Peanut Gallery full of forgetful, forgotten people as Jerry and I debate Howdy Doody's relationship with Buffalo Bob; Our pal, Bob, trashes the room

“It’s Howdy Doody Time

It isn’t worth a dime.

It smells like turpentine

It’s Howdy Doody Time”

At least that’s one of the kinder versions we sang along with the theme song that led a freckled puppet onto our TV screen going on 70 years ago.

 I hadn’t thought of that preschoolers' parody until I reached the end of my cane-aided trek through the corridors of the living dead, or at least people who are lost somewhere inside their bodies. Or heads.

The 1950s television show starring and named for that obnoxious marionette Howdy Doody and his “handler” Buffalo Bob” (Not to be confused with Buffalo Bill, who murdered and skinned his quarry in “The Silence of The Lambs”) was blasted out of my subconsciousness when I finished my long ramble through the Memory Care Ward to see my pal, Jerry.  He’s almost always in his room, physically. But sometimes his “upstairs” is unoccupied.

Buffalo Bob Smith -- who "Flapjacks" may well have met as a kid -- poses with his only friend, Howdy Doody

Jerry Manley, my longest-tenured newspaper pal, was sound asleep when I slipped from the 103-degree day outside and into the nursing home at the edge of one of Nashville’s most-exclusive suburbs.

I, for the third week in a row, was no longer sticking my contraband foodstuffs (and drinkstuffs) into my pants when I smuggled them into the pretty secure joint. I know Jerry, the recipient of this stuff, is not allowed to eat or drink wares from the outside, because of his restricted diet.  Folks in his ward are only to eat what the blood tests and doctors allow. From the first day I visited him, many months ago, he has requested junk food.

I’ve been sneaking this stuff, at least once a week, into the home since early December 2023. But I’ve tired of the shock felt when I stick a frosty bottle of Diet SunDrop in my shorts. So now I keep it and two packs of Ritz sandwich crackers in the plastic sack I carry in my cane hand. Jerry requested both packs be peanut butter crackers, but they just had one of those in stock in my pal Quincy’s Shell station on this day. So, I bought one other pack that is cheese-filled.

Quincy, manager of this station for decades, knows my normal “purchase’’ and who it’s for. That’s why he started stocking the Diet SunDrop for me a few months ago. He promises me he’ll have the peanut butter crackers restocked by the time I return to top off my tank and get supplies for my friend, who lives in a situation that Quincy tells me “is worse than prison.”  A guy can escape or even be released from prison.  There is neither escape nor parole for those spending the remainder of their mortal lives in the Memory Care Ward.  Folks like Jerry. 

A cluster of women – one of them speaking with a Manchester, England, accent (just guessing. I know it was neither Cockney nor Scouse, and those are the only ones I recognize, really) scarcely decipherable by my Midwest-bred ears – were deciding between ice water and lemonade when they sat out on the portico talking about fish-and-finger pies.  Perhaps, as some say, old people don’t feel the heat. Well, I’m kinda old, and the heat was sucking my soul out of me and frying it on the sidewalk. It occurs to me these women who are not yet qualified for Memory Care but who get all chipper in this heat obviously are crazy.

Nah, I shook my head at that summation. If they were crazy, they’d be shackled to the wall, naked, caked in excrement, a tin cup for water, begging for dried bread crusts, in the Memory Care Ward, like Jerry.

Joking again. The Ward is no dungeon from “Silence of the Lambs” or even “Camelot” or “Peanuts” or "The Andy Griffith Show." This actually is a really nice nursing home, if such exists.  Even Jerry said that when we were talking about what likely is his final frontier.  “I really like it here. Pretty good place. Clean. Bright. But it gets lonely, cause all I do is sit and watch TV.”

We compared it to the nursing home in Lewisburg, Tennessee, where he’d lived for a few months.  It was really dark, depressing even for a semi-sane visitor. They kicked Jerry out because he refused to shower.  “Showers hurt,” he explains. “And they are too cold.” The nurses down at that home used to call me in my Nashville basement to encourage me to encourage Jerry to bathe. “If he doesn’t this week, then they’ll throw him out.”

They did just that, and Jerry was sent back to his house, where his nephew, who lives in Jerry’s house, found him alone, raped and freezin’, alone, cold and sneezin’ – sorry, even Alice Cooper has lyrics planted in my brain. In any case, Jerry was discovered passed out on the floor of his living room last November. The family scooped him up, wiped him down and then dropped him off here. He remembers none of that. Nor does he remember prior nursing homes and rehab facilities where they unsuccessfully tried to bathe him.

He does reach the weekly shower requirement here, but it takes a lot of work by the nursing staff. They turn his room thermostat up to 86 or so, and when it reaches that level, they hogtie him on the shower handles and sit on him, swatting his butt like he’s a horse they are riding, while rubbing him down with Mister Clean. That’s not even a fraction of the truth, but it’s a helluva image. He does hate showers though, and they do crank up the heat in his room before they strip him down for the pressure wash.

For the last months, contractors and corporate hacks have been spiffing the nursing home up. Walls have been painted, new carpet is being installed, new and larger TVs are in each room. And a higher-grade of furniture, in general, has been put in the rooms and the hallways.  Jerry hasn’t noticed the changes. I’m sure his medical insurance will notice.

A lone woman is putting together a jigsaw puzzle on a table in the “normal old people” part of the home when I pass by en route to the double-locked and guarded entrance into the Memory Care Ward.

I am allowed through the door by a dietician, whose name I don’t know. I look around to see that my favorite staffer, T’Alijah, is not around.  I like her as a human, but she must be on vacation. In fact, there must be a lot of folks on vacation, as I don’t see any helpers I’ve gotten to know in the seven months I’ve been coming here, at least once a week, to visit Jerry.  I’ve been told I am a very rare visitor on this side of the locked doors. My visits cheer the staff as well as the inmates. I really like these people.

