With the sudden loss of my father two years ago, it is just now that memories are starting to surface, which brings clarity and understanding to my childhood. My father was a first generation Italian of Sicilian descent who was rooted in the old country even though he was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. My father Phil’s body might have been in Brooklyn, but he was firmly planted in nature in Lecara Friddi, Sicily. No one spoke English in his home, and in those days, when sent to public school, if you couldn’t speak English you were sent home until you learned. He was sent home and allowed back when he had a grasp on the language a year later.

As I age, I understand the conflicts that I had with my father were mainly based in basic geography.  Here was a man who was steeped in old world tradition and culture surrounded by a modern Italian American wife and five daughters and a son. He lived in perpetual culture shock. His background was such that the male was the head of the house, so he exercised his authority with an iron fist and strong determination to control what was oftentimes out of his control.

Nowadays I spend some of my leisure time thinking back on some of the memories that can help me better understand a man whose good intentions, pride, hard work and definition of honor and respect went oftentimes severely misunderstood.
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People talk about all the snow in Buffalo, NY.  Well, it does get its share of the white stuff.  However, nothing like the snow the South Towns get.  The South Towns are exactly that, towns located south of the City of Lights.  They are the winter Mecca of the Western NY area, precisely because of all that snow.  My friends and I loved to ski and toboggan, and later snow mobile and snow board “down south.”  Our favorite winter destinations were Kissing Bridge and Chestnut Ridge.

There were many “firsts” associated with KB and Chestnut:  My first run down a main ski slope at KB, which led to the first time I had to yell for people to “get out of the way” as I picked up too much speed and managed to fall just a few feet before skiing straight into the lodge.  Then, there was the time I had my first, (and last), drink of Southern Comfort, from a bottle passed around under the seats of the bus taking us tobogganing at Chestnut.  I got pretty silly and sick.  Two of my best friends were mad at having to hold my arms to walk around outside, and then hold my head inside the restrooms.  They got over it pretty fast, though, when the group we were with got tired waiting in line and crashed their toboggans down an unauthorized slope.  A couple managed to get their first broken bones that trip.

Mostly, though, our times were great fun.  Even when I was in my twenties and on tour a lot as a singer, there’d still be time for winter escapes.  One year, some musician friends from Hawaii came with us for their first time tobogganing.  The keyboard player was blind, but up for most anything, when he went “sightseeing” as he said.  The rest of his group sat him up front, not one of them wanting to sit there.  I worried that he would have a hard time of it, without the advantage of seeing where he was racing.  Instead, he loved it and was our lead man all day.  In truth, I think the cold was a lot rougher on these Pacific Islanders than the speed out of the chutes.  So, later I took them to my favorite place of all for enjoying winter in the South Towns; inside a lodge by the fire with a hot drink, watching the other snow birds go by.

I went to middle school about a mile away from a Wendy’s on Wyoming and Wayne Streets in Dayton, and I had gone to elementary less than a half mile down the road. One day out of each week I got picked up from school to go to a ‘cello lesson in a southern suburb. The after-school snack was invariably a small fry and small Frosty. Every once in a while, local celebrities would come in with their children and eat the same thing.  Back when this guy was mayor of Dayton, he used to take his kids to that same Wendy’s. 

One day, the mayor and his two children happened to be there, sitting rather fitfully in one of the tables at exactly the same time I was. I don’t know what the problem was, but Mike (he was called Mike then, before he moved to Washington and somehow became respectable) must have been having a bad day. His kids, who didn’t seem to be doing anything out of the ordinary as far as I saw, were irritating him. As a result, anyone who happened to say hello to him were greeted curtly. I watched amusedly, slurping my Frosty and chomping down my fries, as this man told his kids to sit up, to not open their mouths when they ate, to be quiet. I didn’t think at the time that there was anything particularly remarkable about him, nor did I particularly care when he was elected out of office several years later (’02, to Rhine McLin, who’s more embattled now as Mayor than he ever was, it seems), or that he’d be part of the Congress that allowed for us to get into the nasty mess that we’re now in. It’s not that I blame him, mind you. It’s that in the eight years that he was mayor of that place–of the place that housed this Wendy’s where he constantly told his kids to sit up straight, to keep their elbows off the table, to not talk so loud when in public, to behave because, you know, he’s the mayor and his kids just can’t behave that way–his legacy was marked primarily by a monument in the middle of the city.

