Tales of Waring: he never tells that story

"Oh," Bill shouted, "he got away with bloody murder! Everybody I've talked to that knew him as a child!"

The Fred in mj’s mirror came alive and produced this time a biting White Northern Gospel sound, harsh and conscience-rattling.

Clearly, Fred Waring had learned somewhere, maybe from his mother, that if a contralto and three males sang ever so smoothly blended in four parts at the right moment with the right intensity, it struck and stung like a viper.

"One of his parents was an alcoholic?" mj asked like a tail-wagging puppy. For, according to Sigmund Freud, if you knew what happened way back when, in somebody’s childhood, you could explain why they behaved the way they did now. And comprehending intolerable behavior could be the first step toward accepting, adapting to, and even appreciating, that same person’s intolerable behavior now.

Bill nodded. "Y'see, his mother was a Temperance nut, and they used to have these meetings. She was the driving force in a temperance thing. And where Fred first claims he learned to sing, and all about harmony and stuff, was the whole family used to stand around and sing the Temperance songs." Bill laughed silently, shaking – in truth! – like a bowl full of jelly! "And they used to go to these meetings!" He chuckled so hard the floor shook this time. "And they'd have to stand on the stage and sing these Temperance songs. And now I can see what happened." His face went suddenly grave: "This Temperance is being driven into him, and all of a sudden his father splits off with a lost month with some broad; his father was a banker: must've been a terrible jolt to this man."

Awe and tragedy packed Bill's presentation. "Terrible," he said. "When he speaks of his Dad and his Mom he speaks of them together. He never tells that story that they split. I've heard that from others."

"Did they split up and never get back together?" The puppy’s tail was betwixt-legs again. Psychotherapy could be hard on the therapist too sometimes.

He grieved for the poor old man, and young Fred, too; and there were even times in later years when Dr. Lorenzo practically wept on the page, he said, coming across this after having forgotten it.

[1] Like many of the scores if not hundreds of cartoons by the USA’s greatest 20^th-Century cartoonists housed in the Pennsylvania State Library “Fred Waring’s America” collection (bequeathed by Fred to his alma mater), this cartoon was a personal gift from Rube Goldberg to Waring in appreciation for his hospitality shown to the National Cartoonists Society one year during their annual get-together at his Shawnee Inn, on or around Fred’s June 9^th birthday. It was photographed atop a wood-grain library table by Dr. Lorenzo (with an i-Phone 6) at Penn State’s Pattee and Paterno Library November 7, 2018, during a side trip from his sister’s in South Jersey. The NCS celebrated their annual outing at Fred’s Shawnee Inn and Golf Course every year from roughly 1947 to – as Virginia Waring reports in her book – ‘when the Inn was sold’. A study of the mass of cartoons in the collection leaves the impression that during the annual event Fred acted as Master of Ceremonies, orchestrating large portions of the cartoonists’ overall experience during the event, especially the musical show on the last night, but also baseball games opposing cartoonists against the Pennsylvanians, and golf rounds or tournaments, poolside lounging (watching women in bathing suits), and even eating and drinking. Goldberg’s portrayal here of Fred ‘magically puppeteering’ (no visible strings) or ‘conducting’ (hands in air, with resultant musical notes) is probably a reference to his godlike manipulation of all events, as well as to his abilities as musical conductor of the Pennsylvanians, and role as master conductor of the final night’s big show featuring the Pennsylvanians (and sometimes even some performances by the cartoonists).

[2] The lyrics of this second verse of Away with Rum were sung during the Prohibition era as a mocking parody of the serious, sincere Temperance songs and the self-righteous goofballs that sang them, such as Fred Waring’s family of origin, including himself, during the years before he grew up and became a drinker. See Annals of America vol. 14, pg. 450. The preceding page of the Annals gives an editors’ perceptive overview of the section, “Drinking Songs of Prohibition:” “The Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, prohibiting the manufacture, sale, or transportation of alcoholic liquors, was adopted and submitted to the states by Congress on December 18, 1917. Declared ratified on January 29, 1919, the Amendment, along with the Volstead Act enforcing it, went into effect on January 29, 1920. Herbert Hoover in 1928 called Prohibition ‘a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive, far-reaching in purpose’, but the American people on the whole felt differently. The result was that the 1920s – the Amendment was repealed in 1933 – were marked by more flagrant and more widespread disobedience to federal law than probably any decade in our history. The four songs reprinted here give some hint of the attitude that most Americans had toward Prohibition.” (p. 449) Italics, underline and bold type are ours, to emphasize the educational point often made by Dr. Lorenzo that Americans kept and still keep failing to learn from their own history: during the era of the ‘Prohibition’ (of the quite brain-altering and very physically addicting substance, alcohol), the people lost respect for a Federal Government that attempted to legislate a type of morality they did not want; and similarly so, in just the same way, since the late 60s, the American people have shown increasing disrespect for the Federal Government for overstepping its bounds in the same way, only this time with regard to the popular, quite brain-altering and only rarely physically addicting substance, marijuana.

[3] Frank Waring would leave for longer and longer spells starting when Fred was 18; and by the time Fred was about 25, Frank had left for a woman thirty years his junior, never to return, according to Virginia Waring in her Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians, p. 19f. She researched the matter with meticulous purpose among Fred’s junior siblings (he being eldest) after realizing Fred had never revealed any of this to her, his own wife of thirty years. She explained in her book about Fred’s life that he had always talked about his parents – exactly as Bill said – as if they had always remained together, even to her, his own wife. This agreement between two independently operating reporters supports an argument for the general overall accuracy of Bill Blackburn’s storytelling.