Mr. Beecher

There are those people you come across in life that just really stand out, and then the real joy is getting to know these individuals as your friends.   In many cases, people like this are often people who either share a common interest, or they are part of an area you are interested in.  Back in 1995, when I was still in college and working at Carpenter's Home Estates in Lakeland, FL, I met one of these individuals who still to this day is someone I will always remember.  So, today, I want to tell you a little about this person.

Gene Beecher was a skinny little fellow who talked a lot, had some radical ideas, and at times could shock some of the people with a more conventional outlook at Carpenter's Estates.  It was really odd how he ended up buying a home there anyway, as Carpenter's at that time was owned by the former Carpenter's Home Church, which back in the day (before its decline) was perhaps the biggest Pentecostal megachurch in central Florida.  At the time, I worked as a security officer there, as Carpenter's was fairly good about hiring students from our college to work, and although it paid hardly anything, it was a good gig for the time.  Although hired by the church, many of us worked at the adjacent property which was a large condominium community owned then by the church and staffed by us as far as security went.  And, a good part of the job was meeting a lot of fascinating people - I could name several I got to know, as it was fairly easy to become close with them as some were lonely and would just come down by the desk to chat or you would see them during rounds, etc.   We also had a few people from the parish Barb and I attended at the time - Christ the King, a charismatic Episcopalian church a short distance from where I worked - and we ran into them on occasion too.   But, few of them stood out as much as Gene Beecher, and as I begin to talk about him, you will see why.

Eugene Beecher, a man of many talents!

Anyone who knows me will attest to the fact that I have an avid interest in vintage big band recordings, and that being the case, it came as a bit of a pleasant surprise one night when this skinny, wizened, little old man dressed like a beatnik professsor came down to the desk and noticed I was reading George T. Simon's book The Big Bands.  He struck up a conversation about this book, and as I told him a little about my interest, he told me to look in the back of Simon's book.   For big band enthusiasts and collectors, this book is a virtual encyclopedia of practically every orchestra from the time period between the early 1900's and mid-1950's, and at the back of the book Simon has an extensive list of bands that he either didn't have the time to document in detail or had little information on.  So, when this fellow pointed me to the back of the book, I was directed to that section, and reading down the list, I found the name "Gene Beecher" among the orchestra leaders, and lo and behold, I was actually talking to this guy!  Turns out that Gene Beecher - known in his day as the leader of what was called a "Mickey Mouse" orchestra, meaning he played in a similar style to Lawrence Welk (Beecher claimed Welk stole the "Champagne Music" sound from him, as he claimed he was the first to use it, but that remained to be seen since another famous bandleader, Shep Fields, had a similar sound called "Rippling Rhythm" at around the same time) - was a territory band (meaning he was well-known in a certain geographical region, in his case Cleveland, OH) and he was also a childhood friend of a man who was probably one of the greatest legends of the era, Artie Shaw.   When Beecher had his orchestra, he played banjo and guitar, and his wife Lois (who at that time was still alive but suffering from serious dementia) was the "canary" (girl singer, in dance-band lingo) with the orchestra.   He also had a moniker - as did many orchestra leaders - as he billed himself as "Beecher the Music Teacher," and in that he had a similar gimmick with his orchestra as did the better-known Kay Kyser.  Although as far as I am aware no commercial recordings of his orchestra exist, a few years ago a friend of mine, Mark Caputo in Herculaneum, MO - who collects and reissues old big band broadcasts on CD (he has several hundred thousand of them!) happened to have one of Mr. Beecher's old broadcasts from 1939, and I was fortunate enough to get a copy of it from him.    Mr. Beecher was right in that he said his band sounded like Welk's or Field's, and on it he sings a little too, but what is ironic is his own taste in music - despite having what was called a "Sweet Band" in the day, Beecher was a solid fan of people like Duke Ellington and Stan Kenton, which I found paradoxical but interesting.   I suppose this came too from his close friendship with Artie Shaw, whom he chatted with once a week at least on the phone (I tried unsuccessfully to have him get me an autograph of Shaw, but it never happened as Shaw was noted for being a little moody at times with fans) up until he passed away in 2002.   Any rate, after that initial discussion with Simon's book, Mr. Beecher and I had a lot of nightly talks, and it made going to work a joy for a long time.

