Old Songs in a New Cafe: Selected Essays Read online

  When Pan Am wrangled a contract for supplying the Far East, he went to work for them and flew as a copilot in four-engine DC-4s and C-87s, hauling cargo and passengers down the Caribbean to Brazil and from there to Accra on the coast of West Africa. In Accra, the cargo was off-loaded onto smaller planes for the flight over the desert and across Asia to Calcutta.

  In the summer of 1943 he was riding copilot alongside Captain Wesley Gray with a load earmarked for the Generalissimo himself. In Accra, they were ordered not to off-load, but rather to continue on across Africa and Asia to Dinjan, pick up a Hump pilot to guide them through the mountains, and take the cargo on into Chungking,

  On the way, Charlie bumped into a few CNAC pilots and talked with one of them at length. Since Pan Am owned 20 percent of CNAC, he applied for a transfer, and by the fall of 1943 he was flying the Hump.

  The C-47 settles down on the runway at Kunming. It’s 9 A.M. Charlie will spend the day at a hostel near the airfield. He will nap, play cards, and talk with other pilots. In late afternoon, he takes off for the westward flight back to Dinjan. Tomorrow he will fly the same route once again. Often he will make one-and-a-half, or even two, round trips in a single day.

  Charlie Uban made 524 flights over the Hump in two years and knows of only one CNAC pilot who claims more wartime crossings. After the war, CNAC moved its operations to Shanghai. Charlie went along, flying all over the orient-—north to Muckden in China, west to Calcutta, and south to Manila.

  Things got messy, though. Four planer crashed in one day in Shanghai due to weather and radio interference from commercial stations operating at illegally high power levels. The Chinese communists had begun firing on the CNAC planes, and there was dissension among the pilots over the way operations were being run.

  Charlie had enough and came home to finish his mechanical engineering degree at Iowa State. He graduated in 1949 and entered the family oil business in Waterloo. In 1964, and again in 1968, he was elected to the Iowa legislature as a state representative.

  The CNAC Alumni Association meetings are important to him. Friends come by. “I see Kusak and Norman there. It’s an occasional refurbishing, a touching again… all the time, throughout the decades.”

  The old pilots talk about airplanes and mountains. Some flew for commercial airlines after the war or opened restaurants or farmed. Others, they say, smuggled gold through Asia and flew contraband in South America. There is a bond of forever among them. They bellied up against death, saw it all, and delivered the goods.

  Any regrets about getting out of flying? Some. But Charlie Uban has looked backward, looked forward from there, and is comfortable with his choices. Yet he has a recurring dream in the nights of his life, even now. In the dream, he is flying low toward obstacles, trees and mountains and such, and there is never enough room to pass between them. He wonders about the dreams.

  And I wonder what there is in the ordinary machinations of life to rival flying the Hump at twenty-two. Can the adrenaline ever flow that swift again? Can there ever be another sound as pure to the soul as the landing gear coming down at Kunming or a sight like that of Everest and Kanchenjunga to the northwest on a clear day as you come in to Dinjan?

  Most of us think of life as a long upward sweep to some modest glory in our middle years. But if you have battled the great whale in your early times, what can ever compare? Maybe Hannibal or Lindbergh or the foot soldier at Normandy or even Orson Welles also suffered these proportions.

  On the other hand, maybe none of this is important. Maybe it is enough to have done it and to live a life on the memories of having done it—of having swept upward from a thousand blacktop runways into the jungle nights on your way to China.

  Others will do it again, but not in that place, in that way. The Hump, as a presence, has disappeared. It was a concoction of the times and the available technology. In a jet airplane, at 40,000 feet, the Hump no longer exists.

  It’s been forty-two years since Charlie Uban flew the Burma Hump. He talks about those times, late of an April afternoon, while Emma Jo makes supper noises in the kitchen. “I remember the time I realized I was doing an excellent job of flying this tough, tough route, and it just did wonders for my self-esteem.” “If you’re doing a good job, and somebody knows it and appreciates it, that’s about as good as life gets.”

  His khaki uniform with a CNAC patch on the right shoulder drapes from the back of a chair. He wears a bush jacket from his India days and shuffles through piles of flight maps and logbooks and picture albums on the table in front of him. As he warms to the memories, his voice alternates between the past and the present tense, and he speaks softly, more to himself than anyone else, running a finger gently along his recollections.

