pawnedaccordion

I guess a Forward is what comes before a Prologue but I don’t know nor really care. So let me explain the journey I am about to describe and you may elect or not to take. First, it’s already happened. Jo and I drove across the United States using a northern route during the summer of 2010 when we left Studio City, California and moved to Camden, Maine. It was a great trip and we both recommend that everyone do a coast to coast drive at least once to have your own experience and make your own discoveries crossing our truly magnificent country. I kept a running diary that I emailed to friends as we traveled and what I’ll post here are the observations and commentary I saved from six years ago that I’m sure I’ll tweak a bit… I hope you’ll want to travel along.

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Prologue

It’s 3,201 miles from Studio City, CA to Camden, ME and according to my favorite directions giver website (http://drivingtimebetweencities.com/) the trip could have taken us just two days and four hours by car if we had worn adult diapers and did that other type of speeding. Instead, my wife Jo and I took three weeks and used bathrooms in 14 American states and one Canadian province and slept normally.

It was a journey home for Jo who was born and grew up in Maine and had lived in Los Angeles for 24 years, feeling for most of that time like she was in exile. I had been in California even longer and after a career that had been mutually dissolved by my employer and me in the spring of 2010 was ready and able to get back closer to where I once belonged myself which is Pennsylvania.

Jo and I had dreamed of making our cross-country trip for a while. We’d bought our Maine house in the fall of 2009 and had moved most of our things there right away with the intention of moving ourselves there permanently in 2011 at the end of my contract with ABC News. My buyout from Disney/ABC moved up our timetable. The plan for our route was simple. Jo had never been to Oregon nor Montana and had never seen Mt. Rushmore nor Niagara Falls. We both wanted to explore Michigan’s two peninsulas. The dots were not going to be difficult to connect and I had a list of golf courses I hoped to play and some offbeat attractions I wanted us to visit along the way.

A good friend of ours threw us a wonderful going away party and since there was a substantial gap between it and our actual departure date we kept saying goodbye to the same people who had been there until we felt embarrassed we were still around.

In the meantime I had our 2004 Volvo S40 serviced, printed out maps for daily driving plans and addresses and phone numbers for cheap motels and local non-chain restaurants. We began packing clothes into suitcases and tote bags that would go in the trunk along with my golf clubs that already lived there. We made lists and then gathered or bought the supplies we thought we’d need. Our picnic basket filled up quickly with things for lunches by the side of the road and we made a trip to REI for a serious cooler. There were low-tech no brainers like a first aid kit, flashlights, and a Swiss army knife and hi-tech necessities like our cameras, laptop, GPS and iPod. We even took our two foam pillows we cannot sleep without. The back seat began to disappear. It would prove a challenge to make it all fit but hey, that’s why cars have rear view mirrors.

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The Day before Day 1

Thursday, July 29, 2010

We still had a lot of things left in our apartment to ship to Maine and were worried about the whereabouts of our mover. A friend had recommended him to us and our departure date had already been pushed back because he told us his pet cat had gotten sick. He was actually coming from Maine, delivering art objects on the way and it had been tough getting a hold of him for updates about his progress. It was mid afternoon on the day he said he’d arrive and we were waiting with our packed boxes and getting nervous.

I’ve never been very good about getting rid of stuff and so I had clothes I’d packed that I’ll admittedly never manage to wedge into again and Jo had plenty of her own that did still fit her. Along with other boxes filled with books, kitchen items, office supplies, our desktop computer, widescreen TV and memorabilia such as my ashtray collection from imploded Las Vegas casinos there wasn’t much room to move around in the front of our apartment.

