The day the Rolling Stones nailed a country song (their own) to the wall

Album cover for “Some Girls.” Amazon.com

The Rolling Stones song “Far Away Eyes,” has been described as a country satire, which it certainly seems like, given the comic exaggeration in the lyrics and Mick Jagger’s swaggering delivery. But I think it also reflects the Stones longtime love of the country music vernacular.

So, if a satire, it’s a deeply affectionate one, as I hear it. Watching them, you can see they’re having a good old time. And listening to the band, it sounds as authentic traditional country (Bakersfield style) as many of the acts you might see these days at the Grand Ol’ Opry. The gently sashaying tempo embraces the song like a romancer sweeping a girl (with faraway eyes) off her feet in semi-slow motion.

And here. the Stones nailed the country style to the wall, in 1978 — with a song they wrote — though you might guess they were covering country songwriting legend Harlan Howard. For a bunch of Brits, you gotta hand it to them — oh, maybe a ten-gallon hat and a bolo tie. The song helps underscore their long-professed love of country music.

I decided to post this after I did a simple Facebook post and got no response. So I decided to to to post it again, and again, got crickets.

I did get some appreciative comments and responses from some of my rock ‘n’ roll friends, with whom I directly shared the post.

The lack of response otherwise might suggest I don’t have many country music friends, which is probably true. When I got deeply into American vernacular roots music somewhat belatedly in the late 2000’s, I did not really cultivate many friends who were into these American genres. I always had an appreciation for roots music styles, but after my divorce I almost involuntarily made an emotional investment in Texas outlaw style country, primarily courtesy of Townes Van Zandt.

I started writing for nodepression.com, and was even putting together material for a prospective dissertation on American roots music as a literary form, while I was pursuing a doctorate degree in English at Marquette University. However, I only got halfway through the course work, so my roots music material has either languished or been cherry-picked for publication in some form.

But I enjoyed this video so much I wanted to share it more. So I’m giving it another shot as a blog post.

By the way, here’s my Facebook comment on the song:

This shore is tasty, showin’ how well The Stones handle full-blown country in 1978, from the “Some Girls” album. I admit I never knew Mick could handle the piano like a honky-tonker, while delivering a typically stylish vernacular vocal. And Ron Wood plays a mournfully bittersweet pedal steel solo. The harmony refrain goes down like a shot of 90-proof Jim Beam.

The relative indifference to the posting may have to do with the song’s relative obscurity, despite its quality. It did make it onto a single but only as the B Side to “Some Girls.” It’s also on the 1978 album titled Some Girls.

The Rolling Stones – Far Away Eyes (1978, Vinyl) - Discogs

discogs.com

Finally here’s a Facebook exchange about “Far Away Eyes” between myself and Cal Roach, my next door neighbor, who also happens to be a music critic (no kidding).

  •  

    Close enough! I’m pretty sure that was on my mom’s tape as well. I think whether or not Mick realized it he was always bridging the gap between country and blues the way he sang. Which is kind of the most legitimate way a white guy from England should be getting away with doing Bo DiddleYour cheating hearty and Willie Dixon covers, eh?

    Reply

    2h

  • Kevin Lynch

    Yep that sounds about right. We might throw in Hank Williams, for the hell of it. If he’s never done it, I can hear Mick nailing “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” or” Your Cheatin’ Heart.”
    _____

 

Wisconsinite Frank Stemper goes Euro on us with a new orchestral piece, “Protest.”

 

Composer-pianist Frank Stemper. Courtesy frankstemper.com

Pound-it-out-piano player? Erstwhile composer? Slightly obsessive golfer with a chip shot on his shoulder? Whatever he is, Frank Stemper’s done gone Euro on us, proving his composer’s erst is a while around now, or ‘Round Midnight, or whatever time it is in Austria.

Best known recently in Milwaukee as a jazz pianist, most often with the brilliant bassist Hal Miller, Frank Stemper is actually a longtime composer of “legit” music, heavy on the quotation marks. That’s not because he’s not really a legit composer, as he’s highly honored in that realm. It’s because, since returning to his hometown, Stemper reclaimed jazz as his personal “classical” music, thus we look at his history in the “modern” Euro-classical tradition a tad more from the vernacular perspective.

