WA2K Radio is now on the air

Merry Christmas[/size]

or any other holiday you choose to celebrate at this time of year

some tunes for the day

for our buddies in the brittish isles

Christmas In Killarney

The holly green, the ivy green
The prettiest picture you've ever seen
Is Christmas in Killarney
With all of the folks at home

It's nice, you know, to kiss your beau
While cuddling under the mistletoe
And Santa Claus you know, of course
Is one of the boys from home

The door is always open
The neighbors pay a call
And Father John before he's gone
Will bless the house and all

How grand it feels to click your heels
And join in the fun of the jigs and reels
I'm handing you no blarney
The likes you've never known
Is Christmas in Killarney
With all of the folks at home


for dys

Christmas For Cowboys

Tall in the saddle we spend Christmas day
Driving the cattle on the snow-covered plains.
All of the good gifts given today;
Ours is the sky and the wide open range.

Back in the cities, they have different ways,
Football and eggnog and Christmas parades.
I'll take the blanket; I'll take the reins;
Christmas for Cowboys and wide open plains.

A campfire for warmth as we stop for the night;
The stars overhead are the Christmas-tree lights.
The wind sings a hymn as we bow down to pray;
Christmas for Cowboys and the wide open plains.

It's tall in the saddle we spend Christmas Day,
Driving the cattle on the snow-covered plains.
So many gifts have been opened today;
Ours is the sky and the wide open range.
It's Christmas for Cowboys and wide open plains.


for panz, the bear and all the rock n rollers we know

Jingle Bell Rock
Bobby Helms

Jingle bell, jingle bell, jingle bell rock
Jingle bells swing and jingle bells ring
Snowing and blowing up bushels of fun
Now the jingle hop has begun

Jingle bell, jingle bell, jingle bell rock
Jingle bells chime in jingle bell time
Dancing and prancing in Jingle Bell Square
In the frosty air.

What a bright time, it's the right time
To rock the night away
Jingle bell time is a swell time
To go gliding in a one-horse sleigh
Giddy-up jingle horse, pick up your feet
Jingle around the clock
Mix and a-mingle in the jingling feet
That's the jingle bell,
That's the jingle bell,
That's the jingle bell rock.


for the worst of our lot, and you know who you are
(don't forget he checks the list twice)

Nuttin' For Christmas

I broke my bat on Johnny's head;
Somebody snitched on me.
I hid a frog in sister's bed;
Somebody snitched on me.
I spilled some ink on Mommy's rug;
I made Tommy eat a bug;
Bought some gum with a penny slug;
Somebody snitched on me.

Oh, I'm gettin' nuttin' for Christmas
Mommy and Daddy are mad.
I'm getting nuttin' for Christmas
'Cause I ain't been nuttin' but bad.

I put a tack on teacher's chair
somebody snitched on me.
I tied a knot in Susie's hair
somebody snitched on me.
I did a dance on Mommy's plants
climbed a tree and tore my pants
Filled the sugar bowl with ants
somebody snitched on me.

So, I'm gettin' nuttin' for Christmas
Mommy and Daddy are mad.
I'm gettin' nuttin' for Christmas
'Cause I ain't been nuttin' but bad.

I won't be seeing Santa Claus;
Somebody snitched on me.
He won't come visit me because
Somebody snitched on me.
Next year I'll be going straight;
Next year I'll be good, just wait
I'd start now, but it's too late;
Somebody snitched on me.

So you better be good whatever you do
'Cause if you're bad, I'm warning you,
You'll get nuttin' for Christmas.


for our gracious host and PD letty,
no particular reason, it's just a fave of mine

Winter Wonderland

Sleigh bells ring, are you listening,
in the lane, snow is glistening
A beautiful sight,
we're happy tonight,
walking in a winter wonderland.

Gone away is the bluebird,
here to stay is a new bird
He sings a love song,
as we go along,
walking in a winter wonderland.

In the meadow we can build a snowman,
Then pretend that he is Parson Brown
He'll say: Are you married?
we'll say: No man,
But you can do the job
when you're in town.

Later on, we'll conspire,
as we dream by the fire
To face unafraid,
the plans that we've made,
walking in a winter wonderland.

In the meadow we can build a snowman,
and pretend that he's a circus clown
We'll have lots of fun with mister snowman,
until the other kids knock him down.

When it snows, ain't it thrilling,
Though your nose gets a chilling
We'll frolic and play, the Eskimo way,
walking in a winter wonderland.

Walking in a winter wonderland,
walking in a winter wonderland.

a classic tale

and a very different take on the same

A Child's Christmas in Wales
by Dylan Thomas

One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.


All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find. In goes my hand into that wool-white bell-tongued ball of holidays resting at the rim of the carol-singing sea, and out come Mrs. Prothero and the firemen.

It was on the afternoon of the Christmas Eve, and I was in Mrs. Prothero's garden, waiting for cats, with her son Jim. It was snowing. It was always snowing at Christmas. December, in my memory, is white as Lapland, though there were no reindeers. But there were cats. Patient, cold and callous, our hands wrapped in socks, we waited to snowball the cats. Sleek and long as jaguars and horrible-whiskered, spitting and snarling, they would slink and sidle over the white back-garden walls, and the lynx-eyed hunters, Jim and I, fur-capped and moccasined trappers from Hudson Bay, off Mumbles Road, would hurl our deadly snowballs at the green of their eyes. The wise cats never appeared.

We were so still, Eskimo-footed arctic marksmen in the muffling silence of the eternal snows - eternal, ever since Wednesday - that we never heard Mrs. Prothero's first cry from her igloo at the bottom of the garden. Or, if we heard it at all, it was, to us, like the far-off challenge of our enemy and prey, the neighbor's polar cat. But soon the voice grew louder.
"Fire!" cried Mrs. Prothero, and she beat the dinner-gong.

And we ran down the garden, with the snowballs in our arms, toward the house; and smoke, indeed, was pouring out of the dining-room, and the gong was bombilating, and Mrs. Prothero was announcing ruin like a town crier in Pompeii. This was better than all the cats in Wales standing on the wall in a row. We bounded into the house, laden with snowballs, and stopped at the open door of the smoke-filled room.

Something was burning all right; perhaps it was Mr. Prothero, who always slept there after midday dinner with a newspaper over his face. But he was standing in the middle of the room, saying, "A fine Christmas!" and smacking at the smoke with a slipper.

"Call the fire brigade," cried Mrs. Prothero as she beat the gong.
"There won't be there," said Mr. Prothero, "it's Christmas."
There was no fire to be seen, only clouds of smoke and Mr. Prothero standing in the middle of them, waving his slipper as though he were conducting.
"Do something," he said. And we threw all our snowballs into the smoke - I think we missed Mr. Prothero - and ran out of the house to the telephone box.
"Let's call the police as well," Jim said. "And the ambulance." "And Ernie Jenkins, he likes fires."

But we only called the fire brigade, and soon the fire engine came and three tall men in helmets brought a hose into the house and Mr. Prothero got out just in time before they turned it on. Nobody could have had a noisier Christmas Eve. And when the firemen turned off the hose and were standing in the wet, smoky room, Jim's Aunt, Miss. Prothero, came downstairs and peered in at them. Jim and I waited, very quietly, to hear what she would say to them. She said the right thing, always. She looked at the three tall firemen in their shining helmets, standing among the smoke and cinders and dissolving snowballs, and she said, "Would you like anything to read?"

Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the color of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, when we sang and wallowed all night and day in caves that smelt like Sunday afternoons in damp front farmhouse parlors, and we chased, with the jawbones of deacons, the English and the bears, before the motor car, before the wheel, before the duchess-faced horse, when we rode the daft and happy hills bareback, it snowed and it snowed. But here a small boy says: "It snowed last year, too. I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea."

"But that was not the same snow," I say. "Our snow was not only shaken from white wash buckets down the sky, it came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss, minutely -ivied the walls and settled on the postman, opening the gate, like a dumb, numb thunder-storm of white, torn Christmas cards."

"Were there postmen then, too?"
"With sprinkling eyes and wind-cherried noses, on spread, frozen feet they crunched up to the doors and mittened on them manfully. But all that the children could hear was a ringing of bells."
"You mean that the postman went rat-a-tat-tat and the doors rang?"
"I mean that the bells the children could hear were inside them."
"I only hear thunder sometimes, never bells."
"There were church bells, too."
"Inside them?"
"No, no, no, in the bat-black, snow-white belfries, tugged by bishops and storks. And they rang their tidings over the bandaged town, over the frozen foam of the powder and ice-cream hills, over the crackling sea. It seemed that all the churches boomed for joy under my window; and the weathercocks crew for Christmas, on our fence."

"Get back to the postmen"
"They were just ordinary postmen, found of walking and dogs and Christmas and the snow. They knocked on the doors with blue knuckles ...."
"Ours has got a black knocker...."
"And then they stood on the white Welcome mat in the little, drifted porches and huffed and puffed, making ghosts with their breath, and jogged from foot to foot like small boys wanting to go out."
"And then the presents?"
"And then the Presents, after the Christmas box. And the cold postman, with a rose on his button-nose, tingled down the tea-tray-slithered run of the chilly glinting hill. He went in his ice-bound boots like a man on fishmonger's slabs.
"He wagged his bag like a frozen camel's hump, dizzily turned the corner on one foot, and, by God, he was gone."

"Get back to the Presents."
"There were the Useful Presents: engulfing mufflers of the old coach days, and mittens made for giant sloths; zebra scarfs of a substance like silky gum that could be tug-o'-warred down to the galoshes; blinding tam-o'-shanters like patchwork tea cozies and bunny-suited busbies and balaclavas for victims of head-shrinking tribes; from aunts who always wore wool next to the skin there were mustached and rasping vests that made you wonder why the aunts had any skin left at all; and once I had a little crocheted nose bag from an aunt now, alas, no longer whinnying with us. And pictureless books in which small boys, though warned with quotations not to, would skate on Farmer Giles' pond and did and drowned; and books that told me everything about the wasp, except why."


"Go on the Useless Presents."
"Bags of moist and many-colored jelly babies and a folded flag and a false nose and a tram-conductor's cap and a machine that punched tickets and rang a bell; never a catapult; once, by mistake that no one could explain, a little hatchet; and a celluloid duck that made, when you pressed it, a most unducklike sound, a mewing moo that an ambitious cat might make who wished to be a cow; and a painting book in which I could make the grass, the trees, the sea and the animals any colour I pleased, and still the dazzling sky-blue sheep are grazing in the red field under the rainbow-billed and pea-green birds. Hardboileds, toffee, fudge and allsorts, crunches, cracknels, humbugs, glaciers, marzipan, and butterwelsh for the Welsh. And troops of bright tin soldiers who, if they could not fight, could always run. And Snakes-and-Families and Happy Ladders. And Easy Hobbi-Games for Little Engineers, complete with instructions. Oh, easy for Leonardo! And a whistle to make the dogs bark to wake up the old man next door to make him beat on the wall with his stick to shake our picture off the wall. And a packet of cigarettes: you put one in your mouth and you stood at the corner of the street and you waited for hours, in vain, for an old lady to scold you for smoking a cigarette, and then with a smirk you ate it. And then it was breakfast under the balloons."

"Were there Uncles like in our house?"
"There are always Uncles at Christmas. The same Uncles. And on Christmas morning, with dog-disturbing whistle and sugar fags, I would scour the swatched town for the news of the little world, and find always a dead bird by the Post Office or by the white deserted swings; perhaps a robin, all but one of his fires out. Men and women wading or scooping back from chapel, with taproom noses and wind-bussed cheeks, all albinos, huddles their stiff black jarring feathers against the irreligious snow. Mistletoe hung from the gas brackets in all the front parlors; there was sherry and walnuts and bottled beer and crackers by the dessertspoons; and cats in their fur-abouts watched the fires; and the high-heaped fire spat, all ready for the chestnuts and the mulling pokers. Some few large men sat in the front parlors, without their collars, Uncles almost certainly, trying their new cigars, holding them out judiciously at arms' length, returning them to their mouths, coughing, then holding them out again as though waiting for the explosion; and some few small aunts, not wanted in the kitchen, nor anywhere else for that matter, sat on the very edge of their chairs, poised and brittle, afraid to break, like faded cups and saucers."