  “Fall of ‘43. Two of ‘em crash in Suifu, up the Yangtze River from Chungking. Robertson is still up there in the overcast, sees two puffs of smoke come up through the clouds, decides that’s enough of that, and heads back to Dinjan.” “A hundred and twenty-one hours this month.” “Here! Hydraulic pump failure, good weather, short of personnel; flying the Hump solo, no copilot, no radio operator.”

  “Kunming, Dinjan, Kunming, Kunming. That means I had trouble leaving Kunming and had to come back in.” “Next day, blower failure and had to return.” “Next day, the 14th, rice dropping.” “January 6, 1945, Russ Coldron disappears over the Hump.” “January 7, 1945, my old friend Fuzzy Ball flew into Tali Mountain….”

  His voice trails off to a murmur as he reads. From his kitchen table in Iowa, Charlie Uban is reaching back four decades into the night and the wind and the deep snows of the southern Himalayas where some of his friends still lie.

  I listen not so much to the words themselves, but rather to the sound of his memories. It’s something like the drone of a C-47 cruising out there east of Dinjan, above the Burma Hump, in the days when it was pretty clear who was right and who was wrong. Over his shoulder I can see airplanes coming and going at the Waterloo Airport a mile away.

  Just outside the window, wood ducks are circling among the trees by a pond, peering through the fog at the end of a rainy afternoon, looking for a place to land. Captain Charlie Uban watches the lead drake come in through the dusk on his final approach, sees him catch the headwind as he lets down through the haze, and nods his appreciation—from one old pilot to another.

  Whether it’s Dinjan or Calcutta, Kunming or Shanghai, or a small pond in Iowa, those who live on the wing understand one another. They have been taken aside by Iris, trained by scholars of the twilight. And, while the rest of us plead for guidance and struggle for the trace, old fliers have no need of that, for they know secret things and hear distant ragas that carry them along the great bend of the night toward home.

  Ridin’ Along in Safety

  with Kennedy and Kuralt

  ______________________________________

  Indiana autumn. Blooming-ton, in 1967. The man comes through little swinging doors separating the dining room from the bar in the Holiday Inn. He smiles and asks, “Do you boys know the ‘Wabash Cannonball’?” I do, but I haven’t done it for a while. My partner, Wayne Schuman, riffles around on the five-string banjo for a moment, grins his funny little grin, nods to me. “Yeah, we can get through it,” I say. The man and some friends are eating in the dining room and can hear the music just fine through the doorway. Back he goes to his table, carrying a napkin.

  Wayne and I crank it up—“From the green Atlantic Ocean to the wide Pacific shore…” I’m singing and playing the guitar, Wayne is flying along behind me, working out his instrumental break as he backs me up. “This train, she rolls through Memphis, Mattoon, and Mexico…” It’s early. The bar is only a third full as we hit the chorus: “Listen to the jingle, the rumble, and the roar, as she glides along the woodlands, through the hills, and by the shore. Hear the mighty rush of engine, hear the lonesome hobo call. Ridin’ along in safety on the Wabash Cannonball.” We end and look at each other. Not bad for the first time through the tune together.
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  Back the man comes, through the swinging doors. Three others are with him. A round, familiar-looking fellow with friendly eyes asks if we’ll play the song one more time. Playing the bars over the years has prepared me for things worse than singing a song twice in a row, so we do it.

  After we finish, the round fellow holds out his hand. “I’m Charles Kuralt from CBS. We’re doing a television piece on the death of the Wabash Cannonball, and we want you boys to play the music for it, right here in the bar.” Confusion takes over. The motel manager is gone. The bartender, Cliff, is a suspicious sort, as bartenders are wont to be. This is his world, he’s responsible for it. Finally, he agrees that Kuralt and his crew can do what they want, as long as nothing is damaged.

  Confusion turns to chaos. Kuralt’s old van is pulled up to the outside door of the bar. People are carrying lights, cameras, sound equipment. While this is going on, Kuralt interviews us. I’m writing my doctoral dissertation and playing here on weekends, trying to get my wife, baby daughter, and myself through the last year of an interminable number of years of school, Wayne is an undergraduate, playing mostly for fun.

