Category: Time Travel

The Noir Stylings of Mr. Jack Delano

cladriteLeave a comment

We don’t often share Shorpy photos because, well, they’ve got a huge online presence in their own right, so we figure plenty of you already see the images they share without us riding on their coattails.

But we couldn’t resist sharing this one. Though it was shot on the street, it looks like a still from a classic film noir that we’ve somehow not yet seen (though we’d happily line up to buy a ticket, if we could).

Here’s the info: December 1942. “Chicago, Illinois. An unusually heavy fog in the early afternoon.” Photo by Jack Delano for the Office of War Information.

Nice going, Mr. Delano. Nice going, indeed.

December 1942. 'Chicago, Illinois. An unusually heavy fog in the early afternoon.' Photo by Jack Delano for the Office of War Information.

Cheers and Godspeed to the World’s Oldest Barber, Anthony Mancinelli

cladrite7 Comments

Read the story of our first visit with Anthony, in 2012.

Just weeks after finally calling it a career after 96 years of cutting hair, Anythony Mancinelli passed away in his Newburgh, New York, home on September 19, 2019. We will miss him.

It’s been said that if you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.

If that’s so, Anthony Mancinelli, recognized as the world’s oldest barber by the Guinness Book of World Records, has been not-working for the past 95 years.

That’s right, Mancinelli, who turned 107 on March 2, 2018, has been barbering since 1923, when he was just 12 years old. Calvin Coolidge was president, and barbers still offered such services as bloodletting (with leeches), wart removal and cupping. There’s no longer a demand for those services, but Mancinelli still has the tools he used back in the day and he is happy to show them to the curious.

“I used to have a bottle of leeches on my counter, and I would put them on people’s skin to drain blood,” Mancinelli told The New York Times in 2010. “In those days, while giving a haircut, I would put a leech over a black eye to bring down the swelling, or on the arm of someone who had high blood pressure because the thinking was their pressure might drop.”

Mancinelli was born in 1911 near Naples, Italy, and eight years later sailed to the United States with his family, arriving in New York on September 11, 1919. Because an aunt lived there, the Mancinellis settled in Newburgh, New York, just eight miles from New Windsor, where Anthony currently resides.

“This country gave me an opportunity to do everything in life,” said Mancinelli. “It’s up to the [individual] to take up something, to do something to make things better for themselves as well as the country. This country gave me all the opportunities in the world to do it.”
So how did he get into barbering at such a young age?

With his father, a felt worker, supporting a wife, seven sons and a daughter on just $25 a week, young Mancinelli announced that he was going to go out and get a job.

“My father said, ‘What kind of a job are you going to get?’,” said Mancinelli. “‘Well, I’m going to deliver morning papers, then I’ll deliver afternoon papers, then after that, I’ll see if I can get a job to learn the barber business.’

“I went to the one of the barbershops here, and I asked ‘[the owner] if he would teach me the barber business. He said yes, so I stood with him and I learned the barber business… His name was Joseph Turi.

“I don’t know why I chose the barber business, but I thought it was a good profession, so I said, ‘I’ll try it out and see how I like it.'”

In those days, Mancinelli arose at 4 a.m. to deliver the morning paper and then came home for breakfast before heading off to school. After school, he delivered the afternoon paper, after which he would spend a few hours at the barber shop. Finally, at 8 p.m., he would head home, where his mother had an evening meal waiting for him, after which, he said, “I would go right to bed!”

That’s a pretty grueling schedule for anyone, but considering Mancinelli was 12 years old at the time, it’s especially impressive.

Having served an apprenticeship and learned his trade, Mancinelli opened his own shop in 1930; he was just 19 years old.
Read More »

Bohemians in the Attic: In Search of Ruth Larson Hatcher

cladrite7 Comments

Ruth, age 12, as seen in the 1924-25 Clinton (Oklahoma) High School yearbook

Our mom used to mention an Aunt Ruth, her mother’s sister, who lived in Taos, New Mexico, and was an artist. We’d met Ruth on a couple of occasions, she assured us, but we had been so young at the time, we had (and still have) no recollection of those encounters.

But as we grew into adulthood and came to more greatly appreciate creative types—bohemians, as they are sometimes called—we began to wonder about Aunt Ruth and to fervently wish we could at the very least see some of her artwork, which Mom had led us to understand would be paintings.

We did an internet search every few years but never turned anything up, in large part because didn’t know her last name (we assumed she’d been married at some point).

We even included a heavily fictionalized version of Aunt Ruth in one entry in Men My Mother Dated and Other Mostly True Tales, the collection of humorous essays and stories we published some years back. In this particular tale, Ruth and her husband lived not in Taos, but in Amarillo, Texas, where they operated a roadside eatery. The story had it that Mom, feeling restless as her senior year in high school approached, was given permission to spend the summer with Aunt Ruth and work as a waitress in the diner.

As the story progresses, Mom meets Jack Kerouac, who is traveling south from Denver with Neal Cassady to visit William S. Burroughs in Mexico City. A mildly fictionalized account of that trip is found in Kerouac’s novel On the Road, but Mom’s encounter with Kerouac isn’t, of course, mentioned there, since it never happened (except in the pages of our book).

In recent years, we’ve become an avid (if entirely amateur) genealogist, digging gleefully into the various branches of our family tree via ancestry.com and other similar sites. But only very recently did we make any serious progress in learning more about Aunt Ruth, who was, it turns out, a citizen of some prominence in Taos, so much so that one Mary Alden penned a 1,000-word profile of her for The Taos News that was published on March 4, 1999, nearly a month after Ruth passed away.

From that profile, we learned much more than we’d ever known about Ruth (which was admittedly next to nothing).
Read More »

The B. C. Clark Jingle: A Christmas Tradition Continues, Year Nine

cladriteLeave a comment

It’s that time of year again, folks, when we share the B. C. Clark holiday jingle with you.

B. C. Clark Jingle: A holiday advertisementLongtime Cladrite Radio readers and listeners will recall that the sharing of the B. C. Clark jingle is something of a Christmas tradition here. 2017 marks the ninth year we’ve spread the holiday spirit in this fashion.

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 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 become the norm on local television.

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 (a bit outside Cladrite Radio’s typical time frame, 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. And here’s a fun fact: the good folks at B. C. Clark paid just $300 for the jingle back in the day—that’s $2,681.12 in 2017 dollars, a pretty sweet bargain for a jingle that’s been a favorite of Oklahomans everywhere for more than six decades.

So for 62 years, denizens of central Oklahoma have been humming along to this catchy ditty, and it’s our pleasure to share this holiday highlight with folks from other parts of the country (and around the world).

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).

Happy National Drive-in Day!

cladriteLeave a comment

The first movie ever screened at a drive-in, 84 years ago tonight in Camden, New Jersey, was a 1932 Adolphe Menjou picture called Wives Beware.

Except that wasn’t the original name of the movie; it was originally titled Two White Arms. The name was changed for the reissue.

So on National Drive-in Day, we share with you a recording of Menjou performing the title song from that movie. Warning: Menjou was a much better actor than a singer. But unless and until the movie, long considered a lost film, is found, this recording is as close as drive-in fans will get to experiencing it.