My high-school teaching career began at Mission Prep, a Catholic high school, in San Luis Obispo. We older folks were hit smack in the face by the New Wave movement, and we were suitably horrified, mostly by Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone. Her stuff was not Catholic School Approved, after all. And young ladies do NOT wear rosaries as necklaces, although shattered rosaries unearthed during an archaeological dig in the Immaculate Heart Academy’s privy indicate teenaged Bolsheviks as far back in San Luis Obispo Catholicism as the 1870s.

This song, then, was a shocker to those of us from the Boomer Generation.

“Like A Virgin” made me a little uneasy, too, so it wasn’t the first Madonna song that I grudgingly liked. This one, charming, was. I bought the album because of it.

There’s a little bit of genius in what she does with this song twenty years later. Madonna grunge.

My generation, of course, grew up with Marilyn. Even though I was only ten when she died, I had a little-boy fondness for her—even little boys, given the right upbringing, can sense vulnerability in others—and so this song, a wonderful homage, resonated with me.

Yes, I know that this is a tangent, but Nicole Kidman channeled MM well, too, in the Baz Lurhmann film that, on its ending, made me realize that my jaws hurt. I’d been smiling for two hours– up until Satine’s demise.

I’ve got many Madonna songs on my MP3 player, but the incredible pace of this video production of “Ray of Light” makes that song one of my favorites.

At the opposite pole from “Borderline,” this song is heart-breaking, with elements of Irish keening. We’ve all known people like this. The Frozen govern us today.

Happy Birthday, Madonna. Thank you.

Easy Money is a Depression-era screwball comedy starring Jean Arthur, one of my favorite actresses. She’s is desperately poor and rides a double-decker bus to a job interview when a fur coat suddenly flies out a Manhattan apartment window and lands on her.

So she keeps it and discovers that it wins her a lot of attentive attention, which she enjoys.

She’s still poor, though.

So she stops at what was called an automat, the Thirties’ version of fast food, for a very little something to eat, and she encounters Ray Milland’s automat attendant.

Ray Milland is not a Cheerful Charlie. He was lugubrious as Oliver’s father in “Love Story,” oily and deceitful as Grace Kelly’s would-be killer in “Dial M for Murder,” and inebriated in “The Lost Weekend.”

But in this scene from Easy Money, he shows that he’s a deft comedian.

He’s a generous actor, too. He shows it here with Arthur and does the same with a Ginger Rogers in a film with a preposterous premise, The Major and the Minor. The two are superb in a film that is very funny and, since it’s set as World War II breaks out, deeply touching.

https://jimgregory52.wordpress.com/2023/03/02/the-gift-of-ginger-rogers/

And a little on Jean Arthur.

https://jimgregory52.wordpress.com/2025/04/26/actress-jean-arthur-1900-1991-an-appreciation/

The film Suddenly begins with languid scene-setting shots, a device Woody Allen used in Midnight in Paris, but these, of course are in black and white, and the little California town, called Suddenly (I’d place it somewhere between Pumpkin Center and Avenal) reveals its church, courthouse, supermarket. One of the first kinetic characters we meet is Sterling Hayden, the sheriff. Hayden was 6′ 5″ and so makes his service revolver look like a Mattel Fanner 50. Here’s the film’s trailer:

And here’s the cast:

A little boy, eight, called Pidge, for some reason–maybe he poops a lot?–adores Hayden’s Sheriff Tod Shaw. Sheriff Tod Shaw adores little Pidge’s mother, Ellen, a war widow who hates guns and who resists the sheriff’s earnest wooing because she won’t betray her husband’s memory. When Shaw buys Pidge a toy revolver, that’s the final straw. Ellen, furious, reads him several riot acts.

Then things get even more complicated. The President of the United States is to make a train stop at the Suddenly station on his way for a little vacation. An advance team of Secret Service agents arrives and swears the sheriff and everybody else to secrecy.

The secret leaks, because Frank Sinatra arrives in Suddenly with two fellow assassins, neither one the reddest fruit in the Tomato Garden of Film Criminals, and the three take up a sniper’s nest in—wouldn’t you know it?— Ellen’s home, with Pidge and her father-in-law, a retired Secret Service agent. Convenient, no?

