Valentine's Day - 1964

Rhapsody in Blue – 1964

Experiencing a sleepless night while in battle with a respiratory incapacity, I sought prior-dawn relief by walking from my bed to a television set. Sickened already by contemporary political banter, not to mention my physical influenza ailment, I keyed in to a cable channel of movies.

The 1945 movie Rhapsody in Blue was just beginning. I knew well the music of George Gershwin. Hearing the memorable melodies again would sweeten my disposition and remove me from my seasonal discomfort. The movie carried me away, so to speak. It lifted me into a cloud of nostalgia.

The movie is about Gershwin’s musical elevation and though produced in 1945 it was approximately 20 years removed from its content. The mid-1920s were the years of Gershwin’s best musical output. But the movie carried me 20 more years, 20 years forward to St. Valentine’s Day 1964.

On Christmas Eve Day 1963 I arrived on ship at the port of Naha, Okinawa. As a military musician I was assigned to the 3^rd Marine Division Band after serving in the 2^nd Marine Aircraft Wing Band at Cherry Point, North Carolina. The band’s living quarters was Camp Hague, an old World War II-looking camp with Quonset huts and a couple of Butler buildings. It looked that way because it was indeed an immediate post-World War II Marine Corps base. In fact, the tiny base was headquarters for the entire 3^rd Marine Division for a while.

The United States Government administered Okinawa from 1945 to 1972.

Within weeks after reporting for duty, the band was in preparation for a Valentine’s Day concert at the large U.S. Army Base, Camp Sukiran which was located near the Kadena Air Force base. A large movie and stage theatre was at Sukiran, and during the final days preceding the concert the band rehearsed in that large, “showbiz” edifice.

Impressive efforts is a phrase providing scant justice for work that went into the total production of the performance. The Valentine’s Day Concert’s theme? “Rhapsody in Blue.” The musical score included most of George Gershwin’s recognizable melodies.

The stage’s backdrop situating the 120-piece band, was the skyline of New York City. That large mural was developed onsite by Okinawan artists. Theater technicians, including those who manned the lights, attended the final days of rehearsal just to get things coordinated – to get things right.

The band had the good fortune of having four pianists. Actually, three pianists and one piano player (me). Chief Warrant Officer Griswald, the band officer, selected the best of the pianists to play the lead motif.

On concert evening the theatre was packed, mostly with U.S. Army personnel and their families. In the early 1960s Army and Air Force personnel lived with their families on or off base. Marine Corps personnel were not allowed to bring their families from the United States to the island.

And so it was that a Marine Corps band of virtual bachelorhood presented a grand concert to men, women, and children of our Armed Forces on Valentine’s Day, 1964.  

I am happy, even if only by coincidence, that I saw the 1945 movie Rhapsody in Blue this morning. The movie swept me away from influenza and repositioned me into Valentine’s Day, 1964. The movie was a trigger. That 1964 experience might have been forgotten otherwise. But it was a wonderful time, and with a gap of 53 years, I am thankful for the coincidental recollection.

WENjr

February 22, 2017

Sensing Confusion, Seeing Clearly

Sensing Confusion, Seeing Clearly

A pull from the left,

A push from the right.

The national tongue cleft

Between day and night.

Demands from below

Seem the apex of power, of might.

Though just principalities, they know

Their own authority only darkness incite.

Though our battle

Against neither flesh nor blood,

But with cosmic powers rattle,

As if a raging flood.

Our stand against this force,

Is resistance girded in truth.

Our breastplate appropriately sourced,

Our anointed shoes to kick the sleuth.

No matter what,

Adorn the shield of faith!

To flaming darts you shut,

You thus equipped, merely a wraith.

Apply armor cover to your head,

Keep the Word in your mind.

Through the spiritual sword you are bred,

It is for Me you are designed.

Talk with Me all the daylong,

With your thoughts, your desires.

But be alert and persevere, bidding brethren in song

With un-cleft tongue and a heart on fire.

Ephesians 6:10-20

A Paraphrase

Foreign and Domestic

Foreign and Domestic

Who would have believed

That in our present

An alliance so conceived

Between those angry and those mid-orient?

To those angry

There is no order

Because they hang free

On imaginary lands without border.

The mid-orient think their entry

Opening wider each day

As if their ally killed the sentry

Keeping the guardian at bay.

The alliance is but chimera,

Whether accidental or not.

Soon exposed as guerrera,

Trounced and forgot.

The Rose of Democracy

The Rose of Democracy

USA 2017

It appears that something is arising

Against the elect. An alien emergence

Of a discontent at first not so surprising,

But now mutating toward insurgence.

How delicate is the rose Democracy?

Her petals so beautiful but frail.

Stung by the thorn of a legitimate neocracy,

The former rose keeper becomes enraged beyond scale.

The keeper is confused as if the rose.

An identity it thinks free to change

The flower’s constitution, he would pose.

To the new keeper (the new steward), the former keeper commits to derange.

So, from where is the threat to maintaining the blossom?

Is it a close neighbor or foreign sleeper?

Not a foreigner. The threat is near and it’s terribly awesome!

It’s internal. It’s the old rose keeper.

Remembering Bob Alton

Remembering Bob Alton

My friends and I lost a good friend this past October 19, 2016, Robert M. Alton, Jr., who just seventeen days earlier entered his 90^th year.

Many of us, however, are not aware of his history of achievement and disappointment. He lost his 14-year old son many years ago, a loss most difficult for any parent to accept and endure.

