Floor Burns
by M.C. Antil

Chapter Eighteen: Something Happening Here

For many, including scores who did not actually live through them, the decade of the 1960s was an era of social turbulence the likes of which America had not seen in a century – certainly, since the dark days of the Civil War and Lincoln assassination. It was a decade that by most popular accounts was wall-to-wall mayhem, protests, violence and youth-fueled hedonism.

But the simple fact is, the 1960s, especially the Sixties as history now defines them – the riots, assassinations, violence and anti-war protests – did not start the moment a large ball descended in Times Square and 1959 faded to memory. They didn’t start with the whir of some random noise-makers and the singing of a bunch of merry revelers in the first few moments of January 1, 1960. In fact, the Sixties didn’t really become the Sixties as we think of them now until more than half the decade had already passed.

Oh sure, JFK had already been felled by the time Sacred Heart and Corcoran resumed classes in the Fall of 1966, as had Nation of Islam militant Malcolm X and civil rights leader Medgar Evers. Those three young civil rights workers and CORE volunteers had already gone missing and their bodies found off a lonely country road in the heart of red dirt Mississippi. And the Watts section of L.A. had, indeed, already burned and been looted almost beyond recognition.

But when school began in September of that year, many other events that have since come to symbolize the decade had yet to occur.

Bobby Kennedy, for example, was still very much alive. As were Martin Luther King, Jr., the four Kent State students, and all the men, women and children of Mei Lai, that tiny thatched-hut community in South Vietnam that, at least on that first day of school in Syracuse, New York in September of 1966, was still very much in existence as a village.

The Tet Offensive had not yet rained death and carnage on thousands of unsuspecting and increasingly disheartened American troops in Southeast Asia.

To millions of Americans in early September of 1966, Woodstock was still just another tiny farming community in Upstate New York.

And not only had the U.S. yet to see Neil Armstrong take one giant leap for mankind, but Gus Grissom, one of the seven original Mercury astronauts, was still a living, breathing member of NASA's space program.

The “Summer of Love” had not yet happened, much less been labeled as such, and Main Street, U.S.A. still had yet to hear of such things as LSD, Rowan & Martin’s Laugh In and Timothy Leary – not to mention Nehru jackets, love beads, bell bottoms, and tie-died T-shirts.

Nor had Middle America heard a single note from voices-of-a-generation talents like Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, since none of those ill-fated and era-defining artists had yet to release a single 45, much less a full album.

The Beatles had yet to record Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Not a single American young man had illegally burned his draft card in protest.

The convention-defying musical Hair had yet to debut on Broadway, while five films that would come to define the very essence of ‘60s pop culture – The Graduate, Cool Hand Luke, Bonnie and Clyde, Midnight Cowboy and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid – were still just vague, conceptual ideas and nowhere close to being finished movies.

The 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago was still on the drawing board and no one had yet uttered the phrase “Gestapo tactics” about the treatment of American citizens by American policemen.

The Black Panthers and Weather Underground were still more radical ideas than flesh-and-blood organizations.

The Charles Manson murders had not yet been savaged upon those well-heeled and pampered but otherwise entirely innocent dinner guests in L.A.

Detroit had yet to be set ablaze.

And such iconic ideologues as Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, H. Rap Brown, Angela Davis, Stokely Carmichael, Bobby Seale and Philip and Daniel Berrigan were still largely unknown figures doing whatever they happened to be doing before fate intervened and they, collectively, rose up to become the poster children of the radical left.

In the Fall of 1966, in other words, all these people and events were still out there lurking, waiting for their moment. In fact, until that point, the Sixties were still more an extension of the languid and largely innocuous Fifties than they were a ten-year stretch of time now synonymous with full-scale social upheaval.

Yet, it’s entirely possible that the Sixties that would become part of American folklore actually kicked off just a few weeks prior to first bell on the first day of school in the Fall of 1966. Because that year, two events just before Labor Day brought the decade home to White America in a way it had never been before. And in the process, they sent shock waves through it that still reverberate today.

They were two horrific and bloody items on the nightly news that made millions of men and women across the country – especially millions of white men and women – open their eyes to tbe realization that violence doesn’t always happen to the other guy. And it doesn’t always happen to public figures, or civil rights activists, people of color, and those who, by their own series of choices, have placed a target on their backs.

The first took place in Chicago, just south of the city. On the night of July 13th, Richard Speck, a pock-marked and not-so-bright drifter from nearby Joliet, broke into a South Chicago apartment where a number of nursing students were living and systematically tortured, raped and killed eight of them.

Then, just two weeks later, on August 1st, a young husband and former Marine, Charles Whitman, climbed to the top of the University of Texas clock tower and, with a high powered rifle, began picking off individuals on the school grounds below. When the carnage was over, the death toll stood at sixteen, the vast majority of them students and teenagers, along with an unborn baby whose pregnant mother was shot through the abdomen.  Among the thirty-one survivors was one young female student whose injuries left her both paralyzed and blinded.

