We arrived at our local library to find a vintage style Airstream trailer in the parking lot. There was a nice young lady outside who smiled in recognition at our names being given. When it was finally our turn, we were greeted by another nice young lady who led us into the trailer and gave us a basic briefing on the StoryCorps concept while setting us up for recording. We sat in comfortable chairs facing each other in an intimate room with low lighting, a setting which allowed me to relax and just let the words flow. Christopher did most of the talking (of course), but I also got plenty in as well and moved things along in my role as moderator. We even had a few minutes at the end to talk about our midcentury modern designer-named pets, Eero (cat) and Aalto (dog).

After we finished, we stepped outside and found a local TV reporter who had arranged a story on StoryCorps with us. She interviewed each of us on the experience. Our story should end up on the 9 p.m. Channel 3 broadcast next week!

Here’s Christopher’s account of our exciting day.

In other LitKids news, I’m happy to report that some of my prints will be available locally in a brick-and-mortar retail setting! Changing Hands, the legendary indie bookseller in the Phoenix area, will be selling matted and poly bagged versions of a few of my prints in a special display starting on October 20. They only took five prints (our Laura was among the rejected ones), but they look excellent packaged like this. Hopefully they’ll sell out those five and want more. Later on this month, I’m going to be shopping the prints around to other local retailers. Wish me luck.

You oughta know this by now, but we can’t get enough old movies — on DVD, on Turner Classic Movies, anywhere we can find them. With all the old movies we get to see, however, it’s a shame that we rarely get the chance to see them as they were originally shown. This past weekend, Christopher, some friends and I got the privilege to experience a silent film the way it would have been shown back in the ’20s, on a big screen with live musical accompaniment. The film was Safety Last! starring Harold Lloyd, presented as part of a series of silent film screenings shown at the beautifully restored Orpheum Theatre in downtown Phoenix.

The film itself was so much fun, and there is a lot more to it than Lloyd’s famous “hanging off a clock” scene. Lloyd plays one of his usual cheerful small town boys here, one that must find a job in the big city so that he can afford to marry his best girl (Mildred Davis, who later became the real Mrs. Harold Lloyd). Although he finds employment as a department store clerk, Lloyd finds that he has to exaggerate his position so his girl won’t leave him. Eventually he devises a promotional scheme to have a “human fly” climb outside the huge department store, a plan that goes awry when Lloyd has to sub for his stuntman pal. This fast-paced romp was a great vehicle for Lloyd’s gift for perfect physical comedy, and the film is brimming with several clever bits that utilize it (Lloyd and his roommate turning themselves into hanging coats to avoid their landlady, for instance). The scenes of Lloyd climbing up that building are beautifully done, and what’s more you get a lot of breathtaking aerial views of downtown Los Angeles streets with their trolley cars and lack of crosswalks or stoplights. The showing had live accompaniment on the huge pipe organ that was part of the Orpheum restoration. This isn’t your run-of-the-mill organ — it’s huge! The score was magnificently played by local legend Ron Rhode, whom I remember playing a similarly gigantic instrument at Organ Stop Pizza not far from where I grew up. His presence made the evening doubly nostalgic for this whippersnapper.

Although the showing we attended was fun, it was also sparsely attended with only about 20% of the theatre’s seats filled. What’s more, the audience was, well, old. I only saw a few dozen people who looked under 40, and precious few children (which is a shame, since I think young kids would get a big kick out of this particular movie). The presentation was hosted by a local community college professor who lacked the gravity of a Robert Osborne. I was also disappointed with the lack of accompanying vintage shorts which were at the last showing we attended. Despite all that, it was a fun evening. The Orpheum really needs to get better p.r. people so the younger generation (and trust me, they’re out there) can enjoy vintage movies the way they ought to be seen.

Also noticed: the YMCA building at left in the mid-point screen shot is actually the gym where I work out twice a week!

The inscription on the base reads” “World Progress Through Scientific Research In The Laboratory. Designed in fulfillment of the wishes of the donor and given to the city of Phoenix by Helen B. Rogers, 1957. Charles Badger Martin, sculptor.” I haven’t been able to find much info on either Rogers or Martin.

Lockley is also a funny and excellent writer. An observation on ASU’s fabulous Gammage Auditorium:

This Gammage either looks like a wedding cake with arms, or a smart little sombrero that George Cukor might have put on Rosalind Russell’s head as she clips in from stage left, yacking, a sombrero eight stories tall, a sombrero with welcoming arms. It’s pink. Officially the Gammage is ‘desert rose’ but it’s really pinker than hell and everybody knows it. The general opinion seems to be that it’s ugly — or as my friend Bisser blurted out, “hideous!” As if the ghost of George Cukor had pinched his ass.

Not only is that building a wonderfully loopy landmark, but I also have a lot of wonderful memories associated with Gammage. As a child/teen, I saw a lot of great theater productions there. It’s in the parking lot that I learned how to drive a stick shift. And inside, at around the eighth row center on a November night, I met my significant other.

Our first subject will be Waialua pineapple, a soda originating from Hawaii. Although the label on the bottle sports a retro-style hula dancer, the company in fact got started only a few years ago by a newlywed couple who noticed the lack of soda bottlers on the islands. Right away I noticed that the drink has an appealingly light color, not the screaming piss yellow one would normally associate with pineapple soda. The lightness also extends to the taste. It’s got a really refreshing flavor — good and pineapple-y, sweet but not overpoweringly so. The fact that they use pure cane sugar and not corn syrup as sweetener makes a huge difference (that’s why hardcore Coke drinkers prefer the insanely sweet concoction from Mexico over the U.S. version). Now that I’ve tried the pineapple, I’m very curious about Waialua’s other three flavors … especially the mango. Guess we’ll have to schedule another Pop The Soda Shop trip!

