Perhaps you wake up every day and head to work, content with the thought you’re doing your part to keep the wheels of America’s industry humming along. Or maybe you’re retired, but you know someone dear to you who trots merrily each morning in the pleasant bliss of gainful employment. If only for a brief fleeting moment, consider the opposite.
Call this a modern buggy whip tale. You remember buggy whips, right? If you don’t, well, that’s part of the story. Buggy whips are those short sticks with loose leather strings on the end. They were used to prod horses to make your buggy go faster. They were all the rage at the end of the nineteenth century. Heck, they were still quite popular well into the twentieth century.
Then Henry Ford discovered a way to mass produce cars. More importantly, he figured out Continue Reading “Are You Busy Making Buggy Whips?”
The Decade the Music Died
It was on a cold winter’s night precisely sixty years ago – February 3, 1959 – that Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson boarded a Beechcraft Bonanza and found Rock and Roll heaven in a barren cornfield outside of Clear Lake, Iowa.
Much has been written about this, including two film biopics (The Buddy Holly Story in 1978 starring Gary Busey and La Bamba in 1987 starring Lou Diamond Phillips). Perhaps the seminal tribute, though, remains Don McLean’s 1971 hit “American Pie.” It was his song that first used the phrase “the day the music died” to describe the plane crash that took the lives of those young rock stars.
I’m not going to add to the litany of previously published thoughts on “the day the music died.” Rather, I’m going to share with you a conversation I had with a reporter. We sat at a high table in The Menches Brothers Restaurant in Green, Ohio (between Akron and Canton, for those using a GPS). I sipped my Diet Pepsi as the reporter asked me questions about what inspired me to write Hamburger Dreams (my latest book that looks at the evidence refuting and supporting the various hamburger origin stories).
At one point, he asked if I had written any other “food” books. I mentioned A Pizza The Action (albeit it’s more about business than food). Then I added that I had penned a short article on my grandfather’s pizzeria, mapping its beginning to the emergence of Rock and Roll.
That’s when the fun started. Little did I know this reporter, though nearly my age, still Continue Reading “The Decade the Music Died”