highway number 19 - the people keep the city clean

 

1939

movies:  Gone With The Wind

               The Wizard Of Oz

music:  Cab Calloway's record, "Jumpin' Jive" came out

             also - "Strange Fruit" by Billie Holiday

             that summer, a young black Oklahoman named Charlie Christian popped up in the Benny Goodman Sextet in New York brandishing an unsettling instrument - an electronically amplified guitar

theater:  Ethel Waters became the first black woman to star in a Broadway drama (Mamba's Daughters)

-------------------- Jane Bolin became America's first black female judge

--------------------------- black voters defied Ku Klux Klan cross-burnings to cast ballots in Miami

____________________________________

----------------------------- [excerpt] ------------------ Anna Mae Bullock [Tina Turner] was born on the morning of November 26, 1939, at Brownsville's Haywood Memorial Hospital, a two-story building whose basement was relegated to the tending of black patients.  

She was quickly transported back up Highway 19 to Nut Bush, home:  a four-room shotgun house ensconced amid the vast and bountiful Poindexter acreage.

Her father, Floyd Richard Bullock, was resident overseer on the Poindexter farm, supervising harvests and hands for the property's white owners.  

        A deacon of the Woodlawn Baptist Church, Richard (as everyone called him) was also (as everyone knew) a man in constant conflict with his wife.  Zelma Bullock, Anna Mae's mother, was a black Indian of high spirits.  

Anything but a homebody, she had been smoking cigarettes and shooting .45's since the age of ten, and was not - as Richard had come to be painfully aware - a woman to be trifled with.  

Richard and Zelma's fights, real wall-rattlers, were the dominant feature of the domestic landscape.  There was one other child at home - little Alline, almost three - and she greeted her new sister as an ally. ---------------------- [end / excerpt - I, Tina, written by Tina Turner with Kurt Loder.  Copyright 1986, William Morrow; Copyright 2010, Tina Turner]

Church house, gin house

School house, outhouse

Highway number nineteen,

The people keep the city clean

They call it Nutbush,

Oh, Nutbush,

They call it Nutbush City Limits

Nutbush City --  

Ike and Tina Turner in a 1971 television performance of "Nutbush City Limits"

Ethel Waters

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islands in an autumn stream

a poem

minute-hand of the seasons

The end of Summer and

the beginning of Autumn pass

each other with hardly a glance,

Moving inexorably forward, to

the next month, year, decade -

Oblivious of human beings' plans,

schemes, and wishes - 

bearing down on the future

with calm, terrifying equanimity

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knowledge and information

 

When we have the Internet, we can look stuff up all the time.  If I'm listening to (or watching) a TV series or a show, and I notice an actor or actress who did a particularly great job, I can pause the show, click on the "G" and look up the actor, see their life story - born in New York, one marriage or 55 marriages (whatever), what other shows they were in, what their name was originally, before they changed it for show business, etc.

        I like to do it - I like to have that information at my fingertips.  But then there's also this reality of doubt around the edges - - - is the information - correct??

Like - what good is it, if it might be wrong, right? Ha.  

Sometimes, you can "Google" something and get conflicting information.

If your phone gets wet, there are people advising you to put it in rice, the rice will soak out the moisture.

        Then, the latest thing on Google on that topic is, ----- Don't put it in rice, because the rice can leave a "starchy dust" that can turn into a "glue-like paste" that will mess up your phone.  Or - re-mess it up, because it's already messed up from being wet....

Ooooohhhhh - kay ... original mess getting - messier. ...

Not the goal.

But then again, maybe that's not true.  Maybe rice would fix the problem, but the people putting information on the Internet don't want your phone to start working again, they just want you to have to buy a new phone.

So it kind of becomes a question of - what, if anything, is actually true??

        I remember when I first began to get familiar with the Internet (in early 2000s) and I mentioned to a local veterinarian that I read something on the Internet, and she emphatically stated to me, "Don't take advice for your cat or dog from the Internet, there's a lot of bad, and wrong, information on there!"  [words to that effect]

She didn't want any animals to suffer because of lies on the Internet.

I agreed with that, and was glad she was giving that advice to people.

        The bottom line being:  'OK, there's information, but don't trust it. ...'

So - what good is it??!!

WHAT - IS - THE - POINT - ???!!!

A couple of months ago, I had a wedding to go to.  I had not been to a wedding in a long time - I looked in my closet - what am I going to wear?  I went through a couple of outfit ideas, and then thought the best idea was a simple ensemble of black slacks and pink top (plus buy some shoes to wear that aren't clunky).

        I got the shoe conundrum solved, non-clunked.... but wondered if it's OK to wear black slacks to a wedding, because I have heard you mustn't wear black to a wedding.

        But it would be black that isn't up by your face, so it isn't making any kind of negative statement, it's just slacks.

