Verner

I’ve had 2 bosses in my life that really had an impact on me. Both were father figures. Dennis Connolly, the owner of The Broadway Oyster Bar who I’ll get back to, and Dave Verner.

Calvin “Calmodee” Britt, head Goon Squad member, calls Dave “The Prince of Darkness who’s forgotten more about skydiving than most jumpers will ever know. Dave’s also the father of world champion skydiver Kirk Verner.

Verner ran Archway Skydive Centre in Sparta Illinois and eventually Vandalia. I taught the static line first jump course for him.

I’d spend the entire day with my students. When the class ended I’d take 3 at a time up in a small Cessna and put them out of the plane. Verner would talk them down with a radio.

Verner was famous for his penny pinching. He’d run around the drop zone collecting beer and soda cans. He had the most demonic grin as he flattened them with his little hand pumped crusher.

Verner helped me out of several jams, especially when my car broke down. He threw wildly successful chili parties every winter. I remember leaving there so drunk one year that I drove my little Suzuki Samurai right into a ditch. Luckily I could put it in 4 wheel drive and get out.

Verner could never turn down any business. One time I had a class of seven Japanese engineering students from Parks College. I was teaching them exits from a mock up airplane when I began to get the feeling they didn’t understand a thing I said. I scanned the group and noticed one of them seemed to understand English. “You seem to understand me,” I said. “I understand every word,” he replied. “Great, explain it to them.” “I’m Korean!” he exclaimed.

Anyway, I taught them the commands for steering and landing and Dave talked them down safely.

Pics are me boarding a blue Cessna 182 (this was one of the planes I put students out of), Dave telling one of his bad jokes to a group of jumpers (he’s wearing the green hat), Me standing in front of a red Cessna 185—gotta jump off here.... Our friend George was the pilot of this airplane. I spent a 3 day weekend at a skydive camp 10 miles from Vandalia being coached by Jack Jeffries. He was the team captain of Arizona Airspeed. They were the world champion 4-way team for several years and Kirk was a member. We were practicing our moves at the Greenville airport when George landed his C-185. He had just watched a load exit the plane back at Vandalia when he noticed a glove finger in the back of his plane. He picked it up only to discover it still had a finger in it. Our friend Steve Otke had his finger in the plane’s door hinge and he exited leaving it behind. George flew straight to show us.

The last pic is the Verner family. I got it from Dave’s FaceBook. It shows Dave, Kirk, Dianne (Kirk’s mom), and Kirk’s son. Kirk’s wife Melanie took it.

When Kim and I got married in freefall, Dianne tried to talk us out of letting Dennis Jett be our minister. Dennis was a bit of a Viet Nam vet psychedelic that seemed to have been ordained by mail in San Francisco. Dave told her to shut up and let us have our day.

P.S. I just remembered. There's a scene in the movie Drop Zone where several skydivers form a large spinning round formation over Washington, DC. The single jumper spinning the opposite direction in the center of the formation is Jack Jeffries.

The School Band

In 1969 my brother came home from school with a violin. I was jealous. I was so jealous my dad gave me his cornet and I was signed up for band. His horn was almost unplayable. It became apparent I would need a better one if I was going to take this seriously.

The place to go for band instruments in those days was St. Ann Music. I got a beautiful Conn trumpet that had a copper bell. I’ve never seen another one like it. They told me it improved the tone. It just looked really cool to me.

The next year I started junior high at Nipher in Kirkwood. It was 3 miles away and I used to walk along railroad tracks to get there. Sometimes I’d hop a train. You should try that carrying a trumpet case.

Band teachers were always a little different than the others. They were just a little off. Nipher is where my friend Baritone and I would trade instruments. Our teacher was cool with it. He encouraged experimentation.

In those days when the door bell rang at night we were instructed not to answer. It could only be a bill collector. One night, as we hid in the dark, the ringing became so incessant I had to answer. I couldn’t stand it any more.

