“Nightmares in the Year of the Monkey,” a photo collage by G. Jack Urso.
The photo above
is a wall collage I began in 1989. The inspiration came to me working overnight
at the former Q-104 FM Classic Rock radio station in Albany, NY, which had a 1988 issue of a Time magazine lying about with a photo essay on the events
of 1968 titled, “Nightmares in the Year of the Monkey.” Generally, it is a
visual account of pop cultural images I experienced growing up in the
1960s and 1970s, plus a few other scattered images outside that era. It is both a biography and a peek inside my mind.
Releasing a flood of memories from growing up
in the 1960s and 1970s, I was inspired to create a collage. I frequently created
collages in college. Lacking any artistic talent, it was my only way to create visual
imagery.
This began an over three-decade effort as I dug through magazines and books and albums from the 1960s and 1970s
for images that triggered memories and passions that long lay buried deep inside. Art,
science, music, news, politics, Lee Harvey Oswald, Richard Nixon, the Vietnam
War, protests, Sci-Fi, TV, and film, it is a broad swath of the 1960s and
1970s, and much more. Like our memories, some images
are clear, some are fragmented, some are faded, and some have meanings lost to the
past.
I moved the collage
four times between addresses and now what is its likely final destination. Built
on a base of four pieces of poster board around a poster from the
1989 Batman movie, at this point, it
is probably too fragile to survive being moved or mounted on something more
permanent.
Many thanks to
my good friend Eric Jones for taking this picture for me and being so intent
on making it perfect. Thanks, brother!
The recent election reminds me of
the time when I ran a prison college program during the O. J. Simpson trial and the jury
announced they had reached a decision. The prison staff rolled a TV into one of
the classrooms and about two dozen inmates crowded in. While waiting for the
verdict to be announced I asked everyone if they thought O. J. Simpson was
guilty.
Every hand went up.
One inmate
summed it up, “We know he's guilty. We just want to see him get off.” Everyone laughed.
Because they
were all guilty of their crimes, there was some kind of vicarious thrill in
seeing someone rich and important mock the system that held them accountable
for their actions.
Sherry Coben, in addition to creating the hit 1980s TV series Kate and Allie, was one of the Emmy Award-winningwriters for Hot Hero Sandwich. In fact, she met her husband, Patrick McMahon, the show's film editor, while working on the series. In late December 2022, Sherry read an article I wrote about Hot Hero Sandwich on my blog Aeolus 13 Umbra and reached out to me to inquire if I was interested in asking her any questions about the show, and thus was the Hot Hero Sandwich Project born — an ongoing effort which, to date, has resulted in twenty interviews, nearly seventy articles, and over 220 video clips all hosted on a dedicated website and YouTube channel.
Sherry put me in contact with other writers and individuals connected with the show and got the whole ball rolling. She was a patient mentor and generous with her time. Before the project came along, there was very, very little information about the series available, and what was sometimes was inaccurate. Sherry changed all that. Every word written, every video clip posted, exists because Sherry never lost faith in the promise of what Hot Hero Sandwich could have been.
In the initial phases of the project, Sherry proofread the interviews before I posted the articles. She often added information and details that would otherwise have been lost to history, such as the classic Hot Hero Sandwich logo being designed by my local Niskayuna, NY, native (and National Lampoon graphic designer) David Kaestral, or the opening credits directed by the uncredited John Nicolella, who later became one of the leading directors for Miami Vice.
As a writer, I can't tell you the anxiety I felt having an Emmy-Award winning writer and a hit series creator read my work. Yet, Sherry always treated me as a colleague, not as the fanboy I really was.
I remembered the show's sketches about dealing with divorce, death, and family dysfunction. They uncomfortably reflected my life in 1979. In a way, all of us Hot Hero Sandwich fans were raised a little bit by Sherry and the other writers, as well as the cast and the band. Her passing is a great loss to the project and our community.
The interviews below with Sherry and Pat were the very first ones I conducted for the Hot Hero Sandwich Project and give a glimpse into their passion for the show that continued after so many years.
Patterns was Rod Serling’s first major teleplay,
later adapted into a film production of the same name in 1956. It told a story
of an older man in decline being pushed out of his long-time position in
business by a younger man on the rise. An age-old story, it brings to mind the
ancient Roman tombstone epitaph: “As you are now, I once was. As I am
now, you will be.”
