A Merry Musical Christmas

If you’re a regular reader of this column you know I enjoy writing about history. But there’s a second topic I have a big interest in: music; specifically, the singers and songs that were popular in the 1960s and ‘70s, when I was growing up. So, on the rare occasions when those two topics meet, I’m in a kind of writer’s heaven. That’s the case with today’s column, in which we travel back to a time when some special songs made my childhood merry.

Christmas in the 1960s was an enchanted time. Like other middle class families in a small town, the holiday promised a welcome change to my family’s routines. Our living room was rearranged to welcome a freshly-cut tree, the picture window sparkled with snow sprayed from a can, and our AM radio was always on, awaiting Christmas songs. (This was before stations played holiday music 24/7 from Halloween ‘til the new year.) I’d keep an ear out, and if the deejay announced a Christmas classic, I’d turn up the volume.

Among my earliest yuletide favorites is “White Christmas.” From time to time, my older relatives discussed their memories of our country’s involvement in World War II, and at Christmastime, when Bing Crosby crooned this song, their conversations paused. Only later in life did I understand why. Though Irving Berlin composed his nostalgic tune in 1928 (written while he was grieving the death of his three-week-old son), it wasn’t until 1941, as our country entered the global battle, that the song gained popularity. Our soldiers fighting overseas said that, each December, dreaming of a white Christmas was really about dreaming of home.

Winters in Upstate New York pretty much guaranteed us a white Christmas, but snow-packed roads meant there weren’t a lot of trips in the family car. As the holiday neared, though, Dad would pile us kids in and we’d head out for Christmas shopping. If we were lucky, we’d find a parking space in the busiest section of downtown Fulton and when we opened car doors, holiday music welcomed us. One song I surely heard was “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” which was playing almost nonstop outside Montgomery Ward. Here’s why:

Rudolph’s fanciful story of flight came to life in 1939, after our country had endured a decade of the Great Depression. The joys of Christmas were in short supply and Montgomery Ward wanted to change that. One of Ward’s ad men created the Rudolph character as an illustrated poem, and it was featured in that year’s catalog, better known as the Children’s Wish Book. Many baby boomers remember spending hours flipping through its pages, making their list for Santa.

Rudolph was an immediate hit and a children’s book followed. By 1947, songwriter Johnny Marks set the legend of Rudolph to music, and Bing Crosby, already strongly associated with the holiday, was offered the song. After he turned it down, Gene Autry, America’s Singing Cowboy, recorded “Rudolph” and its popularity soared as high as a team of flying reindeer.

There was more magic from Rudolph, as well as from Johnny Marks’ songwriting abilities. Once Montgomery Ward had struck gold with its magical reindeer, television wanted in on the fun, so, in 1964, an animated Rudolph TV special aired. Marks wrote a bouncy tune called “A Holly Jolly Christmas” and Burl Ives’ folksy version played like a sleigh ride down a snowy hill, delivering us right into the arms of Christmas joy.

Johnny Marks made one more contribution to holiday melodies with a song that older kids at school were crazy about. There were lots of “groovy” dances in the 1960s, and when the holidays drew near, teens were “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.” Brenda Lee was only thirteen when her perky voice made our radios pop, and highschoolers everywhere—including my hometown of Fulton—were shimmying and shaking to it.

Another youngster caught America’s attention at Christmas. Though the same age as Brenda Lee when his song became a hit, young Jimmy Boyd was singing about something entirely different when he informed the world “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.” When the song was released in 1953, the idea of a married woman having an affair with Santa was a little too risqué, even if Saint Nick was really Jimmy’s good old Dad in disguise. Radio stations banned the song for years, but luckily, by the time I came along, all had been forgiven and “I Saw Mommy” was nothing more than an innocent holiday novelty.

Throughout my childhood, TV offered a new Christmas special every December and we kids wanted to watch them all. “Frosty the Snowman” was first recorded by Gene Autry, but it was Jimmy Durante’s razzmatazz version in the TV special that had us singing along. Frosty also gave moms something to hold over our heads when we couldn’t contain our Christmas excitement: “Be good or there’ll be no Frosty on TV tonight!”

I paid special attention to Mom’s warning when I learned that, in 1965, Charlie Brown was going to have his own Christmas special. I was ten that year, young enough to still believe in animated stories that brought holidays to life, but old enough to appreciate the sentiments of a gentle yuletide song.  “A Charlie Brown Christmas” had both.

Comic strip illustrator Charles Schulz and the creators of his TV special wisely added a Christmas soundtrack to the show.  They hired composer Vince Guaraldi to provide piano-driven jazzy numbers, which kept the story moving. Then Guaraldi paused with a song that captured the wonder of the holidays. “Christmas Time is Here,” was sung by the angelic choir of Charlie and his gang as they skated across a pond, caught snowflakes on their tongues and discovered the true meaning of Christmas. Today, when I get too busy to remember the joy of the holidays, I only need to hear the opening piano notes of that song and everything I love about Christmas music comes rushing back.