  People in the bar are agog, asking questions. We announce over the mike what is taking place. This leads to a crush at the pay phone in the lobby as they call friends (“Yes, yes, CBS Television is going to film the folksingers right here in the Holiday Inn bar.”). Five minutes later cars start screeching into the motel parking lot. The friends are arriving. Chaos shifts to pandemonium. Cliff is mixing drinks at record pace, while the waitresses fight their way around equipment, over cords, and through people streaming in and about the bar.

  Forty-five minutes go by; Kuralt’s crew is ready. Sound test. Okay. The klieg lights come on; it looks like midday in what was a dark bar. The labels on the two big cameras in front of me say “CBS TELEVISION.” “Jeez, this is for real,” I think. The sound man lies on the floor at my feet, just out of view of the cameras, holding a large microphone that looks like it means business.

  “All right,” someone says, “start playing and don’t stop until we tell you to.” Sweaty hands. “Here’s to Daddy Claxton, may his name forever stand…” Ten minutes later they flag down the Cannonball. Next, we do just the banjo part for six or seven minutes, Wayne’s magical, double-jointed right hand waving like long grass in the summer wind as he picks.

  It’s over. “Yeah, thanks, we enjoyed it too.” We take a long break. Cliff counts receipts and mumbles about “city folks.” We stagger through the rest of the night, continually rejecting requests to play the “Wabash Cannonball” one more time.

  A few days later, TV on, and Cronkite smiles, “Here’s a report from Charles Kuralt, who’s on the road.” There we are! We’re on the screen for about a minute, hammering away, with some voice-over by Kuralt about the end of the Cannonball (he’s riding on the last run). Kuralt interviews passengers and the conductor. At the end, an aerial view shows the train moving away, whistle blowing. They have synched the guitar and banjo with the clicking of the wheels. It’s pretty touching. She fades into the distance, almost out of sight, and Kuralt says softly, “Tomorrow the Wabash Cannonball won’t be a train at all, only a banjo tune.”

  Cronkite sighs, “That’s the way it is…” My phone rings. It’s an old friend from Connecticut, shouting. “I can’t believe it! I just saw you on Walter Cronkite.” We talk. I hang up, and the phone rings again. Everybody in the world watched Cronkite tonight. They run the tape the next day on a morning news show, then later on a program called “The Best of Charles Kuralt.” We’re famous, sort of.

  A few months later the phone rings once again. A breathless voice asks if he’s talking to the guy who did the Cannonball thing for Kuralt. Yes. He’s from Robert Kennedy’s campaign headquarters. The Senator saw the show and wants us to go with him on an old-fashioned whistle stop tour in Indiana, for which they’ll take the Cannonball out of retirement. Will we go? Yes, but it will cost $200. He doesn’t care what it costs. (I curse my inexperience.)

  Small town in north Indiana. April 1968. On the train with journalists, TV crews, and lots of other people in nice suits just running around. We are instructed to report to the last car, the Kennedy car. Bobby, Ethel, kids, dog. They need publicity shots. Sixteen (I counted) cameras from around the world zoom in on the Senator, Wayne, and me—“Listen to the jingle, the rumble and the roar…”

  First stop. Secret Service types lead us onto the back platform, guns visible when they turn just right. Bobby and Ethel follow them, then us. The Senator holds the mike for me. “… as she climbs along the woodlands, through the hills and by the shore.” Thousands of people, screaming, holding up signs for and against the Kennedy effort, pushing to get close to the platform. Men with cameras on their shoulders are fighting the crowd and trying to get a foothold on the slippery rails.

  We go on, from town to town. The scene repeats itself. Guns, crowds surging, Bobby talking in his persuasive way about problems and people. He holds the mike for me as we pull away. “Ridin’ along in safety on the Wabash CannonbalL”

  Back in Iowa, I receive the check from Kennedy campaign headquarters the morning he is shot. Strange. Probabilities. I somberly walk to the bank and cash it. Strange.

  Bobby Kennedy is dead, Charles Kuralt is still on the road, and Wayne Schuman doesn’t play anymore. I get out the old Martin guitar, late in the day, and once in a while 1 quietly sing, “Listen to the jingle…” Once in a while.

