I am going to reach into racetrack terms to introduce this essay. At tracks where horses and dogs race each other, there is a highlight of the afternoon called the Trifecta. This means that when a bettor picks the winners of the Trifecta, he will be rewarded with extra cash. I have been to the racetracks only three times in my life. There were two occasions when I visited a horse racetrack and one where dogs raced.
For my money, an afternoon at the racetrack was a wasted experience. There are 30 to 45 minute waits for the next race to occur. In the meantime, the track encourages everybody to have another drink or to buy a bettor’s guide that will guarantee winners in every race. That of course does not happen. But for this essay, I am borrowing the Trifecta term for the Silver Dollar Blues.
In this essay there will be three parts. The first has to do with memories of my father and his attachment to silver dollars. The second part of the Trifecta will have to do with a technical description of what “the blues” really means. I will make this as short as possible. Finally, the last leg of the Trifecta will have to do with lyrics from the song, “The Silver Dollar Blues.”
So as Ed Schultz of television fame would say, “Let’s get to work.”
The first part of this Trifecta has to do with my father, who was also named Ezra. As I have reported earlier, our relations – son to father – were more or less cordial but there are no two ways to explain that relationship except to say that we were strangers to the end. My father died when I was 36 years old and for the last several years of his life I lived in Kansas City, Chicago, and then in New York. So I didn’t see as much of him as I would have liked. But as time has gone on, I find myself often thinking about my father. He was a man who had a second-grade education in a rural school. I am fairly certain that he could read but I suspect that he could not write. He was an honest man who succeeded by dint of his hard work.
I suspect that the highlight of his life occurred somewhere between 1906 and 1925. He had gained employment at the Lilac Roost Dairy Farm in Clayton, Missouri. Prior to the farm’s closing in 1925, he was its superintendent. I suspect that this pleased him no end because it had to do with farming. But the owners of the farm sold the business and converted the farmland into a subdivision. The owners of the farm were Sam and Dwight Davis. It was Dwight Davis who donated the Davis Cup which for many years was awarded to supremacy in tennis. My father then found employment with the Evans Howard Refractory until 1930, when he was, along with everyone else, laid off.
One of his idiosyncrasies was that he never wore a belt. He insisted that the proper attire for males was the use of suspenders. He did not have any philosophical misgivings about a belt but until his dying day he wore only a pair of suspenders.
Somewhere along about 1935, he landed a job in a large subdivision to keep the grounds in first-class shape. The pay was $25 per week for six days of work, and it paid every two weeks. There was an occasion when I was with my parents and he asked an official at a clothing store to cash his check. I remember that the place was located on Olive Street Road. I do not know why they used the terms street and road in the same designation. But I suspect that Olive Street Road still exists.
The official at the store said the check was for $50. He complimented my father on his ability to earn that much money. My father was very quick to point out the check represented payment for two weeks of work.
Now we get to the point at which my father’s entrance into this essay becomes necessary. In the summer of 1942, I volunteered to serve in the United States Army Air Corps. The Air Corps has long since been superseded by the United States Air Force. But in any event, my enlistment was with the United States Army Air Corps.
On the night before I was to report for duty, my father asked me to meet him at his roll-top desk that he kept in the dining room. For complete purists, this event took place no later than 8:00 PM because my father went to bed at that hour. You will recall that my father and I were strangers in most respects until the end. As I appeared at the roll-top desk, he turned to me in a very solemn manner. He handed me a silver dollar with the date of 1881. He and I both knew that 1881 was the year of his birth. My father was a taciturn man who didn’t waste words. As he handed me the silver dollar, he said, “I want you to keep this so that you will never be broke.” Being broke was a catastrophic event in my father’s life. He did not want his last child to go through this experience.
I carried that silver dollar in my right-hand pants pocket until a catastrophic event overtook me. My recollection is that on December 8, 1943, we were sent on a mission to bomb the rail marshalling yards at Ancona, Italy. My theory of this raid as with all of the others that involved the A20 aircraft was that we were to come in so low that we would be under the angle of deflection of the anti-aircraft guns. This means that the anti-aircraft guns were firing over our heads. What we did not know was that there was a collection of Messerschmitt 109 and Focke-Wulf 190 fighters waiting for us to complete our bomb run. The long and the short of it is that we were shot down, which is not an unusual event. In this case, the German fighters had information about the raid and we were the losers.
The German soldiers who were to become our captors were glad to see us. In the first place, I was wearing a leather flying jacket. That jacket disappeared instantly. When the soldiers began to look at our belongings, they spotted the silver dollar almost immediately. There is a similar coin in European currency called the Maria Theresa. All that I can say is that somewhere in Germany there is an ex-soldier’s home with an 1881 silver dollar that I assume he probably showed off.