Not many those mornings trod the piling streets: an old man always, fawn-bowlered, yellow-gloved and, at this time of year, with spats of snow, would take his constitutional to the white bowling green and back, as he would take it wet or fire on Christmas Day or Doomsday; sometimes two hale young men, with big pipes blazing, no overcoats and wind blown scarfs, would trudge, unspeaking, down to the forlorn sea, to work up an appetite, to blow away the fumes, who knows, to walk into the waves until nothing of them was left but the two furling smoke clouds of their inextinguishable briars. Then I would be slap-dashing home, the gravy smell of the dinners of others, the bird smell, the brandy, the pudding and mince, coiling up to my nostrils, when out of a snow-clogged side lane would come a boy the spit of myself, with a pink-tipped cigarette and the violet past of a black eye, cocky as a bullfinch, leering all to himself.

I hated him on sight and sound, and would be about to put my dog whistle to my lips and blow him off the face of Christmas when suddenly he, with a violet wink, put his whistle to his lips and blew so stridently, so high, so exquisitely loud, that gobbling faces, their cheeks bulged with goose, would press against their tinsled windows, the whole length of the white echoing street. For dinner we had turkey and blazing pudding, and after dinner the Uncles sat in front of the fire, loosened all buttons, put their large moist hands over their watch chains, groaned a little and slept. Mothers, aunts and sisters scuttled to and fro, bearing tureens. Auntie Bessie, who had already been frightened, twice, by a clock-work mouse, whimpered at the sideboard and had some elderberry wine. The dog was sick. Auntie Dosie had to have three aspirins, but Auntie Hannah, who liked port, stood in the middle of the snowbound back yard, singing like a big-bosomed thrush. I would blow up balloons to see how big they would blow up to; and, when they burst, which they all did, the Uncles jumped and rumbled. In the rich and heavy afternoon, the Uncles breathing like dolphins and the snow descending, I would sit among festoons and Chinese lanterns and nibble dates and try to make a model man-o'-war, following the Instructions for Little Engineers, and produce what might be mistaken for a sea-going tramcar.


Or I would go out, my bright new boots squeaking, into the white world, on to the seaward hill, to call on Jim and Dan and Jack and to pad through the still streets, leaving huge footprints on the hidden pavements.
"I bet people will think there's been hippos."
"What would you do if you saw a hippo coming down our street?"
"I'd go like this, bang! I'd throw him over the railings and roll him down the hill and then I'd tickle him under the ear and he'd wag his tail."
"What would you do if you saw two hippos?"

Iron-flanked and bellowing he-hippos clanked and battered through the scudding snow toward us as we passed Mr. Daniel's house.
"Let's post Mr. Daniel a snow-ball through his letter box."
"Let's write things in the snow."
"Let's write, 'Mr. Daniel looks like a spaniel' all over his lawn."
Or we walked on the white shore. "Can the fishes see it's snowing?"

The silent one-clouded heavens drifted on to the sea. Now we were snow-blind travelers lost on the north hills, and vast dewlapped dogs, with flasks round their necks, ambled and shambled up to us, baying "Excelsior." We returned home through the poor streets where only a few children fumbled with bare red fingers in the wheel-rutted snow and cat-called after us, their voices fading away, as we trudged uphill, into the cries of the dock birds and the hooting of ships out in the whirling bay. And then, at tea the recovered Uncles would be jolly; and the ice cake loomed in the center of the table like a marble grave. Auntie Hannah laced her tea with rum, because it was only once a year.

Bring out the tall tales now that we told by the fire as the gaslight bubbled like a diver. Ghosts whooed like owls in the long nights when I dared not look over my shoulder; animals lurked in the cubbyhole under the stairs and the gas meter ticked. And I remember that we went singing carols once, when there wasn't the shaving of a moon to light the flying streets. At the end of a long road was a drive that led to a large house, and we stumbled up the darkness of the drive that night, each one of us afraid, each one holding a stone in his hand in case, and all of us too brave to say a word. The wind through the trees made noises as of old and unpleasant and maybe webfooted men wheezing in caves. We reached the black bulk of the house. "What shall we give them? Hark the Herald?"
"No," Jack said, "Good King Wencelas. I'll count three." One, two three, and we began to sing, our voices high and seemingly distant in the snow-felted darkness round the house that was occupied by nobody we knew. We stood close together, near the dark door. Good King Wencelas looked out On the Feast of Stephen ... And then a small, dry voice, like the voice of someone who has not spoken for a long time, joined our singing: a small, dry, eggshell voice from the other side of the door: a small dry voice through the keyhole. And when we stopped running we were outside our house; the front room was lovely; balloons floated under the hot-water-bottle-gulping gas; everything was good again and shone over the town.
"Perhaps it was a ghost," Jim said. "
Perhaps it was trolls," Dan said, who was always reading.
"Let's go in and see if there's any jelly left," Jack said. And we did that.

Always on Christmas night there was music. An uncle played the fiddle, a cousin sang "Cherry Ripe," and another uncle sang "Drake's Drum." It was very warm in the little house. Auntie Hannah, who had got on to the parsnip wine, sang a song about Bleeding Hearts and Death, and then another in which she said her heart was like a Bird's Nest; and then everybody laughed again; and then I went to bed. Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steady falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.



A Child's Christmas in Scarborough
Howard Engel (with apologies to Dylan Thomas)
the scarborough reffered to is a suburb of toronto ontario canada

Whenever I remember Christmas as a child in Scarborough, I can never remember whether the slush was new or old, or whether we lived on the sixth street north of the shopping plaza stoplights and I was seven years old, or whether it was the seventh street and I was six. But still my nose and fingertips tingle at the thought of Christmas in the row-housing, whose names rang their challenging, forlorn ways down to the fast-backed, nerve and gear-wracking lanes of the freeway: Elegance Manors, Tweedingham Mews, Buckingham Back Courts; and I am again a boy among boys, riding our crash-barred, chrome-bedazzling bikes through the supermarket swing doors, grabbing girls' toques and Popsicles in the Mac's Milk and diving with our arms spread to make angels in the snow-banks that the ploughs churned up, plunging our hands to the soggy, stitch-straining armpits and pulling out, as I am doing now, uncles with ham-red hands, scratchy and sizzling-hot in their wife-bought cable-knits and après ski, who through the live-long Christmas afternoons watched the Buffalo Bills and the Los Angeles Rams battling in full colour on a purple field, and sat through Sugar Bowls and Dust Bowls, Cotton and Flannel Bowls until the punch bowl was emptied for the last time and they moved up the queasy, shifting stairs from the rec-room to the hall. And clear as the chlorinated water in the taps, but not so clear as a secret rivulet in the snows that we boys found near the highway that was gone in the spring when the hill was cleared for a condominium, I see Uncle Harry turning away the Salvation Army girl at the door and making us all laugh as she fell on the path on the ice I should have chipped away.

Christmas in Scarborough was nothing if it was not families and laughter. But before the compacts and the late-models and the single sports car owned by Aunt Hetty, the divorcee, who bought the Fugs record, before the hoards of uncles and aunts and cousins jousted for a parking spot and the superintendent appeared to ask us to remove a car that had been parked in someone else's spot, there were the presents that smoothed Father's absence due to overtime, and Mother's voice raised in the kitchen downstairs while the supper held in the stove at low heat congealed.

And there were disappointments, for as one scavenged among boxes and ribbons and discarded batteries from robots that never worked, and broken strings from suddenly mite Talking Barbies, there had to be one, small, bright and unutterably just right present that lies forever hiding over the rim of memory even now, as I remember, I can see it dancing somewhere in the dark room before sleep, and even in the dreams of Christmas night, when I ran through the vanished fields of our subdivision and climbed and tumbled in the haylofts of the vanished barns, it was there amongst the ghosts of swallows and blue jays and horses -- all gone now, like the words we wrote in last year's snow: Fanny Hill puts out. And, in the moonlight in the dark of the yard unlit by streetlights because of Charlie's air rifle and where no car would desecrate its stillness and the dark velvet of its shadows with the cold incandescence of its lights, I crept close to the sleeping whaleback of the hay-breathing house. I stole past the oaken veneer majesty of my parents' door, and finally warm in the acrylic goose down of my bed above orchards and cockcrow and the sailing ship moon on the skating pond; I slept until dawn sped back the whole farm and the cattle and the soft-eyed horses back to the darkest corner of my room where the sun never shines and socks can sometimes be found amid the slut's wool.

And then it was afternoon: and all the cousins, friends of friends, who had been stuffed into spare rooms and cautioned to nap because they had stayed up all night in candy-caned anticipation of catching Santa and delayed for a day his return to the department store throne, were awakened and sent off into the streets. And, waking from a dream in which I chased the blue and white stocking-capped boys, bigger boys from the skating rink at City Hall, glimpsed once on television, I dress in my fur-lined boots, was stuffed into station wagons with protesting uncles who drove as though the football games of all the world were punting in the shadows of the last-minute goalposts. And then we were sliding down the slopes of everlasting snow, everlasting for as long as the machine flew Niagaras of chipped ice over its diesel-throbbing back. And there, in that spinning time, I have my ski-lift ticket stapled to me, as though I were my own receipt for being, and hug for dear day the live cable that pulls me to the top and almost doesn't let go, and then I am poised on last year's skis, and am ready to take my turn. And then I do that. And I do it again, and then I come home for tea, uncles and the barracks of my Christmas soon-to-be-forgotten child's life.

And I remember that Aunt Hetty, who was the centre of attention in the kitchen but was not allowed in to help with the gossip, lay stretched out on the Spanish sofa, her soft, brandy-breath keeping Ernie, her latest lover, stupefied. Then Uncle Herbert appeared from the depths of the basement like a drunken porpoise and chased the whole kitchen gaggle with a plastic spring of mistletoe, and came to a bad end with his elbow in the gravy boat. Then Father phoned from Number 41 Station to say that he had been in the eggnog again and that he would be detained, and Mother drank the cooking sherry, and the turkey went unbased. Then Uncle Frank who had been a stockbroker and then a convict tried again to dance the Windfall of '65 and fell through the picture window. Then the neighbours knocked on the wall and we knocked on the neighbour's wall and then the police came.

Clara Barton
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.


Clarissa Harlowe Barton (better known as Clara Barton) (December 25, 1821 (although there is a confusion with her date of birth, as her birth certificate says the 25th, while her family members say that she was born the day before Christmas, the 24th)-April 12, 1912) was a pioneer American teacher, nurse, and humanitarian. She has been described as having had an "indomitable spirit" and is best remembered for organizing the American Red Cross.


Youth, education, family nursing

Clara Barton was born to Captain Stephen and Sarah Barton in Oxford, Massachusetts. Her father was a farmer and horse breeder. Her mother managed the household. She was the youngest of five siblings. All her brothers and sisters were all at least 10 years older. Young Clara was home-educated and extremely bright. It is said that her older brothers and sisters were kept busy answering her many questions, and each sibling taught her complementary skills. As a child, Clara was a shy and retiring little girl, but at the age of 11, when her brother became ill, for 2 years Clara stayed by his side and learned to administer all his medicine, including the "great, loathsome crawling leeches." This was an early indication of what would become Clara's lifework.


Teaching, organizing, learning bureaucracy, a mission

Clara became a teacher at age 15, a post that she was to hold for the next 18 years. For ten years, Barton taught in a small Massachusetts town, where her brother owned a factory. After she was invited to teach in a private school in Bordentown, New Jersey, Barton recognized the community's need for free education, and despite opposition, set up one of the first free public schools in the state.

In 1854 she suffered from a mild nervous breakdown probably brought on by overwork. She took a break from teaching (which would be called a sabbatical in modern times) and attended the Clinton Liberal Institute in Clinton, New York, where she studied analytic geometry, calculus, astronomy, mathematics and natural science in addition to French, German, ancient history, philosophy and religion. Afterward, she was appointed to a job as a clerk in the Patent Office in Washington, D.C. where she learned the ins and outs of the federal bureaucracy.

