Give me a minute and it will come to me.

Today is set aside to observe the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., which actually occurred last Thursday, and tomorrow is set aside to observe the inauguration of Barack Obama as 44th president of the United States, which will actually occur tomorrow. For more on those subjects, check out this post on Dr. Scot McKnight’s Jesus Creed blog.

But I have decided to post about something else. This is not to disparage in any way either Martin Luther King, Jr., or Barack Obama. I’m just funny that way. Sometimes I happily go along with the crowd, and sometimes I don’t. I have never tried to live my life according to majority opinion. In fact, when the whole world seems to be advocating A, it often happens that I consider the merits of B.

Can you name these four people? Do you know why they had their photo taken together?



You will receive extra points if you can also name the husband of the woman on the lower left and tell what he had to do with the people in the photo (besides being the husband of the woman on the lower left).

When you have amassed enough extra points, I have received enough emails to know that something wonderful is going to happen to you. I have no idea what.

Hyde Park, Mon Amour?

The lovely home in the preceding post was the residence of this happy couple:


Here they are in another location with some friends who dropped in for a visit. Unfortunately, I have no idea who the gentleman resplendent in white in the center of the picture is.


Without straining your eyes to read the photo caption, can you identify the husband and wife who are serving as bookends or hazard a guess as to what year the photo was taken?

When I said the mystery home was “very close to a place that has been in the news lately” I was referring to the Hudson River, not the Gaza Strip as one person guessed, but he is more to be pitied than censured as he makes his home in Utah. The Franklin D. Roosevelt Home and Presidential Library in Hyde Park, New York, is indeed quite near the Hudson River, about 75 miles north of where a passenger on a ferry bound from Manhattan for New Jersey snapped this photo with his mobile phone a few few days ago:

(Photo by Janis Krums of Sarasota, Florida)

Who lived here?

I have a black-and-white snapshot of this house taken around 1967 or 1968 and another snapshot, taken closer up, that shows my two oldest children and their two cousins from Florida sitting on the front steps.

I will give you two hints.

Hint #1: The person who lived here is also buried here.
Hint #2: When I took my snapshots, I worked for IBM in Pough-keepsie, New York.

I will throw in two more hints for good measure.

Hint #3: At one time this was one of the most photographed homes in the world.
Hint #4: It is very close to something that has been in the news lately.

Anybody want to take a crack at answering?

Shall we dance?

Some of you will recognize these couples instantly. Some of you won’t have a clue who they are. I am in the former group. On the right are Bob and Justine, and the couple below are Kenny and Arlene. Ring any bells?


So now you know Who. But what about Where? And When? And perhaps most importantly, Why???

I will tell you.

Where is a television studio somewhere in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

When is 1957, 1958, 1959.

Why is two words:



American Bandstand!

I was there in the summer of 1958, visiting relatives in suburban Philadelphia all the way from Texas. I was seventeen years old. Going to American Bandstand was a pilgrimage more to be desired than the one that resulted in Chaucer’s writing The Canterbury Tales.

I boarded an early southbound commuter train in Jenkintown and made my way past Elkins Park, Melrose Park, Cheltenham, past City Line where Old York Road becomes Broad Street, past Allegheny, Lehigh, Girard, and Spring, all the way down Broad Street to City Center where William Penn’s statue stands atop City Hall. There I switched to the east-west line and, still searching for the Holy Grail, headed out West Market Street. At 46th Street I got off the train and there it was: On one side of the street were brick tenements with people’s laundry drying on the fire escapes. But on the other side of the street was the Holy of Holies: WFIL-TV, Channel 6, home of the one and only American Bandstand, the Magna Carta of teenage dance programs.

I stood in line for at least six hours, hoping to be admitted with the other pilgrims when the doors opened. Men with pushcarts came by selling pretzels with mustard, a Philadelphia staple, and hot dogs to fend off our hunger pangs. No one was about to leave the line to do an unimportant thing like eating. And because I had made sure to arrive early, I was near enough to the front of the line that I saw the regulars arrive and when the doors finally opened to the rest of us I made it in.

