Glossary

I want to thank my friend and colleague Mark Leffler for alerting me to the fact that some of the people who buy this book won’t have a clue about my profusion of cultural references. The Battle of Kursk? The Moonglows? Mel Allen? What dat boy talking about? So I hereby offer this key to early 1960s American culture.

A

Aldrich, Henry
This was the lead character in a corny radio sit-com nearing the end of its run in the early fifties. It was called The Aldrich Family, and was about a “typical teenager” who, essentially, acted like an asshole for thirty minutes each week. It had a famous opening — the boy’s mom calling “Hen . . . reeee! Henry Aldrich!”

Allen, Mel
He was the “Voice of the Yankees” through the 1950s, my time of maximum baseball worship. He was a big, hearty fellow with a ready smile, or so he seemed on TV. As the shows were sponsored in part by a beer, he’d refer to home runs as “Ballantine blasts.” And when something really cool happened, he’d drawl, “Well, how about that!” He was a well-liked guy, at least by us Yankees fans.

Anka, Paul
See Bobby Rydell.

B

Baldwin, James
He was a gay, black writer at a time when it was unwise to be either. His major books were Go Tell It on the Mountain and The Fire Next Time. My terminally bigoted father didn’t know which quality repelled him more, the blackness or the gayness, but he sure knew he didn’t like the guy. I myself dug his books. He was an odd-looking guy whose somewhat bulbous eyes made him resemble a rabbit frozen in the headlights.

The Basie Band
The Count came up in wide-open, gangster-ridden, jazz-spawning Kansas City of the 1930s. He formed and led the Count Basie Big Band from the mid-1930s until 1980. They especially kicked ass in the later thirties when they featured tenor sax god Lester Young, and in the late fifties, early sixties when they were known as the Atomic Band. The latter group I once witnessed blow the roof off of Birdland, the great Manhattan jazz club. Another band had opened for them, and when Basie drummer Sonny Paine came out to sit before his kit he found they had been readjusted to a lower height for the previous drummer. “Who set up these drums?” he complained. “Rumplestilskin?”

Batista
Fulgencio Batista was the dictator who ruled Cuba before Fidel Castro took over in 1959. He was a real son of a bitch, cozy with the American gangsters who ran the casinos, dope, and vice down there. Castro threw all those guys out, then started a dictatorship of his own. Nobody’s sweetheart, but at least he gave a shit about the Cuban people, which Batista sure didn’t.

The Battle of Kursk
This go-to between the German and Russian armies in 1943 was the greatest tank battle of all time. Millions of grim troops were involved. Probably more horrendous explosions per square inch than anywhere else, ever. It stands as one of those ultimate military hells, along with the Battle of Verdun and the Retreat from the Chosin Reservoir (which see).

Beiderbecke, Bix
Bix may have been the first great American cult-hero musician. His field was jazz and in the Roaring Twenties this handsome young man from Davenport, Iowa, played trumpet in a contrasting manner to the pre-eminent style of the day, the hot New Orleans blowing of Louis Armstrong and others. Indeed, Bix is one root of Miles Davis, as he introduced cool, spare playing to an instrument often blown with excess fire and flamboyance. Too bad there’s not much of his stuff recorded orthophonically — mostly it’s that tinny sound from the twenties, when audio was primitive.

Berger, Senta
This lovely Austrian actress made a number of Hollywood films of no particular note in the sixties and has produced and acted in movies in Germany ever since. At the time Alby was naming his date after her, she was twenty years old and turning up on the odd American TV drama—quite a fetching dish of weiner schnitzel.

Bergman, Ingmar
One of the 20th century’s great film directors, Bergman released a string of movies from the late forties to the late seventies that dazzled the world. He was easy to parody because he was so gloomy and ruminative. The three-in-a-row combo of The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, and The Magician were simply black-and-white magic, dream-logic, experiences that seemed to work on you from the inside out. The gorgeous cinematography of Gunnar Fischer, and later Sven Nyqvist, was always a plus in Bergman movies, and — hoo-boy! — did they ever feature Actresses of Scandanavian Pulchritude. Ah, the sexy, gamin charm of Bibi Andersson; the classic Nordic beauty of Ingrid Thulin; the generous endowment of dark-haired, profoundly-erotic Gunnel Lindbloom. In 1963, Gunnel went topless for a moment in The Silence and the hearts of young, male moviegoers everywhere leapt.

Berra, Yogi
Yogi is, of course, the lovable, funny-looking Yankee catcher who supposedly continually spouted indelible phrases like “It’s deja-vu all over again” and “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” What is less remembered is that Yogi was one of the greatest ballplayers of all time, a three-time MVP and Hall of Famer who has played in more World Series games than any other ballplayer, up to the present day. He is still with us, as of this writing, and serves as a beloved Yankee gnome, linking the great franchise of today to that blow-em-all-away team of the fifties.

Sergeant Bilko
Bilko, portrayed by longtime comedian Phil Silvers, was the star of one of the best and most popular sit-coms of the fifties, You’ll Never Get Rich. He was the ever-scheming con-man sergeant of a platoon of misfits, one of whom — the happy slob-nebbish — was known as Doberman.

Bosch, Hieronymus
The original psychedelic artist, Bosch, in the late 1400s and early 1500s, painted canvases that were like bad acid trips, hellish visions filled with demons, mutilation, and despair. I hope he was able to leave all that shit at the office sometimes and, you know, enjoy his evenings once in a while.

Brown, Ruth
That song played at the AD house on rush night, “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean,” was a great, ass-kicking R & B song way back in 1953. Ruth was a player, there at the birth of rock ‘n’ roll. Died recently. Goodbye, Ruth. Thanks for the tunes.

Brubeck
This is Dave Brubeck, a jazz pianist who, during the fifties, enjoyed wide popularity on college campuses and elsewhere. His music was advanced tonally and polyrhythmically, and wasn’t much like what anyone else was doing. For going his own way, he reaped a certain amount of derision from the orthodox jazz world, but never let it bother him. The sax star that played with him was Paul Desmond, whose relaxed, cool, smacked-out style was instantly identifiable and a complete delight. I remember him leaning against the piano while playing to keep from falling over.

Bruce, Lenny
How does one describe Lenny Bruce in a paragraph? He was the Charlie Parker of comedy, took it to a new level. Practically every comic working today worships (and steals from) him. Comedy is always close to jazz, the improvisatory aspect of it and so forth, but never closer than with Lenny. His synapses were just faster than anyone else’s, and he took things two or three times further out than his contemporaries. Even today, when I listen to him, he sounds hipper than the room. And, never forget, he smashed the cultural and legal barriers to using “obscene language” in public as part of his schtick. Without Lenny Bruce, no Lampoon, no Animal House, no me.

C

Camus, Albert
He was one of those gloomy, post-war, existentialist French writers, a contemporary of Jean-Paul Sartre. His many cheerful reads include The Plague, The Fall, and Nausea. He had a handsome, world-weary face and a cool manner. The ADs would probably have paid more attention to him if they knew he was a champion of the absurd who once declared “Always go too far, for that is where you will find the truth.”

Cannon, Freddy “Boom-Boom”
A truly loathsome rocker wannabe, Freddy gave us the execrable “Tallahassee Lassie.” He had about as much class as a dick wearing Groucho Marx glasses.

The Cardinals
No, not a conclave of Catholic guys in red robes but another of those fifties R & B vocal groups named after birds. The first one was the Orioles, who began recording in 1948. There soon followed the Ravens, the Robins, the Penguins (who wore tuxedos), the Swallows, the Eagles (the original, black Eagles), the Flamingos, the Crows, the Meadowlarks, and many, many more. The Cardinals sang some beautiful shit but were regional, a New York group. They never attained national prominence. And today they are brain surgeons.

Cerberus
He’s the dog-creature that guards the entrance to Hades in Greek mythology. He’s got three heads, so better not fuck with him.

Chan, Charlie
He was a fictional Chinese-American police detective, portrayed in dozens of movies in the 1930s and 1940s by a string of white men. Nonetheless, Charlie was treated with dignity and respect, and comes off pretty well, even today. He was always aided by Number One Son, and loved him his maxims, spoken in a wise, patient voice. “Waiting for tomorrow waste of today.” Right on, Charlie!

Charles, Ray
The Genius of Soul was a huge musical force for over fifty years in every form of American music except maybe polka bands. He lit up my teenage years with his great blues and R & B singles. By the time I got to Dartmouth, he was a superstar and was exploring other forms: the velvety pop of The Genius of Ray Charles; the achingly soulful country of Modern Sounds in Country & Western Music; the hot, sexy duets on Ray Charles and Betty Carter; the brash, exuberant hard bop of Geuius + Soul = Jazz. He could do anything! Since he was blind, there were lots of jokes made about him falling over piano benches but I don’t think it ever really happened.

Chinos
Khaki-colored pants. Trim and kinda preppie. Dartmouth guys at the time of my book wore them all the time.

Clift, Montgomery
As with so much else, there was a sea change in Hollywood leading men after World War II. They became twitchier, edgier, less overtly heroic. Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire, for instance, or James Dean in anything. The first of these guys to emerge was Mongomery Clift. In 1948, in Red River, his post-war coolness was a great foil for John Wayne’s belligerent, tyranical cattle rancher. Too bad their final fight is broken up by dopey Joanne Dru. What a stupid ending. Anyway, apparently too sensitive for his own good, Clift gradually got deeper into prescription drugs, alcohol, and anything else he could get his hands on, including sex partners of both genders. He went down the tubes in 1966.