When her father was dying, they had a conversation that she later said changed her life. He gave Clara a command that she would always recall:

"As a patriot he bade me serve my country with all I had, even with my life if need be; as the daughter of an accepted Mason, he bade me seek and comfort the afflicted everywhere, and as a Christian he charged me to honor God and love mankind."


American Civil War


When the American Civil War began, Barton resigned her position in the Patent Office to devote herself to the care of wounded soldiers on the field of battle. With the outbreak of war and the cascade of wounded Union soldiers into Washington, Miss Barton quickly recognized the unpreparedness of the Army Medical Department. In April 1861, after the First Battle of Bull Run, she established an agency to obtain and distribute supplies to wounded soldiers. For nearly a year, she lobbied the U.S. Army bureaucracy in vain to bring her own medical supplies to the battlefields. Finally, in July 1862, she obtained permission to travel behind the lines, eventually reaching some of the grimmest battlefields of the war and serving during the sieges of Petersburg and Richmond. Barton delivered aid to soldiers of both the North and South. In 1864 she was appointed by Union General Benjamin Butler "lady in charge" of the hospitals at the front of the Army of the James.

In 1865, President Abraham Lincoln placed her in charge of the search for the missing men of the Union army, and while engaged in this work she traced the fate of 30,000 men. As the War ended, she was sent to Andersonville, Georgia, to identify and mark the graves of Union soldiers buried there. This experience launched her on a nationwide campaign to identify soldiers missing during the Civil War. She published lists of names in newspapers and exchanged letters with veterans and soldiers' families. She also delivered lectures on her war experiences, which were well received. She met Susan B. Anthony and began a long association with the suffrage movement. She also became acquainted with Frederick Douglass and became an activist for black civil rights.


Barton sees the International Red Cross in action

The search for missing soldiers and years of toil during the Civil War physically debilitated Miss Barton. In 1869, her doctors recommended a restful trip to Europe. In 1870, while she was overseas (on "vacation"), she became involved with the International Red Cross and its humanitarian work during the war between France and Prussia. Created in 1864, the International Red Cross had been chartered to provide humane services to all victims during wartime under a flag of neutrality.


Organizing the American Red Cross

When she returned to the United States, she inaugurated a movement to secure recognition of the International Red Cross society by the United States government. When she began this organizing work in 1873, no one thought the U.S. would ever again face an experience like the Civil War, but she finally succeeded during the administration of President James Garfield on the basis that the new American Red Cross organization could also be available to respond to other types of crisis. As Barton expanded the original concept of the Red Cross to include assisting in any great national disaster, this service brought the United States the "Good Samaritan of Nations" label. Barton naturally became President of the American branch of the society, which was founded on May 21, 1881. John D. Rockefeller gave money to create a national headquarters in Washington, DC, located one block from the White House.


Religious Beliefs

Various authorities call her a "Deist-Unitarian." However, her actual beliefs varied throughout her life across a spectrum between freethought and deism. In a 1905 letter to her friend, Norman Thrasher, she called herself a "Universalist." [1]

Later life, heritage


Clara Barton continued to do relief work in the field until she was well into her 70s. She went to Cuba with a cargo of supplies in 1898, and spent six weeks on the scene of the Galveston, Texas floods, at age 79. She resigned from the American Red Cross in 1904 at the age of 83 and spent her remaining years in Glen Echo, Maryland. She died in 1912 at age 90, and is buried less than a mile from her birthplace in a family plot in Oxford, Massachusetts.

One published source sums her life up this way:

Clara Barton was one of America's greatest heroines -- a true patriot and philanthropist who, when she saw a practical need, gave every ounce of her strength to address it. [2]

The American Red Cross she founded is one of the largest humanitarian organizations in the world. Barton herself was the most decorated American woman, receiving the Iron Cross, the Cross of Imperial Russia and the International Red Cross Medal. Her final act was founding the National First Aid Society in 1904.


Clara Barton's Birthplace House and Museum

Clara Barton's Birthplace in North Oxford, Massachusetts [3] is operated as a house museum as part of The Barton Center for Diabetes Education, Inc. [4], a humanitarian project established in Clara Barton's honor to educate and support children with diabetes and their families.


Clara Barton National Historic Site


In 1975, Clara Barton National Historic Site was established as a unit of the National Park Service at her Glen Echo, Maryland home. The first National Historic Site dedicated to the accomplishments of a woman, it preserves the early history of the American Red Cross and the last home of its founder. Clara Barton spent the last 15 years of her life in her Glen Echo home, and it served as an early headquarters of the American Red Cross as well.

The National Park Service has restored eleven rooms, including the Red Cross offices, parlors and Miss Barton's bedroom. Visitors to Clara Barton National Historic Site can gain a sense of how Miss Barton lived and worked surrounded by all that went into her life's work. Visitors to the site are led through the three levels on a guided tour emphasizing Miss Barton's use of her unusual home, and come to appreciate the site in the same way visitors did in Clara Barton's lifetime. [5]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clara_Barton

Evelyn Nesbit
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.


Evelyn Nesbit (December 25, 1884 - January 17, 1967) was a model noted for her entanglement in the murder of her ex-lover, architect Stanford White, by her first husband, Harry K. Thaw.


Birth

Born in Tarentum, Pennsylvania, her family was left destitute when her father, a lawyer, died. Fortunately, Evelyn was considered an exceptional beauty. As a teenager, she posed for an artist, John Storm, in Pittsburgh, and achieved some measure of success. In 1901, at age 16, now the family breadwinner, she decided they would move to New York to further her career. She continued modelling, posing for Frederick Church and photographer Rudolf Eickemeyer. Charles Dana Gibson is said to have used Evelyn as the inspiration for his illustrations of the "Gibson Girl".

Stanford White

Now a Florodora Girl on Broadway, she caught the attention of Stanford White. The fact that he was married and made a hobby of "befriending" young ladies was overlooked by Evelyn's mother, who encouraged White's patronage. In his lavish tower apartment at Madison Square Garden, which he built, he had installed a red velvet swing from which he derived sexual pleasure watching his young friends - including Evelyn - use (Nesbit would be sensationalized as "The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing"). White allegedly took her virtue there after giving her a drink that knocked her out - a claim she repeated often to her eventual husband, though at the end of her life she claimed "Stanny" was the only man she ever loved. White arranged to have her educated at a New Jersey boarding school run by the mother of Cecil B. DeMille.


John Barrymore

Her involvement with White continued off and on. During this period, Evelyn was courted by a young actor named John Barrymore after her affair to White ended. She became pregnant by Barrymore twice, and he arranged for abortions both times. (Nesbit refused Barrymore's marriage proposal during her second pregnancy). Both abortions were explained as appendectomies, though a second appendectomy strains credibility.


Harry Kendall Thaw

Stanford was eventually supplanted in her affections by Harry Kendall Thaw (1871-1947), also of Pittsburgh, son of a coal and railroad baron. Thaw became increasingly jealous of Nesbit (he carried a pistol), and was especially sensitive about her relationship with White. Thaw was also a sexual sadist, and subjected Evelyn to beatings. After a trip to Europe, Evelyn accepted Thaw's proposal and they married on April 4, 1905.


Murder of Stanford White

On June 25, 1906 Evelyn and Harry saw White at a restaurant (the Cafè Martin) and ran into him again in the audience of the Madison Square Garden's roof theatre at a performance of Mamzelle Champagne. During the song, "I Could Love A Million Girls", Thaw fired three shots at close range into White's face, killing him.


Child

Evelyn had one child, Russell William Thaw (October 25, 1910 - 2002), a noted aviator who sometimes appeared in Hollywood films; the identity of his father remains in doubt. Harry Thaw swore he was not the child's father, although Evelyn always insisted he was.


Trial

There were two trials. At the first, the jury was deadlocked: at the second, Thaw pled insanity, and Evelyn testified. (Thaw's mother told Evelyn that if she would testify that Stanford White abused her and that Harry only tried to protect her, she'd receive a divorce from Harry Thaw and one million dollars in compensation. She did just that, and performed in court wonderfully: he was found not guilty. Evelyn got the divorce, in 1915, but not the money). Thaw was incarcerated at the Asylum for the Criminally Insane at Matawan, New Jersey, enjoying nearly complete freedom. In 1913 he walked out of the asylum and was driven over the border to Sherbrooke, Quebec. He was extradited back to the United States, and in 1915 another jury found him sane.


Late career

After the trial, Evelyn Nesbit Thaw's career was largely unsuccessful (vaudeville performer, actor, dancer, café manager) and her life marred by suicide attempts. She married again in 1916, in Ellicott City, Maryland, taking Virgil James Montani (1880-1956), professional name Jack Clifford, her dancing partner) as her second husband; he abandoned her in 1918 and she eventually divorced him in 1933. In 1926, however, several months after she attempted suicide over losing her job as a dancer at the Moulin Rouge Café in Chicago, she reappeared in Atlantic City, New Jersey, where she gave an interview to the New York Times, stating that she and Harry K. Thaw had become reconciled and planned to resume their former relationship; however, nothing came of the couple's reported plans.

Death of Thaw

Thaw moved back to Pittsburgh, and his subsequent life was also filled with scandalous brawls, affairs, and lawsuits. He died of a heart attack in February 22, 1947 at his home in Miami Beach, Florida; he had another home, Villa Marie Antoinette, in Bolton, New York. His will stipulated that his former wife was to receive $10,000 of his more than $1 million estate. If she did not survive him, the money was to go to her son, Russell William Thaw.

Death

Evelyn Nesbit eventually died in a nursing home in Santa Monica, California, at age 82. In her later years she taught ceramics. She also served as a technical consultant to the 1955 movie about her, White, and Thaw: "The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing."


Popular culture

* The author Lucy Maud Montgomery used a photograph of Evelyn, clipped from an American magazine and pasted to the wall near her writing desk, as the model for the title character of her 1906 novel, Anne of Green Gables
* She was portrayed by Elizabeth McGovern in the movie Ragtime
* She was portrayed by Joan Collins in The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing

Robert Ripley
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.


Robert Leroy Ripley, born December 25, 1890 in Santa Rosa, California, was an entrepreneur, an anthropologist and a cartoonist who created the world famous Ripley's Believe It or Not! series. He was an aspiring professional baseball player until he was injured in 1913, the same year his first cartoon appeared in a newspaper. During his life, Ripley visited many countries. He died May 27, 1949 and is buried in his hometown of Santa Rosa. The Church of the One Tree, a church built entirely from the wood of a single 300 foot tall redwood tree, and made popular by Ripley, stands on the north side of Juilliard Park in downtown Santa Rosa.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Ripley

Humphrey Bogart

Humphrey DeForest Bogart (December 25, 1899 - January 14, 1957) was an iconic American actor who retains legendary status decades after his death. In 1999, the American Film Institute named Bogart the Greatest Male Star of All Time.

Bogart typically played smart, playful, courageous, tough, occasionally reckless characters, living in a corrupt world, yet anchored by an inner moral code. He was also able to play characters with flaws and weaknesses that led to their destruction. His most notable films include Angels With Dirty Faces (1938), The Maltese Falcon (1941), Casablanca (1942), To Have and Have Not (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), Key Largo (1948), In a Lonely Place (1950), The African Queen (1951) (for which he won an Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role), and The Caine Mutiny (1954). In all, he appeared in 75 feature motion pictures.

Even outside of America, Bogart is seen as a cult figure. French actors such as Jean-Paul Belmondo were deeply influenced by his work and image. In À bout de souffle (known in English as Breathless), perhaps the best-known work of French director Jean-Luc Godard, the protagonist Michel worships the persona of Humphrey Bogart and mimes some of Bogart's best-known gestures in a way that is both absurd and touching. François Truffaut, another French director of the "New Wave," directed Shoot the Piano Player, another homage to Bogart. India's great national movie star Ashok Kumar listed Bogart as a major influence on his "natural" acting style. When Bogart reached Leopoldville to film the movie The African Queen, his plane was met by the U.S. consul and the Congolese press.

