Harry Jenks, as remembered by a friend

City Limits by Terry TeachoutIn the Arthur B. Church KMBC Radio Collection, there are a set of recordings plainly titled “Harry Jenks.” The sound of Harry Jenks usually falls between the realms of classical organ or jazzy piano, and there is little that can be inferred about the man based on his music outside of the fact that he was a talented musician. It wasn’t until an internet search revealed City Limits, a memoir written by Terry Teachout, that we meet the real Harry Jenks. Teachout reserves an entire chapter for the man that he describes as his friend, “a man of a singular sweetness of character [but] wholly lacking in personal ambition.”

Teachout met Jenks through a personal friend while Jenks played at Shakey’s Pizza Parlor in Independence, Missouri. He had been a part of the Kansas City Jazz scene for many years, but as his eyesight started to fail he entered a sort of semi-retirement, only playing a few shows among old friends. Before their acquaintance, Jenks had a productive career in music. He served as the entertainment director of a troop-transport ship in the merchant marine during World War II. After the war, he worked for KMBC as a staff pianist until the station no longer employed musicians. He later became the organ player at the Royals Stadium and continued to play there until he could no longer read the scoreboard.

The strongest character trait that Harry Jenks had, according to Teachout, was his humility. Teachout admits that he himself struggled to understand why such a talented jazz musician like Harry Jenks never produced a single record. Jenks considered himself a “commercial” musician, able to play whatever the audience requested, but never pursued fame. In fact, he rejected it in many ways. Teachout describes an episode where he set up a local gig, but Harry pulled out three weeks before the performance claiming that he was having company and was too busy to make it.

It wasn’t until Harry Jenks’ old age that he and Teachout finally discussed making a record. Unfortunately, Jenks passed away from a bleeding ulcer before his first record could be made. In his book, Teachout remembers his good friend as a man of an older and more humble generation of artists, and wonders how many other brilliant musicians in cities like Kansas city were unknown, yet content. We can gladly say that are helping to preserve the memory of Harry Jenks and his jazz music for posterity’s sake.

Click here for a complete list of Harry Jenks’ music from our Arthur B. Church KMBC Radio Collection.

Chistina Tomlinson, KMBC Project staff/History (MA) student

Miss Liberty goes to town

“My, the fresh air is wonderful,” says Ulysses S. Grant to the Statue of Liberty as they exit Grant’s Tomb. “Say now, the first thing we might do ma’am, is to step across the street into that bar.” “Well, perhaps just one little drink Ulysses, but later,” Miss Liberty replies.

This is not the beginning of a joke. It is part of the radio play Miss Liberty Goes to Town, written by Norman Rosten for the series “Treasury Star Parade.” This series, which ran from 1942-1944 on over 800 radio stations across the U.S., was produced by the Treasury Department in order to help stimulate the sale of war bonds.

Many of the plays in this series use harsh realism to press the need to buy war bonds. In one play, Paris Incident, Bette Davis plays a French woman defying the Nazis. She is whipped when found out, the strikes forming the percussive rhythm to the musical score. However, in Miss Liberty Goes to Town, fantasy is used to create an entertaining plea for generous giving.

In this radio fantasy, Miss Liberty gets tired of staring out to sea, and to the surprise of nearby airplane pilots and the passengers on the Staten Island ferry, she shrinks down to human size and hales a cab. She wants to go somewhere historical that she remembers when she first came to America. The taxi driver suggests Grant’s Tomb. Here she wakes the ghost of Grant. They make introductions. The general ghost tells the lady statue that she still looks good, “a little tarnished,” but still good. The lady statue explains why she left her post, “I want to see what is going on behind my back, Ulysses. I keep looking out to sea all the time, and sometimes I wonder if the people behind me are the same. If their still worthy of the torch I hold aloft for them.”

