Monthly Archives: November 2018

Eminent Rochestrians — Mitch Miller

Once when I was teaching an ElderHostel (now RoadScholar) course at Watson Homestead, one participant told us a story.

*She had been on the island of Corfu, looking across the sea toward Greece, when a voice behind her said, “Now there’s someone from Rochester, New York.”

*She turned around, and it was Mitch Miller.

*They chatted a little, and she asked how he knew she was from Rochester. “I could tell by the accent,” he replied.

*Well, Mitch no doubt had a very good ear, but he came by his knowledge of Rochester accents honestly, having been born in the Flower City in 1911.

*He took up the oboe in junior high, and by age 15 was playing with the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra. After graduating from East High he went on to Eastman School of Music, and finished there with honors, then signed on with the Rochester Philharmonic.

*By the late 1940s he was a record producer, charged with finding, developing, and directing talent. He gave Aretha Franklin her start, and worked with dozens of top vocal stars.

*He despised rock-and-roll, and so missed the boat on a lucrative new field. (More to the point, his company also missed the boat.)

*All of this was more or less “insider baseball,” but as a sideline he created a men’s choral group, performing as Mitch Miller and the Gang. In 1961 NBC brought forth a weekly show, “Sing Along With Mitch.” Families crowded around the sets to sing, and suddenly Mitch, along with what was now called the Sing-Along Gang, were household names.

*They were popular enough to be parodied by Steve Allen, Alan Sherman, MAD, the Chipmunks, and even the Flintstones.

*The songs were old-time hits of previous generations, all the way back to the Civil War. In my case, it was my first exposure to Gilbert and Sullivan. But if the music was staid, some of the values were cutting edge. Even a male choir needs a few female singers, and Leslie Uggams was one of the first African Americans to have a weekly TV appearance outside of playing a traditionally black role. She got death threats.

*In line at the old Borders Books and Records store in Rochester once, I saw that I was likely to be waited on by someone who appeared to be a Serious Music Person. Great, I said to myself. Here I am looking for two copies of “Holiday Sing Along With Mitch.” But another clerk stepped into the breach.

*The show ended in ’64 but Mitch kept working and performing, at least until the late 1990s. He was married to Florence Alexander for 65 years, and died at the age of 99.

*Each week as the show ended Mitch and his Gang sang, “Let me hear a melody, a simple singin’ song… loud and strong… I love to sing along! Let me hear a melody, a simple singin’ song, and I’ll sing along.” Words to live by!

Woodpeckers at the Bird Feeder!

Now that the bears are safely tucked up asleep hibernating, and now that snow lies deep on the ground (some days, anyhow), many local thoughts turn to bird feeders.

*Thanksgiving to Easter is a good feeder schedule here in bear country, and we’re doing the bruins a favor if we don’t lure them in. Bears are dangerous just by virtue of their size, and habituating them to human dwellings as a source of food spells tragedy… a fed bear is a dead bear.

*But as this stage, we can feed the birds safely. I find that they love three foods above most others: suet; peanuts; and black-oil sunflower seeds.

*I also provide nyger or thistle seed, though they mostly ignore that until the sunflower runs out.

*Even in the cities and the villages, feeders can bring in an impressive array of species. Have you ever noticed the woodpeckers?

*They seem to go especially for the peanut and the suet, though of course they’ll also take seeds.

*Maybe the most-seen woodpecker at many feeders is the downy woodpecker. It’s largely black, with a white back, white underside, and some white speckles on the wings. It has a small red spot on the back of its head, but this is often hard to see.

*Downies are about six inches in length. I have a hard time estimating size, so I measured a couple of prominent points on the feeder, six inches apart. Then I always have an exact comparison to check the size of the birds.

*All the woodpeckers have relatively long sharp beaks, which they use like chisels or jackhammers to break into trees after insects. Watch a downy at the feeder and you’ll see that he attacks the seed the same way, darting his whole head forward in attack.

*Most woodpeckers have feet constructed such that they usually don’t perch on twigs or branches, as most of the songbirds do. Instead of keeping their feet under themselves they swing them forward, sinking their talons into the trunk of the tree. They hang there upright, using their tails as a prop against the tree.

*But we also have a larger woodpecker, the flicker, that spends a lot of its time on the ground, hunting for insects there. Flickers have speckled breasts, with dark “gorgets” at their throat. There’s no crest, but they do have “mustache” stripes running back from their long beaks. (These are often hard to see.) A flicker is bigger than a downy woodpecker, even noticeably bigger than a robin. It shows a white rump when it flies.