Holiday shows liked “A Charlie Brown Christmas” have provided memorable yuletide songs for over fifty years.

Home Cooking in Downtown Fulton

In my last blog, I wrote about Fulton’s neighborhood grocers. Years ago, you could find one of those small stores every few blocks in our city. The same was true of restaurants and diners. Fulton once had dozens of establishments where you could get a meal or cup of coffee. Some offered ethnic specialties and were often found in neighborhoods where immigrants from the same country gathered. Other eateries didn’t specialize, but they still offered good food at reasonable prices. One of those places was Fry’s Diner.

Located on Fulton’s east side, Fry’s was a favorite destination for a good meal from 1951 until 1977, the years it was owned and operated by Glen Fry. Glen’s two daughters, Rosemary Scott and Glenda Abbate, have shared their memories of their father and his lifelong dedication to the restaurant business through the Fulton Library Memoir Project. Here’s some of what they remembered:

 “In 1951, Dad acquired the equipment of a restaurant that had been damaged in a fire,” Rosemary explained. “He opened his own place on East Second Street between Cayuga and Oneida. In 1953 or ‘54, when the city decided to widen East Second, Dad moved his restaurant up the hill on Oneida and worked the rest of his life there.”

 Glenda talked about the long hours associated with the restaurant business: “Fry’s was open seven days a week, serving three meals a day, until shortly before Dad died. Six days a week, he’d go in at 7 a.m. and work until 8 p.m. Each day, he would come home around 2 or 2:30, take a nap, and then head back for the dinner hour. A waitress would cover while he was gone. On Sundays, he’d go in a little later and close at noon.”

 “People still talk about his home cooking,” Rosemary reflected. “When Dad started the restaurant, Ann Truel was his cook, and when she retired he took over her recipes. Dad had a special every day of the week and Fry’s was famous for his baked beans—people loved his bean sandwiches with ketchup.  He was also known for his rice pudding, milkshakes, and ice cream floats made with Hire’s Root Beer. Aunt Edna, his sister, made pies that people loved.”

 When both Glenda and Rosemary mentioned how their father kept the restaurant open during the Blizzard of ’66, my ears perked up. I’ve heard hundreds of stories of how central New York survived that storm and wanted to know how someone managed to keep a restaurant in operation during and after it.

 “When the snow finally stopped,” Glenda said, “Dad walked to the restaurant. How he was able to get there, I don’t know; the streets hadn’t been plowed yet. But Dad had a lot of regulars who depended on him for their meals, and there were also people who were trying to clean up the snow—the city workers and all—who needed a place to get food. So throughout that storm and its cleanup, which lasted the whole week, Dad never missed a day.”

 Both of Glen’s daughters worked for their father; Rosemary began at age 11, and Glenda while she was in high school and college. They got to know Fry’s regular customers. “A lot of the old bachelors, some who lived at a boarding house nearby, would eat at Dad’s restaurant,” Glenda said.  “One of the reasons he opened on Sundays was because those men would have had no other place to go for their meals.”

Glenda ended up marrying a SUNY Oswego student, Joe Abbate, a New York City native who’d never experienced small town life before attending the college. When Joe got to Fulton, he was introduced to Fry’s Diner, and he wrote about his impressions of that Fulton mainstay for our Library Memoir Project:

“I will never forget the first time I walked into the place. It was like a Norman Rockwell painting come to life, a throw-back to the days of the past; simple and to-the point. This was a mirror reflection of its owner, who always said what he felt in a direct, no-nonsense way. You knew where you stood when you talked with Glen and that’s how he ran his restaurant.

“As you slid into a booth, atop the weary vinyl that had cushioned many a hungry client over the years, the feeling came over you that you were home, and that someone was going to serve you a good meal—not because he wanted your money, but because he cared about you.”

Joe went on to write that he never had the chance to get to know Glen really well, because his father-in-law suffered a stroke right before he and Glenda were married. “He died a few years later,” Joe explained, “but I did learn something about Glen that summed up his life and the way life was in Fulton. When the family was cleaning out the store and settling Glen’s affairs, they discovered a pile of cards underneath the drawer in his cash register.” 

Joe and others learned that the stack of cards were meal tickets that Glen had issued to people on fixed incomes. “They were like their ‘tabs,’” Joe said. “They were punched whenever a person could not pay.  Then, when they would receive their monthly check or a bit of money, they would pay whatever they could, little by little. Many people never paid. The cash register till may never have been full, but the stomach of everyone Glen met was. He made sure of it.”

For many years, Glen Fry served pies and much more from behind the counter at his popular restaurant, Fry’s Diner.

