I have never been an athlete – no hand-to-eye coordination; never enjoyed participating, always enjoyed watching. Lately I’ve become a gym rat and workout six days a week, staying fit with Pilates and other forms of working out.

My husband always was a sports enthusiast, on intramural football and softball teams in college, but got into running in a serious way in the late 70s. He ran his first marathon in 1977, qualified for the grueling Boston Marathon many times and I became a race groupie. All our friends were runners and they competed in various events: the Falmouth Road Race, The Charles River 5K, and of course the Boston Marathon; always needing to run a marathon earlier in the season to qualify. His best time was 2:44! We lived in the Back Bay, near the finish line, so I would wait for the guys there. I saw Rosie Ruiz, the cheater, come across the line on a hot day in 1980 and snapped her photo, seeing the first woman’s number. Dan never came across. He had “hit the wall” at the 21 mile mark, “Heartbreak Hill”. At the time, we had friends living there, who threw a big party. I drove out there to find him lying on the grass, recovering.

When those friends moved away, we took over with the big party. For 29 years, we’ve lived in Newton at the crest of Heartbreak Hill, where we always watch the Marathon. I had friends running it three years ago and was out on the course waiting for mother and daughter in the afternoon. Helene’s daughter had gone by, but I waited and waited for my friend. At about 3pm, a young woman came out of the pack to speak to me on the sideline. She asked if I’d heard any news. She had gotten a text from her brother, a firefighter at the finish line. He informed her that two bombs had gone off. She looked to me for confirmation or more information, but I had none. I had been standing there for a long time with no phone, no link to the outside world. I told her I was sorry, I could not provide more information. It was the first bit of news I had and I ran home to turn on the TV. Coverage is supposed to end at 3pm, but this was turning into a huge news story. I stood, stunned, watching it unfold, real time. Texts and phone calls started pouring in from across the country; all knew that I watched the Marathon on the course and wanted reassurance that I was unhurt. Eventually I posted an account on Facebook, thanking people for their concern.

We received a robocall from the City of Newton to “shelter in place” early on Friday morning of that week. Newton is next to Watertown, where the shootout between the two terrorist brothers and the police took place overnight. One died, one escaped. As the day wore on, my husband grew bored and decided we should go outside the designated area, go to a movie and out to dinner. News alerts came across my phone that the surviving brother had been captured once the “shelter in place” order was lifted. A homeowner in Watertown went outside to check on his boat and noticed blood on the side of the tarp, covering it. He called in the police immediately and the bomber was captured. The next week I was in the area of the finish line, walked over to the bombing sites and thought of all that had happened there. Three young people lost their lives, countless others seriously injured. The unthinkable. I had lived in that neighborhood for seven years and loved it. Now it was the site of an act of terrorism. The motto of the city became Boston Strong. The sports teams rallied. David “Big Papi” Ortiz, famously said at the next Red Sox game, “This is our fuckin’ town!” and perfectly captured the sentiment around the region.

The 120th Boston Marathon is happening as I write this. I have just returned from Heartbreak Hill. Everything has changed. There were always various forms of barriers, as the race became larger and larger, but it was a festive atmosphere. Awakening from the New England winter, this rite of spring was a place to see your neighbors, run across the road and see people on the other side of Commonwealth Avenue, buy fried dough on the mall, have a great time. Now serious barricades block access to the mall and the other side of the street. National Guardsmen jog the entire course. The feeling is one of caution and restraint. Granted, I was there to see the leaders go by, (a relatively slow day). The crowds will swell as people come to see their relatives running. 4,000 qualified runners did not get numbers. Now the emphasis is on the large hordes of charity runners; most are not qualified to run this event. While they are raising huge sums of money for great causes, the race is not necessarily an elite event, except at the very front of the pack. The road is now closed from 8am until 6pm, hours longer than just a few years ago.

It is still the Boston Marathon, the greatest marathon of them all, but it has irrevocably changed.

I told them I was only eight, but I promised the announcers that when I was older I would drink Stroh’s beer and use Speedway 79 gasoline.
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Sixties and Seventies music is still the best!
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When the old sorrows rise up, the press of a button can send a rich honey of harmonies and voices to pour over my scars.
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Back in the early days of the Internet, I wrote for a short-lived interactive startup in Santa Monica. I was a practicing jazz musician at the time, so of course I needed the money. Before the interactive outfit folded I happily researched and wrote a brief musical history of Mozart, a jazz jukebox, a classical jukebox and a funky portrait of James Brown.

Since childhood, music had flowed through me like blood but I had never realized the scope and scale of my lifelong affair with music until I wrote those interactive cameos.

