Job priced right? Like the Blues? you have to hear this

[beth]

Was this job priced right? Listen to the story.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDUlsemXahk

[Keith Morganstein]

Remove engine
replace rod
turn crankshaft
reinstall engine
$32

Jimmy Reed was great.

[enigma57]

It all depends, Keith. Keep in mind that this was 1955 and if Mr. Reed and his band were driving due South on old Highway 51 from Memphis to New Orleans...... Or from Arkansas to New Orleans by way of Baton Rouge on old Highway 61 after crossing the river at Helena on old Highway 49...... 72 miles North of New Orleans would put them out in the boonies close to the Mississippi / Louisiana state line. Not a lot going on there back then. Folks were poor and couldn't buy much. As a result (supply and demand), things didn't cost much, either.

To put it into perspective, my folks bought a brand new 1954 Ford the year priour for $1,500 cash and my Mom said they spent too much. My Step-Dad worked hard as a union carpenter in heavy construction in the Houston area at the time and made pretty good money back then...... But even when weather permitted him to work a 40 hour week...... His take home pay was still only around $75.00 per week in those days.

In the recession that followed a few years after, work was so scarce that he had to drive his 1950 Chevy work car all the way up to the Dakotas to work there on a travel card for many months. I remember that he would send me a picture post card from time to time and I really liked the one of the Corn Palace. Lawrence Welk and his band would play there. We really liked the polka music and the big band music and when my folks bought a black and white TV, we would watch Lawrence Welk. I think my Mom had a thing for Myron Floren, the Norwegian accordionist from South Dakota with the wavy hair. He played a lot of Scandinavian music and German polkas.

Many years later, my folks lived for a while in a trailer park in Houston that backed up to the SPJST Lodge over near 14th and Beall. The Czech people would have these big parties and weddings there and play polkas and dance into the wee hours quite often in the 1970s. When I was home on leave from the service and would stop by and visit, we would enjoy hearing them play. Sometimes, my Mom would play along on her piano.

My Step-dad was a Louisiana man from an old Creole family there. And he would trap, shoot, cook and eat just about any critter that happened his way. I remember that he got into trouble in the trailer park because he had an air rifle and he would crack open the door and pop a few squirrels out of the tall pine trees that grew there. He was retired by then and crippled up some from a fall off a tall scaffold on his 62nd birthday some years before. So when one of the squirrels fell on someone's trailer, he couldn't get up there and fetch it. And after a few days, it would get kinda ripe and that didn't set too well with the neighbours, many of whom fed the squirrels and thought of them as pets.

My Step-dad had a cast-iron cauldron and a wrought iron spit that he would fire up outside from time to time between their trailer and the one next to it. After dressing out his kill on the clothes line, he'd cook them over a wood fire. By then, my Mom had an electric clothes dryer, so she didn't mind him using the clothes line. But when I was a kid and we lived down on the bayou, I remember that my Mom caught my Step-dad dressing out squirrels and rabbits and possums and racoons on her clothes line and gave him such grief that he built her a separate clothes line just for hanging out clothes to dry because she wouldn't hang them on the one he dressed out his kill on. We were the only family except for one other in those parts who had two clothes lines. The other family had 15 kids and they really needed the extra clothes line.

My Mom and us kids were Jewish and did our best to keep Kosher when it came to food and food prep, so she made him cook his critters outside and use separate plates and utensils to eat them with. Step-dad would make boudin du pays (blood pudding) for Christmas festivities when his relations would come over to visit. When I was a kid, I rode with him a couple of times to a really stinky rendering plant and had to keep a large pot of pig's blood and pieces of meat from sloshing over that sat on the floorboard between my feet so that he could make his pudding.

His especiality for family get togethers (his folks) was gator tail gumbo, though. I believe it was his own recipe. Only he and Mr. Broussard down the road knew how to make it properly. Lots of folks tried, but they just couldn't get the roux and the meat right. The roux and the meat prep are key. If you don't get the roux right and know how to prepare and cook gator meat really slow over a wood fire, nothing else works. Step-dad would usually make it in early April when gator hunting was good.