The Clovers
Another Atlantic Records R & B group. They had a string of hits during the first half of the fifties. Their sound was bluesier than most of the vocal groups at that time, which veered closer to the smooth, Caucasion-friendly Ink Spots than to downhome blues. Their most famous song, though, was not bluesy at all—the very Coasters-like “Love Potion Number Nine.”

The Coasters
Probably the most popular of all fifties black vocal groups — along with the Platters, they sold the most records — the Coasters worked with, and sang the songs of, Leiber and Stoller, who composed some of the best rock ‘n’ roll songs of the day. The Coasters started as the Robins. They made a few fine sides, most memorably “Smokey Joe’s Café.” Then, with a partial switch of members, they became an institution. Who doesn’t know “Charlie Brown,” “Along Came Jones,” and “Poison Ivy?” What, you don’t? Google them immediately and give yourself a treat! And don’t give me any shit about being old-school.

Cobb, Lee J.
The thick-lipped, pissed-off bigot in the 1957 film 12 Angry Men. The brutal labor union boss in On the Waterfront who kicks the shit out of Marlon Brando. Usually a villain or at least a loud-mouthed asshole, Lee J. Cobb was an important American character actor from the late thirties to the late seventies. Maybe his high point was his creation of the Willy Loman character in Arthur Miller’s 1949 play Death of a Salesman. Willy, in the confusion and misery caused by his doomed pursuit of the wealth and success of the American dream, would occasionally, after becoming sloppily drunk, schtupp some sorry bimbo on the road. He is what Pinto did not want to be like.

Colby Junior College
This was the nearest girl’s school to Dartmouth and hence very popular indeed. Sometimes, “cattle drives” were organized and one of the Colby dorms would send a busload of girls to some Dartmouth fraternity house. But never to Alpha Delta Phi. We were on the proscribed list. Colby girls were given the impression we were worthless slackers and perverts. “Yeah, so?” we asked.

Cole, Nat “King”
An American musical institution from the forties through the mid-sixties, he began in a jazz vein with a trio that influenced everyone, including Ray Charles. In the fifties, he became a crooner of smooth, smooth ballads for a mainstream audience, often backed by, choke, strings. Not what the ADs were listening to. In 1956, he became the first black person to host an American prime time TV show. Unfortunately for his fans, the guy was in the habit of smoking three packs of Kools a day and died of lung cancer in 1965 at the peak of his career.

The Contours
They had one of the great, early-Motown records, “Do You Love Me.” If you wondered what I was talking about in the opening sentences of the preface to this book, it’s the recitation that opens this great dance record. The ADs would scream the refrain together: “Do you loooooove me—now that I can dance . . . dance . . . dance — Watch me now!”

Crawford, Broderick
A big, burly, blue collar-looking actor who scored big playing Huey Long in the 1949 flick, All the King’s Men. He had a brusque, gravelly, five-o’clock-shadow sort of charm, like a Nixon with balls, to which Bags may have aspired.

The Creature from the Black Lagoon
The fifties, of course, were the heyday of cheap, tacky monster movies — great octopus-like things from under the ocean, revived dinosaurs, giant ants. Supposedly what underlay this was anxiety about the Bomb. The giant ants in Them!, for instance, were mutations caused by nuclear testing. The Creature from the Black Lagoon was one of the sillier entries in this genre — he was a sort-of fishman who lived in, yes, a black lagoon. He was more pathetic than scary, but the title of the movie has always been great.

Curtis, King
The tenor sax player who enlivened the instrumental breaks on the Coasters’ records employed a new style, known for a time as “Yakety-Sax,” which was widely imitated. The King was a solid and likable musical presence for many years. In 1970, he played Amherst Frog’s wedding party at the Rainbow Room. In 1971, while sitting on the stoop of the Manhattan brownstone he owned, he was murdered.

D

Dadaistic
Dada was a school of art in the late teens and twenties of the 20th century. It reflected the horror the artists at that time felt about World War I. It was, of course, anti-war, but also “anti-art.” That means it rejected traditional artistic goals like beauty or even fascination. In fact, it was fairly boring, essentially unlovely stuff from a visual standpoint. But its nonlinear, nonsensical quality was right in line with what the ADs, in their inchoate way, were groping for.

Dance steps
As noted in Chapter 13, there were an awful lot of them in the early sixties. The Lindy is the basis of what is called swing dancing today. It was named in the thirties for flyer-hero Charles Lindbergh. In the bop, you stood in one place and did cool moves with your toes. The slop was the sexy dance of my high school days. The stroll was a line dance, great for people who were coordination-challenged, like your faithful recounter-of-past-times. In the mashed potatoes you got on your toes and slid your heels toward each other repeatedly with a cool expression on your face. No one had a clue how to do the continental walk, which may have been a sixties version of the stroll, or the bacon fat, either. As for the twist, see Hank Ballard and the Midnighters.

Darvon
This is a mild, pleasant pain pill I first encountered at age 12 when I had my wisdom teeth removed. Puts you in a nice float. Nowadays, though, instead of Darvon they give you Darvocet, so if you swallow enough pills to feel good the Tylenol destroys your liver.

Dick, Philip K.
This is a hard one for me to write because PKD, as he is known familiarly, is a particular writer-hero of mine. His passionate advocacy of humanity at a time when dehumanization was all the rage was exemplary, and his surreal, hip worlds of the future are mind-boggling. He is the only American author I am aware of who wrote a novel in which the sole morally upright character is a Ganymedean slime mold. If you are adventurous at all in your reading, you’ll go batshit over his novels, Ubik; A Scanner Darkly; Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said; and, especially, The Man in the High Castle and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. This is the shit, man.

Diddley, Bo
The coolest of all the rock ‘n’ roll pioneers and the one who gets the least respect. Buy a Bo compilation — there’s a definitive one on Chess — and just listen. He has major charm. Take these lyrics, from “Who Do You Love:” “I walk forty-seven miles of barbed wire, wear a cobra snake for a necktie, got a brand new house by the roadside, made from rattlesnake hide. Come take a walk with me, Arlene, and tell me WHO DO YOU LOVE???”

Domino, Fats
This genial New Orleans R & B singer, as Rolling Stone once pointed out, combined great charm with no perceptible charisma whatsoever. By 1955, his music was called rock ‘n’ roll. He was the pioneer our parents least minded; in fact, our dads often dug him. He came along in 1950 and his great work spanned the decade. He has too many hits to name, but just tap into one of his Best Of albums and you, too, will fall willing victim to his sweet, soulful, Southern sound.

Doughboys
What we called the American guys sent to France to fight in World War I. They had nothing to do with Pillsbury, I’m assuming.

The Drifters
Another black vocal group and one of the more prominent. The personnel would vary over the years but in one form or another the guys churned out hit after hit, from their beautiful and eccentric take on “White Christmas” in 1954 to their slickly produced early-sixties hits, “There Goes My Baby,” “Under the Boardwalk” and “Up on the Roof.” Their rumored follow-up, “Sick in the Bathroom,” was never released.

E

The Ed Sullivan Show
Running from 1948 to 1971, this bizarro TV program coralled much of America every Sunday night. It was, essentially, a variety show, and Sullivan was some kind of weirdo gossip columnist who seemed not to have a clue about anything. Yet, there he was, giving us marching bands and Italian mice puppets each Sunday night. Happily, he also gave us Bo Diddley and the Beatles from time to time, and you can get DVDs of all the rock acts that appeared on his show, so that’s the upside. Incidentally, my son, Jack, when ten years old, could do a great Ed Sullivan impression, pursing out his lips and saying “Really big shew!” A bizarre character, really. Uh, Ed, not Jack.

Edwards, Douglas
He was a New York newscaster with a bad-breath face.

English Leather
This was a heavily advertised brand of male cologne. In the early 1960s, male scents beyond Old Spice After Shave were something rather new. I never liked the way either smelled and used a third one called Royall Lyme. In fact, I seem still to have a bottle of the stuff in my bathroom. Talk about brand loyalty.

F

Falstaff
Falstaff shows up in three of Shakespeare’s history plays as a drunken, carousing fat guy, and a pub pal of Prince Hal, the royal heir who was quite the party-guy before he had to become Henry the Fifth. Falstaff was vain, vulgar, and generally of low character, with mostly meade and wenches on his mind. But he was often funny. When Hal became Henry, he cut Falstaff out of his life, breaking the deteriorated old drunk’s heart.

Father Knows Best
The most iconic of all the dippy fifties sitcoms about lovable nuclear families. Robert Young was unflaggingly patient, wise, caring, helpful, and considerate toward all three of his adorable kids and his lovely wife as well. Just like my house. Didn’t you know? We all lived that way in the fifties. Then those terrible sixties came along and just messed everything up forever.

Feiffer, Jules
A cartoonist who seemed a fixture of the hip world during the fifties, sixties, and seventies in New York. You could find his syndicated comic strip each week in the Village Voice for 42 years. He was a sweet, balding soul and reading him was always like a visit with a favorite uncle. Each spring, like the annual appearance of the monocled gent on the New Yorker cover, there would be Feiffer’s black leotard-clad dancer, offering an interpretive dance to the season, during which she would go on about life. You can see some of his strips at www.adambaumgoldgallery.com/feiffer_jules/feiffer.htm. Feiffer also wrote the film Carnal Knowledge, and illustrated the classic children’s book The Phantom Toll Booth.