Sure enough it was a guy from St. Ann Music looking for the trumpet payment. If he couldn’t get that he wanted the trumpet. I told him I’d left it at school. He asked how my instruction was going. I told him I loved it and I was getting better every day. He said he was glad to hear it. I never heard from them again.

When I moved out to the country with my dad I hadn’t practiced for months and my embrasure was shot. I auditioned for the school band and didn’t make it. I had always been encouraged and this was a real blow to my ego.

Somehow when I moved back to the city with my mom I passed the audition and was back in the school band.

It was a whole different experience this time. My teacher was a lovely, ancient woman who wore too much rouge and perfume named Mrs. Lewis. She loved me and really pushed me to excel.

Mrs. Lewis took me to play with the black gospel church groups on St. Louis’ north side on Sundays. I traveled with a friend whose name I can’t recall. He would wail out an improvised horn line every now and then. I was really impressed and realized how musically repressed I’d been.

I loved these trips. I felt like I was carrying on a family tradition. My dad and his friends went to church for the gospel music on weekends even though he had admitted to me that he was atheist. He thought the lyrics of a Blood, Sweat and Tears song were really deep that went, “Swear there ain’t no Heaven but I pray there ain’t no Hell.

At the end of 8^th grade Mrs. Lewis took my buddy and me to audition for Walter Suskind. At the time he was the director and principal conductor of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra.

I played Mendelssohn’s Intermezzo which I’d never even heard before. I remember my buddy got to play something that seemed like a lot more fun. We both passed the audition and got free summer lessons from one of the first chair trumpet players of the Symphony. I think this was the course you took to get into the Young People’s Symphony.

I remember I had to ride my bike miles with the trumpet case hanging from my fingers. It hurt.

Eventually I quit. I felt like I was burning up my summer vacation. I regret it now of course but at the time I never admitted to anyone that I hated the sound of trumpets. It was electric guitar for me!

Well here I am with kids in band. Schools are always cutting band from their budget first and we’re lucky the St. Charles schools realize how important music is.

My kids have the same discipline issues I did and Dylan has already given up trombone. They had both studied piano for years and eventually lost interest. Chloe seems to be genuinely into the flute.

To be fair to Dylan he’s getting better at bass and guitar every day. I guess music has to be a personal pursuit.

When I gave up trumpet my brother and I took the bus downtown to Hunleth Music. (An incredible place whose demise is a real loss to St. Louis). We were both playing hooky. I traded my trumpet for a violin for him. We were stopped by a truant officer. We explained we were on a musical expedition for school. He looked at the violin case and let us go.

Eek

We have mice. It’s not a big deal for Valerie. She grew up in the country and they were just a fact of life. They terrify me.

They didn’t use to bother me at all. When I was still living with my mom in Soulard we had one that would sit on a mop that was propped against the wall. The mouse watched every move we made. It had no fear. I guess it didn’t need any. We left him alone.

They may as well be rats as far as I’m concerned.

When I was in 4^th grade I lived in the Shaw neighborhood. There were blocks and blocks of empty apartments where highway 44 was coming in. In those days there were no flashing yellow caution signs for road work. They used weird little bowling ball shaped torches that had a little flame on top. They must have been filled with lead because they were very heavy. I’m not sure how they could have been bright enough to stop an accident. I had to steal one of course.

No one had air conditioning in those days. My brother and I slept on our back porch. Mosquitoes were easier to deal with than the heat from inside.

This led to late night excursions into the dark. One night I grabbed my stolen torch, wandered into the alley, lit it and sat by its little flame like it was a campfire. I noticed movement nearby. There was a large rat right next to me. Its eyes glowed red from the flame as he gazed at me with loathing. I was paralyzed with fear.

The empty apartment shells of the construction site looked like post war Europe. This is where we stuck a smoke bomb in a dead rat’s ass. Kids find the strangest things amusing.