An advertisement for Mr. Beecher's orchestra from the 1930's - Gene is at the upper left of the page.

As I mentioned, Carpenter's Estates was a retirement condo, and that being said it is also worth mentioning that Mr. Beecher at the time was in his late 80's, although he was very sharp and vibrant.   Although he had never attended college, the man could be called a true intellectual due to the fact he was well-read, and he kept up with a lot of things.  Although I didn't see eye-to-eye with him on politics or religion (he was considered by many of his neighbors, many of whom were conservative Pentecostal Christians, to be an oddball because he called himself a "Zen master," although it was doubtful he actually practiced that - he did that to repel the more over-zealous religious people), he was a fascinating individual with a good heart and we discussed a lot of music.  As a matter of fact, many of us guys who were working security got to know him pretty well, and with a couple of the other guys he also discussed philosophy and art.  Speaking of art, I should mention that for a bit.  When Mr. Beecher retired to Florida I believe in the early 1980's, he took up painting as a hobby, and painted in a style known in the art community as "Naive Art," which was in a similar vein to the late artist Grandma Moses.  This type of art is impressionistic, Dali-esque in that it was a little odd-looking to the untrained eye, but it had a following.  After Mr. Beecher passed away in 2002, his paintings cornered an art market and they are today worth thousands.   Lucky for me, I was able to obtain one, as Mr. Beecher gave me one himself - it is a picture of a creature that looks like a yellow six-legged cat or something.  His son, whom he called "Inky," still manages the propagation of his art today, and I believe personally that was a good thing - if art with that type of value is to be managed, it should be by a family member, and "Inky" Beecher has done well in preserving his father's legacy from his base in New Jersey. 

Although I eventually left Carpenter's upon graduation from college, I still kept in touch with Mr. Beecher up until the time of his passing, although we mostly talked by phone.  In the last couple of years of his life, he had grown somewhat frail, and had to go to assisted living over in what was called the Villa, a part of the Carpenter's complex that provided assisted care for residents that couldn't care as well for themselves.   when he passed away, he was about 92 or 93 years of age if I recall, and he had lived a long, full, and satisfying life.  I still miss him to this day, but fortunately I have many good memories of him as well as even one of his paintings and recordings of his orchestra.   It was truly a blessing to get to know Eugene Beecher as a person as well as a veteran orchestra leader, and I count it as a blessing - few individuals impact me personally like that, and he was one of those definitely.  May he rest in peace, and may his legacy always continue to be celebrated.  

Mama Fazool

There are those people in your life that you encounter that leave an impression, and in some cases it is a mixed impression - you love them and want to strangle them at the same time.  Such is the case with someone we know from years ago, a 92-year-old lady by the name of Frances Williams, whom we affectionately nicknamed "Mama Fazool." (more on that momentarily)

In 2004, we attended a small independent church in Dunedin, FL, called Holy Apostles Catholic Charismatic Church.  It was not a Roman Catholic parish, but was part of a small independent jurisdiction called the Catholic Charismatic Church of Canada, which is made up of former Roman Catholics who wanted to also exercise a Pentecostal spirituality.  The group has a handful of parishes in the US, and one of those was about 30 minutes from where we lived at the time.  Their bishop, Bill (Bishop Angelo) Nicolaro, was a former Italian-American Roman Catholic deacon and New Jersey native who had graduated from the Cursillo program back when the charismatic movement was strong in the Roman Church, and feeling a calling to shepherd, he was spurned by the powers-that-be in the local Roman Church (something many of us know something about!) and therefore sought Holy Orders from Patriarch Andre Barbeau, who was the spiritual head of the Catholic Charismatic Church at that time.  Being the CCC believed in the Ignatian model of ministry, it allowed its clergy to be married, and thus Bishop Angelo was able to eventually be consecrated a bishop, and in true fashion as an Ignatian-model bishop, he remained pastor of the parish as well.   "Father Bill," as we called him, was also assisted by another priest, Fr. Larry Upham (a former Episcopalian) and Deacon Mark Bryan, a practicing attorney by trade, and Deacon Donald Staley, who like myself was from a Pentecostal background.  A spiritually-expressive group, Holy Apostles Parish would be a church home for us for a couple of years, and it was there we met an eccentric octegenarian Italian lady by the name of Frances Williams, and this is now her story.