For 25 years and
8 months I was what my employers reported to the IRS a “Defense Analyst.”
A catch-all and overly broad term, during my career I performed numerous duties
including communications specialist, multimedia content provider, database
sales, news reporter, website designer, and the job I did through all that time —
weapon systems profiler. I worked for companies in news, publishing, competitive intelligence, and on an independent contract basis.
Back in late 1997, a friend of mine, an editor at a military database in Washington D.C., was complaining to me about one of his stringers, a senior freelancer about 60
or so. A friend of the publishers, he had probably started off in the field in
the 1960s and his habits were still squarely set in the age of typewriters. For
example, his habit of pressing the Return key at the end of every sentence
created havoc with the HTML coding which read every Return keystroke as the
end of a paragraph, not just the line. Consequently, my friend had to go through the
old guy’s assignments line by line and remove each Return keystroke. It was a massive pain in the ass. I admit we had a
bit of an ungenerous laugh at the guy’s expense. A couple young bucks mocking
an old bull’s growing obsolescence.
I was hired to replace him; however, as I would eventually learn, if you live
long enough you become the punch line to your own joke.
Climbing
Up the Ladder
Database
product name for a company I worked for.
The company my
editor friend noted above hired me for is a proprietary online military
database located in the Washington D.C. area. The subscribers include
governments, industries, libraries, militaries, news organizations, etc. My work
mainly involved profiling weapon systems and tracking exports, transfers, and
sales, but also sometimes preparing news abstracts as well as a nation’s
order of battle — meaning what weapons it had, how many, how they were
acquired, where they were located, and with which units. Small arms were generally
considered beneath our concern. Rather, the focus was on large weapons
systems such as aircraft, artillery, armored vehicles, and electronic intelligence and sensor
systems.
It was not
full-time work, but since I could do it at home on my own time it suited me just fine. For nearly 26 years, I had a steady monthly
income. The amount varied over the years; however, a regular monthly paycheck is a
nice benefit, but it was one with a steadily declining return. When I began in
1998, I was paid $900 for a month to update the profiles of 50 weapon systems,
or $1,736.72 in 2024, or, in other terms, $18 per record or $34.73 in
2024. If I spent just one hour per record that would have been decent pay,
but instead, it took me about 80 hours to finish 50 records, which reduced the
hourly pay equivalent to fast-food wages.
The company
would recruit other stringers over the years, political science majors, pre-law
students, grad students, but the tedious, detail-oriented work, and low pay,
would eventually move them all on. After two and a half decades, I was the last
man standing, more out of stubbornness than talent, but in the end I was there.
Frankly, it was the longest relationship in my life.
Rung-by-Rung
Another
former project I worked on.
As my career in
defense information grew, so too did my skills. I became proficient with
website design, HTML coding, using software like Dreamweaver and Sound Forge to
produce interactive maps and audio commentary. My work also expanded to other companies.
I worked several years as a freelancer for one Israeli defense information
company writing news abstracts and then moving on to sales, creating contact
lists of hundreds, and I do mean hundreds, of generals, admirals, majors, lt. colonels,
colonels, defense attaches, and military libraries. The following audio clip is
a background sound collage for an Israeli defense information database I produced and gives
a sample of my work during this time:
Other work over
the years included designing a webpage for a behavioral modification company
run by a former Russian general (at least that’s what he claimed), as well as audio commentaries for a defense media reporting website (see below).
Despite all of
this, I should mention that I am a peace advocate and there's not one war in my lifetime that I have supported. Yet, while a peace advocate,
I am pragmatic. I live in a world with nations led by psychopaths who do not
share my sentiments. On the other hand, one thing I learned in nearly 26 years
of reporting on the weapons of war is that wherever weapons go, war
inevitably follows. While one may conjecture that a strong military deters
others from attacking a nation, the truth is that human history is replete with
examples of militarily strong nations going to war against each other. I
explore this conundrum in another essay on Aeolus 13 Umbra, “If You Want Peace, Prepare for War”: The Logical Paradox.
Not-So-Secret Reports
Banner
I created for a special report I prepared on shoulder-mounted missile systems.
