The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 280 times in 2014. If it were a cable car, it would take about 5 trips to carry that many people.
Hello Everyone. I love doing research for my book on my father. Since he was in show business in 1949, the newspaper people kept track of everything he and my mom did. So I have lots of articles on their “doings”. For instance, the following is a portion of an article from a California newspaper about their New Year’s Eve party 1949:
USHERED IN STYLE
Father Time stopped the clock at Norma and Eddie Green’s
when celebrities and socialites gathered there New Year’s Eve for one of the most exciting parties of the night. Among those who heralded the “baby ‘ with heaping plates of the ‘Good Luck” menu, were, Hortense . . , all done up in beautiful black ‘after-five’ dresses; Mabel, who played the piano while Betty . . . .sang “A Little Bird”, with Ethel Gordon, who did her celebrating in a green satin crea- tion trimmed in rich brown fur; Paulette Coleman arrived on the scene wearing a red dress that called for that second look from Tony, and a host of others. Eddie, the genial host, was still greeting New Year rounders as ye ole scribe made her departure.
Ethel Gordon was our family doctor’s wife and Paulette was my mom’s best friend, the people whose last names I left off were folks in the entertainment field. Articles like this one allow me to imagine those parties that my parents hosted. The house that we lived in at the time is still there and i can still see the women in their gowns milling around.
After my father died in 1950 those types of parties ended. What I remember most in the years following his death is that on New Year’s Eve my mom’s Uncle Uly would come over and bring hogshead cheese (ugh!), and his rifle. My siblings were born and my cousins would be there and mom would let us stay up till midnight, when Uncle Uly would shoot off his rifle. Mom would cook a pig with an apple in its mouth and everyone would sit and eat, and the adults would get drunk. Once I myself became an adult I went out to party on New Years, didn’t even think about cooking and I usually got drunk (Hap……py New Year!).
I don’t get drunk anymore, and I pretty much stay inside on New Year’s Eve, just in case someone shoots off a rifle. I don’t do New Year’s resolutions because I know I won’t keep them, and I don’t like stress. The thing I am happy about this year, that I know will carry me through 2015, is that my family, me, my daughter Melony and my grandson Edward, are closer than ever. We are all speaking to each other, our individual personal lives are happy and we are all healthy. My siblings, my nieces, nephews, and long-lost cousins and all their family members, are celebrating this year together, in one way or another, and I don’t think I could be any happier with how this year has turned out.
With love for my family, and may everyone out there have a peaceful, prosperous and a Happy New Year.
I have put a lot of time and effort into finding out all I could about my father. I was only three when he died and I basically have no memory of him. He was 30 years older than my mother and they were only married for five years. During my research I have found out my mom knew very little about the man she married, or, what she told me was very little. Eddie was an actor, a songwriter, a singer, a restaurant owner, a dancer, a movie producer, a movie star, a radio personality and I could go on, but I won’t. The thing is, I have only learned most of this information in the last four years, mom never told me half of this stuff. I figure since she was only in her early 20’s when she married Eddie and he had money at the time, their life was too busy for her to worry about what he had done before she met him. They traveled and gave “soirees” and went to nightclubs all the time, and had me, so mom only knew what was going on from the time she married Eddie.
My problem now is that I have almost no information on my father’s early years. I know where he was born, that he was extremely poor and that he left home at about nine years of age. I know that he taught himself to read and taught himself magic tricks and became the “Boy Magician” traveling around Baltimore putting on shows in churches and halls. And that is about it. He was born in 1891 and I have been told his birth certificate no longer exists. I have his parents names (finally) but cannot find them in any census. I want to start my book but I hate to begin the book with sketchy information, and the longer I put if off, the more I feel that I am procrastinating.
My really good information starts when Eddie wrote his first song. According to the Catalogue of Copyright Entries, Eddie copyrighted “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” on December 28, 1917 in Chicago under his given name, Edward Green. He sold it a year later, but continued to perform the song in places like the Booker Washington Theater in St. Louis until 1920.
A Good Man Is Hard To Find
Advertisement
Pace and Handy Building, 232 West, 42nd ST., New York
on sale at Pace & Handy Co., Inc., Publishers. Price 15 c. Composed by Eddie Green.
From there it is easy to trace Eddie because his name stays in the paper as his career and his entrepreneurial life grows. As a matter of fact, his name was in the paper so much, I was beginning to wonder if he was paying someone to see that it was.