The one and only "Mama Fazool," Frances Williams.

Although "Williams" was not a very Italian-sounding name, Frances was widowed, and her late husband was a non-Italian.   A native of Binghamton, NY, she was very vocal and proud about her Italian heritage, which she expressed mostly in her cooking, and in particular her homemade pasta e fagioli, which she considered her signature dish.  And, that is how she got her nickname, Mama Fazool.    In reality, any stereotypes about Italian ladies all being great cooks though was shattered by Mama Fazool - in reality, she was not that great a cook, but we humored her a lot as she was an old lady.   For a "foodie" like myself, she was a little too sloppy with her cooking for my taste (canned beans in the pasta e fagioli, for one), and oftentimes she could cook some downright nasty stuff - she bragged, for instance, about putting pigs' feet, beef tripe, and chicken lips, among other things, into her pasta sauce.  She also suggested, on one occasion, that we could get creative with our Thanksgiving leftovers - including the turkey trimmings, stuffing, and even the cranberry sauce! - by dumping it all into a pot and making a soup out of it (we graciously declined that suggestion by the way - yuck!).   To her credit though, she actually did have a gift for baking, and she created some really delicious cookies, most notably her homemade pizzelles (a type of light waffle-like cookie, usually flavored with vanilla, chocolate, lemon, or aniseseed, that was prepared on a special type of iron heating appliance).   I personally wouldn't mind having the recipe for those for my food blog, to be honest!  You can buy pizzelles in the store, and while they are good, the homemade ones are much more tasty.  Anyway, her cooking was part of the story, as there are so many more things to tell about her.

Let's see - where do we begin??  Ah yes - Mama Fazool was the consummate opportunist, and if she could take advantage of a free car trip, she would.   A typical outing with her usually involved hitting practically every thrift store, yard sale, and garbage pile on the side of the road she would encounter, and that led to a couple of amusing situations with her.  One day - I think we were coming back from church, and we took her that day as her usual ride, her neighbor Pat Savage, was out of town - we were passing on Alternate 19 in downtown Dunedin, FL, when Mama Fazool just happened to see a yard sale that got her attention.   Mind you, if you saw this woman's small apartment, it would be easy to conclude that the last thing she needed was more junk, as she had bric-a-brac all over the place in her house.   So, like a little kid seeing the  entrance to the Chuckie Cheese, she started hollering "OOH! OOH! OOH!" and of course my dear wife Barb, who is a sucker for this stuff, had to stop.   We get out, and Mama Fazool is flitting from table to table of this thing as fast as her walker could take her, until she happens upon this metal container.  She is picking this thing up, looking at it, and this look comes in her eyes and then she says it - "This would store a lot of cookies!"  However, upon looking at it, I asked her, "You do know what that is, right?"  "Well yes - it's a cookie jar!"  "Um no..." I respond.  "That is an urn for someone's cremains."   Being a superstitious old guinea (this is a woman who performs a spell every New Years Eve to exorcise the "evil eye" out of her house, as well as religiously reading horoscopes, etc.) the urn went back on the table and nothing more was pursued concerning it.   I don't think the idea of snicker-doodles coated with someone's charred spleen appealed to her either, thank goodness!