But no doubt about it. When Beethoven hit his muse — like a musical linebacker crashing head-on — in the 1970s, Stemper was sent reeling, but soon steadied himself with a composer’s pen in hand. 1

Here’s the Beethoven bobble head Stemper received recently from your blogger for a milestone birthday. Look at that middle linebacker’s mug. Plus, Beethoven is one “middle linebacker” who, in his later years, never would’ve been drawn offside by an Aaron Rodgers “hard count,” as he was stone deaf! How he composed his late-career masterworks remains one of the miracles of the ages. Courtesy eBay 2

A Stemper friend since grade school, I wrote the poetry libretto for his doctoral dissertation work, for soprano and chamber orchestra, Seamaster, premiered in Milwaukee by Marlee Sabo and the Milwaukee Chamber Orchestra.

But Stemper has ventured oe’r rough seas to far reaches of orchestral tidal waves and islandic chamber work, since then. He spent several decades as professor of composition at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, where he first hooked up with bassist Miller, who spent a residency there, some years ago.

Stemper’s composing style, generally speaking, is post-Schoenberg expressionistic, often with almost compulsive modulations, and extreme dynamic ambushes.

He tries to harness sound, broken free from tonality, and flying. It’s usually bracing stuff and can be stimulating fun for those in the grappling mood. Among his most impressive works was a vividly-imagined piece called Secrets of War, written in response to the Illegitimate Iraq War, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

A cursory look at the score of Symphony Number 4 (Protest), shared by the composer, suggests, amid muscular scoring, plenty of space, or grace notes, with small chamber-like details and interplays. This may reflect Mahler’s influence, though his model (such as it may remain), The Second Viennese school, employed plenty of chamber-like moments in larger orchestral scores. Beethoven’s propulsive dynamics and tempi seem inherent to Stemper’s language. Characteristically he’s more concerned with ensemble players arriving at the end of phrases or passages in rhythmic unison, rather than on pitch, allowing for freedom and ambiguity of tonality. Swift sequences of tonally chromatic sharps and flats abound, and improvised moments are invited.

Similarly, bass clef passages seem to work more for dramatic effect, than tonal grounding. One extended passage of bass clarinet and clarinet tangling with each another amidst similar byplay from bass trombone and trombone promises quasi-comical (or dangerous?) effect. Ah, such squabbling occurs in social-movement protests, certainly on the left, and most certainly on live battle lines of opposing political camps, as I’ve personally witnessed.

(The program also included Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 and Smetana’s woozy, stirring and nationalistic Le Moldau, two pieces which faintly befit Stemper’s influences and American-oriented programmatics.)

Stemper’s oeuvre amounts to ultimately a personal, and original style of new music. sometimes delving into wit-leavened, honest sentiment, mined from his remarkable memory for historical details and contours. 

By the way, his scored piano music reveals jazz influences yet often super-charged in intensity or with harmonic density and piston-like rhythms akin to Dave Brubeck, but in concentrated samples. It’s powerfully realized in the latest recording of his music, Blue 13: The Complete Piano Music of Frank Stemper, by Junghwa Lee.

The new piece, an orchestral work titled “Protest” reviewed below, also shares some qualities with “Secrets,” i.e. extra-musical sounds, bumps-in-the-night, rattles, and vocal-isms from orchestra players.

Stemper had been coy about the programmatic aspects of “Protest,” having referred to it as simply “Symphony No. 4” to his golfing buddies, perhaps fearing it might not live up to explanations even to himself, before the piece was born in performance.

As a score, the 16-minute piece seems subversive of classical symphonic notions of sonata-allegro form, based on major-minor key interplay and traditional three-part, long form. But I’ve hardly studied it extensively. The score includes instructions for ensemble players to “whisper” even at the very end. This might conveniently obscure the possibility of distracted audience members doing same, by then. But I doubt you’ll find Stemper’s music boring, though perhaps provocative of instant comment. So it goes. 3

Slaughterhouse Five: Book Analysis | bulb

However, the piece hardly bombed. Stemper claims it received four or five curtain calls. Nevertheless, I was told by a semi-reliable concert witness to “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” (opening and closing it with convenient alacrity).