With those two events, the 1960s took on, at least for millions of middle class Americans, a too-close-for-comfort reality that simply could not be dismissed or buffered by the reassuring fatherliness of news anchors like Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley.

And just like that, for those Americans, violence had become something you no longer had to seek out, or something that happened to come knocking on your door because of the beliefs you held, the color of your skin, or the accident of your birth.

No, from that point forward, violence would be known by countless folks up and down Main Street for being exactly what it was – unpredictable and random.  It also, for the first time ever, now seemed to be lurking around just about every corner.

In the case of Speck, the violence came calling on a group of young ladies who regularly dressed in virgin white from head to toe, young women who’d hoped to spend their lives tending to the sick and lending comfort to those who needed it most.

In Whitman’s case, he and his rifle violated one of the most idyllic sanctuaries in America: the ivy-covered walls of academia, where discourse and inquiry had always been the lingua franca – not guns and bullets. But with each dispassionate pull of his icy-cold trigger finger, Whitman turned a place that had always been a hotbed of hope and humanity into something dark and scary –  and, suddenly, something no longer safe at all, but deadly.

These two events, though savage and brutal, were apolitical and unattached to even a whiff of ideology. Perhaps for that reason, millions of U.S. citizens, even if they didn’t realize it at the time, intuitively sensed that something had just occurred that was fundamentally era-defining, if not life-changing.

For such people – countless hard-working men and women, like so many in Syracuse, who fancied themselves inhabitants of a magical, mystical and deeply American place depicted in so many Norman Rockwell paintings – that ill-fated fortnight in the Summer of ‘66 was when two unrelated yet forever-linked jagged pieces of human depravity were thrust through the heart of America's innocence.  And when they pierced that innocence, a fuse seemed to get lit on a powder keg of chaos, upheaval and change that would, in time, become known as simply The Sixties.

 

 

 

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Of all the generations of Americans in the 20th Century, perhaps none was any more defined by the music it made and loved than the country’s post-war “Baby Boomers” – the largest and most impactful generation in U.S. history.

From the earliest days of the acoustic folk scene and the Beach Boys forever-tan and forever-young California sound, through the thundering invasion of the Beatles and their fellow Brits, the trippy-ness of psychedelia, and the socially conscious protest songs of the Vietnam era, music served both a mirror and a siren call for so many Boomers – often at the same time.

The decade started out innocently enough, as pop music – even the Beatles’ music – was thought of predominantly as a vehicle for physical and youthful self-expression, played out nightly in places like school dances, drive-ins, pizza parlors, and slumber parties.

But then, in the summer of 1965, a single song seemed to change everything.

Bob Dylan, at that point, had been something of a fringe player on the national music scene; a largely admired but otherwise dismissible singer/songwriter from the Bohemian Greenwich Village scene. At the height of that summer, even as a sweltering drought continued to grip the Northeast and turn hundreds of lakes into little more than glorified mud puddles, Dylan released a single that, by all rights, should have died on the vine, yet didn’t.

It was a song that didn’t just command attention. It demanded it. Nothing about it was traditional, or melodic, or easy to love. It was wordy, nasally and completely unvarnished. And it had an unmistakable edge to it.

Columbia Records had been obligated to release the song as a single based on the contract they'd just inked with the mercurial singer/songwriter. But the label’s execs hated Bob Dylan’s first-ever 45 for them; they deemed its six-minute running time almost three times too long for any reasonable expectation of airplay.  As a result, they put one half of the song on side A of the 45 and the other half on side B, then quietly denied the record even a penny’s worth of promotional support.

Their actions went beyond lack of support, though. To the contrary, it was almost as though they wanted the record to fail.

But a funny thing happened to the record on its way to the cut-out bin. All across the country, disc jockeys – largely independent of one another – took it upon themselves to record the two sides of the 45 and splice them into a single reel-to-reel tape, which they then placed into heavy rotation on their station.

Before you knew it, and just like that, young people all across the U.S., including countless high school and college students, began to request, buy and, above all, embrace Bob Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone.

The song seemed to speak directly to their growing level of disenchantment with the world around them, a world they'd soon inherit. They saw an undeclared war spiraling out of control in Southeast Asia. They saw slums growing and hope dying within their paper-thin tenement walls. They saw ultra-conservative, ham-fisted and concrete-rigid thinking run amok. They saw elitism, racism and hyper-conformity, not to mention a runaway sense of privilege. They saw what they viewed as their parents’ twisted priorities, ones that placed material wealth over humanity, and they grew angry and were determined to not follow suit.