We’d lived in this apartment for seven years and called it an Ikea showroom since nearly all of our furniture was purchased there in flat boxes with their wordless but surprisingly adequate assembly instructions. All of it had served its purpose admirably but we weren’t taking any of our “popup” furnishings to Maine. I had placed ads on Craigslist but nibblers hadn’t taken the bait and when I called the National Council of Jewish Women and asked them to come take everything away for free they scheduled a pick up but didn’t show up. My son had wanted the bureaus, a lamp and one of the chairs that required our unscrewing each of them to fit it all in his car. With reassembly on the other end Gil and I spent a nice day together and also learned that stuff from Ikea is not really made to be taken apart and put back together a second time.

So now I made a last minute deal with the two Latino guys who were fixing up a vacated apartment in the building. They could have the rest of our Swedish interior collection (dining room and coffee tables, futon, sofa chair, bookcases plus the refrigerator) in exchange for helping me load everything else with the mover if and when he showed up.

When he finally did and I saw his panel truck towing its small trailer outside on our street I had a panic attack. There was no way in hell we were going to get all our things in there. I had damn near lost faith in this guy’s sense of time and now I enlarged that continuum to include both time and space. Fortunately, spatial relations have never been one of my stronger abilities. In fact in 10th grade biology I screwed up the dissection of a fish so badly that my teacher told me to take out some other homework and forget about medical school. After I calmed down and the mover assured me he could make everything fit I shifted from crisis mode to blind faith.

Almost four hours later his truck and trailer looked like the sides of a Rubick’s cube. The man was a master packer if there is such a designation. That evening we had the final of our multiple farewell dinners with a good humored good friend and then went back to our empty apartment to spend our last night in Los Angeles.

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Day 1

Friday, July 30, 2010

Everything fit in the car this morning and although there would be no room for passengers or even small reptiles in the back seat, at least it was still possible to see around our gear through the rear view mirror. Jo and I met my son at Mel’s Diner in Sherman Oaks for a farewell breakfast. Neither of Jo’s kids still lived in L.A. but Gil does and leaving him was obviously the most bittersweet aspect of our move to Maine for me.

After breakfast we had one final stop to make on our way out of the San Fernando Valley. I thought it would be a simple drop off but when I walked in the door at the cable company in Van Nuys it was take a number like a bagel store on a Sunday morning. You can do a lot of things at home through the Internet that you used to have to show up at places to do just a few years ago but returning your modem and DVR when you’re leaving town isn’t one of them apparently. I waited nearly an hour to do it.

We headed for the freeway, the 405, which is one of Los Angeles’s coronary arteries in need of a quadruple bypass, and after it rejoined the I-5 heading north near Magic Mountain we slowed to a halt. In LA it’s easy to find a traffic report on the radio and as soon as we did we heard the dreaded words “Sig Alert”. In LA this means a bad accident and/or a serious traffic jam and we were stuck in one. And since we’re not moving forward so quickly in our narrative, I’ll take a moment to tell you what most Angelinos don’t know. The “Sig Alert” is actually named after a man named Loyd Sigmon who came up with the way to automatically transmit a radio signal from the police department to Los Angeles radio stations whenever there was a need to. Now, he’s immortalized and unrecognized at the same time.

Another hour went by before we passed the scene of a nasty accident involving two semitrailers and twice as many passenger cars. But our escape from Los Angeles was still not complete. After getting around the highway wreckage we saw a huge smoke plume in the direction of Palmdale before turning west to go up the coast— “Sig Alert” and wildfire in the rearview mirror we had completed our escape from LA.

Lunch was at La Super-Rica in Santa Barbra (pictured here), Julia Child’s and our favorite taco stand, and then another 300+ miles on the 101 to San Francisco to visit Jo’s daughter Drew and her husband Aaron. Our GPS mysteriously lost its voice just when it came time to really want to rely on it as we hit the city and then just as mysteriously regained it as we parked the car. What’s that about? Drew made an incredible dinner. Aaron introduced me to some new music and it’s about 50 degrees in San Francisco in July.

So, we’re off. After thirty-one years in Los Angeles it will take a while for it to sink in.