They stroll for a few minutes on Riverside Drive, and the Statue of Liberty is satisfied that people are still patriotic enough. The strange couple sees women working at a manufacturing plant proudly making shell casings. They pass a long line of men waiting to buy war bonds (this really convinces her). Before they part Grant proposes they continue to see each other.

“Miss Liberty,” he solemnly begins, “I’m a man of few words. I kind of took a fancy to you today. Neither of us is getting any younger.  Will you marry me?” She politely turns him down.

Miss Liberty Goes to Town is a good example of the imaginative thinking and persuasiveness that produced some of the best radio in American history. Hopefully, this will spark some more interest in the vast collection of historical radio recordings that make up the J. David Goldin collection at UMKC. And, it shows us two main ways that we can approach this collection.

First, the men and women involved in producing these historic recordings were artists–artists in imagination and persuasion–artists in sound. Listening this way encourages aesthetic and analytical approaches to the works as pieces of art. Secondly, these recordings are history. History captured on discs, straight from the mouths, hands, and minds of the people of the time. When we drop the needle, a little of that history comes alive in the air around us and gives us an invitation to understand the culture and times that produced it. Good listening!

Troy Cummings, guest contributor

Woo me with your golly poop

The KMBC Texas Rangers with their golly poopsEv’rybody come on down! Our very own Fran Mahaney, affectionately known as Irish, will serenade you with his romantic melodies. Herbie Kratoska, Arizona as we call him, will grab your attention with his fast-playing banjo skills. Good luck keepin’ up with him! How can anyone resist the “hottest guitar player this side of Half Day, Illinois”? That’s right folks, the boys are in town.

What? No, they’re not Country Music Television’s latest stars! They’re members of a popular novelty musical group from the good ol’ 1930s and 1940s. They are the “Gentlemen in White Hats,” the Texas Rangers of KMBC and CBS.

Browse KMBC’s promotional portfolio for the Gentlemen in White Hats for an entertaining introduction to the eight-man group, not to mention “one of the sweetest quartets on air.” Their musical performances offer a variety of tunes for listeners, including western ballads, contemporary songs, Latin tunes, novelty numbers of a hillbilly nature, as well as hymns, solos, and instrumental interludes. Regardless of one’s personal tastes, the Texas Rangers offer something entertaining for everyone.

Marketed nationally by Arthur B. Church Productions as having the “largest established audience for any musical group of its type [and time period] in America,” Texas Rangers’ music carried melodies and sponsors’ messages from coast to coast. The boys were nationally celebrated. Irish and Arizona, along with their bandmates Tucson, Rod, Tenderfoot, Pappy, Joe, and Captain Bob, collectively played a total of 20 different instruments. Such talent easily attracted lucrative sponsorships, and over the years the Texas Rangers advertised for several national brands including Wrigley’s, Kellogg, and Camel.

Among the more unique instruments in their saddles was the ocarina, a “musical sweet potato.” Of course, to the Texas Rangers, it was the “golly poop.” It came in various colors, sizes and sounds, but always guaranteed a laugh. If the name has piqued your interest, listen to the boys put on a golly poop performance for a fan on the Musterole and Zemo audition. [audio:http://info.umkc.edu/specialcollections/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/2011-10-04_TexasRangers_Church_kmbc-850.mp3|titles=Hand me down my walking cane]

The boys sure are a fun time to be had. Luckily, the Arthur B. Church KMBC Collection is home to an extensive range of Texas Rangers entertainment, including radio programs like Life on the Red Horse Ranch and the Texas Rangers Transcribed Library, a massive collection including over 300 individual selections.

Click here to see our collection of Texas Rangers favorites.

Chadi El-Khoury and Christina Tomlinson, KMBC Project staff

“Tune Chasing” the past

KMBC Tune ChasersEvery fall and spring since 1989, Johnson County Community College holds the Ruel Joyce Recital series. Offered as a free event for the public, the series brings together local classical musicians from the KC Metro area for a low-key performance. The series was created to honor Ruel Joyce, remembered by many as a talented classical musician and head of the local musician’s federation from 1977 until his death in 1989.