All the regulars were there. Bob and Justine, and Kenny and Arlene, and Pat, and Fran, and others whose faces I recognized but whose names I didn’t know. Dick Clark was there, of course, looking all of 18 even though he was 28 years old at the time. We all were there, dancing to Bobby Day’s hit, “Rockin’ Robin (Tweet, Tweet, Tweedly-Deet)” and Bobby Darin’s hit, “Splish, Splash, I Was Takin’ A Bath” and “Heavenly shades of night are falling; it’s twilight time” by The Platters and “All I Have To Do Is Dream” by The Everly Brothers, Phil and Don, and saying such profound things to Dick Clark as “It has a good beat; I give it a 90” on national television!

I went for three days in a row.

Two months later, back in Texas, I stopped by my old high school after classes had resumed and before I went away to college. I was treated like a celebrity because everybody had been watching American Bandstand five afternoons a week for over a year. (Actually, there wasn’t that much to do in small towns in Texas in the fifties. If you saw The Last Picture Show or Places In The Heart, you will know exactly what I mean.) It wasn’t that I was great personally, but I had been in the presence of greatness.

Any other acclaim I might have received since then has been pure gravy. My fifteen minutes of fame happened early, when it could be properly appreciated by the only people who mattered, the new crop of high school seniors.

Photo by Dick Clark Productions, Inc.

Later on, American Bandstand was televised in color. It moved to California and became a once-a-week show, broadcast only on Saturday afternoon. It was slicker, and over-produced, and lasted until 1989, but it was never as good as the original, more innocent, five-afternoons-a-week, black-and-white version from Philadelphia. It may have still had Dick Clark, but it didn’t have Pat. It didn’t have Fran. And it certainly didn’t have Bob and Justine, or Kenny and Arlene. The kids today know nothing about American idols. Ours were not Fats Domino and Elvis Presley and Ricky Nelson. Ours didn’t even have to sing.

Dick Clark became “America’s Oldest Teenager” and Ryan Seacrest is trying hard to succeed him. Saint Paul, who said a lot of things, probably said it best. To the Corinthians he said, “When I was a child, I thought as a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child. But when I became a man, I put away childish things.” And to the Colossians he said, “Since you have been raised to new life with Christ, set your sights on the realities of heaven, where Christ sits in the place of honor at God’s right hand. Think about the things of heaven, not the things of earth. For you died to this life, and your real life is hidden with Christ in God. And when Christ, who is your life, is revealed to the whole world, you will share in all his glory.”

That will be a real celebration. There may even be dancing in the streets.

Happy Birthday, Uncle Jack!

My Uncle Jack was born 102 years ago today. He died in 1987 at the age of 80. He was the third of four children in the family where my mother was the youngest, three years his junior. Born near Philadelphia, he lived his entire life in the state of Pennsylvania. In his later years he also owned a winter home in Tequesta, Florida. He earned an M.D. degree from the University of Pennsylvania around 1930 and set up medical practice in the little town of Annville, between Hershey and Lebanon, where I believe he was also the campus doctor at Lebanon Valley College for a time. He ended up marrying his nurse, my Aunt Ruth, who hailed from Pittsburgh.

During my senior year of high school, my mother died at the age of 47 after a long bout with cancer. I was valedictorian of my class that year and received a one-year, tuition-only scholarship from the small school district, but most of the money my parents had tried to save for my college years went to pay for my mother’s hospital bills and funeral expenses. The summer after I graduated, I traveled all the way from Texas to Pennsylvania on a bus to visit various members of my mother’s family I had met four years earlier. While I was there, Uncle Jack presented me with a check for $750.00 (a lot of money in 1958), enough to pay for the dormitory and cafeteria fees and all of my personal expenses for the whole year. He also gave me a plane ticket so that I could stay a little longer and return home on something other than a bus. (“Now I know why they call it Greyhound,” my mother’s sister said after one trip, “it’s because you feel like a dog when you get off.”) It was my first plane ride, and I traveled on a DC-3 from Harrisburg to Pittsburgh, where I changed to a DC-6 and flew on to Fort Worth. It was heady stuff for a kid of seventeen who lived in a house without indoor plumbing.