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Hard to believe that over 50 years have gone by since Bob Dylan composed “The Times They Are A Changin’.” Many of us might disagree on many things but I’m guessing there is an ever growing consensus that unfortunately, there are a lot of ways the times —our times since those times— have not changed completely for the better.

Talk radio is one of those developments that I’m pretty certain I could live without. My father used to have his car radio tuned permanently it seemed to Rush Limbaugh and so when I visited and borrowed the car I sometimes got a quick earful. When I was in the car with him and Limbaugh was on I got a serious earful. About the only thing I learned from Rush and his cohorts was that there’s no issue too complex that it can’t be reduced to fear and loathing. And if you’ll excuse my own rant, I’ll contend that the majority of talk show hosts are egomaniacs and most of their callers either stridently xenophobic on the right or blindly naïve on the left.

The late former sane governor of Texas Ann Richards was once asked why she didn’t have a talk show. Her answer: “The people who have time during the day to listen to me on the radio are not the people I want to be talking to.”

But I remember a kinder gentler time when talk radio was in its infancy and I was not much older. There was a program on WHUM in the city where I grew up in Pennsylvania on weeknights that I’d often go to sleep listening to. Its theme music, big band clarinetist Artie Shaw’s “Nightmare”, would play and Reading’s Night Mayor was on the air.

It might not have been the first radio talk show in the country but I’ll bet it was close. Paul Barclay was the host, a high school school teacher by day and back then, I’m guessing, his radio gig was barely making him vacation money. I don’t think he was even much of a local celebrity and he certainly wasn’t into spouting his own opinions to his audience. No diatribes, no insults, no spin but something else was missing from Barclay’s show that, despite his objectivity and neutrality, made him a very singular voice back in his day. His was in fact the ONLY voice.

In that pre cell phone and Internet era of long ago either the technology didn’t exist or his radio station couldn’t afford it. So listeners only heard one side of the conversation— the Night Mayor’s. Because of this much patience was required from its devotees. Calls all started the same way: “Hello, Night Mayor!” followed by a long silence as the caller made his point and the listener waited to hear Barclay repeat, and no doubt condense, what that point was. Each call was literally translated from English into English and even then, listening to the program plod along, it was awkward to the point of painful.

The theme music kind of scared me, too but I couldn’t resist tuning into the Night Mayor when I was growing up. My transistor radio back then brought me the world, although St. Louis was actually about as far as it could reach out into it on a good night. It was rock and roll from Buffalo, basketball from Boston and talk of the stench of Reading politics or on one occasion I recall the real thing– complaints about tardy garbage collection –from the callers to the Night Mayor.

And then one night I decided to call the Night Mayor myself. I had to. Something incredible had occurred on live television that afternoon and the Night Mayor was asking for a witness. I had just gotten home from school and seen it myself on a kitsch variety show hosted by Bert Parks.

It was a stunt gone amazingly wrong. A woman from the audience blindfolded and spun around while a lit fuse running on the floor was racing toward her husband. The studio audience implored to scream directions to help her find it so she could stamp it out with her shoes. Her husband sitting in a chair below a sack of flour hanging from the ceiling. The fuse attached to a firecracker and the firecracker next to the sack of flour and well… she didn’t find it. And when the firecracker exploded the flour ignited and the man instantly became a human torch. Aflame he rose from his seat as Bert Parks ran to him and probably saved his life by quickly covering him with his green master of ceremonies blazer. Yes, this actually happened!

I could barely believe I had seen it but I had and I was obligated to report it to the Night Mayor. I felt it my duty… Well partly, but mostly I just wanted to be the first one to call in. I dialed WHUM from the phone in my parents’ kitchen and as it rang and I waited my nerves started to get the better of me. Stage freight hit and I thought of hanging up. I was a kid, not even a teenager. What was I doing? Only adults called the Night Mayor.