Bogart is no less an icon in the country of his birth. One of Woody Allen's most popular comic movies, Play It Again, Sam, is about a young man in love with Bogart's aura and intimidated by it. The title refers to a frequent misquote from Casablanca; Rick Blaine (Bogart's character) actually says "Play it, Sam." In 1997, the United States Postal Service featured Bogart in its "Legends of Hollywood" series. And Entertainment Weekly magazine has named Bogart the number one movie legend of all time.

Bogart's exalted standing in the Hollywood pantheon would have astonished most of the agents, casting directors and studio bosses who knew him in the 1920s and 1930s as a good but hardly great Broadway stage actor and B-movie player in Hollywood.

Birth and early life

He was born Humphrey DeForest Bogart on 25 December 1899 in New York City, New York, the oldest child of Belmont DeForest Bogart and Maud Humphrey, both of whom were of English descent.

It was long believed that his birthday on Christmas Day was a Warner Bros. fiction created to romanticise his background, and that he was really born on 23 January 1899, a date that appeared in many references. This story is now considered baseless. Although no birth certificate has ever been found to settle the issue conclusively, his birth notice did appear in a Boston newspaper in early January 1900, which would support the December 1899 date. The 1900 census for the household of Belmont Bogart lists his son Humphrey as having a birthdate in December of 1899. Lauren Bacall always maintained this was his true birth date.

Bogart's father was a successful surgeon. His mother, Maud Humphrey, was a very successful commercial illustrator. Indeed, she used a drawing of baby Humphrey in a well-known ad campaign for Mellins Baby Food. In her prime, she made over $50,000 a year as an illustrator, then a vast sum. The Bogarts lived in a fashionable Upper West Side apartment, and had a cottage in upstate New York.

Maud Humphrey was a distant woman and the Bogarts' marriage was troubled. Both parents were alcoholics and/or morphine addicts at various times. Maud also suffered intense migraine headaches. "I can't say I ever loved my mother," Bogart once said. "I admired her." He was raised mostly by an Irish nurse. "My parents fought," he said another time. "We kids would pull the covers over our ears to keep out the sound of fighting. Our home was kept together for the sake of the children as well as for the sake of propriety."

From his father, Bogart inherited a tendency for needling people, and a love of fishing and especially sailing. Humphrey was the oldest child of three. Both of Bogart's younger sisters were troubled adults; Kay ("Catty") died at 34 of peritonitis complicated by alcoholism. Frances "Pat" Bogart Rose was tall, shy and sweet, but mentally unstable. Bogart was gentle with her and paid for her care. Other relatives were few and rarely saw the Bogarts. (When Bogart fell in love with Lauren Bacall and she introduced him to her large extended family, he said "Christ, you've got more goddamn relatives than I've ever seen.")

As a boy, Bogart was teased for his curls, his tidiness, his lisp (although some people belive that Bogart obtained his lisp while he served in the navy when a prisoner hit him in the face with the handcuffs), for the "cute" pictures his mother posed him for, the Little Lord Fauntleroy clothes she dressed him in?-and for the name "Humphrey." In a childhood accident, Bogart got a splinter of wood embedded in his lower lip. "Goddamn doctor," Bogart later told David Niven, "instead of stitching it up, he screwed it up." The accident left Bogart with a slight lisp.

The Bogarts sent their son to the Trinity School in New York and then to the prestigious prep school Phillips Academy, in Andover, Massachusetts. They hoped he would go on to Yale, but in 1918, Bogart was expelled from Phillips Academy. The details of his expulsion are disputed. One story says that he was expelled for throwing a janitor into the local pond, while others say that he was expelled for smoking and drinking. His study habits were erratic and his grades low, and he may have hastened his departure by some intemperate comments to those in authority. He had a lifelong dislike of authority figures.


Early career

Bogart did menial labor, joined the Naval Reserve, and eventually drifted into acting. He liked the late hours that actors kept, and enjoyed the attention that an actor got on stage. Most of all, he enjoyed the challenge of putting on a difficult scene, making the audience believe it. He dug deeply into the characters he portrayed, and found them a welcome escape from his own self.

He began his acting career on the Brooklyn stage in 1921, playing a Japanese butler. He never took acting lessons, and had no formal training. An early reviewer wrote of Bogart's work: "To be as kind as possible, we will only say that this actor was inadequate." Bogart loathed the trivial roles he had to play early in his career, calling them "White Pants Willie" roles.

Bogart was in 21 Broadway productions between 1922 and 1935. He played callow juveniles, or the romantic second lead in drawing room comedies. The legend persists that he was the first actor to say "Tennis, anyone?" on stage.

Early in his career, Bogart met his first wife, Helen Menken. They married in 1926, divorced in 1927, and remained friends. In 1928, he married his second wife, Mary Philips. Philips, like Menken, had a fiery temper, once biting the finger of a cop who tried to arrest her for drunkenness.

Spencer Tracy was a serious Broadway actor whom Bogart liked and admired, and they became good friends. It was Spencer Tracy, in 1930, who first called Bogart "Bogie." The name stuck.

In 1934, Bogart starred in the play Invitation to a Murder. The producer Arthur Hopkins saw the play and sent for Bogart when he chose to produce Robert E. Sherwood's new play, The Petrified Forest. Bogart arrived in Hopkins' office while Sherwood was there; Hopkins told him: "I've got a good role for you. A gangster role." Robert Sherwood was sure Hopkins was wrong; Bogart should play the football player. Bogart said later: "They argued back and forth, and I thought Sherwood was right. I couldn't picture myself playing a gangster. So what happened? I made a hit as the gangster."

The Petrified Forest had 197 performances in New York; Bogart played escaped killer Duke Mantee. Leslie Howard, who played the lead, knew how crucial Bogart was to the success of the play. He and Bogart became friends, and he promised to help Bogart reprise his role if Hollywood made the play into a movie.

Bogart was proud of his success as an actor, but the fact that it came from playing a gangster weighed on him. He once said, "I can't get in a mild discussion without turning it into an argument. There must be something in my tone of voice, or this arrogant face?-something that antagonizes everybody. Nobody likes me on sight. I suppose that's why I'm cast as the heavy."

Warner Brothers bought the screen rights to The Petrified Forest, signed up Leslie Howard, then tested several Hollywood veterans for the Duke Mantee role, and chose Edward G. Robinson. Bogart cabled news of this to Howard, who was in Scotland. Leslie Howard insisted that Bogart play Duke Mantee. When Warner Brothers saw that Leslie Howard would not budge, they hired Bogart to play Mantee. Bogart never forgot this, and named his only daughter Leslie.

Robert E. Sherwood remained a close friend of Bogart's. In 1936, the movie version of The Petrified Forest came out. Bogart got excellent reviews. Still, he was stuck in a series of crime dramas for Warner Brothers and cast as a heavy, with little acting range. All told, in his career as a tough guy, Bogart went to the electric chair 12 times, and got over 800 years of hard labor. Jack Warner saw nothing wrong with that; as long as the movies made money, and the actors got paid, he saw no reason for anyone to complain.

Mary Philips refused to give up her Broadway career to come to Hollywood with Bogart, and soon they were divorced.

On August 21, 1938, Bogart made a disastrous third marriage, which only heightened his frustration. His third wife was Mayo Methot, a lively, friendly woman when sober, but a paranoid drunk. She was convinced that her husband was cheating on her. The more she and Bogart drifted apart, the more she drank and the more she got furious and threw things at him: plants, crockery, anything close at hand. Bogart sometimes returned fire, and the press dubbed them "the Battling Bogarts." "The Bogart-Methot marriage was the sequel to the Civil War," said their friend Julius Epstein. Another wag observed that there was madness in his Methot. During his marriage to Mayo Methot, Bogart bought a sailboat, which he lightheartedly named Sluggy after his hot-tempered wife.

In 1938, Warner Brothers made Bogart do a "hillbilly musical" called Swing Your Lady, playing a wrestling promoter managing the career of an idiotic giant. In 1939, Bogart reached a new low when he had to play a mad scientist in The Return of Doctor X. Bogart cracked: "If it'd been Jack Warner's blood…I wouldn't have minded so much. The trouble was they were drinking mine and I was making this stinking movie."

The studio system, then in its heyday, largely restricted actors to one studio, and Warner Brothers had no interest in making Bogart a star. The system was made for quantity, not quality. Shooting on a new movie might begin days or only hours after shooting on the last movie was complete. Any actor who refused a role could be suspended without pay. Bogart didn't like the roles chosen for him, but he worked steadily: between 1936 and 1940, Bogart averaged a new movie every two months. He thought that Warner Brothers were cheap in their wardrobe department, and often wore his own personal suits in his movies. On the movie High Sierra, Bogart used his own mutt to play his character's dog "Pard."

In California, in the 1930s, Bogart bought a 55-foot sailing yacht from Dick Powell. The sea was his sanctuary. He was a serious sailor, respected by other sailors who had seen too many Hollywood actors and their boats. About 30 weekends a year, he went out on his boat. He once said: "An actor needs something to stabilize his personality, something to nail down what he really is, not what he is currently pretending to be."

The leading men ahead of Bogart included not just such classic stars as James Cagney, Spencer Tracy and Edward G. Robinson?-but also actors far less well-known today, such as Victor McLaglen, George Raft and Paul Muni. Most of the better movie scripts Warner Brothers bought went to these men. Bogart had to take what was left. He made movies with names like Racket Busters, San Quentin, and You Can't Get Away With Murder. The only substantial roles he ever got during this period were in Samuel Goldwyn's Dead End (1937) and Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) (another picture in which he gets shot by James Cagney). Bogart rarely saw his own movies and didn't even attend the premieres, which were an expected part of the actor's job.

Bogart had been raised to believe that acting was something beneath a gentleman. Acting in movies was even worse than on the stage, and playing depraved gunmen in "B" pictures for Warner Brothers was not something to be mentioned in polite company.

He had a lifelong disgust for the pretentious, fake or phony. Sensitive yet caustic, and disgusted by the inferior movies he was churning out, Bogart cultivated the persona of a soured idealist, a man exiled from better things in New York, living by his wits, drinking too much, cursed to live out his life among second-rate people and projects. When he thought an actor, director or a movie studio had done something shoddy, he spoke up about it, and was willing to be quoted on the record. The Hollywood press, unaccustomed to candor, was delighted. Bogart once said, "All over Hollywood, they are continually advising me 'Oh, you mustn't say that. That will get you in a lot of trouble' when I remark that some picture or writer or director or producer is no good. I don't get it. If he isn't any good, why can't you say so? If more people would mention it, pretty soon it might start having some effect."

Rise to stardom

High Sierra, a 1941 Raoul Walsh movie, was written by Bogart's friend and drinking partner, John Huston. The movie was a step forward for Bogart. He still played the villain, "Mad Dog" Roy Earle. He still died at the end; but at least he got to kiss Ida Lupino, and to play a character with some depth. In a climactic scene, Bogart's character slid 90 feet down a mountainside to his punishment. His stunt double, Buster Wiles, bounced a few times going down the mountain and wanted another take to do better. "Forget it," said Raoul Walsh. "It's good enough for the 25-cent customers."

Bogart and Huston enjoyed each other, and drew on each other's gifts. Bogart had always been self-conscious about being a small man; Huston was about 6 ft 4 in (1.96 m). Bogart had never been close to his father; Huston was very close to his father, the actor Walter Huston.

Bogart admired and somewhat envied Huston because Huston got to write scripts, to shape a story and make sure it had heft. Though a poor student, Bogart was a lifelong reader. He could quote Plato, Pope, Ralph Waldo Emerson and over a thousand lines of Shakespeare. He admired writers, and some of his best friends were screenwriters, including Louis Bromfield, Nathaniel Benchley and Nunnally Johnson.

John Huston reported being easily bored, and admired Bogart not just for his acting talent but for his intense concentration.