I think my real fear of mice came when I was living with my dad and his second wife in the country. I was in the basement and a deer mouse ran along a wall. It looked like a hideous genetic freak. It had a mouse’s body but long deer legs. Man I still get goose bumps thinking about it.

From there my brother and I moved back with my mom to the attic of a mansion in Gaslight Square. The Central West End hadn’t been gentrified yet and the neighborhood was filled with dilapidated old mansions.

We had a swimming pool that hadn’t been used in years. It was half filled with black water and a bloated, hairless, dead rat floated in it. No one would go near it.

A few years ago, when we were living in Florissant, we had a mouse that would come out of an air vent. My kids found a tiny Christmas stocking that was really a tree ornament. They hung it next to the vent and put a small cookie in it. Christmas morning they discovered the cookie had been nibbled on by the mouse. I never told them I made it look that way.

Anyway, like I was saying, we have mice. At first Valerie’s cat Charlie took care of them for us. Valerie couldn’t bear the thought of traps. She would scoop them up alive if she could and take them outside. From there I’m sure they would just come back inside.

Charlie is 15, constantly sneezing from allergies, and probably deaf. The other night I was tossing in my usual state of insomnia when I noticed 2 mice playing around my shoes. Charlie was in a purring meditative ball at the end of the bed. I gently lifted him and set him down facing the mice. He turned back to look at me like he was confused. I guess his mousing days are over.

KXOK

I mentioned in an earlier post that the universe changed as I was listening to the radio one day in 1964. I was listening to my favorite song, Lena Horne’s Stormy Weather and it was followed by the Beatles version of Twist and Shout. It really felt like we were entering a whole new world.

There were 2 stations in St. Louis in those days, KATZ and KXOK. St. Louis was as racially divided over the air as it was on the ground. KXOK was my connection to God.

I had an old tube radio by my bed and a small transistor with a tinny little earpiece. I don’t know why ear buds sound so much better today.

Childhood was like a movie and KXOK played a sound track of Beatles, Monkees, and Good Vibrations. When I hear Len Barry’s 123 I still slip into a nostalgia delirium.

I was a big Johnny Rabbit fan. He had a sidekick named Bruno J. Grunion.

If you are familiar with The Paul Winchell/Jerry Mahoney show or even the later Pee Wee Herman show you’ll understand the effect Bruno J. had on kids in St. Louis.

Johnny Rabbit had been stationed with Elvis in Germany and everything about that era in radio was totally magic to me.

From what I can remember Bruno was the manager of a band called The Aardvarks. I loved these guys. They even opened for The Beatles at Busch Stadium.

We were living in Laclede Town at the time just a few blocks from there. My mother later told me she wouldn’t even consider going because ticket scalpers wanted $20.00.

The event is famous in St. Louis history because a hundred bands played before The Beatles arrived. It rained the whole time. When The Beatles finally got on stage their set lasted 18 minutes. No one could hear anything of course.

Later, as a young man, I would get to know Ron Elz (Johnny Rabbit), Chuck Connors (Bruno J. Grunion) and Mike Newman (Guitarist for The Aardvarks). I thought I knew all the really important personalities in St. Louis. Eventually I learned none of these guys were the people I idolized as a child. One step removed from greatness.

All three of these guys are great in their own ways. Chuck is a saint and I’ll definitely do blog about him and his restaurant The Other Mother.

The Johnny Rabbit and Bruno J. Grunion of my childhood were both Don Pietromonaco and Mike was too young to have been in Aardvarks yet. I have had a few adventures with Mike and his ex, Gail.

I remember driving around with my mother in 1970. We were listening to the top 100 count down from the sixties on KXOK. When it got to number one it was Hey Jude. We sang along. We always sang along to the radio.

My mother’s favorite pastime was driving us around as she dreamed of living in one of the pretty little houses in one of the nice little neighborhoods we’d visit.

By the end of the sixties culturally conscious kids outgrew the commercialism of the AM stations and moved on to KSHE and WESL or MAJIC 108.