Fields, W. C.
Fields, an American actor and performer from the last years of the 19th century into the 1940s, created an indelible comic persona appreciated more by men than women, who, in my experience, see only a bitter, drunk, misogynistic (unless the lady is of ill repute) jerk. Well, yeah . . . but he did it with style. He was graceful as a dancer, could juggle and so forth, spent many years in vaudeville. Maybe he’s the emblem of everything women hate and men tend to behave like when in thrall to their low, lizard-brain selves. Whatever, I think he’s hilarious.

The Five Royales
The guys made more than a hundred records in a career that began in 1942 in their earlier incarnation as a gospel group called the Royal Suns. Ten years later they morphed into an R & B group, adding the “e” to Royales to avoid legal action from an existing group called, simply, the Royals. Never leaving their churchy roots far behind, the Five Royales made a great string of singles through the fifties and into the sixties. Their musical marriage of gospel and R & B was a major influence on another group beloved of the ADs, Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, and on Soul Brother #1, James Brown. Okay, now, ready for this? In a bizarre twist, the pre-existing Royals then changed their names to Hank Ballard and the Midnighters! Confused yet?

The Five Satins
Another harmony group, they gave us possibly the most beloved of all doo-wop ballads, “In the Still of the Night.” In 1963, the ADs were one-upped by the Chi Phis next door, who actually bagged the Satins to play at one of their parties. Check out the gallery on my website. Oh, you wonder what the address is? It’s www.chrismillerwriter.com.

The Flamingos
In the vocal group-laden days of the fifties, the Flamingos stood out. They had their own sound. It featured high, ethereal harmonies. It sounded as if they were singing from heaven. These sweet, trippy records were well-loved by the ADs, back in the day. Probably because we enjoyed trying to sing like them. Something there is that loves a falsetto.

The Fly
A low-budget fifties SF movie that ends with a shot of the hero having been merged with a housefly, crying “Help me! Help me!” in a small, insect-like voice. A much better remake was done with Jeff Goldblum in the eighties but it lacked the endearing tackiness of the original.

Francis, Arlene
Another unappetizing female fifties person. She was all gushy and smiley. She’d been a Broadway actress but by the time your humble glossary-writer came of age you could find her sitting on the same What’s My Line? game show panel as Dorothy Kilgallen. They were a one-two punch of utter nonpulchritude and reason alone for never watching the show.

Francis, Connie
Connie would have been a good candidate for the Adelphian boot wall, so lame and obnoxious a musical presence was she. She’s so offensive that if you listen to her records you could turn into a pillar of shit. Here’s a fact you won’t find anywhere else: Amherst Frog’s father, Harry, discovered her for MGM records and inflicted her on an unsuspecting world. He was an A & R man who’d previously produced Frank Sinatra et al., so this was not his proudest musical moment, but MGM made plenty of dough as scads of dippy young girls proved to adore Connie’s insipid records.

Freed, Alan
Little known today, he’s the semi-sleazy white guy who came along in the early 1950s, played black music for white teenagers, and named it rock ‘n’ roll. That’s when and how the term came into use. It was an old black euphemism for enthusiastic copulation, dating at least as far back as the 1920s, but it was Alan who named the emerging new music after it. He started doing this as a deejay in Cleveland — this is why the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame and Museum is there — and then took his show to WINS in New York in the autumn of 1954, sparking the entire rock ‘n’ roll revolution. You can find a few of his old shows on the Internet. My teenaged friends and I loved this guy.

Frye Boots
Frye made a cowboyish kind of boot that came in handy during the snowy New England winters.

Fudd, Elmer
That guy who’s always shooting at Bugs Bunny? With the bald head?

G

Garnet Mims and the Enchanters
The ADs were enchanted both by this R & B group’s cool name and by their big hit, “Cry Cry Baby,” which never left the jukebox as long as I hung out in that funky basement.

Garrison, Jimmy
John Coltrane used two bass players in his early-sixties quartet. Jimmy was one and the other was Reggie Workman. Sometimes both would be onstage at once, lending strange, polyrhythmic undercurrents to the music.

Gaulois
A noxious but very existential French cigarette. No filter, totally lethal. Sartre smoked them and eventually died of lung cancer.

Gibran, Kahlil
An Arab guy who came to the USA as a kid and later wrote a book called The Prophet that featured wisdom in the form of poetry about all aspects of life. I think it was Lenny Bruce who first stated publicly that the real reason guys bought it was to whip out on date night as proof of their sensitivity, to help them get laid.

Gish, Lillian
This actress was a fixture in American movies practically from their get-go. She’s Little Nell, the one running across the ice floes in the silent version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Her earnest, early-20th-century sweetness made her an icon and she was still making movies in the 1980s. Quel pro! Hey, the woman was in Birth of a Nation!

Goldberg, Rube
One of the great American cartoonists, Rube’s career lasted from 1905 to 1964. He is best remembered for the fantastical machines invented by his character Professor Lucifer Gogonzola Butts. The machines were exceedingly complex arrangements of all sorts of odd things to accomplish an extremely simple purpose. Professor Butts’s Self-Operating Napkin, for instance, wipes your mouth as you eat. The machines are better seen than described so check ‘em out on Rube’s website: www.rubegoldberg.com.

Goodman, Benny
He was a nice Jewish jazz icon in the thirties and forties, his big band one of the premier attractions of the day, a friendly ethnic shoemaker-looking guy who gave us “Sing Sing Sing” and innumerable other pleasing ditties. But with Bix, on “Barnacle Bill the Sailor,” he blows one hot — albeit short — motherfucker of a solo that is another example of the younger, juicier incarnation of an artist being the one to create the hotter music. Another example is Elvis Presley, whose music never recovered from the move he made from Sun Records to RCA, where they mainstreamed him and cut off his balls.

Goosey Gander
A name from an old English nursery rhyme about being sure to say your prayers.

Gordon, Dexter
After Charlie Parker invented saxophone bebop on his alto, Dexter Gordon stepped up and became the foremost exponent on tenor. He had drug problems (who of these guys didn’t?), then went away to Europe for a while, where jazz got respect. In 1976, he made a triumphant return to the USA, which can be heard on the Blue Note album Homecoming: Live at the Village Vanguard. He was a cool, suave, stylishly dressed black man.

Graziano, Rocky
An up-from-the-gutter Middleweight Champion of the World in the late forties. His classic trio of fights against “iron man” Tony Zale make you wince even in memory; they really beat the shit out of each other. Rocky’s scrappy story can be seen in the early (and pretty good, with an uncredited Steve McQueen moment) Paul Newman film Somebody Up There Likes Me. By the time of Animal House, Rocky had morphed into a sort of goofy, lovable goombah in TV commercials, acting a little punchdrunk. Just an act, though. The man once went toe-to-toe with Sugar Ray Robinson and delivered to that fistic gentleman one of the few knockdowns of his entire career with a powerful right to the neck in the second round. After which Sugar jumped up and put Rocky out for the count.

H

Hank Ballard and the Midnighters
One of the enduring vocal groups from 1954 and into the Animal House era of the early sixties. They shot to fame — or perhaps infamy — when they released “Work With Me Annie,” an earthy little number about doing the ol’ in-out. The next record spelled out the unfortunate result: “Annie Had a Baby.” You may be sure that in straight-arrow mid-fifties America, these recordings caused an uproar and were taken off the playlists of most radio stations. But Hank had become a star and almost a decade’s worth of outstanding R & B/rock ‘n’ roll would follow. He wrote and performed the original version of “The Twist,” which became an endearing if lame-o dance craze when Chubby Checker covered it a couple of years later. Luckily, Hank got the royalties. A trim, dapper man, he was a local hero in LA through his death in 2003, and still is, actually.

The Harptones
The lead singer of this vocal group, Willie Winfield, was one of the greatest ballad singers of the era. There is a story that Johnny Mathis once refused to follow him onto the stage, having been totally intimidated by the performance he’d just witnessed. Check out the Harptones “Life Is But a Dream” from 1955.

The Haunt of Fear
From 1950 until early 1955, my fellow pubescent boys and I were enthralled with EC Comics. Some of us pubescent boys still dig the things, even though there hasn’t been a new issue in 52 years. They are simply the best comic books ever made. They had nothing to do with superheroes. There were three horror titles, including the famous Tales from the Crypt, two science fiction titles, some adventure and crime titles, and then, in 1952, the incomparable MAD. The boss was Bill Gaines, the head editor Al Feldstein, and the resident satirist Harvey Kurtzman. They were cool, wised-up, post-war, New York Jewish guys with a liberal attitude and could they ever tell a story. They assembled a stable of simply the best comics artists under one roof ever. Amherst Frog and I learned to recognize each guy’s style immediately. Wally Wood drew the sexiest women and the best rocket ships. Will Elder filled his panels with odd goings-on and could imitate any other artist extant. Al Williamson drew the most hideous, slime-dripping aliens. The stories were hip, sexy, and well-crafted — the guys who put them out never writing down to us. Oddly enough, the stories were very moral, too. The evil character inevitably had something horrible happen to him in the end. Like, the victim rising from his/her grave and, leaving a trail of rotting flesh, finding the protagonist and killing him/her in some delightfully just and gory way. You can actually buy full-color versions of the best of the EC library in bound volumes. The website you want is www.eccrypt.com.

The Heartbeats
Shep Sheppard, the lead singer, had one of the great voices of doo-wop, and the Heartbeats were one of the top groups, best remembered for the famous “A Thousand Miles Away.”