Here’s where the film gets eerie, at least for us history majors.

Ellen’s home is about 200 yards away from the train station. That’s the president’s Cadillac limousine awaiting for his arrival in the 1954 film. Lee Harvey Oswald’s sniper’s perch was about 200 feet above President Kennedy’s Lincoln; the fatal shot came at about 265 feet. The second photo is from a Secret Service reconstruction in 1964.

Sinatra, out to kill the president in Suddenly, was, in the real world, a close friend of JFK’s. That ended after the 1960 election, when Attorney General Robert Kennedy began a campaign against organized crime, including mobster Sam Giancana. Giancana and Sinatra were partners in the Cal-Neva Lodge. Giancana and JFK shared a mistress, Judith Campbell Exner. One of the it-will-never-go-to-bed rumors (a term that doesn’t apply to Exner) was that JFK’s murder was a mob hit.

Kennedy and Sinatra; Giancana and Sinatra; Judith Exner

Sterling Hayden was the crooked cop whom Michael Corleone shot dead in mid-veal in The Godfather. Michael’s father, the Don, was a composite, but there were strong resemblances to—wait for it!—Chicago’s Sam Giancana.

Another Godfather connection? The movie poster includes Sinatra’s well-deserved Oscar for his portrayal of Maggio in From Here to Eternity. It was the Corleonie family who got fading singer Johnny Fontane his big “war movie” role, thanks to *shiver!* the bigshot producer waking up with his thoroughbred’s head beneath the sheets.

Try the veal. It’s the best in the city. Hayden’s cop a moment before his death; Michael and the Don confer; Sam Giancana.

Hayden was also Gen. Jack D. Ripper, modeled on Air Force Gen. Curtis “Bombs Away!” LeMay, in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, which, of course, includes this mesmerizing speech by Hayden/Ripper, directed against fluoridated water, a big issue in the 1960s that is getting trendy again. Here’s the speech:

Lemay and JFK at a missile launch. The president’s Ray-Bans were a kind of sensation. Lemay and the president confer during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Lemay had commanded the firebombing campaign against Japan in 1945, during which he ordered his B-29s to fly lower, for accuracy’s sake. He proposed using nuclear bombs against Cuba and the Soviet missile sites there. Kennedy demurred.

Kennedy despised the Central Intelligence Agency, whose bungling of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba (Fidel Castro’s takeover is vividly portrayed in The Godfather Part II), but Sterling Hayden, as a World War II Marine—that’s him below— had been an operative in the OSS, the World War II precursor of the CIA.

In the process—he earned a Silver Star for valor—Hayden became deeply sympathetic to the Yugoslav partisans he worked with as they resisted the Nazis who occupied their nation. This led him to an unwise decision: He was briefly a member of the Communist Party USA. The chickens came home to roost in 1951, when Hayden was ordered to testify before the notorious House Committee on Un-American Activities. Hayden was in the midst of a hard-fought divorce, and his lawyer assured him that the government, if it wished, could make sure that he would never see his little boy again.

So Hayden testified, and named the names of what were called Fellow Travelers, and the shame of the man once called “the most beautiful man in the movies” followed him the rest of his life.

Hayden testifying; “The Most Beautiful Man” and his beautiful first wife, actress Madeline Carroll.

Hayden sought solace in the sea—part of his OSS spying had involved sailing along the Yugoslav coast to keep in touch with the partisans–and his expertise as a sailor led to two books, the autobiographical Wanderer, which I need to read, and the novel Voyage, which I have read. It is superb.

But I believe I promised an epic death scene in the title of this meandering little post.

Sterling Hayden is fairly passive in Suddenly, the result of a gunshot wound from would-be assassin Sinatra. But the plot thickens.

Pidge—wasn’t I right?—has to go to the bathroom. Along the way, he discovers his grandfather’s old Secret Service revolver. Winks are exchanged when Pidge returns to the living room and deftly switches his toy gun with grandfather’s real one.

This kid is bright.

So’s grandfather. He fakes a heart attack and call for his nitroglycerine capsules. Pidge fetches them, his mom gets a glass of water, and grandfather, demonstrating the same drinking problem depicted in Airplane!, spills it on the floor.