Years passed.

When our children were small and Mrs. RWP and I were living in south Florida, Uncle Jack and Aunt Ruth flew to Fort Lauderdale to go on a Caribbean cruise out of Port Everglades. They invited us to meet them aboard ship before they embarked so that they could meet their great-niece and two great-nephews, and we went. I presented them with a bottle of champagne I had won in a contest on a big jet plane while returning from a business trip for IBM.

More years passed. Each family is different. Some families live close together and gather frequently. Our family never gathered at all and lived hundreds of miles apart. But if we didn’t see each other for ten years, we still loved one another and were glad it hadn’t been twenty.

A couple of years after my Aunt Ruth died, Uncle Jack married for a second time to Aunt Harriet, the widow of a doctor friend of theirs. Although we had never met, I spoke with her on the telephone after his death and told her how much Uncle Jack had meant to me and what he had done to help me through my first year of college. She said that she had received calls of a similar nature from several other people also, and that she hadn’t known he had helped so many because he never spoke of it. He just did what he thought was right and didn't look for applause.

Here’s Uncle Jack and my mother around the time he graduated from medical school.

Butcher? Baker? Spark Plug Maker?

No, the mystery objects in my January 10th post have nothing to do with butchering, baking, or spark plug making, but those were all good guesses. The word “itinerant” might have helped define the field more narrowly, but Scissors Grinder and Encyclopedia Salesman can also be eliminated.

Although no competition had been announced for Best Comment, Mr. Yorkshire Pudding of Sheffield, Yorkshire, United Kingdom, wrote a magnificent one: “Clearly all three items are used by traditional clockmakers,” he said. “The first is called a Whitaker's Noggin invented by Baltimore based clockmaker R. Henry Whitaker in 1857. The second is a traditional French clockwinder. The third item is a simple cogstopper (half inch gauge). I await my prize with unbridled glee.”

For sheer inventiveness, it is a top-drawer comment, worthy of emulation, and brimming with the audacity of hope. Nevertheless, I regretted to have to inform Mr. Pudding, “As Tonto used to say to The Lone Ranger, ‘Wrong, Kemosabe.’ But extremely clever!”

Therefore, Mr. Yorkshire Pudding is the recipient of a special honorary award, the coveted Medium Fries With Triple Ketchup Packet Cluster. If his noggin, Whitaker’s or otherwise, is ever in my neighborhood, I will be happy to present the award to him in person. We might even go out afterward and try to stop a cog or two.

Okay, okay, enough of this chitchat. I hear you clamoring for the right answer, so I will tell you without further delay.

Cue the ruffles and flourishes. Trumpets in the background. The answer to the burning question, “Who would use the mystery ojects shown in the January 10th post?” is (tah-DAH!):

A PIANO TUNER!

In order of their appearance, the mystery objects are:

1. Piano String Size Gauge Tool For Tuning Repairs
2. Piano Tuning Pin Stringing Crank
3. Stainless Steel Piano Voicing Tool For Tuning, 3 Needles

The first two are self-explanatory. I have no idea how the third one is used, or whether it is also available in versions with more or fewer Needles. And I never even knew there were stainless steel pianos.

Finally, here’s a piano tuner at work using still another (and perhaps more familiar) tool of his trade:

Mystery Objects

Anybody care to guess what this is?

Or this?

Or this?

These are all tools of a certain trade. Anybody care to guess who would use them?

I will give you a hint. They have nothing whatever to do with pornography.

The correct answer plus one dollar will entitle you to a double cheeseburger at your local McDonald’s. With extra pickles, even.