My apologies for digressing. That's the thing about old men, you see. We have all these memories and sometimes our thoughts just turn towards times long forgot by most

Best regards,

Harry

[rskrause]

It all depends, Keith. Keep in mind that this was 1955 and if Mr. Reed and his band were driving due South on old Highway 51 from Memphis to New Orleans...... Or from Arkansas to New Orleans by way of Baton Rouge on old Highway 61 after crossing the river at Helena on old Highway 49...... 72 miles North of New Orleans would put them out in the boonies close to the Mississippi / Louisiana state line. Not a lot going on there back then. Folks were poor and couldn't buy much. As a result (supply and demand), things didn't cost much, either.

To put it into perspective, my folks bought a brand new 1954 Ford the year priour for $1,500 cash and my Mom said they spent too much. My Step-Dad worked hard as a union carpenter in heavy construction in the Houston area at the time and made pretty good money back then...... But even when weather permitted him to work a 40 hour week...... His take home pay was still only around $75.00 per week in those days.

In the recession that followed a few years after, work was so scarce that he had to drive his 1950 Chevy work car all the way up to the Dakotas to work there on a travel card for many months. I remember that he would send me a picture post card from time to time and I really liked the one of the Corn Palace. Lawrence Welk and his band would play there. We really liked the polka music and the big band music and when my folks bought a black and white TV, we would watch Lawrence Welk. I think my Mom had a thing for Myron Floren, the Norwegian accordionist from South Dakota with the wavy hair. He played a lot of Scandinavian music and German polkas.

Many years later, my folks lived for a while in a trailer park in Houston that backed up to the SPJST Lodge over near 14th and Beall. The Czech people would have these big parties and weddings there and play polkas and dance into the wee hours quite often in the 1970s. When I was home on leave from the service and would stop by and visit, we would enjoy hearing them play. Sometimes, my Mom would play along on her piano.

My Step-dad was a Louisiana man from an old Creole family there. And he would trap, shoot, cook and eat just about any critter that happened his way. I remember that he got into trouble in the trailer park because he had an air rifle and he would crack open the door and pop a few squirrels out of the tall pine trees that grew there. He was retired by then and crippled up some from a fall off a tall scaffold on his 62nd birthday some years before. So when one of the squirrels fell on someone's trailer, he couldn't get up there and fetch it. And after a few days, it would get kinda ripe and that didn't set too well with the neighbours, many of whom fed the squirrels and thought of them as pets.

My Step-dad had a cast-iron cauldron and a wrought iron spit that he would fire up outside from time to time between their trailer and the one next to it. After dressing out his kill on the clothes line, he'd cook them over a wood fire. By then, my Mom had an electric clothes dryer, so she didn't mind him using the clothes line. But when I was a kid and we lived down on the bayou, I remember that my Mom caught my Step-dad dressing out squirrels and rabbits and possums and racoons on her clothes line and gave him such grief that he built her a separate clothes line just for hanging out clothes to dry because she wouldn't hang them on the one he dressed out his kill on. We were the only family except for one other in those parts who had two clothes lines. The other family had 15 kids and they really needed the extra clothes line.

My Mom and us kids were Jewish and did our best to keep Kosher when it came to food and food prep, so she made him cook his critters outside and use separate plates and utensils to eat them with. Step-dad would make boudin du pays (blood pudding) for Christmas festivities when his relations would come over to visit. When I was a kid, I rode with him a couple of times to a really stinky rendering plant and had to keep a large pot of pig's blood and pieces of meat from sloshing over that sat on the floorboard between my feet so that he could make his pudding.

His especiality for family get togethers (his folks) was gator tail gumbo, though. I believe it was his own recipe. Only he and Mr. Broussard down the road knew how to make it properly. Lots of folks tried, but they just couldn't get the roux and the meat right. The roux and the meat prep are key. If you don't get the roux right and know how to prepare and cook gator meat really slow over a wood fire, nothing else works. Step-dad would usually make it in early April when gator hunting was good.