My first musical memory involved playing the harmonica with reckless abandon to a 78-rpm Josh White recording. We still lived in the housing projects in Jamaica Plain, Boston, so I must have been three. I remember hearing the classics, the Soviet pianists, cellists, recordings of the Red Army Chorus, Songs of the Spanish Civil War, all etched into brittle shellac.

In pre-suburban Massachusetts, I joined the junior choir of a spectacular, picture-postcard, Norman Rockwell version of a New England Unitarian Church, built in 1756, its peg-and-beam structure and grandiose simplicity startlingly intact.

Those protestant hymns, I could never remember the lyrics, they meant nothing to me — The Lord, ye know, is God indeed / Without our aid He did us make / We are His folk, He doth us feed / And for His sheep He doth us take… really???

Meaningless lyrics notwithstanding, harmonizing with the church’s massive pipe organ and my choral cohort gave me an unforgettable, ecstatic sensation of flight.

Timing was everything. As with every generation, I was convinced that I had been born at exactly the right time to be surrounded by the hippest music the planet had ever known. I projected my endless  adolescent crushes onto the cascade of Top 40 tunes that gushed through my after-hours earphones, wading through 45 minutes of dedications to hear Carl Perkins sing “Blue Suede Shoes,” Fats Domino roll out “Blueberry Hill,” and Elvis pleading “Don’t be Cruel.”

While still in grammar school, I was exposed to bebop by our senior band drummer. I was the junior band drummer and my crew-cutted mentor would lend me ultra-hip LPs featuring Art Blakey, Buddy Rich, Max Roach, and of course, Gene Krupa. I remember my seventh-grade history teacher going ballistic when I named Krupa, Benny Goodman’s powerhouse drummer as my hero. “He’s a low life,” the teacher shouted, all red in the face, “a dope fiend.” It wasn’t the first time I remember labeling an adult as “uncool.” I was 12 and I knew what cool was. Krupa wasn’t rockin’ Buddy Holly but he sure knew how to swing.

Between explosions of seminal rock ‘n roll, my family made Thursday evening excursions to Symphony Hall where you could hear the Boston Symphony Orchestra rehearse for cheap. My sister and I would race into the balconies to claim the best first-come, first-serve seating. My mother fell unabashedly in love with the symphony’s debonair first trumpeter, the Parisian Roger Voisin. I mean, it was embarrassing, but he was good looking.

By age 15, I had discovered Kerouac, the beat poets and folk music. Now it was my turn to fall in love. I purchased a $75 Harmony guitar and learned every song Joan Baez recorded on her first album, every tune Odetta and Dave Van Ronk sang. Even the Kingston Trio had cool, tragic material to learn. I was into tragedy.

That summer I attended a Quaker summer camp where all the kids from New York were talking about Mississippi blues players like Howlin’ Wolf, Leadbelly, Big Bill Broonzy, and John Lee Hooker. Once again, a new musical world opened wide and embraced me.

I began performing traditional folk music as collected by archivists John and Alan Lomax. I teamed up with a folkie friend and built a repertoire of blues, ballads and hollers, learning the changes and words as authentically as possible, an essential element of the folkie religion. There was a right way and a wrong way to sing those songs…until Bobby Dylan came along.

My folk singing partner showed at my house one day. We had planned to learn a few more traditional tunes when he said, “I got a new one.” He then finger-picked and sang his way through Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice.” Instantaneously, Dylan blew our minds; he had turned the whole folkie scene upside down.

While we and the rest of the folksingers were faithfully reproducing old tunes, Dylan was grabbing from Woody Guthrie and Cisco Houston, twisting Appalachian murder ballads into protest tunes, cross-pollinating labor songs, spirituals, dust bowl ballads, rock and roll, the blues, and the talking blues of Pete Seeger, spitting out lyrics that spoke to the wry, ironic, caustic, rebellious, rage-driven sense of the world as we were beginning to know it.

Dylan sang as the gray-flannel, McCarthyite, conformist 1950s, whose only saving grace was the music, turned to the resistant, rebellious, and contrary 1960s. Blast off.