Hemingway
You saw the cheerful, red-cheeked, white-bearded face of Ernest Hemingway all over the place in the fifties. He was a major literary celebrity and a man’s man, an American institution, novelist, short story writer, and journalist for decades. He went to report on the Spanish Civil War, actually put himself through that horrible shit and then wrote about it in For Whom the Bell Tolls. He won a Pulitzer and the Nobel Prize when his short novel The Old Man and the Sea was published in 1955. He wrote in a boiled-down prose style that became the voice both of the French existentialist writers and of the American hard-boiled crime scribes like Raymond Chandler. This voice just influenced the shit out of American writing. I, in my own way, try to use his voice. He gave us the phrase “grace under pressure.”

Henry the Eighth
The roly-poly English monarch was portrayed in the historical films of the fifties as a bearded voluptuary taking a single bite from a leg of mutton and carelessly tossing it over his shoulder while wiping his mouth with his sleeve. Very AD house.

Hirsch, Crazy Legs
He was a famed football running back in the fifties and sixties. More than this, I know not. Oh, wait, his first name was Elroy. He played for the professional football team of Los Angeles, back when there was such a thing.

Holly, Buddy
Buddy was a frail-looking, unlikely rock ‘n’ roll star who emerged in the later 1950s. A Texas boy with zits, thick black-framed glasses, and terrible teeth, he was perhaps the first geek rock ‘n’ roll star, a category that seems still to be major in today’s indie rock. What he did was write great songs. “That’ll Be the Day.” “Oh, Boy.” “Rave On.” The list goes on. Listening to his music today, I’m struck by how much the Beatles got from him. The Stones loved him, too. He was major, and even more so after he died in that legendary 1959 plane crash with Richie Valens and the Big Bopper — the first widely - publicized rock ‘n’ roll deaths—as he at once became immortal.

Hootenannies
These were gatherings of folksingers for the purpose of singing it up, often with the audience joining in. In the early sixties, the commercially successful folksingers all seemed clean-cut and full of highly commercial pro-humanity cheer. I had about as much interest in attending a hootenanny as I did in fucking a puma.

Howdy Doody
If you were a kid growing up in the 1950s, you watched this stupid puppet TV show every afternoon at five-thirty. Howdy himself was apparently meant to be an all-American boy. You know, with freckles and a pug nose. But his weird lips looked like raw liver and he had no discernible personality. I preferred another of the characters — a goofy animal called Flub-A-Dub who acted as if he were stoned.

I

The Impressions
They were a class-act vocal group that, in 1959, with Jerry Butler singing lead, gave us the awesome ballad “For Your Precious Love.” After Jerry bailed, Curtis Mayfield became lead singer, and in his warm, churchy way gave us great soul music that encouraged the civil rights movement and the notion of integration for the next ten years. When integration crashed, Mayfield went on and, with James Brown and Sly Stone, created a new musical form, funk. His soundtrack album for the cool blaxploitation flick Superfly is one of the high points of hip seventies music, essential listening.

Ingels, Ghastly
Graham “Ghastly” Ingels was one of the great artists working at EC Comics (see The Haunt of Fear) in the early fifties. His drawings of horrible old men and rotting corpses were particularly evocative — you could almost smell them.

Invisible Gardol Shield
This is from a dopey toothpaste commercial of the fifties. If you used Colgate, an invisible Gardol shield would enclose your teeth, protecting them from decay. They were represented as bubble-like enclosures, like the force fields we would later see on Star Trek. As it turned out, these commercials were such bullshit they prompted the government to attempt to regulate the truthfulness of ad claims.

The Isley Brothers
Three brothers whose career began in the late fifties and continues today, a remarkable achievement in a business where it’s hard to make a living even for a year or two. Their many terrific records include the original version of “Twist and Shout,” which the Beatles covered, and the irresistibly danceable “It’s Your Thing.” But for fans of Animal House, the brothers will always be remembered as the singers of that ultimate fraternity party anthem, “Shout.”

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Jamal, Ahmad
This great jazz artist, when he came along in the fifties, was beloved of other musicians and the public — but, oddly, not of critics, who dissed him as a “cocktail pianist.” His songs on Live at the Pershing were a constant companion of mine through college and still sound great today. Like my dad used to say about Brooks Brothers suits, they’re classics — they last forever. Miles Davis was checking Ahmad out almost from the start. Miles was fascinated by the spareness of his playing, and by the clarity of the interplay between the musicians. In other words, you could hear the whole thing together, yet hear what each instrument was playing at the same time. This would become musical policy in Miles’s own groups from there on, until he abandoned the concept of keeping space in his music to the wholly different weirdness of Bitches Brew in 1970.

Jerome
Jerome is Jerome Green, Bo Diddley’s lanky maracas player in the 1950s and 1960s. He held two maracas in each hand and created a rock ‘n’ roll sound that was later incorporated into works by the Rolling Stones, Van Morrison, and yadda-yadda. In July of 1955, he sang lead on Bo’s recording of “Bring It to Jerome,” a song my seven-year-old son unaccountably adopted in the early ‘90s and wandered around the house singing. Jerome is also the other voice on the great “Say Man” recordings of 1958-1960, during which he and Bo exchange repeated artful insults. At one point at a Brooklyn Paramount show, he added a put-down not found on the records: “Oh, yeah? Well, yo’ breff smell like zoo dirt!”

Dr. Jive
His real name was Tommy Smalls and he was an R & B deejay every afternoon on WWRL, 1600 on your dial, during the later fifties. He was amiable but had a less focused radio personality than the more loudmouthed Alan Freed and Jocko (whom see). He was brought down in the same payola scandal that ended Freed’s career in 1962. Meanwhile, pleasant, white, equally culpable deejay Dick Clark blandly denied everything, cleaned up his act, and went on to unlimited success, fame, and fortune.

Jocko
If you dug good black rock ‘n’ roll and R & B in New York in the fifties you probably tuned to WOV each night after Alan Freed went off the air to listen to Jocko’s Rocket Ship Show. The Ace from Outer Space, with his trademark line of jive patter, played great sounds from 10 till 12 each week night during the later fifties. The show started with a countdown and the roar of a rocket taking off, Jocko rapping, “Way up here in the stratosphere, where you gotta holler mighty loud and clear: Eeetiddly-ock, this is the Jock, and I’m back on the scene with the record machine, saying ‘Ooh-poopa-doo, a-how do you do?”

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The Kama-Sutra
The ancient Indian book of sex positions, more and more popular as America loosened up in the sixties. Hot stuff, Chucko!

Kerouac
Jack Kerouac is the beat generation icon. Along with Alan Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Neal Cassady, and assorted other restless, disenchanted seekers, poets, and madmen in the late 1940s, Kerouac birthed the counterculture that endures, in some form or other, to this day. Oddly, he professed to dislike and be embarassed by hippies when they came along in the second half of the sixties, by which time he far preferred alcohol to pot. If you haven’t read On the Road, shame on you.

Khrushchev
Nikita Khrushchev was the first ruler of the Soviet Union after the death of Stalin. He ran the place from the time I was ten until I’d graduated from college, and I guess I thought he was going to be there always. He was a tough-looking, rather boorish bald guy with a big mole on his face. Born a peasant, he was somewhat deficient in the nuances of international diplomacy. During a UN speech made by British Prime Minister Harold McMillan in 1960, Khrushchev removed his shoe and began to pound it on his desk, shouting in Russian. And then did it again. A suave guy he wasn’t. He was the face of our commie enemy in those days, but I could never quite bring myself to hate him. He seemed to be enjoying himself so much.

Kilgallen, Dorothy
A dowdy and unattractive slice of fifties womanhood, she wrote a newspaper column and appeared weekly as a panelist on the early game show What’s My Line? She had a birdlike face and a long, skinny neck. Frank Sinatra referred to her as “the chinless wonder.”

Killer Kowalski
You found a lot of professional wrestling on fifties TV. The shows weren’t as over-the-top as they are now, when a lot of the guys resemble aliens, but the fifties grapplers were nonetheless a colorful crew. The champ was Vern Gagne, a likable fellow who somehow always came back from terrible beatings to take out some villain or other. Like, maybe, Gypsy Joe, or Haystack Calhoun, or Hans Schmidt, or my favorite, Killer Kowalski. He was a six-foot-seven Polish guy who weighed 275 pounds and was one mean-looking son of a bitch. He won most of his bouts with his signature hold—the Australian Claw. That is, getting his opponent down on his back, the Killer would grasp at his midsection with clawlike fingers. The opponent would flail his arms and legs, screaming. And lose.

The Kingston Trio
See “Hootenannies.”

The Kinsey Report
This was a major stride forward in understanding what sex was all about in America. There were two volumes, the first about the sexuality of the American male, which was bad enough, but when the second hit the stands in 1953 and verified that women actually liked sucking cock, all hell broke loose and our love lives were changed forever. It had all been so hidden and untalked-about before. If you mentioned s-e-x in public, you braced yourself for a bolt of lightning from God. I know this sounds bizarre and unbelievable but, babe, that’s the fuck how it was. It’s amazing any children were born then, sex was supposed to be so disgusting and forbidden.

Kluszewski, Ted
Though my baseball focus was largely on the New York Yankees in the fifties, you couldn’t help noticing there was this guy on the Cincinnati Reds who wore his sleeves cut off and had, like, these huge muscles. This was Big Klu and during the early fifties he was hitting almost fifty homers a year. No steroids in those days, hard work, guts, and a good shoeshine.