Like a Rolling Stone not only spoke to those kids’ frustration, it reflected it. And when, in the midst of that sweltering summer of 1965, just as the drought was digging in and threatening to suffocate anything and everything in its path, when the first few notes of Al Kooper’s organ punched their way out of millions of transistor radios being held up to millions of young ears by millions of restless students, it was as though a refreshing breeze had come to both soothe and empower them.

Young, post-war babies on both sides of the Atlantic, kids with names like Zappa, and Springsteen, and Petty, and Lennon and McCartney, would trace their own creative awakenings to having witnessed for the first time ever the extent to which a single piece of music could do to alter minds and shape lives. Like millions of other Boomers, those buddying young artists and music-makers would never be the same after hearing Like a Rolling Stone.

Within weeks, the single had risen to #2 on the charts, behind only Help!, the title track of the Beatles most recent soundtrack album.

One of the DJ's who’d taped and spliced the two sides of Like a Rolling Stone and started to play them as one was a young man from Homer, New York by way of Norwich, just a few miles southeast of Syracuse, a young man who’d recently landed the job as the night time guy at WOLF, one of the Salt City's two Top 40 stations. His name was Dale Dorman and he brought with him to the Salt City a real edge, musically and otherwise.

A baby-faced 21-year old armed with little more than a high school diploma, Dorman possessed a wildly high-pitched voice – certainly not the kind of resonant, sonorous instrument normally associated with radio, even a Top 40 radio – and was put in the precarious position of having to follow a local legend at his new station. So from the start, the young man’s odds of success in the Salt City were, shall we say, long.

Prior to being hired by WOLF, Dorman's time slot had been in the solid-gold clutches of a smoking-hot DJ named Bud Ballou, who decades later would remain the most popular disc jockey in the history of Syracuse radio.

Ballou, a howling, preening and often giggling man-child from a small town northwest of Syracuse (literally, the geographic opposite of Dorman), who’d started at WOLF as a S.U. undergraduate, and had, among other things, introduced local teens to the unhinged fervor that was Beatlemania.

What’s more, Ballou actually traveled with the Fab Four as part of their first North American tour, conducting in-depth, one-on-one interviews with the four Beatles in cities ranging from Montreal and St. Louis to Los Angeles. Ballou lobbied hard, in fact, for the Beatles to play Syracuse at some point on that first tour, but was told by Brian Epstein, their manager, that their schedule simply wouldn’t allow it.

In the process, Ballou grew so popular with local teens that he merited his own Saturday night dance show – a la Dick Clark’s American Bandstand – on WNYS, the all-new ABC affiliate in town, and a station that at that point was so new and wobbly it was willing to try local programming of any shape and size, just on the off-chance some of it might click.

However, Ballou, Syracuse’s undisputed King of Nighttime Radio, would soon be pirated away from WOLF by Top 40 rival, WNDR, lured by a pile of cash and the promise of even greater promotional support. This talent raid left a spectacular void at WOLF that the station’s honchos eventually filled with the relatively unknown Dorman.

At WOLF, Dorman took the legend of Bud Ballou head-on, tweaking him mercilessly and constantly making fun of him. He regularly referred to Ballou by his given name, Dudley, and lampooned various things about his rival, including his new radio home, a station Dorman told listeners was located in a rickety shack on a swamp on the outskirts of some pastureland otherwise known as Dewitt. In engaging in such nightly verbal warfare with the very legend he replaced, Dale Dorman managed to keep his new employer in the public eye and relevant, even as it was being threatened by the defection of its biggest star to its sworn enemy, just a half turn away on the radio dial.

Dorman also took on anyone he viewed as part of the Syracuse “establishment,” from his own employer to the FCC to his local advertisers, regularly apologizing to listeners for having to interrupt all the great music to play some stupid commercial his bosses demanded he play.

But Dorman was more than just another whirling dervish of nighttime wit, sexual innuendo and attack dog-attitude. He was a kid who knew and loved rock ‘n roll, especially the edgy stuff that more and more seemed to be emanating from garages and basements around the country. He’d regularly play break songs locally by snarling “garage” bands from the heartland that no one had ever heard of before and, often, never would again.

One such band Dorman latched onto was a trio of S.U. kids with a passion for making music that went beyond simple rock star dreams. They called themselves the Fallen Angels and their music was hard, and mean, and stripped naked. It was punk before there was such a thing.

On his History of Syracuse Music website decades later, local music historian Ron Wray (who also produced the Fallen Angels) would tell the story of how, in the late summer of 1966, the band had been booked to play in something called the Club au Go-Go at the New York State Fair.