I also did work in competitive intelligence (CI). On the surface, CI is just gathering information
on what a company’s competitors are doing. Ostensibly, this is NOT corporate spying, according to the industry,
but it sort of really is. One company I worked for created shell companies to provide cover for researchers to approach competitor companies for information which they
would otherwise not share. The old pros quickly caught on to CI inquiries and
shut me down. So, I shifted tactics and called at 4:30 PM on Friday afternoons
before a holiday weekend. At that point, the only ones left in the office are
interns, receptionists, and junior execs who were more easily fooled and I
usually got the info I needed.
Special reports I prepared during this period of my career include:
Just a few years
ago, I completed my last such project, this one involving a company producing Resilient
Positioning, Navigation and Timing (PNT) solutions and secure radar and GPS. These
are systems that ensure accurate navigation and protect aircraft and ships from
electronic attacks. The executive heading the effort was generally an absent leader and
when he was around he was a fatuous ignoramus. It reminded me of the empty
suits I worked with in public relations and why I left it. I was getting too old to have the patience for this shit.
Old Man
Out
It was always a
side-gig, but I began to shift more of my work to teaching college composition
courses as I realized my defense information career, such as it was, was
drawing to a conclusion. Through all this time, I continued to profile
weapon systems for the company that first hired me back in 1998. Yet, desktop
publishing technology had changed over time. When I first started, the company required
the records be prepared with the extensive use of HTML tags and all hyperlinks had to be formatted manually in a very specific way.
Each assignment typically had thousands of HTML tags and hundreds of hyperlinks.
Very little of my time was actually involved in researching and writing. Since
I was the only stringer to endure the tedium so long, I became something of an
institutional relic.
As the decades rolled
by, the need for HTML tags and special hyperlink formatting was no longer needed, not that anyone told me. I continued on with now-meaningless editorial tasks, sometimes for years, until I would find out by some accidental revelation they were no longer needed.
Nevertheless, how I did things had become engrained in me and it was
difficult to make the change when I did find out. So, I kept turning in assignments as I always had, HTML tags and all, which, as the old man caused my editor friend at the beginning of this journey, was just creating more work for the database editor.Eventually, I made the change as the evolution of the software eliminated about half the total time I spent working on an assignment.
Notably, this entire time, the new database editor said nothing to me. I was actually hoping he would and probably dragged it out longer than I should have just to see if I would get a reaction. I didn’t. Over twenty years younger than me, I could only surmise he was hesitant to disrespect the old man.
And that’s what I was. I became the old man.
Banner
I created for the OSIS Pakistan OSINT page in the wake of 9/11. Posted Oct. 10, 2001.
In the final few
years I was there, acquisitions, mergers, and partnerships with
other defense information companies brought with them real defense experts with journalism
degrees and military experience — not a peacenik slumming around an old beat. My pay hadn't changed in nearly 26 years, and taking into account inflation, I was earning a lot less than I was when I started. With each change of editors, my workload, in addition to my pay, gradually diminished until they
simply had no more use for me.
Last year, as I got the old
heave-ho, I thought about that old man whose obsolescence my editor friend and
I laughed at. I was 58 and a just a couple years younger than the old man was when he became the object of our derision. Rod Serling’s Patterns
haunts me now as a ghostly reminder of my own hubris and the whole experience brings
me back to that old Roman epitaph, “As you are now, I once was. As I am
now, you will be.”
As I learned, if you live long
enough, you become the punch line to your own joke — just be careful not to
choke on it.
Mac, Bob, and Rosco the Clown, hosts on Up, Up,
and Away (credit: Bob Carroll).
“The World's
a Nicer Place in My Beautiful Balloon”
This year is the
50th anniversary of a fondly remembered TV show from my childhood. In 1974,
WAST (now WNYT), Channel 13, Albany NY, premiered a short-lived children’s
show, Up, Up, and Away, it featured
three performers, Rosco (Steve Roz), a clown; Mac (Mark Macken), who played
guitar; and Bob Carroll, who performed magic and ventriloquism. Opening up with The Fifth Dimension’s hit, “Up, Up,
and Away,” the show was as gentle as its theme song. It was a quiet spot for
young children in a world that seemed increasingly confusing and chaotic in the early 1970s.
Live-action children's shows like these used to be a staple with local TV stations during the Golden Age of Television, but by the mid-1970s, just before the dominance of cable television, those days were gone. As best as can be determined, Up, Up, and Away appears to have been the last locally produced children's entertainment show in New York's Capitol Region.