My apologies for digressing. That's the thing about old men, you see. We have all these memories and sometimes our thoughts just turn towards times long forgot by most

Best regards,

Harry

Great story, thanks! How did your Mom hook up with a Creole? BTW, my Mom is also Jewish.

Richard

[Masher Manufacturing]

To put it into perspective, my folks bought a brand new 1954 Ford the year priour for $1,500 cash and my Mom said they spent too much.

That's $12,035.35 today. A basic Ford Ranger mini truck lists at 17,000 but has more stuff standard.

My Step-Dad worked hard as a union carpenter in heavy construction in the Houston area at the time and made pretty good money back then...... But even when weather permitted him to work a 40 hour week...... His take home pay was still only around $75.00 per week in those days.

$601.77 post tax today. $ 15.04 Hr post tax is ~ $ 18.50 Hr pre tax ( ~ yr 38,478 ) As you said, pretty good $ .


[/quote]

[enigma57]

That's true, Masher. The Ford was a '54 Customline 2dr sedan and it had the 239 OHV engine and 3-speed stick shift tranny, radio and heater. That's it...... No power brakes, power steering, air conditioning nor other creature comforts most folks take for granted now of days.

When I was a teenager, the '54 block cracked one winter, so we picked up a '56 292 bare block and swapped the short stroke 239 crank into it along with 312 rods and a set of Jahns pistons. They were standard bore size for a 312 (3.80") and had a compression height to suit the 239 crank (3.10" stroke) and shorter 312 rods. It was a 0.050" overbore for the 292 block and it worked out to 281 cu. inches displacement. Used a Holley carb off a '58 Lincoln and '57 312 distributor, 4bbl heads, intake and dual exhaust manifolds and an Isky E-4 cam. Ran pretty good in the '54, which was a couple hundred pounds lighter than the '55 - '56 Fords. We also redrilled and tapped the flywheel to carry a '57 11" heavy duty clutch. Ran straights (no mufflers) and '56 duals on the '54 and painted her Confederate gray.

The Y-block ran great, but it couldn't keep up with my 276 DeSoto powered '55 Ford. That little hemi was a beast.

Happy Motoring,

Harry

[enigma57]

Great story, thanks! How did your Mom hook up with a Creole? BTW, my Mom is also Jewish.

Richard

Well, its a long story, Richard. I'll try to be as brief as I can. Our family on my Mom's side are Sephardim. Our experience in Europe and in America has been one of living alongside and fitting in amongst other cultures rather than living in separate communities or shtetls for the most part. Our family lived for 400 years in Spain under the Moors. But they were expulsed in 1492 when Ferdinand and Isabella gained power and the Moors were pushed out. Those Jews who stayed suffered greatly and most were murdered during the Spanish Inquisition that followed.

Our family fled to Portugal, but had to leave a few short years later when the same thing occurred there. From Portugal, they journeyed through France and Belgium and finally found refuge in the Netherlands. There, in the early 1600s, they met others who had found refuge from religious persecution in their lands of origin. Amongst these were Puritan separatists who were in exile from the religious strife in England. A group of these separatists and other expat non-separatists as well, formed the group who quietly slipped back into England and sailed from there to America. We call them the Pilgrims, but there were both separatists and non-separatists amongst their number. And soon, my family followed and came with them to the colonies here as well.

By the time of the American Revolution, our family lived in Connecticut (Stratford area). And by the time of the War for Southern Independence, many of them had moved South to Louisiana and settled in Plaquemines Parish on the West side of the river. And some of them moved to New Orleans as well.

New Orleans was a place where people of many ethnicities and backgrounds were accepted in those days. It was a place of opportunity. What you could accomplish was more important than who you were or where you came from. But if you had political aspirations, you had to marry into the established Creole French society of planters in order to be accepted. And that's what our cousins did.