A few months prior, an enterprising impresario, college dropout and former Parochial League kid named Jim Oricchio had approached Fair officials and pitched them on the idea of offering a nightclub during Fair week that would feature live bands and target teens and young adults. Those officials, truthfully, thought Oricchio was out of his mind. But they liked the notion of attracting more young people, and they loved the idea of giving them something to do besides running up and down the Midway causing trouble. So they agreed. They offered Oricchio, a young man who grew up just down the block from the St. Vincent's rectory, an unused booth out near the third turn of the horse track, a booth in such a relatively horrible location that no vendor had rented it for two years.

The very first band Orrichio booked for his newly christened “New York State Fair Club au Go Go” was the Fallen Angels. The young impresario, likewise, had approached the Angels, all of them originally from New York City, a few months back and had offered to become their manager, something they conspicuously lacked at the time. He’d been pitching the Angels to music clubs and schools in town ever since, booking them several times.

Knowing the Angels would be playing to a house of mixed tastes and ages, Oricchio knew it was critical for them to sprinkle in a few Top 40 hits. As a result – and over the band’s strenuous objections – he reached out to a local Corcoran High senior named Sandy Bigtree, a pretty young Native American girl from the South Side who, with her two older sisters, had carved out a name for herself singing big band, jazz and show tunes on WFBL, an AM station sandwiched between WNDR and WOLF on the dial, one that specialized in “mom and pop” fare like the songs of such artists as Joni James, Frankie Laine, Perry Como and Gogi Grant. If she had a few nights to spare, Oricchio asked Bigtree, would she be willing to join the band and serve as guest vocalist for their Fair gig?

The four young musicians, with Orrichio sitting wordlessly and watching, then spent two full evenings rehearsing a number of contemporary AM hits in a small storage area in the basement of Watson Hall on the S.U. campus, including a few Motown nuggets by Martha and the Vandellas that Oricchio had convinced the Angels would be ideal for Bigtree’s big voice and her soulful and occasionally bluesy style.

The rehearsal period proved to be a real eye opener for the young Corcoran coed. Bigtree, a 17-year old jazz prodigy, discovered three kids only a few years older than she who were not just random college bums playing rock ‘n roll on weekends to make a few extra bucks and meet girls. They were actually serious musicians and people.

For all they might have looked like unwashed, unkempt bums, they regularly talked about things like art, politics, and books. One of them, during a rehearsal break, even detailed his begrudging admiration for the actor, Ronald Reagan, about whom he’d just read an intriguing magazine profile. Another happened to mention his girlfriend, whose sister, Bigtree later learned, turned out to be actress Mia Farrow. The third, at least from what the young Corcoran co-ed could gather, was dating the daughter of CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite.

Bust most of all, the Fallen Angels proved they were as dead-serious about creating their music as just about any collection of players Sandy Bigtree had ever been around (or, frankly, ever would be).

The bulk of the band’s Fair playlist, she’d learn during rehearsal, was going to be made up of covers of Top 40 songs, notably by the Zombies, a slightly haughty and musically sophisticated English quartet, and a new working-class group whose members billed themselves as Them. An uncompromising R&B outfit from the politically and religiously divided city of Belfast in Northern Ireland, Them was fronted by a soulful, sawed-off and strutting little red rooster named Van Morrison.

About a third of Fallen Angel’s playlist, however, was not going to be covers at all. It was going to be all-original material. Those self-penned compositions included two spectacularly blistering numbers, one titled Bad Woman and the other titled, Mystic Eyes. The former, an in-your-face three-chord rocker, would be laid down just weeks after the Fair ended, and recorded in the same area in the bowels of S.U. where Bigtree had rehearsed with them. It would then become the Fallen Angels one and only single and receive a smattering of airplay on WOLF, WNDR and the university’s FM station, WAER.

The other original, however, was going to be a throbbing rave that featured a couple of long and wildly indulgent solos that dripped with a palpable sense of anger; one on guitar, the other harmonica. The dense song was just too meandering, too untethered, and way too feral to be contained on any single 45. The Fallen Angels may or may not have ever recorded Mystic Eyes, but if they did, they never appeared to have released it. The boys did, however – and the audience be damned, must have been their thinking – add Mystic Eyes to their playlist for the State Fair and then willingly (and, perhaps, gleefully) set it loose upon an otherwise unsuspecting audience of Fair-goers.

Unfortunately for the Angels and their future in the Salt City, a few Sacred Heart parents happened to be at the Club au Go-Go that evening. A few weeks prior, Dorman had conceived a radio contest for area schools that he called “Get the Point.” The winning school in “Get the Point,” as drawn up by the DJ, would receive a free concert by the Angels at an upcoming school dance that he, himself, would host. The winning school, of course, turned out to be Sacred Heart, which was likely the only reason those parents had chosen to be there. They wanted to get a sense of what their kids had gotten themselves into, musically speaking.

