The Red, White and Blue

On June 14^th, 1777, the fledgling government of the United States of America officially adopted the thirteen star, thirteen stripe, Red, White and Blue flag designed and sewn by Betsy Ross.  It’s changed over the years, but the basic idea of thirteen stripes, commemorating the original thirteen colonies, and a single white star for each state, stitched into a field of blue.

If Mr. Obama is reading this, I’d like to point out that there are fifty stars, not fifty-seven.

In 1975, in anticipation if the 200^th anniversary of the Birth of our nation the following year, composer John W. Peterson wrote a cantata he called “I Love America”.  One of the songs, “The Red White and Blue,” contained the following lyrics:

Proudly it waves, Old Glory

Over the Land of the Free!

Promise of Hope and Freedom.

Symbol of Liberty!

Red, White and Blue are its colors,

Colors both bold and clear,

Colors with far deeper meaning

Than that at first may appear.

Red is for the blood of Patriots who have had died to free us

White is for justice and government of law

Blue is for honor, and faith in all we do

This is my flag!

This is Old Glory!

The Red, White and Blue!

There are others words, but you get the gist.  Our flag – the symbol of what America stands for.  On this day – Flag Day – I can only think of one appropriate gesture.  I hope you’ll join me:

I pledge allegiance to the flag

Of the United States of America

And to the Republic for which it stands

One Nation, Under God.  Indivisible,

With Liberty and Justice for ALL!

God Bless America!

. . . This is My Song

A story is never really complete without the soundtrack that accompanies it.  Think about it.  Would M*A*S*H really be the same without the instrumental Suicide is Painless riff playing behind the opening credits?  How empty would the words “Space.  The final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise…” be if the haunting pipes were absent behind William Shatner’s monotone drone? 

Can you even imagine Darth Vader descending from his shuttle in The Empire Strikes Back without John Williams epic Imperial March playing in the background?  I get shivers even thinking about it.

Television and movies have music to set the mood for the film.  In the days before blood and gore onscreen became the norm, light, shadow, and music told you what to expect or what was going on just out of your line of sight.

We call it all collectively songs, but that’s not technically accurate.  Words and music are both needed to make a song.  Without the melody the words are lyrics.  Without the words, the melody is just a tune.  Marry them and you have a song.  Give them a story, and you have a soundtrack.  Much like Gone With the Wind, Fiddler on the Roof, or even Harry Potter, there is a sound track to life.  My life – my soundtrack.  I guess with all its multitudinous layers and shades of tone and timbre, this is my song.

My first memory of music was big band and swing.  The stuff my Dad played.  He had the smoothest, sweetest horn you ever heard.  I don’t have any recordings of him, but I found something almost like him.  It’s from a fifteen year old recording by the Brass Band of Battle Creek.  The disc is called Music with no Strings Attached.  The track is called L’il Darlin.  It’s NOT Little Darlin.  This is the older jazz standard, and there’s not enough o’s in smooth to describe the horn work of the soloist.  It reminds me of how I remember my father playing, and that a long time ago how he used to take me to garden gigs, stand me up on a milk crate in front of a microphone, and have me sing not Old MacDonald, but the Ellington Classic, Mood Indigo.

Late the big band and jazz standards would give way to the Beatles and the Monkees, to Jimi Hendricks, Jim Morrison, Herman and his Hermits, the British Invasion, and folk tunes, and a sprinkling of the divine Mahalia Jackson, but my heart would always remember Dad’s horn, and the Duke.

In junior high school my life took a significant turn.  I became a Christian, and I changed my soundtrack station to the Southern Baptist Hymnal.  Christian pop and folk music was just forming, Christian Rock was clearly understood to be an oxymoron, and praise and worship festivals were still decades away.  We were the generation of Derek Johnson’s Regeneration, The Edwin Hawkins Singers, the Oak Ridge Boys before they went all Country, and yes – still the old faithful Southern Baptist Hymnal.

High school brought the Beach Boys, Aretha, the Temptations, the Carpenters, and BS&T.  And the kickingest Marching Band any high school had ever seen.  Cliff Colnot took over a hum drum program in my Junior year, and transformed it into Florida State University-South Campus.  We did all the top-40 tunes the marching Seminoles did, and with as much flair and flash as had ever been seen in a high school halftime show.  Mr. Colnot arranged out pieces himself, and other schools simply stood back in awe when the Marching Chiefs took the field.  We were DRUMLINE before Hollywood ever got the idea.  At our school, halftime was the show.