Writing about these stations makes me think about how much more passive the act of listening to the radio is these days. Local radio now? Sucks. Having a deep aversion to commercials and stupidity, my car’s dial never strays away from the local NPR affiliate. But there is an upside — the internet is where true, passionate radio lives on. Ironically, I don’t find myself listening to much online radio either. Sure, I’ll occasionally tune into Pandora, Luxuria Music, or somebody’s Last.fm station for a radio fix. But it’s not the same. I don’t get the same excitement of wondering what song will come up next (except maybe Luxuria or WFMU on a good day). Let the wistful nostalgia begin:

Station: KSTM
Years of Operation: 1981-87
Typical Songs: Echo & The Bunnymen — “Bring On The Dancing Horses”; The Police — “Synchronicity”
KSTM or “The Storm” is fondly remembered by Phoenix-area listeners as much for its “anything goes” format as for its weak signal emanating from the dusty faraway hamlet of Apache Junction. Back in my high school days I used to tune in sometimes and hear wonderful and completely unfamiliar new stuff from England. Although the station was very DJ-centric and often succumbed to its own quirkiness, the music planted a seed in my young mind to be more adventurous and not fear the unknown. The best thing I remember about The Storm is that they’d play an entire album from beginning to end every night at 10:00. That was unheard of, even back then, but it allowed me to listen to things like Sgt. Pepper’s for the first time. (Many former KSTM staffers are now at the internet station Radio Free Phoenix.)

Station: KUKQ
Years of Operation (Alternative format): 1989-c.92; 1994-95
Typical Songs: Love & Rockets — “So Alive”; Michelle Shocked — “Anchorage”
The station that all the cool kids listened to. Originally a straight-up contemporary R&B station, as of 1989 KUKQ became the first place in the Valley (indeed, the entire U.S.) where one could hear all Alternative Rock, all the time. Prior to this fans had to wait for the occasional KSTM song or strain to hear the faint signal of KEYX, a short-lived but adventurous station that specialized in Alternative and R&B (and likely the only place where one could hear Ministry and Aretha Franklin played back-to-back). The KQ atmosphere was a wild and loosey goosey place with a casual crew headed by the affable Jonathan L. During the station’s height (just before Alternative got commercialized to death), it was an eclectic place that wasn’t hemmed in by any agenda or preconceived notions of what it should be. The euphoria was pretty short-lived, however. KQ was revived in the early ’90s with a harder-edged sound, but by that time I moved on to the next eight call letters listed below. (Jonathan L’s KEYX and KQ memories; a fan’s KUKQ memorial site.)

Station: KYOT
Years of Operation (Eclectic format): c.1992-94
Typical Songs: Tina Turner — “Nutbush City Limits”; Lee Michaels — “Do You Know What I Mean”
I would describe the early, coolest years of “The Coyote” as Oldies With Attitude. The playlist was a little bit of everything, new and old, rock and R&B, interspersed with DJ patter and soundbites from campy movies. This was the only time I heard nuggets like Shorty Long’s 1966 gem “Function at the Junction” on the air. It was a fantastic station, which only made it harder when after a few short years the owners converted it to a lobotomized “Smooth Jazz” format. To this day, I can’t overhear KYOT in restaurants or shops without throwing up a little.

Station: KTWC
Years of Operation: c.1993-95
Typical Songs: Al Martino — “Volare”; Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’66 — “Going Out Of My Head”
The most obscure station listed here was also the most influential on my own musical tastes today. KTWC was a mysterious Easy Listening station with no deejays and very few commercials — just lots of music interrupted by news breaks every 15 minutes. The playlist was a bizarre bunch of pop songs from the previous 40 years thrown into a blender, foreshadowing the “iPod Shuffle” format of so many internet stations. On a typical day you’d hear Robin Ward’s orgasmic “Wonderful Summer” followed by a schmaltzy instrumental like “Theme From A Summer Place” followed by Brenda Lee’s rockin’ obscurity “Is It True” followed by Olivia Newton-John’s roller boogie masterpiece “Xanadu”. It was here that I can remember being bewitched by a weirdly atmospheric tune with fake bird calls, only to find out years later that it was Martin Denny’s Exotica classic “Quiet Village”. Honestly, hearing that station was like being let in on some cataclysmic and wonderful secret.

Station: KZON
Years of Operations (Adult Alternative format): c.1994-99
Typical Songs: Big Head Todd & The Monsters — “Bittersweet”; The Barenaked Ladies — “If I Had A Million Dollars”
In the mid ’90s, I worked at a suburban satellite office of the local newspaper. Me and my co-workers, all young professionals in their mid to late twenties, loved KZON. Of all the stations listed here, this one was probably the most tightly formatted — in this case, Adult Alternative. Remember AA? Very flavor of the month. Although it often verged on the too-mellow, this was the last local station I can think of which was guided by what the deejays wanted to play. A big chunk of the playlist was popular stuff, sure, but occasionally you’d hear a lesser-known single or an interesting older album cut from an established artist. Little did we know that it was the beginning of the end for truly creative local radio in the Phoenix area.

Related: Derrick Bostrom’s vintage Phoenix postcard collection.

By the way, the other places we talked about were Yellow Front (rustic shop to get jeans and camping equipment), UTotem (convenience stores), the Hostess Bakery Outlet my mom used to drive in from another town for, and Gemco (general purpose department store).