Kovacs, Ernie
Mr. Kovacs was your steadfast interpreter-o’-yesteryear’s favorite comedian during the period in which Animal House took place. So much of the comedy in the fifties sucked. Bob Hope never said a funny thing in his life, except maybe by accident. Milton Berle was like some sort of repulsive reptile. Abbot and Costello’s whole routine was about Abbot treating Costello horribly — it wasn’t funny, it was mean and painful. All Jackie Gleason ever seemed to do was bellow angrily or pretend to be drunk. Martin and Lewis I actually liked — until I reached puberty. But then there was Ernie Kovacs. It’s fair to call him a genius. He was the first man — or at least the first comedian — to be able to think in TV. He could go deeper into this new medium than anyone else around; he intuitively knew how to be funny in it. The other so-called comedians on TV were mostly recycling tired vaudeville routines. Ernie was inventing the future. He was a cheerful guy of Hungarian descent with a fat moustache bisecting his face. A large cigar often poked from his mouth. He had a character named Percy Dovetonsils, a gay poet who sipped a martini behind his book of writings while doing his reading. This was in no way mean-spirited; in fact, it was rather sweet. In those days, TV was live. One night a couple of crew guys put real gin in the martini glass. Ernie took a taste. He did a take. He twinkled, raised the glass to the audience and drank it right down. Ernie was so unique I am finding it a challenge to give you any real idea of what he was like or what he meant to me. You kinda hadda be there. Check out his Nairobi Trio routine on YouTube. It kept being announced that the Kovacs show would shortly be graced by the presence of a famous, international music group, the Nairobi Trio. But each week something happened. The plane was grounded. One of the Trio was sick. Someone’s mother died. “But they’ll be here next week, folks.” Finally, on the last episode of the season, the Trio was introduced. They were three guys in ape masks, playing this tune on a piano, and Ernie is conducting with a banana, and . . . . You see what I mean? This doesn’t sound like anything, but it was great! You’re just going to have to check it out yourself. What he did on TV massively influenced the future of comedy in that medium. He was a cool guy with a great wife in Edie Adams. He was popular, brilliant, and getting rich. And then, one night in January of 1962, during a sudden, unusual Los Angeles rainstorm, he lost control of his car and smashed into a power pole, killing himself instantly.

Kubek, Tony
Tony was the New York Yankees shortstop who followed Phil Rizzuto. His tenure lasted 9 years in the late fifties, early sixties, during which time the Yanks won the American League pennant seven times. He was another of the blond, white, goyische Yankees who dominated the team in those days. The bad-hop ball that hit him in the throat traumatized him and he was never comfortable talking about it afterward. When the comedian Phil Silvers, apparently a Dodgers fan, made a list before the ’63 World Series of ways to mess with the minds of the various Yankees players, by Tony Kubeck it said, “Show him a pebble.”

L

Lake, Veronica
She was a big Hollywood star in the forties, then dropped off the map. Her thing was that her hair hung over one eye, which allowed her to give you peek-a-boo sexy glances. She was pretty hot and made a bunch of movies with Alan Ladd, playing classy dames. In LA Confidential, she’s the star Kim Basinger is “cut” to resemble.

La Rosa, Julius
Could there have been a more egregious example of fifties lameness than this guy? He came up to the big time through the execrably square Arthur Godfrey radio show, and then Godfrey’s TV show as well. He was a singer of stunningly unhip music. And he was, well, cute. Too cute. Really, my flesh crawls just thinking about him.

Lawrence, D. H.
Major English writer of the first third of the 20th century. He wrote all kinds of stuff, but for the book you hold in your hands what matters is his famous and controversial novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Though written in 1924, it did not see print (except in private editions) until the end of the 1950s. Its explicit sexuality and use of four-letter words made it instantly notorious, and it was banned both in Britain and America. In 1959, the US ban was overturned in the courts and the book became widely available. I remember reading it in my twenties and finding it a hot little mother but also very touching. Things were changing in goody-two-shoes America, but it would take eleven more years for pubic hair to appear in Playboy.

Lemmon, Jack
A celebrated, usually comic film actor for more than fifty years, he was like your nice Uncle Harry. Shortly after the action occurs in The Real Animal House, though, he put out a movie called Days of Wine and Roses that presented him initially as the kind of guy a lot of ADs dug — affable, smart, funny, and drunk — but who quickly devolved into horrible alcholism and wound up rolling around in a straitjacket, screaming, which might have given some of my fraternity brothers pause. Unfortunately, it could not, as it did not yet exist.

Life magazine
In the old days — say, the 1950s — TV programs would be aimed at all Americans. Narrowcasting did not exist yet. The Ed Sullivan Show is one example — it had something for everyone. The same could be said for John Ford movies, which would contain a romance story for the ladies, lots of shooting and killing for the guys, a low-comedy thread for the kids. Life was the great magazine version of this one-for-all concept. First brought out in 1936, it dominated the magazine racks of America for the next thirty years. It’s raison d’etre was its photojournalism, which was terrific, with dozens of images that have become part of the American heritage.

Little Richard
Among the founders of rock ‘n’ roll, Richard Penniman was the one that most scared the bejesus out of our parents. He was unquestionably the wildest, sexiest, and most bizarre living being to be glimpsed anywhere in those grandfatherly, Eisenhower 1950s. As he recounted in his autobiography, Richard as a boy had the interesting habit of shitting in a glass jar, putting on the top, and leaving it for Mom to find in the kitchen cabinet. He was just getting started. His records from 1955 to 1957 are the purest expression of flipped-out rock ‘n’ roll frenzy ever made. Rolling Stone once referred to him as the laser of rock. That’s pretty good. Check out “Long Tall Sally” and “Lucille” for a taste of the unalloyed real deal.

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Madras jackets
Madras is a colorful cotton fabric with a patterned texture, and sport jackets made of it were worn by the preppie class in the early sixties. Greg Marmalade can be seen in one in Animal House. Unfortunately, the colors bled when wet, ruining the look, and it was hilarious to see all the Psi Us bolt for the nearest shelter at the slightest drop of rain.

The Magnificent Seven
Guys who liked westerns — for instance, Alby — loved the 1960 film The Magnificent Seven. It had a career-making performance by Steve McQueen that defined cool, and Yul Brynner as the baldy leader of the Seven. The movie was a western remake of the Japanese samurai classic known here as Seven Samurai. Brynner assembles a motley group of gunfighters (and one knife-fighter) to protect a poor Mexican farming hamlet from a gang of bandits led by ferocious, scenery-chewing Eli Wallach. Their pay — enough to eat. But each of the Seven is there for a reason. Fancy-pants gunfighter Robert Vaughn is trying to regain his lapsed courage. Horst Bucholz, as the youthful, likably enthusiastic Chico, hero-worships the Seven and is hungry for mentors. Brad Dexter thinks the villagers have hidden gold. There are great action scenes and totally cool lines of dialogue throughout. And it had famous, much-loved theme music, which later was used to sell Marlboro cigarettes.

Mantle, Mickey
As a celebrity icon of the fifties, the Mick is up there with Marylyn Monroe and James Dean. He was the quintessential all-American boy, plucked from Nowheresville, Oklahoma, and dropped into all the excitement of New York City, where he spent the next few decades drinking his ass off and royally fucking himself up. But he was the superstar of superstars during the time in which Animal House is set. His Yankees career lasted seventeen years and at times he seemed like the most perfect, natural ballplayer there ever was. He still holds the World Series lifetime record for most runs scored (42), runs batted in (40), and home runs (18).

The Mar-Keys
The earlier incarnation of Booker T and the MGs, a soul institution through the sixties, the guys who later backed Otis Redding and others. In fact, the Mar-Keys great “Last Night” was on the first album ever released by Stax Records, in 1961, and reached number three on the pop charts as a single.

The Marne
There was a First and then a Second Battle of the Marne, and luckily they stopped there. The second one was the last German offensive of World War I, repelled by the French with the infliction of great losses. Lots of Americans died there, too. I suspect that Rhesus Monkey, aware these guys routinely threw horrible gases at each other, was using it as an all-purpose Great War battle name to make his point.

Martin, Dean
Dino was a handsome Italian-American guy with black curly hair who could sing his ass off. Not the kind of music I was listening to at the time, you understand, but for the hipper segment of the square crowd, he was the shit. His movies with Jerry Lewis in the late forties and fifties, with Dean’s casual suavity contrasted to Lewis’ freaked-out-nutcase persona, made a big splash. Dean was also one of the key figures in the Las Vegas Rat Pack, which seemed cool to me then but now, when I revisit it, seems like a bunch of narcissistic jerks.

Mathis, Johnny
The gay thing was way, way undercover in the early sixties. You hardly knew it existed. But the average straight guy in those days knew two things about Johnny Mathis. There was something sort of, er, off about the soaring girly voice the guy had, and the lack of, well, balls, in his affect. And thing two: Playing one of his records had the effect of immersing women in some strange, thick, romantic soup, within which it was a lot easier to get off her bra.

The Mess-Around
Another early sixties dance step (see Dance steps). The problem was, no one knew exactly what it looked like. Bags decided one day that you held your sport coat open and sort of rocked your upper body around to the music, so that became the official, AD-house version of the mess-around.