James Cagney and George Raft had both turned down Bogart's part in High Sierra; Raft didn't want to play a character who died at the end. Now George Raft turned down the male lead in John Huston's directorial debut, The Maltese Falcon, also 1941.

Bogart grabbed the part and audiences saw him play a leading role with real complexity. His character Sam Spade was still capable of duplicity and violence, but he was a leading man: handsome, smart, fated to survive. When he discovered his sexy client was a murderess, he turned her in, with a speech he made famous: "I don't care who loves you. I won't play the sap for you! You killed Miles and you're going over for it. I hope they don't hang you by your sweet neck. If you're a good girl, you'll be out in 20 years and you'll come back to me. If they hang you, I'll always remember you."

As America entered World War II, it turned to a new kind of leading man, less dapper and polished, but tougher and more willing to use violence to make the world safe and to get what he wanted. Bogart's persona was much better suited to the war years than to the 1930s. Bogart played a guy who'd grown up on the streets, a guy who knew how to fire a gun, how to punch a guy on the jaw, and spit out "Tell that to your boss."


Bogart got his first real romantic lead in Casablanca, playing Rick Blaine, the nightclub owner. Bogart had learned how to convey pain in his eyes and to show emotion with subtle shadings of his voice. He was still young but looked like a man who had lived hard.

As Casablanca became an iconic movie, much was made of the fact that its script was still being written as shooting on the movie began. Less well understood is that the character of Rick Blaine drew powerfully on the persona that Bogart had been cultivating in real life for at least six years. The soured idealist; the loner; the hard-drinking man exiled from better things in New York?-all of these were crucial parts of Rick Blaine?-and of Bogart. Bogart played a complex man wary of showing his emotions or ideals, a chess player who kept even his friends off balance. In real life, Bogart himself played tournament chess, achieving expert strength, one level below master level. Bogart reportedly asked that Blaine also be portrayed as a chess player.

Bogart was surrounded by a fine international cast, including Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains, Peter Lorre, Sidney Greenstreet, Paul Henreid and Conrad Veidt. Dooley Wilson played the part of Sam, Rick's confidant and piano player, even though he could not play the piano. The script and Max Steiner's musical score have both been praised extensively, as has the cinematography.

The stories that Ronald Reagan had been offered, but passed on, the role of Rick are just that, stories, resulting from the casual lies pumped out by studio publicity departments in those days to keep fans interested in the activities of a star who was not doing anything newsworthy at the time. Warner Brothers' publicity department concocted similar tales during the shooting of Casablanca, e.g., that Bogart was learning Swedish so that he could woo Bergman, that were just as spurious.

Off the set, Bergman and Bogart hardly spoke during the filming of Casablanca. She said later, "I kissed him but I never knew him." Years later, after Ingrid Bergman had taken up with Italian director Roberto Rossellini, and borne him a child, Bogart bawled her out for it. "You used to be a great star," he said. "What are you now?" "A happy woman," she replied.

Casablanca won the 1943 Academy Award for Best Picture. Bogart was nominated for the Best Actor in a Leading Role, but lost out to Paul Lukas for his performance in Watch on the Rhine.


Bogart and Bacall

Only Bogart's fourth marriage, to Lauren Bacall ("Baby"), was a happy one. They met while making To Have and Have Not. Bogart played a tough, independent fisherman named Steve, who got pushed to his limit by some unsavory people and then got his revenge. They were married on 21 May 1945 in Mansfield, Ohio, at Malabar Farm, the country home of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Louis Bromfield, who was a close friend of Bogart.

Bacall became an overnight sensation with her famous line to Bogart. Leaning against a doorway, her head down and voice low, she told Bogart's character: "You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? Just put your lips together, and blow."

Bogart fell in love with Bacall. The movie's director, Howard Hawks, once commented: "When two people are falling in love with each other, they're not tough to get along with, I can tell you that. Bogie was marvelous. I said "You've got to help" and of course after a few days he really began to get interested in the girl. That made him help more." Hawks also said of Bacall: "She had to keep practicing for six to eight months to keep that low voice. Now, it's perfectly natural. And the funny thing is that Bogie fell in love with the character she played, so she had to keep playing it the rest of her life."

Bogart had another strong, unspoken friendship with Walter Brennan, who played the harmless drunk Eddie in To Have and Have Not. Hawks recalled: "The fellow who rented their boat said 'What do you take care of him for?' Bogart looked at him and said, 'He thinks he's taking care of me.' And he wasn't very nice the way he said it. Those are the relationships that happen between men."

Bogart and Bacall's relationship is at the heart of the film noir masterpiece The Big Sleep. The plot is complex and has holes in it that even Raymond Chandler, who wrote the novel on which it was based, could not explain. Hawks himself admitted "I never figured out what was going on but I thought [it] had great scenes in it…After that got by, I said, 'I'm never going to worry about being logical again.'"

Chandler thoroughly admired Bogart's performance: "Bogart can be tough without a gun. Also he has a sense of humor that contains that grating undertone of contempt."

Bacall allowed Bogart lots of weekend time on his boat. She got seasick on boats and Bogart liked the boat to be an all-male preserve, stating "The trouble with having dames on board is you can't pee over the side." Bogart would frequently sail to Catalina with friends or set some lobster traps.

Bogart allowed Bacall romantic crushes on Adlai Stevenson and Leonard Bernstein, knowing she'd married young before ever having much chance to date. But he made clear he'd leave Bacall if she ever had an affair. She never did. Bacall once wrote of Bogart: "You had to stay awake married to him. Every time I thought I could relax and do everything I wanted, he'd buck. There was no way to predict his reactions, no matter how well I knew him."

Bogart and Bacall moved into a $160,000 white brick mansion in Holmby Hills, an exclusive neighborhood between Beverly Hills and Bel Air. Bogart and Bacall had two Jaguar cars, and three blooded Boxer dogs. Bogart said "We moved where all the creeps live." But he enjoyed some of his neighbors, especially Judy Garland.

When Lauren Bacall learned she was pregnant, she was ecstatic. Bogart came home from a day at the studio, and she met him with the great news. He grew very quiet. He put his arm around her and led her gently into the house. He was quiet during dinner?-and then, after dinner, Bogart and Bacall had the worst fight they ever had. Bogart had finally found a woman he truly loved, and he didn't want to share her. He was scared of losing her affection to a baby.

When Lauren Bacall gave birth to a son, Stephen, Bogart became a father at 49. He'd had months to absorb the news, had even had his own baby shower. (Frank Sinatra had brought him baby rattles.) But Bogart still felt awkward about being a father. ("What do you do with a kid?" he asked a friend. "They don't drink.") In 1952, they had their second child, Leslie (a girl, named after actor Leslie Howard).

In 1950, Bogart and his friend Bill Seeman arrived at the El Morocco Club in New York after midnight. Bogart had bought two giant stuffed panda bears for Stephen, and he and Seeman introduced the bears around as their "dates" and demanded a table for four. They propped up the bears in separate chairs, and began doing some heavy drinking.

Two young women at the club saw the pandas. One of them picked up one of the pandas. Bogart got angry and pushed her. After she fell to the floor, her friend picked up the other panda, Bogart said something cruel, and her boyfriend arrived and began throwing plates. After a wild scuffle, Bogart, Seeman and the pandas were thrown out of El Morocco and told never to return.

One of the women sued Bogart for $25,000. He showed up in court and was asked: "Were you drunk?" "Isn't everybody at three in the morning?" he replied. The case was dropped. Later, he mused: "Errol Flynn and I are the only ones left who do any good old hell-raising."

Bogart also loved to go to Romanoff's in Beverly Hills. A valet would take the Jaguar, and a maitre d' would lead Bogart to his regular booth. Friends would stop by to chat or talk shop: David Niven, Judy Garland, Richard Brooks, Marilyn Monroe, Swifty Lazar, Spencer Tracy. Rock Hudson was a rising star; when he saw him, Bogart would ask, "What the hell kind of name is 'Rock' Hudson?"

Bogart considered Mike Romanoff a poseur but nonetheless counted him a close friend. Among other things, Bogart admired him as a chess player and appreciated his tendency to needle people. Mike Romanoff was a man with a cultivated Oxford accent, who insisted that his true name was "Prince Michael Alexandrovitch Dmitri Obolensky Romanoff", and that he was a blood nephew of the former Russian tsar.

Mike Romanoff would greet Bogart by saying, "Good afternoon, Mr. Bogart. Are you going to be paying your bill today? I thought that might be a pleasant change."

Bogart would smile and reply: "Are you going to be putting any alcohol in your drinks today? That might be a pleasant change."

If Bacall was with Bogart, Romanoff might turn to her and say: "I see that you are still dating the same aging actor."

Later career

In 1951, Bogart starred in the movie The African Queen, with Katharine Hepburn, and again directed by his friend John Huston. It was a difficult shoot, on location in Africa. One day the boat The African Queen sank. (Lauren Bacall recalled: "The natives had been told to watch it and they did?-they watched it sink.")

John Huston recalled: "Bogie didn't particularly care for the Charlie Alnutt role when he started, but I slowly got him into it, showing him by expression and gesture what I thought Alnutt should be like. He first imitated me, then all at once he got under the skin of that wretched, sleazy, absurd, brave little man. He realized he was on to something new and good. He said to me, 'John, don't let me lose it.'"

Hepburn's proper spinster character scolded Bogart's Charlie Alnutt: "Nature, Mr. Alnutt, is what we are put in this world to rise above." Bogart had a famous put down too: "You crazy, psalm-singing, skinny old maid!"

The role of Charlie Alnutt won Bogart his first Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role in 1952. He had vowed to friends that if he won, his speech would break the convention of thanking everyone in sight. He would say instead: "I don't owe anything to anyone! I earned this award by hard work and paying attention to my craft." But when Bogart won the Academy Award, he thanked John Huston, Katharine Hepburn, the cast and crew of the movie. He had always felt Hollywood people did not like him much, and he was deeply moved to find himself so popular now.

Also in 1951, Bogart and Bacall co-starred in the syndicated radio drama Bold Venture, for which he was paid a reported $4000 a week. He played a character very much like Steve in To Have and Have Not, she played his "ward". He called her "Sailor".

Bogart relied on his standing with his fellow actors to organize a delegation who went to Washington, D.C., during the height of McCarthyism, to protest the House Unamerican Activities Committee's harassment of Hollywood writers and actors. Bogart was not, however, prepared to deal with the industry pressure to abandon this campaign; within a year he disavowed his activities, retreating to his role as actor and apologizing for speaking out on politics.

The Caine Mutiny was Bogart's last major movie. He dropped his asking price to get the role of Captain Queeg, then griped with some of his old bitterness about it. ("This never happens to Cooper or Grant or Gable, but always to me. Why does it happen to me?")

Bogart gave a bravura performance as Captain Queeg. Queeg was in many ways an extension of the character he had played in The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, and The Big Sleep?-the wary loner who trusts no one?-but with none of the warmth or humor that made those characters so appealing. Like his portrayal of Fred C. Dobbs in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Bogart played?-but did not overplay?-a paranoid, self-pitying character whose small-mindedness eventually destroyed him.
.

Bogart had always treated his body poorly, and often drank heavily when not working. (Typically contrary, the one night he refused to get drunk was New Year's Eve.) He smoked unfiltered Chesterfields. Once, after signing a long-term deal with Warner Brothers, Bogart predicted with glee that his teeth and hair would fall out before the contract ended. That sent a fuming Jack Warner to his lawyers.

In 1955, he made three movies: The Desperate Hours, The Left Hand of God, and We're No Angels. Each movie had a special satisfaction. The Desperate Hours gave him a third chance to play a hostage drama. During The Left Hand of God, Bogart was able to befriend Gene Tierney, and encourage her to get the psychiatric help he thought she badly needed. In We're No Angels, he got a starring role for Joan Bennett, who'd been out of work for three years after a family scandal.

But his health was failing?-Bogart had cancer of the esophagus. He almost never spoke of it and refused to see a doctor until January of 1956, and by then removal of his esophagus, two lymph nodes and a rib was too little, too late.

Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy came to see him. Bogart was too weak to walk up and down stairs. He tried to joke about it: "Put me in the dumbwaiter and I'll ride down to the first floor in style. Come on?-I'm a little guy?-I'll fit."

Hepburn has described the last time she and Spencer Tracy saw Bogart: "Spence patted him on the shoulder and said, 'Goodnight, Bogie.' Bogie turned his eyes to Spence very quietly and with a sweet smile covered Spence's hand with his own and said, 'Goodbye, Spence.' Spence's heart stood still. He understood."

Bogart had just turned 57 and weighed only 80 pounds (36 kg) when he died on January 14, 1957 after falling into a coma. His funeral was held at All Saints Episcopal Church with musical selections played from Bogart's favorite composers, Johann Sebastian Bach and Claude Debussy. Lauren Bacall had asked Spencer Tracy to give the eulogy but Tracy was too upset. John Huston gave the eulogy instead, and reminded the gathered mourners that while Bogart's life had ended far too soon, it had been a rich one. Huston said: "He is quite irreplaceable. There will never be another like him."

Huston also noted of Bogart: "Himself, he never took too seriously?-his work most seriously. He regarded the somewhat gaudy figure of Bogart, the star, with an amused cynicism; Bogart, the actor, he held in deep respect…In each of the fountains at Versailles there is a pike which keeps all the carp active; otherwise they would grow overfat and die. Bogie took rare delight in performing a similar duty in the fountains of Hollywood. Yet his victims seldom bore him any malice, and when they did, not for long. His shafts were fashioned only to stick into the outer layer of complacency, and not to penetrate through to the regions of the spirit where real injuries are done."

Katharine Hepburn: "He was one of the biggest guys I ever met. He walked straight down the center of the road. No maybes. Yes or no. He liked to drink. He drank. He liked to sail a boat. He sailed a boat. He was an actor. He was happy and proud to be an actor. He'd say to me, 'Are you comfortable? Everything okay?' He was looking out for me."

Bogart once said of himself: "I don't approve of the John Waynes and the Gary Coopers saying 'Shucks, I ain't no actor?-I'm just a bridge builder or a gas station attendant.' If they aren't actors, what the hell are they getting paid for? I have respect for my profession. I worked hard at it."

His cremated remains are interred in Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery, Glendale, California. Buried with him is a small gold whistle, which he had given to his future wife, Lauren Bacall, before they married. In reference to their first movie together, it was inscribed: "If you want anything, just whistle."

Humphrey Bogart's hand and foot prints are immortalized in the forecourt of Grauman's Chinese Theater and he has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6322 Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood.

Quotes


Attributed
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
Humphrey Bogart

* I can't say I ever loved my mother, I admired her.
* My parents fought. We kids would pull the covers over our ears to keep out the sound of fighting. Our home was kept together for the sake of the children as well as for the sake of propriety.

His last words were,

* "I never should have switched from scotch to martinis."



Famous movie quotes


Casablanca

* "I stick my neck out for nobody."
* "There are certain sections of New York, Major, that I wouldn't advise you to try to invade." [to Major Strasser]
* "Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine."
* "You played it for her, you can play it for me! . . . If she can stand it, I can! Play it!"
* "Here's looking at you, kid."
* "Tell me, who was it you left me for? Was it Laszlo, or were there others in between? Or ?- aren't you the kind that tells?"
* "Don't you sometimes wonder if it's worth all this? I mean what you're fighting for."
* "If that plane leaves the ground and you're not with him, you'll regret it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon ?- and for the rest of your life."
* "I'm no good at being noble, but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you'll understand that."
* "Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."
* "We'll always have Paris."


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humphrey_Bogart

Cab Calloway
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.


Cab Calloway (December 25, 1907-November 18, 1994) was a famous American jazz singer and bandleader. Calloway was a master of energetic scat singing and led one of the United States' most popular African American big bands from the start of the 1930s through the late 1940s. Calloway's Orchestra featured performers that included trumpeters Dizzy Gillespie and Adolphus "Doc" Cheatham, saxophonists Ben Webster and Leon "Chu" Berry' and bassist Milt Hinton. Calloway continued to perform right up until his death in 1994 at the age of 86.


Biography


Early years

Calloway was born Cabell Calloway III in a middle-class African-American family in Rochester, New York, and raised primarily in Baltimore, Maryland. His father, Cabell Calloway II, was a lawyer, and his mother Martha Eulalia Reed was a teacher and church organist. His parents recognized their son's musical talent, and he began private voice lessons in 1922. He continued to study music and voice throughout his formal schooling. Despite his parents' and vocal teachers' disapproval of jazz, Calloway began frequenting and eventually performing in many of Baltimore's jazz clubs, where he was mentored by the drummer Chick Webb and the pianist Johnny Jones.

After graduating from high school Cab joined his older sister, Blanche, in a touring production of the popular black musical revue "Plantation Days". When the tour ended in Chicago in the fall, Cab decided to remain in Chicago with his sister, who had an established career as a jazz singer in that city. His parents had hopes of their son becoming a lawyer like his father, so Calloway enrolled in Crane College. His main interest, however, was in singing and entertaining, and he spent most of his nights at the Dreamland Cafe and the Sunset Cafe, performing as a drummer, singer and emcee. At the Sunset Cafe he met and performed with trumpeter Louis Armstrong who taught him to sing in the "scat" style.


Forming the Cab Calloway Orchestra

When Louis Armstrong and his band left for New York City in 1929, Calloway dropped out of college and became the leader of the house band at the Sunset Cafe, an 11-piece group called "The Alabamians." He was quickly signed to a deal with MCA (at the time a booking, management and publishing company, not yet a record label) and began a national tour. The tour ended in New York at the Savoy Ballroom, a prestigious jazz club owned by his old friend from Baltimore, Chick Webb. Impressed by Calloway's showmanship and singing, but not very impressed with "The Alabamians", the manager of the Savoy convinced Calloway to become the leader of the Savoy's house band, "The Missourians."

It was during his stint at the Savoy that Calloway truly developed his individual style of showmanship. Wild-haired, with the conk hairdo then popular among black musicians, and dressed in an all-white tuxedo and tails, Calloway introduced audience singalongs, vocal histrionics, snappy song introductions and a wildly extroverted band, all of which made the Cab Calloway Orchestra very popular with New York audiences.

Success

By 1930 the Cotton Club in Harlem had become the premier jazz venue in the country, and the Cab Calloway Orchestra was hired as a replacement for the Duke Ellington Orchestra while they were touring. (There is some speculation that Mafia pressure was responsible for Cab's hiring.) Calloway quickly proved so popular that his band became the "co-house" band with Ellington's, and Cab and his group began touring nationwide when not playing the Cotton Club. Their popularity was greatly enhanced by the twice-weekly live national radio broadcasts on NBC at the Cotton Club. Calloway also appeared on Walter Winchell's radio program and with Bing Crosby in his show at the Paramount Theatre. As a result of these appearances, Calloway, together with Ellington, broke the major broadcast network color barrier.

In 1931, he recorded his most famous song, Minnie the Moocher. That song and St. James Infirmary Blues appeared in the Betty Boop animated shorts Minnie the Moocher and Snow White, respectively. Cab took advantage of this and timed his concerts in some communities with the release of the films in order to make the most of the attention.


Later years

In his later career, Calloway became a popular personality, appearing in a number of films and stage productions that utilized both his acting and singing talents. In 1959, he played the prominent role of "Sportin' Life" in a production of the Gershwin opera Porgy and Bess with William Warfield and Leontyne Price as the title characters. Another notable role was The Cincinnati Kid (1965), with Steve McQueen and Edward G. Robinson.

In 1967 Calloway co-starred as grumpy millionaire Horace Vandergelder in an all-black cast Broadway revival of Hello, Dolly! (even though the original production was still running!) starring Pearl Bailey. This was a major success and led to a cast recording released by RCA. In 1973-1974 he was featured in an unsuccessful Broadway revival of The Pajama Game alongside Hal Linden and Barbara McNair.

Calloway attracted renewed interest in 1980 when he appeared as a supporting character in the film The Blues Brothers, performing "Minnie The Moocher" to buy time for the Brothers to make it to their own concert. In 1994, a creative and performing arts school Cab Calloway School of the Arts was dedicated in his his name in Wilmington, Delaware.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cab_Calloway


Minnie The Moocher Lyrics
The Blue Brothers

Buy this CD | Print Lyrics


Minnie The Moocher
The Blue Brothers

Hey folks here's the story 'bout Minnie the
Moocher
She was a low-down Hoochie Koocher

She was the roughest toughest frail
But Minnie had a heart as big as a whale

Hidey Hidey Hidey Hi
(Hidey Hidey Hidey Hi)
Hodey odey odey oh
(Hodey odey odey oh)
Heedey Heedey Heedey Hee
(Heedey Heedey Heedey Hee)
Hidey Hidey Hidey Ho
(Hidey Hidey Hidey Ho)

She messed around with a bloke named smokey
She loved him though he was cokey

He took her down to Chinatown
And showed her how to kick the gong around

Hidey Hidey Hidey Hi
(Hidey Hidey Hidey Hi)
Whooooooooaaaap!
(Whooooooooaaaap!)
Heedey Heedey Heedey Hee
(Heedey Heedey Heedey Hee)
Hidey Hidey Hidey Ho
(Hidey Hidey Hidey Ho)

She had a dream about the King of Sweden
He gave her things that she was needin'
He gave her a home built of gold and steel
A diamond car with the platinum wheels

-----

He gave her is townhouse and his racin' horses
Each meal she ate was a dozen courses
Had a million dollars worth of nickels and dimes
She sat around and counted them a million times

-----

Poor Min'
Poor Min'
Poor Min'....

Cab Calloway
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.


Cab Calloway (December 25, 1907-November 18, 1994) was a famous American jazz singer and bandleader. Calloway was a master of energetic scat singing and led one of the United States' most popular African American big bands from the start of the 1930s through the late 1940s. Calloway's Orchestra featured performers that included trumpeters Dizzy Gillespie and Adolphus "Doc" Cheatham, saxophonists Ben Webster and Leon "Chu" Berry' and bassist Milt Hinton. Calloway continued to perform right up until his death in 1994 at the age of 86.


Biography


Early years

Calloway was born Cabell Calloway III in a middle-class African-American family in Rochester, New York, and raised primarily in Baltimore, Maryland. His father, Cabell Calloway II, was a lawyer, and his mother Martha Eulalia Reed was a teacher and church organist. His parents recognized their son's musical talent, and he began private voice lessons in 1922. He continued to study music and voice throughout his formal schooling. Despite his parents' and vocal teachers' disapproval of jazz, Calloway began frequenting and eventually performing in many of Baltimore's jazz clubs, where he was mentored by the drummer Chick Webb and the pianist Johnny Jones.

After graduating from high school Cab joined his older sister, Blanche, in a touring production of the popular black musical revue "Plantation Days". When the tour ended in Chicago in the fall, Cab decided to remain in Chicago with his sister, who had an established career as a jazz singer in that city. His parents had hopes of their son becoming a lawyer like his father, so Calloway enrolled in Crane College. His main interest, however, was in singing and entertaining, and he spent most of his nights at the Dreamland Cafe and the Sunset Cafe, performing as a drummer, singer and emcee. At the Sunset Cafe he met and performed with trumpeter Louis Armstrong who taught him to sing in the "scat" style.


Forming the Cab Calloway Orchestra

When Louis Armstrong and his band left for New York City in 1929, Calloway dropped out of college and became the leader of the house band at the Sunset Cafe, an 11-piece group called "The Alabamians." He was quickly signed to a deal with MCA (at the time a booking, management and publishing company, not yet a record label) and began a national tour. The tour ended in New York at the Savoy Ballroom, a prestigious jazz club owned by his old friend from Baltimore, Chick Webb. Impressed by Calloway's showmanship and singing, but not very impressed with "The Alabamians", the manager of the Savoy convinced Calloway to become the leader of the Savoy's house band, "The Missourians."