On the floor just below a folding metal table where the assassins have set up their rifle, a M1 Garand graced by a stubby scope above and a big magazine below. During the war, when the M1 was standard issue for American rifleman, it was not known as a sniper’s rifle, and it had a glaring deficiency: when the rifleman had emptied his eight-round clip, a bracket was ejected that made a loud “PING!” That informed any nearby enemy who was paying attention that the Yank was out of ammunition.

Sinatra plays a G.I. who discovered, in Italy, how thrilling it was to kill Nearby Enemies. So his weapon of choice is an M1, but with a difference: It sports a clip that looks as if it could hold twenty rounds.

So now we’ve got a rifle mounted on a metal table with spilled water on the floor. We’ve also got a TV repairman who wandered into a bad situation. A tube needs replacement (convenience stores in Arroyo Grande used to have tube-testers so you could figure out which one you needed to replace. And TV repair was once a secure occupation.)

Grandfather, recovered from his alleged heart attack, muses aloud to the TV repairman: “Boy, I bet if you attached this wire here from the back of the TV to the leg of that metal table, it’d be a natural antenna. We’d get such a good picture for the ball game.”

I think he has to repeat this a couple of times, including using semaphore flags. The TV repairman’s eyes finally brighten.

So when, just before the president arrives, one of Sinatra’ henchmen stumbles and finds himself pulling the rifle’s trigger. He is not-so-instantly electrocuted. In his convulsions, his finger remains on the M1’s trigger and the rifle keeps firing, over and over, and so alerts the authorities that something peculiar is going on in that house above the train station.

It’s a stunningly violent scene for 1954—maybe even for today—but because you don’t really see it coming until the TV repairman does, it’s a corker.

Oh, and the sheriff winds up with the girl, with Ellen. Satisfying all around, by golly.

Alan Magee was a ball-turret gunner on a B-17 based at RAF Molesworth in March 1943. A key responsibility of his bomb group, the 360th, and his squadron, the 303rd, was to assault the German U-boat bases along France’s western coast. The U-boats themselves, as long as they were in their pens, were safe; the concrete and steel protection, built by slave labor, was so indestructible that the French Navy used the sub pens for their submarines throughout the Cold War.

In 1943, the U-boats were attacks were devastating, the tonnage sunk so vast that England was in danger of starving. (My father gifted a British family, in 1944, with a bag of California oranges. The mother of the family burst into tears. They hadn’t seen fresh oranges since 1939. That was the work of the U-boats.)

Later, the Halcyon brothers, the Varians, would help to develop the klystron tube, an improvement on radar that, in air attacks, devastated the U-boats once they’d slipped into the slipped from their protection at St. Nazaire or Lorient. I once read a gripping autobiography written by a U-boat captain, appropriately entitled Iron Coffins; by 1944, that’s what they’d become.

So it wasn’t the sub pens themselves that were the targets of Magee’s squadron: it was the yards where torpedoes were gathered after their shipment from German factories to the French coast.

His B-17 was named “Snap! Crackle! Pop!” after the Rice Krispies characters, which made for far less racy nose painting than the generously-bosomed Vargas girl imitations that adorned so many B-17s. (Pilots averaged around twenty-two; some gunners, liars, were fifteen.)

Since Magee was a ball-turret gunner, that meant he was the tiniest of the nine men he flew with. Only a small man could fit in the bubble beneath the B-17. An electrical motor rotated the turret; the exit hatch, however could only be opened from inside the B-17’s fuselage, .

Magee was lucky. When “Snap! Crackle! Pop!” was riddled by German fighters on the St. Nazaire mission, on January 3, 1943, He found his way onto the flight deck, inside the seeming safety of the fuselage.

That’s when the B-17 blew up.

Magee was thrown out by the blast, semiconscious, and began to fall.

He had no parachute.

He had 22,000 feet to fall.

What broke his fall was the steel-and-glass roof of the St. Nazaire train station, made famous in studies by the Impressionist Claude Monet, obsessive, in 1877, about capturing light properly at different times of the day, experiments he could continue with the Rouen Cathedral and along the banks of the Seine.

