Tag: Oklahoma City

Play it again … and again

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There’s a antique mall in an old farmer’s market building in downtown Oklahoma City that we try to get to whenever we’re home visiting the family, and in that mall is a particular store that we make it a point to patronize. The owner’s kind of an old grump and some of his stuff’s overpriced, but he has plenty of the sort of paper ephemera we like, and we usually find something to covet, if not purchase.

The last time we were in his store, we stumbled upon a shelf filled with piano rolls of the 1920s and ’30s, and our heart skipped a beat. They were much more reasonably priced than many of his other offerings, and the titles were right up our alley, many of them songs frequently heard on Cladrite Radio.

It’s one of the few regrets we have about residing in New York City: Space is at a premium, and we simply don’t have room for a player piano. Would that we did. We’d snap up a couple of dozen of that old grump’s piano rolls in a heartbeat

But we did recently learn of a YouTube channel that eases the pain a bit. AeolianHall1 is the poster’s handle, and his or her channel features a delightful roster of piano roll recordings from the 1930s, the 1920s, and even earlier.

We thought we’d share one of our favorites with you, Pauline Albert’s recording of Irving Berlin‘s 1927 hit “The Song Is Ended (but the Meolody Lingers On). But you really should make it a point to pop over and give AeolianHall1’s extensive collection a good listen.

Pitch perfect: communities

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As the Pitch Perfect series continues, today we feature a 1949 collection of advertising slogans used to market cities and civic campaigns.

America’s birthplace (Plymouth Colony Assn.), Plymouth, Wisc.
America’s dairyland (Wisconsin).
America’s home town (Plymouth Colony Assn.).
America’s lake country (The Thousand Lakes Assn.), St. Paul.
America’s Mediterranean (Miami Shores), Miami.
America’s only tropics (Coral Gables), Miami.
At the seashore, in the country, near the city (Lido Beach), New York.

Birth state of the nation (Pennsylvania).

Center of scenic America (Salt Lake City).
City that does things, The (Norfolk, Va.).
City of destiny (Tacoma).
City of industrial opportunity, The (Warren, Pa.).
Clean up and paint up (Nat. Clean Up Campaign Bureau), New York.
Clean, paint up and fix up (Nat. Clean Up Campaign Bureau).
Climate best by government test (Redwood City, Calif.).
Cool off in Colorado.
Cordage city, The (Auburn, N. Y.).
Crossroads of the Pacific (Hawaii).

Dallas is the door to Texas.
Double crossroads of America (Indianapolis).
Dynamo of Dixie, The (Chattanooga, Tenn.).

Enchanted land of opportunity, Florida.

Find your place in the sun (San Francisco Peninsula).
For cleanliness, thrift and civic pride (Nat. Clean Up Campaign).
Forging a share in victory (Thompson McLaughlin Co.), Portland, Me.
Forward with Memphis, since ’69.

Give them life and make it worth living (United Jewish Appeal).
Give to conquer cancer (American Cancer Society).
Good citizenship is good business (Nat. Clean Up Campaign).
Great state in which to live and work, A (Rhode Island).

Heart of America, The (Missouri).
Heart of the fruit belt, The (Benton Harbor, Mich.).
Help others help themselves (Salvation Army).
Hub city of the southeast, The (Spartanburg, S. C.).
Hub of the Americas (New Orleans).
Hub of the highways, The (Cape Girardeau Bridge, Mo.).
Hub of world flight (Mass. Development & Industrial Comm.), Boston.

Inside the sins of adventure (Manitoba, Canada).
Isle of June (Nassau Development Board, Nassau).
It is profitable to produce in Massachusetts.
Read More »

There’s a small hotel

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One thing we love about New York City is the through line that connects those who once lived here with the eight million residing here currently.

In our hometown of Oklahoma City, this connection is tenuous at best. It’s not that easy to find recognizable locations, sites, and structures in old pictures of OKC—it’s just not that old a town. If somehow a Oklahoma Cityan of 1910 could time travel to the present day, we’re not sure he or she would find much that was recognizable.

But a New Yorker traveling to the present from 1910, while he’d still be amazed by all the changes that had taken place, could find plenty of recognizable landmarks: The Statue of Liberty, the Flatiron Building, City Hall, Bowling Green, the Great Hall at Cooper Union, Carnegie Hall, the city’s great parks—we could go on and on.

And there are thousands of small residential buildings still in use that were around 100 years ago, too.

We recently spent a little time browsing the photography collection at the Museum of the City of New York’s web site, and we were delighted to find a 1921 photograph of the old Allerton House at 22nd Street and Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, which is right down the street from Cladrite HQ.

Allerton House, Southwest Corner of Eighth Avenue and 22nd Street. Byron Company (New York, NY). From the collections of the Museum of the City of New York.

When we moved to this neighborhood twenty-one years ago, the Allerton was what is often referred to as a welfare hotel. Folks who were down on their luck lived there under the auspices of the city’s social services organizations. We were unfamiliar with the hotel’s history, and we sometimes wondered how that once-proud structure had come to suffer its then-current fate, just as we often mused over how the folks who resided there found themselves down on their luck.

Years passed, and the hotel was sold. It’s since been spruced up (though, thankfully, the exterior has not been noticably changed) and is now a semi-fancy hotel called the Gem.

It’s perhaps a reflection of the current economic times that the two commercial spaces on the ground floor of the Gem have remained empty, except for an occasional pop-up art exhibit, over the two or three years the hotel’s been in operation. At least when it was still called the Allerton and served as something of a timeworn sanctuary for folks trying to get back on their feet, there was a Subway sandwich shop in the ground floor.