After the show, those same parents, in apparently some combination of disbelief and white-faced (and maybe even white-knuckled) horror, drove immediately to the rectory at Sacred Heart, banged on the door under the cover of darkness, and told a sleepy Monsignor Piejda of the musical carnage they’d just been witness to. The buttoned-down and iron-fisted Piejda was more than concerned; he was angry.

In turn, first thing Monday morning, the "Boss” decreed – via the school intercom, before first bell, and in no uncertain terms – that the Fallen Angels would not be allowed to play at Sacred Heart Academy, regardless of what the radio station had promised. Of course, the young man from the station could certainly emcee the Open House, and he could spin his records. But the band in his station’s prize package was expressly forbidden from playing at that or any other Sacred Heart function – ever.

In defense of those Sacred Heart parents, years later even Bigtree herself, when asked about her experience with the Fallen Angels in the Summer of 1966, would call their performance that night on the New York State Fairgrounds “wildly intense.” She'd also contend that their extended rendition of their own untethered composition, Mystic Eyes, was in a word (and even decades later), “disturbing.”

By 1966, for countless teenagers in Syracuse and beyond, music had become something more than just background, or a beat and melody on which they’d occasionally hang a dance or two. It became the voice, sound and beating heart of their longing to be heard as a generation; a desire that had been festering in people their age for the ten years since some frothing, manic DJ somewhere first branded the soundtrack of their lives, rock 'n roll.

 

 

 

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Music had, indeed, long been deeply woven into the fabric of the Parochial League experience, and had for years been an essential part of Friday night basketball. That relationship between music and basketball, in fact, had stretched as far back as the 1949-50 season (if not longer) and at one school in particular, St. John the Evangelist.

That season – Al Nelson’s senior year and brother Marshall’s freshman one – Mary Young (whose husband Art, the Post-Standard pressman, helped the Nelson boys integrate the Parochial League the year prior) realized after one game that the Evangelist players and cheerleaders had nowhere to go to celebrate, socialize, and relive the excitement of the game.

St. John the Evangelist was one of only two schools in the league (Cathedral being the other) without its own gymnasium – the likely reason was that both were so close to downtown, where real estate had long been precious and costly, but also because in Evangelists’ case, at least, the parish remained among the smallest in the city.

Similarly, because St. John's was so centrally located compared to the other Parochial League schools, what little sense of neighborhood that did exist around it offered virtually nothing in the way of post-game gathering spots for students. Since Evangelist played its “home” games at any number of venues around the city, like North High, Grant Junior High, Danforth School, the Boy’s Club, the Armory, and even the War Memorial, any post-game options for kids would, likewise, vary from week to week.

So, one Friday night in fall of 1949, Mary Young invited all the St. John’s players and cheerleaders back to her house on Teall Ave, a few miles east, for a post-game house party. And, since it was Friday, Young made dozens of meatless sandwiches on Wonder Bread for them, like tuna fish, egg salad, peanut butter and jelly, and sliced cheese. Plus, she went out and bought plenty of icy cold 7 oz. bottles of soda pop, which she stacked in her new Kelvinator. The St. John’s students came, ate, talked, flirted and danced to the songs on the full-sized Philco console that sat in Mary's front room.

The event proved to be so popular that news of it soon spread throughout school and the following week the amount of party attendees virtually quadrupled as other kids from St. John’s (the bulk of them non players and non cheerleaders) showed up at the Young’s house as well. Mary, who the week prior had had time to socialize and talk to the kids about their game and victory, this time was too busy in the kitchen hurriedly slapping together sandwiches and dispatching her son Jack and daughters Mary and Meg off to the corner market to pick up more wooden crates of Coke, 7 Up, Royal Palm Orange, and Canada Dry Ginger Ale.

It did not stop there, however. Word soon got out throughout the league of the killer parties that some family from Evangelist was hosting after the games on Fridays, and within weeks the crowds inside Art and Mary Young’s house near St. Vincent’s had spilled out into the front yard and down Teall Ave. And the bigger the crowds of teenagers grew, the louder the Young's Philco got cranked.

Eventually, one Friday night Mary had to throw up her hands and raise the white flag. That night, smack dab in the middle of her biggest party yet, a raucous affair with kids from every Parochial League school lined up and down Teall Ave, and music throbbing from her console, she called Monsignor Christian at St. John’s in a mild panic and told him of her dilemma. “Monsignor,” she yelled into the phone above the music, “We have a situation here. Look, I just can’t fit any more kids and it’s really getting out of hand. May I please come in and speak with you next week about an idea I have?”