The train roof broke Magee’s fall, and it broke Magee. One arm was nearly severed. one leg was broken, he suffered massive internal injuries and the surface of his body was peppered by bits of shrapnel. In a story not uncommon for the war in Europe, a German military doctor saved his life. The antiaircraft crew that had shot down another Morro Bay copilot offered him a hot bowl of potato soup once they’d recovered him, about to be shot by an irate German farmer. When he was on his way to a POW camp, he boarded a train with his Luftwaffe guard, who slipped the latches of the briefcase he was carrying, removed its contents, and wordlessly offered Lt. Robert Abbey Dickson a thick slice of sausage atop black bread.

In the 1990s, Alan Magee returned to France for the unveiling of this memorial to the crew of “Snap! Crackle! Pop!”

That might be the end of the story, but of course it isn’t. Weeks later, another member of the 303rd Bomb Squadron was killed returning from a raid on the submarine facilities at Lorient. Clair Abbot Tyler was from Morro Bay. I once lived on Piney Way, the street where he grew up. The best man at his wedding, to a schoolteacher and descendant of the Dana family, was Alex Madonna, for whom my father worked.

Like so many fliers I wrote about in Central Coast Aviators in World War II, Tyler left a little girl behind.

Here is his story.

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And one final point, but this one about U-boats. There have been so many fine World War II films, and one of the finest is German, written and directed by Wolfgang Petersen. Das Boot (1981) humbled me in that it separated Germans from Nazis. In this scene, the crew sings a popular British tune from the First World War, mostly to infuriate the boat’s political officer. He got off easily. In The Hunt for Red October, Sean Connery strangled his political officer.

i

My first exposure to the man, when television screens were slightly bigger than postage stamps, was “The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickock.” Guy Madison played a squeaky-clean Pure American version of the gunfighter/lawman, with an equally squeaky-clean cowboy hat that never existed in 1876. Fortunately, his sidekick was the delightful Andy Devine, the stagecoach driver in John Ford’s 1939 Stagecoach, who rotundness, crowned by a an endearing squeaky voice, kept us from taking Wild Bill too seriously. Except for me, but I was only four.

I would not return to Hickock, thanks to the interventions of other TV gunmen/heroes, like James Arness, Richard Boone and Steve McQueen, until I began teaching U.S. History and American Lit at Mission Prep. Every year, I showed the revisionist Western Little Big Man because of its sweep, which included, for once, telling the Native American side of the story. Dustin Hoffman, too, was extraordinary. Before he became an adult Human Being—a Cheyenne—he had a gunfighter period, and it included this encounter with Wild Bill, played by Jeff Corey, an actor instantly recognizable for his many appearances in The Twilight Zone. Corey is excellent here, but it’s Hoffman’s squeaky leather that steals the scene.

It would be a good long time before I found a Wild Bill I’d want to hang with, if only fitfully. Jeff Bridges Bill is losing his eyesight, frequents opium dens, is adored by Ellen Barkin’s Calamity Jane (she looks like Calamity Jane not at all. Deadwood’s Robin Weigert is far closer to the mark, and she cleans up real good. She is lovely.)

What made Bridges even more real to me was that hat. It was amazing, and it looked like one of the hats the Hickock actually wore.

Bill liked his hats, even this one, from his buffalo hunter days..

Jeff Bridges, without a doubt, is one of my favorite actors, and his Bill is sublime, down to the gravelly voice he’s evolved into Rooster Cogburn’s. But he’s not my favorite Wild Bill. That honor, of course, belongs to Keith Carradine, who blends his portrayal, of a wasted man who knows he’s doomed, with unfolded moments of honor, taking up a hammer, for example, to help newcomers to Deadwood set up a hardware store or refusing to throw down when goaded by men almost as crude as the current president.

There was a certain nobility in Carradine’s character. I knew this scene was coming in Deadwood, and, like Calamity Jane, it took me a long while to get over it.

My Pop’s birthday anniversary (it would be #107) is tomorrow. He’s in this photo.

My Aunt Mildred (She preferred to be called “Aunt Bill.” Mildred, that unfortunate name, comes from a marriage connection to Washington’s Aunt Mildred) and Dad in Raymondville, Missouri, about 1936. They’re with Blackie the dog.