A distant cousin of my Mom's paternal grandmother (his family came to America much later via the British West Indies) was a U.S. Senator from Louisiana when secession came. He resigned his seat in the Senate and joined his friend Jeff Davis, serving in his cabinet in several posts during the war years. His likeness is on the Confederate $2.00 bill if ever you come across one. At war's end, the occupying Union armies had a price on his head and he had to flee to Florida, where he was taken by a Confederate privateer in an open boat to the West Indies. He had been born there whilst his family was en route to America and thereby claimed status as a British subject in the courts there. He prevailed in his court case and traveled to England in his mid-50's arriving with little else save the clothes on his back. He studied, became a barrister and eventually served on the Queen's Privy Council during the time of Queen Victoria. He is buried in Paris.

Anyway, what I am getting at is that our family has roots in Louisiana and a long standing tradition of marrying into Creole French families there. My Step-dad was descended of the early French trappers and the Indians who lived there before the Louisiana purchase. He drew a distinction between Creole French and Cajun and reminded me in private that his ancestors were living in Louisiana long before the Acadiennes came down from Canada and settled there and he was proud to be Creole.

With all that in mind, my Dad married my Mom when she was 16. He was 32 and had served in the Great War (First World War). His folks were from Memphis and my Mom's folks were living in Beaumont, Texas not far from the Louisiana border in those days. Dad and his younger brother had built a race car and campaigned it in the late 1920s. My Grand-dad on my Mom's side was a baker and owned a pastry shop. Dad met Mom when he came in to order a cake whilst he was in Texas for a race. They were very much in love, but she was still 15 at the time and so he waited for her to grow up before asking my Grand-dad for her hand in marriage.

I learned from my Aunt Florence only after my Mom passed away that she had been married before...... At 14. It was one of those old world arranged marriages to an older Ashkenazi man who was established in his business. Turned out that he drank and didn't treat her well and so the beit din met and her husband granted her a get, ending the religious marriage and the civil marriage was ended by annulment. Once that was done, my Grand-dad lit a candle, beat the living crap out of him and told him he was dead to us (the family).

My Dad was Irish and he and my Grand-dad became close friends. From what I gather, my Grand-dad and the family took the position that better Mom should find happiness with someone who wasn't Jewish than be mistreated by someone who was. And as long as husband and wife respected one another's religious traditions and neither pressured the other to convert..... All would be well. And that's the way it was.

Mom and Dad picked a spot about halfway between his folks and hers and opened a machine shop in Little Rock, Arkansas. They rebuilt automobile and truck engines there during the 1930s and during the Second World War, they rebuilt aircraft engines for the government as well. Dad ran the shop and Mom did all the mic work. Until the day she died, Mom could quote you all the dimensions and clearances of every American made engine from Model Ts through those that were built right after the war when they shut down the shop and moved to Texas. Dad was in poor health by then. He came back from France with a steel plate in his head, a steel pin holding one knee together and his lungs burned from mustard gas and as he neared 50 when I came along, it began to catch up with him. He was killed in a car wreck when I was three.

A few years after Dad passed away, Mom met my Step-dad and after a while, they married. Step-dad had served in the merchant marine during the 1930s and the war years and had begun work as a heavy construction carpenter when Mom and he met. He was the spitting image of Humphrey Bogart and there wasn't an ounce of fat on him. Just muscle and bone. His physique was similar to that of Charles Bronson in his prime. Before joining the merchant marine, he had been one of Hughey Long's body guards and before that, had made a living as a prize fighter in New Orleans. They were married in a civil ceremony and that's how Mom came to marry a Creole man from Louisiana. Mom and Step-dad had a daughter 5 years later and my sister lives up in the Texas hill country now.

Step-dad was a Chenxxxx and my sister got into researching her family tree on his side some years back. In the process, she was asked to help with the annual Chenxxxx family reunion, which was held out in California that year. In so doing, she learned that there were 2 separate Chenxxxx family reunions held each year...... One for the white Chenxxxx and one for the black Chenxxxx.