  Jump Shots

  ______________________________________

  In a Dakota February, the wind never rests. Neither do the basketball fans. Both are howling as I bring the ball upcourt in the North Dakota State University fieldhouse. Old patterns before me. Stewart shouting instructions from the sideline. Holbrook loping ahead and to the right. Spoden, our ail-American center, struggling for position in the lane. Head fake left, and the man guarding me leans too far. Dribble right. Double screen by Holbrook and McCool. Sweat and noise, smell of popcorn. See it in slow motion now. Behind the screen into the air, ball over my head, left hand cradling it, right hand pushing it, slow backward spin as it launches. Gentle arc…

  The ball just clears the telephone wire and bounces off the rim of the basket as I land on hard-packed dirt in the silence of an Iowa summer evening. Miles from the wind, years before the Dakotas. Bored with school and small-town life at thirteen, I have decided to become a basketball player. Absurd. Five feet two inches tall, 110 pounds.

  I am untroubled by the impossibility of it all. Day after day, night after night in the weak glow of the back porch light, the ball goes up. One hundred more shots, and I’ll quit. Maybe 200. Can’t stop until I have five straight from twenty feet.

  Freshman year. I try out for the high school team, which is just not done by freshmen. Freshmen are supposed to play on the junior high team. That’s understood. I take a pounding, mentally and physically, from the upperclassmen. Yet, into the evenings, wearing gloves in late autumn, I work jump shots around the telephone wire. Merlin, the school janitor, ignores the rules and lets me in the gym at 7 A.M. on Saturdays. I shoot baskets all day, with a short break for lunch.

  The Big Day. Twelve will be selected to suit up for the games. I feel that I have a chance. I have hustled and listened and learned. But about twenty people are trying to make the team, a lot of them are seniors, and there is the whole question of whether a freshman even ought to be out there. At the end of practice, the coach has us informally shoot baskets while he walks the gym with a list. Studying it, he begins to call out names, slowly, one every minute or so: “Mehmen” …“Clark”… “Lossee”…

  Eleven names have been called; eleven have gone to the locker room to select their uniforms. I can hardly make my shot go up, or dribble, or even think. The coach paces the gym, looks at his list. Three, four minutes go by. He turns: “Waller.”

  There is silence; I remember it. A freshman? Wait a minute! I trot to the locker room with a feeling that comes only a few times in a life
. The locker room is silent, too. I am not welcome, for all those complex reasons having to do with tradition and adolescence and the 1950s’ definition of masculinity. Even Clark, the thoughtful one, shakes his head.

  The remaining uniform is the largest of the entire lot. The pants can be cinched in to stay up, but the shirt is so big that the armholes extend down into the pants when it is tucked in. If it weren’t so funny, it would be grotesque. But nobody is laughing.

  Running through the darkness of a 1953 November evening, squeezing the neatly folded purple and white jersey, I explode through the back porch and into the kitchen. My parents are stunned. They have humored me through all of this, knowing how sensitive I am about my size. But they never expected success.

  My dad is concerned for my safety. “Those big guys will make mincemeat out of you.” My mother is worried about my schoolwork. But I care only about getting that damn suit to fit. Mother takes enormous tucks in the shoulder straps until the armholes assume somewhat normal proportions. The armor fits. The warrior is ready.

  Our yellow bus rolls through a midwestern winter with Hank at the wheel. St. Ansgar, Greene, Nora Springs, Riceville, Manly, and on and on, through the Corn Bowl Conference. I ride alone in my jeans, green checkered shirt, and engineer boots, ostracized. A good friend of the seniors has been left home because of me. On the bench, I watch closely. The season is not going well.

  Gradually, and mostly out of desperation, the coach looks down the bench and says, “Waller, get up here.” Occasionally there is a chance for the long jump shot that arcs into the bright lights of a dozen high school gyms, slicing the net on its way through the basket. The other players are a little kinder to me. By the final game of the season, I am there. I start. We pound up and down the floor at Nashua, winning. I score 12 points. Merlin lets me in the gym the next morning at seven, grinning, with news of the game from the cafÉ. “Twelve points, huh?”