From the Vault of Art Shay: The Bugle
By Art Shay in News on Jul 13, 2011 4:00PM
Working on a three-year photo project documenting hard-working rock star Billy Corgan as he composes some thirty new works, I've come to relish the moment in his secret studio when he reaches down to choose a favorite guitar for a new creative flight. It's the same look of love and ownership I've seen on the faces of loving parents reaching for their babies, Roger Maris casually choosing the bat he would use to break Babe Ruth's batting record, the care with which Ernest Hemingway chose a yellow pencil with which to write down the phone number of his girl friend for a corporal to try to get through 8th Air Force phone censorship for him.
Papa looked up and said, "Did you ever notice some pencils squeak when you use 'em, even talk? This one says, 'Ti-con-deroga, Ti-con-deroga...'" (That was the brand of the pencil.)
It was lost on the corporal, but cherished by me, a writer freak even at 23.
I'm talking talismans - one of my favorite fairy-tale words since I picked up that $3 Rexcraft Boy Scout bugle, still alive and well atop a bookshelf, a few feet above pictures of my wife, five kids, their six kids, and even one of my new great grandson, Moses. All, all (except my lost son Harmon) alive and thriving, and all in this world, and the next, as one turned out, serving as living proof that talismans are for real.
The Brown, Green, Blue and Grimm Fairy Tales on which I battened between 10-14 were full of talismans. Agates, toads, deathless flowers, shiny stones, pieces of bone, jewels - anything that moved the story along. Latter day talismans surely include Hitchcock's "MacGuffins"- his made-up word for story-propelling talismans like The Maltese Falcon. Whatever the people in the movie are seeking, trying to steal, trying to protect, or otherwise lusting after. Like that giant jewel in Topkapi, stealable only by a gymnast suspended from a rooftop rope, hovering over the entire outwitted alarm system to make the grab, then get up, up and away.
My talisman bugle tale is simple. When I was 12, my Bronx Boy Scout Troop 257 decided to form a drum and bugle corps. My talismanic bugle changed my life completely.
I desperately wanted to become a drummer, so I stood on the drum line in the tiny basement synagogue room in which we were to get our instruments. Suddenly, three scouts away from getting a drum, I saw that the old Jewish WWI veterans distributing the instruments weren't giving out drums, merely drumsticks with O'Sullivan rubber heels to practice paradiddles on. The drums would come when the troop could afford them: hey, this was the first Depression. The bugle's brass shone seductively.
So I took the three sideways steps that changed and gave direction to my life and got on the bugle line.
In 9 months I became the bugle champ of the east Bronx, one prize for which was a summer working free at Camp Peter Pan in Armonk, NY, now the site of IBM. Through this job I would meet my beautiful mate of the past 67 years, Florence, and help produce the kids shown in the pictures.
What I don't show are the three kids and their five offspring that came along when the girl I jilted for Florence married her second choice WWII GI just to get even (or so it appeared). They too, I like to think, sprang from my talisman. One of these won a Pulitzer Prize I learned in a nyah nyah follow-up note decades later.
A few years ago, the then-Tribune Magazine did the story of my bugle but, in their editorial wisdom, didn't think the kids who sprang from that bugle figured in the story. It took the magic of my talisman all this time to get it right.
Before I got my implants I would take the bugle down every New Year's Eve and, leaving our famous annual party at midnight, stand on the front steps and blow my fifth or sixth thousand Taps into the cold night, properly ushering out the old year and infuriating half the neighborhood as the new one began.
One result of the Trib story: the name of a kindly bugler named Tom Day who promised to play Taps over my grave. Or have someone from his Bugles Across America organization do it. You WWII Veterans remaining should give him a call at 708-484-9029.
If you can't wait until this time every Wednesday to get your Art Shay fix, please check out the photographer's blog, which is updated regularly. Art Shay's book, Nelson Algren's Chicago, is also available at Amazon.