Milford/Bob, Jerry’s horse-riding and breeding roommate, is walking up and down the hall, looking for, I think, his room, when I get near the 15-by-15 cubicle he and Jerry call “home.” Wasn’t it Dorothy who said “There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home?” It doesn’t take a constipated wizard to know that this room really is no place like home. It’s a place to spend your dying days, semi-incognito. Don’t bother clicking the heels of your red slippers, you’d probably trip.

“It’s in here, Bob,” I say to the horseman who has that name embroidered into his sweatpants.  He just looks at me, so I go into the room and see Jerry, sound asleep, in his recliner.

The TV is blasting “Pawn Stars” when I sit in Bob’s recliner – each resident has a bed, dresser and recliner, and Jerry’s asleep in his.  I loudly say Jerry’s name two or three times and he doesn’t stir.  I have two thoughts: He’s sleeping really soundly, or he’s dead. It’s really difficult to tell.

I’d prefer he wasn’t dead – “not dead, yet,” as the Python dialogue goes -- so I push him with both hands, shaking him conscious.  I give him another damn good whacking with the cane my brother, Eric, made for me before he died recently. “I Don’t Work To Be Ordinary,” a Paul McCartney quote, was etched into it before he gave the stick the final, waterproof sheen.  My brother knew I love The Beatles as much as an evangelist preacher loves money, and he also was proud of and amazed by the unconventional and stubborn way I’ve lived my professional and personal life.  I wouldn’t recommend you try it, though, as friends, probably correct in their fears my “success” might rub off on them, are hard to find. Yes, I'm lonely, but I know where at least one true friend can be found, even if he sometimes doesn't realize he's there.  

I have found friendship in the Memory Care Ward, both among the patients – even the woman who addresses everyone as “knucklehead” and poor, old Bob, who lives with Jerry but has no idea where that is.

“Hey man, what’s going on?” Jerry asks me, as he props open his eyes.

I tell him I love him and that basically this is the day dedicated to visiting him in the nursing home, and he nods.

“I don’t know why you come,” he says. “I can’t remember anything to say. I can’t even remember if I ate breakfast today.  You have to do all the talking. I wouldn’t bother coming here if I was you.”

“Well, I’m me,” I answer. “And I like to see you, even though you can’t even remember your last shit.”

He laughs at that, and agrees that he really might take one soon. “My stomach kind of hurts from all the bacon and eggs and toast I had for breakfast,” he says, suddenly comprehending and quickly forgetting that he has, indeed, eaten this morning.

“I’m sitting here thinking about using the bathroom. Need to, but I’m really hungry. I wonder when they have lunch? I don’t think I ate anything today. Missed breakfast, maybe.”

I look at the time on my phone and tell him it’s just after 11 a.m. and lunch is served at noon.

“Good, cause I’m really hungry,” he says, as he begins to shove the crackers I’ve brought down his throat. I open the bottle of Diet SunDrop – his favorite beverage – and hand it to him. He takes a greedy  gulp, then uses the rest to wash down the crackers.

“I hope we have lunch soon, because I’m really, really hungry,” he says, again, between bites of crackers and swish-around-the-mouth savoring of the pint of citrus beverage.

He looks up at the TV, where “Pawn Stars” grifters are taking a look at things to buy from down-and-out Vegas gamblers who lose everything but their boxers in the casinos and then try to sell junk found in their car trunks to pay for a head-vacuuming visit to the Mustang Ranch.

Well, that’s over-simplifying the premise of the History Channel show. People come from all over to bring high-class junk to the guys on “Pawn Stars.”

The first guy I see is selling a Civil War rifle used in Texas.  The Pawn Star sets it aside to check on its worth. 

Then comes that damned puppet. I only wish it was Chucky.

I look up at the screen to see a guy holding up a marionette’s face and arms. The rest of the red-headed puppet is missing, likely the result of a custody dispute or a bad blackjack hand or rats. 

The dismembered body’s face looks familiar, and considering how it has been ravaged and savaged, I ponder that maybe Buffalo Bob was more like “Silence’s” Buffalo Bill, after all.

“Hey, Jerry, that’s Howdy Doody,” I say, almost cheerfully. I remember religiously watching the puppet’s great Saturday morning show when I was a kid. I was lying belly-down, on the floor of my house at 1812 Beverly Road in Sylvan Lake, Michigan. My brother, Eric, was up on the couch.

He’s dead now, something that still makes no sense to me and that keeps me from getting a full night’s sleep. But 65-70 years ago, he was not dead yet (that happened just a couple of months ago).

He was a typical big brother, in that I had to watch “Howdy Doody” from the floor, while he relaxed on the sofa, staring straight at the old black-and-white Philco.

By today’s standards, the show was pretty simple. Then again, so were “The Lone Ranger,” “Sky King,” “Buffalo Bill Junior” and “Roy Rogers.”  The most complex Saturday morning show was “Mighty Mouse,” mainly because it was about a rodent with superpowers. “Here I am to save the day,” he’d chirp. And the answer from some sort of rodent chorus was “That means that Mighty Mouse is on his way.” Or was it “on the way?” Debate rages among Paris intellectuals.

One thing I never taught Jerry, during our years of roaming, was that The Moody Blues only had one good song, "Nights in White Satin." 

And I don’t want to lump “The Lone Ranger” in completely with this elementary school TV mindlessness, because I loved the guy. “Mr. Lone Ranger,” as I used to call him whenever we got together, was a close friend of mine when he got old and I was moving in that direction. Forty years or so ago, I met The Lone Ranger at a gathering in Hopkinsville, Kentucky.

He immediately took a liking to me and my comrades on that wintry day. Rob “Death” Dollar and Scott “Badger” Shelton, two of my News Brothers cronies, were with me, “Flapjacks,” on that day.  So was Eric, who had stayed with me in my Clarksville, Tennessee, apartment the night before, so he could meet Clayton Moore as well.  Eric took the picture of me and the guys with Mr. Lone Ranger.