Blackie had just been given away for “botherin’ sheep,” but this is the moment when he arrived home after a forty-mile walk, running away from his new home in Rolla to be back with his people in Raymondville.

I inherited a little bit of an Ozark Plateau accent from these people; I’ve grown out of most of it, but here are some samples:

“July” is pronounced with a distinct emphasis on the first syllable.

“Insurance” is likewise.

“Theater” is pronounced “Thee AY ter.”

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When I was in college and staying with kin near Raymondville, I was walking to the local burger stand in Licking, Missouri (MLB baseballs were once manufactured there) for some deep-fried mushrooms. Once you get deep-fried mushrooms fixed in your mind, they do not go away. I heard a voice.

BOY!

Kept walking.

BOY!

Damn. I heard it twice. It was a man calling me from a pickup truck. He just wanted directions. He meant no harm. I restrained myself, because he had a rifle rack. But I was steamed.

BTW: Deep-fried pickles, from The Heist in Lexington, Missouri, where my great-great-GREAT grandpappy fought a Civil War battle (I think his general’s commission got lost in the mail, a peril when you choose a confederate form of government) are beyond even deep-fried mushrooms. They are transcendental. The restaurant’s called The Heist because it was once a bank, robbed by Frank and Jesse James.

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I was delighted to read that a Bakersfield-based restaurant, “Honey I’m Home” has opened up a Pismo Beach branch. The menu is pure Texas County, Missouri:

Chicken-fried steak and eggs, hash browns, biscuits and gravy.

Hamburger steak and eggs, hash browns, biscuits and gravy.

Deep-fried catfish and eggs, hash browns, biscuits and gravy.

I haven’t tried the place yet nor will I tell my cardiologist if I do, but the menu fits my Dad and me perfectly.

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Before I go on anymore, I need to pause for my grandmother’s mashed taters. She was a delegate to the 1924 Democratic convention in Madison Square Garden, the granddaughter of a kinda sorta Confederate brigadier general, and that woman, although scary (she’d been a rural Ozark Plateau schoolmarm and swung her cane liberally when we tested her), could flat-out COOK.

https://jimgregory52.wordpress.com/2018/10/04/grandma-gregorys-mashed-taters/

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My college friends and I once found a handsome catfish struggling from a trotline over a creek near Columbia, Missouri. We liberated him. Then we fried him. He was delicious. Parenthetically, water moccasins inhabit Missouri creeks. You have to really, really want some deep-fried catfish to wade in after one.

My college friends also enjoyed exploring nearby caves. You get absolutely filthy with deep-down Missouri clay, but finding cave explorer graffiti left by University of Missouri students in 1874 makes you pretty happy anyway.

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My father was a marvelous joke-teller and was especially fond of Spoonerisms. One of his favorites was about the Empress of Iran, the Shan. (A mythical title). I don’t remember the joke except for the punchline:

“Where were YOU when the fit hit the Shan?”

Another, about Roy Rogers killing the mountain lion that ate his cowboy boots:

“Pardon me, Roy. Is that the cat that chewed you new shoes?”

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Dad was also a repository of pithy sayings, some from the Great Depression, some from World War II:

“Use it up, wear it out. Make it do or do without.”

“When in danger or in doubt, nose her down and bail out.”

Which contrasted with:

“Forward ever! Backward never! Sink or swim! Do or die!”

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He came home from World War II Europe with a profound and colorful vocabulary, which we discovered every time he tried to adjust the TV antenna on the roof, and us just below:

“A little more! A little more! STOP! Too far!”

From the roof: ARGDIDDLYGMRPHSONOF!!!VILEBASTARDSSNAFUFUBAR!

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His greatest gift to me was teaching me how to tell stories. His only equal is my friend and mentor, Cal Poly Emeritus History Professor Dan Krieger. They taught me how to teach, which led me to thirty-one of the happiest years of my life, knee-deep in teenagers.

At least I wasn’t knee-deep in water moccasins.

Elizabeth and I were watching this film, featuring this Irving Berlin song, and modestly enjoying it.

And, of course, being raised proper by our World War II-generation parents, we began to wonder where the Black GI’s were. Not one in sight.