Before departing overseas, Stemper betrayed natural, if comical, anxiety about the trip, since he hadn’t had an orchestral piece premiered in quite some time. So I can’t wait to actually hear it, and/or protest it.

Stemper’s music has found happy homes (though perhaps as a “problem child”) in a number of European and other foreign orchestras, including previously with conductor Guntram Simma, who commissioned this work (with funding from the city of Dornbirn) and debuted it with the Collegium Instrumentale Dornbirn.

American composer Frank Stemper (right) confers with conductor Guntram Simma during rehearsal for Stemper’s Symphony No. 4 (Protest), in Dornbirn, Austria. Photo by Nancy Stemper.

For now, we have a substantially appreciative and not overly judgmental review, by a German critic. Stemper is pictured after the performance in the bottom photo of the review layout.

If this review page opens in a German text, a mouse right click should allow you a translation function: https://www.kulturzeitschrift.at/kritiken/musik-konzert/guntram-simma-und-das-collegium-instrumentale-verstroemten-bei-dornbirn-klassik-viel-energie-und-aussagekraft

p.s. Qualifiers aside, I really do like most Stemper music that I’ve heard over the years. I’m not sure whether it likes me as much.

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1 The rough-and-tumble analogy to demanding modern music holds true in that pianist Stemper — a high school footballer and amateur rugby player — once badly injured one of his hands playing the “impossible” piano part of Schoenberg’s song cycle Pierrot Lunaire. Old Schoenberg clearly won that arm-wrestling match — from his grave.

2. However, I did not purchase the Beethoven bobble head from eBay, rather it came from Art Smart’s Dart Mart and Juggling Emporium, on Brady Street. in Milwaukee.

3. The Kurt Vonnegut reference above, to his famous philosophical phrase “So It goes,” from the novel Slaughterhouse Five is quoted in hopes that at least part of the implicit “protest” evoked in Stemper’s piece is anti-war, and especially meaningful for Europeans who still honor the allied D-Day invasion that turned WWII. After the performance, composer Stemper and his spouse Nancy visited Normandy Beach, France, site of D-Day in World War II. The visit to Omaha Beach prompted these reflections by composer Frank Stemper:

“I cannot imagine what it was like to be part of something so grotesque, and I am glad that I cannot imagine it.  And thankful.  I had to go there, I guess to thank those that had to do it. Nancy’s dad was in the Pacific building air fields on islands. The CBs.  My dad was in rural Georgia taking care of German POWs – he never made it to any war zone.  He was scheduled to go to serve as a shrink at the Nuremberg trials, but his points ran out and he was discharged…Gus (Valent) paid at (Guadalcanal)  

Anyway, it’s life.  It’s our flawed species…Link below to one of the many D-Day videos – although this is mostly just the old soldiers remembering.  
The bad news is that D-Day and war in Europe was the so-called “Conventional War,” by the rules – as absurd as that sounds.  But it does have some validity and meaning when compared to the war in the Pacific.  The Japanese didn’t know the rules, and, I’m afraid, that THAT part of WWII made D-Day look like a picnic.  Damnit.”

The Stempers also provided these photos, including of another artist’s work, honoring that occasion (footnote photos by Nancy Stemper, unless otherwise indicated):

 

Omaha Beach, Normandy. 

“Les Braves” Normandy beach memorial sculpture, to the fallen and the victorious, by Anilore Banon.

 

 

 

NPR American Masters question: What single work of art changed your life?

