hit me at 52 and again at 57.