I think it was Badger who shot Eric’s picture with Mr. Lone Ranger. But I don’t have it. I wish I did.

Rob "Death" Dollar, Scott "Badger" Shelton, Mr. Lone Ranger and Tim "Flapjacks" Ghianni

We talked with Mr. Lone Ranger, who mounted Silver, while we watched, in shock.

“From out of the blue of the Western Sky comes Sky King,” the intro to that show about the pilot and his niece Penny, played, slightly, in my head while I recalled the Saturday morning TV squabbles I had with my brother. I loved him like a brother when he died, but he was a bully to my pacifist ruse when we were kids.

Back to “Howdy Doody,” though.  My parents liked my brother more than they liked me (He was the older child and was generally much nicer than I.) So, it was Eric who got the Howdy Doody marionette at Christmas. He kept it stashed away in the toybox my dad made him, that’s emblazoned with “Ricky.”  There never was a toy box emblazoned “Timmy.”  My brother’s grandsons now have the large, red “Ricky Box.”  I never had a toy box, so my grandchildren have to make due without. They won't know otherwise, of course.

When I saw the freckled puppet on “Pawn Stars,” the first thing I did was think of my brother and how much I miss him. Even if, when we were kids, he made me lie on the floor to watch TV and he got Howdy Doody and the toy box.

Since that show was made back in the 1950s, and was among the first programs telecast from Rockefeller Center, most of you may not know what I’m even talking about. The Howdy Doody generation is falling almost as quickly as the heroes of our parents’ Greatest Generation.    

Jerry did remember, after I began describing it to him. He listened to me, while his eyes focused on the marionette on the pawn shop counter.

Basically, the puppet was created by Buffalo Bob Smith, first as a radio sensation in the late 1940s. 

Without going into a lot of detail, when TV came along, so did the demand for Buffalo Bob and a real Howdy Doody (or marionette). They both wore western clothes.

Puppetmaster Buffalo Bob, by the way, was given the nickname mainly because he was from Buffalo, New York, (where the Ghianni family settled after finally getting released from Ellis Island.) Network execs also thought "Buffalo Bob" had a cowboy ring to it, kinda like Buffalo Bill. The arrogant little puppet was given his name as a play on the “Old American Greeting”: “howdy doody/howdy do.”  

It became a merchandising sensation. By the way, Howdy Doody was a red-haired puppet with 48 freckles, one for each state at the time of his birth.  They did not add a freckle when Alaska joined the Union. And nobody could figure out how many freckles to add for the 137 Hawaiian Islands.

I should add that there was a mute clown, Clarabell, played by Bob Keeshan, who went on to eternal glory as Captain Kangaroo, on the Howdy show. I used to laugh like hell when Clarabell honked his horn and squirted the crowd and Buffalo Bob with seltzer.

 Old guys like me remember the show’s Peanut Gallery, bleachers onstage that held 40 children. (Local channels copied this with their own clown or cowboy and a bleacher of kids for great television, like introducing "The Three Stooges" or "The Little Rascals" or "Tarzan.")

Buffalo Bob started off the show by asking “Say kids, what time is it?”

The kids would yell "It's Howdy Doody Time!" and sing the theme song (set to the classic “Ta-ra-ra-Boom-de-ay, ain’t had my beer today, I had one yesterday, ta-ra-ra-Boom-de-yay.’’ Actually, the beer part of it was constructed by my grandfather, George Champ, who used to sing that song to us while he was teaching us five-card stud and sipping Stroh's. Beginning when I was 5, I was losing hands and pennies to my Grandpa, who learned his “show-no-mercy” gaming habits when working as a roving thresherman, working the wheat fields from Vancouver to the Chicago area in the first part of the 20^th Century. Also, when you are a child, a small sip of Stroh's goes a long way to assuage the pain of poker losses. 

“It's Howdy Doody time,

It's Howdy Doody time,

Bob Smith and Howdy, too,

Say "Howdy do" to you.

Let's give a rousing cheer

’Cause Howdy Doody's here.

It's time to start the show

So kids, let's go!”

 

That was the theme song, but as I noted earlier, kids would mix and match rhymes and wordplay when singing along. You should have heard what I did with "Huckleberry Hound." My mother got pissed.

 As we watched the puppet sale on “Pawn Stars,” I kept throwing out other lines and memories to try to get Jerry to connect.

 We talked about his recent visitors – John Staed and “newspaperman” Wendell Wilson – neither of whom actually have visited.

His daughter hasn’t visited, or at least he doesn’t remember it.

“What do you remember?” I asked.

“That monkey story,” he responds, referring to the front-page news story 40-some years ago.  Almost every week we talk about the story of Chico, a squirrel monkey, who escaped in Clarksville.

“Remind me, whatever happened to Chico?” Jerry always asks.

I’ll not go into it the whole story here, other than to say local deputies were terrified and, months later, Chico was eaten by dogs. His little jacket and scarf and scant remains were found where the dogs did their business.

It’s about this point when Bob finally comes into the room. I’m in his recliner, so I get up and say “Bob, you have your chair back, I’ll sit on Jerry’s bed.”

Bob smiles, says "Yes," and I reach for his arm to lead him to the chair.  Instead, he sits on Jerry’s bed, where he finds his combination UT Volunteers/camouflage deer-hunting cap. He gets up and leaves the room, coming back a few minutes later.

Again, he declines my offer to let him have his chair. Instead, he opens his closet and does some sort of mental inventory, though doesn’t remove anything.

“I don’t know where he’s going next,” says Jerry.  “Sometimes I don’t see him all day. I never have talked with him.

“He’s a crazy, old man.”

I don’t know if Bob understands this or not, but he decides to plop down on Jerry’s bed and lies there pulling tiny pieces of tissue out of his pocket and carefully putting them on the dark, blue bedspread.

