Authors Electric

Yellowhammer The other day - maybe due to my advanced age, or upon hearing that I've been writing a memoir - a friend asked me how I would choose to come back in the next life, if there is one.  "As a busker," I responded. I didn't give my answer much thought, except that I've always liked street performers. "Maybe as a great orchestra conductor, like Toscanini, maybe a pianist too, or Arthur Fiedler . My mother took me to see the legendary Fiedler lead the Boston Pops at the Shell in the summer of 1941 beside the Charles River. I recall the outdoor spectacle vividly though the mists of early memories. After that, I took to conducting radio music with a yellow pencil. One of my aunts gave me a baton, real or perhaps a toy one.  Beethoven  That began my childhood busking career. Housing was scarce. For a while, my parents and I lived at the house of my paternal grandparents in the then toney, Boston district of Brighton. It was a spacious three-floor affair fo...

Smocked Puglia in "20 Million Miles to Earth," 1957 The first time I saw Arturo Toscanini was on a then state-of-the-art, 16-inch, Philco TV set at Frank Puglia's house in Beverly Hills, where my mother and I were regular Sunday guests. It was in the early 1950s. Toscanini was featured on a then-special, coast-to-coast broadcast with a stellar cast, conducting the NBC Symphony Orchestra (specially created for him by the network, now the New York Philharmonic.) performing Giuseppe Verdi's Aida, live from New York. The white-haired, mustachioed, octagenarian maestro electrified viewers even on that a fuzzy black-and-white screen that seemed otherworldly. I was 12 or 13 years old at the time, but knew I was watching history. Besides having been a musical genius who changed the fundamental of the way orchestras had been conducted, Toscanini was a genuine, anti-fascist, World War 2 era hero, a larger-than-life link to great composers of the 19th and early 20th cen...