This is the colorized cover of the Kindle edition of Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” as illustrated by Rockwell Kent for the 1930 edition, but with the author’s name added. (see below) 
Well, I gotta right to sing the blues, Or to sing praises, like a fool, to the earthly heavens where art might come from. And if it is the blues, it’s the kind that inspires you rather than keeps your head just above water.
You see, my song sort of went on and on (by Facebook comment standards), spilling over the 12-bar blues form like water in a sinking ship. But the editors at PBS American Masters Facebook page didn’t jettison any of my load of responses to the provocative question: What single work of art changed your life?
They’ve received 247 responses and counting. Here’s my response. I couldn’t quite help myself. I have even expanded on it here, with a bit more text and imagery.
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As a long-time generalist arts journalist, I’ve encountered so much extraordinary art in all its forms. How to pick one? I might say seeing Picasso’s “Guernica,” but it was an oddly truncated experience, as the Metropolitan Museum of Art closed before I could see all of it. I’d literally been stopped in my tracks on the staircase for long minutes because the center of Guernica filled the doorway view at the top. Then the doors closed, as the museum was closing for the day. I didn’t have time to return before flying back home. The great work moved to Spain a short time later, in 1981. So, I live with a reproduction of it, and that oddly but profoundly unfulfilled experience. 1
Imagine seeing, through a doorway, the middle of this astonishing political mural by Picasso, being stopped in your tracks by it on a museum staircase — and then the gallery doors closing on you at 5 p.m. That’s my sadly truncated but unforgettable experience of seeing the mighty “Guernica.” Courtesy Magazine Artsper
“Guernica,” of course was named for the Spanish town bombed in 1937 by Nazi planes, complicit with Fascist dictator Franco  — the first act of modern war terrorism on a civilian population of nascent World War II.
***
And then, seeing Arshile Gorky’s often-gorgeous metamorphosis from surrealism to abstract-expressionism — closely reflecting my own artistic sensibilities — at the Guggenheim Museum of Art is another life-changing moment.
The plow and the song - Digital Remastered Edition Painting by Arshile Gorky
Arshile Gorky’s 1946 painting “The Plow and the Song,” (above) lyrically transmutes his memories of homeland Armenia to the modernist present. The memories were rooted in his long, desperate childhood escape, by foot, with his sister Vartoosh and mother, from the Armenian holocaust conducted by the Ottoman Empire. Their mother, Sushan der Marderosian pictured below — in this wrenchingly poignant Gorky painting from about 1926, with the artist at the age of their exodus — died of starvation in 1918. (Courtesy pixels.)
Pleased with my Milwaukee Journal review of the Guggenheim show, Gorky’s nephew Karlen Mooradian contacted me. I was fortunate enough to obtain an in-person interview with him and Gorky’s sister Vartoosh Adoian Mooradian (Gorky’s original name was Vosdanig Adoian) in Chicago, but I was never able to publish anything from the interview. I did glean great insight from Mooradian’s 1980 book The Many Worlds of Arshile Gorky, about his artist uncle, who committed suicide in 1948. He profoundly influenced many abstract expressionists, none more than Willem de Kooning. 2
The Artist and His Mother, 1926 - 1936 - Arshile Gorky - WikiArt.org
****
Then, music vibrates on and on in my life, where the single transforming moment could be the Butterfield Blues Band’s ground-breaking East-West album, or first hearing John Coltrane’s achingly eloquent and exalting A Love Supreme suite, or his searing Live at Birdland, and imaging being there, in that fire.
John Coltrane “Live at Birdland.” Courtesy deep groove mono
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Or, by contrast to such earnest passion, the lacerating sneer of Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” which helped pinpoint the existential waywardness of the freedom my generation declared from bourgeois convention and responsibility. Or, by another contrast, Dylan’s affirmatively flashing “Chimes of Freedom,” poetry aflame in music
Or, hearing Beethoven or Mahler in fearless, heaving performances, in Milwaukee and Madison. Grammy-winning conductor John DeMain especially unlocked much of Mahler’s glorious might with the Madison Symphony Orchestra, in a full Mahler symphonic cycle in the 1990s and 2000s.
In theater, a darkly, full-chested staging of Macbeth at American Platers Theater, and a thunderbolt-raging King Lear at UW-Milwaukee. So, yes, the commonality here seems an appetite for grand gestures, of many sorts.
***
That’s why I finally must land on the experience of reading Moby-Dick for the first time (as some readers of this blog might’ve guessed). I was already in my ‘40s and, knowing its reputation and having seen Huston’s movie version, I remained unprepared for how inexorably the book swept me away, even though many readers understandably turn back to the shore. And yet, there’s so much you’d miss. Even the cetology I gobbled up like so much krill going down a cavernous throat.
Yet the haunting had begun several decades earlier when I found a copy of the 1930 Random House edition which brought the book to widespread readership.
My plastic-covered copy of the 1930 Random House edition of Moby-Dick, what I still believe is the definitive version of an illustrated edition of the book, with art by Rockwell Kent. Photo by Kevin Lynch
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The visual artist in me responded to this powerfully. I knew then, my day of reckoning with the book loomed somewhere in the future. There have been many illustrated editions of this book since, and some are steeped in their own fiery inspiration. But none so eloquently captures the spirit of the book as it manifest itself in the Depression era, as does that 1930 edition.