In his office the following Monday – the same office in which her husband had lobbied the parish leader to accept into his all-white school Al and Marshall Nelson, two African American boys from the 15th Ward – Mary Young proceeded to convince Monsignor Christian that St. John’s should host a post-game party in the school cafeteria each week.  Such a party, she explained, would give kids from all the league schools something to do, while keeping them all off the streets and out of trouble. The priest hesitantly and reluctantly agreed, provided Young continued to supply her allotment of chicken salad, tuna and cheese sandwiches, and that she assumed complete control of securing, monitoring and coordinating the chaperones needed each week.

And with that, a Syracuse tradition was born: the Parochial League Friday night dance. What’s more, since those post-game dances had their roots in the Young family home – the Young family house – they soon became known to kids around the city, not to mention within the walls of many convents and rectories, as Friday night Open Houses.

At first, the Parochial League’s Open Houses were the exclusive domain of Mary Young, her team of chaperones, and the nuns, priests and janitor at St. John the Evangelist. Each week, Catholic and non Catholic kids from schools all over the city would descend upon the corner of Willow and Townsend after their own game ended to dance, swap stories, meet, have a sandwich and a beverage, and maybe steal away to sneak a kiss or two from someone from another school.

But eventually – due in part to logistics, due in part to space limitations, and due, mostly, to the fact that the Evangelist coffers had become stretched beyond their limit by Mrs. Young’s eat-and-drink-to-your-heart’s-content postgame soirees – it was decided by the league's pastors that the (now-wildly popular) Open Houses had become too much responsibility for any one parish (or woman) to bear.

As a result, the league's nine pastors determined that each of the four home teams in the league would, from that point forward, stage an Open House after the Friday night varsity game, which would be primarily for the students of the two schools who’d just competed against one another. That’s how things remained until 1957, when Sacred Heart joined the Parochial League and the arrangement grew to five games and five home teams.

The Friday Night Open Houses became an essential and vital part of the Parochial League experience for nearly three generations worth of Catholics and high school students, and not just for the basketball stars and popular kids, but for those who, as Father Billy Jones of St. John the Baptist would say, “lived in the shadows.”

Jones was a handsome and well-spoken West End kid originally from St. Brigid’s with smiling eyes and a flat-top; a kid who, himself, had risen to become a mega-star for Bobby Felasco and Evangelist in the late 1950s. He’d later enter the seminary and come out as one of his diocese’s new wave of socially responsible priests. Such newly minted and socially aware men-of-God soon began filtering into parishes, large and small, in and around Syracuse in the mid-to-late '60s.

Jones knew full well, of course, what life was like in the Parochial League spotlight, knew its warm glow, and knew first-hand the adulation and acceptance that, at least in high school, always walked arm-in-arm with physical beauty and athletic prowess.

By the time he’d been ordained, however, he’d evolved into a fundamentally changed man, one who was able to see the world through eyes other than his own, eyes of those less blessed. Like many priests of his age, he believed that the bishop had assigned him to administer to all the students in his flock; not just the beautiful ones, the ones whose musical names and glowing faces got regularly splashed across the sports pages, and who seemed to glitter as they walked, but also the kids who, like Jones himself, felt increasingly uneasy, if not out-of-place, in Syracuse’s rapidly evolving social order. The kids in the “shadows,” in other words.

For those kids, those Friday night Open Houses were an essential part of their school life, if not their weekly existence. For every Parochial League school’s late bloomers, geeks, loners, chubbiest and plainest-looking, those Friday night affairs were a chance to, just maybe, reinvent themselves.

Parochial League girls, at least for one night, didn't have to dress in muted and nun-approved woolen uniforms with itchy knee socks, buttoned-to-the-neck blouses, and just-above-the-knee skirts. They could don dresses, wear make up, put ribbons in their hair, and apply gag-inducing quantities of perfume, if they so desired. Even if doing so didn’t land them the man of their dreams, or a date, or even a phone call from a cute boy, it allowed them to bond with like-minded girls and, at least for that night, as the music played, attempt to give those oh-so-perfect cheerleaders a run for their money.

Parochial League boys, meanwhile – the non-athletes, that is – were free to dress up or down, depending upon how they felt. In the process, those Open Houses gave those outsiders a chance to pay fealty to, and put themselves more in touch with, the budding adults inside each of them; be they strong-minded but still slightly unsure young men in search of an identity, rutting bucks with their spiky antlers raised, or rapidly maturing teens who, despite the all peach fuzz and acne, were sick and tired of having to live beneath so many layers of ridicule, misconception, and Catholic school conformity.

For such students – the countless boys and girls living in Father Jones’ “shadows” of Parochial League acceptance – the tingling anticipation they felt in advance of those Open Houses in those tiny cafeterias and those parish-based academies with names like St. Anthony’s, St. Vincent’s and Assumption was just as real and just as butterfly-inducing as the game itself.