Miles and Trane
There’s not room in this glossary to write all one would need to say about Miles Davis and John Coltrane. But let’s start with this: Musicians who played in Miles’s bands were commonly inspired to personal bests in creativity. Cannonball Adderley, for one, never sounded better than when he was with Miles. Coltrane was considered a journeyman bebop tenor sax player when Miles heard something more in him and hired him in 1955. Coltrane began to blossom. With each passing year, he played more extraordinary music. When his heroin habit pissed Miles off once too often — Trane had been nodding off onstage again — Miles fired him. Trane then spent most of a year with Thelonious Monk, another musician who tended to bring out the best in his sidemen. And he kicked his drug habit. Miles was pleased to receive the cleaned-up Trane back in his band, and they went on, with Cannonball and Bill Evans, to invent modal music and make what many call the greatest jazz album of all time, Kind of Blue. After this, Trane wanted to start his own band; he had too many ideas that wouldn’t fit into the music Miles played. Miles couldn’t stand to lose him, though, and prevailed on Trane to play with him just one more time, to accompany him on his 1960 European tour. On a CD called The Essential Live in Stockholm, you can hear what happened during one of their very last gigs. Trane solos with an intensity and mad daring that make it seem he is trying to explode his way out of Miles’s music with dynamite. Indeed, after about a week, Trane told Miles he couldn’t stay on, that he had to get back to New York and do his own thing. It was the sixties. Miles hired Sonny Stitt to play the rest of the tour, Trane began his awesome quartet, and that was the end of the Miles and Trane period, for the two musicians seldom saw each other again. For seven years, Trane shook up the world of music with his unique new sounds, and then he died suddenly of liver cancer in 1967 at the age of forty. It was noted many years later that Miles’s cool apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan contained not a sign of his musical career — his various awards had been carelessly tossed in a closet — except for one: a photo of John Coltrane hanging on the wall.

Miller, Henry
The American writer’s Tropic of Cancer was declared legal to sell in the same trial that legitimized Lady Chattereley’s Lover and a third naughty book, Fanny Hill. When you heard Miller’s name mentioned, you thought of Paris, fine food, wine, pussy, and dirty words, all officially frowned upon in the mid-20th-century USA.

Ming the Merciless
Among the joys of my childhood were the Flash Gordon movie serials. There were three, all from the thirties, so they were already antiques when I was watching them on the early-fifties TV show Serial Theatre. But, in their clunky way, they had a compelling charm. Movie serials were extremely low-budget affairs and routinely terrible, something added to your movie experience as an afterthought, to get the kids back the following week. Because all the chapters but the final one — there were usually 12 — ended with a cliffhanger. Beauteous Dale Arden apparently devoured by a flame creature! Flash dragged into a cave by the Clay People! You had to come back to see what happened. My favorite characters were not hammy, well-meaning Flash, the ever-screaming Dale, or the redoubtable Doctor Zarkov, but some of the villains: Voltan, the jolly, corpulent king of the Hawkmen; the totally-hot, metallically-brassiered Queen Azura; and, most especially, Ming the Merciless. He was a tall, lean, ascetic-looking fellow with “Oriental” makeup and beard. I guess we were worried about the Yellow Peril or something in those days of aggressively warlike Japan. But he was a sterling villain and there will always be a place in my heart for him. Rhesus Monkey, by squeezing his eyes almost shut, painting a Fu Manchu moustache and beard on himself, and sneering, became Ming — except he was the short Ming.

The Modern Jazz Quartet
This gemlike musical group brought us something new — chamber jazz. Like Miles, they made music with space — you could follow all four players. The leader and pianist, John Lewis, brought a classical, no-nonsense rigor to the group, which was somewhat subverted by the sexy, bluesy lines of vibraharpest Milt Jackson. The stuff was beautiful and highly adaptable — you could use it as background music while you read your history book or you couldtotally go into it, marveling at its little intricacies. The John Lewis composition “Django” is one of the great jazz standards.

The Moonglows
These guys were particular favorites of mine. They were just a cut above. The major members were Harvy Fuqua and Bobby Lester. They took vocal group music quite some way, in their own remarkable style. “Sincerely” was one of the great songs of 1954. The unabashed, soulful blackness of the voicings was a tonic amidst the beknighted, white-dominated pop of those days. The Moonglows introduced something called “blow harmonies” to the genre. You blow out as you go “Ooooooo!” The Dells did it, too. Okay, okay, you gotta hear it. If you don’t like it you can have the time back you spent reading this entry.

Moore, Archie
One of the cooler celebrities of the fifties, this light-heavyweight boxing champ had a sly charm and was known as the Mongoose, or, somewhat later, as the Ol’ Mongoose. He always seemed relaxed and amiable. I guess when you could kick ass like him, you didn’t have to act tough. Prevented by racism from fighting for the title until 1952 when he was 39 years old, he KOed Joey Maxim and became champ, then continued to ply his trade for another ten years. He tried repeatedly to win the heavyweight title but against bigger men had trouble and was defeated by Rocky Marciano, Floyd Patterson, and, in 1962, at the age of 49, by up-and-comer Muhammad Ali. Against light-heavies, though, he was supreme. He fought for an incredible 27 years and knocked out more opponents — 141 of them! — than anyone in boxing history.

N

Ness, Eliot
One of the biggest TV shows during Animal House days was The Untouchables and lots of ADs never missed an episode. It was loosely based on the story of real-life, incorruptible FBI agent Eliot Ness, who ran a special anti–Al Capone unit that first put a big dent in his operation by using wire taps to time their raids and then brought the crime boss down with the Volstead Act — for income tax evasion. The TV Ness was played by Robert Stack with great unchangeability of expression. Neville Brand shows up for three episodes as an amusingly overripe Capone, and Bruce Gordon is the long-suffering Frank Nitti. One night, plagued with yet another problem caused by Ness, needing a good hit man, Nitti lips, “Get me Pittsburgh Phil.” The AD tube room fell out, pounding fists on the floor, yelling “Get me Pittsburgh Phil” at each other all the way through the commercials.

Nuts ‘n’ Sluts
Most courses at Dartmouth in my day had nicknames. Herb West’s western history class was called Cowboys and Indians. Astronomy courses were called Stars 1 or Stars 27. Naturally, the abnormal psychology course was called Nuts ‘n’ Sluts. Oddly, it was taught in the campus building called McNutt Hall.

O

Onyx Club
In the 1940’s, 52nd Street in New York City was jazz central. On a given night, at the Onyx, the Famous Door, the Three Deuces, or Jimmy Ryan’s, you could hear anything from the hot New Orleans jazz of the 1920s to the most cutting-edge bebop played by Bird and Diz. Some called it Swing Street, some called it simply the Street. Here would be Coleman Hawkins, there Billie Holiday, there Thelonious Monk. I’m earmarking one of my ten designated time trips as a visit to 52nd Street on a hot summer night in 1948, where I’ll just wander from club to club until they close at 3 AM. and New York’s finest drag me away and throw me in the hoosegow.

Orange Crush
A popular bottled soda since early in the 20th century. A big, sweet mouthful of ORANGES.

Oz books
The first, most-famous one, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, was published in 1900. What some do not know is that 35 more Oz books were brought out over the next 42 years. The original writer was L. Frank Baum, who wrote fourteen of the books. Next came Ruth Plumley Thompson, who accounted for another nineteen, and the final three were written in inimitable punning style by the man who had done the marvelous illustrations in every Oz book but the first, John R. Neill. This brings us to 1942. Like much else in American culture — the hilariously surreal Vic and Sade radio show comes to mind — the Oz books did not survive the war. A different mood was on the land and although there were several additional titles published in an attempt to revive the series, the books stubbornly refused not to suck. But the world of Oz — in the books, as distinct from the movie, which is fun in its own right — was a fantastic playground for the childhood imagination of your faithful information imparter and my thoroughly modern son devoured them from the time he was five. So I’m thinking they still have the goods.

P

The Paragons
Came along relatively late in the doo-wop cycle, during an elaborative period in the late fifties. They appeared on The Paragons Meet the Jesters, which featured leather-jacketed, shades-wearing teenage hoods rumbling on the album cover, a cool marketing ploy that sold the shit out of this album. Their great song was “Florence.”

Percy Dovetonsils
See Ernie Kovacs.

Piltdown Man
Once thought to occupy a position between Neanderthal Man and Cro-Magnon Man, Piltdown Man turned out to be a hoax. Scientific investigation proved the bones found in Piltdown, England, belonged to a 500-year-old orangutan jaw. But drawings were made imagining what Piltdown Man would have looked like and those broad, primitive faces much resembled the visage of Brother Bags.

Q

R

The Raelettes
Ray Charles’s back-up singers. They established the paradigm for black-chick back-up groups, which we have heard so many times since, not least on songs by Bob Marley and Bob Dylan. They’re the voices that reply to Ray’s sexual cries with cries of their own on the great “What’d I Say,” the first number six song on the pop charts of America to simulate the sounds of copulation.

Retreat from the Chosin Reservoir
The early fifties gave us the Korean War. As Harold Ramis recently remarked to me, it was our war. What he meant was that when we were young — I was 8–12 — we were bombarded with images of our brave, grim troops getting their asses shot off in what then was this obscure, far-away country. The way the helmets and rifles and bazookas looked was our template for how soldiers and war would always look, and it came as a shock when they wore different uniforms in Viet Nam. Korea was a sort of film-noir war; I always think of it in black and white, full of shadows. It was the first war in history in which neither side could actually win because the shadows in question were thrown by the Bomb. In other words, if you did try to win, you could trigger a nuclear holocaust! Nevertheless, America’s General Douglas MacArthur, simultaneously one of our great heroes and most puffed-up egomaniacs, was fucking going to win anyway. For a while, he did great. But after his brilliant victory at Inchon, the war was essentially over, the North Korean army virtually non-existent. Could he stop there? Nooooo! He chased the tattered remnants of the enemy so far north that he was bearing down on the border of China, which, at that time, under the glowering, malevolent rule of Mao-Tse Tung, was an obnoxious, in-your-face enemy of the USA. Finally, our boys got a little too close and Mao unleashed a million (actually 70,000) troops on the 30,000 UN troops who’d made it to the border. They seemed like a million because the Chinese forces used what was called human wave tactics — so many soldiers would charge you that you couldn’t kill them all and they’d plow right over you. This is what happened to the US First Marine Division, which had ascended into the mountainous terrain near the Chosin Reservoir and the Yalu River — across which loomed China. Their heroic retreat — or “redeployment,” as we might say today — from the Frozen Chosin was a feat of arms to rank with any in history. Almost all the troops made it out, with their equipment and with their dead. This is the battle in which the American commander, when asked if he was retreating, famously replied, “Retreat, hell! We’re just advancing in another direction.” But the battle was an absolute horror. The temperatures were so sub-zero that our guys had to piss on their rifles to fire them. In the most heart-breaking single war story I have ever heard, a Marine during this battle had his jaw blown off by a grenade. It was so cold his blood immediately froze. The medics shook their heads. One of them advised the guy to write letters to his family. The minute the temperature rose above freezing, he’d be gone.

