My mom, door-to-door salespeople, and the clarinet: tooting in the 1950s and 1960s
My 1950s and 1960s Georgetown childhood was characterized by cacophony, including rumpus and din on our little subdivision street where a knife sharpener man would ring his bell; where the breadman would dart from home to home distributing succulent baked goods with a cheery nod and greeting; where a horse-drawn dairy vehicle would clop along the street bringing the milkman with his clatter of colliding bottles; and where the Good Humour Man would pull up his cart in summer to the delight of a swarm of sweet-toothed tots craving frosty delights in the sweltering heat.
There were also strange and uncouth door-to-door vendors milling around the street, including a motley crew of gadget peddlers of all stripes; persistent book salesmen hawking the World Book Encyclopedia and other compendiums of fact and lore; the iconic Fuller Brush Man with his treasure trove of mops, vacuums, waxes, polishes, dusters, and cleaners; and the smarmy, ding-dong Avon-calling Lady lugging a sample case replete with a vast array of cosmetics, fragrances, and accessories.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Fuller
https://nostalgiacentral.com/pop-culture/fads/avon-ladies/
My mother was an easy mark for every vendor who appeared at the door. She couldn’t resist their Siren call.
And so it was that Mom acquired every sort of book and gadget. As a first-generation Canadian of Polish extraction who had been made to feel ashamed of her roots, she laboured mightily to become the ideal, fully-equipped suburban housewife and a cookie-cutter mother with all the trimmings.
This is how she fell prey to the music-lessons man who showed up like a predatory wraith on our doorstop in the fall of 1963 and convinced my mom that her eleven-year-old son needed to learn to play the clarinet.
Mom was very ambitious for her kids so the package-deal transaction was promptly completed on an ostensible high note; she fell for vendor’s well-rehearsed song and dance routine. Thus the musical instrument, weekly lessons, an instruction book featuring tunes of ever-increasing difficulty called Easy Steps to the Band, and other various paraphernalia were acquired with money my parents didn’t have.
Now my paternal grandfather was a professional musician – having been a clarinet player in the British army– and my dad played piano and sang lustily in the United Church choir and all of Georgetown’s epic musicals organized by the local musical impresario, Mr. Ken Harrison, so I had huge shoes to fill.
This I could not do.
I grew to hate the clarinet and all that came with it: the hours of forced practice, which cut into my baseball and hockey playtime; the disgusting reeds and the bilge-like spittle and gunk that filled the instrument and had to be expunged; the honking and squeaking that inevitably accompanied any tuneless apprenticeship; the brutally banal ditties and hymns that were staple fare for learners, such as “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” and “Abide with Me”; and most of all, the fact that my parents forced me to perform like a trained seal for visiting relatives, who had to sit through these squawking recitals with a rictus of feigned benevolence pasted on their faces.
My dad was convinced that I needed to master the “licorice stick” in order to perpetuate family tradition, whereas I only wanted to play saxophone like Fred MacMurray in the tv series “My Three Sons.”
This musical ordeal continued after we moved to London, Ontario, in the summer of 1964. I knew that my clarinet playing was for the birds, but my folks insisted that I continue lessons and that I check off music as my high school elective.
It quickly became apparent to Mr. Don Jones, the kindly music instructor at Oakridge Secondary School, that I was a dissonant dud, and he kept demoting me to lower echelons of the junior band, before offering me a sinecure as bass clarinet player, where I traded in my licorice stick for a humongous honking instrument upon which I was only required to tootle about three notes like a hard-wired mechanical goose.
The days of the honk concluded with a whimper soon enough and the pesky clarinet was passed on to my sister, who squeaked and squawked desultory serenades for a couple of years in high school, before abandoning the offending licorice stick to charity.
In my case, mom and dad soon had bigger musical fish to fry as I moved on from pious hymns and schmaltzy ditties to hardcore rock and roll in those long-lost years of the 1960s.
Your friend,
Robert
https://robertmcbrydeauthor.com/