That heightened feeling – the anticipation of being able to step out, break free, and be who they were, if only for a night – became even more pronounced as events unfolded and the ‘60s continued to gain a toehold in the American psyche. That was particularly true after Like a Rolling Stone broke through and its cynical lyrics and chin-out attitude planted a stake in the soul of so many high school kids in Syracuse

Because that was the moment at which, in communities all across America – communities just like Syracuse, New York – pop music began concerning itself less with holding hands, teen angels, pretty girls standing there and perfect waves, and more with self-discovery, self-expression, non-conformity and, above all, the need to not merely challenge authority, but every so often rise up and flip your middle finger directly at it.

 

 

 

 

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For millions of young men like Danny Van Cott, Joe Zaganczyk and Tom Sakowski, the world changed the night of February 9, 1964. That was the night the Beatles, with a big assist from a prune-faced TV personality named Ed Sullivan, turned America on its ear and changed forever what it meant to be a teenage boy in the Land of the Free. Because that was the night those three young men, and so many others like them, decided to pick up the guitar, learn a few chords, and start a band.

For Zaganczyk, his five-piece group first thought of calling themselves Richie and the Vandels, before eventually settling on Richie and the Strangers as a play on the name of the group’s founder, leader, and most talented musician – Rich Strager – a classmate of Joe’s at Sacred Heart.

As for Van Cott and Sakowski, they christened their little dog-eared, basement-dwelling music machine, the Bitter End.

Van Cott sang lead and played rhythm guitar. Big Tom Sakowski, meanwhile, while he may have looked like a bass player out of central casting, actually didn’t do a whole lot more than look down at his fret board, belt out a few close-enough harmonies, and then strum in time with the music. The band, in fact, didn’t even have a bass player – at least not technically – since playing bass was not only a musical skill that required the ability to pick and play specific notes, but it was also contingent on someone in the band actually, you know, owning a bass.

Few, if any, of the boys in Ronnie and the Strangers and the Bitter End were serious musicians. Nor were they particularly serious students. But what each boy was serious about – dead serious, in fact – was testing the limits of his God-given talents and, in doing so, discovering who he might one day become.

Zaganczyk was a dyed-in-the-wool Beatles nut; Van Cott a tried-and-true Rolling Stones and Animals guy – and the songs their two bands chose to learn and play reflected that musical dichotomy.

Ronnie and the Strangers’ tunes were melodic and bouncy, a la the Beatles’. They were accessible, mostly harmless, and made kids just want to get up and dance. The Bitter End’s songs, on the other hand, were edgier, bluesier, and less harmonic – much like the R&B nuggets played on WOLF and WNDR by the Stones and Animals.

Ironically, that's also a little how those two Sacred Heart boys managed to not just co-exist as ballplayers, but thrive as Billy E’s backcourt for his 1966-‘67 Heartsmen. Zaganczyk and Van Cott always seemed to have something of a yin-and-yang dynamic going, an opposites-attract thing. While it may not have worked on paper, it always seemed to within the limits of a basketball court. Dan Van Cott and Joe Zaganczyk, for all their personal and even cultural differences, were – at least every Friday night, come tipoff time – in perfect harmony.

While both young men were good looking, smarter-than-average and wildly charming, and while neither suffered for lack of female companionship, they still stood in stark contrast to one another in other ways.

Zaganczyk was the quintessential boy-next-door. He could be sensitive, almost to a fault. He constantly aimed to please. And, for reasons that will become apparent, he deeply longed to be accepted, even loved, and took strides to avoid offending anyone, including strangers.

What’s more, though he was still just in high school, he was a classic clothes horse. He came to Sacred Heart each day dressed impeccably, was always groomed, and could be caught every now and then glancing at a reflective surface to make sure that not a single strand of his rich, full head of hair was out of place.

Van Cott, on the other hand, represented almost the polar opposite. As a black Irish kid from the other side of the tracks who’d grown his hair out (at least to a degree) after seeing the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show, and who now sported dark-rimmed eyeglasses and longish sideburns, and who had adopted a walk with a gentle hint of swagger, Van Cott – at least within the confines of the waxed halls of Sacred Heart – was something of an outsider. As such, the young man had neither the money nor the inclination to dress as his teammate did.

As an occasional (if only half-hearted) loner, he had a way of emitting an ever-so-faint whiff of trouble to any young girl with whom he happened to cross paths.

Maybe that’s why the boys’ two bands were so well received by the other kids in school whenever they found themselves forced to quickly shower after a game, grab their guitar, and jump onstage. Van Cott, as his band’s frontman, had an off-handed way of luring in his classmates with his chip-on-shoulder attitude and strutting-rooster air of confidence. Zaganczyk, meanwhile, could do much the same thing, only in his case winning them over with his warmth, his Paul McCartney-like boyishness, and his perfect hair and handsome face.