Her exploits at Mass were also legendary.  Fr. Bill loved to razz her, as she often set herself up for some friendly banter, and he like most of us loved the crazy old bitty.   Some of the other church folk though didn't take her exploits as lightly though, including her neighbor and weekly ride, Pat Savage.  Pat was a very devout lady, former charismatic Baptist, who was also a retired school teacher and thus she could be pretty straight-laced.   However, Pat was also one of the most sincere people I had ever met, and she lived her faith, although if people didn't understand or know here they could easily get the impression she was uppity.  Pat was also very intelligent, and she taught a ladies' Bible study that later expanded to include all the adults who wanted to participate, and she did a capable job of it.  On one occasion, she wanted the class members to say a few words about some Biblical prophets she assigned to each person.  Mama Fazool was assigned Jonah, and of course to "help" her out she came over to our house and we showed her that VeggieTales movie Jonah, which although cute (who doesn't love talking vegetables after all, right?) was not exactly the version Pat was looking for.  So, when it came time for Mama to give her little presentation, she told people about how God punished the people of Nineveh by slapping them upside the head with mackerels, and that Jonah was cursed for his disobedience by being turned into an asparagus and getting eaten by a vegan whale.  If only my Old Testament professor, Dr. Jerry Lee, were alive, he would be rolling over in his grave over that one!  And, Pat almost went to her grave over it, as Mama Fazool almost gave the poor woman a stroke!  It was obvious her Bible knowledge was minimal, for although she knew there was somebody named Jonah in the Bible, she didn't know where he was in there or much else beyond that.  But, it was a funny story regardless.   Plus, I think on the trip home that day she learned a little something, as Pat gave her a talking-to.

Mama Fazool in front of the sanctuary at Holy Apostles in Dunedin, FL.

A third story took place on the weekend of my 35th birthday in November 2004.  Anyone who knows me knows that I love Persian and other Middle Eastern food, and Clearwater has a restaurant called the Mirage Grill that serves some of the best.  When Barb asked me where I wanted to have my birthday dinner, of course I said the Mirage, and I wanted Mama Fazool to come with me.   That turned out to be an experience in more ways than one!  For one thing, I got put on the spot by the live entertainment, a belly dancer, and I was a little embarrassed (although I can laugh at it now though!).  But, then there was Mama Fazool - she really got into the spirit of things when she was doing a sort of convalescent conga/bunny hop with her walker and the belly dancer, tooting the horn on the walker as she went.   That is one of those occasions when a video camera would have come in handy.  Then she started waving around her hanky to the beat of the music, which caught the attention of a seventy-something-year-old Coptic man at the next table - I explained to her that by waving that hanky in some Middle Eastern cultures, she was saying she was open for marrying.  Upon telling Fr. Bill about it the next day, he asked how many camels we could have traded her for, as he got a big kick out of it too.  

All-in-all, I have a lot of fond memories of this old crazy Italian, as she was a lot of fun and also had a giving nature.  However, she could also drive you crazy, as she was as mentioned earlier the consummate opportunist.   One night at an Albertson's - mind you, this was at 10 at night too! - she spent 45 minutes haggling over a pack of wieners with a bag boy, and she would also make odd requests like asking someone to take her to pick up underdrawers for her son, who was in his 50's, disabled, and lived fairly close to her.   However, she was definitely never dull to be around, and she loved life.  In time, we lost touch with her, although I learned that she had moved up to North Carolina with her daughter.  She is now 92, very much alive, and probably driving her daughter as crazy as she drove everyone else, yet she was someone you couldn't help but love either.   May she live to be a hundred and cook enough pasta e fagioli and pizzelles to feed all of North Carolina.

What the Week Holds

I regret that I may not be able to write as much, being I am starting back to graduate school and in a month and a half I will be focusing on learning theological Greek, which should keep me busy for a while.  Therefore, I am writing more now to take up the slack that will be happening in due time, so hope you don't mind a few more frequent posts.