Rockwell Kent, in his way, approaches Melville’s genius in his 228 woodblock prints. The black and white Deco-influenced imagery is proto-noir, capturing the sense of lost-at-sea and impending doom and, in deft knife strokes, the essence of characters lurking inside their ravaged, or mortally infected, souls. 3
Infected by what? The blood-lust fervor of Ahab, akin to a demagogue manufacturing an enemy, in the whale that took his leg. The expansively stentorian Ahab, recalling Lear, captivates the whole crew in his questing rage — except for first mate Starbuck and, to a degree, Ishmael, who remains somewhat remote, and “aloft.”
Alas, Random House jumped on their perceived marketing coup with the new edition so strongly that they failed to put Melville’s name anywhere on the cover, only including “Illustrated by Rockwell Kent” on the spine. It was yet another of countless insults to the great and long-forsaken writer, right at the emergence of his genius to broader acceptance. The current Kindle version (at top), at least, corrects that “oversight” with the original cover (colorized though it is).
Captain Ahab — Rockwell Kent – Biblioklept
Here’s a brooding but burning portrait of Captain Ahab, by Rockwell Kent. 
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So, back to Melville’s text:
The extraordinarily antiphonal voices of Ishmael and Ahab echoed through my head and psyche, across the oceanic expanses of poetic writing, gritty details, and surprising humor, which might make some virtually sea-sick, but hang onto the horizon as the crow’s nest sways!
It was indeed postmodern in 1851, in how Melville strangely constructed it, and summed up his own creation as well as anyone: “It is the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships’ cables and hawsers. A Polar wind blows through it, and birds of prey hover over it.”
“Thar she blows!” from “Moby Dick,” 1930, illustrated by Kent. Courtesy “History of Art: Masterpieces of World Literature: Herman Melville.”
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Yet it persists, remaining afloat as a metaphor and allegory for America, in the tall, creaking bones of The Pequod, manned by people from many races. And what else did it all mean? Defying fate? Or God? Or nature? Or Nature? Hubris as delusion, or the destiny of grace embraced, one storyteller’s backward glance into timelessness?
Rockwell Kent Ishmael Going Abroad Giclee Art Print | Etsy
Here, Pequod first harpoonist Queequeg, who deeply befriends Ishmael early in the novel, remains vigilant for the White Whale, even while down in the forecastle where the crew bunks. Illustration by Kent. Courtesy Etsy.
From childhood, oceanic depths had always scared me. In time, Melville’s mounting whorl of words, and his own extraordinary life story, compelled me to begin writing a novel about its author.
These days, people critique the book’s scarcity of women characters. Yet, as Sascha Morrell comments. “On the other hand, the novel makes numerous appeals to the maternal forces of nature. It also breaks down gender norms and boundaries, from Ishmael’s surrender to Queequeg’s ‘bridegroom clasp,’ to Ahab’s boasting of his ‘queenly personality’ to the ambiguous mingling of ‘milk and sperm’ in the infamously erotic chapter ‘A Squeeze of the Hand.’”
Another she doesn’t mention is one of my favorite chapters, the stunning awe of gigantic maternal nursing in “The Grand Armada.” For that matter, tell (the late) Elizabeth Hardwick, author of a brilliantly concise and empathetic Melville biography, how much it lacks for a human female presence. Or Laurie Robertson-Lorant, author of a comprehensive Melville biography. Or Elizabeth Schultz, the doyenne of visual art about “The Great American Novel.”
Moby Dick breaches like a god reaching for the stars, (or to “kiss the sky,” as Jimi Hendrix would exult in the 1960s). in this image by Kent from 1930.
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On the other hand, one could quote any number of astute observers on the book’s magnificence: Hardwick, F. O. Matthiessen, Harold Bloom, Leslie Fiedler, Alfred Kazin, and Lewis Mumford all come to mind, worth looking up. Most recently, I revisited D.H. Lawrence on Moby-Dick and he says: “A wonderful, wonderful voyage. And a beauty that is so surpassing only because of the author’s awful flounderings in mystical waters. He wanted to get metaphysically deep. And he got deeper than metaphysics. It is a surpassingly beautiful book, with an awful meaning, and bad jolts.” Read his essay in Studies in Classic American Literature for more. 4
So, living on the Heartland edge of a Great Lake, I remain haunted by this and more, by Saint Elmo’s Fire and the diabolical blood ritual, by Pip seeing God’s foot on the treadle of the loom, by the Catskill Eagle emerging from the woe that is madness, by Ahab’s burning obsession, by the massive will and long, mysterious memory – is it consciousness? — of the white whale and, of course, by Queequeg’s coffin, a miraculous, sacred offering from a brotherly friend, somehow rising, just free of the hellish vortex.
“Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf…”
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1 Picasso was adamant that Guernica remain at the Met until Spain re-established a democratic republic. It would not be until 1981, after both the artist’s and Franco’s deaths, that Spanish negotiators were finally able to bring the mural home.
2 Mooradian’s The Many Worlds of Arshile Gorky includes 70 illustrations, a Q& A interview with Willem DeKooning about Gorky, as well as interviews with Alexander Calder, Lee Krasner Pollock, Malcolm Cowley, Reuben Nakian, Barnett Newman, Peter Blume, Meyer Schapiro, Saul Steinberg and other important figures in modern art and criticism.
3 The edition of Moby-Dick with Kent’s illustrations remains in print. I recommend the version with an introduction by Elizabeth Hardwick, published by The Modern Library, in paperback 2000.
4. Studies in Classic American Literature, DH Lawrence, Penguin, 1923, 1977, 159