Anyhow, I am going to start my very first book writing adventure for the new year and I hope to take you along with me. I will use my blog as a place for updates of my progress and to ask for suggestions or words of encouragement, while continuing to post what I think are inspirational posts from myself or others, inspirational poetry if I find any, or information on motivational blogs I run across. And speaking of inspiration and motivation, I know that my father started out with nothing, very little schooling and entered into a world that, in the early 1900’s was a truly difficult world for people of color, but Eddie took the bull by the horns and ran with it and became an upstanding man who was well-liked by those who knew him, both professionally and personally and always got asked back. I am very proud to be his daughter. Thanks for stopping by.
Hi. I am writing this post on December 22, 2014. For whatever reason, I am not in the Christmas spirit this year. At least, I am not in the spirit of buying Christmas presents, nor do I have the money. I like listening to “Silent Night” by the Temps and “The Little Drummer Boy”, but I have not done so this season. Maybe I am not looking at my life properly.
Today I read an article about a woman whose daughter was lost in the Tsunami 10 years ago. At least, the daughter was assumed lost. This lady has just found out that her daughter’s body was actually found and buried in a grave marked with a stone. Somehow, someone found this lady and gave her the news about her daughter. The article said that the mother is sad, but happy that someone took care of her daughter for her. This mother is unable to travel to give her daughter a final goodbye as she doesn’t have enough money. She taps rubber trees for a living, which starts the process of making latex, and it probably does not pay very well. She taps rubber trees for a living and, oh poor me, I can barely get out of bed and get to my computer or the TV.
I need to start looking at the fact that I can get up when I feel like getting up, I have a computer I can turn on and listen to all types of music from anywhere and I have a TV, AND my life is pretty calm right now.
For Christmas this year I will say a prayer for those whose children may not be with them, that they may find solace in the reason for the season.
remote village in Myanmar’s southern Karen state, where she taps rubber trees for a living.
May’s mother is too poor to travel to Thailand to retrieve her daughter’s body, or to pay to have it brought home. She hopes the body can be cremated in line with Buddhist customs.
The other day a relative of mine posted this statement “If you wanna change your situation, start changing your situation and your situation will change.” He said that it sounds simple, but is really something to think about. I found the statement rather profound. He said he used the statement as a way to motivate himself to take action, in order to make some changes in his life.
One of the reasons I started this blog is to write about how and why people are motivated. Are we motivated by what we want to get or are we motivated by situations in which we find ourselves? Or can we motivate ourselves? Whatever it is, the situation usually calls for some type of action on our part.
Dangling a carrot (so to speak) in front of someone is one way to get that person to take action, if the carrot looks good enough, that person will reach for the carrot. Poverty can motivate a person to take action, which is what my father did at the age of nine when he left home to make money to feed himself and have a better life.
My relative has used self talk to motivate himself. Self talk is an action. For me, at one time in my life, self talk would have been a difficult action for me to take because I suffered from low self-confidence. For some people, the only thing that could motivate them to take an action would be a pin in the tush. You’ve seen the cartoon drawing of someone being stuck in the butt with a needle-they jump!
So, I admire my relative for putting his self talk out there, because he has started an action which is going to require him to take more action in order to change his situation. He is an inspiration and an example to others who may be struggling with the need to change. It helps to know how others are motivated into action, that way we know we are not alone, and it makes our own efforts easier. How were you motivated today? Or what has motivated you in the past?
This is beautiful.
Hello. Well, its’ a week before Christmas and the one thing I am missing this year is my Mom. Her name was Norma, she passed away in 2010 and just yesterday I decided to put a picture of her on the wall next to my work station so she can be my muse. It’s a picture of her at a volunteer day celebration luncheon so she has a plate full of food in front of her. She has on a white shirt with a collar, a pink sweater with a pink tie, strawberry blond hair and a nice smile. It’s a full face picture so I can see her “beauty mole”. I like the smile because it looks as though she is pleased with what I am doing in regard to this blog. If you care to browse further I have a pic of my mom in another post and a younger picture in my little photo section.
Three things my mom liked to do was volunteer work (Hollywood Bowl gift shop, library reading tutor), wear pink and decorate for the holidays. By now her tree would be up and decorated, Christmas candy would be in a candy bowl (who does that anymore?) and, oh yeah, my favorite thing of all, there would be a huge reindeer head on her front door that played “Rudolph, the Red Nosed Reindeer” when you pushed the button. And everybody pushed the button. Until her last couple of years, she would also decorate the hallway near the elevator by putting up a small Christmas tree. And of course, she cooked. Mac and cheese. Yams and pineapple and ham. Usually, everybody in the family who could, came by on Christmas. I miss that.