Graduate school - that was something that was long in coming.  It is hard to believe it has been 16 years since I got my Bachelor's, and I really wanted to by this point have my graduate work out of the way.  However, over the past several years I had gotten seriously sidetracked, and it wasn't the greatest thing to happen honestly.   Talk about feeling like a proverbial "fish out of water," I surely did!  As I have been looking back on it recently, I have had to ask myself, "what on earth happened??"  I have to be honest now as I write this - 46 jobs in 20 years is not a great track record, yet unfortunately that has been mine.  Of course, objectively many of those have been limited contract positions for me, but still - I often have the feeling that I have not accomplished a lot, and I do get bothered by that on occasion.   And, also quite honestly, I hate the corporate world, especially the larger companies who often treat their employees like commodities to be terminated and traded at will.   This happened fairly recently when a large corporation I was contracted with just cut me loose without as much as a chance - they encouraged us, of course, to ask questions, but when you do ask about something, the management sees it as a sign of weakness and that you are a "weak link" in their chain or something - I mean, seriously, God forbid the CEO loses a few stock points because you had the audacity to ask a question so you could perform your duties more effectively!!  I have said it for years, and continue to say it - corporate executives are from an entirely different universe in many cases than the rest of us, and they cannot face the possibility that people have limitations and may need a little help on occasion.  Of course, these are the same people that also would sell their own mother to increase their accounts, as it seems as if their only motivating factor is greed.   Greed has many temples these days, and its Vatican is Wall Street.   Corporate America is a petri dish for the "grand experiment" of social Darwinism, and has been for at least two centuries.  Of course, I have bellyached about this before, so I won't belabor the point, except to say that if I had my way, there would be no Fortune 500 corporations - I would disband them all and encourage small business instead, as the quality of both the service and the product is so much better.  However, we will save that for another discussion.

I guess a disclaimor is in order here too - my comments above, lest they be misconstrued, in no way advocate support for the "Occupy Wall Street" movement, and here is why.  While I can appreciate one aspect of OWS fighting against corporate greed, the problem with them is that they are just a rehashed hippie movement and they want to demand to get something for nothing - in other words, they want to exchange Corporate America for Big Brother (ie: big centralized government), and that is going from bad to worse.   Small government and small business are the way to go, and NO ONE should inhibit anyone from the pursuit of legitimate wealth, nor should the government tax people to death to steal their wealth either.   OK, NOW we are done with the subject!

Anyway, back to graduate school.  I feel like I am in for an adjustment concerning that, but it is an adjustment I am ready to take because it is long overdue.   And, I definitely have my work cut out - this is the first of two Masters degrees I will be working on.   I love research, and am one of those people that just has to keep my mind active.  Over the past several years, a part of me has felt incomplete as a result, but once I got that acceptance letter from my school it brought so much back into focus.  I haven't quite figured out the direction I need to go yet with all of this, but I am sure at the right times things will begin to unfold. 

That being said, I will go for now and leave you with these thoughts for the week, but I will surely return later.  Have a good week all.

Romney - The Lesser of Two Evils

The 2012 elections are a pivotal event this year, as much is at stake.  Many of us of a more conservative persuasion are wanting Obama out, and the thrust of the election this year seems to be more on getting Obama out than picking the right alternative candidate.   And, to the reluctance of many of us - Republicans and independents alike - it looks like Romney is going to be our man.

Mitt Romney is not my first choice of candidate, but being we have a two-party system it seems like in this country, he is the best option mainly because he is the proverbial "lesser of two evils."   Although he is too centrist to be conservative unfortunately, nonetheless he does have conservative backing and it is hoped that the backing he is getting will exert some influence on the way he does things if he is elected.   Some of my fellow conservatives have tried to oppose him because he is Mormon, but I do not think this is a valid reason.  We are, after all, electing a President, and not nominating the pastor of our local church, so that makes little difference.  

I additionally would give my support to Romney because despite any issues, he is at least native-born - no one can be all that sure about Obama at this point, being he lied about his last birth certificate.   And, contrary to a lot of accusations flying around from the Left out there, our opposition to Obama has nothing to do with his skin color - it must be understood that it is politics and not pigmentation that we have issue with.  Personally, I voted for Alan Keyes in the last election, who is also Black.   That being said,  let me summarize why we need to rally around someone who has a chance to get Obama out of office for good. 

We do need a change, but not the "change" Obama proposed as that has been for the worst.  Rather, we need positive change, a return of someone like Ronald Reagan who can restore this nation's greatness.  Whether Romney is up to the task or not remains to be seen, but for now he may be all we have.  Therefore, vote for change in the White House first, and then change in the nation will follow. 


by YourLocalSecurity.com