Even so, though both boys were popular amateur rockers in their day, there were distinct differences between them. Joey Zaganczyk’s genial Beatles cover band – Richie and the Strangers – can now serve as something of a half-baked metaphor for all that the '60’s had been prior to the first day of school in the Fall of 1966, while Danny Van Cott’s rough-hewn band of Rolling Stone wannabes – the Bitter End – remain to this day a slightly undercooked symbol for all they were about to become.

 

 

 

 

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Things in Syracuse were changing, and not just in terms of music. Socially and physically, the city was rapidly becoming a place where, almost daily, the status quo was being beaten into submission.

At the same time, the Ward continued to physically crumble and disappear. For its residents, even the few victories they were able to muster turned out to be defeats dressed in their Sunday best. The Greyhound Bus Company, for example, which was based in Cleveland, had announced plans a few years prior to relocate its local terminal onto Harrison Street, in an otherwise residential block of the 15th Ward.

The residents of the Ward, including Father Charles Brady, were outraged. It wasn’t just the noxious fumes or the ugliness of having a working garage and a bus depot right in the heart of their cozy little neighborhood. It was the fact that hundreds of children, with no other place to go, regularly used its streets as a playground. Touch football, keep-away, hopscotch and rope skipping were all played on streets like Harrison and Montgomery, and at all hours of the day. But with massive, hissing busses suddenly running up and down those very same streets, it was just a matter of time before games and vehicles collided and tragedies ensued.

Brady and dozens of Ward mothers picketed daily, carrying signs on the site of the proposed terminal. They sent long passionate pleas to Greyhound’s CEO in Cleveland. They held equally passionate town hall meetings, to which they regularly invited the five members of Syracuse’s governing body, its “common council.” They wrote multiple letters to the editors of both the Post-Standard and Herald-Journal. They fought with virtually everything they had and left no stone unturned.

And what do you know? It worked. After two years of non-stop picketing, protesting and lobbying by Charlie Brady and his fellow denizens, the Greyhound Bus Company actually relented. It announced it had had a change of heart and was now not going to relocate its new depot to the proposed location on Harrison Street. Instead, it would relocate the depot a few blocks from there to a more industrial/commercial part of Syracuse.

The victory would prove to be a Pyrrhic one for all those diligent protesters and concerned mothers. With Greyhound no longer in the equation, the entire block on Harrison Street was subsequently sold to Mutual of New York, a Manhattan-based life insurance giant, which immediately razed every building on it and began construction on what would become one of the signature high-rise buildings in all of Upstate New York, the 19-story MONY Tower, complete with its a one-of-a-kind illuminated phallus that the architects were calling the MONY Weather Star.

The Weather Star, which company execs promised would stretch high above the city, would be a tower of lighted rings of multiple colors topped by a brightly illuminated star about the size of a small sailboat. The tower would be breathtaking, they promised. And it would rise above every other building in downtown Syracuse and herald the Salt City as a beacon in the night, a gleaming paragon of American capitalism and commercial possibility for all to see and share.

What’s more, they crowed, the tower would give accurate and constantly updated weather reports. The Weather Star even came with its own poem, one they’d commissioned, a rhyming little ditty designed to help the locals become conversant with its intricate and ever-changing series of light, color and directional options.

Green light, weather bright. Orange on high, overcast sky. Orange flashing, raindrops splashing. Flickering white, snow in sight. Watch the lights on the tower perform; they run down for cold, and up for warm.

Everything one might want in a weather report, it would seem, except which way the wind blew.

It was then, perhaps, more than appropriate that just three weeks after December 12, 1966 – the cold, brittle evening on which a beaming and proud Mayor Bill Walsh ceremoniously flipped a large switch and illuminated, for the first time, the new MONY Tower and Weather Star to a frigid but eager throng of cheering Syracusans – WOLF and WNDR started playing a release by an L.A. band that few, if any, kids in town had ever heard before.

The band called themselves the Buffalo Springfield. And, while their single on the ATCO label would end up going nowhere on the Syracuse Top 40, it would soon take root in a place of greater significance. Because the Buffalo Springfield’s 45 released that frigid January of 1967 – the song that WOLF and WNDR both started playing to largely tepid reactions – would soon become less an artifact of American pop culture than a small but meaningful slice of American history.

In short order, For What It’s Worth emerged as something of a generational anthem, if not a touchstone for countless disillusioned and increasingly angry young men and women; and not just in Syracuse, but across America. And with its eerily still and gently echoed opening, during which two simple guitar notes and a dirge-like drum line repeated back and forth ominously, like the tick-tick-tick of a time bomb, the song introduced Americans of all colors, creeds and political stripes to a rhyming couplet that managed to capture perfectly the uncertainty of not just their shared moment in history, but the violent and uneasy future that, together, they would soon be forced to confront.

There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear.

 

 

 

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