High school also introduced me to epic, sweeping choral pieces, and the sweet harmonies and intricate counterpoint of madrigal music.  I will carry the memory of eight part harmony in a spiritual called The Eyes of All Wait Upon Thee, and the matchless, smooth beyond their years voices of Keith, Beverly and Alfred as long as I walk this planet.  And the thousand voice festival choir at Miami’s Fountainbleu Grand Ballroom, as we sang a controlled triple pianissimo with such quiet magnitude that the chandelier rattled.

When my children discovered band and choir, I returned with them to my roots – big band and swing.  Vocal Jazz.  Intricate harmonies that made the once formidable Southern Baptist hymnal seem empty and without form.

I polished my vocal skills to sing anything from upper registers of Bass to high Tenor.  My instrumental prowess expanded to include keyboards, percussion, and electric Bass guitar.  I wrote and performed my own tunes, and I accompanied others, and until my stroke three years ago, I was the bassist in our church praise team.

There you have it – the lyrics to the song, but what of the song?  It is the song of the Redeemed!  It is the song of forgiveness and repentance.  The song of recovery a sinner can sing when he or she finally stops running from God.  It is the song of Salvation and worship; of singing Worthy is the Lamb of God who was slain from the foundations of the earth.  And for all my love of praise and worship tunes, and my ebullience at the sweet, sweet harmonies of Southern Gospel quartet singing, my sing is really best expressed in the lyrics of an old tune from the Southern Baptist Hymnal written by a blind song writer named Fanny J Crosby: Blessed Assurance:

Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine!
Oh, what a foretaste of glory divine!
Heir of salvation, purchase of God,
Born of His Spirit, washed in His blood.
This is my story, this is my song,
Praising my Savior all the day long;
This is my story, this is my song,
Praising my Savior all the day long.

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This is My Story...

I went to a web site today to update some personal information.  Not the name, rank, serial number sort of thing mind you, just a small portion to bring people I went to school with forty years ago up to date.  “What’s your story?” the web page patiently asked.

What’s my story, indeed?

A flood of possibilities immediately presented itself, from the mundane to the miraculous; the silly to the sublime; the artistic to the awful.  All of them at once, and at  once none of them. 

I was reminded of the Peanuts cartoon where Lucy ‘read’ a bedtime story to younger brother Linus.  “A man was born.  He lived.  He died.  The end”  “A fascinating account,” replied the young Linus.  “It really makes you feel like you knew him.”  I can relate to this, all but the ‘he died’ part.  Haven’t done that yet.  Bright and well read constant reader that you are, you will have already deduced that from the fact that I am indeed writing this, recognizing as you do the absurdity of that happening if I were already departed from this plain.

Then the Travis Tritt song came to mind: “That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.” But this is not without its difficulties.  I mean, not to put to fine a point on it, what specifically is the story to which I am alleged to be sticking.

Oh, I’ve taken half hearted stabs at telling my story now and then, mostly because I think I probably know me better than you do, nor am I of the delusion that you really give a fig.  In all likelihood you’re reading this with the hope that maybe this time I’ll actually say something of value.  I hope you’re not too disappointed.

I wrote a book, you see.  Well, three of them, actually.  The first is a very tongue in cheek autobiography of my life in the summers of 1963 and 1964.  It was the year we lived on Front Street and our back yard ran squarely into Greenbrook Park.  It was the two summers bookending fifth grade and before we moved to Florida.  Later I wrote a book about a happy time in my life much, much later.  That was from summer, 1999 to summer, 2001.  The third covered the year from summer 2001 to summer, 2002, and it was probably the most painful time of my life.  These stories have been written down.  Only the first one will ever be published…someday.  And maybe the second.  The third was therapeutic and cathartic.  I will probably delete it one day.

Funny – it seems the most vivid chapters in my life story seem to center around summers.

I wonder why that is?  I don’t particularly favor summer over any other season.  If pressed to choose, I would pick autumn first followed by spring.  At least I think I would, based on nearly sixty years of accumulated knowledge about myself, but we humans are so seldom objective sources of information about anything, least of all ourselves.  I, flawed being that I am, am no less.

A brief history of my time on Planet Earth, by David J. (not Lee) Roth, Jr.

I was born on the first day of nineteen hundred fifty three, the second person in our county to accomplish such a feat that year.

In the summer of my eleventh year, I started the sixth grade in Miami, Florida. 

In the summer of my fourteenth year I started high school.