Even by then St. Louis was segregated on the air waves (still is). Some of the white kids were lucky enough to know what was going on in the other camp.

I’ll never forget listening to WESL (East St. Louis) in my first apartment with my brother and Tony Patti.

WESL’s DJ “Dr. Jockenstein” ranted over every record he played. It made great radio. Most of it was Funkadelic.

We learned George Clinton himself gave Jockenstein his name and the title cut from Mothership Connection was based on his show.

Years later I was tending bar at the Broadway Oyster Bar. Jockenstein came in, jumped up on the stage, got the band to jam on a riff and did a spectacular Old School Hip Hop routine. He was pure Hollywood, sleazy lounge and sunglasses. What a show!

The Frank O. Pinion show has been talking about KXOK all week. I’m not really much of a fan of the show but Frank seems to have the same nostalgia for the station that I do. I had forgotten what Bruno J. Grunion really sounded like. I think kids are too sophisticated for that kind of radio today. I think the whole world grew up the same time The Beatles did.

Check out this link.

http://www.myspace.com/johnnyrabbitt

A Chip Off the Old Block continued......

I was driving my mother to the store the other day. We were talking about Dylan. I always joke that he’ll still be living at home when he’s 35.

My mother asked me if I remembered when I realized I’d become an adult. I thought about it and had to answer that I never had. “I’m glad you said that,” she said. “I never did either.”

What I do remember is thinking maturity was always somewhere in the future. When I was a teenager I thought it was 21. In my 20s I thought it was 30. I’m 51 now and I still have the same, off in the future, feeling.

My mother said she was the same person she had always been. She is coming to terms with it always being that way.

I know the sum of our experiences must have molded us in some way.

My mother and I share the same memory that we were never children in our minds. Maybe we missed out on something. I remember adults having a problem with my lack of automatic respect for their authority.

My mom found my reaction to her childhood photos very funny. I’m unnerved by her adult face on her child’s body.

A Chip Off the Old Block

I am currently experiencing a rite of passage of every parent. I’m teaching my son to drive. Before we even started I warned him I’d be yelling a lot. My father had. How can a person who’s terrified for their very life help it?

He told me his Driver’s Ed teacher told him that wasn’t the best way to learn. I’m not sure I agree. If you can deal with the stress of a terrified parent, you can handle almost any surprise situation.

A month ago we were at a party in the country. Everyone there grew up in the city and learned how to drive in the parking lot of the Muny Opera. That’s were my dad taught me. My son, Dylan, decided a long time ago his heart was in the city, not the county. He determined that it was important to learn in the Muny parking lot.

Dylan has already picked up the St. Louis habit of rolling through stop signs. The stress is compounded when he rolls through a right on red and there are cameras at the intersection. I really hate those things. At least you can try to reason with a cop!

Dylan and I have a lot in common. Justice and being fair are very important to him. He hasn’t realized that life really isn’t fair yet. He’s not cynical at all. I hope that lasts a while.

By the time I was his age I was hitch hiking around the country, doing drugs, and having sex. I had been taking care of myself for years already. I can’t imagine any of this with him. Sometimes I think my kids have been too sheltered but I know they’re going to make it through school. I hope that makes life a little easier for them.

Dylan generally has very good taste in music but when he wants to be rebellious he’ll tell me how much he loves the band Journey. He really knows how to push my buttons.

It reminds me of the last time my mom tried to give me a haircut. It was the summer between 8^th grade and high school. At some point she yelled, “Son of a bitch,” at me. “Yep,” I replied. It stopped the conversation cold.

Last week my girl friend Valerie and I took my kids to Soulard for Oktoberfest. Why there’s a German festival in the French section of St. Louis I’ll never know. Any excuse for a party I suppose. When we saw the beers were $13.00 we went to our favorite haunt The Shanti.

We went in through the beer garden where we ran into our friend David Classé. I introduce my kids to him. He took one look at Dylan’s long hair and said, “He’s a chip off the old block.”