It was during his stint at the Savoy that Calloway truly developed his individual style of showmanship. Wild-haired, with the conk hairdo then popular among black musicians, and dressed in an all-white tuxedo and tails, Calloway introduced audience singalongs, vocal histrionics, snappy song introductions and a wildly extroverted band, all of which made the Cab Calloway Orchestra very popular with New York audiences.

Success

By 1930 the Cotton Club in Harlem had become the premier jazz venue in the country, and the Cab Calloway Orchestra was hired as a replacement for the Duke Ellington Orchestra while they were touring. (There is some speculation that Mafia pressure was responsible for Cab's hiring.) Calloway quickly proved so popular that his band became the "co-house" band with Ellington's, and Cab and his group began touring nationwide when not playing the Cotton Club. Their popularity was greatly enhanced by the twice-weekly live national radio broadcasts on NBC at the Cotton Club. Calloway also appeared on Walter Winchell's radio program and with Bing Crosby in his show at the Paramount Theatre. As a result of these appearances, Calloway, together with Ellington, broke the major broadcast network color barrier.

In 1931, he recorded his most famous song, Minnie the Moocher. That song and St. James Infirmary Blues appeared in the Betty Boop animated shorts Minnie the Moocher and Snow White, respectively. Cab took advantage of this and timed his concerts in some communities with the release of the films in order to make the most of the attention.


Later years

In his later career, Calloway became a popular personality, appearing in a number of films and stage productions that utilized both his acting and singing talents. In 1959, he played the prominent role of "Sportin' Life" in a production of the Gershwin opera Porgy and Bess with William Warfield and Leontyne Price as the title characters. Another notable role was The Cincinnati Kid (1965), with Steve McQueen and Edward G. Robinson.

In 1967 Calloway co-starred as grumpy millionaire Horace Vandergelder in an all-black cast Broadway revival of Hello, Dolly! (even though the original production was still running!) starring Pearl Bailey. This was a major success and led to a cast recording released by RCA. In 1973-1974 he was featured in an unsuccessful Broadway revival of The Pajama Game alongside Hal Linden and Barbara McNair.

Calloway attracted renewed interest in 1980 when he appeared as a supporting character in the film The Blues Brothers, performing "Minnie The Moocher" to buy time for the Brothers to make it to their own concert. In 1994, a creative and performing arts school Cab Calloway School of the Arts was dedicated in his his name in Wilmington, Delaware.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cab_Calloway


Minnie The Moocher Lyrics
The Blue Brothers

Buy this CD | Print Lyrics


Minnie The Moocher
The Blue Brothers

Hey folks here's the story 'bout Minnie the
Moocher
She was a low-down Hoochie Koocher

She was the roughest toughest frail
But Minnie had a heart as big as a whale

Hidey Hidey Hidey Hi
(Hidey Hidey Hidey Hi)
Hodey odey odey oh
(Hodey odey odey oh)
Heedey Heedey Heedey Hee
(Heedey Heedey Heedey Hee)
Hidey Hidey Hidey Ho
(Hidey Hidey Hidey Ho)

She messed around with a bloke named smokey
She loved him though he was cokey

He took her down to Chinatown
And showed her how to kick the gong around

Hidey Hidey Hidey Hi
(Hidey Hidey Hidey Hi)
Whooooooooaaaap!
(Whooooooooaaaap!)
Heedey Heedey Heedey Hee
(Heedey Heedey Heedey Hee)
Hidey Hidey Hidey Ho
(Hidey Hidey Hidey Ho)

She had a dream about the King of Sweden
He gave her things that she was needin'
He gave her a home built of gold and steel
A diamond car with the platinum wheels

-----

He gave her is townhouse and his racin' horses
Each meal she ate was a dozen courses
Had a million dollars worth of nickels and dimes
She sat around and counted them a million times

-----

Poor Min'
Poor Min'
Poor Min'....

Tony Martin (singer)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.


Tony Martin (born December 25, 1912) is an American actor and traditional pop singer.

Born Alvin Morris to a Jewish family in Oakland, California, he received a soprano saxophone as a gift from his grandmother at ten. In his grammar school glee club, he became an instrumentalist and a boy soprano singer. He formed his first band, named "The Red Peppers," when he was only a high schooler, eventually joining the band of a local orchestra leader, Tom Gerun, as a reed instrument specialist, sitting alongside the future bandleader Woody Herman. In the mid-1930s, he left Gerun's band to go to Hollywood to try his luck in films. It was at that time that he adopted the stage name, Tony Martin.

He was a featured vocalist on the George Burns and Gracie Allen radio program. In the movies, he was first cast in a number of bit parts, including a role as a sailor in the movie Follow the Fleet (1936), starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. He eventually signed with 20th Century-Fox and then MGM in which he starred in a number of musicals. At the same time, between 1938 and 1942, he made a number of hit records for Decca.

In World War II, he first joined the United States Navy, but as a result of rumors (without any factual basis) that he had gotten an officer's commission through bribery he left the navy and joined the United States Army Air Corps. Though he had an outstanding record in the military, the rumors hurt his professional reputation and the major record labels refused to sign him. He eventually signed with Mercury Records, then a small independent run out of Chicago, Illinois. He cut 25 records in 1946 and 1947 for Mercury, including a 1946 recording of "To Each His Own" which became a million-seller. This prompted RCA Records to offer him a contract, which he signed in 1947 after satisfying his contract obligations to Mercury.

In 1937 he married Alice Faye, and in 1941 they were divorced. Martin has been married since 1948 to Cyd Charisse, almost a Hollywood record for marital success. They have one son together - Tony Martin Jr., born in 1950.

He appeared in many film musicals in the 1940's and 1950's. His rendition of "Lover Come Back To Me" with Jane Powell in Deep In My Heart - based on the music of Sigmund Romberg and starring José Ferrer - was one of the highlights of Hollywood musicals.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Martin_%28singer%29


Lover, Come Back to Me Lyrics:

Sky was blue and high above
The moon was new, so was love
This eager heart of mine was singing
Lover, where can you be
It came at last love had it's day
The day is past, you've gone away
This eager heart of mine is singing
Lover, come to me
I remember every little thing we used to to
I'm lonely
Every road I walked alone,
I walked along with you
No wonder I am lonely
The sky is blue, the night is cold
The moon is new, but love is old
And while I'm waiting here
This heart of mine is singing
Lover,, come to me
When I remember every little thing we used to do
Oh...i'm lonely
Every road I walked alone I walked along with you
No wonder I am lonely
The sky is blue, the night is cold
The moon is new, but love is old
And while I'm standing here
This heart of mine is singing
Lover, lover, get here to me...
Now!!!

Jimmy Buffett
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.


Jimmy Buffett (born James William Buffett on December 25, 1946 in Pascagoula, Mississippi) is a singer and songwriter, best known for his "island escapism" lifestyle and music including hits such as "Margaritaville" (No. 234 on the list of 'Songs of the Century'), and "Come Monday." He has a rabid, but genial, fan-base known as "Parrotheads." They call the youngest members "Parakeets."


Early life

The son of James Delaney Buffett Jr. and Mary Loraine "Peets" Buffett, Buffett grew up in Mobile, Alabama, where he attended McGill-Toolen Catholic High School. He only began playing guitar during his college years at Auburn University and the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where he received a bachelor's degree in journalism in 1969 (ΚΣ). Later that year, he married his first wife, Margie Washichek, at Spring Hill College in Mobile.

Career

Buffett began his official musical career in Nashville during the late 1960s as a country artist and recorded his first album, Down to Earth, in 1970. He then moved to Key West and began establishing the easy-going beach bum persona for which he is known.

Buffett's third album was A White Sport Coat and a Pink Crustacean, now acclaimed as his best though it achieved only moderate sales. Havana Daydreamin' appeared in 1976, followed by 1977's Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes, which featured the breakthrough hit song "Margaritaville".

During the 1980s Buffett made far more money off his tours than albums and became known as a popular concert draw. He released a series of albums during the following twenty years, primarily to his devoted audience, and also branched into writing and merchandising. Two of the more unusual albums were Christmas Island, a collection of holiday songs, and Parakeets, a collection of Buffett songs sung by children and containing "cleaned-up" lyrics (like "a cold root beer" instead of "a cold draft beer").

In 2003, he partnered in a partial duet with Alan Jackson for the country hit "It's Five O'clock Somewhere," a number one hit on the country charts.

Buffett's most recent album, License to Chill, released on July 13, 2004, sold 238,600 copies in its first week of release according to Nielsen SoundScan. With this, Buffett topped the U.S. pop albums chart for the first time in his three-decade career. This made some longtime fans feel that Buffett had alienated them by abandoning his traditional "Gulf and Western" sound for a more commercial and thus mainstream act.

Buffett co-owns the "Margaritaville" and "Cheeseburger In Paradise" restaurants (the latter of which is a part of the Outback Steakhouse family of restaurants). He harbors a well-known love for baseball, and has been part-owner in two minor league teams: the Fort Myers Miracle and the Madison Black Wolf. He makes an estimated 30-40 million dollars a year between his restaurants, album sales, and tours.

Writing

Buffett has written three No. 1 best sellers. Tales From Margaritaville and Where Is Joe Merchant? both spent over seven months on the New York Times Best Seller fiction list. His book A Pirate Looks At Fifty went straight to No. 1 on the New York Times Bestseller non-fiction list, making him the sixth author in that list's history to have reached No. 1 on both the fiction and non-fiction lists. The other five authors who have accomplished this are Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, William Styron, Irving Wallace and Dr. Seuss. He also co-wrote two children's books, Jolly Mon and Trouble Dolls, with his eldest daughter, Savannah Jane Buffett.

His latest book, A Salty Piece of Land, was released on November 30, 2004, and included a CD single of the same title.


Trivia

He is a regular visitor to the Caribbean island of Saint Barts and other islands where he gets inspiration for many of his songs and some of the characters in his books.

Buffett has been instrumental in the work of the Save the Manatee Club.[1]

He is friends with legendary investor Warren Buffett and they suspect that they are distant cousins, but they haven't been able to document this. (Wall Street Journal, 5/2/2005)

Buffett has appeared in several movies, including Repo Man as "Additional Blond Agent", Congo as a pilot and in a cameo in Cobb. He is referenced (though never mentioned by name) in Broken Lizard's Club Dread; Coconut Pete (Bill Paxton) is a Buffett-esque singer running his own tropical resort who is offended when asked to play "Margaritaville" rather than his own "Pina Coladaburg", released seven years earlier, exclaiming "son of a son of a bitch."

An avid pilot, Jimmy Buffett owns several planes including a Grumman HU-16 "Albatross". The plane, named "Hemisphere Dancer," is currently parked next to his Margaritaville restaurant in Orlando, Florida. Previously it could sometimes be seen on the ramp at Princess Juliana International Airport (IATA identifier SXM) in nearby Sint Maarten while he was in the area. This is the plane Buffett was flying during the incident recounted in the song "Jamaica Mistaica" on the album Banana Wind. While in Jamaica on January 16, 1996, Buffett's plane was shot at by Jamaican police. The "Hemisphere Dancer" had been carrying Buffett, U2's Bono, and Island Records producer Chris Blackwell. Police suspected it was smuggling drugs. No one was hurt, although there were a few bullet holes in the plane. Buffett's company has since licensed use of the name Margaritaville to several restaurants in Jamaica, in Montego Bay, Ocho Rios and Negril, where the "Jamaica Mistaica" incident took place.

Buffett was hired to sing for Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski at a party on the Island of Sardinia. The local news showed a video of him singing at the extravagant Roman toga party. Horatio Sanz impersonated Buffett on SNL after the incident, alleging he "smoked dope with Hulk Hogan."

Buffett has been satirised by David Allan Coe in his protest song, "Jimmy Buffett Doesn't Live in Key West Anymore" or "The Jimmy Buffett Song"[2], which also uses the "son of a son of a bitch" joke (and predates Club Dread).

He has donated $500,000 to Hurricane Katrina relief so far.