The 5th Dimension perform “Up, Up, and Away” on the Aeolus 13 Umbra YouTube channel.
Rosco, Mac, and
Bob were performers from Gaslight Village, in Lake George N.Y. A 1890s-era theme
park designed by the legendary, and later Disneyland designer, Arto Monoco, and
constructed by the equally legendary theme park entrepreneur Charles Wood.
Gaslight Village was a more gentle experience than the large high-energy amusement
parks today. Featuring vaudeville shows, clowns, Keystone Cops, silent movies, a
movie car collection (including the car from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang), and some generally tame rides, Gaslight
Village was a fairly mild amusement park experience. My other favorite
childhood destination, Fort William Henry, was located directly right
next door. With Lake George only about an hour away from where I lived, between
school field trips, scouting excursions, and dragging my dad, I enjoyed many a visit in my youth.
Nov. 9, 1974 TV listing from the Albany Times Union.
According to one
advertisement, the show premiered Sat., Nov. 9, 1974, at 7:30 p.m. Bob Carroll,
in response to one of my questions also remembers a slot on Fridays at 4:30
p.m. as a running time as well. That also fits in with my memory as I remember
watching it after school. A look at the Albany Times Union microfilm record reveals a 4:00 p.m. Friday start time (see image below) though it is possible the show got shifted to a later start time during the course of its run.
From the Albany Times Union, Feb. 3-7, 1975, TV
listings.
In a Facebook
post, Bob Carroll noted that he, Rosco, and Mac, each received $30 per show ($191.18
in 2024 dollars) and that the show was sponsored by Sears.
These types of
locally-produced children’s shows were a staple of television stations
beginning in the 1950s. The other one that comes to mind from this era is The Magic Garden (1972-1984) on WPIX,
Channel 11, NYC, with Carole Demas and Paula Janis. These shows were low budget
productions driven by the hosts’ personalities and talents. Nothing overly
stimulating took place. With gentle humor and low-key laughs, these were just
peaceful diversions for children, not the high energy advertising platforms
more common today.
“It Wears
a Nicer Face in my Beautiful Balloon”
Frankly, it was
just what I needed as a kid. The years leading up to 1974 were confusing for any
child. I was still 9-years-old at the time of show’s premiere and the previous
two years were confusing, to say the least. Several incidents stood out to me
at the time and affected me deeply.
Credit: Bob Carroll.
First, the infamous Pulitzer Prize winning photo of Phan Thị Kim Phúc in 1972. My brother paid me 25 cents to help him deliver newspapers and sometime shortly after the photo was taken on June 8, 1972, it appeared on the front page of the local Knickerbocker News. Phan was naked and covered in burns, running away from a South Vietnamese napalm attack on her village — napalm provided courtesy of U.S. taxpayers. It was the first time I ever saw anyone naked, let alone a 9-year-old girl burned and running for her life. We were nearly the same age. I was absolutely terrified.
Then, there was
the massacre at the 1972 Munich Olympics when members of the
Pro-Palestinian terrorist group Black September attacked and murdered 11
Israeli athletes. American swimmer Mark Spitz, in the middle of a seven gold medal run, is Jewish. I had to wonder if he would be next.
Then, in 1973,
there was the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, which, although touted as “Peace
with honor,” sounded suspiciously like we lost the war, and the United States
never loses a war, right?
Then, also in
1973, came the Watergate Hearings and President Nixon resigning. I thought the
president was supposed to be the most trusted man in America. What was going on?
Finally, the
Patty Hearst kidnapping in 1974. As the local Albany newspapers were Hearst-owned publications, it got a prominent coverage. It was getting hard to keep up. My 8- and 9-year-old brain couldn’t process all the tragedy, not to mention the
complication of my own family’s dysfunction.
All of the world's problems got
played out not just in the news but also recycled in popular media on sitcoms
of the time like All in the Family and M*A*S*H. Heck, even comic books were not safe. In 1971 Green Arrow’s sidekick Speedy developed a heroin addiction and in 1973
Spider-Man’s girlfriend Gwen Stacy died while he was fighting the Green Goblin.
It was almost enough to make me want to read Richie Rich.