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
This thick and definitive book about Hitler-era Germany was a big deal when it came out in 1960. It had an almost hallucinatory power to blow your mind; at that time, the war had happened in the fairly recent past, around the time you were born. What a bunch of schmucks the Nazis were. Seig Heil, my ass.

Rizzuto, Phil
The great, Hall of Fame Yankees shortstop of the late forties and early fifties. He was a peppy, likable guy, and when his playing days ended in ‘57 he moved into the broadcasting booth and wouldn’t leave for 40 years. He always blatantly rooted for the Yanks, crying out “Holy cow!” whenever anything good happened to them.

Robinson, Sugar Ray
The thing you always hear about this splendid boxing champ is that, pound for pound, he was the best prizefighter who ever lived. Even the not-normally-modest Muhammad Ali once said that he himself may have been the greatest heavyweight of all time, but Sugar Ray was the greatest fighter. Ray was sleek, handsome, and moved like a dancer. His amateur record was an astonishing 85-0. He won and lost the middleweight championship five times. He practically owned a block of Harlem and got about in a series of fushcia-colored Cadillac convertibles with many a fine fox by his side. He tipped with $20 bills and dressed slick as a whistle. In the forties and fifties, his coolness was up there with Miles’s.

Rocky and Bullwinkle
An early example of the hip humor that would grow to dominate the sixties and beyond. The showrunner was a cool guy named Jay Ward and those of us who loved the zany Moose and Squirrel combo thank him very much. Not to mention the other characters on the show, Dudley Do-Right, Snidely Whiplash, Mr. Peabody (with his way-back machine) and the always cheerfully wicked Russian villains (it was the Cold War), Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale.

Roosevelt, Eleanor
I don’t know why I’ve always found this great, beloved American woman to be, er, sort of funny. Well, yes, I do, and so do you. Look at her. Her face is like a turkey’s, without the feathers. But you’ve never dared say it out loud. It would be too politically incorrect to call attention to her schmwerped-up features. But since, as Christopher Buckley pointed out in the New York Times, the book you are holding is a nuclear bomb of political incorrectness, I can get away with saying anything I want! Nyah!

Rydell, Bobby
One unfortunate residue of fifties rock ‘n’ roll was the “teen idol.” What that meant was too-cute white boys who appealed not to “teens” but to teeny-bopper girls whose youthful sexualities would respond by dampening their panties. Naturally, as a guy, I was offended and repelled by the entire genre, silly-looking characters like Frankie Avalon, Paul Anka, and Fabian. The ADs would make boot sounds when these guys came on the radio and rush to change the song. Bobby Rydell was one of the least offensive of them. He appeared toward the end of the cycle in the early sixties and made some halfway decent records for a year or two. He had cool hair, give him that.

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The Saturday Evening Post
Another of those all-for-one venues, like Life magazine, that we had in an earlier, more cohesive age. It was an American institution, having begun way back in 1821, a slick magazine with a huge readership that idealized small-town America. The magazine didn’t make it through the sixties, having its plug pulled in 1969. The media were shattering into smaller, more specialized venues then, like magazines for people who just like pictures of overweight Romanian gypsy-lesbians with missing limbs, to name just one.

Seeger, Pete
He was sort of the pope of folk music in the early sixties. It was a sound that came from some alternate world, to which no AD would have thought to listen. Pete was a major figure in the politics and aspirations of the left, doing his thing for more than sixty years. The ADs, too rowdy and heedless for such stuff, were oblivious.

Dr. Seuss
The great cartoonist who gave us The Cat in the Hat, Green Eggs and Ham, and dozens of other beloved kids’ books was not an Alpha Delta Phi. If you read the Seuss reference in Chapter 13 again, you will see that Pinto has no idea to which fraternity the doctor actually belonged and is merely saying he went through the Fires to keep the frightened Flounder entertained and moving forward. In fact, Ted Geisel, ’25, first used the signature “Seuss” while editor of the Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern, the school humor magazine then and now. But his fraternity was Sigma Phi Epsilon.

Shalimar
As my delightful girlfriend, Janet, has imparted to me, Shalimar, the strong and sexy woman’s perfume, was first created in the nineteen-twenties. As I imparted to her, it surely blew my particular mind in the early nineteen-sixties, causing erections so instantaneous they created sonic booms. Some girl once left her emptied bottle of it behind and I kept it in my dorm room all that school year, so I could sniff it in passing and cleave the air with my magnificent boners.

Shane
Considered one of the greatest westerns of all time, Shane came out in 1953. It starred Alan Ladd as the mysterious man-with-a-past who comes to the aid of a family and rescues an entire community from a tyrannical range boss and his black-garbed hired gun (an evilly grinning Jack Palance). It was like a hundred earlier westerns distilled into one. In the last scene, as Shane rides away, never to return, the young boy, Joey, his blond hair flopping on his brow, races after him, plaintively calling, “Shane! Come back, Shane!” It became an American catch phrase for a time. Alby had of course seen the film. He dug westerns.

Shearing, George
A renowned pianist from the 1930s through the present day. His trio was one of the most popular jazz combos on the planet at the time The Real Animal House takes place. Blind, he wore dark shades, and when my fraternity brother Scotty put on his dark shades, he was the spitting image. Unfortunately, when Scotty tried to play the piano, he sounded like Horrible Fatlove, a keyboard man I’ve just made up who played with his head.

Sheckley, Robert
The fifties saw a great flourishing of Reader’s Digest–sized science fiction magazines. Galaxy was the best of them, full of wit and crackling topical satire. One of the best of the Galaxy writers was Bob Sheckley, the source of much of that wit and satire. As an eighth-grader and member of the Teen-Age Book Club, I sent for Sheckley’s first collection of short stories, Untouched By Human Hands, and was, in my pubescent fashion, blown away. The smoothness of his writing awed me — you started one of his stories and entered a greased chute of prose that you slid through with an elegant swiftness and landed at the end with a big smile on your face. I worshiped the guy’s style and always wanted to craft prose like his — quick, smart, economical, funny. No bullshit, just storytelling. He wrote some crime and spy books, too, and some SF novels, but his gift to us was his science fiction short stories, which I have always tried to live up to.

Bishop Sheen
An insipid-looking TV priest during the fifties. He could drop you into a slumber that took hours to wake from, he was so boring. He exemplified the bland, awful, Republican bullshit we lived with in the fifties. Believe me, it wasn’t so great then.

“Shenandoah”
A traditional American folk song of the sort beloved by high-tone glee clubs. Not danceable at all.

Shirley & Lee
A pair of black teenagers, they began a string of enormously popular R & B records in 1952. By 1956, their music was called rock ‘n’ roll and they released their most famous song, “Let the Good Times Roll.” Lee sang genially and Shirley in a contrastingly high squeak of a voice. Their records are great examples of the infectious sense of fun contained in early rock ‘n’ roll, and naturally the ADs danced their asses off whenever one came up on the jukebox.

Sketches of Spain
Miles Davis was simply the coolest cat extant in 1960. He was at a peak in his career, going modal and blowing the music world’s mind. At the same time, he was making albums with Gil Evans, the genius jazz arranger, in which he took a different approach — arranged jazz orchestra music that he would improvise in front of. Sketches of Spain stands out to this day as an extraordinary, shimmering piece of work. Gil wrote gorgeous Spanish/Jazz charts while Miles played unbearably sad but in no way sentimental phrases on top. I’m not really crazy about the notion of jazz being “America’s classical music.” Hell, it was birthed in whorehouses! But there is something seriously classical about Sketches of Spain. Check it out.

Skidmore College
This all-women’s (until 1971) school in Saratoga Springs, New York, was a much-favored road trip destination for Dartmouth men of my era. There was something about the girls there. They just had a more fun-loving slant on life than the ones anywhere else. This does not mean you would always get laid but rather that, if you didn’t, you would have had a great time anyway. They knew how to party. Furthermore, since you were in New York, you could drink at age 18!

Smith Brothers
A couple of brothers named Smith concocted a cough lozenge in 1852 that became famous and dominated the American cough-drop market for a hundred years, including the early sixties. The brothers were depicted on each box or tin wearing prominent, rather pubic-looking black beards. Smith Brothers Cough Drops is now owned by some giant corporation but the beards remain.

Smith College
One of the “Seven Sister” schools, which were the femme equivalent of the mostly all-male Ivy League colleges. The others were Wellesley, Mount Holyoke, Radcliffe, Vassar, Barnard, and Bryn Mawr.