This had to have been ’95, because he hadn’t been in office long enough to get a street named after him, but had been able to push through his first project:  a broken rail-road track on Main Street, it’s a silly-looking pseudo-sculpture marking the exact length that the Wright Brothers took on their Kitty Hawk flight. It’s bendy, not straight; short, warped, and metallic. It really makes no sense where it is, except that the then-mayor–the one who wanted his kids to sit up straight, to act as if they were in a formal restaurant while really eating at a fast-food place right outside of one of the most run-down neighborhoods in the city–built a legacy based on a silly monument.

And now, of course, he’s that district’s congressman. The Wendy’s, at least, is still there.

Small rodents and curious sparrows could have easily become tragically impaled on the sky-high Aqua Net bangs that I proudly wore in the 80s…yes, they were that gravity-defying. The notoriously cheap extra hold hairspray that I favored, so alluring in its pastel aerosol container and oftentimes just 99 cents a can, was my main weapon of choice and (sadly) the precise brand that all of my bang-competing-peers bought up in mass quantities with their seemingly limitless allowances. I was of modest circumstances, and therefore the ongoing deficit of this most essential resource in my community would prompt me to raid the kitchen and cook up my own cockamamie sugar-water-hair-preparations, guaranteed to resist hurricane-force winds of up to 67 miles per hour. Despite keeping up with the Joneses, any self-respecting teen who had been around the mall a few times knew that Aqua Net brand aspirations were de rigueur – they were the golden standard to which all wall-‘o-bang-standards were held.

 In order to achieve such supremely-high styling heights, one had to become highly skilled in the art of back-combing, and for this very task, I turned to none other than my grandmother’s gnarly-looking, metal-tailed comb. Why it didn’t occur to me to scrub off the accumulated hair mouse and Dippity-do caked at the base of the teeth, I’ll never know, but it was quite sight to behold. I never quite mastered the foof-and-spray technique (despite hanging my head upside down, creating a voluminous thatch in my bangs, swinging back and forth, and spraying until the cows came home), so I learned to do the next best thing – cheat with my curling iron. To this day, that memory summons the distinctive burned-chemical-hair-scent that surely made common houseflies keel over and die in my path. Even when I swallowed, I could ‘taste’ the chemically goodness in my throat.
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My first radio job out of college, in 1984, was working for WRKL in Rockland County New York . I announced high school football games on Saturday and during the week covered insanely boring things like planning board and town hall meetings.

One of the few meetings I actually enjoyed covering was the monthly board of health gathering. I found it interesting and informative to know which restaurants had been fined for health code violations.

At the first board of health meeting I covered, I spoke with a woman who was there for the local newspaper. She warned me about Doctor Fletcher Johnson, the board of health president. She told me he was tough to deal with. When the board of health members walked into the meeting I was struck by how huge Dr. Johnson was. He was about 6’8 and solidly built. All throughout the meeting I kept thinking, “Fletcher Johnson. Where have I heard that name before?”

At the conclusion of the meeting, I went up to Dr. Johnson, a cardiovascular surgeon, while carrying my tape recorder and introduced myself. He didn’t appear all that impressed with me. He wasn’t rude, but he gave the impression he had other, more important things to get to.

Before I began the interview I asked him, “Are you the Fletcher Johnson who played basketball at Duquesne?” He stared at me. Then his eyes lit up. He even smiled.
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Every Wednesday, my grandmother used to take me to the Audubon Zoo, nestled amongst the oak trees in New Orleans. As usual we took the oldest form of transportation there, made famous in movies throughout the past century: the streetcar. My quarter plunked in the metal tin receptacle at the front of the car, and we made our way back to find our seats. In the summer months, the windows were open all the way, allowing the sticky humid New Orleans air to penetrate the car. Even with the windows open, the back of my thighs stuck to the wooden slated seats as I sat squashed next to my grandmother. Sweat-stained workmen mingled with Tulane scholars as the streetcar clacked along the rails towards our destination.