Is it any wonder
why a 9-year-old me found Up, Up, and
Away to be a peaceful place of escape amidst all the turmoil I knew would
be waiting me when I grew up?
“Way Up
in the Air in My Beautiful Balloon”
Bob Carroll at his magic shop In Albany, early
1970s (credit: Bob Carroll).
Then, in late 1974,
came Up, Up, and Away. Harmless, and probably
boring for teenagers, the show was a sort of Zen-like break from reality for
me. A budding ventriloquist and magician myself, I watched Bob closely for
tips, but despite my Charlie McCarthy doll and magic kits, I was never very
good at either. I bought my share of tricks off ads on TV commercials (like the
Marshall Brodien TV Magic Kit) and from the back pages of comic books, such as
the ventriloquist’s mouth aide, a small piece of metal you were supposed to
slip under your tongue. It never worked, and I was afraid of swallowing it,
so it got little use.
At the time of
the show, I was also a frequent customer of the House of Magic at the now
long-gone Northway Mall in Colonie, NY. One showpiece trick at the store was
the guillotine. They would dare customers to put their heads in it. No matter
how many times I saw them use it, and understanding it was a trick, I could
never convince myself to stick my head in it.
Marshall Brodien TV Magic Kit.
In the
intervening years, I often thought of that magic store and wondered what
happened to it. As it turns out, Bob Carroll himself worked there! He later opened up MCM Magic a little further down from Northway Mall near Redwood Lanes in Colonie, just a half mile from where I live today. All these
years of me wondering what happened to two fondly-remembered things from my
childhood — Up, Up, and Away, and the
House of Magic at Northway Mall — and it turns out both were connected.
The House of Magic listing in the 1973 Albany, NY, phone directory.
According to
Carroll, Up, Up, and Away, came to an end about ten months later when Mac decided to move to New York City. Steve Roz
continued on as Rosco for Gaslight Village and elsewhere, as did Bob Carroll,
who continues to post online his memories of Gaslight Village, Charles Wood, and
others from that era. Indeed, it was in looking up old photos of Gaslight
Village in a bit of nostalgia when I discovered the theme park, the magic
store, and Up, Up, and Away, were all
related.
“We'll
Chase Your Dream Across the Sky for We Can Fly”
Promotional advertisement (credit: Bob Carroll).
I spoke to a few
others my age who recall the show but remember little else except for the
opening theme, the hosts, and the channel it played on. Anyone younger than their mid-50s
would not remember the show. Given it was a local show, short-lived, and the
passage of fifty years, I doubt that more than a few thousand people alive today probably
even recall it.
However boring
and inane they might seem to grownups, there is a value to these types of innocent children's shows, whether
it is Up, Up, and Away, The Magic Garden, Barney & Friends, or Teletubbies.
Children are more observant than we give them credit for. They know how confusing
and scary the world they’re going to inherit from us is going to be. Is it too
much for us to give them a safe place for a few years?
Gaslight Village poster.
Gaslight Village
closed down in 1989 and Rosco the Clown was there to the end. Times had
changed. The small locally owned upstate tourist-trap theme parks that opened
up in the immediate post-war Baby Boom era of the 1940s and 1950s had by the
1980s begun to give way to large nationally owned amusement parks. Restricted
by its plot of land located inside the village of Lake George itself, Gaslight Village could not
grow. Combined with changing demographics and consumer tastes, higher ticket
prices, and fewer customers, Gaslight Village, like Frontier Town and other
local theme parks, closed down. The other local Charles Wood-owned theme park Storytown
USA, also originally designed in part by Arto Monaco, survived — now known as Six Flags
Great Escape.
As is the great
tragedy for locally produced shows from the pre-home VCR era, footage from
shows like Up, Up, and Away is
probably lost unless the station saved a copy, which is unlikely. The tape
format used in 1974 would have been 2-inch reel-to-reel tapes which take up a
lot of storage room. It is unlikely the station would have any 2-in VTRs
available to play the tapes even if any had survived.
Nevertheless, it
is important to preserve those unrecorded memories of our youth in some form,
even the most fleeting and ephemeral like a short-lived children’s show, a
magic store, or a long-gone, old fashioned, theme park, elsewise
when the last person to remember it disappears so too will the show itself, like
a puff of magician’s smoke, and float . . . Up, Up, and Away.
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