His last name is often misspelled "Buffet".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Buffett


Marqaritaville :: Jimmy Buffett

Nibblin' on spongecake, watchin' the sun bake.
All of those tourists covered with oil.
Strummin' my six string on my front porch swing.
Smell those shrimp their beginnin' to boil.

(chorus)

Wastin' away again in Marqaritaville,
Searchin' for my lost shaker of salt.
Some people claim that there's a woman to blame,
But I know, it's nobody's fault.

I don't know the reason I stayed here all season.
Got nothin' to show but this brand new tattoo.
It's a real beauty, a Mexican cutie.
How it got here I haven't a clue.

Wastin' away again in Marqaritaville
Searchin' for my lost shaker of salt.
Some people claim that there's a woman to blame
Now I think, hell it could be fault.

I blew out a flipflop, stepped on a poptop.
Cut my heel, had to cruise on back home.
But there's booze in the blender, and soon it will render
That frozen concoction that helps me hang on.

Wastin' away again in Marqaritaville
Searchin' for my lost shaker of salt.
Some people claim taht there's a woman to blame
But I know, it's my own damn fault.
Yes and, some people claim that there's a woman to blame
And I know, it's my own damn fault.

A song which always gave and gives me the heebie-jeebies.


Valley's deep and the mountain's so high
If you want to see God you've got to move on the other side
You stand up there with your head in the clouds
Don't try to fly you know you might not come down
Don't try to fly, dear God, you might not come down
Jesus came down from Heaven to earth
The people said it was a virgin birth
Jesus came down from Heaven to earth
The people said it was a virgin birth

He told great stories of the Lord
And said he was the saviour of us all
He told great stories of the Lord
And said he was the saviour of us all

For this they/we killed him, nailed him up high
He rose again as if to ask us why
Then he ascended into the sky
As if to say in God alone you soar
As if to say in God alone we fly.

Valley's deep and the mountain's so high
If you want to see God you've got to move on the other side
You stand up there with your head in the clouds
Don't try to fly you know you might not come down
Don't try to fly, dear God, you might not come down




A Merry Christmas to all the staff and listeners of WA2K!

Annie Lennox
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Jump to: navigation, search

Annie Lennox is an Oscar-winning British rock musician and vocalist. She was born December 25, 1954 in the city of Aberdeen, Scotland.

As a child, Lennox attended a school for the exceptionally intelligent. She was educated as a classical musican and studied the flute at the Royal Academy of Music in London, England.

After three years as lead singer of The Tourists, Lennox achieved her greatest fame to date as the alto, soul-tinged lead singer of the 1980s rock duo Eurythmics with British musician David A. Stewart. Early in the Eurythmics' career, she was known for her androgyny, wearing suits and once impersonating Elvis. Many journalists often referred to her as "the white Grace Jones." The duo released a long line of classic singles in the 1980s: "Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)", "Here Comes The Rain Again", "Would I Lie To You?", "There Must Be An Angel (Playing With My Heart)", "Missionary Man", "You Have Placed A Chill In My Heart", "Don't Ask Me Why" and so on. After her break-up with Stewart (the other half of the duo) in 1990, she began her long and equally successful solo career.

Her 1992 debut album, Diva, was an unambiguous commercial and critical success: Lennox's profile was boosted by Diva's singles, numerous awards and a soundtrack for Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 movie Dracula. This profile decreased due to her somewhat sparse output although she continued to be a major figure in popular music. Medusa was released three years after Diva and sold well. In 1997 she re-recorded the Eurythmics track "Angel" for the Diana, Princess of Wales tribute album. In 1998 she re-established contact with Dave Stewart and by 1999, Eurythmics had reformed for the album Peace. In 2003 she released her third solo album, Bare.

In 2004, Lennox won the Academy Award for Best Song for "Into The West" from the film The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King at the 76th Academy Awards. She had previously recorded "Use Well the Days" for the movie, which incorporates numerous quotations from Tolkien in its lyrics. This song was not used in the film, but appears on a bonus DVD included with the "special edition" of the movie's soundtrack CD.

In July 2005, Annie Lennox performed at Live 8 in Hyde Park, London. She also made a memorable appearance with David Bowie and the surviving members of Queen at 1992's Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert at London's Wembley Stadium, performing "Under Pressure."

Lennox and Stewart recently collaborated on two new pieces for their upcoming Eurythmics hits album, Ultimate Collection. One of which, "I've Got a Life" was released as a single on October 31 2005. The promotional video for the song features Lennox and Stewart performing in present day, with images of past Eurythmics videos playing on television screens behind them. Lennox also appears in a man's suit and cane, reminiscent of her "Sweet Dreams" video image from 1983.

The father of her two daughters, Lola and Taia is Uri Fruchtmann whom she was married to from 15 July 1988 to 2000. She was also married to Radha Raman from 14 March 1984 to 1985.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Lennox

Sweet Dreams Lyrics


Sweet dreams are made of this
Who am I to disagree?
Travel the world and the seven seas
Everybody's looking for something
Some of them want to use you
Some of them want to get used by you
Some of them want to abuse you
Some of them want to be abused

Sweet dreams are made of this
Who am I to disagree?
Travel the world and the seven seas
Everybody's looking for something
Some of them want to use you
Some of them want to get used by you
Some of them want to abuse you
Some of them want to be abused

I wanna use you and abuse you
I wanna know what's inside you
(Whispering) Hold your head up, movin' on
Keep your head up, movin' on
Hold your head up, movin' on
Keep your head up, movin' on
Hold your head up, movin' on
Keep your head up, movin' on
Movin' on!

Sweet dreams are made of this
Who am I to disagree?
Travel the world and the seven seas
Everybody's looking for something
Some of them want to use you
Some of them want to get used by you
Some of them want to abuse you
Some of them want to be abused

I'm gonna use you and abuse you
I'm gonna know what's inside
Gonna use you and abuse you
I'm gonna know what's inside you

Merry Christmas Day, everyone, and your PD appreciates all of your wonderful and heart warming contributions. Although I have not had time to review all the transcripts. I simply want to thank you all for keeping us on the air during the holidays.

Well, listeners, the day is winding down, and I would like to say that here in Orlando, all is calm and all is bright.

A special thanks to hamburger for "spiking" up the studio.

and a salute to our dj for his tales of Christmas and wide range of music.

Thanks, also, to BBB for reminding us of Les Paul.

Walter, that was indeed a strange song, and thank you, Germany, for the lovely greeting card to all of us here.

McTag, that was an excellent picture of you and the nipper. I enjoy seeing the photo of a father and son, obviously so happy with each other.

More recognition and appreciation to follow, listeners, as everyone here has done such a wonderful job.

And for our Raggedy and her mini history note about Silent Night, a piece of mistletoe and a hug.

And for our Bio Bob and his wonderful instructions about who was who, a laurel leaf. <smile>

I was always intrigued with The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing, Boston:

swimpy reminded me of how great aimee mann is, so here's some tunes from miss mann

4th of July
Aimee Mann

Today's the fourth of July
Another June has gone by
And when they light up our town I just think
What a waste of gunpowder and sky

I'm certain I am alone
In harboring thoughts of our home
It's one of my faults that I can't quell my past
I ought to have gotten it gone
I ought to have gotten it...

Oh, baby, I wonder if when you are older
Someday
You'll wake up
And say, 'My God, I should have told her
What would it take
But, now here I am and the world's gotten colder
And she's got the river down which I sold her'

So that's today's memory lane
With all the pathos and pain
Another chapter in a book where the chapters are endless
And they're always the same
A verse, and a verse, and refrain

Oh, baby, I wonder if when you are older
Someday
You'll wake up
And say, 'My God, I should have told her
What would it take
But, now here I am and the world's gotten colder
And she's got the river down which I sold her
And she's got the river down which I sold her...'


Satellite
Aimee Mann

Let's assume you were right
And play the game of charm and strange and satellite
And when we've all had our fun
Deflate the stars and put away the sun
And so, we can call it a day

'Cause I'll never prove that my motives were pure
So let's remove any question of cure
'Cause even though you've made it pretty obscure
Baby, it's clear
From here
You're losing your atmosphere
From here
You're losing it

So let's assume it was true
'Cause baby can't lift up a hand to swear to you
And what's the use of defense
The hangers-on are too far gone for evidence
And that one was lost from the first

'Cause I'll never prove that my motives were pure
So let's remove any question of cure
'Cause even though you've made it pretty obscure
Baby, it's clear
From here
You're losing your atmosphere
From here
You're losing it

So have it your way
Shatever makes the best résumé
Whatever you can throw in
Wash, rinse and spin til it's spun away
Okay
But I won't be sticking around

'Cause I'll never prove that my motives were pure
So let's remove any question of cure
'Cause even though you've made it pretty obscure
Baby, it's clear
From here
You're losing your atmosphere
From here
You're losing it


Invisible Ink
Aimee Mann

There comes a time when you swim or sink
So I jumped in the drink
Cuz I couldn't make myself clear

Maybe I wrote in invisible ink
Oh I've tried to think
How I could have made it appear

But another illustration is wasted
Cuz the results are the same
I feel like a ghost who's trying to move your hands
over some ouija board in the hopes I can spell out my name

What some take for magic at first glance
Is just sleight of hand depending on what you believe
Something gets lost when you translate
It's hard to keep straight
Perspective is everything

And I know now which is which and what angle I oughta look at it from
I suppose I should be happy to be misread-
Better be that than some of the other things I have become

But nobody wants to hear this tale
The plot is clichéd, the jokes are stale
And baby we've all heard it all before
Oh I could get specific but
Nobody needs a catalog
With details of love I can't sell anymore

And aside from that, this chain of reaction,
baby, is losing a link
Though I'd hope you'd know what I tried to tell you
And if you don't I could draw you a picture in invisible ink

But nobody wants to hear this tale
The plot is clichéd, the jokes are stale
And baby we've all heard it all before
Oh I could get specific but
Nobody needs a catalog
With details of love I can't sell anymore

Thanks, Canada. Not familiar with Aimee, but I loved the words to the song, "Satellite."

And what rhymes with satellite? Goodnight!

From Letty with love.

goodnight letty, a song to send you off

Baby's Request
Paul McCartney

When the moon lays his head on a pillow
And the stars settle down for a rest,
Just do me one small favour, I beg you,
Please play me my baby's request.
It's the song that we heard when we started.
Now the birds have all flown from our nest,
But you could bring back mem'ries departed
By playing my baby's request.
My baby said that she knows how it goes
But you're the one who really knows,
So go ahead, just one more time and then we'll go to bed.

- solo -

But you could bring back mem'ries departed
By playing my baby's request.
My baby says she knows how it goes but you're the one that really knows.
So go ahead, just one more time and then we'll go to bed.
When the moon lays his head on a pillow
And the star settles down for a rest,
Just do me one small favour, I beg you,
Please play me baby's request.
Mh-hm, play me baby's request.

Mrs edgarblythe gave me a copy of RAY for Christmas. I have to say, it's the best biographical Hollywood movie I have seen.


Georgia, Georgia,
The whole day through
Just an old sweet song
Keeps Georgia on my mind

I'm say Georgia
Georgia
A song of you
Comes as sweet and clear
As moonlight through the pines

Other arms reach out to me
Other eyes smile tenderly
Still in peaceful dreams I see
The road leads back to you

I said Georgia,
Ooh Georgia, no peace I find
Just an old sweet song
Keeps Georgia on my mind

Other arms reach out to me
Other eyes smile tenderly
Still in peaceful dreams I see
The road leads back to you

Georgia,
Georgia,
No peace, no peace I find
Just this old, sweet song
Keeps Georgia on my mind

I said just an old sweet song,
Keeps Georgia on my mind

Boxing Day is December 26th, the day after Christmas. It is more celebrated in the UK and Canada than in the U.S.
In the old days, servants had to work on Christmas, but they got the next day off, and their employer gave them a box with gifts and a bonus.
It is also the feast day of St. Stephen (which good Kind Wencelas celebrated) or the 2nd Christmas day and a public holiday in most European countries.

"Don't Take Down the Mistletoe" - unfortunately I don't find the lyrics.