So I thought that I would never see that silver dollar again and that was the case. My father did not trust currency other than the U.S. silver dollar. Obviously, he distrusted checks. The silver dollar represented real money to my father and he always had a small supply of such dollars in his roll-top desk.
I often thought that with my father requesting to be paid in silver dollars, they would be too heavy for his suspenders to hold up his pants. But he never got paid in silver dollars of course.
In December of 1944, I was very fortunate to be a crew chief on the oldest airplane in the European theater. It was to be taken home and refurbished and to be used for a war bond drive. That period in my life is covered in two or three other essays, so I will not trouble you with it at this point. At any rate, when I arrived back in the United States in December of 1944, I made a beeline to the St. Louis County Bank. They had no 1881 silver dollars but did have a collection of 1922 silver dollars. That of course is my year of birth. So I took one and showed it to my father, who seemed pleased. And with that thought, the first leg in this Trifecta has now been completed.
Now we can turn to the technical explanation of what constitutes the blues. At this point, I will tend to bail out because I know absolutely nothing about the technical description of the blues. Miss Chicka, my wife, is an accomplished pianist and organist. But Miss Chicka says that she is in way over her head when it comes to this technical description. So it is offered here in the hope that you will either ignore it or that you may even understand it.
“The Blues is an American form of folk music related to jazz. It is based on a simple, repetitive, poetic-musical structure. The sound is based on the Blue Note, or a slight drop of pitch on the third, seventh, and sometimes the fifth tone of the scale. It is also known as a bent pitch. The Blues Scale is typically a diatonic major scale incorporating a lowered or bent 3rd, a lowered or bent 7th and sometimes a lowered or bent 5th to approximate melodic notes that originated in African work songs.” Source: Virginia Tech Multimedia Music Dictionary
With that, we can now proceed to the final leg in this Trifecta, the song.
Technically the song is called, “A Man without a Woman.” It was written by Alfred Williams in 1907. So when you sing this song, you may point out that it is over 100 years old.
The lyrics go like this:
A man without a woman is like a ship without a sail
Like a boat without a rudder, a kite without a tail.
A man without a woman is like a wreck upon the sand.
If there’s one thing worse in this universe,
It’s a woman, it’s a woman, a woman without a man.
You can roll a silver dollar across the bar room floor,
It will roll because it’s round.
A woman never knows what a good man she’s got
‘Til she puts him down.
So won’t you listen, my honey, listen to me.
I want you to understand.
Just like a silver dollar goes from hand to hand,
A woman goes from man to man.
I seriously suspect that the line about “a woman goes from man to man” would not make that song acceptable to the current generation. But I am only the simple purveyor of lyrics that have stood the test of time since 1907.
There you have the final leg in the Trifecta. I am still enamored of silver dollars. The last one I had was taken by my wife to a jeweler who put a gold ring around its edges. I have carried that silver dollar so long that the edges have been worn off. So that silver dollar with the gold edges is now attached to a bright new gold chain. On the other end, it was attached to a pocket watch which had been given to me by AT&T upon the completion of 40 years of service.
So the silver dollar with the gold rim acts as a fob and anchors the big pocket watch. If one of the Carr grandchildren ever marries, I will offer to loan – loan them the use of this watch and fob that are the proper accoutrements for a vest, which I assume must always be worn at a wedding.
One other thought about my father. He thought that men who wore wristwatches were “queer.” As a linguist, you might like to know that “queer” preceded the word “gay.”
I am very happy that I have had the opportunity to tell all my readers about the Silver Dollar Blues. I love the music of the blues. When that music is attached to something like the silver dollar that I have carried for a number of years, it is totally irresistible.
“A silver dollar falls on the ground and it rolls because it’s round.”
Man, there is no way that you can beat songs like that.
E. E. CARR
September 3, 2012
Essay 691
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Kevin’s commentary:
This is one of my all-time favorites of Pop’s essays. I just think it strikes a really solid balance between subjects.
If the Olive Street Road in question is in St. Louis, it certainly still exists. If it is elsewhere I hope that Pop tells me what city that it is in so I can attempt to find it on Google maps, because I’m curious.
Unrelatedly I have reason to believe that none of the Carr grandchildren will be getting married anytime soon. That task would nominally fall first to Connor (as the oldest) and that doesn’t appear to be in the cards in the near future. Perhaps he will not appreciate me posting this. So it goes. Also on this subject I think Pop is lucky to have had five grandsons and zero granddaughters, ensuring that if even one of the five of us gets married he will have an occasion to loan out his watch. Having met all of the five boys in question however, I am pretty confident that the odds of a marriage anytime soon are substantially lower than readers may expect.
There are plenty of other great things in this essay (like the entire discussion of suspenders) but for whatever reason, the most striking thing to me was the revlation that my grandmother is an adept pianist — she has in my recollection never given us a demonstration. Judy, as you read this I hope you will consider playing for everyone at the earliest available opportunity. That is all.