They were in London, where their dash endeared them to most Londoners. There was an outburst of “race riots,” from San Luis Obispo to Greenland, the same year as this film.

And their dash was often equaled by their sass. This soldier, with his M1 Garand, seems to be outpacing the White column beyond him.

But you didn’t see Black GIs in This Is the Army. Then this scene appeared, in all its glory, in blackface, even with blackface transvestites.

Only 432 World War II American servicemen were recipients of that rarest of honors, the Medal of Honor. Not one of them was a Black man.

It took the Army until 1997 to bestow the Medal of Honor on these soldiers:

By 1997, Baker was the only one of this group still alive. Here is his Medal of Honor citation:

For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty: First Lieutenant Vernon J. Baker distinguished himself by extraordinary heroism in action on 5 and 6 April 1945. At 0500 hours on 5 April 1945, Lieutenant Baker advanced at the head of his weapons platoon, along with Company C’s three rifle platoons, towards their objective, Castle Aghinolfi – a German mountain strong point on the high ground just east of the coastal highway and about two miles from the 370th Infantry Regiment’s line of departure. Moving more rapidly than the rest of the company, Lieutenant Baker and about 25 men reached the south side of a draw some 250 yards from the castle within two hours. In reconnoitering for a suitable position to set up a machine gun, Lieutenant Baker observed two cylindrical objects pointing out a slit in a mount at the edge of a hill. Crawling up and under the opening, he stuck his M-1 into the slit and emptied the clip, killing the observation post’s two occupants. Moving to another position in the same area, Lieutenant Baker stumbled upon a well-camouflaged machine gun nest, the crew of which was eating breakfast. He shot and killed both enemy soldiers. After Captain John F. Runyon, Company C’s Commander joined the group, a German soldier appeared from the draw and hurled a grenade which failed to explode. Lieutenant Baker shot the enemy soldier twice as he tried to flee. Lieutenant Baker then went down into the draw alone. There he blasted open the concealed entrance of another dugout with a hand grenade, shot one German soldier who emerged after the explosion, tossed another grenade into the dugout and entered firing his sub-machine gun killing two more Germans. As Lieutenant Baker climbed back out of the draw, enemy machine gun and mortar fire began to inflict heavy casualties among the group of 25 soldiers, killing or wounding about two-thirds of them. When expected reinforcements did not arrive, Captain Runyon ordered a withdrawal in two groups. Lieutenant Baker volunteered to cover the withdrawal of the first group, which consisted mostly of walking wounded, and to remain to assist in the evacuation of the more seriously wounded. During the second group’s withdrawal, Lieutenant Baker, supported by covering fire from one of the platoon members, destroyed two machine gun positions (previously bypassed during the assault) with hand grenades. In all, Lieutenant Baker accounted for nine enemy dead soldiers, elimination of three machine gun positions, an observation post, and a dugout. On the following night, Lieutenant Baker voluntarily led a battalion advance through enemy mine fields and heavy fire toward the division objective. Lieutenant Baker’s fighting spirit and daring leadership were an inspiration to his men and exemplify the highest traditions of the military service.

When “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” appeared in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, it was complemented by two fine actors, Katy Jurado and Slim Pickens. Pickens is facing imminent death—you can see his realization of this, and then his light beginning to fade, In Jurado, you see the love she carries for him. Surprisingly—maybe not—the tenderness of the scene was directed perfectly by Sam Peckinpah.

Avril Lavigne’s version, framed as an antiwar song, is incredible.

The “Playing for Change” people produced this Afro-influenced version, but the harmonica could’ve been Dylan’s own.

There’s not a version of this song I’ve heard that I dislike, including from The Dead, Guns ‘n’ Roses, another “Playing for Change” version, also Afro-influenced and at least one “America’s Got Talent” cover. This one, with Dylan and Tom Petty, kinda seethes. The background singers are miraculous.

It’s not a” “girl” song, you might say. But I give you Avril and this woman, Leire. Born in the Basque Country, she’s performing her version near Leicester Square, in London There’s a chance that her version is my favorite.. Wow.

And, to get off-topic, one more from Leire, this time from Pink Floyd.