A Two Rivers trip: a luminous lakeside and nature preserve, football glory, and the original ice cream sundae

The twin rivers of Two Rivers surround the central city. Courtesy Pinterest.org. 

A Trip to Two Rivers, Wisconsin: nature abounds, football glory and the original ice cream sundae 

 

PHOTO ESSAY Part 1 The Lighthouse Inn Embraces the Edge of Lake Michigan.

Two Rivers, Wisconsin, is a Lake Michigan coast community that sits somewhat inauspiciously between Milwaukee and the far-more-desired coastal destination of Door County. But this small city — also always somewhat in the shadow of the larger Manitowoc, about nine miles south — has plenty of charm, beauty, atmosphere, and history.

The West Twin River of Two Rivers. Courtesy two-rivers.org

With a population of 11,700, Two Rivers is largely situated between its nominal two rivers, which creates a virtual island for the central city proper (see photo at top). The lakeside and waterways make for a bountifully green environment (photo above).

The city also holds a natural interest for me, as both my parents grew up there, met, and became high school sweethearts destined to marry. Yet I have too belatedly partook of the city’s allure, after having visited here only once, in the late 1990s, since a family reunion a handful of decades ago, which included the extended families of the four Two Rivers Lynch siblings: My father Norm Lynch (and his wife Sharon, a Two Rivers native), and my uncles Jim and Jack (and his spouse Barbara), and my aunt Eileen.

Travel partner Ann Peterson and I were staying in The Lighthouse Inn, the very place the Lynch families stayed at back then for the reunion. Memories bubbled up as we sat in the hotel’s bar.

A highlight of the reunion for me was when Jack Lynch, our hip California uncle, summoned brother Norm Lynch’s three oldest children — me, Nancy and Maureen — to his hotel room. Then, with a cagey grin, he pulled out a pipe filled with marijuana. We proceeded to get high and float through the rest of the day in a refracted, altered state.:Like, zowsville, man. My mother detected us and determined the cause, and was less than pleased with Jack for “corrupting” her children.

An animated moment at the Lynch family reunion, in the mid-1980s, in the bar of the Lighthouse Inn. From left are my mother, Sharon Lynch (seated), my uncle Jack Lynch (standing in navy and white jacket), my Aunt Eileen Lynch, my sister Sheila Lynch, and Eileen’s old Two Rivers friend Joyce Amman.