But what we really wish was still taking up the ground floor of the Gem was the haberdashery that occupied that space in 1920. If you go to the MCNY web site, you can see an enlarged version of the picture we’ve shared with you above, and, in that hi-res version, you’ll see what we mean. The windows of the clothing are filled with men’s shirts and suits and, best of all, literally dozens of men’s hats—fedoras, bowlers, derbies, you name it.

Oh, how we wish that shop were still in operation, but of course, when we say that, what we really mean is that we wish the still-operational shop would be selling the very wares in which they were trafficking in 1920, and that wouldn’t, of course, be the case, even if the shop had somehow managed to survived all these years.

Still, one can dream, no?

A new Cladrite holiday tradition

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We posted the following a year ago, but we figure it’s worth making a perennial of it.

We wish we could embed the jingle discussed below, rather than linking to it, but take our word for it—it’s a link worth fallowing (take a tip from us and click on the “Original Jingle” first. It includes a line that was excised from later versions of the song).

* * * * *

image--BC Clark logo Anyone who grew (or is currently growing) up in the Oklahoma City area knows that it’s just not the Christmas season until you’ve heard the B.C. Clark Christmas jingle on television or the radio at least once.

B.C. Clark, for the non-Okies among you, is a jewelry store that’s been in operation in the Sooner State since 1892, and since 1956 (just one year outside Cladrite Radio’s purview, but we’re stretching a point for the holidays), they’ve been running the aforementioned jingle advertising their annual sale, which takes place not after Christmas, like most stores (or so the lyrics to the jingle insist), but just before.

So for 54 years, denizens of central Oklahoma have been humming along to this catchy ditty, and it’s now our pleasure to share this holiday highlight with folks from other parts of the country (and around the world).

Ms. Cladrite, who grew up in New Jersey, has the darned thing memorized after just two or three Christmas seasons’ exposure to this seasonal delight and can sing along whenever it’s played.

It’s just that catchy a tune.

If we’ve managed to pique your interest, just follow this link. You can hear the original version from the ’50s, compare that to a more recent recording of the song, and even watch an animated television commercial that features the jingle.

But be forewarned — watch or listen more than two or three times, and you’ll be hooked, no matter how far away you live from the nearest B.C. Clark location. And soon, as with the millions of Okies who have come to associate the Christmas season with this venerable jingle, you’ll come to feel that it just isn’t the holidays each year until you’ve heard the jingle once or twice (or a dozen times).

Celebrating the silent Marx

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One of the first places we went upon receiving our driver’s license (and the mobility that came with it) some—gulp!—36 years ago was the miniscule (and long since defunct) Mini-Mall Theatre in north Oklahoma City. They featured old movies there, mostly comedies, and we wanted to see a Marx Brothers movie. We had become intrigued somehow with the Marxes—Groucho, especially—but had never seen one of their pictures.

The bill that evening was Horse Feathers (1932), followed by Duck Soup (1933). As Horse Feathers opens, Groucho is being inducted as President of Huxley College. Following his introduction by the outgoing president, Groucho begins his speech this way:

“Members of the faculty and faculty members, students of Huxley and Huxley students—I guess that covers everyone. I thought my razor was dull until I heard his speech, and that reminds me of a story that’s so dirty I’m ashamed to think of it myself. I came to this college for one reason: to get my son out of it. I remember the day he left for school, a mere boy and a beardless youth. I kissed them both goodbye.”

Groucho was off and running, and so were we. From that night on, we couldn’t get enough of Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and sometimes Zeppo. The Marxes quickly became our avocation, and an avid one at that. We were initially drawn most strongly to Groucho, who was cracking the jokes we would had made if we were clever enough.

But we also loved Chico’s puns and crazy piano stylings and, even more, Harpo’s innocently mischievous ways. Over the years, our affection for Groucho has not faded, but we’ve grown ever fonder of Harpo. Our appreciation for the second eldest Marx may have been fueled by our increasing knowledge of—and appreciation for—the great silent comics such as Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and Charlie Chaplin. We’re convinced that, had Harpo not been part of a family act that very much relied on dialogue and wordplay, he could have been right up there with those comic greats in the silent era.

By all reports, it wasn’t hard to love Harpo. Everything we’ve read (and we’ve read just about everything there is to read on the Marxes) suggests that he was as lovely a fellow as you’d ever want to meet, kind and gentle and fun-loving (the term that so often gets used to describe him is “childlike”).

Harpo’s autobiography, Harpo Speaks!, is still (or, perhaps, again) in print, and we highly recommend it to you. We have enjoyed it more every time we’ve read it, and Ms. Cladrite, who has to date viewed only a couple of Marx Brothers movies, found it an engaging and charming read.

But we also want to recommend a delightful web site of which a pal made us aware recently. It’s called Harpo’s Place, and is described on the home page as The Official Arthur Harpo Marx Family Online Collection. It’s a lovingly crafted tribute to Harpo—the man, the actor, and the father—and it has no other agenda than to celebrate and commemmorate his life and career. There’s nothing for sale on the site (heck, we almost wish there were), and it’s loaded with material even the most devoted Marxist might never have seen before. Harpo’s Place is clearly a labor of love, and that labor has paid off in a delightful site that we heartily recommend to you.

Check it out, and tell ’em Cladrite Radio sent you.