Jerry watches for awhile as the mess grows on his bed, then asks Bob “What are you doing? Stop that.”

With neither word nor grunt, Bob gets up, tosses more tissue from his pants pocket to the rug, puts on the Vols camo hat and leaves the room.

“I wish they had something else on TV, but I don’t know how to change the channels,” Jerry says, as the Howdy Doody segment is done on “Pawn Stars.”

I have several times taught Jerry how to find channels, raise volume, etc., so on this day, I decide to skip the lesson.

“They’ve got good shows on this channel, anyway,” he says, adding, quickly, “I’m really hungry.”

It’s been an hour since he had the crackers and Diet SunDrop, and he’s ready to go eat.

“I may want to use the bathroom first,” he says, though when he gets up, he doesn’t go in that direction.

Instead, he begins his slow march toward the lunchroom.  “I wish you could join me,” he says.

I probably could, but I’m not sure I want to try to eat among the rather eccentric dining styles of those in the Memory Care Ward.

Jerry turns to go toward the table he shares with the guy with the Vanderbilt sweatshirt, another guy I’ve not met and Bob at every meal.

The nurses call it “The Guys’ Table,” as the other 20 or so diners all are women. This ratio makes me wonder if women do live longer than men or if they simply go nuts more quickly.

“I’ll see you in a few days,” I tell Jerry, as I turn to leave.

Way down at the other end of the hall, Bob is lost. He keeps looking into each doorway.  The nurse leads him down the hallway, saying “Lunch is up here.”

“Jerry and the guys are waiting for you, Bob,” I say, lightly tapping him on the shoulder. “I’ll see you in a few days.”

He clicks his false teeth three or four times and enters the TV/dining room.

On the television, Lucy and Ricky are yelling at each other about bad sex while Fred and Ethel look on, their expressions as empty as Bob’s and Jerry’s.

I wander through the security doors and toward the front of the home, passing through the “normal old people’s” lunchroom.

I greet those whose names I’ve learned, like Stockton, the guy who always wears UT orange golf shirts and who has lived in this “great” nursing home for the 10 years since he left his beloved home near Reelfoot Lake.

On the portico, more women – late to lunch – are finishing their water and lemonade and talking in strange accents.

An older man is sound asleep in his wheelchair. Doubtless, a staffer will come to get him for some of the pulled pork, cornbread and grits they are eating on this day.

Exhausted, I climb into my 40-year-old Saab with half-strength air-conditioning, and I start it up.

An ambulance pulls up, slowly, and blocks my immediate exit.

“It’s Howdy Doody time,

It isn’t worth a dime,

Let’s turn to Channel 9

And we’ll watch Frankenstein.”

I remember singing that version of the theme song with my brother, Eric. Probably the first time in 65 years that has popped into my damaged brain.

 “Fuck, Eric,’’ I say. “I wonder what you ever did with that stupid puppet?”

   

 

 

 

  

 

 

A few words about my pal, Phil Lee, a Burrito who flew on to became 'The Mighty King of Love'

My good friend, Phil Lee, who fancies himself "The Mighty King of Love," is toiling for pounds and shillings right now in the United Kingdom.  And it is good luck for all the pub-hounds and house-partiers, as this guy is top-notch as a musician and as a human being. Here is a little piece I wrote to help out his cause and his goal -- to sell both of his new discs to "The Mighty King of England": King Charles. It also will give you a pretty good idea of whether you'd like his stuff. I'm pretty sure you would...................   

California’s Two-Man Wrecking Crew, like the almost-namesake flock of musicians who reigned over studios in L.A. during the last half of the 20^th Century, can play and produce whatever type of music desired on any particular day that Phil Lee shows up at David West’s Play Ball! Music Services studio in Santa Barbara.

“I’ll just write a song and tell David I think it’s ready, and he’ll tell me to come on down,” says Phil Lee, who lives just up the coast in Cayucos, California, where he can strum his guitar in the front yard and watch whales mate in the Pacific Ocean below his mountainside. Well, he really may not have watched them mate, but it certainly would be a fitting experience for the guy who often bills himself as “The Mighty King of Love” as he travels from house-party to concert stage to nightclub to studio in his converted van crammed with CDs, merch and a place he can sleep if he can’t find a friend’s couch or a safe neon lit motel along America’s Blue Highways.

The pairing of the two Pacific Coast Highway-based music veterans has yielded a pair of traditional and traditional-sounding country albums, Phil Lee & Other OId Time Favorites and When I Close My Eyes I See Blood.  

Phil Lee, a veteran California rock and roots hero, is known for his knife-throwing precision and audience-endearing dance moves when onstage.

In the studio with David, he offers up delicate guitar work to accompany his sometimes satiric, often ironic songs, traditional and original.  With a voice as at home and commanding in rock, gospel and stone-cold country, he offers up high-lonesome lament and Hank-style zest, sometimes flavored with a bit of Chuck Berry wordplay or with Crazy Horse-style rock ‘n’ roll.

A soft and soulful fellow when not throwing knives or peppering a crowd with his sometimes offbeat wordplay, he draws a somehow humble comparison between the work he does with David and the work of the legendary “Wrecking Crew,” a tight fraternity of world-class musicians who held court in Los Angeles’ studios decades ago.

That loosely affiliated group of L.A.-based musicians – including soon-to-be-stars Glen Campbell on guitar, Leon Russell on keyboards, Mac Rebennack (aka “Dr. John, The Night Tripper”) on piano and Sonny Bono on jingle bells and tambourine – were instrumental geniuses, often working with producer Phil Spector. They moved deftly from workaday pop backing with Frank Sinatra or The 5^th Dimension to providing the rich texture for Brian Wilson’s masterful Beach Boys opus Pet Sounds.