One more of 1980s Lynch family reunion at Lighthouse Inn in Two Rivers. (L-R) Uncle Jack, the surgeon, with Uncle Jim who, after a distinguished career as a Colonel in the Air Force, earned a degree in art and reinvented himself as a visual artist in Seattle. Next to Jim is his second wife, Sherri.

Yet so much time had now passed that all four of the Two Rivers Lynch children, raised by the family matriarch Frances Lynch, have now passed as well.

So, settling in at The Lighthouse Inn, with its reunion memories, I had a slight feeling of bittersweet remorse. The rarity of such reunions derived from the four Lynch children being so scattered: Norm in Milwaukee, Eileen in Austin, Texas; Jack in Sacramento, California and Jim, the oldest and the one with the strongest ties to the family’s original home, in Seattle.

The Lighthouse Inn, on Lake Michigan in Two Rivers. Courtesy trip101

A big part of the history and mythology of Two Rivers for me personally also has to do with my father’s exploits as quarterback of a remarkable high school football team, for The Two Rivers Purple Raiders of Washington High School. From 1943 to 1946-47, the team, also known as “The Golden Air Patrol,” went undefeated 24 consecutive games over the three years my father quarterbacked. However, dad always emphasized to me, it’s very much the story of a talented and dedicated team and a brilliant head coach, Harry O’Mealy (more on that below, in Part 4).

But  Ann and I had also wanted to explore the Woodland Dunes Nature Preserve, not far from the hotel.

And the hotel provided quite a romantic vista, with the magnificently setting sun on the horizon accompanying my vague awareness of the shipwrecks that haunt the Two Rivers shoreline. A few years ago, a new monument was erected to commemorate one of the state’s deadliest shipwrecks ever, of The Vernon, in the treacherous waters of Lake Michigan near Two Rivers, on October 28, 1887, coming from Frankfurt, MI. We missed the anniversary by one week, being there on Oct 22-23. But as the photos hopefully show, the Great Lakefront was plenty evocative of whatever the imagination might summon. See feature story link, here, followed by my photos of the lake from The Lighthouse Inn.

Two Rivers monument honors lives lost in one of Wisconsin’s deadliest shipwrecks

Print of dramatic seafaring scene painting in restaurant of Lighthouse Inn in Two Rivers.

The Lighthouse Inn Bar overlooking Lake Michigan in Two Rivers

 

The mutating dusk sky in two views looking south towards Manitowoc (on the distant horizon) from Lighthouse Inn.

Looking north towards the Two Rivers lighthouse on the breakwater, from Lighthouse Inn

 

Sunset on Lake Michigan, from The Lighthouse Inn 

The next morning, the moon lingered above Two Rivers, not quite ready to let go of its nocturnal domain.

 

Part 2  — The Woodland Dunes Nature Preserve, in Two Rivers 

The entrance to the woods of the Woodland Dunes Nature Preserve

At first, I though maybe this little fella might’ve been “playing possum.” We came back his way later. Sadly, he wasn’t.

Here’s a rare photo of the semi-mythical Woodlands Pharting Ogre which audibly followed us for a short while on our hike through the preserve

 

Part 3 — Two Rivers history, including its distinction as the Birthplace of the Ice Cream Sundae.

Inscription beneath Civil War soldier statue (below) outside Two Rivers City Hall (formerly Washington High School): “In memory of those who fought in defense of the Union.”

Two Rivers City Hall (formerly the site of Washington High School). The original school was a larger red brick building (since razed) but visible in the yearbook photo below.

And what of the birth of the ice cream sundae? Well worth pondering as National Sundae Day is about to arrive on November 11th. Here’s the lowdown:

“In 1881, George Hallauer asked Ed Berner, owner of a soda fountain (in Two Rivers), to top his dish of ice cream with chocolate sauce, hitherto used only for ice cream sodas. It became a popular concoction, but was only sold on Sundays. One day, a little girl asked for one, saying they could pretend it was Sunday. Voila — sundae (the spelling is attributed to a mistranscription on the check).” 1

Ann Peterson at the site of Berner’s Ice Cream Parlor, established 1881, the legendary

birthplace of the ice cream sundae, in Two Rivers, Wisconsin. It’s now a museum and ice cream parlor (below).

