Christmas Morning at Raymond Pert's/Writing Assignment #5

Raymond Pert's family hopes Santa will bring a stereo

Assignment #5 came from my sister Carol. We are to write about a memorable Christmas morning at our house.
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I was about six years old. Our family still lived at 14 E. Portland. My sister Carol hadn't been born yet.

Our family awoke that morning to the surprise that Santa Claus had visited the Furniture Exchange and picked out a Zenith stereo record player with speakers on each side of the turntable and a spindle growing out the turntable to stack record albums on.

That record player didn't make an immediate impression on me. I was distracted by other lesser toys, but in the long run, that primitive stereo record player has had more impact on me than anything else that ever appeared under a Christmas tree.

That Christmas morning we had three record albums and they have all stayed with me for the past forty-five years or so. One was a fellow singing folk songs geared toward young listeners: "You take the high road and I'll take the low road and I'll be in Scotland afore ye. " "My Grandfather's clock was too big for the shelf, so it stood ninety years on the floor." "John Jacob
Jingleheimer Schmidt, that's my name, too" and many others. The record album gave me songs I could sing with and they had some substance. Barney wasn't even a twinkle in a children's cartoon's marketer's eye yet.

I'm wondering what kind of feelings a boy my age at the time has. I felt some kind of warmth for the grandfather clock's age. I somehow knew that the high road was the road best travelled. I had fun filling in Hinkemeyer, the family name of a family in Elizabeth Park, for Jingleheimer.

But, what puzzles me is how deeply I felt a sense of warmth and joy for the original Broadway Cast recording of "My Fair Lady". I loved Rex Harrison. I know now that he was like the great grandfather of some mutant form of rap, the way he sang/spoke his songs: "Let a woman in your life, and your sabbatical is through". And how could I, at age six, have felt romantically transported, dreamy eyed, even misty, listening to "On the Street Where You Live"? (This broadway tune, by the way, was somehow the emotional gateway to Little Anthony and the Imperials', "Goin' Out of my Head,"another song that made me feel emotion I knew nothing about.)

But those two albums were not the most memorable. An anthology album came with the record player. It was called "Songs to Remember" and compiled pop hits of the 1950's. I learned to love pop melodies and movie soundtracks and pop lyrics listening to Rosemary Clooney's husky siren song, "Come On-A My House"; I felt the hair-raising excitement of range life listening to Frankie Lane's "Mule Train"; to this day, I've never seen the movie, "A Summer Place", but Percy Faith's playing of the "Theme from A Summer Place" chokes me up; I love the baritone saxophone thanks to this album having The Champs playing "Tequila"; I was, and I mean it, haunted as a six-year old by Gogi Grant singing "The Wayward Wind"; and I loved the clear voice of Patti Page singing "The Tennessee Waltz". Just what I remember being on this album is the whole span of what would become my experience as a teenager and adult: hard work, drinking tequila, lost love, infidelity, longing, and how these enduring experiences can be expressed in tunes and lyrics that are pleasant to hear and deeply moving.

For Dad, the record player was his way of moving into a mystical fifth dimension of a brandy drunk. He loved to pour brandy over ice after he'd had a steak and listen dreamily, mistily to Sarah Vaughn, Dinah Washington, and Teresa Brewer. Dad helped me see how to be transported by beauty.

I think of all the music we played on that one Christmas gift: The Ray Conniff Singers, Roger Williams, The New Christy Minstrels, Jan and Dean, The Beach Boys, Gary Lewis and the Playboys, Gary Puckett and the Union Gap, Cream, Led Zeppelin, Carole King, Carpenters, the Jackson 5, the Soundtrack to Romeo and Juliet, The Music Man, Sousa Marches (I used to conduct them before school, if home alone), Rhapsody in Blue, Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, The Monkees, Petula Clark, the Kinks, Santana, Chase, all this music tracing back in my mind to an album of children's folk songs, "My Fair Lady", and "Songs to Remember".

It's hard for me to think of Christmas without music. I loved singing carols at school. I love singing them at church. My stepdaughters love Christmas music, especially Harry Connick, Jr. For me, though, all music, no matter what kind, takes me back to the Christmas Mom and Dad decided to have Santa Claus enrich our family's life with a record-playing stereo.