*Although generally groundfeeders, at this time of year flickers will often come to your feeding station.

*Red-bellied woodpeckers are easy to mistake for flickers… they have the same general size (about like a robin, in this case), coloration, and ground-feeding behavior. But the red-belly has a striped “zebra back,” and white wing patches when it flies. The male red-belly has a red “helmet,” while the female has red only on the back of the neck.

*What neither one of them has, particularly, is a red belly, at least not so as you’d notice it from your window. A lot of these names were originally given by guys with magnifying glasses, studying carcases in dissection pans.

*We also have two other woodpeckers that are fairly common, but not too often seen, since they prefer to hang out deep in the woods. The hairy woodpecker looks much like the downy, but is half again the size. The pileated woodpecker is as big as a crow, with an impressive crest and white wing undersides when it flies.

*We could also mention two other feeder guests who, like the woodpeckers, prefer the trunks of trees to the branches. These are the nutchatches… one of them white-breasted and the other… less common, and about a third samller… the red-breasted. They hunt for insects on the surface of a tree trunk, usually starting at the top and working their way downward… the “upside-down bird.” They’ll often hang on your feeder head-down, stocking up for these cold winter nights.

Snow

Snow is a great thing. It falls so gently, and looks so beautiful. When we have trouble with it, it’s usually because of the wind, not the snow itself.

*The Bible says that God has unlocked the treasures of the snow. Robert Frost wrote about stopping by woods on a snowy evening. Irving Berlin sang of a white Christmas. Mitch Miller (of Rochester!) jollied us all along with choruses of “Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!” All of us have watched it form a winter wonderland.

*Snow falls in beloved, long-remembered picture books: “The Big Snow,” by Berta and Elmer Hader; “Katy and the Big Snow,” by Virginia Lee Burton; “City in Winter,” by Eleanor Shick; “The Snowy Day,” by Ezra Jack Keats.

*Snow comes in many forms, including cylinders and needles. It may fall as the ball-shaped graupel so beloved by skiers (because it’s smooth and slick).

*When most of us think of snow, we think of flakes. Of all the trillions that fall, each one crystallizes into a different shape – no two snowfalkes are alike.

*The man who demonstrated this to most everyone’s satisfaction was Snowflake Bentley, who as a Vermont farm lad begged his parents for a camera… an expense his mother suported, but his father forever resented. Working in the cold, he took thousands of glass-plate images of snowflakes. Naturalist Edwin Way Teale wrote that of all the men of science whose lives had overlapped his own, he most regretted never meeting Snowflake Bentley.

*Sometimes, of course, it’s too much of a good thing. Winter weather disasters can take many forms: deep snow; high winds; low temperatures; ice; flooding from snowmelt and icemelt. We’ve seen them all.

*Snow crushed the roof of Zion African Methodist Episcopal Church on January 25, 1877, wrecking the building, a former Corning schoolhouse, beyond repair. Five feet and four inches of snow had fallen since the last thaw, and country roads were snowbound on every hand.

*On March 11 of 1888, a blizzard got under way — and kept going for fifty hours. Twenty-eight inches of snow fell locally, the mercury hit ten below, the telegraph failed, and the trains were four days late. Despite all that, our area got off fairly easily from the infamous Blizzard of 1888. New York City and New England were paralyzed. Something like 800 people died… plus more on ships at sea. The East River froze. Horses died in their traces. Even out here, it was a very bad storm.

*Folks in the Corning-Campbell area could learn to dread December 17. A two-day blizzard started on that date in 1890, dumping two feet of snow that drifted even higher in strong winds, blocking the roads and stopping the trains. And on that same date in 1901 Painted Post was under four feet of water, even as thermometers plunged to four below, marking a drop of 68 degrees since three days earlier.

*A 1935 ice storm, combined with high winds, broke down trees in Bath’s Pulteney Park (which had already been flooded in July).

*A snowstorm on February 14, 1940, buried parked cars. The girls at Davenport orphanage in Bath went to school by sleigh for a week. Snow was still (or again) on the ground in April.

*On February 16, 1958, we were on the second day of a two-day blizzard that drifted snow as tall as fifteen feet; Prattsburgh children could reach above the telephone wires. Trains hit piles of snow outside the villages, and stopped. Families suffered without medical care and ran low on food waiting days until the roads could be opened again.