Smith, Cordwainer
He wrote a series of stories and a couple of novels that comprised a future history of humanity that was sui generis, nor have we seen its like since. This marvelous, fanciful vision of the future was put together, as was revealed only upon his death, by a person whose actual name was Paul Linebarger, and who, in real life, had been a diplomat, scholar, and spy. Perhaps not for every taste but, as has been said about the music of the Grateful Dead, those who like it really like it.

Sousa, John Phillip
You know, the guy who wrote all those American marches you hear on Memorial Day? “And the monkey wrapped his tail around the flag pole . . . ?” That one.

Spanish Civil War
This nasty bit of business featured the Spanish dictator Franco who, with considerable help from his pals, Hitler and Mussolini, eventually clobbered the poor, heroic, idealistic Republicans, a heart-breaking defeat for the International Left, which sucked on this sore tooth for the next three decades. Picasso’s famous mural Guernica depicts an April, 1937, Nazi-Fascist air action against the old Basque city of that name. The Condor Legion flattened the place and hundreds of innocents were killed. Yet the town had no military significance. Sound familiar? This was the template for a terrible addition to modern warfare, the deliberate airborne slaughter of civilians, and a major hint that the rest of the 20th century was really going to suck.

Stalingrad
A big, horrible 1942 battle in Russia that seemed to go on forever and wound up turning the tide against the Nazis in World War II. The remorseless winter alone was responsible for killing untold numbers of Germans, which was perhaps what Otter had in mind when he made his comment about the Fires.

Sturgeon, Theodore
Another SF writer who gave us an absolutely unique canon. His marvelous series of books and stories included the great More Than Human and innumerable other uniquely weird and sexy science fiction conceits. If he were a jazz saxophonist, he would perhaps have been Charles Lloyd — beautiful but with an edge and cosmic vision that was impossible to ignore or describe. He was the guy Kurt Vonnegut had in mind when he cooked up his literary alter-ego, Kilgore Trout. Get it? Sturgeon? Trout? You don’t hear much about Ted these days, when so much of science fiction seems to be about dragons, swords, and dwarfs. Too bad. Oh, by the way, I recently came into possession of a genuine Sturgeon autograph, which I have placed in my first edition copy of his initial book, Without Sorcery.

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Taylor, Sam “The Man”
One of the great R & B tenor sax blowers, Sam Taylor led the band at the Alan Freed rock ‘n’ roll shows of the mid-fifties. He played some of the most exciting sax breaks on the records of the time, such as “Sh-Boom” by the Chords and “Jim Dandy” by Lavern Baker. He also cut a single, called “Cloudburst,” that featured a song-long, breakneck solo that became famous during my fraternity days when Jon Hendricks of Lambert, Hendricks & Ross gave it lyrics and sang it with an intensity that rivaled Sam’s own.

Teagarden, Jack
A favorite of J. C. Senior, this amiable Southern gentleman was the greatest trombone stylist of the pre-bebop era. There are classic duets between Jack and Louis Armstrong — singing and playing — on songs like “Ol’ Rocking Chair’s Got Me” and “Basin Street Blues,” which define the charm of the hot jazz they exemplified. He sang in a buttery, booze-soaked Texas voice that contrasted amusingly with Satchmo’s growl.

Technicolor yawn
One of the many delightful terms for throwing up that have entered the national vocabulary over the years. You know, like “booting” or “flashing” or “blowing chunks.” Technicolor, of course, is the trademark for a series of color film processes that were the most widely used ones in Hollywood from 1922 through 1952. You see it when watching The Wizard of Oz. (Thanks, Wikipedia.)

Tip-Top Bread
A kind of ultra-bland white bread that came along after World War II. You had your peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on it. It’s true what they say — if you poked a slice with your finger, the impression you left would stay there.

Titter
Along with its stablemates Rogue, Topper, Cavalier, Nugget, Gent and Beauty Parade, this was an example of the pre-Playboy skin mag. It featured shots of slutty-looking, not-particularly-slender women in bras and panties, which was about as naked as you could get in those days. These were imaginary sex partners with whom you would have had serious questions regarding sexually transmitted diseases, or “the clap,” as we then called it. But one had to start beating off to something and this was what there was.

“Top of the world, Ma!”
These are the last words of arch-criminal Cody Jarrett (James Cagney) as he stands atop a giant oil tank at the end of White Heat, a bitchin’ 1949 film noir. He then shoots the tank and goes up in a giant fireball. Ow!

The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk
A long time ago, when Doug Kenny, Harold Ramis, and I were in the early stages of writing Animal House, we were thinking about a scene in which Pinto, who has been spending all his time getting drunk at the house, has to take an oral exam in Modern European History from a professor named Dean James. And the question we had him answering was: What was the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk? (It took Russia out of World War I, right?) Pinto was going to very lamely attempt to bullshit his way through but totally blow it and then get scolded by the professor. Scene never happened but we were all sorry we didn’t get to use the funniest treaty name of all time. Yo, Doug and Harold! I finally got it in, you guys! The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.

Turner, Big Joe
The guy who sang the original version of “Shake, Rattle, and Roll,” one of the prime songs that got rock rolling, especially when covered by Bill Haley and the Comets. Joe had been a blues shouter for years but wound up on Atlantic Records at the time they were helping to create the unruly new musical form so many of us loved. A guy I knew at National Lampoon met Joe in the late sixties. A blues aficionado, he brought up some of Joe’s early work with Hot Lips Page in the forties. Joe laughed and said, “Yeah, that was when I was young and dumb and full of come.”

Tyner, McCoy
An ace pianist, he came up in the fifties and shot to fame in John Coltrane’s great, early-sixties quartet, playing those mesmerizing chords behind Trane on “My Favorite Things” and so many other songs. Since Coltrane’s death in 1967, McCoy has carried on, making innumerable albums and maintaining his position of great respect in the world of jazz. Once slim as could be, the McCoy Tyner of today has become an endearingly bearlike, though no less serious and intense, presence.

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The Untouchables
See Eliot Ness.

Upchurch, Phil
A journeyman R & B guitarist who hit it big in 1961 with an instrumental hit called “You Can’t Sit Down.” The title says it all—the record was killer.

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Vance, Jack
turned out superbly crafted SF yarns from the late-forties to the current day, his high point perhaps having been the five Demon Princes novels of the sixties and seventies. He wrote in a spellbinding and highly idiosyncratic prose style that I have found impossible to resist stealing from. I must have forty or fifty of his books on my shelves. He’s like some wine you really like, perhaps a Rosenblum Zinfandel.

Venn diagrams
They allow you to map out common ground. One circle represents your set of interests. The other circle represents your spouse’s set of interests. The parts of the circles that overlap is what you have in common. What? You say your circles don’t overlap at all? Uh . . .

Victrola
Here we travel back into the dark ages of the modern audio system. A “Victrola” was a player of 78 RPM records made by RCA Victor, that you wound up with a crank. You could then hear an entire version of, say, “When the Saints Go Marching In.” We are talking major lo-fi. Featured on every model was the Victor icon: A dog listening intently to a phonograph with a big speaker cone, and the subtitle “His master’s voice.”

The Vi-Kings
A game but inadequate white-guy rock ‘n’ roll band that, in the early sixties, worked out of Boston. At the AD house, they did play one song that stood out, an absolutely kick-ass version of “Night Train,” which was having a revival at that time because James Brown had just done a version of it.

Vincent, Gene
He was the epitome of the evil-looking, greasy-haired, collar-up, in-your-face hoody white guys who did much of the rockabilly in those days. His hair formed a perfect, front-hanging triangle of epic proportion and he rocked his way through “Be-Bop-a-Lula” and its flip-side, the amazing “Woman Love,” with its sexual grunting and hunh-ing in 1955, for God’s sake! He died in 1971 of a ruptured stomach ulcer, which seemed appropriate.

V-J Day
The celebration of the victory over Japan that brought about the end to World War II. The date was August 15, 1945. People around the world danced in the street, drank immoderately, and created unplanned pregnancies.

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Waffen-SS
These Nazi troops were Hitler’s purest vision of the pitiless Aryan supermen he idealized. They were bad motherfuckers. SS, by the way, stands for shutzstaffel, or “doodoo heads.”

The Watusi
Another of those early-sixties dance steps, perhaps based on the pseudo-obscene kavooga two-step engaged in by Watusi warriors during fertility rituals. When guys in my fraternity tried to do it, they mostly looked like they were being ravaged by cerebral palsy.

The Wehrmacht
In the early sixties, we were still culturally marinating in World War II, which had so disrupted our parents’ lives and gotten in the way of our having been born earlier. But people had to wait and that’s why that baby boom you’ve heard so much about occurred. And in the middle of everything were those terrifying Third Reich guys in their scary but cool uniforms, with their pitiless Aryan bullshit and icy blue eyes. So, to get specific, the Wehrmacht was the German army. They were bad motherfuckers, having taken over most of Europe in a series of amazing blitzkreigs that revised everyone’s thinking about the art of war, and almost kicked Russia’s ass. But not quite.

Wile E. Coyote
You know, the poor cartoon wretch who chases the Road Runner, whose every doughty effort winds up in total failure. Can you relate?

Wollensak tape recorders
Trim, metallic-looking, portable, and German, this was the reel-to-reel deck of choice in the early sixties.

Wright, Frank Lloyd
Come on, man, everyone knows who Frank Lloyd Wright is! The man who designed the coolest house of all time, Falling Water? The genius who stood in relation to normal architecture as Little Richard did to Liberace? The tough guy who thought no one should be taller than five-foot-ten and built low doorways to dash out the brains of those who defied his maxim? Yes, him!

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