Once we were there, the zoo seemed like an amazing paradise. Tropical birds, jaguars, elephants, and sea lions represented a variety of animals from virtually every continent. As we made our way past the growling tigers and pacing lions, I fingered a little brown lunch sack with anticipation. It was a tradition, made by myself at the ripe old age of 3, that we would eat our peanut butter and jelly sandwiches by the giraffes every Wednesday. As we found a seat on the wooden park bench, I admired the graceful yet clumsy creatures. Their long necks, innocent eyes, and gentle natures appealed to me for reasons I still don’t quite understand.

I ate my sandwich with the peanut butter sticking to the roof of my mouth and washed it down eagerly with cold Sprite straight from the bottle. My grandmother was never in a hurry, and she allowed me all the time I needed to enjoy my lunch with the giraffes. After lunch was over, we would stroll through the rest of the zoo watching indigenous squirrels and sparrows fight over popcorn crumbs. Cocky peacocks strutted by displaying their feathers for all to see, and goldfish half my size begged for food from the center fountain.

When our day was over, we would pile back on the streetcar. The rhythmic rocking of the streetcar held me in a trance as it scuttled down the line. Just before I drifted off to sleep, I already began planning our next trip. After all, when you are 4 and with your grandmother, Wednesday can’t come soon enough.

I can remember when Sonny and Cher premiered with their new variety show. Ed Sullivan aside, it was groundbreaking in that we were seeing a very glamorous young woman host a television show in primetime, and she became quite the rage. Sonny, her sidekick, didn’t have the charisma or ability to impress that his young wife seemed to radiate.

She was part Cherokee, and she had the hair to prove it; long, straight, shiny, blue-black hair to her slender waist. Her hair alone was enough to catapult them to the top of prime time television. Cher exuded sardonic sarcasm, which was the epitome of a modern woman who didn’t have a problem zinging her husband with sassy barbs. She even had the courage to “vamp” around the stage as a trampy character, which fit her well.

I would say Cher’s influence mainly manifested itself in the hair department. Being of Italian heritage, I had long, dark hair, so I thought it was easy for me to emulate her style. For purists such as me, I found out that wasn’t exactly true. I happened to have a slight–and I mean really slight–wave to my hair, which was unacceptable. In order to rectify this hirsute handicap it was time to bring out high end remedies like curlers the size of coffee cans.

The routine was to wash your hair, comb out all the knots, then plop yourself on the toilet, put your head between your legs, and before passing out from the blood rushing to your head, brush your hair into a ponytail in the middle of the top of your head. Secure it with a rubber band from an envelope your Grandfather gave you from his desk. After sitting up and regaining your equilibrium, and waiting until your face changed back to a normal flesh tone, you would take one or two large curlers and put them in your hair.
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It’s spring, 1997. The bell tower at the Carrillon is always nicest this time of year; not only are the hills surrounding this 150-foot tall, 57-belled tower on the southern edge of the city particularly flowing and green and the breeze off of the river particularly sweet (when not after a rain, of course), it’s also among the most beautiful views in town. The museum itself has the air of a place trying to be stuck in time, the last bastion of a city whose memories of Wright Brothers and Dunbars and NCRs are still very fresh and very dear. But the hill itself, with that tower hovering above in the closest thing we have to a Washingtonian monument, is the place where the youngest of lovers go.  At the foot of this hill where the bell-tower rings out for life and love and lust every hour on the hour, this place really belongs to us, the brashest, the exhibitionists trying to shake up the calm of this town full of cars and wide-open roads and rolling hills.

It’s spring, 1997. I’ve been dating this girl now for about three weeks, so we’re still in the mode of finding as many different places to hook up as possible. It’s mid-afternoon, and the bells have just rung a Bach tune. The wind blows. We kiss. An older couple–he’s about thirty, she’s about twenty-two, so old for us– walks by. He grins at me, rasises his fist in the air.

“Yeah, man! Do it! I remember that spot. Good spot, good spot. Get it done!”

It’s spring, 1997. The bells ring a Bach tune, and I’m too young to know that just where I am, right now, so many others–the exhibitionists, the lovers, the Dautonians still home and not sure where they want to go–will do just what I am doing now for years to come. The bells ring on.