David West, who helped modern bluegrass ensemble the Cache Valley Drifters carry the Appalachian-birthed acoustic music sound across America and Europe 20 years or so ago now spends most of his time in the studio, where he constructed his own Wall of Sound for his teamings with Lee, who has used his guitar and voice with everyone from The Flying Burrito Brothers to Richard Bennett to Heartbreaker Howie Epstein to Billy Joe Royal to Crazy Horse.

The latter, best-known for playing with Neil Young, teamed up for Phil Lee & the Horse He Rode In On, which led to the pairing of West and Lee.

“I met Phil a couple of years ago working on the Crazy Horse record,” says West. “Since then I thought it would be interesting to hear his unique voice and songwriting skills turned loose in the fertile musical field of regional North America.”

If anyone has explored those fields, it’s West, who expanded on his expertise as bluegrass sideman and multi-instrumentalist to serve as producer for the massively successful “Pickin’ On” series, in which songs from Dylan to AC/DC to Kanye to Radiohead to Petty and beyond are given the bluegrass treatment. So far, more than 5 million copies from that collection have been sold.

Lee and West accomplish what they set out to do in both of these records, with their instruments lifting up vocals that capture the topics and the musical style of old-time era they salute.

While vocal master Lee can and does write many songs that make audiences laugh, this set of albums is not parody.  It’s honest music.   

Lee knows he and his pal in the Two-Man Wrecking Crew came up with something unique and yet familiar-sounding and endearing.  “It’s two guys who know what the fig they’re doing with the heart, soul, motor skills and the credentials to back it up.”

Jerry's no monkey, like Chico, but am I his uncle? Also, Tony was lazy, Milford goes missing, ambulance means someone probably dies

 “Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle!”  That thought brought me an uncommon smile after leaving Jerry in the dining hall and then being let out of my temporary incarceration in the nut house.

Just joking about that last part. These folks aren’t all nuts, many of them, like my old friend, are just half-peeled bananas as they go about their blank-eyed days in the Memory Care Ward.

The beautiful and kind nurse got me thinking that way with a stirring “You his uncle?” inquiry just as she pointed to Jerry just before I turned to escape the cuckoo’s nest …

Rob "Death" Dollar, Tony "short little asshole with a beard" Durr, Tim "Flapjacks" Ghianni and Jerry "Chuckles" Manley, during obviously happier days. The other main News Brother in the beginning was Jim "Flash" Lindgren. He left Clarksville to become an Indy race driver, and after long auditions were held, he was replaced by Scott "Badger" Shelton.

“Uncle? Like a monkey’s uncle?” I asked myself, still smiling at the thought as I continued my painful, cane-aided trek past the “normal, old people” who were spooning what looked like eggplant parmesan casserole loaf from their white, maybe-even china plates.  This is a swanky joint that often has cucumber water out on the front porch for residents to sip as they wonder what goes on in the world at large, just beyond the hedges. And, I’ve been known to sip it myself before escaping to the world outside the hedges.

The “monkey’s uncle’’ thought stuck in my head, becoming – after my emotionally exhausting visit to my old running mate -- the day’s highlight. It led me to memories of Chico, the squirrel monkey whose Steve McQueen-like escape from cage confinement in Clarksville, Tennessee’s Swan Lake area led the front page of my newspaper, under my watch …

We’ve talked in this space about Chico’s escape and how we covered it with gusto. I’ve also written about the shrug of anger, frivolity and disbelief displayed by Publisher Luther Thigpen when he looked at the front page with the 90-point headline “Deputies Go Bananas: ‘Monkey At Large!’”  Jerry, me and police reporter Rob Dollar, who gathered the facts and compiled -- with all of our pun-filled minds in full gear – the lead story. We teamed up for Jerry’s headline that made national newspaper history. After 40-plus years of dedicated research, I have determined that our Sunday edition was the only time a serious newspaper has led with a tale of an escaped monkey and the panicked deputies worrying about potential carnage released on the community.   

Broke my heart when Chico was eaten by dogs a few weeks later.

I wrote about that in my nationally honored “Calling Card” column.  “I’ll be a monkey’s uncle,” Luther reportedly screamed at the Multimedia corporate meeting when that final chapter in the Chico tale was discussed among newspaper publishers.  “I told Flapjacks not to ever do something like that again, after the first story. Darn him.”

That was decades ago.

Maybe I’m just Uncle “Timmy,” the name Jerry Manley often used for me when we both were somehow impaired – or perhaps at work in the newsroom where exploding cigarettes were as common as rubber vomit and coffee-flavored nicotine breath almost a half-century ago.

Or maybe I’m Uncle Pops? Pops is, of course, the name the lovely and top-heavy young woman calls me when I stop into my favorite Shell station to get my tank topped off and grab supplies for my regular assault on the asylum, the nursing home where Jerry is living and dying, not in three-quarter time, but full-speed ahead.

Uncle Flap? The News Brothers’ co-founder?

Hell, I don’t know. All I know is that on this day I purposely chose my “Magical Mystery Tour” T-shirt from a closet filled with perhaps 20 Beatles shirts, three Stones shirts, a couple of Who shirts, an Ali, Led Zeppelin, Kinks, Hendrix and even a Steppenwolf shirt the “Born to Be Wild’’ writer and singer gave me perhaps 20 years ago. That was back when I was gainfully employed by a publication that – by that point – was only faintly trying to be a newspaper, while the Korporate devils purposely induced its death swirl, like blue water, down the toilet.

Sometimes, like The Beatles’ famous bus tour, these visits to Jerry are dying to take me away. Take me today. And I only breathe free again after I slip from the front door, hit my last number and walk to the road.  

"Newspaperman" Wendell Wilson 

Harold "The Stranger" Lynch

Original News Brother Jim "Flash" Lindgren. This is a current photo ... oh, maybe it was from 42 years ago. He sold his shirt to the Newseum in Washington, D.C.. for the Gannett newspaper historic archives and killing field.