*

Freshman year, I had a friend who was a classical pianist, and — as much as the dorm room stunk of freshmen boys — it rocked from Mozart to Rachmaninoff, from Weber to Orff. Horrible football jock roommates in Quincy House left me alone with my bleak Dylan tunes until I…

Moved off campus to my tumultuous Putnam Avenue pad where we all lay on one bed, stoned, listening to Jim Kweskin, the Stones, the Beatles and then came Motown and Stax/Volt and Sam & Dave and Otis Redding out-stoning the Stones on “Satisfaction,” fade to…

The day I arrived back from California in my battered Ford station wagon, and heard the Mamas and the Pappas sing “all the leaves are brown,” just as I pulled up to Putnam Avenue where the landlord was busting into the apartment with two cops and two plainclothesmen and he stopped and shouted, “there’s one of ‘em now,” pointing at me and…

Listening to Otis sing “Try a Little Tenderness” on acid and couldn’t get the ending — if you play it on YouTube, you’ll understand — out of my head, crazy and…

Graduation and heading back to the Haight Ashbury where I joined the antiwar movement and for a buck twenty five you could hear Janice Joplin with Big Brother, Eric Clapton and Cream, Jefferson [then] Airplane pre Starship, and the forever noodling Grateful Dead and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and…

In the 70s, joining the priesthood in San Francisco where jazz was the hippest religion, there was so much jazz to play, more to listen to, Coltrane, 24/7 in the Harrison Street loft where I lived with two drummers and another bass player.

*

Interspersed through it all…

The approaching rock and roll of steam locomotives climbing the grade on the Boston & Maine tracks across the meadow and down the ravine and…

Voices from the next orchard, me perched high in a tree dropping perfect apples into a canvas shoulder sack, hearing every word spoken or whispered in the clear, still September air and…

The sound of Harley hogs driven by the wild bunches of restless WWII vets as they cruised the lake and the hot dog stand by the beach with all the tall, tall girls in their short shorts and…

The sound of country boy glasspak V-8 mufflers brapping out of the high school parking lot with the A-list cheerleaders and…

The silent cacophony of snow flakes falling and the sub-audible rumble and ping arcing across the newly frozen black ice on the pond and…

The static-borne scrabble of after-bedtime radio dramas like “The Great Guildersleeve” and “The Green Hornet and…

My mother playing Bach on the piano down the hall as I fell asleep.

There was so much to listen to.

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The Beatles provide a (somewhat) useful language lesson.
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My mother only allowed me to listen to classical music for a long time. I was a serious singer, took voice lessons, attended a music camp in summer, but wanted to be like the other kids and listen to rock and roll too. I got a transistor radio with an ear piece and broke the house rules, listened and loved the Top 40 hits of my era. Growing up in suburban Detroit, we loved Motown as well as British Invasion. I loved going to the school dances and learned the moves. I had rhythm! I couldn’t moon walk but could really shake my groove. The folk sound was also ascendant and I loved that as well. I have broad tastes in music.

Music defines moments in our lives like nothing else. In 8th grade, friends and I sang “Yesterday” on the playground during recess, longingly, lovingly. “Sitting by the Dock of the Bay” by Otis Reading always takes me back to a first real boyfriend, who broke a leg. I visited him in the hospital with this playing on the radio. When he got out, we went to a party and made out to this song.

Judy Collins’ version of “Both Sides Now” is 11th grade. I sang it at a temple youth group event, but I remember listening to it backstage, during practice for “Arsenic and Old Lace”. I played Elaine, the love interest. Aretha co-existed with Petula Clark. Our tastes were democratic.

Freshman year in college was defined by Livingston Taylor’s one hit album, and then by Elton John’s first album, with the top song, “Your Song”. We played it over and over again, with the arm up from the turn table, so it would just repeat. Sophomore year was dominated by “Tapestry”, the anthem of the year. One college boyfriend introduced me to blue grass music. He further broadened my taste. I introduced him to light classics.

First dates with my husband were dominated by “The First Time, Ever I Saw Your Face”, and John Denver’s “Annie’s Song”.  All, special memories.

Now my husband has music on his iPad including many of the songs from college like “Suzanne” and “Send in the Clowns” and we listen to them as we fall asleep at night…thrown back to our first years together.

 

Then came a series of questions about rock music, meant, I'm sure, to be my downfall.
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I never knew my grandparents. They died long before I was born. My father died before he could describe them to me. Given the circumstances surrounding his time with them, I doubt that he could have told me much.

Therefore, my fact-or-fiction report springs from primary source materials including pictures, letters, and newspaper articles and the recollections of my cousins and aunts, my father’s sisters. Family myth and the bastard child of my own speculation further fueled this paean to my grandparents.

My grandfather, Charles Degelman was born in Placerville, California, the descendent of German farmers who left Bavaria after the Holy Alliance overthrew the “spectre that [haunted] Europe,[1]” communism.

Even back then, my family was on the revolutionary side, although they left Europe as much due to the weather-induced famine as anything else. My grandfather’s immediate forebears subsequently fought in the Civil War in the Illinois militia and on Mississippi River gunboats, back when the our waterways served as freight and passenger superhighways in peace and war.