*On March 13 in 1993, snow started falling. And it kept on. And on. And on. By 5 PM all the roads were officially closed. Governor Mario Cuomo declared a statewide state of emergency. By the time it ended, folks were coming and going through their windows, rather than doors. The snow fell on Saturday, and school reopened on Thursday. No lives were lost locally in what, at the time, they called the storm of the century. The Emergency Broadcast Network was actually activated for the first time.

*On January 19, 1996 a combination of snow melt, heavy rain, and frozen ground suddenly meant lots of water – everywhere. Kanona, Corning, Campbell, and the whole Route 415 corridor suddenly found itself with way too much water. Roads were blocked, and fields were flooded. Let’s hope for a gentler winter this time!

Election Vignettes

Elections and political campaigns often make for vivid memories. It’s fashionable to disdain them, to say the politicians are all liars, and there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between them. But first, that isn’t true – there’s often a LOT of very meaningful differences between candidates. For good or ill, if Al Gore had been president… as the voters chose… would we have invaded Iraq? The world could be a very different place today.

*Remember also that elections are what we do, rather than having gun battles in the streets. Elections are a much better choice.

*In no particular order, here are some vignettes of voting and campaigning in our area.

*Angelica lays claim to being the birthplace of the Republican party. More precisely, a political group in Angelica later joined the new Republican party. The Angelica group preceded the party, but it’s a bit of stretch.

*Rock-ribbed Republican Hammondsport, like much of the rest of the nation, voted for Franklin D. Roosevelt as president in 1932. Suffering the horrors of the Great Depression, voters hoped that F.D.R. could improve matters. In Hammondsport, though, the key issue was probably the fact that Roosevelt wanted to repeal Prohibition, which would be great news for the grape growers and winery owners. Within the year Prohibition was repealed, but Hamondsport voters, in the true American spirit of what-have-you-done-for-me-lately, went back to the Republicans. At least this gave them the distinction of having voted for Alf Landon, who carried exactly two states (Maine and Vermont) in ’36.

*When Roosevelt ran for governor in 1928, Republicans pulled long faces, insisting that while he was a fine, likeable fellow, they just feared that the office would be too much for his delicate health (he having been crippled by polio seven years earlier). Roosevelt’s response was to barnstorm through every county in the state by auto (mostly on dirt roads), giving multiple speeches every day and asking crowds “Do I look sick to you?” He didn’t, and he won. Locally he gave speeches at Elmira, Corning, Bath, Hornell, and onward, touting his progressive credentials to cheering crowds.

*Governor Al Smith was running for President that year – a CATHOLIC! Thousands of western New Yorkers, including ministers and public officials, openly joined the Ku Klux Klan to defend America from what they insisted was devilish plot by foreigners and immigrants to rule America by stealth. They flooded the region with anti-Catholic hate propaganda, burned crosses on hill after hill (and sometimes on people’s lawns), and goose-stepped down to the polls to vote for Republican Herbert Hoover.

*Franklin’s fifth cousin Theodore campaigned in and around Steuben County, more or less forced into our area by the routes of the railroads. Seeing a local man with nine children at Cameron Mills, TR shouted out that this was the most prosperous place he’d seen on his travels. (He only had five, himself.)

*William Jennings Bryan campaigned for president here in 1900, trying in vain to convince Americans to stop taking over other countries. He and his supporters marched from the depot in Bath to the courthouse square, where the “boy orator” made one of his famed speeches, then marched back to the train.

*Steuben County Historical Society has a photo, circa 1900, of the Bath Socialists meeting in Pulteney Park. Three of them.

*The Town of Fremont was named for “the Pathfinder,” military man and western explorer John C. Fremont. When he ran for President in 1856, the new town voted overwhelmingly in favor of their namesake.

*The 1835 directory states that there were three black voters in Steuben County, and three more in Livingston. By then just about any 21 year-old white male could vote, but New York went through a period when it loaded lots of extra property requirements onto African American men before THEY were allowed to vote.

*People in other parts of the country sometimes ask me, “What’s politics like out in your area?” I used to answer, “All you need to know is that in 1918 our U.S. Representative was a Republican named Houghton from the Corning Glass Works. And today, our U.S. Representative is a Republican named Houghton from the Corning Glass Works.”

*Ralph Nader some years ago came through our area on one of his symbolic campaigns for president. Having no hope of winning more than a trace amount of votes, he had no qualms about freely admitting his surprise when reporters at a press conference told him he was in Corning. It had been a very busy trip, and he’d thought it was Binghamton.