Bob was born in Tallassee, Alabama on October 2, 1927. Tallassee, a small town populated with less than 5,000 in the 2010 census, is geographically located in both Elmore and Tallapoosa counties. Its claim to current-day fame is a major hydroelectric power plant at Thurlow Dam operated by Alabama Power Company. Tallassee’s historical recognition is the central area of the Creek Indians.

As a young man Bob Alton worked as a tinsmith, coppersmith, and sheet metal worker. On August 6, 1946 he enlisted in the Regular Army at Fort McClellan, Alabama. His service at that time was with the Panama Canal Department. At the time of his enlistment Bob had completed one year of college.

Later Bob would complete his undergraduate degree at the University of Alabama. He played trumpet in the Alabama “Million Dollar” Band and was a member of the Phi Kappa Alpha fraternity. In 1951 he graduated from the Alabama Law School and received his Juris Doctor degree (J.D.).

He practiced law in Elmore County, Alabama, became an officer in the Army Reserves and the Alabama National Guard where he served for twenty-six years, and retired as a Lt. Colonel. Bob developed laudable careers in the military and in the practice of law. 

Robert M. Alton, Jr. was an American patriot.

Most of all, Bob was a follower of Jesus Christ. As a member of The Gideons and the Full Gospel Business Men Association, Bob lived his faith hour-by-hour and day-by-day. He was a shining light for many to see, not shining for himself but shining as a reflection of his Lord and Savior.

Bob was a loud (perhaps a hearty) singer of hymns. If you ever sat in church in front of Bob, you knew who was singing. And he could carry a tune. Obviously his college trumpet-playing years continued the development of his musical skills. He and his wife Kay of 46 years exemplified a wonderful duet/couple for the rest of us.

At our church, Saint Peter’s Anglican Church in Mountain Brook, Alabama, Bob was stalwart, a person of deep faith and of high personal integrity. He was a friend to everyone.

God has called our brother-in-Christ to be with Him. It is indeed a sad time, but it is a joyous time, too.

It is Christ in Whom we live, both now and at our time of eternal rest.

Rest in Peace, Bob.

© 2016 Worth Earlwood Norman Jr

What's Left

What’s Left?

Has it all gone away?

Our conscience, our soul, our will?

What’s left is here to stay.

Though many chill, the left thrill.

What’s left is any progression

To confuse, mislead, or destroy

Our most prized possession

And its unraveling, their method deploy.

What’s left to control,

Oppress, and dominate

Is not some part but the whole

Social strata to subjugate.

What’s left is a “living” Constitution

And not our Forefathers’ foundation.

It lives to prepare for adversarial persecution

Of murmuring winds from an original nation.

What’s left are new winds

Of persistent change incapable of standard.

What’s left rescinds

Rights, politically gerrymandered.

 What’s left is a humanly constructed deity

Of poverty, attachment, and death.

A government of forced homogeneity,

All the left’s lie, its shibboleth.

What’s right is saving our nation.

What’s right is seeing through the storm.

What’s right is saving the next generation

From what’s left to conform.

© October 2016 Worth Earlwood Norman Jr

Challenging Russell Moore

Challenging Russell Moore

The other day several of my Facebook ® “Like”s cited, and recommended as a favorable read, an article by Russell Moore. Therefore, I had to read it.

In The Washington Post opinion article of October 9, 2016, Moore headlined (or The WP editor headlined) his opinion as “If Donald Trump has done anything he has snuffed out the Religious Right.”

I, for one, never want to criticize Russell Moore, the president of the Southern Baptist Church’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. But I challenge his initial assertion.

Trump did not and has not “snuffed out the Religious Right.” Moore credited the wrong person. The Religious Right described by Moore as the “old guard,” has for decades been a dying phenomenon.

The likes of Oral Roberts, Jim & Tammy, Robert Tilton, and Jimmy Swaggart were not mentioned by name in his article, therefore one has to assume that Moore is referring to those older TV evangelists as well as to the more politically active evangelists of the past namely Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. (Falwell eventually walked away from his political activism and returned to the Gospel.)

For this current political cycle, again, one must assume that Moore obliquely refers to and lumps in Dallas Baptist minister, Dr. Robert Jeffress as part of the “old guard.” Fair enough. But to headline that it is Donald Trump who has snuffed out the Religious Right is a stretch, a stretch that actually undercuts Moore’s conclusion – the Gospel witness of Millennials.

Russell Moore attributes to the next generation a witness to Christ as counter-cultural. Who can argue with that? For the past decade or more I have read articles by young people who have become fed up not only with TV evangelists but with churches that deftly identify with the culture.

Many of us have seen this emerging Gospel generation close up. Take for example Beeson Divinity School in Birmingham, Alabama. Beeson is an academically top-notch school of theology and trains its students with sound and fundamental Christian teaching. In my own parish we have had a dozen or more seminarians from Beeson taking part in our church life as interns – a requirement of the Beeson curriculum.

These students and most of their non-seminary peers are replacing the “old guard.” Their Christian witness is implicitly counter-cultural, not anti-cultural. It took 40 years for God to transform the Israelites [read the details of the difficult transformational process in The Book of Numbers]– it took the passing of one Israelite generation to the next to understand its mission.

It is the witness of this younger Christian generation who are replacing the “old guard” and not Donald Trump.

© 2016 Worth Earlwood Norman Jr

Russell Moore Article