Now in Louisiana during the days of the plantations, it was not unusual for a plantation owner to have both a white family and a black family. And oft times when he passed on, he would leave money and landholdings to both families and would make free men and women of his black family. That is what happened in the Chenxxxx family.

In addition, there were also black Chenxxxx who were not blood kin, but had taken the name of their master when taken away by Union troops following the fall of the Confederacy.

So my sister decided that the right thing to do was to include and invite all Chenxxxx, both white and black so long as they were blood kin. And I concurred. Seems this had mixed reviews when both groups showed up at the reunion, however. There were those on both sides who applauded her including all Chenxxxx, there were those on both sides who were quite vocal in their opposition and there were those who didn't really care one way or the other. The upshot is that my sister made a decision following the reunion never to be involved in the planning of another reunion ever again.

I hope this answers your question.

Best regards,

Harry

[Keith Morganstein]

It all depends, Keith. Keep in mind that this was 1955 and if Mr. Reed and his band were driving due South on old Highway 51 from Memphis to New Orleans...... Or from Arkansas to New Orleans by way of Baton Rouge on old Highway 61 after crossing the river at Helena on old Highway 49...... 72 miles North of New Orleans would put them out in the boonies close to the Mississippi / Louisiana state line. Not a lot going on there back then. Folks were poor and couldn't buy much. As a result (supply and demand), things didn't cost much, either.

I met and and played gigs with an American "roots music" musician for many years. He and the band traveled in beat older buses, motorhomes and vans with trailers. As with Jimmy Reed's mechanic, I helped out some musicians. R&R and rebuild a 727 trans in a 38' Motor home. R&R in the dirt, on a top of a private mountain camp.

These guys would do many thousand mile tours of the USA traveling from gig to gig. honky tonks, bars, state fairs, nightclubs. Sometimes 200-250 year. They call it the lost Lost Highway (Hank Williams)

We played several Jimmy Reed tunes.

check him out in this video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXAPV0teUTk

[enigma57]

"Big Boss Man" was always one of my favourites of the genre, Keith.

You played with Sleepy's band? That's really cool. He's kind of a legend around these parts. Bet you have some tales to tell.

Best regards,

Harry

[ZIGGY]

Entertaining thread, at least for me. Thanks.

[beth]

How much is a top 5 record in today's money? I guess it would be a top 5 hit since records are long gone. I think it's interesting that he came up with the words to the song in the car while it was being fixed.

He doesn't say what kind of car it was, not many engines today that could be repaired if they "threw a rod". I guess throwing a rod isn't as likely to happen these days, at least in passenger cars.

[enigma57]

Beth, as an aside...... I wanted to learn about cars and earn a few bucks, so I took a job at a wrecking yard after school, on weekends and during the summers when I was in high school. Started when I was 14 going on 15 (I was big for my age, but I think they knew I wasn't really 16).

Anyway, back in 1964, a gentleman drove into the shop area in a 1950 Chevy. He said it had been missing 'for a while', so I began checking plugs, plug wires, distributor cap...... The usual stuff. And then I noticed that it had thrown #2 rod. What was left of the big end of the rod was stuck in a hole it had broken through the side of the block. The triangular shaped piece of the block that broke off was hanging to the side, still held in place by a couple of oil pan bolts. Somehow, the rod was high enough that the crank was able to rotate without hitting it.

Well, I called the yard owner over and after surveying the damage...... He told the fellow that we could pull a good 235 engine from a '54 he had there, install it and have him back on the road by the end of the day for $50.00 bucks. And he would guarantee the engine against defects for 30 days. Such a deal!

But the gentleman just listened to his sales pitch, shook his head and said, 'Too much money'. Then he got into his Chevy and drove off down the road. We never saw him again. No telling how long he drove it that way.

Best regards,

Harry