In the summer of my twenty second year I started college.

In the summer of my twenty-third year, I got married, a union that would produce two daughters – the best work I have ever done.

I would repeat the next to last one twice more in the summers of successive years, and once, the most recent time, in the autumn of my fifty-first year.

I endured middle school, survived high school, excelled at college, and made a total disaster of marriage.  Marriages.  Only the Autumn one is what anyone might even remotely call a success, and that’s really due more to the angel of a woman who tolerates my moods, encourages my enterprises, makes my coffee, plays with my cat, and loves me in a way I had given up hope of ever being loved.

I’ve endured heath problems, been healed by the God who found me when I was thirteen, and survived two strokes.  It would seem that in spite of my years of running from Him, He still has some use for me.

And now, in the summer of my fifty-eighth year, I am making plans to see people I haven’t seen since that hot summer day forty years ago.  People I promised I’d never forget, but did.  I hope they’ll forgive me.

Because you see, when all is said and done, perhaps Lucy’s story is my story.  Filled with successes and failures, achievements and flops, accolades and disappointments, a landscape potted with more holes that a block of aged Swiss cheese, this is my story.

A man was born.  He lived, such that it was.  He has yet to die.  Not quite the end.

And That's the Way It Was

I suppose my earliest real memory of a newsman was Walter Cronkite.  I don’t know when I really became aware of “America’s most trusted broadcaster” but he was an icon of my youth.  He told me about the Cold War and Yuri Gargarin.  He gave me the countdown down to Apollo 11.  And on a cold November day in 1963, he interrupted my fifth grade class to inform me that the President of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, was killed earlier that day by a lone gunman in Dallas Texas.

Walter Cronkite.

The very name evokes competence.  Trust. Reliability.  Dependability.  If Walter Cronkite said it, then by golly, that was it.  You could take it to the bank.  He was tough, honest, thick skinned, objective, sincere and believable.

Of course, in due time, things had to change, as they always must.  Walter gave way to Dan.  Reporting gave way to creating.  Newsmen gave way to actors who read scripts poorly, became cutesy pals with the weather men, joked with the sports guys, and smiled and tried to look serious and concerned when their co-anchor read a line from the teleprompter.

When I was a kid the news was a thirty minute event before the Flintstones, Bonanza, or the Wonderful World of Disney.  Fifteen minutes of local news, which in our case came from New York City because that was the closest city with a broadcasting tower that would reach our north central New Jersey rooftop antennae, and fifteen minutes of network news.  Short, concise reporting of real news and no fluff.  No teasers about ‘breaking stories we’re following live at 11:00’.  If it was that important, they interrupted the network programming and returned to ‘the regularly scheduled program joined in progress’.  No ticklers about important issues that weren’t so important that they couldn’t wait until the morning show.

What happened?  When did bringing the news to America’s homes become a scripted sitcom where the anchors and other talking heads were best buds all joking with each other, nodding seriously at each other, and encouraging the weather guy to please not let it rain on the parade tomorrow, as if there’s anything he can do about it?

My local news source has resorted to a redneck commentator with a catchy handle to ‘tell you like it is, because no one else will.’ Followed by a live plug for said redneck’s nationally syndicated radio show.  Huh?  This is newsworthy how, exactly?  I feel like I’ve just segued into a bit from Rowan and Marin’s Laugh-In minus the actual humor.

Big local stories in the last two weeks have included instructions on proper bar etiquette, including the recommendation that you carry cash to your favorite watering hole so you can give the barkeep a better tip.  Of course there was no mention of the possibility that flashing all that green around a bar might just make you a robbery target.  That would take the cool out of the report.  The next day they carried a detailed story on where to find drag queen bars in a local town.  The big gig this week is milking every minute they can, including promoting about five different live streams of coverage, to the bandwagon to which everyone has hitched their hopes that it will be a bigger story than Jon Benoit Ramsey.  I figure we’re a week from it hitting the tabloids, although I don’t know if I’ll be able to tell the difference.

And they’re all getting terribly PC and thin skinned.  I commented on the media circus local sources are making of the Casey Anthony trial.  The station spokesperson said I was rude.

A station where I used to live featured their ‘Six in the City’ team – a locally produced sort of clone of the nationally broadcast show, ‘The Talk’, featuring their six female anchors, two of whom have been with the station for over twenty years, dating back to the days before the station’s call letters changed to what they are now.  Beneath the photo, someone demanded to know why there were no minorities in the photo.  Note that you may safely insert the word ‘African Americans’ in place of the word minorities, because that’s what the writer was really asking.  My comment was that I thought that women technically were minorities, or does that not count since none of the women were women of color, and if so, isn’t a demand that color be a hiring consideration a tad racist?