 

Part 4 — Gridiron glory of the undefeated Two Rivers Raiders

Evan Gagnon describes the unparalleled era of Two Rivers’ Washington High football coach Harry O’Mealy, in his book Neshota: The Story of Two Rivers, Wisconsin:

” ‘It’s never too late.’

A pat phrase, maybe, but it pretty well sums up the philosophy of Harry O’Mealy, the winningest football coach ever to tear up the turf at two Rivers Washington high school.

“Clever, articulate, highly competitive and always a jump ahead of the opposition, O’Mealy pushed his Golden Air Patrol in about the same fashion that Vince Lombardi drove his Packers and the results on a comparative basis were about the same.” 1

I love O’Mealy’s philosophy, “It’s never too late” (to win a game), even if mathematically there comes a time. Still, with onside kicks, and sideline passes etc., great teams and quarterbacks can make it seem like they’re bending the arc of time towards improbable victory. That stirs the souls of faithful, hanging onto the chance for a great comeback win.

At top is a print of a well-known Two Rivers Reporter action photo that ran (lower) as the featured photo in the news story of the team’s final 1946 game against arch-rival Manitowoc. Norm Lynch, an up back on the return team, returns the opening kick-off for a big gain, but he was tackled by Shipbuilder No 30 downfield.

Pictured above is the starting offensive lineup for the Two Rivers Raiders of Washington High in 1946. The team went undefeated for three consecutive seasons from 1943 to 1964. My father, Norman Lynch, is the quarterback (32) behind center and in front of the T-formation of three running backs. The second partial photo is of a 50-year team reunion, posing in the same configuration. Norm Lynch is the guy in the dark sport coat.

There was no playoff system to determine a state championship for Division 3 high school football in 1947, but this team would’ve been a prime contender. The Washington High Raiders of 1980 did win their division’s state championship.

This page from my father’s yearbook (above) documents the scores for the 1946-47 year, including the season-opening 40-0 blowout of Pius XI, one of the state’s biggest private schools. The Pius players were also physically much bigger than the Raiders. Note also the remarkable disparity of total season points between Two Rivers and its opponents (260-39). The Raiders specialized in head-spinning plays to deceive the defense, including their version of the fabled “Statue of Liberty” play which required precise timing and execution. The team’s brilliant, innovative head coach and play-caller Harry O’Mealy (standing at left in photo at right) is pictured with his assistant coach. O’Mealy signed his quarterback Norm Lynch’s yearbook there, with the inscription: “Get that pitching arm in shape for St. Nobert’s next fall. Harry O’Mealy.”

Curiously, my father went to St. Norbert’s College on a football scholarship but did not pursue football in college. Why, he never really explained, though I think he was already thinking about marriage and a family with his betrothed, Sharon Jann. In his junior year, they moved to Milwaukee when he transferred to Marquette University, where he received his bachelor’s degree. I was born a short time afterward.

So part of my little quest was to visit the football field where the photo of my father ‘s kick return took place. Though the high school is now in suburban Two Rivers, the original football field is still there, though the goal posts are long gone. It’s very spacious, far bigger than a single football field.

In fact, during the 1930s and 1940s, the original Washington High’s facilities were used for summer training by a number of professional football teams, including the Philadelphia Eagles in 1941 and 1942.

Sadly the glorious field’s fall season has now been taken over by a loose-knit “team” we might call The Two Rivers Honkers, who line up in several directions at once, as the photo of me below shows. The Honkers specialize in the “double-wing formation,” but are especially skilled at leaving lumpy “yard markers” in the grass, which one now encounters at least every yard or so. The field is right beside the East Twin River, as you can see the street bridge at the right.

But all I could do was invoke an old expletive from a Marquette High Jesuit:

“Cripes Mini-Manure!!”

For all the forsaken past, I summoned the spirit to pose in a football runner’s manner, following in the old man’s footsteps, to recalled to glorious days of yore (below).

Photos above and below by Ann Peterson.

Other photos by Kevin Lynch, unless otherwise indicated.

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1. Birthplace of the ice cream sundae: https://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/11967