What the public seems to have forgotten is that Ruel Joyce was also a member of the Tune Chasers, a musical group featured often on KMBC radio. Any sampling of the Tune Chasers would demonstrate their versatility as performing artists. The majority of their sound is of a classical or jazz-like nature, but include uncommon instruments like the xylophone and washboard. They covered a number of popular folk songs and silly novelty numbers like “Grandpappy (He’s a champeen a-spittin’ down a crack).”

Additionally, the Tune Chasers contributed to the war effort in the 1940s by singing upbeats songs like “Shut my mouth (for Uncle Sam),” “There’s a helmet on my saddle,” and “Little Bo Peep has lost her jeep.” During the height of their popularity at KMBC, they not only had their own time slot every week, but they also guest starred on other KMBC programs like “Night time on the trail.”

The members of the Tune Chasers also played what I consider to be an abnormally large number of instruments. Ted Painter played double bass, guitar, and banjo. Vaughn Busey played the clarinet in virtually every song, but also played the sax and drums. Our friend Ruel Joyce played double bass, guitar, and sang vocals. The leader of the Tune Chasers, Charley Pryor, played drums, vibraphone, xylophone as well as a customized musical washboard. Playing nine instruments between its members, it is clear that the Tune Chasers had talent.

So why doesn’t anyone remember them? Perhaps their largely instrumental repertoire was a factor. The Tune Chasers played a number of local gigs in the KC Metro area, but don’t seem to have headlined any of them. Very little evidence of the Tune Chasers exists outside of their musical collection. Among the little bit of evidence we have found is a concert review from the February 18, 1948 issue of Variety Magazine. In the review, the Tune Chasers played at an outdoor concert that flopped. At $1 a head, the concert barely made $2000. Further, it seems that the members didn’t go on to bigger things after the Tune Chasers. The only name that actually makes a hit on the internet these days is Ruel Joyce, and that is only because of the local recital series. It’s rather
depressing: a truly talented musical group fades away over the years until all that’s left is a music festival, and the event description doesn’t even mention the group name.

Click here for a listing of Tune Chasers music in the Marr Sound Archives.

Christina Tomlinson, KMBC Project staff/History (MA) student

Labor Days of yore

2011-09-01_LaborDay_Church The first Monday every September is Labor Day, and it has been ever since legislation was rushed through Congress in merely six days in 1894. Americans celebrate Labor Day by engaging in the most relaxing pastimes: closing public pools, preparing for football season, putting their white linen pants at the back of the closet, and partaking of a staggering array of grilled meats. The day was initially proposed to celebrate the “strength and esprit de corps of trade and labor organizations” at a time when unions were incredibly powerful. Their power has eroded in the 107 years since Labor Day was declared a national holiday, but I think I can speak for all of us when I thank the gentlemen from the Pullman Strike of 1893 for getting a Federal holiday as a token of reconciliation from President Grover Cleveland and company.

Labor Day 2011 comes at an ironic time, with unemployment at 9.1% and the economy still not recovered from the crisis of 2008, but one need only to look back 70 years to see a Labor Day on the exact opposite end of the spectrum. And thanks to the Arthur B. Church KMBC Radio Collection at UMKC, we cannot just look back, we can listen up.

On September 1, 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered a radio address rife with the emotion of impending war. Less than a month earlier, Roosevelt met with Winston Churchill to draft the Atlantic Charter; within a month, the USS Greer was fired upon by a German submarine and the first Moscow Conference began. A mere three months later, Roosevelt would deliver the most famous speech of his life on “a day which will live in infamy” and war was declared on Japan.

American labor in September 1941 was engaged largely in the task of producing weapons of war despite the United States’ neutrality at the time. Roosevelt speaks to this dichotomy by declaring that “We have never sought glory as a Nation of warriors. We are not interested in aggression. We are not interested—as the dictators are—in looting. We do not covet one square inch of the territory of any other Nation. Our vast effort, and the unity of purpose that inspires that effort, are due solely to our recognition of the fact that our fundamental rights-including the rights of labor—are threatened by Hitler’s violent attempt to rule the world.”