With the suddenness of a car crash it was too late. “Hello, Night Mayor.” His voice sounded different on the phone.  I surprised myself and didn’t hang up and as best I could began my account. The Night Mayor didn’t ask me my age. He had a show to do and now I was part of it and I was relieved that nobody was hearing me but him. He helped me along with tactical “ah huhs” and “um hums” honed from experience. I rambled around them and listened to the Night Mayor edit me as I went along. I reported what I had seen and The Night Mayor was relaying what I told him to possibly thousands of others. Was I articulate? Did I make sense? Who knows? But together we made it work and then it was over. I was alone in the kitchen and shaking a little but not embarrassed or scared. I was now officially a Night Mayor caller. Until writing this I’ve never told anyone.

Years later I became a journalist. I produced accounts of events for many others– millions in fact– to watch on the news for a living. But to this day I have never called another talk show.

Want to listen to Artie Shaw and His Orchestra play the Night Mayor theme? … Click below to get taken there…

My name is Peter Imber. I’ve Googled myself and discovered there are a number of other Peter Imbers in the world. I’m the one who lives in Maine with the hot wife. Sure, I’m bragging but it’s true. It’s also true that I’ve had an interesting life on top of a good one so far. Anyway, I’ve been a Facebook poster for a number of years and I’ve entertained my FB friends with stories from my life and career and now, I want to see if I blast further into cyberspace whether or not anybody will detect my presence.

For most of my working life I was in television news and privileged to work at its highest level. I was a videotape editor and then a field producer for ABC News and was based in its Los Angeles office. I covered bad and sad stuff for the network mostly in the Western United States. Fires, plane crashes, earthquakes, riots, murders– I spent a year on O.J. Simpson and nearly lost my mind. But what I liked most to do were stories that were not in the headlines or admittedly that important but to me were interesting, even fascinating and worth sharing with our viewers. I like to tell people that much of the time my work was introduced with exactly the same words. Peter Jennings or the other ABC News anchors would introduce something I produced with the words “Finally, tonight…”

These stories were called show closers or end pieces or enders. I have uploaded a bunch of them to YouTube and you can watch them by going to:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDRB2el9OnbUwpDyuB3cKtw

So, this my first post on my blog Pawned Accordion. Yes, there is a story behind my choosing that as its name. I’m sure I’ll get to it. But for now here’s a tale about one of my experiences at ABC News just doing my job…

Twenty years ago I was asked to do a piece about Bozo the Clown. We’d gotten a press release about him celebrating his 50th year in show business and the quirky ABC News overnight broadcast, watched mainly by insomniacs and the incarcerated, wanted it for their show.

The late Larry Harmon was the man who developed and owned the Bozo the Clown empire which he licensed to many local television stations around the country and the world each then hiring their own Bozo. By the late 1960s Harmon had licensed Bozo shows in nearly every major U.S. television market. Harmon’s autobiography is titled “The Man behind the Nose” even though he rarely dressed up as the clown he so successfully marketed. I interviewed him at his office in Los Angeles on Hollywood Blvd.

When we finished Harmon made the rest of my assignment very easy by offering me a large box of tapes with an amazing variety of Bozo milestones– Bozo on safari in Africa, Bozo riding an elephant in India, Bozo with the Pope in Rome, Bozo floating weightless while training with the astronauts… And in the box was also a printout with a timeline of Bozo’s many additional accomplishments, but as I looked at it something else leaped off the page.

Now, I knew Larry Harmon hadn’t been the original Bozo the Clown and had purchased the rights to a character who had already existed. But what I didn’t know and what the timeline let slip was that Bozo the Clown wasn’t 50 at all. He was at that moment actually only 47!

I phoned Harmon to clear things up. “Larry, I think we have problem. According to the information you’ve given me, Bozo isn’t really 50 this year,” I said in a gotcha voice.

There was a long silence on the other end of the line and then Harmon spoke, “So?”

I went ahead and did the story… Please click below if you want to watch it…