Jerry was my last boss, by the way. He was night editor at The Tennessean when the front office assholes began chopping away at me and eventually made me night cops reporter. They wanted me to leave, but I stayed in that spot for almost a year, writing about murders, drugs, prostitutes, lawyers, guns and money with something like relish. Or brown mustard.

Those quick, deadline crime stories were my “fuck you” pieces of journalism.  They had put me on night cops to get me to resign to be with my young family, two children adopted from Romanian orphanages, my wife, Suzanne, and my best friends, Buddy, the Big Brown Dog, and Pal, the Pinkish Runt Cat with albino eyes.  

Instead of fleeing with no severance pay or pension, I dug in next to my boss, Night Editor Jerry Dale Manley, and I was quickly the best night cops reporter the paper had ever seen, so productive and blood-spattered that the assholes up top told Jerry to rein me in.  He tried, half-heartedly, because he was having so much fun working my stories, he couldn’t or wouldn’t stop me from writing them. Just quit leading with them and began tucking them in on B-3 or the obit page (back when newspapers recognized local deaths as news).

Anyway, when I finally was whacked and sent, with armed guards helping to carry my stuff out to the parking lot, Jerry hugged me and cried. We’d been comrades for so long, from the Chico stories to the Rodney Long and Kathy Nishiyama stories to the Klan rally against our paper. Hell, we even clenched hands (mine deep-tanned and his redneck-Irish pale) for the hand-shaking logo to the Clarksville paper’s “Neighbors” good-news story that was cycled among reporters and mandated to appear on the front page every Sunday.  It left me less room for stories about dead monkeys and human butchery.

“I think that (the Klan march against the paper) had something to do with our coverage of Black soldiers at Fort Campbell,” Jerry reached into his deep state of mind to rescue that old occurrence.

 It was one of two times The Leaf-Chronicle was picketed by the Klan, during my 14 years at the Clarksville newspaper. I believe my writing and editorial guidance fueled the fire.  Speaking of fire, the late Greg Kuhl, a nice former vegetarian and great reporter who began eating hamburgers and ran himself into an early grave many years ago in Calgary, Canada, once went, with my encouragement, to cover a Klan rally at, I believe, Trice’s Landing. That was the park later made infamous by Big Jim and his pals and a professor who fell/jumped off a cliff. If you don’t know the story, I’ll let it go, this time. It made me sad, and I was interviewed, sometimes scolded, about that coverage by national publications. “It was news, and we covered news,” was the point I made. Nowadays such an explanation wouldn’t hold water.

Greg went and wrote the Klan story.  I think he or Harley-riding photographer Kathy Cobble snapped a picture of a flaming cross.  Greg wrote a colorful and fair story. As fair as you can be when writing about men in white sheets who kill Black people and who use their tiny penises to rape their own little boys and girls after too much Peppermint Schnapps.

It was primed to be our front-page centerpiece. Until Luther Thigpen … fuck, it could have been pre-Luther and by some meaner, misogynistic, racist and semi-literate executive, korporate cheese or even the Clarksville Visitor’s Bureau … pulled the plug on the story.

Big shots inside and outside newspaper walls didn’t want the Klan cross-burning published because it would look bad for the city’s image. (At the time, Clarksville was growing, but in 2024, it may well be like other “boomtowns” and suffer floppy-dicked, big city-envy, with the same set of good old boys or their descendants in charge. I hope that’s not true in Clarksville, but Nashville’s the same way as its corps of Good Ol’ Boys strives to create a little L.A., but mostly draws national attention for drunken and drowned frat boys or semen-drenched bridesmaids with neither pants nor hope in party buses.)

At least that’s the way Jerry remembers the Klan wienie roast and its premature death. It’s the same mindset that had Luther, jingling his change/scratching his scrotum, used when telling me years later that we would run no more car wreck pictures. Made the city look undesirable. Especially after W.J. took the red Teddy bear and tricycle out of his trunk and placed them, randomly among the fatal wreckage.  And who was going to stop him? After all, he drove tanks in WWII and taught me about F-stops, lens speed and developing film and photos.  And the best thing about W.J. was that he was not turned on by others' private tragedies or lives. Some photographers can become voyeurs. Not W.J. He just did his job.

Jerry remembered the Klan and little else when I sat in his room after I corralled him, walking down the hall, saying, “I’m hungry” to anyone who might listen. “I can’t remember if I ate breakfast this morning. Can’t remember anything.”

When prompted, he did remember Jim "Flash" Lindgren, who was his righthand man on the copy desk in Clarksville. 

He plopped in his recliner – I sat in Milford/Bob’s chair. “I don’t know where Bob is,” said Jerry, noting that Bob, the much-awarded horseman of some sort, was liable to end up sleeping in someone else’s bed or using someone’s toilet.

I had not seen roommate Bob in the lunchroom when I passed on my way in, after I greeted, happily, my Big Orange-clad friend, Stockton Davis, as he waited for lunch in the normal people’s section of the nursing home.

I had been glad to see Stockton, as he watched, passionately, a Bingo game involving perhaps 30 of the nursing home’s citizens.  The young woman calling out the Bingo selections was indeed beautiful, a frisky, brown-eyed social worker who winked at me. Or maybe she was making fun of my cane. Or, like so many women, wanted to grab it. Or, more likely, her eye itched.

The activity by Stockton, my new friend who has lived here a decade after spending his first 65 years at the edge of Reelfoot Lake, and the Bingo ladies provided rapid relief from the worry of a few minutes before: As I pulled up at the nursing home, a man in a flannel shirt and khaki trousers was leaning back in a wheelchair, with both legs suspended by the limb-lifting  machinery. Waiting for the sun.

I spied a cucumber-water pitcher and another of pink lemonade on the porch, near him, so I asked if he wanted me to get him some. No answer. How you doing, sir? No answer. His eyes were focused dead ahead.  Clearly, he was somewhere other than on the grass in front of a nursing home in Middle Tennessee. I thought later that he may have even been dead. But surely someone would notice. Especially if he missed lunch.