Pic of Dylan is his school 2009 photo. The pic of my brother Patrick and me was taken by Matt O’Shea in the mid 70s some time.

Taking It to the Streets

Valerie’s (and now my) friend Don invited us to a walk around Tower Grove Park last Saturday. It was supposed to raise public awareness for deaf people in St. Louis. I dragged my kids along.

When I first met Don it was hours before I even realized he was deaf. He’s very good at reading lips. He had a cochlear implant but it had failed and he was going into surgery for a new one. He said people sounded like robots when it had worked.

When we met him at the march he had had the surgery. He said it would be eight weeks before they could turn it on. He had to mend from the operation.

I told my friend Fojammi the last thing Don really heard was the song Wake Me Up Before You Go Go. Fojammi pointed out Don had some catching up to do. I asked Don if he’d be able to listen to music with his new implant. He said they were starting him out with music therapy.

Technology is making great strides. Maybe we’ll be able to replace anything someday. There are deaf people who think implants are a bad idea. The logic is deafness is not abnormal it’s just different. My take is, if you could turn on a switch and understand Spanish, why not? It’s communication. Understanding is a good thing.

He told me he had to learn how to hear with a cochlear implant. When he got it the first thing he heard was a dog barking. Then a car’s brakes squealed but it still sounded like a dog barking. Even a door slamming sounded like a dog barking. He looked at me and said, “Stop barking at me!”

I thought it would be a good idea for my kids to get involved with a social issue. This one seemed tame enough. Little did I realize Don’s repertoire of dirty jokes.

I thought we could march at the front of the line with our fists in the air yelling, “Deaf people take back the streets!” Once a militant, always a militant!

A side benefit was Don’s vast knowledge of plants. He was able to identify everything we saw along the way.

When we got back to the Turkish Pavilion, the home base of the walk, someone decided we needed a photo of our group. It seemed like it took half an hour to keep us contained while someone tried to figure out the camera.

During all of this some little guy was bending Valerie’s ear. I thought maybe he was looking for free food. He asked me what the gathering was about in a soft whisper. We told him. He asked what the popular spots in the neighborhood were.

He was actually a little rude because he kept demanding our attention while we were trying to get the group picture. I asked what all of his questions were about. He said in his mysterious whisper that it would all soon become clear.

My interest was piqued. Finally he produced a card. It was Jerry Berger. “Oh,” I said, “That explains it.” Someone asked me who he was. I said he had an old gossip column. He overheard me and whispered, “Old?” He must’ve been pretty confident that the whole world knew who he was. I wonder if he would have been crushed if we had no idea who he was.

After we found out who he was we had a lot to talk about. He knew Valerie’s sister. I told him he reviewed my band in the 80’s. He said he remembered but who knows.

He kept whispering. Valerie leaned into his ear and whispered, “Why are we whispering?” “Yeah,” I said, “These people are all deaf.”

“I have cancer.”

Anyway, he took photos of us and the kids. He has an on line column and still works for the Riverfront Times. Valerie said she was a little jealous when he kissed her on one cheek but kissed me on both cheeks as we parted.

Anyone who knows me knows how much I love publicity. I was very disappointed when our mention in his column wasn’t accompanied by a photo.

The photo they finally took has Valerie, me and the kids in the back on the left. Don is dead center to my left. I also lifted part of Jerry Berger’s blog.

DATE: Sunday 10/4/2009. . . The "Walk for Hearing" was also in full-swing, and that's where Valerie Pennington andDavid Udell, with his offspring Chloe andDylan, gave me a rundown on the hottest Southside nightcrawling spots. They liked The Shanty in Soulard; The Tin Can; Three Monkeys; Mattingly's; and The Cat's Meow "where I used to get a shot and beer for $1.50," said Udell. (The Meow is the deliciously dive bar operated by St. Louis 9th Ward aldermanKen Ortmann and his wife, Pat.) . . . Continuing the green theme