So I Googled - can I wear black slacks and a pink top to a wedding? - and "it" answered me, saying, 'You're good to go!'

So - I wore that outfit to the wedding, and I didn't get - ejected, so it worked out.

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it has a "ring to it"...

 

On The Golden Girls episodes, I started to notice that, on Betty White's left hand, on her ring finger, is a ring with a big sapphire in the middle, and surrounded by diamonds.

        It's just like Lady Diana Spencer's engagement ring from Charles, the Prince of Wales, in February of 1981.

Once I noticed it, I started watching for it, and kept seeing it.

Googled - didn't have time to read the whole thing, but yes, it's a ring like Princess Diana's.

        A headline on the Internet said that Diana's engagement ring "started a trend."

Betty White and Allen Ludden

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fashion of the early 1980s

 

        A video about then-Prince Charles and Princess Diana in 1983.  That's the year when they took their first trip to Australia.  They had been married for two years, and had their first child, Prince William - they brought him with them on the trip.

Diana's dresses:  pie-crust collars abounded!

I wanted to wear dresses like that!

        At the age I was, then, I kind of wanted to wear - everything.  Dreaming, and yearning, and wanting.  Wanting everything (well, not really, but you think  you do)....

        ---------------- Making an exception, perhaps, for the hats.  It's a British Royal Family tradition - ladies wearing hats.

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in a subterranean chamber

 One of the people on that Kennedy Library panel discussing Jackie Kennedy's "literary life" is Greg Lawrence, author of Jackie As Editor, copyright 2011, Thomas Dunne Books - St. Martin's Press.

------------------------ [excerpt] ------------ {the narrator here is Eugene Kennedy (no relation to the Massachusetts Kennedys); he's a Catholic priest from Chicago who worked with Jackie on a book about Mayor Daley} -------------------- "I was her escort at the Democratic Convention in 1976. ... She had talked to me in advance about going with her and whatnot, and it was quite an experience.  

I was traveling with Mike Royko and a group from the Chicago papers.  What occurred that night, first, of course, we came into the hall, and it was mayhem as soon as she entered.  

        She was extremely calm, and I walked with her, and I didn't have my collar on or anything like that, and I went to these seats that had been reserved for her.  And her sister was there.  And then all these people came streaming over to say hello to her - the actor Lorne Greene and the Carter family came down.  Everybody wanted to be seen with her.  It was highly amusing, in a way, because you could see why she did want to walk fast....

"Here we were at the heart of the Democratic Convention, and she had asked to meet Daley, who was a delegate.  We talked to the guy that was the chairman of the party then, Robert Strauss, from Texas.  So he set up this meeting, in a lower level of Madison Square Garden, in some subterranean chamber.  

And here's Dick Daley in his blue suit, and I knew the way Daley would react.  She went over to talk to him, and he just listened, very happy to see her.  But even to her...as far as a book, he was very self-protective and protective of his family.  

She wanted him to know she was having a book written about him.  She was very straightforward.  She told him that she had commissioned a book, and he said something like, 'We'll look into it.'

        "He died the next December.  Now while he was alive, nobody would talk.  They feared for their lives and their jobs and so forth.  It was very interesting, the control he exerted.  After he died, I ended up talking to dozens and dozens of people, who knew him in various ways, some of them in a very intimate way, and they were very helpful.  

Jackie was fascinated by all this, and her support never wavered.  

Before Daley died, it didn't matter to her that he wasn't going to give any direct support.  She understood, if you were on to something, if she felt you were on the right track, she would encourage you to keep going along that track.  If she thought you were diverging from it, that's when she would intervene and say, 'Well, I'm not sure about that.'  She did it so nicely."

-----------------------------------------------------

On You Tube:

World Turning

> Fleetwood Mac

...and play

Lorne Greene

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"I'm a senior editor at Doubleday"

 Oh! - you can find this on You Tube, video titled:

The Literary Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

channel / uploader:  John F. Kennedy Library Foundation

------------------------------------- I've never seen this, before.  It's an hour and 38 minutes, so if you put it on when you have some work to get done, it will last for a bit - you don't have to keep stopping what you're doing to find something else to play.

        One panelist tells the story of getting invited to dinner at the home of New York City Mayor Ed Koch.  The guy arrived at the mayor's apartment and the 20 people who were there didn't seem to know each other.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was one of the guests.

        When they all sat down at the dinner table, Mayor Koch asked everyone to go around the table, each person introducing themselves.

        ("I'm Jacqueline Onassis; I'm a senior editor at Doubleday.")

I think people for whom English is a second language will enjoy this video, as well as people whose first language is English.

        In our economy, I cannot help but notice, there are many things that aren't good and are expensive, while at the same time there are things like this "literary Jackie" video that are really good, and - free of charge - !  LOL.  It's like some kind of absurd, unexpected miracle....

Ed Koch, mayor of New York City, 1978 - 1989

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