So, I went on in, my bag of two packs of peanut butter crackers and a pint of icy-cold Diet SunDrop in my cane hand. Complete contraband in this diet-controlled compound. In my heart I was “daring” the guards to take my stash from me. After all, inmates are only supposed to eat what the dieticians supply. Not junk food from a gas station toted in by a crippled old man with shaggy hair and beard and a Magical Mystery Tour shirt (I also wore short pants, underwear and shoes that day.)   But no one stopped me, and the ladies all seemed to be admiring my sack when I walked past their Bingo game.

T’Alijah  -- the pretty, dreadlocked nurse, who I have been calling “Aliya,” let me into the Memory Care Ward.  I have to say that her name, when she says it, has a soft/silent “T” and the “J” is silent. So. it’s not “Aliya.” It’s (t)Aliya.” Nonetheless, her kindness and good bedside manner with my friend in recent weeks has earned her a spot in my heart. She was the one who started the uncle stuff later on, but I didn’t get angry. I gave her a big, old uncle hug instead.

Get to that later, as the crow flies. I do have to say that when I stopped at my Shell station for gas and nursing-home foods, my long-time friend, Quincy, the manager, was happy to see me. He was a little darker than normally, I noted, which forced him to smile. “I got a good tan down Puerto Rico,” he said, adding that he’d only been down there “a little past a week,” as he told me last week.  “Beautiful place, beautiful people,’’ he said. “But it was too hot. I’m going to go back in the fall.”

He rang up my purchase, adding “So you’re going to see your friend in the nursing home today? That’s good. Those places are worse than prisons, as I told you. You are a good man.”

I long ago learned that the most-sincere compliments come from people who work for a living more than from the Good Ol’ Boys who kick us in our nuts or the blossoming female equivalent and tell us “you really ought to love this” as they jam corporate shit down our throats. And then “buy us out” – the nice way they term firing, like mine almost 17 years ago.

Which is one of the things Jerry and I talked about. Well, really, it was me doing most of the talking and I peppered the really hot air – obviously this is bath day – with thoughts that might inspire response or some kind of mental “click.”  These two-hour monologues are exhausting, gratifying, filled with love and it takes me 72 hours to recover, as my brain is not as rubbery flexible as it was back in my sleepless boozing and smoking days.

After Jerry sat down in his chair, I noted that the nursing home had put a really large, new TV in his room.  He knew that. “But I don’t know how to turn it on. One of those remote controls, I guess.” He looked at the three little black rectangles but made no attempt to retrieve one.

I rescued the three remotes, and punched different buttons to turn the TV on, fiddle with the volume, find him something decent to watch. He settled on “Ender’s Game,” starring Harrison Ford and Ben Kingsley with a young fellow, Asa Butterfield, as Ender Wiggin. It is loud and pyrotechnic and seemingly Ford and Kingsley needed paydays.  “I’ve seen this before,” Jerry says. “Leave it on, but first I need to figure out what it’s about.”

So, while he washed crackers down with Diet SunDrop and belched, he fixed his eyes on the movie.

No, he answered my first question. He has not seen his daughter in a long time. Last week, I showed him a Facebook video of her in class, she teaches special ed. She posted that she’s leaving the classroom to become dean of special ed classrooms at her school. A great achievement. She’s a nice-enough kid and very smart. I don’t know if she visits her dad or not. He woudn’t remember. His son lives in Houston with his wife, and he hasn’t visited nor called, according to Jerry.

Other than that, he’s only got a couple of brothers and some ex-wives, at least one of whom is still alive, he reckons.

So, who would he call? “They don’t let me have a phone. I guess they are afraid I’d run up the long-distance bill.” I didn’t tell him that all calls generally are included in the phone plan and Ma Bell is dead. He didn’t need to know.

I pointed out that he also had a brand-new dresser, a vertical one rather than the long, massive bureau he had before.

“I didn’t notice that,” he said.  It is the place where his clothes are stored.

“Did I tell you John Staed came by?” he asked.

I know John, a really nice fellow who lives in Birmingham, Alabama, and teaches ill people how to breathe, has not been here. John’s told me that.

Nevertheless: “John Staed and I talked about our time. I think it was in Clarksville. He looks just like he did back then. He asked me a lot about you.”

I asked Jerry if, indeed, John still looks like the guy we knew back in the 1980s, and he says “yes.”

“He didn’t age like you and me?” I ask. “I mean, we’re old fuckers and we look it, though I think I look pretty damned good. Can’t walk worth a shit.”

“No, he looks just the same as he did back then. Hasn’t aged,” Jerry said.

“Did I tell you Wendell (‘newspaperman’ Wendell Wilson) came by the other day? He lives out west (Arizona, where he sits on haybales and protests the death penalty). But he came to see me.

“We had a nice talk, but I don’t know why he came to see me. I never really liked him much. Surprised me.”

Jerry’s “forgiveness” of Wendell and the fact the man with three foreheads visited, in his dreams, is kind of surprising.

Jerry, none of us, really, liked Wendell, who was city editor before he was demoted for being an asshole.  When Tony Durr was editor, he promised Jerry the city editor job, but gave it to Wendell instead.

“I moved on over to take over the copydesk, because I needed more money,’’ Jerry says. “I know Tony was your friend, but I couldn’t stand him. Bad newspaperman. Lazy.”

And that’s basically true. I loved Tony for who he was, a little, short asshole with a beard who turned a lot of his editor’s duties on over to me, so I ran what became a sinking ship, while we had loads of ink-stained fun. Tony’s biggest contribution to the paper was promoting me, which made sure that work got done.

He also neglected the obvious and didn’t promote Larry Schmidt from assistant sports editor to sports editor. A stupid move he made so he could hire some guy named George from Harris computers in Florida. Larry left before George was fired for mistaking a basketball for a croquet mallet.