So, my mom is my muse, she is an inspiration and today we are visiting Christmas of 1942. Mom was 19 and working for the City. She hadn’t gotten married yet so she was still living at home. I don’t know for sure but she was probably listening to songs like, “Flying Home” by Lionel Hampton or “White Christmas” by Bing Crosby, or she could have been listening to the Gilbert and Sullivan Operetta “H.M.S. Pinafore” because she was an aspiring opera star at the time.
My mom had met my father, Eddie Green, by now, though they were not married, so she may or may not have known that Eddie was performing that Christmas season on the popular Columbia network’s “Caravan” program. The program was billed as an hour of fun and music with a veritable “blitz” (I think this was a nod to the war) on gloom. Guests included Xavier Cougat’s Orchestra and Eddie Green, comedian. I have an article from a Niagara Falls newspaper that says “It has been decided that the nation today, more than ever, needs laughter, and the “Caravan” is going to contribute as much of it as can be packed into an hour of radio time.”
As I have stated before my father, Eddie Green, was by that time a well-known radio personality appearing as “Eddie, the waiter” on the Old Time Radio program, “Duffy’s Tavern”. From everything I have read, so far, most people thought Eddie was “side-splittingly” funny.
I think that, like in ’42, the world could use more laughter. I know I could use a good laugh. I have copies of most of the programs my father was on, but listening to them by myself is not as fun as it might be if I could listen to them with mom. I have only received most of my recordings over the past three years, so mom, to my knowledge, never got a chance to hear them.
I can imagine though, going over to mom’s and pressing that button on the old reindeer head hanging on her door and dancing to the little tune that comes out and then going in and sharing my discoveries her, I think that would be a great Christmas present. Wow, this was my longest post yet, thanks for hangin out with me.
The Christmas season is upon us and I am having difficulty getting into the spirit of Christmas. I believe my difficulty comes from the turmoil that is going on in our world today. If I watch the news I see nine incidents of violence before I see something positive. So I decided that since I have been doing research on my father for the year 1942 (the date of his draft registration card) I would go on-line and see what was going on in the world that year that is similar to what we are experiencing now. Well, duh, we were in the middle of WWII. OK, so maybe there were some things going on that might prove to be more positive. After all, there are some good things that happen in this world, right? For instance:
Count Basie recorded “One O’Clock Jump”.
Bing Crosby recorded “White Christmas” the greatest selling record to date.
John H. Johnson published the first issue of the Negro Digest.
Walt Disney released “Bambi”.
Then I found this article about a race riot in Harlem. A white police officer was arresting a black woman and a black off-duty soldier stepped in because he thought the officer was being too rough and in the scuffle that soldier was shot. Somehow, a false rumor was spread that the woman was the soldier’s and that he had been killed right in front of her. This was not true, but a riot was sparked. Violence. And the weird part is that the Mayor lifted the dim out that was in place because of the war, so the police could keep a watch out for looters.
I understand that good and bad will always exist, but I am hopeful that we will someday figure out a better way to exist with our fellow human beings. Then that way when people view the news, however that may be done in the future, they will view nine good incidents first before they have to see the bad.
One other thing, remember these? My childhood was not always the happiest, but, my little golden books always made me feel good, even seeing one today gives me a warm feeling. I encourage you to think about some of the things that give you pleasure this holiday season. Share your good feelings with another person, spread the love. How do you plan to be merry for the holidays?
HA! I am thanking my lucky stars that someone posted the above quote. I was having a hell of a time thinking of a post. I don’t know if it is the cold or the crickets, but I just can’t seem to think. And I need to post, otherwise I am subject to just giving up. If I do not post on a continuous basis, I will eventually convince myself that this blogging thing is not working, because look how long it’s been and where is my traffic? No traffic must mean I am failing! It’s probably just the crickets, though. They have crawled into my landlady’s wall and are driving me crazy! I have a catastrophic brain and the crickets and the cold weather are not helping. Cold weather stops my flow, it seems. I mean, it’s not snowing or anything harsh like that, I am just a warm weather person who needs to turn on her heater, for Heaven’s sake.
I have had amazing experiences these past few weeks, my first writer’s convention and appearing on a radio program, but I seemed, today, to have tried to take myself into a place that does not exist at present, a place of failure. Then, while surfing the web, I saw the above quote and I thought HA! That’s it. I remembered that I started this blog to have a presence in the writing community, not to attract heavy traffic. Well, I have a presence, and by living and pursuing a goal today, I may encounter failure but it will certainly not occur by default.
I feel warmer now, thanks to my little heater and some socks, and maybe those crickets will take pity on me and go to sleep or hop away. Toodles.
Held together by lifechats
Spirituality in the Wisdom Years
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