So why Placerville? After the Civil War, one branch of the Degelman family climbed aboard a small fleet of Conestoga wagons. My great-grandfather, John Degelman plied his trade as a bootmaker who set up shop on the boardwalk of Placerville, profited off the gold madness, upgraded his harness shop to a boot store, and raised several sons.

Unlike his siblings, Charles, my grandfather, wasn’t much about playing with steam power or handcrafting leatherwork. He took his inspiration from a neighbor, Mark Twain, temporarily in residence in nearby Calaveras county.

A budding and enthusiastic journalist, Charles possessed an adventurous soul. He left Placerville for San Diego, where he took a job on that city’s newspaper, The Union Tribune. It was here that he wrote an infamous feature article, released on New Years Day, titled “The Bowels of the Earth: Discovery of an Immense Subterranean Cavern in San Diego. A Prehistoric Race Found Entombed in Coffins Chiseled Out of Solid Stone.” http://bit.ly/1pHpIed

My grandad’s feature article seems to exist in the same best tradition as Mark Twain’s resounding support of the Great American Lie. To wit, the story doesn’t have to be true but it does need verisimilitude.

There was no subterranean cavern beneath San Diego. According to historian Bruce Linder “The story incited a tidal wave of excitement and chatter. The discovery was on everyone’s lips. The San Diego Union was flooded with inquires; the paper quickly sold out.

The only problem with this swashbuckling tale was that it was a hoax. And it was NOT a hoax engineered by the mysterious Professor Stearns but by the San Diego Union itself!

The San Diego Union was never apologetic about their ruse – even declaring a “Journalistic Success” when they sold out the New Year’s edition.

No legal action was taken against the paper or my grandfather and you gotta ask, who zoomed whom? Did a charlatan geologist dupe a gullible reporter? Did a savvy reporter fool his editor? Did the editor and reporter trick the Union’s publisher? Or…

Did the entire staff pull off an elaborate New Year’s Day hoax on its readership? Go figure.

• * * *

Hoax and its consequences behind him, Charles Degelman set out to cover the union battles in the barren but lively copper country around Butte, Montana. He arrived as the I.W.W. (read International Workers of the World) locked horns with the Amalgamated Copper Company (read Rockefeller, the Rothschilds, Hearst) as great labor battles, suffrage, and a demand for social justice turned the Gilded Age into the Progressive Era.

At the same time that my grandfather arrived in Butte, another unlikely citizen came upon the scene. Louise Nydegger, daughter among seven raised on a Pennsylvania farm had resolved that she would never marry one of those grumpy, bearded men who formed the patriarchal backbone of her claustrophobic farm community. Louise was pretty, saucy, and straight-backed; at 20 she set off to become a pioneering woman graduate of Penn State University. After earning a degree, with no place else to go but the farm, Louise boarded a steamer for Europe. She surfaced at the Sorbonne where she studied linguistics.

Oh, to be a woman alone in Paris at the end as the old guard battled it out with progress. It couldn’t have all been fun but she learned much from her European sojourn. She returned to America as a proud suffragist with a raging class consciousness. Perhaps her disdain for the farm still drove Louise. She shot past Pennsylvania and didn’t stop until she landed in Butte Montana, where there was plenty of feist — union battles, wild west politics, victimized prostitutes, and uneducated laborers’ kids. Louse began to educate them.

Charles Frederick Degelman and Louise Nydegger met in a union hall where Charles was covering the foment — how to root out the Pinkerton stooges who had infiltrated the Butte Miners Union during the intense labor struggles. I know few details, but photographs tell me that country-boy journalist Charles — now in his forties — and the worldly well-educated Louise fell in love. My father was born in Butte but the smoke of the copper smelters had gotten to his father, Charles. The Degelman family fled the stink of the smelters to join a utopian commune in San Diego where my aunts were born.

The commune turned out to be a land scam. Charles and Louise were soon on their own, providing for a needy nuclear family to support late in life. In San Diego, the tireless Charles took a job on the San Diego Telegram but one day, while waiting for a trolley car to take him to the newspaper, he keeled over from a stroke. Three days later, he was dead, leaving Louise, now nearing menopause with three small children under the age of ten.

Louise went mad. She was placed in a sanitarium but when she was released, she tried to murder her children. Shortly thereafter, long before the demise of Virginia Woolf, the brilliant refugee from a Pennsylvania farm filled her skirt pockets with rocks and waded into the Pacific Ocean.

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[1] Engels, F., Marx, K. ­Communist Manifesto. 1848 and all that…

Charles Degelman is a novelist, editor and educator living in California. You can find more of his writing here.