Tony also remains one of my life’s five best friends, and, if lazy, he was kind and (when he wasn’t using his fiction-writing skills to fashion a weekly “true” column) he loved me.  He was my houseguest many times in the years after he slinked out of town in the dead of night over a health insurance dispute. 

I always loved to see him, hugged him, almost kissed him and maybe did, at least on the cheek.

“You are a lying son of a bitch, but you are my friend and I love you,” I told him, many times. He never disagreed, but he relished my nonjudgmental friendship and he liked to escape life by hiding out in my house or apartment.  I once had to tell him not to visit, because I wasn’t sure when I was going to escape from my own life’s destructive trap.

After six marriages and at least that many newspapers, Tony joined the Coast Guard in Alaska. They found his body, his phone off the hook, an empty pill bottle by his hand, alone on the floor of his quarters. His life had been boisterous but filled with pain. Suicide, the old nursery rhyme goes, is painless. It brings on many changes.

It cost me a best friend.

Jerry and I often talk about Durr, mainly so he can try to digest why I still love the guy. He was a liar, but he did take many a bullet aimed for me when I got in trouble with Luther for decisions I made while doing Tony’s job.  He also backed up tough reporting by Rob or even the lurid news-fronts composed by Jerry. He wasn’t scared of Luther. Just work.

It’s complicated. Life is what happens while you’re busy making plans.

Other than maybe my brother and John Lennon and perhaps Jesus (not necessarily the same guy), there’s nobody I’d prefer to hear from on an especially long-distance phone call from above than Thomas Anthony Durr.

Still, the fact Wendell inhabited Jerry’s dreams and hallucinations amazes me as I write this. None of us liked Wendell. I loved his now ex-wife, Kathleen. She was homely, but was a great and kind reporter, and she worked with me at the Nashville Banner before she and Wendell and their kid -- Friedrich, Wilhelm or did they call him him Al? -- moved to Santa Barbara, where they divorced.

I reminded Jerry that Wendell and Kathleen lived in the apartment complex where I spent my only happy days in Clarksville. Then they rented a house near Austin Peay State University.

They invited us all over for a BYOB party (it was our custom then, since we all were getting by scrimping or selling our sperm or eggs to pay for groceries.)

The most-memorable scene from that party came in the person of Harold “The Stranger” Lynch.  Whenever one of us would sit down somewhere, putting our cans of beer on the floor or coffee table, Harold, rodeo-busted back and all, would sidle on over and be real friendly. Then, if we looked away to talk with someone, he’d reach down and quickly guzzle our beer and put the empty can back down. I loved Harold. Great man. Great reporter. I had the delicate task of sending him to rehab. I also was one of the last people to hug him as lung cancer ate his organs.

Jerry laughed at that memory of Harold, a damn good reporter even when he was drunk, and a far-nicer and more-honorable man than “newspaperman” Wendell Wilson.

Maybe Harold will drop in to visit Jerry sometime in the next few days. Even dead, he’d be a better companion that the guy whose head looked like a bald death mask.

“Mr. Manley,” T’Alijah said, in her sultry voice, as she strode her fine and pleasantly thick frame down the hallway. “It’s time for you to come to lunch. And I’ll need to take your blood, so we’ll know how much insulin you need.”

Jerry looked at me. “Let’s just wait a few minutes. I like having you here. Only company I get, and I don’t know why you come. I can’t think of anything to say. I wouldn’t come.”

We did watch as Harrison Ford gave a pep talk to the teenage warriors at the heart of the B-grade Sci-Fi Movie. 

But it looked like Jerry was going to nod off. Perhaps lack of food. Too much junk food. Lack of insulin.

So, I got up and grabbed his hand.

“Hey, man, let’s get you down to get T’Alijah to take your blood, and you can eat.”

We walked slowly down the hall, arm-over-shoulder, both watching her retreat.

When we got to the lunchroom, she eyed me, foot to head, and she smiled. It’s a great gift when a beautiful woman focuses her pools of brown on me. Her agenda had none of the lust that lurked in my second-favorite president’s heart when he was rabbit-hunting.

“Let me ask you. Are you Jerry’s uncle?” T’Alijah asked.

Jerry couldn’t laugh. I think he was pondering the possibility that was true. Other nurses, wondering why I’m here when no one else gets such a steady visitor, scooted up, wanting to hear my answer.

“No, T’Alijah, we’ve just been friends for about 50 years, and I love the guy. He’s a brother, a News Brother, but that’s a long story.

“You think I look that much older than him to be his uncle?” I pointed toward Jerry, who waited patiently for her to take a razor to the tip of his fuck-you finger to plan for whether he could have carrot cake with his lunch.

“Well, you do look older, maybe not THAT much older. But you two kind of favor. He looks like you.’’

He is about a half-foot shorter and 60 pounds heavier and he has no idea where he is. But yeah, in a lot of ways, maybe I am his uncle. Or at least his big brother, though we both are 72, and he’s nine days older than me.

She told me “You look good, really. I just know you keep coming here to see Mr. Jerry. We don’t get a lot of visitors back here.”

I gave her my best “come-hither” smile and ran my hand along her butt, pulling her close.

Nah. That’s not true. She’s a very nice young woman, and I really do look old. “I’m a monkey’s uncle,” I whispered.

She let me out of the Memory Care Ward, pinching me in the bottom swiftly (joking), and I used my cane to help me walk the long distance to the front of the nursing home.

An ambulance was pulled to the front door and probably 10 people were loading personal possessions into the trunk of a car. Some were crying. Others jumped from cars they had urgently squealed into the parking lot.  The lights on the ambulance flashed. But no one seemed in a hurry.

I grabbed my last cucumber water and I walked to the road.   

(Copyright Tim "Flapjacks" Ghianni, July 14, 2024. May not be shared or reproduced without legal penalties.)