New and Old #140
Friday roundup and commentary
What’s It Like to Live in a Grocery Store? Surprisingly Comfortable, New York Times, Tim McKeough, March 22, 2023
A few years after Demi Raven and Janet Galore were introduced by a mutual friend and fell in love, they started looking for a home where they could live together. But for artists with careers in technology, it was clear that a cookie-cutter house would not suffice….
Fortunately, the friend who introduced them, Marlow Harris, is not just a matchmaker, but also a real estate broker. And she knew of an unusual building for sale that she was sure the couple would like: a former corner grocery store from 1929 in the North Beacon Hill neighborhood of Seattle.
The piece goes on to explain the renovation work, which was fairly complex. It also underscores how adaptable these old buildings were—they could be any number of different uses over the years. The grocery store building here looks a lot like the old Main Street grocery store in my hometown. Very nice little story.
I was aware of this bit of old-fashioned trivia surrounding this Christmas classic:
Not everyone was so keen on the song. In Boston, the Catholic Archdiocese officially condemned it, and so great was their influence that some radio stations took the song out of rotation despite it being the most popular single in the country….
Jimmy Boyd actually met with church leaders to convince them the song was harmless, and upon being granted a private audience with the 13-year-old boy, the Boston priests agreed to change their position. It’s generally assumed that Jimmy explained to the priests that this song wasn’t about adultery: Santa Claus is really the child’s father dressed up, which is the whole joke of the song.
I did not, however, know this one. It’s fairly well known that Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer began life as a story book handed out by department store Montgomery Ward (the song came later). But “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” was also a department store promotional item!
It was conceived not by any record company but by Saks Fifth Avenue, the department store. Saks had an annual Christmas card to promote the store, and they commissioned the song to promote the card. The card used a sketch by artist Perry Barlow, which had previously appeared on the cover of The New Yorker, of a mommy kissing Santa while he holds her confused child.
I’m still learning new things about the Christmas canon!
One of the most well-known novelty songs of country music is Cash’s hit song, “One Piece At A Time.” The song is about a poor assembly line worker who sneaks bits and pieces of a Cadillac out of the plant in a lunchbox over the course of 20-or-so years….
In 1977, Bill Patch, a guy from Welch, Oklahoma, who loved to dabble in mechanics, decided to build a Cadillac just like the one in the song. He and his mechanic buddies bought any junked Cadillac pieces they came across and started putting the car together.
This is one of those things that obviously hails from a different era. Cars are no longer the relatively simple mechanical devices that could be workshopped and jerry-rigged. It’s just a song, but at a certain distance in time, it’s more than that.
I guess I always thought “dressing” was just a weird Southern-ism, as in, “In the South, they call stuffing ‘dressing.’” There is a regional divide as to which term is predominantly used, but this article explains the difference in terms of context: stuffing is stuffed in the bird, dressing is “stuffing” served on the side. My Yankee mind never thought of it that way.
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