Radio Jingles

“That boy,” she said, pointing at me, and wrinkling up her nose, “knows nothing but radio jingles”.  Our fifth grade teacher Mrs. Karla Greenspan always talked about me in that way, whether addressing the principal, another teacher, the whole class, or even me.  “That boy, what are we going to do with him?”

But that was hardly a question requiring an answer from anyone, certainly not from me.  It had a querulousness about it that, young as I was, and I was probably only ten at the time, seemed to hide within something else, a kind of secret admiration and a prescience that someday in the great future, when these silly radio musical interludes and advertisements were faded into history, “that boy”(meaning me, of course) would have internalized the most fundamental and archetypal rhythms of language and so become a great writer.  Had I known the word then, perhaps I would have said “poet” or epic singer.” But back in those days, “great writer” was all I could think of, and by that I am not sure what I meant since, though I did know that individual authors wrote books and songs, when I read books or listened to songs I neither identified the names of the authors or the performers.  Things just were.

Mrs. Greenspan was perfectly right, of course.  When asked to recite a poem or speech in class, I was incapable of keeping any combination of more than two words in mind, and certainly could not have explained what any of these recitations meant to say in my own words.  Alka-Sekltzer, I thought, listen to it phizzzz. However, when the request was rephrased, so that I was asked to recite a speech or a song, then out there flowed a stream of those jingles that were forever ringing in my mind and making my tongue quiver with delight: DUZ does everything! Or maybe there would undulate through my mind: “Mmm-mmm good, Mmm-mmm-good, That’s what Campbell’s soup is, Mmm-mmm-good.  But then the words zipped out of my mouth with the rising and falling intonations.  Or, I could take a deep breath, and make the deep sounds of a doctor with a mirror over one eye: For a treat instead of a treatment, Smoke Camels. Then, as looks of consternation formed on everyones' faces for a more crazy recitation of a  jolly number, out flew this ditty:  Rinso white, Rinso white, Happy little washday friend, tweet-tweet-tweet!  Here, inspired by the situation, I added a whistle to sound like the little Rinso washing-powder bird and repeated the wondrously generous song.  And then Coca Cola hits the spot, Twelve full ounces, that’s a lot—and how it frolicked along to its glorious cadenza-like conclusion: Nickel, nickel, nickel, nickel….

Or when asked to go on, which was rare enough, the teacher unable to control her own curiosity as to what would emerge from my surely insane mind,  I could produce the more elaborate arias from radio advertising:

You don’t have to go to univerver-sity

To know what you should do when your thirs-ity,

Call for  Hoffman’s,

Drink Hoffman’s,

Hoffman’s is the finest when your thirs-ity.

Then, if pressed further, which it seems I always was,  the most glorious chant of them all:

Skip the bother and skip the fuss,

Take a Public Service Bus,

Public Service sure is great,

Takes you right up to the gate,

So skip the bother and skip the fuss,

               Beep-Beep,

Take a Public Service Bus.

Sometimes, though, I could do a whole patter of commercial rhetoric and it didn’t matter whether it was for Preparation-H haemorrhoids treatment or Old Dutch Cleanser to scrub your kitchen shining bright.

               But at the same time, going simply by the results over the ensuing years and measuring myself by the standards of those who back then said I would probably amount to nothing, both of us were right.  That is, on the one hand, indeed by some unconscious means, all that reading of books, listening to adult discussions, and experiencing the world in a way refracted through rhythmical language and patterned thought, did make me what I am and allowed me to write all the books I have over all these years, no matter how few members of the general public might be aware of it.  Yet, on the other hand, precisely because none of these publications—and the many books that were never printed or are lost in some thick fog overseas wherein no one ever notified me of their fate—achieved financial success, the first cousin several times removed of celebrity, it would have been impossible for those teachers, friends of the family, relatives or parents to comprehend the achievement—and, if not joy in any sustained way, I did feel when a small number of scholars and writers sent me letters of approval.  Nevertheless, all my adult life the biggest regret has been that I could not give nachas to my mother and father, to please them in terms they could grasp, and only after that to have the frustration of never being able to make the other detractors eat their words, to chalish a little from my reputation.  Nu, so that’s the way it is.