It’s that time of year again, folks.

Longtime readers will recall that the sharing of the B.C. Clark anniversary sale jingle is something of a holiday tradition here at Cladrite Radio. 2011 marks the third year we’ve shared it with you.

Anyone who grew (or is currently growing) up in the Oklahoma City area knows that it’s just not the Christmas season until you’ve heard the B. C. Clark Christmas jingle on television or the radio at least once.

Below are two versions of the jingle—the original, which is admittedly of lower audio quality, and a later version—the one currently heard on radio and TV in the Oklahoma City area—which arguably sounds a bit better, but drops one line late in the song (“The Christmas wish of B. C. Clark is to keep on pleasing you…”), because 30-second commercials had became the norm on local television.

Original B. C. Clark Jingle

Revised B. C. Clark Jingle

B. C. Clark, for the non-Okies among you, is a jewelry retailer that’s been in operation in the Sooner State since 1892, and since 1956 (just one year outside Cladrite Radio’s purview, but we’re stretching a point for the holidays), they’ve been running the aforementioned jingle advertising their annual sale, which takes place not after Christmas, like most stores (or so the jingle’s lyrics insist), but just before.

So for 55 years, denizens of central Oklahoma have been humming along to this catchy ditty, and it’s now our pleasure to share this holiday highlight with folks from other parts of the country (and around the world).

Ms. Cladrite, who grew up in New Jersey, has the darned thing memorized after just three or four Christmas seasons’ exposure to this seasonal delight and can sing along whenever it’s played.

It’s just that catchy a tune.

But be forewarned — listen more than two or three times, and you’ll be hooked, no matter how far away you live from the nearest B.C. Clark location. And soon, as with the millions of Okies who have come to associate this venerable jingle with the Christmas season, you’ll come to feel that it just isn’t the holidays until you’ve heard the jingle once or twice (or a dozen times).

There’s a antique mall in an old farmer’s market building in downtown Oklahoma City that we try to get to whenever we’re home visiting the family, and in that mall is a particular store that we make it a point to patronize. The owner’s kind of an old grump and some of his stuff’s overpriced, but he has plenty of the sort of paper ephemera we like, and we usually find something to covet, if not purchase.

The last time we were in his store, we stumbled upon a shelf filled with piano rolls of the 1920s and ’30s, and our heart skipped a beat. They were much more reasonably priced than many of his other offerings, and the titles were right up our alley, many of them songs frequently heard on Cladrite Radio.

It’s one of the few regrets we have about residing in New York City: Space is at a premium, and we simply don’t have room for a player piano. Would that we did. We’d snap up a couple of dozen of that old grump’s piano rolls in a heartbeat

But we did recently learn of a YouTube channel that eases the pain a bit. AeolianHall1 is the poster’s handle, and his or her channel features a delightful roster of piano roll recordings from the 1930s, the 1920s, and even earlier.

We thought we’d share one of our favorites with you, Pauline Albert’s recording of Irving Berlin‘s 1927 hit “The Song Is Ended (but the Meolody Lingers On). But you really should make it a point to pop over and give AeolianHall1′s extensive collection a good listen.

As the Pitch Perfect series continues, today we feature a 1949 collection of advertising slogans used to market cities and civic campaigns.

America’s birthplace (Plymouth Colony Assn.), Plymouth, Wisc.
America’s dairyland (Wisconsin).
America’s home town (Plymouth Colony Assn.).
America’s lake country (The Thousand Lakes Assn.), St. Paul.
America’s Mediterranean (Miami Shores), Miami.
America’s only tropics (Coral Gables), Miami.
At the seashore, in the country, near the city (Lido Beach), New York.

Inside the sins of adventure (Manitoba, Canada).
Isle of June (Nassau Development Board, Nassau).
It is profitable to produce in Massachusetts.
Read more

One thing we love about New York City is the through line that connects those who once lived here with the eight million residing here currently.

In our hometown of Oklahoma City, this connection is tenuous at best. It’s not that easy to find recognizable locations, sites, and structures in old pictures of OKC—it’s just not that old a town. If somehow a Oklahoma Cityan of 1910 could time travel to the present day, we’re not sure he or she would find much that was recognizable.