Neighborhood Grocery Stores

With Tops Supermarket recently closing, I’m reminded how grocery shopping in Fulton has changed over the years. Before Aldi’s, Price Chopper or Wal-Mart’s mega store, our favorite grocers were right in our neighborhood.  For younger folks, that may seem hard to believe, but some longtime Fultonians know it’s true.

“There used to be 72 grocers operating in Fulton at one time,” remembered Fran Mirabito, a member of the family who once operated several neighborhood stores in and around Fulton. “This would have been during the 1930s,” Fran explained. “There were bigger stores, like A & P and Acme, but in addition to them, every neighborhood had their own store that sold a little bit of everything.”

Fran shared this with me a few years ago when I was having lunch with him and several of his friends. In that group were other Fultonians: Bob Green, Vince Caravan, Don Ross, Bart Chalone, Wally Auser and Dr. Kenneth Kurtz. These men used to meet weekly to share a meal, discuss local and national news, and reminisce about their days working and raising families in Fulton. (I was informed that other men and women would join them from time to time.)

Meeting with those friends got me thinking about the neighborhood of my youth. I grew up on the west side of the city, north of Broadway, and the two neighborhood stores I remember were Manitta’s and Sieron’s. Through my work with the Fulton Public Library’s Memoir Project, I’ve had the privilege of meeting and talking with two people who know a lot about those stores: Jean Sieron Niver and Dominic “Doc” Manitta.

The story of Sieron’s, which was located on West First Street, begins with Jean’s parents, John and Genevieve Sieron, who opened the store in 1929. Jean came along several years later and remembers growing up in the store.

“I had various jobs throughout my childhood,” Jean said. “I learned how to correctly bag groceries, stock shelves and eventually progressed to waiting on customers when I had learned how to make change (the old-fashioned way). 

“As a preteen and teen, I was given the privilege of taking on an important department in the store: the candy counter!  The three-shelf square stand was the home to a large variety of ‘penny’ candy and chocolate candy bars.  I loved neatly arranging the bars on the stand by size: Snickers, Milky Way and 3 Musketeers on the bottom, Nestlé bars in the middle and the tall Mars varieties on top.   They were surrounded by numerous boxes of individually-wrapped candy and gum.”

Jean’s responsibilities at the store continued to grow, including regular visits to the nearby Stanley Tobacco Company where she selected the candy Sieron’s sold.  “Walking into their stockroom (their converted living room) was like walking into Candy Heaven,” Jean remembered. “The wooden shelves were stacked high with hundreds of boxes. What would I select? What would kids like the best?” 

I imagined that Jean might have been the envy of Fulton children and she confirmed that in her memoir: “For years, many of my Phillip Street classmates had me shopping for those treats with their ‘extra’ lunch money.  I returned to school from lunch carrying numerous tiny brown paper bags with their choices.”

One block further north of Sieron’s on West First was Manitta’s, with its famous tag line “Fulton’s Biggest Little Store.”  Founded in the mid-1930s by Angelina and Salvatore Manitta, it soon became popular not only for the neighborhood, but throughout the city. Whether it was their display of fresh produce out front, their renowned meats cut fresh by the Manitta’s older son Phil, or the great conversation you could expect while you shopped, everybody knew about the store. Here’s a memory from the younger Manitta son, Doc, about one of the store’s most popular items:

“I bought my produce in Syracuse at the Farmers Market.  All of us would be there at five in the morning, our trucks lined up, ready to go in and buy the best produce from the big retailers. We used to pick up bananas in huge bunches that would hang on a rack.  For a long time we sold them for 11 cents a pound, and when I raised it to 12 cents my customers wanted to kill me!

“I used to buy anywhere from five to ten 40-pound boxes of bananas at the market. At times, they would save the ones that were going bad and I would buy them for $2.00 a box. One time, I got a call from the produce guy, who said, “Doc, they gassed the bananas too much (They used to make bananas ripen faster by gassing them) and these are gonna get soft and ripen too quickly. We’re not going to be able to sell them.”

“I said, ‘How many boxes you got?’

‘A hundred fifty. And I’m gonna send my grandson down with them. I want a dollar a box.’

“No, I’ll give you fifty cents a box,” I said, “and I’ll be responsible for them. Well, everybody who came in the store got a box of bananas for a dollar. I had people lined up out the door. Within two days, they were gone.”

Today, the supermarkets where we shop have specials and sales, but when was the last time you saw people lined up outside a grocery store to take advantage of a huge discount? But people didn’t make regular visits to Manitta’s and Sieron’s just for good prices and high-quality food. They also knew that they’d be greeted by storeowners who were part of their neighborhood, and who welcomed them into their stores.

Manitta’s grocery store, one of many neighborhood stores that were once found in Fulton.