The answer is, of course, that when color is part of the equation going either way, it is racist.

The stations response was to go PC, defend the women on the basis of their history with the station, and decry the insulting use of the term racist.  I predict that the pressure to be PC will result in a hiring change, and that saddens me.  Not the hiring of a qualified minority, but the hiring of a minority to satisfy public pressure.  A ‘token’, if you will.  And likely the least senior anchor currently part of the team will begin her transition to a wonderful letter of recommendation to another market to make room for the PC solution.

And my station will keep doing fluff stories, commentaries by Bubba the Love Sponge, and practicing their acting skills so they look concerned and involved between bubbles of cute and nodding seriously.

And that’s the way it was for Thursday, June second, 2011.  Goodnight, and may the good news be yours.

Remembering Martha Raye

I read something this week, and I’m going to try to have a stab at it, but I don’t remember where I got it, so this may by very inaccurate.

“You will never know how much it has cost my generation to preserve your freedom.  I hope you make good use of it.”  John Quincy Adams (1967-1848).

Think about it.  His generation left their country, their families, their homes, their jobs, in some cases titles and deeds granted by the crown and generations old to ride aboard leaky boats across an angry unpredictable ocean in a time long before Concord, Carnival Cruise Lines, and GPS to a wild, uncivilized, sometimes savage land to begin their lives again as free men and women.  They had little but what they carried with them, and many did not survive the journey.

Having arrived in the new land, they fought a war to keep that land from succumbing to the pitfalls that prompted them to leave their homes in the first place.

Nor was this a victory easily won.  There was no ‘Seal Team 6’ to handle it, no lifeflight for injured companions, no comforting care packages from ‘back home’.  All they had was the opportunity to fight for freedom, and fight they did.

Fewer than 250 years have since passed.  This land and this freedom have survived, yet not without great cost.  Revolution, 1812, Civil War, WW’s I & II, Korea, Nam, Desert Storms I & II and others.  Each generation sacrificing some of their own to pass freedom and liberty on to their children and grandchildren with the hope that they will ‘make good use of it’.

With this in mind, and this being the weekend we set aside to show respect and honor to those who have laid down their lives in service to our nation, I submit the following for your approval, received yesterday from a friend from Pittsburgh:

“This is a great story about a great woman.  I was unaware of her credentials or where she is buried.  Somehow I just can't see Brittany Spears, Paris Hilton, or Jessica Simpson doing what this woman (and the other USO women, including Ann Margaret & Joey Heatherton) did for our troops in past wars. Most of the old time entertainers were made out of a lot sterner stuff than today's crop of activists and whiners.

“The following is from an Army Aviator friend who takes another trip down memory lane: It was just before Thanksgiving '67 and we were ferrying dead and wounded from a large GRF west of Pleiku.

“We had run out of body bags by noon, so the Hook (CH-47 CHINOOK) was pretty rough in the back. All of a sudden, we heard a 'take-charge' woman's voice in the rear.

“There was the singer and actress, Martha Raye, with a SF (Special Forces) beret and jungle fatigues, with subdued markings, helping the wounded into the Chinook, and carrying the dead aboard.

“ 'Maggie' had been visiting her SF 'heroes out west'.

“We took off, short of fuel, and headed to the USAF hospital pad at Pleiku. As we all started unloading our sad pax's, a 'Smart Ass' USAF Captain said to Martha, "Ms Ray, with all these dead and wounded to process, there will not be time for your show!

“To all of our surprise, she pulled on her right collar and said, "Captain, see this eagle? I am a full 'Bird' in the US Army Reserve, and on this side is a 'Caduceus' which means I am a Nurse, with a surgical specialty....now, take me to your wounded. He said, “Yes, m'am.   Follow me.”

“Several times at the Army Field Hospital in Pleiku, she would 'cover' a surgical shift, giving a nurse a well-deserved break.

“Martha is the only woman buried in the SF (Special Forces) cemetery at Ft. Bragg.

“Hand Salute!  A great lady.”

As you’re sitting around the BBQ having a hot dog and a beer, watching a parade, or whatever your plans for Memorial Day, 2011, be sure to thank a vet this weekend.  And if you’re reading this and you are a Vet, Thank You!