But a New Yorker traveling to the present from 1910, while he’d still be amazed by all the changes that had taken place, could find plenty of recognizable landmarks: The Statue of Liberty, the Flatiron Building, City Hall, Bowling Green, the Great Hall at Cooper Union, Carnegie Hall, the city’s great parks—we could go on and on.

And there are thousands of small residential buildings still in use that were around 100 years ago, too.

We recently spent a little time browsing the photography collection at the Museum of the City of New York’s web site, and we were delighted to find a 1921 photograph of the old Allerton House at 22nd Street and Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, which is right down the street from Cladrite HQ.

	Allerton House, Southwest Corner of Eighth Avenue and 22nd Street. Byron Company (New York, NY). From the collections of the Museum of the City of New York.

When we moved to this neighborhood twenty-one years ago, the Allerton was what is often referred to as a welfare hotel. Folks who were down on their luck lived there under the auspices of the city’s social services organizations. We unfamiliar with the hotel’s history, and we sometimes wondered how that once-proud structure had come to suffer its then-current fate, just as we often mused over how the folks who resided there found themselves down on their luck.

Years passed, and the hotel was sold. It’s since been spruced up (though, thankfully, the exterior has not been noticably changed) and is now a semi-fancy hotel called the Gem.

It’s perhaps a reflection of the current economic times that the two commercial spaces on the ground floor of the Gem have remained empty, except for an occasional pop-up art exhibit, over the two or three years the hotel’s been in operation. At least when it was still called the Allerton and served as something of a timeworn sanctuary for folks trying to get back on their feet, there was a Subway sandwich shop in the ground floor.

But what we really wish was still taking up the ground floor of the Gem was the haberdashery that occupied that space in 1920. If you go to the MCNY web site, you can see an enlarged version of the picture we’ve shared with you above, and, in that hi-res version, you’ll see what we mean. The windows of the clothing are filled with men’s shirts and suits and, best of all, literally dozens of men’s hats—fedoras, bowlers, derbies, you name it.

Oh, how we wish that shop were still in operation, but of course, when we say that, what we really mean is that we wish the still-operational shop would be selling the very wares in which they were trafficking in 1920, and that wouldn’t, of course, be the case, even if the shop had somehow managed to survived all these years.

Still, one can dream, no?

We posted the following a year ago, but we figure it’s worth making a perennial of it.

We wish we could embed the jingle discussed below, rather than linking to it, but take our word for it—it’s a link worth fallowing (take a tip from us and click on the “Original Jingle” first. It includes a line that was excised from later versions of the song).

Anyone who grew (or is currently growing) up in the Oklahoma City area knows that it’s just not the Christmas season until you’ve heard the B.C. Clark Christmas jingle on television or the radio at least once.

B.C. Clark, for the non-Okies among you, is a jewelry store that’s been in operation in the Sooner State since 1892, and since 1956 (just one year outside Cladrite Radio’s purview, but we’re stretching a point for the holidays), they’ve been running the aforementioned jingle advertising their annual sale, which takes place not after Christmas, like most stores (or so the lyrics to the jingle insist), but just before.

So for 54 years, denizens of central Oklahoma have been humming along to this catchy ditty, and it’s now our pleasure to share this holiday highlight with folks from other parts of the country (and around the world).

Ms. Cladrite, who grew up in New Jersey, has the darned thing memorized after just two or three Christmas seasons’ exposure to this seasonal delight and can sing along whenever it’s played.

It’s just that catchy a tune.

If we’ve managed to pique your interest, just follow this link. You can hear the original version from the ’50s, compare that to a more recent recording of the song, and even watch an animated television commercial that features the jingle.

But be forewarned — watch or listen more than two or three times, and you’ll be hooked, no matter how far away you live from the nearest B.C. Clark location. And soon, as with the millions of Okies who have come to associate the Christmas season with this venerable jingle, you’ll come to feel that it just isn’t the holidays each year until you’ve heard the jingle once or twice (or a dozen times).