TERRY MOSHER
There was a large part of my early life where I was filled with sadness caused by the death of my mother when I was 12 (she was 48), my father’s remarriage and a move from the East Coast to the West Coast a year later.
That marriage included me but as I discovered soon enough that was just in theory. Don’t take me wrong. My father was a very good man. Big (6-3, 240 pounds of farm muscle) and very strong (the strongest man with the biggest hands I have ever seen), but also very gentle and not a swear word did I ever hear him utter.
His wife I discovered way too late was not unkind but just not very smart. She knew very little how to raise children (she had two she brought into the marriage) and that included a not so subtle effort to blame me for everything that happened while exonerating her own children.
I’m not complaining about that. It’s just the way it was, and I managed to adjust and cope (long walks alone in the woods helped and annual trips back to my home stomping grounds in New York State were salve for my soul).
While I now know that many, many other children have gone through and continue to go through worst situations then what I did that don’t make it any better. My heart aches for the problems I see and hear about, not just in this country but in a world that is often violent and at tunes seemingly uncaring.
This world is tough enough (and about to get worse if, and when, the Donald The Terrible is elected president) without dysfunctional homes that often stunt the chance for many young people to have a fair chance at success in what is a tough and competitive world.
So it was that I was stunted in my growth, mentally, emotionally and physically (I often would not eat for several days so while I grew to almost six-foot-five I was thinner than the rails that Abe Lincoln walked as a kid) during my high school days. I’m sure – really sure – that I was not the same person in my teen years that I was when my mother died. I became somebody that she would not have recognized.
A whole bunch of us guys from New York landed in Ferndale back in 1954 when the Mobil Refinery opened and our dads who had worked in Olean, N.Y. for SCONY Vacuum that was shut down were transferred out here, out west. We New York guys brought an attitude to our new homes and basically if you walked into the halls of Ferndale High School in the late 1950s it wouldn’t take you long to figure out whom the New York guys were.
But while my fellow New Yorkers made a fairly good adjustment because their homes were intact when they arrived, I never did. I went from being the best athlete of my age and really better than kids two and three years older than me and a student in the classroom that was in the top five percent of my class to sinking to lows I had never dreamed.
I was basically a basket case who lost most reasons for living, and in fact when I look back at some of the stupid things I did, probably was trying to end it. I wasn’t even good at that, obviously.
This is a long way to get to the reason for this story. I turned to music as a savior for my senses. I fell in love with jazz, especially what would now be termed old-time jazz that included the original Ink Spots, the Mills Brothers, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Louie Armstrong, Stan Kenton, Dave Brubeck, Benny Goodman, Earl “Father” Hines, Art Tatum, Dizzy Gillespie, Fats Waller, Count Basie, Clark Terry, Chet Baker, Gerry Mulligan, Dinah Washington, Bix Beiderbecke, the Dorsey brothers (Jimmy and Tommy), Glenn Miller, Coleman Hawkins, Fletcher Henderson, Johnny Hodges, Artie Shaw, Lester Young and Woody Herman just to name some.
I used to say up all night listening to jazz and country music on my upright Zenith tube radio. That probably led me to be more uptight than I already was, because I rarely slept more than a few hours for fear I would miss what to me was music that soothed a tormented soul.
At an early age in New York I fell in love with country singers like Earnest Tubbs, Webb Pierce, Patsy Cline, Bill Monroe, the father of Bluegrass, George Jones, whose own soul was very much tortured, Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, Loretta Lynn (who I first saw at Bill’s Tavern in Blaine, WA when she was first starting out), Buck Owens, Ferlin Husky, Carl Perkins, Kitty Wells, Lefty Frizzell, Ray Price, Hank Snow, Cowboy Copas, Red Foley, Louvin Brothers, Roy Acuff and Hawkshaw Hawkins (Hawkins and Copas died with Cline in a 1963 plane crash).
I have intentionally left off Hank Williams because he proved to be special to me during what I have called my dark years. His sad life is reflected in the music he wrote and sang and it deeply affected me and helped me cope knowing that somebody else, somebody as famous as he was, was also living a life of sorrow. Somehow it got better knowing that somebody else was also grieving.
You likely know Hank’s story. He died on Jan. 1, 953, five months before my mother, in the backseat of his Cadillac as he was being driven to a gig in Canton, Ohio. He was just 29.
Before I met my wife Mary, who I was destined to find and marry (that is a story I have told before; I was told I would marry Mary when I was nine years old by somebody from the “other side.”) I had gone through a couple girlfriends, one of whom had a life that was similar to mine in that her dad, although a hard worker was alcoholic and a womanizer. He actually was a “Good ‘ol boy” who lived as a single man while married with five children.
He would get is comeuppance later when his wife divorced him and lived with another man while keeping him in the same house in some kind of strange, and weird, punishment that I still have a hard time figuring out. It was a little too weird for me.
This girl and I eventually parted and she married another guy who we both know. And then she developed MS real bad and wound up spending the last 20 years of her life in a state institution blind and unable to speak while strapped in bed at night and in a wheelchair in the day.
Thankfully, her misery ended 30 years ago when she was 43. But when she was full of vim and vinegar we would spend hour listening to the sorrowful twangs of Williams as he told his sad story in words and music. Williams is likely the most decorated county music singer in history, and his career was very short-lived, about five years.
I ran across one of Hank’s less known songs the other day. After he died, some of his recordings in which he sings while accompanying himself on guitar was released. This one – A Tear in My Bear – I have always imagined he composed and first sung this while in the basement of his house while half in the bag, as was more than normal for him. In fact, when he was found dead in his car he had an empty whisky bottle beside him
But this song really got to me because it brought back a flood of memories that I had pushed back into the depth of my mind in a vault under lock and key. Somehow this song managed to unlock this vault and brought shivers running up and down my arms. Perhaps it’s just me getting close to the end and wanting to relive those sad times once more before Trump the Terrible gets to the White House and renames it the Trump White House and I will bid this world goodbye before he destroys it.
Anyway, here are some of the lyrics:
“There’s a tear in my beer
Because I’m cryin’ for you dear
You are on my lonely mind.
Into those last nine beers
I have shed a million tears
You are on my lonely mind
I’m gonna keep drinkin’
Until I’m petrified.
And then maybe these tears
Will leave my eyes.”
Hank goes on and talks about being so doggone blue and comes back to drinking those beers and shedding more tears. think he was going through this about the time he separated from his first wife Audrey and that probably led him to sing this sorrowful song.
For me, it brings back a time when sadness overwhelmed my waking hours and only subsided when I turned on that Zenith and the light from its tubes shown the only light on my life.
May God forgive me for allowing that darkness to creep back into the light of my life. But it was what it was and there is no lock strong enough to sometimes unleash that darkness back.
I hope and pray all the children who are having a tough time find the light and won’t have to go through the darkness like I did. May God bless them, and you.
Be well pal.
Be careful out there.
Have a great day.
You are loved.