It is endlessly fascinating to view this speech through the lens of the history that we know occurred after it was given. Two things particularly leap to mind. First, Adolf Hitler was an actual living person, a world leader in the middle of an intensely terrifying quest for world dominance. Over the course of time, that fact has been obscured by the invocation of Hitler and Nazism as code words for anything we find disagreeable, but there was a time when Hitler was “current events,” and hearing Roosevelt speak about the need to support the Allies in their efforts against the Nazi regime reminds us of that. Second, it is startling to hear the evolution of the United States as an international power. It took less than twenty years for us to go from Roosevelt’s powerful message of weaponry production as a defense for our fundamental rights to perhaps the greatest presidential farewell address of all-time, Dwight Eisenhower’s profound warning about the ever-expanding military-industrial complex.

You can read this speech online, as you can with lots of great speeches, but it’s really amazing to hear the words spoken.[audio:http://info.umkc.edu/specialcollections/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/2011-09-01_LaborDay_Church.mp3|titles=FDR Labor Day address]Roosevelt was an incredibly gifted speaker, filled with extreme intensity, and the Labor Day 1941 speech is a perfect example of his skills.

Of all the ways to document history, audio is the most captivating. This is an obvious thing when you’re talking about a speech, perhaps, but it holds true for anything. Watch video of the Hindenburg disaster with no sound and it is certainly eye-opening. But it really becomes heartbreaking when you hear Herb Morrison fight back tears and try and put into words what happened. Ditto the Kirk Gibson home run in Game 1 of the 1988 World Series, perhaps the most famous play in baseball history. The story is great, the video is great, but it becomes a transcendent moment when you hear Ernie Harwell’s call of “I don’t believe what I just saw!”

There are a lot of great historical audio recordings to be found in the KMBC collection at UMKC, including a great deal more from President Roosevelt. History comes alive when you hear it, and when I listened to the Labor Day speech I felt connected to a time and a place that I have no real comprehension of. I could practically taste the doctor-recommended Chesterfield brand cigarettes! Roosevelt’s Labor Day speech, and many of the others available, give us an opportunity to be in the moments that our parents and their parents lived.

Happy Labor Day, America!

Erik Klackner, guest contributor

Welcome to UMKC Special Collections

Welcome to the UMKC Special Collections blog! We are the rare books and manuscripts department of Miller Nichols Library, and our department also includes the Marr Sound Archives, a collection of over 330,000 sound recordings!  The rare book collection centers centers on Western Americana, with an emphasis on Kansas and Missouri; the strength of the manuscript collection is music (particularly Kansas City jazz) as well as the recently formed Gay and Lesbian Archive of Mid-America; and the Marr Sound Archives seeks to preserve the American experience as reflected in recorded sound. We serve the students, faculty, and staff of the University of Missouri–Kansas City as well as community researchers locally, nationally, and globally.

We hope to use this blog to keep you updated on interesting content from our collections, programming and other activities we sponsor, and special projects we are working on. One such project, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, focuses on cataloging and preserving the transcription and lacquer discs from Kansas City radio station KMBC. These recordings form part of the Arthur B. Church KMBC Radio Collection along with promotional materials, a station timeline, business correspondence, ledgers, and contracts. The audio discs, containing local and national entertainment, news, special events, and speeches, reveal the history of Kansas City and the world from the 1930s through 1950s. Much of the national coverage originates from the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) and follows war-time events and the administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, and Dwight D. Eisenhower. The project to catalog and preserve the contents of the audio recordings started in May and has already unlocked programming from over 350 discs! As we delve further into the KMBC collection and other collections in LaBudde Special Collections, we look forward to sharing our discoveries!

Stuart Hinds, Director of Special Collections, UMKC Libraries