Sixty years ago today the US dropped the nuclear bomb called Little Boy over the central part of Hiroshima, killing at least 66,000 people.
In honor of this year’s Hiroshima Day, I am posting this excerpt from my father’s Political Autobiography.
By now the McCarthy period was upon us. The CIO was split and the traditional antagonisms […]
[I never marked the first anniversary of HungryBlues back in March, but I think that gives me occasional license to rerun posts that are more than a year old. What follows is a slightly shortened version my post from this time (on the Jewish calendar) last year. I think I have some more readers since […]
I mentioned in part III of this series that I can date the handwritten drafts of Long Days Short Nights because of a passage about Frankie Newton. I am posting that passage here, though it was not intended for publication. It is an unpolished prose sketch, written in one shot, to get the material down […]
Dad had a number of stories like this one, lessons in being on the outside. The most developed one, and the most fully fictionalized, is “Lonesome Blues” , the story I posted in September, named after the song by Louis Armstrong and his Hot Fives . In “Lonesome Blues,” the high school years of a suicide jazz musician, Mo Bartel, closely mirror my father’s.
My father graduated from the eighth grade of Public School 89, Elmhurst, NY (Queens), in June of 1941. Like other kids graduating PS 89, he planned to go on to high school about a half mile away, at Newtown High School. According to his 8th grade autograph book, my father’s favorite author was Jack London, his favorite book The Sea Wolf ; Stardust was his favorite song; he loved baseball and worshipped Mel Ott.
[final draft from Long Days Short Nights ms., summer or fall, 1963]
by Paul A. Greenberg
Maybe it was 1937 when my oldest brother and I were in a local WPA theater production of Waiting For Lefty. I remember thinking that a union organizer was the noblest of all jobs even better than playing right field like Mel Ott. I also thought that Jewishsocialist was one word and that Jews who were not socialists were the exceptions even though my mother’s family was among the exceptions.
We were a decidedly secular family. Judaism was some old fashioned thing that my paternal grandmother held onto and it was sort of embarrassing. I did love seders at my Aunt Beck’s house because my Uncle Sam made Exodus come alive. To me Moses was a union organizer and socialist revolutionary and John L. Lewis all rolled into one.
It’s still Independence Day a few more minutes, which means it’s still Louis Armstrong’s putative birthday. My father was passionate about many things, perhaps most so about music, especially Jazz music from the 20s, 30s and 40s. So July 4th seems a good occasion to say a few things about my father’s love of music and how in in a certain sense it all began with the Pops Armstrong.
In honor of Mother’s Day, I’d like to make some mention of my mother, who married my father in 1951. When he died in 1997, they were married almost 47 years.
As I’ve been doing this research about my father, I’ve been fortunate that I can ask my mother questions. She can add historical information, details […]
Folks I've got them hungry blues
And nothin' in this to lose
People tellin' me to choose
Between dyin' and lyin' and
keep on cryin'
Tired of them hungry blues
Listen ain't you heard the news
There's another thing to choose
A brand new world
clean and fine
Where nobody's hungry
And there's no color line
A thing like that's worth
anybody dyin'
I ain't got a thing to lose
But them doggone hungry blues
2008 Benjamin T. Greenberg
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