Swing music of the 1940’s was officially declared dead by none other than Martin Block, the man who newspaper reporter, Walter Winchell, described as America’s first disc jockey. Block’s radio program Make Believe Ballroom premiered in 1935 and was broadcast live from a New York hotel. By 1956, Make Believe Ballroom had gone the way of Fibber McGee and Molly. Block suggested his brand of music had seen its day, and that the sons and daughters of WWII’s ‘jumpin’ jivin’ ‘bobby soxers’, had crowned a new god and its name was Rock and Roll.
In ‘56, I admit to being a twelve-year-old rhythm and blues junkie, an active card carrying member in the cult of Rock and Roll. But really, who under the age of 16 wasn’t? Every afternoon, at exactly three o’clock, while sitting in algebra class, all of a sudden, I’d break out in a cold-cold sweat. After school, in need of a quick R & R fix, I’d play an air Stratocaster while running through the doors of a juke-joint aptly named Vaughn’s Dairy. Shakin’ like a hound dog looking for his lost bone, I’d take a seat in a booth way in the back next to the gigantic Wurlitzer jukebox that boasted 24 stereophonic speakers.
“Hail, hail, Rock and Roll. Long live, Rock and Roll.”
Toe-tapping, hand-jivin’ music played in 4/4 time, combined with syncopated rhythm, flowed through my ear canals straight into my brain in a rush. Satan’s music may have had a hold on me, but what I truly loved, Mom hated. It was R & R’s heavy back-beat that aggravated an existing nervous condition. While the beat went on-and-on behind the closed door of my bedroom, Mom decided to check-into the Ursuline convent, a monumental 3 story brick building with a tile roof overlooking the Mississippi River, that served as a nunnery, and a silent retreat for the Catholic faithful seeking ‘serenity now’.
A St. Louis shrink finally determined that Mom’s frazzled nerves were due to the fact that after surgery several years earlier, she was left with only one ovary, which meant that no matter how hard she tried to conceive, Mom lived with the fact there’d be no more babies. That summer of ’56, Mom popped pills, Dad went fishing and I humped produce for my grandpa. Why? I needed bread, lots of it, to feed my hot wax habit and the bubbling Wurlitzer at Vaughn’s Dairy.
Reveille came at 4:30 a.m. Then on an empty stomach, there was over an hour of bouncing up-and-down on a hard-bench seat, inside the stuffy cab of my grandpa’s WWII double-axel International-Harvester that he’d converted into a produce truck. We shot out of Festus/Crystal City, aimed North toward St. Louis and Produce Row. During the trip, Gramp’s usually had to take only one of the tiny white nitroglycerine pills that kept his heart ticking. But sometimes, if the traffic was unusually heavy, or another driver had the nerve to cut in front of us, Gramps would let out a string of Italian profanities that would make the Pope blush, then pop another pill. I wasn’t tall enough to reach the clutch and shift gears at the same time, so if Gramps had the ‘big one’, I hoped the plastic Jesus glued to the dashboard would come to our rescue.
Once the truck had been backed into a slot on Produce Row, Gramps footed the bill for breakfast. For 50 cents, I was served a tall glass of ice-cold milk with an inch of cream on top and a glazed donut the size of a dinner plate. After stuffing my stomach, all I had to do was ‘stay the hell outta’ the way’ until the old man finished dickering for lettuce, potatoes, grapes, etc.
One morning, while waiting for Gramps to finish negotiating with the Scalise Brothers on the price of bananas, I slipped around to the dock where they unloaded produce from the railcars. In syncopated rhythm and softly humming, bare-chested men, their shiny ebony skin glistening in the sunlight, balanced a 100# stalk of green bananas on their left shoulder. It was a ‘lumper’ ballet without a choreographer.
When Gramps hollered it was time to, “Hit the bricks,” I saw a wispy black feather fall from a stalk of bananas. I nonchalantly strolled over, removed my St. Louis Cardinals baseball cap and dropped it over the fuzzy object.
Once I was back in the produce truck and we were on the road, again, I slowly uncovered the surprise hidden in my hat. At that particular instant Gramps happened to glance over in my direction. I’d never seen his eyes go so wide when he hollered, “Good-a, God, Boy. That’s-a tarantula.”
Once things settled down and Gramps had popped a nitro pill, I saw that he had been right. The hairy creature staring up at me was a genuine arthropod, brought to the U.S.A. courtesy of the United Fruit Company and the banana republic of Costa Rica. With his 8 legs splayed-out the stowaway was only about 3 inches in diameter. He was just a baby.
When I was finished lumping produce for the day and collected my $1.00 slave-wage, always-in-debt earnings from Gramps, I named my new pet Inky Dot. The little guy/gal with the unusual orange and black stripes on his butt, didn’t mind being picked up, then placed on top of my head under my baseball cap for a stroll down to Rock and Roll Headquarters and the colorful Wurlitzer. Once inside, I doffed my cap. After the initial shock of a tarantula sighting wore off, I introduced Inky Dot to my friends. The girls loved ‘him’ and called ‘him’ cute. Between the screams and screeches, some were even brave enough to touch ‘his’ hairy body.
Inky’s favorite food were grasshoppers, katydids, moths, mealworms, houseflies or cockroaches in that order. Did I mention the little dickens wouldn’t eat any of those disgusting insects unless they were alive? Inky lived in an old orange crate with slits on the sides for ventilation, a broken flower pot to hide in, and a soft sponge to sleep on. But it seemed that no matter how secure I made his home the creepy, crawling 8-legged Houdini always managed to escape.
I soon learned the little rascal’s favorite game was hide and seek. I tied ‘him’ on a string leash, but ‘he’ ate through the thin twine. Nothing could keep my pet penned. He was ‘spidey’ unchained. With Mom on the verge of a nervous breakdown, her daily screams were a signal that she’d found Inky lurking in her underwear drawer, inside a shoe, or taking a nap on the toilet seat. The last straw came during a weekly bridge session at our home, when Inky got lost and decided to crawl up a guest’s stockinged leg. It took some tricky maneuvering, but I was finally able to coax my pet out of the bush without too much embarrassment to the bridge player, me or Inky Dot.
It was while trying to find a suitable home for Inky that a miracle occurred with Mom. After 13 years of trying, the woman was preggers. To everyone’s amazement her nervous condition seemed to disappear overnight. But that didn’t stop Inky from showing up unexpectedly in the most unpredictable places. The little guy I’d found on the loading dock had grown to the size of a small tea saucer. What’s more, ‘his’ appetite for live food begin to take a toll on the time I could have spent listening to Rock and Roll, not to mention searching for a girl who’d date a guy with what? A pet spider? Ugh.
Fortunately, I finally found Inky a permanent home at the St. Louis Zoo where he made friends with his neighbor a Peruvian pink-toed tarantula. While we coexisted, Inky Dot never did growl or even purr, he was totally silent, I couldn’t have asked for a better friend. It was at the zoo where I learned that Inky was a Costa Rican tiger rump tarantula, which answered the eternal question, “Why does Inky Dot have orange stripes on his butt?”